by Colin Wilson
He was so cocksure, you see. Yet not one of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.
… Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why…From the dark horizon of my future, a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing towards me … and on its way, that breeze had levelled out all the ideas people had tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I was then living through.
…all alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn too would come like the others. And what difference did it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end.’6 [Italics mine.]
His last reflections, as he falls asleep on the eve of his execution, bring him a sort of insight:
With death so near, mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life again.... And I too felt ready to start life again. It was as if this great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky. ... I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself… made me realize I had been happy, that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that, on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators, and that they should greet me with howls of execration.7
The last pages of the novel have revealed Meursault’s secret; the reason for his indifference is his sense of unreality. All his life he has lived with the same sense as Roquentin: All this is unreal. But the sense of unreality doesn’t torment him, as it tormented the Outsiders of our first chapter. He accepts life; sunlight, food, girls’ bodies; he also accepts the unreality. It is the trial that pulls him up, ‘with a brutal thunderclap of Halt’ (Wells’s phrase). The prospect of death has wakened him up, thereby serving the same function as Roquentin’s nausea. It has, admittedly, wakened him up too late as far as he is concerned. But at least it has given him a notion of the meaning of freedom. Freedom is release from unreality. ‘I had been happy and I was happy stil1’, but where is the point in being happy if the happiness is hidden from the consciousness by a heavy grime of unreality?
Sartre’s later formulation of Meursault’s realization is: ‘Freedom is terror.’ He observes, in his Confederation de la Silence, that it was during the war, working in the Underground resistance, in constant danger of betrayal and death, that he felt most free and alive. Obviously, freedom is not simply being allowed to do what you like; it is intensity of willy and it appears under any circumstances that limit man and arouse his will to more life.
The reader cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between Camus’s work and Franz Kafka’s. In Kafka, the sense of unreality is conveyed by deliberately using a dream-technique. In The Metamorphosis the hero awakens one morning to find himself changed into a gigantic beetle; in The Trial he is arrested and finally executed without knowing why. Destiny seems to have struck with the question: If you think life is unreal, how about this? Its imperative seems to be: Claim your freedom, or else ... For the men who fail to claim their freedom there is the sudden catastrophe, the nausea, the trial and execution, the slipping to a lower form of life. Kafka’s Metamorphosis would be a perfectly commonsense parable to a Tibetan Buddhist.
Camus’s L’Etranger reminds us of another modern writer who has dealt with the problem of freedom, Ernest Hemingway. The parallel that L’Etranger brings to mind is the short story ‘Soldier’s Home’, but comparison of the two makes it apparent that all of Hemingway’s work has its relevance to the problem of the Existentialist Outsider. Hemingway’s contribution is worth examining at length at this point.
‘Soldier’s Home’ deals with an American soldier who was returned from the war some time in late 1919. Krebs had been to a Methodist college before he joined up; when he comes back home, it is to realize that he has lost contact with his family and his former self. No one wants to hear about his war experiences—not the true stories, anyway.
A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in, because of the lies he has told. All the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside him when he thought about them; the times when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality, and then were lost themselves.8
At home, a kind of apathy makes him spend his days reading or playing pool. He would like a girl, but cannot overcome the apathy enough to go to the trouble of finding one. One morning his mother talks to him during breakfast:
‘God has some work for everyone to do,’ his mother said. There can be no idle hands in his kingdom.’
This sort of thing is notoriously meaningless to the Outsider. Krebs tells her:
‘I’m not in his kingdom.’
‘We are all of us in his kingdom.’
Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful, as always.
His mother asks him:
‘Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?1
‘No,’ said Krebs.
His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.
‘I don’t love anybody,’ Krebs said.
It wasn’t any good. He couldn’t tell her; he couldn’t make her see it. It was silly to have said it…
‘I didn’t mean it,’ he said. ‘I was just angry at something. I didn’t mean I didn’t love you.’…
‘I’m your mother,’ she said. ‘I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby.’
Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.9
She insists on their kneeling together to pray. He submits, but cannot pray when she asks him to. Afterwards he reflects:
He had tried to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie about it. He would go to Kansas City and get a job …
Krebs’s similarity to Camus’s Meursault is immediately striking. With the difference that Krebs’s state of mind is the result of specific experiences, while Meursault’s is natural to him, Krebs and Meursault would be almost interchangeable in their two stories. The difference is important though. Meursault reached a state of being ‘cool and clear inside’ on the eve of his execution; it came too late. Krebs had been through experiences during the war that had given him the sense of freedom; now, back in his home town, he knows that this way of life is not freedom. The times when he has done ‘the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally’ has given him a glimpse of meaning, of a part of himself that is not contented with the trivial and unheroic. Freedom lies in finding a course of action that gives expression to that part of him.
This is the theme of a great deal of Hemingway’s early work. The first novel, The Sun also Rises (the title taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes) has a stifling atmosphere of the trivial and unheroic. The hero, Jake Barnes, has been through the war, and a serious wound in the genitals has made him incapable of consummating sexual union with a woman. The wound is symbolic of the whole tragedy of unrealized freedom. The woman he loves has to take other men for physical satisfaction. Paris of the nineteen-twenties is a futile round of drinking and dancing; the futile people of the ‘Waste Land’: ‘I see crowds of people walking around in a ring.5 Hemingway does not turn to the past, to the Biblical prophets or Dante’s Commedia, for meaning. He is much less an intellectual than Eliot. He finds his memories of the heroic in his own past; in the war, in hunting and fishing in the Michigan backwoods. He finds it in the bullfighter who risks his life every day. But certainly he would agree with Sartre that ‘Freedom is terror’; or possibly: Freedom is crisis. Jake Barnes goes on a fishing trip to Spain, and sees the running of the bulls, and in spite of his unhappy love affair, he is not too discontented with life. As with Meursault the pleasures of eating and drinking and sunlight make up for a great deal. Hemingway’s answer to
the indictment of Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ is: Seek out the heroic. Jake Barnes says in The Sun also Rises ‘Nobody ever lived their life all the way up except bullfighters.’10 The facts of Hemingway’s life fill in the picture that his work outlines. Everything he writes has a more or less immediate bearing on his own experience. The early stories (‘In Our Time’) deal with his childhood in the Michigan backwoods, and with later incidents in the war. The hero, Nick Adams, goes fishing or skiing or canoeing, or possesses a little Indian girl on a carpet of pine needles, and there is no shadow on his world; he reads Maurice Hewlett, G. K. Chesterton and Mark Twain. Everything is fun. The war makes the difference. When he returns from it, the notion of evil has entered his life, the idea of a fundamental disharmony that cannot be evaded in sport or whoring. In various stories and novels, Hemingway gives different versions of how the ‘fall’ took place. The voice telling the stories is always personal enough to excuse us for regarding them as all part of the same legend. Nick Adams is wounded and shell-shocked. Propped up against a wall in a retreat, he comments: ‘Senta, Rinaldi, senta. You and me, we’ve made our separate peace.’ The nameless hero of ‘A Very Short Story’ has a love affair with a nurse in hospital in Padua; later, when she betrays him, he contracts gonorrhoea from a shopgirl in Chicago. Jake Barnes was made sexually impotent. Frederick Henry of A Farewell to Arms has the love affair with the nurse that was sketched in ‘A Very Short Story’, but loses her when she dies in childbirth. After the publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1929, Hemingway’s work takes on the nihilistic colouring of Wells’s Mind at the End of Its Tether; the stifling feeling of thought turning on itself.
After the war, Hemingway found himself in somewhat the same position as Corporal Krebs, with the past dead on his hands, the future a possible ‘posthumous existence’. The early stories begin the attempt to reconstruct the past; the Nick Adams cycle are his Garden of Eden legend. Then follows the major attempt at reconstruction, A Farewell to Arms. This is Hemingway’s most satisfying single performance; more than anything before, it conveys a sense of warmth, of excitement in reliving a fragment of temps perdu. In the novels that followed, the early spring quality was lost; they seem cold in comparison. A Farewell to Arms opens with a skilful evocation of the sense of meaninglessness, of confusion, of the soldier in a strange country. Drinking in cafes ‘when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop’ and ‘Nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark‘n And when Frederick Henry starts an affair with a nurse, it is all happening at three removes from him:
‘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.14
Or the reflections of the heartless cripple in ‘The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio5:
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 defeated5. 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 Hemingway5s 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.
