The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The psychiatrist looked solemn. Another bull came into the ring, and a matador executed a verónica. It was not a good one. The matador should hold the cape directly before the bull’s face, one hand close to his own body, the other away from his body, stretching the cape, then pull it away from the bull’s face in such a manner that when the animal follows it, he passes directly in front of him. This matador held both hands far away from his body, and the bull passed at some distance from him. The crowd whistled and shouted insults. “Look at that, Doc,” said Franklin. “There’s a guy who doesn’t have the faintest grasp of noblesse oblige.”

  The psychiatrist cleared his throat. The bullfight, he said, might be looked upon as a plastic model of Freud’s concept of the mind and its three divisions: the id, the uncivilized brute in man; the ego, a combination of environment, which has tamed the id, and of the id itself; and the super-ego, the conscience, often represented by the father or the mother, who approves or disapproves. He suggested that the id might be represented by the bull, the ego by the bullfighter, and the super-ego by the whistling and hooting crowd. “Many things you do in life,” he added, “are a projection, or model, of what is going on in your mind. For instance, you might be fighting bulls because internally you have a conflict between your id and ego, id and super-ego, or ego and super-ego, or possibly a conflict between your combined id and ego and your super-ego. The bullfight, then, might be a good model of your state of mind.”

  “Nah,” said Franklin. “If I had my life to live all over again, I’d do exactly the same thing. Do you grasp my point?”

  The psychiatrist thought it over for a while, then said yes, he believed he did.

  After the bullfight, Franklin, in saying goodbye to the British psychiatrist, advised him to take care of himself. “If you can’t be good, be careful, Doc,” he said.

  · · ·

  In general, Franklin says, he likes the life of a bullfighter because of the number of things he can pack into it. “You come into a town, and the moment you arrive, be it by plane, ship, train, or car, everybody is there to receive you,” he says. “You barely have time to change your clothes before it’s a high old round of banquets and dinners. You don’t pay for a thing; others consider it a privilege to pay for you. You’re yanked out to go swimming, hunting, fishing, and riding, and if you don’t know how to do those things, others consider it a privilege to teach you, to satisfy your every whim and desire. The select of all the professions like to be seen with you.” “They’re never alone,” Hemingway says morosely of bullfighters. “What Ernest has in mind when he says that is that all the sexes throw themselves at you,” Franklin explains. “I never went in for that night-owl stuff. I never let myself become detoured. Many of them allow themselves to become so detoured they never get back on the main highway.”

  Chaval’s attitude toward the bullfighter’s life is rather different. “I just like to scare girls,” he says. “Boy, I bring the bull so close to me, the girls, they scream. Boy, I get a kick out of making girls scream.”

  Franklin used to lecture Chaval on the significance of noblesse oblige in bullfighting to help the young man stay on the main highway. “I am alive today only because I was in perfect condition when I had my accidents in the ring,” he sternly told Chaval, who had night-owl inclinations.

  “Jeez, Sidney, all you gotta do in the ring is show you’re brave,” said Chaval. “That’s what girls like, when you’re brave.”

  Most bullfighters agree with Chaval, but they state their case with more dignity. A young woman who once met Carlos Arruza at a party in Mexico City complimented him on his bravery in fighting so close to a bull. “You think I am going to be killed, but for you I am courageous in the face of death,” Arruza replied gallantly. “This is manliness. I fight to make money, but I like very much to bring the bull to his knees before me.” The fearlessness of Manolete is legendary. He specialized in the most difficult and dangerous maneuver in bullfighting—the pase natural, which, properly executed, requires the bull to pass perilously close to the body. He had no worthy competitors, but he always tried to outdo himself. “Manolete was a tremendous personality,” a Mexican aficionado said recently. “He never smiled.” He was gored several times before he received his fatal wound. On more than one occasion, he might have saved himself by moving an inch or two. “Why didn’t you move, Manolo?” he was asked after suffering a leg wound one afternoon. “Because I am Manolete,” he replied sombrely. Lack of fear has been attributed by some people simply to lack of imagination. Franklin disagrees with this theory. “I believe in facing facts,” he says. “If you’re a superman, you’re a superman, and that’s all there is to it.” Few of the critics who hold to the opinion that Franklin lacks artistry believe that he lacks valentía, or bravery. “Nobody ever lives his life all the way up except bullfighters,” Franklin says, quoting from The Sun Also Rises.

  In giving advice to Chaval on how to live his life all the way up, Franklin once said, “You’ve got to be the sun, moon, and stars to yourself, and results will follow as logically as night follows day.”

  “Jeez, Sidney! I don’t get it,” Chaval replied. “All I know is I gotta kill the bull or the bull kills me.”

  “Bullfighting taught me how to be the master of myself,” Franklin said. “It taught me how to discard all that was unimportant.”

  “Jeez, Sidney!” said Chaval.

