The Tragic Conservatism of Ernest Hemingway: And Other Essays Including the Neocon Cabal

By Sam Bluefarb

The six essays in this collection were written over the years 2010-2012. Most of the essays are literary in nature. These touch on the works of Ernest Hemingwayhis tragic conservatismof Lionel Trilling, mentor to a generation of teachers of literature, and of Henry Miller. In the case of Miller, the essay is as much a critique of his social and spiritual values as literary. The essay on The Age of the Grand Hotel is a historical and social analysis of the part such hotels have played in the growthand declineof upper class society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479755288

Sam Bluefarb

Sam Bluefarb is a World War II veteran and Professor Emeritus of English. He served on the faculty of the English Department of Los Angeles Harbor College for some 22 years. He was also a part-time adjunct instructor at UCLA Extension, Chapman University (Palm Desert campus), College of the Desert, and Mt. San Jacinto College. Until some years ago when mobility became limited, Bluefarb was a serious amateur photographer. With the exception of his years in the service, he has lived most of his life in Southern California.

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© 2012 by Sam Bluefarb.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4797-5527-1

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Rev. date: 07/15/2016

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Contents

I.   Introduction

II.   The Tragic Conservatism Of Ernest Hemingway

III.   The Age Of The Grand Hotel

IV.   Casablanca: The Bogart-Hemingway Nexus

V.   Henry Miller And The Pull Of Gravity

VI.   The Magic Mountain And

The Middle Of The Journey; Analogous Tales

VII.   The Neocon Cabal: Its Roots And Resonances

VIII.   The Road From Theodore Herzl: A Personal Story

IX.   Vertigo—Yet Again

X.   Bert Meyers, Lyric Poet: An Homage With Some Caveats X

XI.   On The Death Of Robin Williams (1951-2014)

XII.   Notes From A Memoir

Other Titles by Sam Bluefarb

The Dubious Benefits of Nostalgia 2003

Reunion 1998

Set in L.A. 1986

The Escape Motif in the American Novel 1972

To Nancy… Once Again

INTRODUCTION TO THE

FIRST EDITION

The first six essays in this collection originally appeared in the online New English Review from 2010 to 2012, and I wish to thank the editors of the Review for permission to reprint them here. Other than two essays—Henry Miller: The Pull of Gravity and Notes from a Memoir—the remaining essays are exercises in a mix of literary criticism, one movie review, and two personal essays, one on the death of the late actor Robin Williams. Yet on closer scrutiny, all have social and political—and, in the case of The Age of the Grand Hotel, historical—threads running through them. Even those dealing with literary matters grapple with life beyond mere literature: e.g., the anti-war views of Henry Miller in Henry Miller: The Pull of Gravity; the role of social class in The Age of the Grand Hotel; and the deep vein of stoic pessimism that runs through Ernest Hemingway’s work, as in The Tragic Conservatism of Ernest Hemingway."

INTRODUCTION TO THE

REVISED EDITION

When the first edition of this collection was published, I did not anticipate that there would be a second—and, this time last—edition. But then, the five additional essays here, also excerpted from the online New English Review, had not yet been published. Also, at the time when the 1st Edition was publisher, I felt that because of my advanced age, there would be no second revised edition. But obviously, I am still here. Apart from the normal (?) complaints of old age, I feel confident that this time, this will truly be a final foray. The dramatic onset of decreased vision due to Age Related Macular degeneration, touched on in the Introduction to the 1st Edition, has finally reached the tipping point. Now it is truly So long!.

I hope you will enjoy these additional essays, as I, in my most limited—and challenged—way have enjoyed writing them.

Sam Bluefarb, March 20th, 2016

THE TRAGIC CONSERVATISM OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away.

—Ernest Hemingway,

from The Paris Review interviews, Writers at Work

Apart from his flirtation with the Left during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939), few think of Ernest Hemingway as a conservative, or simply conservative—there is a subtle difference. Yet Hemingway’s tragic conservatism was not political, though briefly he was drawn to the non-partisan politics of the revolutionary left. Michael Reynolds puts a more benign face on it:

Never a radical, Hemingway became apolitical and remained so for the rest of his life… . [H]e was one of the least overtly political writers of his generation.[1]

Actually, Hemingway’s tragic conservatism can in part be traced back to the legendary traumatic wound he sustained in 1918 during the First World War, an experience he immortalized in A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway shared that tragic vision with the great Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), And although there is no evidence that the two ever met—Unamuno was dead by 1936—they shared not only a love of Spain but the challenge to faith in a world where God has disappeared, and despair has filled the void of His loss. It’s a despair—and a fear—that comes to Jake Barnes at night, where for six months I never slept with the electric light off.[2] Fear of the dark and of the night is a neurotic syndrome of key characters in Hemingway. In the story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,[3] the scene is a café in Madrid. Two waiters are ready to close up for the night but are delayed by an old man who keeps ordering more drinks. The man had recently attempted suicide. The young waiter wants the old man to leave so that he can go home to his young wife who is waiting for him. The older waiter has compassion for the old man, and can identify with him because he too suffers from despair. As he tells the young waiter, I am of those who like to stay late in the café… . With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.[4]

The older waiter finally tells the younger waiter to go home, that he will close up. On his way to his room, the older waiter knows that, for him, there is no clean, well-lighted place either. If there is a God, where is He? And if He doesn’t exist, what or whom can he pray to? but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada… etc, etc… . [5]

Unamuno expresses the same bleak vision, though he clings to faith in spite of its seeming irrationality: We have created God [says Unamuno] in order to save the Universe from nothingness.[6] Thus, each of these men struggled with the same dark angel, except that Hemingway expressed it through his characters, while Unamuno, did so in his philosophical work;[7] the main character in Now I lay Me, is afraid to sleep in order to keep the nightmare at bay, and stays awake reminiscing about fishing in an earlier time; Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms concedes to the priest that he does not love God, but fears Him—at night!

