4 - Posthumous Evaluations (1961–1969)

Summary

HEMINGWAY's SUICIDE ON JULY 2, 1961, was front-page news across the country. The New York Times accepted Mary Hemingway's explanation that he shot himself accidentally and quoted President John F. Kennedy's statement mourning his loss, in which the president called him “one of the great citizens of the world” (“Hemingway Dead” 1961). On the same day, the Times ran a tribute by regular reviewer Charles Poore (1961), who proclaimed that Hemingway “stands now, with William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, as one of the three most influential writers of an era.” Poore also observed rather presciently that “a hatful of pedants will find new allegories, new symbols, in Hemingway, year after year after year” (6).

Three days later, the Times carried a long article containing tributes from eighteen prominent writers and critics (“Authors and Critics” 1961). Acknowledgments of his status as one of the greatest writers of the century and an influence on prose style around the world came from critics Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Van Wyck Brooks and writers John Dos Passos, V. S. Pritchett, C. P. Snow, John O'Hara, William Faulkner, and Robert Frost. Only a few like those of J. B. Priestley and Oliver La Farge contained negative comments. Within months, Mary Hemingway and Charles Scribner announced that Carlos Baker would be writing the authorized biography (“Hemingway's Biographer” 1961, 16). Implicit in the announcement is the notice being given to the world of who would be in charge of keeping alive Hemingway's memory and controlling the manuscripts he left behind.

Although not intended as an obituary tribute, Irving Howe's (1961) “In Search of a Moral Style” paid homage to Hemingway as the “most influential American novelist of our time” (21). Howe explained how the generation of writers after World War I found it impossible to cling to traditional values or develop new ones; destined to “spend their lives in uncertainty,” they sought instead to create a “moral style,” which is seen in attempts to create rituals and gestures that could substitute for a moral outlook. Learning how to “make do” with grace and courage is “the great problem” (21), and Hemingway's hero is an embodiment of the person who has learned how to solve that problem through his actions, especially in the face of death.