  Franklin began to make history in the bull ring at his Spanish début, on June 9, 1929, in Seville. Aficionados who saw him fight that day wept and shouted, and talked about it for weeks afterward. “On that day, I declared, ‘Bullfighting will never again be the same,’ ” Manuel Mejías, the bullfighting father of five bullfighting sons, has said. “Sidney Franklin introduced a revolutionary style in the bull ring.” “Sidney was a glowing Golden Boy,” recalls an American lady who was at the fight. “He was absolutely without fear. He was absolutely beautiful.”

  “I was carried out on the shoulders of the crowd through the gates reserved for royalty,” Franklin told Chaval ecstatically not long ago. “The history of the ring was then a hundred and ninety-nine years old. All that time, only four fellows had ever been carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the crowd. I was the fifth. Traffic in the streets of Seville was wrecked. The next day, they passed a law prohibiting the carrying of bullfighters through the public streets. I was taken out of the ring at seven and deposited at my hotel at twelve-twenty that night. I didn’t know what I was doing or what had happened to me. I was so excited I took all my money out of a dresser drawer and threw it to the crowds on the street. The die was cast that day. I was riding on the highest cloud in this or any other world. I felt so far above anything mundane that nothing mattered. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I looked, but I didn’t see. I heard, but nothing registered. I didn’t care about food. I didn’t care about drink. I was perfectly satisfied to lay my head on the pillow and pass out.”

  E. B. White

  DECEMBER 12, 1948

  Before a book can be published in Czechoslovakia, the publisher must submit an outline of it to the government for approval. Accompanying the outline must be written opinions of “responsible literary critics, scientists, or writers.” (We are quoting from a dispatch to the Times.) The question of who is a responsible critic or writer comes up in every country, of course. It must have come up here when the Algonquin Hotel advertised special weekend rates for “accredited writers.” We often used to wonder just how the Algonquin arrived at the answer to the fascinating question of who is an accredited writer, and whether the desk clerk required of an applicant a rough draft of an impending novel. It seems to us that the Czech government is going to be in a spot, too. No true critic or writer is “responsible” in the political sense which this smelly edict implies, and in order to get the kind of censorship the government obviously wants, the government will need to go a step further and require that the critic himself be certified by a responsible party, and then
a step beyond that and require that the responsible party be vouched for. This leads to infinity, and to no books. Which is probably the goal of the Czech government.

  The matter of who is, and who isn’t, a responsible writer or scientist reminds us of the famous phrase in Marxist doctrine—the phrase that is often quoted and that has won many people to Communism as a theory of life: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Even after you have contemplated the sheer beauty of this concept, you are left holding the sheer problem of accreditation: who is needy, who is able? Again the desk clerk looms—a shadowy man. And behind the clerk another clerk, for an accreditation checkup. And so it goes. Who shall be the man who has the authority to establish our innermost need, who shall be the one to approve the standard of achievement of which we are capable? Perhaps, as democracy assumes, every man is a writer, every man wholly needy, every man capable of unimaginable deeds. It isn’t as beautiful to the ear as the Marxian phrase, maybe, but there’s an idea there somewhere.

  A NOTE BY JOAN ACOCELLA

  The Second World War was a catastrophe for most of the people in the East and the West, including The New Yorker’s book critics. Hence the leading characteristics of this collection of reviews from the 1940s. Nine essays culled from ten years do not an average make. The editors have of course pulled up the most interesting pieces. The table of contents reads like a short list of mid-century masters: Edmund Wilson on Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling on George Orwell, Orwell on Graham Greene, W. H. Auden on T. S. Eliot—a wide gamut. Nevertheless, most of the reviews share one striking trait: an unashamed quest for objective truth. Modernism, with its claim that perception is relative to the perceiver, had been around for nearly a half century, but the writers of the forties, looking out over the wreckage of Dresden and Hiroshima, decided that the events leading up to this were not relative to the perceiver. Trilling, in his review of Nineteen Eighty-Four, speaks of Orwell’s “old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is.” The same might be said of most of the writers in this group.

  They want seriousness. Not one of them fails to discuss politics, or something close. They fear ideologies, and not just those that underlay the war. They also inspect the belief systems, seemingly benign, that rose up out of the rubble. Wilson, always Johnny-on-the-spot, voices his mixed feelings about Existentialism, the new French philosophy. Other critics mull over the religious orthodoxy embraced by many intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period. Orwell, in his review of Greene’s Heart of the Matter, casts a cold eye on the author’s adopted Roman Catholicism, and on what he saw as the new Catholics’ habit of exalting vice as well as virtue, at least in their co-religionists: “This cult of the sanctified sinner seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath it there probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.” On the other side, Louise Bogan thinks that neo-Catholicism may have exacerbated Robert Lowell’s tortured introspection, and thereby unsettled his mind.

