This is Part 5 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012.
Here is the question that obsessed Hemingway over the long arc of his novels and stories: What can heroism mean in an age where it is no longer possible to believe in a glorious death? How can the 19th century’s Charge of the Light Brigade square with the horrors of trench warfare 60 years later?
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen was writing about a gas attack in the killing fields of WWI. That last line, from Horace, translates: Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country. Owen himself was killed by artillery fire in France, a week before the Armistice in 1918. Four months earlier Hemingway, not yet 20, was grievously wounded on the Italian front by an Austrian mortar shell. The explosion killed the soldier in front of him, blew the legs off another, and inflicted over 100 pieces of shrapnel in Hemingway’s legs. Owen died; Hemingway, of course, survived and eventually recovered. But the same question was to drive each of their arts. Faced with the impersonal lethality of death in our time, how does one act and what does one make of it? Hemingway returned to the question again and again; in successive wars — the Spanish Civil War and WWII (in both China and the European theaters); in the bullring; in the African bush. The answer he found, and exemplified in his heroes, was guts. They displayed grace under pressure. In the foreknowledge that fate was pitiless and impersonal, that the sharks and wounded buffalo eventually would win, Hemingway’s heroes persevere. They don’t embrace their death, neither do they flee it. They stand and deliver.
This concern for proper human conduct in the face of mortal adversity places Hemingway in the tradition of the epicists. In The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, adversity is the occasion for heroes to demonstrate their courage, strength, cunning and leadership. For Homer and Virgil: the hero is a model for human conduct, an ideal for us all to emulate. For Hemingway: Jake Barnes, Robert Jordan and Santiago are models of stoic fortitude, and personal capability empowered by expert knowledge. As exemplars they are direct descendants of Achilles, Odysseus and Aeneas. Until today I would have defined an epic as a tale told with a moral urgency to explain the ways of gods to men — or in the case of the Christian epics (Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost), the ways of God to men. And I would have said that writing an epic is not possible today because an epic can only be written with a settled worldview and a divine order. But Hemingway found a way to give us the hero, his model for moral conduct, in a century where there is no settled worldview, and where the intervention of God or gods is not to be found in the cataclysms of our time.