Religion without God
PATRICK COSGRAVE
Islands in the Strewn Ernest Hemingway (Collins 40s)
Islands in the Stream recounts three episodes in the life of Thomas Hudson, painter. He entertains the three sons of his two ex-wives on his island home in the Caribbean; operates a wartime Q boat from a base in Cuba; hunts down the survivors of a German submarine. The subject is the in- tegrity of the artist at work and war. The first episode is remarkable for an epic fight between David, the second son, and a giant swordfish; the third for the most moving and exacting writing about men at war since Hemingway's own A Farewell to Arms; the second for destructively self-indulgent writing and thought. In this respect, basically autobiographical, the book can be compared to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's previous novel-memoir which, were it not for the last chapter, might have been judged his best work.
What needs to be stressed is that characteristic merit and characteristic vice alike were inherent in Hemingway's literary doctrines from the beginning; that they are themselves characteristic products of the amoral assumptions of twentieth century literature and responsible for its decline; and that Hemingway partially triumphed over them because of his awareness of their inadequacy.
In modern times the decline of belief in religion and the destruction of the stability of social order alike have, historically but not necessarily, destroyed the ability of the novelist to base his writing on either absolute (religious) values or on adequate coherent moral rules of social order. The power of the romantic assumption that there was a philosophy of art separate from religious or social values similarly inhibited the artist (like Eliot), who was a Christian and a social Conservative, from rendering his personal values in his work. As a consequence art became disastrously the expression of personality or the search for value in sensory phenomena.
Hemingway never abandoned the search for absolute value and this was the sinew of his work : Hudson, in his Hemingway world of precisely felt sensory phenomena, wants always 'an absolute veto power against all wickedness and to be able to detect it . . . justly'. The famous style is not a means of asserting or expressing a certain desirable sensuousness of behaviour but was devised to encapsulate and judge the relevance of phenomena to the search for absolute, Moral, value. By committing himself to the *arch for value in phenomena, however, the writer recognises that he has not got the means of moral judgment necessary to art and his work may deteriorate into in- discriminate reportage or undisciplined self- indulgence.
To meet this danger Hemingway had two supposedly inviolable rules. One was instinctive reverence for fidelity to talent and work: Hudson's 'life was built solidly on work . .. and it would stand up all right'; his friend Roger had misused his talent and, 'how can anyone think that you can neglect and despise, or have contempt for craftsmanship ... and then expect it to be at
the service of your hands and of your brain when the time comes when you must have it?' The other was to leave out rather than put in : as he wrote in A Moveable Feast 'The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it'. Out of the concentrated criticism these rules involved, his symbolism grew: as he shrewdly observed of the error in Baker's study of that symbolism, it came through the writing, not before it. But the rules were merely instinctive, not intelligent; when instinct failed we get self-parody and self-in- dulgence.
Hemingway was a crippled novelist, because his instinct often failed and he never found his absolute value. He was also a great one, for he never abandoned the search. He is certainly the greatest novelist in our language maturing in this century. From his career commonsense alone can deduce that great novels can only be written out of belief in absolute moral value or out of the search for such belief.
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