The Outsider (8 page)

‘
You did say you loved me, didn
’
t you?
’

‘
Yes,
’
I lied,
‘
I love you.
’
I had not said it before.
¹²

He is in the same position as Meursault and Krebs. Love is impossible when there is a prevailing sense of unreality. It is only later, when he lies wounded in the hospital in Milan, and the nurse is posted there too, that he suddenly realizes he loves her. The unreality is dispersed; the atmosphere of
L’
Etranger
is replaced by the atmosphere of a strange modern
Tristan und Isolde.
(Hemingway, in point of fact, liked to refer to it as his
Romeo and Juliet.)
It is a masterly achievement, beyond comparison in its kind with anything else in modern letters. Scene after scene has a poignant vividness; the climax, with Catherine
’
s death in childbirth, is as emotionally exhausting as the last act of
Tristan.

Hemingway had taken a firm grip on those experiences that made him feel
‘
cool and clear inside
’
, and the novel has the power of conveying the reader into the sensation spoken of by Sartre: I am touched: I feel my body at rest like a precision machine.

The subsequent stages in Hemingway
’
s work are far less satisfying. With this major evocation of the war behind him, the artistic problem was then how to go forward from such a level of seriousness and intensity. His various solutions— big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and, later, rushing off to Spain as soon as the civil war broke out—betray his failure to get at the roots of the problem. His formulae for the later books would seem to have been arrived at by considering the elements that he supposed made the early books an artistic success— realism, violence, sex, war—and repeating them with variations. The elements that give the early books their unique atmosphere, the blending of a sort of religious despair with a rudimentary nature mysticism, have disappeared, and have been replaced by elements that could be found in half a dozen other American writers or, indeed, Soviet Russian
‘
historical realists
’
.

In spite of this, some of the later work succeeds in taking the Outsider problems a stage beyond Meursault and Corporal Krebs. For Frederick Henry, the sense of unreality is dispersed by the physical hardships of the war, and then by his falling in love with Catherine Barkely. (It is to be noted that Catherine Barkely was in love with Henry long before he realized he was in love with her; the woman is always more instinctively well-adjusted, less susceptible to the abstract, than the man.) The feeling that the final Negative gets the last word, Catherine
’
s death, is a maturer realization than the feeling that nothing matters.

The short stories after 1930 often contain sentences that can be taken as fragments of the Hemingway Credo; there
is, to begin with, Frederick Henry when Catherine is dying:

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn
...
they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
¹³

Or the Major of
‘
In Another Country
’
, whose wife has died:

A man must not marry.... If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that.
...
He should find things he cannot lose.
^1
4

Or the reflections of the heartless cripple in
‘
The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio
⁵
:

Religion is the opium of the people... and now economics is the opium of the people, along with patriotism... . What about sexual intercourse, was that an opium of the people? But drink was a sovereign opium, oh, an excellent opium.... Although some people prefer the radio, another opium of the people.
¹⁶

There is the old waiter of
‘
A Clean, Well-lighted Place
’
, who prays:
‘
Hail nothing, full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
’

Here the encounter with death has become an encounter with the meaninglessness of life, an encounter with nothingness. The only value that remains is courage; Santiago in
The Old Man and the Sea
with his
‘
A man can be destroyed but not defeated
⁵
. And the value of courage is doubtful. Death negates it, and the causes that inspire it are usually
‘
opium of the people
’
.

There is a short story written before 1933 that expresses Hemingway
⁵
s
Weltanschauung
briefly. This is the unsuccessful experiment in style called
‘
The Natural History of the Dead
’
. He opens by quoting Mungo Park
’
s argument for
‘
a divinity that shapes our ends
’
: how, when fainting from thirst in the desert, he noticed a small moss flower and reflected:
‘
Can that Being who made, watered and brought to perfection ... a thing that appears so unimportant, look with unconcern upon the suffering of creatures made in his own image ?
’
Encouraged
by this thought, he travelled on, and soon found water. Hemingway asks:
‘
Can any branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life? Let us see therefore what inspiration we may derive from the dead.
’
¹⁸

The story then becomes a ponderously ironic account of war experiences. He recalls the mules at Smyrna, their legs broken, pushed into the shallow water to drown:...
‘
Called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say they called for a Goya, since there has only been one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight, but more likely would, if they were articulate, call for someone to alleviate their condition.
’
¹⁷