  Communism, of course, comes under discussion. After Stalin’s show trials, some writers frankly denounce the Soviet Union. (It is certainly the foremost model for the dystopia in which Nineteen Eighty-Four is set.) Others still embrace a diluted Communism—for example, that of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, as portrayed by Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Clifton Fadiman, in his review of that book, quotes the hero’s farewell to his young mistress as he goes off to blow up a bridge, and die: “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry.” Today’s readers may find this rather gassy, but I think that they will still grant the man’s convictions some honor. The point is not which program for living the reviewers recommended or condemned, but that they regarded such endorsements as part of their job. Even in the one frankly comic essay in this collection, Wilson’s “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” the basic complaint is that detective fiction has no moral content. Reading such novels, Wilson says, “I finally felt that I was unpacking large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.”

  These critics feared the loss of their world: their allegiances, the books they lived by, the emotions born of those books. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot, by then a declared Tory, voiced his worry that the dominant culture of the West was going to be tossed out by arrivistes. Auden, in his review of that book, has some fun imagining the howls of rage that such views, coming from the most honored poet and critic of the period, were going to provoke. They did. But it is worth noting that Eliot, and also Auden, were taking on the gravest questions of their time. Their difference from other critics of the period was only that they tried to figure out, and say, what the problem was. Before the Second World War book criticism in The New Yorker was, in general, a casual business. Reviews tended to be short—relaxed, genial, as if the critic were sitting down and lighting a pipe and recording his thoughts in an hour or two after dinner. In the forties, because of the war—and also, I believe, because of the example of Edmund Wilson, who arrived at the magazine as a weekly book reviewer in 1944 and stayed for about twenty-five years, raising the bar—the treatment of books became more searching. In a 1946 review of Robert Lowell’s second collection of poems, Lord Weary’s Castle, Louise Bogan says that Lowell “may be the first of that postwar generation which will write in dead earnest.” This was a prescient judgment. Lowell was indeed one of the first representatives of the new seriousness, but he was also the most personal and hair-tearing. Soon after him, as people became used to postwar blues, we get comedy, and not just in Wilson’s piece on detective stories (he also has a sterling essay on horror stories) but also in the glints of wit between the lines of Orwell’s view of the apocalyptic Greene, and Auden’s view of Eliot’s Toryism. Still, they were all writing in dead earnest.

  CLIFTON FADIMAN

  OCTOBER 26, 1940 (ON FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS)

  It’s not inaccurate to say that Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is A Farewell to Arms with the background, instead, the Spanish Civil War. The hero, Robert Jordan, a young American Loyalist sympathizer, recalls to mind Frederic Henry. Like Henry, he is anti-heroically heroic, anti-romantically romantic, very male, passionate, an artist of action, Mercutio modernized. Though the heroine, Maria, reminds one rather less of Catherine Barkley, the two women have much in common. Also, in both books the mounting interplay of death and sex is a major theme, the body’s intense aliveness as it senses its own destruction.

  But there, I think, the resemblance ends. For this book is not merely an advance on A Farewell to Arms. It touches a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books. It expresses and releases the adult Hemingway, whose voice was first heard in the groping To Have and Have Not. It is by a better man, a man in whom works the principle of growth, so rare among American writers.

  The story opens and closes with Robert Jordan lying flat on the pine-needle floor of a Spanish forest. When we first meet him he is very much alive and planning the details of his job, which is to join forces with a band of Spanish guerrillas and with their aid blow up an important bridge at the precise instant that will most help the Loyalist advance on Segovia. When we last see him he has fulfilled his mission and is facing certain death. Between the opening and closing pass three days and three nights. Between the opening and closing pass a lifetime for Robert and Maria and something very much like a lifetime for the reader. “I suppose,” thinks Robert, “it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years.” The full life lived by Robert and Maria spills over into your own mind as you read, so the three days and three nights are added to your life, and you are larger and more of a person on this page than you were on this page. That is one test of a first-rate work of fiction.

  For Who
m the Bell Tolls is about serious people engaged in serious actions. The word “serious” (a favorite among Spaniards) occurs again and again. The thoughts of Robert, even at his most sardonic, are serious thoughts. “There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war.” It is a stern and grave reflection, sterner, graver than anything in A Farewell to Arms. The title itself is part of a grave reflection, from the sermons of John Donne. That we may see on what a new and different level of emotion Hemingway now works, I quote the sentence from which the title is taken: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

  This utterance (I suppose it is one of the greatest sentences in English) is about death and says yes to life. That men confer value on life by feeling deeply each other’s mortality is the underlying theme of the novel. Here is something other than Hemingway’s old romantic absorption in death, though growing out of it. Remember that For Whom the Bell Tolls is an anti-Fascist novel. “Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” All of what the dictator most profoundly and religiously disbelieves is in that sentence. Hemingway is no fool. He portrays many of the Loyalists as cowards, brutes, and politicians—as they undoubtedly were. He portrays some of the Fascists as men of twisted nobility—as they undoubtedly were. But he knows that the war, at its deepest level (the first battle of the war now on your front pages), is a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it. And if it is not yet such a war, it must become so, or it will, no matter who wins, have been fought in vain. I take that to be the central feeling of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that is why the book is more than a thrilling novel about love and death and battle and a finer work than A Farewell to Arms.