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Hemingway
and Faulkner in Their Time is a compilation of comments or evaluations to William
Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway by writers coeval with them. Though one might
wonder if this book is slanted in favor of the latter because of the two
editors, Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn,
both of whom have lavished years of academic devotion on Hemingway, and dedicate
this book to two great Hemingway scholars, Michael Reynolds and Paul Smith, yet
their impartial editorial policy permeates their selection of materials. Rovit
and Waldhorn extensively range over letters and
(auto)biographies of wide-ranging writers, and from them, they extract
contemporary impressions and evaluations in literary world about works and
lives of Faulkner and Hemingway. The two extinguished scholars' effort resulted
in the congeries neatly condensed from lengthy biographies and collections of
letters. Snippets from those are arranged chronologically, beginning from the
Paris years when both writers set their literary career and ending at their
death, and short profiles and interesting episodes about writers included serve
well to knit these fragmented extracts and make this book eminently readable.
Though these anecdotal
descriptions are apt to be excluded out of a textbook for literary history,
they inform us of unexpected ties (or grudge) among literary figures and it is
quite often in the course of reading that they steal spotlight from the two
principals. Let's say, a description about William Saroyan;
"A blithe Californian spirit, Saroyan wrote
(often with excessive sentiment) of his love for all humanity. In fact, despite
the lovable folk drawn from his native Fresno---the characters in his Pulitzer
Prize play, The Time of Your Life (1939) and his novel The Human Comedy (1943)---he was himself
nasty, belligerent, and cruel to family, friends, and fellow artists
(134)." Those who were touched with Saroyan's My Name Is Aram
might be surprised at this biographical description telling about dissociation
of the author's personality, and astonished that the exposure above is followed
by the fact that he had a punchout with Hemingway in
Paris immediately after the liberation in 1944.
What makes the present work
distinctive among other similar books is that the editors give two interesting
chapters. The one of the two "The Poets Sing: On and Off Key," is
made up of excerpts from critical or emotional appraisal of the two writers
made by various contemporary poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost. Though almost
all poets in this chapter evaluate, as a matter of course, Faulkner and
Hemingway as novelists, it is interesting that Wallace Stevens reckons them as
"poets." "Now, the best man I can think of for the job is Ernest
Hemingway... Most people don't think of Hemingway as a poet, but obviously he
is a poet and I should say, offhand, the most significant of living poets, so
far as the subject of EXTRAORDINARY ACTUALITY is concerned.... But supposing
that Hemingway shouldn't be available: What about Faulkner? He is my second
suggestion. For all his gross realism, Faulkner is a poet." (103) In spite
of the fact that Stevens had a fist fight with Hemingway six years before the
letter, the poet's discerning eye for literary achievements Hemingway
accomplished is not blurred with this ungrateful memory.
Another of the two unique
chapters deals with how literary figures in the South accepted works of
Faulkner and Hemingway. I had a vague sense that Hemingway was underestimated
by Southerners, at least much more than Faulkner, but this chapter "Sounds
of the South" has made me realize that I had only a superficial
understanding of the literary context of the time in the South. In a letter,
for example, Allen Tate expresses an objection against a review by Donald
Davidson in which Hemingway's A Farewell
to Arms is severely criticized; "He [Hemingway] is unquestionably one
of the great stylists of English prose, and it is not his fault if a horde of
damn fools have taken him up.... We must not get so lost in our vision of what
novelists should do to the Southern scene that we reject the version of
"reality" given us by writers who are not Southern." (83) Tate
goes so far to say "...if Hemingway were a Southerner he would be just the
novelist we are looking for...." In response to Tate, Davidson sent a
letter in which he candidly admits that he was discreet about his remarks;
"I must confess that I extended myself at Hemingway's expense... I
sacrificed Hemingway... in order to make a point against science...." (84)
This correspondence would bring our academic attention back to an ideological
tendency of New Criticism where agrarianism should restrain "science"
from pervading the South. If we reread some works by New Critics, this chapter
must bear different facets.
Noble style of Rovit and Waldhorn succeed in
giving a vivid portrait of each of literary figures and as often as not casting
light on a tangled aspect of praise and censure among contemporary writers. And
in terms of the sprucely assembled book, we could quickly review a rough
outline of a literary history around the center of the two Nobel Prize-winning
authors. I can really recommend Hemingway
and Faulkner in Their Time as a perfect book for those who are getting fed
up with enormously complicated theoretical interpretations.
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