Thursday, January 12, 2023

the dumb ox and the mandarin: Ernest Hemingway and Cyril Connolly


 Sartre’s essay about Jules Renard, ultimately dismissing the search for the most economical way of writing a thing as the search for a way of being outside of “intelligence” – the latter classified as giving reflection its expanse and structure as it is construed in the urban tradition, rather than narrowing it to its reflexes as it is construed in the peasant tradition – was written during the phoney war, though published in 1944. At the same time, Cyril Connolly was revising his book, the Enemies of Promise, which was first published in 1938 and re-issued in the revised form in 1949.

Connolly was a member of the “bright young things” generation, like Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton and Evelyn Waugh, but he was always slightly a figure of fun for Mitford and Waugh. The Ambrose Silk figure in Waugh’s phoney war novel, Put out more flags, has definite echoes of Connolly, whose seriousness is disguised by an outward silliness. Like Connolly, who founded and edited the great British magazine of the war years, Horizon, Ambrose Silk busies himself with founding a magazine, the Ivory Tower. Silk’s friend and underminer, the cheerful villain-hero, Basil Seal, has a great time getting into British security and convincing them that the magazine is a nest of Nazi spies, thus leading to the arrest of the writers and the flight of Silk. and, in a grace note at the end of the novel, we see Silk holed up in a small cottage in Ireland, in a revery about the British imperial heroism. But Silk’s great speech, to a drunk Basil Seal and Silk’s much trodden upon publisher, sets the tone of the novel and – secretly, I think – Waugh’s own view of where things were trending:

 “European scholarship has nover lost its monastic character… Chinese scholarship dealt with taste and wisdom, not with memorizing of facts. In China, the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. Eureopan culture has become conventual; we must make it coenobitic.”

This is a nice parody of Enemies of Promise. Waugh always knew just where to stick the knife in.

The Enemies of Promise is full of summaries of the literature of the twentieth century, and spends much time on the question: how to write a book that lasts a decade. The subject, of course, brings up and loses one in fashion: in the game of who is up and who is down. Because the “memorizing of facts” is cast aside in this game, the whole thing depends on the critic’s impression. Although Connolly doesn’t know it, his book, in 1939 and in 1949, was already an anachronism. Connolly was too much of a bright young thing to see that the Program era was upon us: the incredible expansion of higher education, and with it the annexation of literature by academia.

In the Enemies of Promise, Connolly treats Hemingway, whom he sure is now out of fashion, to a species of reasoning not unlike that laid on Renard by Sartre. Hemingway, too, wrote with a kind of cult of silence – except in his case it was a cult of toughness. Wordiness and toughness were antithetical. To a criticism of his style by Aldous Huxley, Hemingway wrote a reply in Death in the Afternoon, which contains an interesting defence of his own choices in writing:

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters, which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel, is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart, and from all there is of him;  If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.”

I like Hemingway, while recognizing how much masculinist bullshit lies in comparing prose to “architecture” instead of “interior decoration.” For Whom the Bell Tolls is as Baroque as all fuck, and at the time Hemingway went around saying that he read Donne’s sermons for encouragement.

At the same time, Hemingway obviously had a style – the “dumb ox” style that Wyndham Lewis ranted about. Unlike Jules Renard, Hemingway was not born and raised among peasants. His ancestors came from solid New England stock. But the Midwest of Hemingway’s time, and now, did have its own distinctive silence: American Gothic is its totem. The way in which Hemingway speaks of “bulking up” the novel with a buncha interior decoration to make more money speaks to a very Midwest ethos: the farmer that gives good weight, as opposed to the farmer who waters his stock. The Midwest silence is something I have witnessed. The parents of an old ex-friend of mine were Midwesterners of the American Gothic type, who could sit in a room with people they didn’t know and not say anything, not ask a question, not make a remark. This is the heavy  silence of a million dinner tables in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, where the competition between opening your mouth to speak and opening your mouth to eat was right out there in the open – and the latter was preferred.

This silence, to Connolly, Hemingway’s tell: “It is a style in which the body talks rather than the mind, one admirable for rendering emotions; love, fear, joy of battle, despair, sexual appetite, but impoverished for intellectual purposes. Hemingway is fortunate in possessing a physique which is at home in the world of boxing, bull-fighting and big game shooting, fields closed to most writers and especially to Mandarins; he is supreme in the domain of violence and his opportunity will be to write the great book (and there have been no signs of one so far), about the Spanish war.”

Connolly was not intelligent like Sartre was intelligent: the mandarin and the engaged writer are two very different approaches to literature and even life. But they are in agreement with what Derrida called the White Mythology, made up of oppositions such as that of the mind to the body, emotion to reflection, and their consequent styles. When a Hemingway character is presented so wholly from the outside, to this way of thinking, the inside is drained of its depth. While the writer of fiction doesn’t have to present the thought process going on the inside of the heads of his “characters” – that word Hemingway did not like – the idea is that conversation will carry that burden, that there is a seal, a pact, between the thought and the spoken. When that pact is not honored – when what a character speaks does not give one a picture of what the character thinks, which is where Hemingway’s “toughness” comes in – then the critic, the bearer of the oppositions we enumerated above, reverts to the idea that intelligence has been sacrificed to economy. For gesture and act is dumb, in the double sense: unspeaking and unreflective.

And if gesture and act are not dumb?  

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