Hemingway in the Twenties: "The Artist's Reward"

Abstract

Hemingway in the Twenties: "The Artist's Reward" JOHN RAEBURN I No American writer of his own or any other time has matched the rapidity of Hemingway's rise to literary fame and honor. In 1924 a young and obscure former newspaperman living literally in a garret, he became by 1930 the most famous and respected novelist of his generation. More than John Dos Passos, more than Scott Fitzgerald, more than Thomas Wolfe, more than William Faulkner, all of whom published works of genuine distinction in the late 1920s, Hemingway was hailed at the beginning of his career by literary critics as the brightest star in American fiction and its best hope for the future. His fellow writers were just as taken with him as were the critics, and many of them showed their admiration by imitating him. By the end of the decade, just five years after the appearance of In Our Time (1925), it was already possible to speak confidently of Hemingway's influence on contemporary American fiction as greater than that of any other writer, living or dead. He published five books between 1925 and 1930, and all of them, save the jeu d'esprit The Torrents of Spring, received rave notices from most of their reviewers. (Even The Torrents of Spring [1926], surely his most insignificant work, was not treated all that unkindly.) It seemed that he could do no wrong. A sampling of the reviews of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927), and A Farewell to Arms (1929) turns up phrases which illustrate the John Raeburn's book, Fame Became of Him: The Public Reputation of Ernest Hemingway , will be published by Indiana University Press. He teaches at the University of Louisville. 118HEMINGWAY IN THE TWENTIES nearly unqualified admiration his work received: "his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own"; "among the first men writing today"; "if there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it"; "magnificent writing"; "a truly magnificent work"; "a real occasion for patriotic rejoicing"; "will match up as narrative prose with anything that's been written since there was any English language." 1 By the age of 30, Hemingway was already being spoken of as a modern master; he was, to borrow Jimmy Durante's expressive phrase, "the toast of the intellectuals." This meteoric rise to literary eminence was accompanied by the growth of a different kind of fame—personal fame—which at first was subordinate to his literary renown, then rather soon began to vie with it on equal terms, and eventually surpassed it to make Hemingway not simply the best known writer of his generation, but one of the most famous men of his time. The enthusiasm for him among the intellectual elite, which had nearly canonized him in the 1920s, periodically waxed and waned after 1930, but the enthusiasm of the public, which was the guarantor of his personal fame, never wavered once it had taken him up as its champion. This division between his literary and public reputations , indeed the very fact that he had a public reputation at all, was one of the most arresting aspects of Hemingway's career, and not only in a sociological sense. His own acute awareness of the public response to him and his personality affected what he chose to write about and what he said when he did write. Nearly everything that he published after 1930, fiction and non-fiction alike, reflected this knowledge. Even as a very young man he seemed to have a preternatural talent for making news. As one of his friends later remarked, "he couldn't walk down the street and stub his toe without having a newsman who happened to be walking with him magnify the little accident into a near fatality." 2 Stepping off the troop ship on which he had returned from Italy where he had been wounded during battle, the eighteen1AIl quoted from reviews annotated in Audrc Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehemive Bibliography (Princeton, 1967), 347-365.¦ Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York, 1964), 22. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW119 year-old veteran was corralled by...