The examples Hemingway selects for his
‘
field of observation
’
are all violent and bloody:

The first thing you found about the dead was that, hit quickly enough, they died like animals.
...
I do not know, but most men die like animals, not men.
¹⁸

Speaking of natural death, he comments:
‘
So now I want to see the death of any so-called humanist
...
and see the noble exits they make.
’

‘
The Natural History of the Dead
’
is Hemingway
’
s clearest exposition of his Existentialist position, and the key sentence,
‘
most men die like animals, not men
’
, is his answer to the humanist notion of the perfectibility of man. He cannot believe in the God of Bishop Butler
’
s or Paley
’
s arguments, because the idea looks thin against the raw facts of existence. The nearest approach to religious ideals in his work is the sentence
‘
He should find things he cannot lose
’
. This idea is not followed up, or rather, is followed up by a protracted demonstration that there is nothing that man cannot lose. This doesn
’
t mean that life is of no value; on the contrary, life is the only value; it is ideas that are valueless.

* * *

At first sight, Hemingway
’
s contribution to the Outsider would seem to be completely negative. Closer examination
shows a great many positive qualities; there is honesty, and intense love of all natural things. The early work especially seems to be Hemingway
’
s own
Recherche de Temps Perdu,
and frequently the reader is picked up in a rush of excitement that the search is really leading somewhere. It is after 1930 that the direction seems to have been lost, the time of Hemingway
’
s great commercial success, when he had become a public figure and something of a legend. The stoicism of
A Farewell to Arms
should have led to something, and it didn
’
t. In none of the novels after 1929 do we feel ourselves in the hands of Hemingway the supremely great artist. And Hemingway the thinker, who had so far sifted and selected his material to form a pattern of belief, has disappeared almost entirely.

Perhaps Hemingway
’
s susceptibility to success is not entirely to blame. The problem is difficult enough. In the whole of
L’
Etre et le N
é
ant
Sartre says little more than Hemingway in
A Farewell to Arms.
Subsequently, Sartre, for all his intellectual equipment, has failed to advance to a satisfyingly positive position. His philosophy of
‘
commitment
’
, which is only to say that, since all roads lead nowhere, it
’
s as well to choose any of them and throw all the energy into it, was anticipated by Hemingway in Henry
’
s finding that the feeling of unreality disappears as soon as he plunges into the fighting.

Compared with Sartre, neither Hemingway nor Camus is a penetrating thinker. Camus
’
s
Mythe de Sisyphe
enlarges on the conclusions of the last pages
oi
L’Etranger
,
and concludes that freedom can be most nearly realized facing death: a suicide or a condemned man can know it; for the living, active man it is almost an impossibility. In the later book,
L’
Homme Revolt
é
,
he studies the case of the revolt against society, in men like de Sade and Byron, and then examines the attempt of various social ideologies to realize the rebel
’
s ideal of freedom. It would be an impossibility to advance from
LEtranger
and
Le Myth de Sisyphe
to acceptance of a sociological answer to the problem of man
’
s freedom; and Camus faces this conclusion squarely at the end of
L’
Homme
Revolt
é
.
In this matter he clashed violently with Sartre, whose theory of commitment or
‘
engagement
’
had led him to embrace a modified communism; thereafter Sartre and Camus, once comrades in Existentialism, went their separate ways.

Hemingway had never thought in terms of a social answer,
or in fact, of any answer except that of his semi-stoic philosophy. This has been the most constant complaint of Marxist critics against Hemingway.

Our foregoing considerations have made it clear, however, that the question of freedom is
not
a social problem. It may be possible to dismiss Barbusse
’
s Outsider as a case of social maladjustment; it may be possible to dismiss Wells
’
s pamphlet as a case for a psychiatrist. But the problem of
La Nausee
is unattackable except with metaphysical terminology, and Camus and Hemingway tend to fall into very near-religious terms. This is a point that I must return to later in the chapter, after further consideration of our terms: freedom and unreality.

Freedom posits free-will; that is self-evident. But Will can only operate when there is first a motive. No motive, no willing. But motive is a matter of
belief
you would not want to do anything unless you believed it possible and meaningful. And belief must be belief in the
existence
of something; that is to say, it concerns what is
real
So ultimately, freedom depends upon the real. The Outsider
’
s sense of unreality cuts off his freedom at the root. It is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.

* * *