*     *     *

It could not have been a momentary brainstorm that inspired two incongruent quotations on the epigraph page of The Sun Also Rises (1926)—that off-hand comment made by Gertrude Stein, You are all a lost generation, and the longer passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes:

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… the sun also ariseth, and… goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… . All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full…

Unlike Stein’s comment, which refers to one fleeting generation, Hemingway has juxtaposed a Biblical passage that is in sharp contrast to Stein’s; it touches on something more profound than a single (lost) generation.

Lostness was not the cause of that generation’s cynical malais, its hedonism but a rationalization for it. Hemingway was not lost, neither was F. Scott Fitzgerald, the eponymous darling of that generation, nor were the genuine working artists and writers who lived in the pensions and cheap hotels of the Montparnasse quarter. They worked at their trade, writing, painting, aching to produce great, lasting works. (The Sun Also Rises is still a popular best seller, after eighty five years.) These young people were the antithesis of lostness! Carlos Baker, the eminent Hemingway scholar and biographer, has put paid to the myth:

It ought to have been plain to discerning readers that Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, and Pedro Romero [in The Sun Also Rises] were solid—if slightly beat-up—citizens of the republic. They were not lost. They refused to surrender to neuroses like those which beset Robert Cohn, Brett Ashley, and Mike Campbell. And three lost neurotics do not make a lost generation.[8]

The public impression of Hemingway, the tough guy, was that of a free spirit, an icon of the hedonistic, cynical 1920s, who broke free of his mother’s mid-western values and deep Protestant ethos; who poked fun at faux respectability and hypocrisy. He characterized his home town of Oak Park, Illinois as a place of wide lawns and narrow minds. He countered his mother’s Oak Park moral values with the defiant Moral is what you feel good after.[9]

To speak of Hemingway’s tragic conservatism—or Hemingway as a tragic conservative—may sound a jarring note. Yet the world view that runs through his work, points toward human limitations. As Russell Kirk has succinctly put it, ‘Conservatism’ is a way of looking at the human condition.[10] Hemingway’s conservatism—in contrast to the narrower political, fiscal, and social conservatism—cannot be hemmed in by the boundaries of politics or utopian blinkers. Like the English Constitution, an amorphous body of laws and statutes that just grew [and continues to grow] like Topsy, Hemingway’s conservatism is best expressed by Russell Kirk’s concept of negative ideology:

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism [Kirk’s emphasis] possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries.[11]

In that respect, Hemingway’s tragic conservatism was not based on the Holy Writ of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) as it was tempered in the kiln of experience, a word used some thirty times in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Hemingway’s characters live and learn—if they survive (and many do not)—through bitter experience. It has nothing to do with any abstract ideology.

Hemingway’s pessimism was likely rooted in his childhood years and early-life experiences. A product of Midwest conservative values grounded in strong religious convictions and hard work, he absorbed those values, even as he chaffed against his mother’s version of Christianity. On the other hand, his father, a country doctor, was a greater influence. He taught young Ernest how to fish and to hunt, and to cultivate a love for nature.

Nature would be the touchstone of Hemingway’s life and work, and though he often found himself living in major cities like Chicago, Toronto and Paris early in his career, once he became successful he chose somewhat isolated places to live like Key West, or San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, or Ketchum, Idaho. All were convenient locales for hunting and fishing.[12]

*     *     *

For Hemingway, the bullring was the quintessential microcosm of the larger human tragedy. His view of life, even at age nineteen, was that of a prematurely seasoned old man, and comes close to the wisdom of old Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea (1952). In October, 1918, in a letter to his parents from Milan, he offers some dubious comfort, but for a nineteen-year old, it is revealing. The passage is nothing that most nineteen-year-olds are likely to write, but perhaps his wounding at Fossalta di Piave—and this may be true of many young Americans fighting in today’s wars—and seeing men die, had intensified the difference between youthful illusion and immanent mortality:

Dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death. And really I know… And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and illusions shattered.[13]

But it was not only his experience—early childhood, the war, deep sea fishing, etc.—that went into forming the complete man; it was his reading.

Legend has it that Hemingway never thought of himself as an intellectual; indeed, he had small use for New York intellectuals. The public image of the boastful, hard-drinking, tough guy was, in part, a mask for his wide reading. Other than the King James version of the Bible, Shakespeare, John Donne. and beyond,[14] much of his early reading was formed by the curriculum of the English Department of his Oak Park High School. Its courses would do credit to any graduate program in English up until the 1960’s, when much of the earlier English curriculum became diluted by radical and post-modernist doctrine.[15] Somewhere in those readings, Hemingway may well have run across—or been assigned—the essays of William Hazlitt (1778-1830) and his essay On The Fear of Death.[16] It will be recalled that in the last scene of Hemingway’s short story Indian Camp,[17] Dr. Adams has just delivered an Indian woman’s baby by Caesarian section. Her husband, in the bunk above her, unable to