2 - The Development of In-Depth Criticism, 1947–1961

Summary

JEAN PAUL SARTRE, in a 1946 Atlantic article, remarked that the “greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck. … The French novel which caused the greatest furor between 1940 and 1945, The Stranger, by Albert Camus, deliberately borrowed the technique of The Sun Also Rises” (114). Following the war, Hemingway became a celebrity, his works transferred increasingly to film, his visits to New York appearing in gossip columns. He influenced younger writers as dissimilar as J. D. Salinger, Mickey Spillane, Saul Bellow, and Raymond Carver, although his only publication in the forties after For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was a collection of his short stories he edited and provided a long introduction to, Men at War. His plane crashes in Africa in the fifties produced a torrent of premature but favorable obituaries — and perhaps the Nobel Prize, for his near death inspired the Nobel committee to consider him again sooner than they otherwise might have. But intelligent criticism of his works still came slowly, including assessments of The Sun Also Rises. In those reviews, evaluations of Brett were conditioned by mid-century’s morés regarding women, views little different than those of the preceding century. Initially, thoughtful criticism studied the Hemingway code, blended biography with a great deal of psychoanalysis, and looked in more detail at his handling of myth and religion; there was more close attention paid to the ritual of the bullfight (rather than just to Romero), with some critics linking bullfighting to its ritual and religious origins. As throughout Hemingway’s career, there were still examinations of style throughout the period, and examinations of how he characterized women (i.e., Brett Ashley) and men. The Hemingway code became an accepted notion, although who the hero was who exemplified that code differed widely among critics. Never defined by Hemingway, the code — as critics usually defined it — included stoicism in the face of difficulty, professionalism, and courage, or “grace under pressure,” as Hemingway once defined it.

W. H. Frohock, in two essays published in the Southwest Review in 1947, collected in his The Novel of Violence in America: 1920–1950 (1950), discussed Hemingway’s prose style and the author’s preferred subject matter of violence and sex, with emphasis on the effects of style and little analysis of content.