Ernest Hemingway: The Agnostic

ERNEST HEMINGWAY:
THE AGNOSTIC IN SEARCH OF FAITH

An incredible event in the history of 20th century American literature is that Ernest Hemingway, who had fostered the cult of courage, who wrote scathingly of the post-war generation which had lost the nerve to face reality, should have embraced the coward’s finale to existence–suicide; the more incredible, since he had climaxed his tumultuous career by a superb testament of faith in man in The Old Man and the Sea–A “man may be destroyed but not defeated.” Hemingway had been defeated by life.

Hemingway represents the Zeitgeist of the post-war generation in America, torn by the eternal human conflict between cynical and doubting despair and the need for belief in a viable meaning and value of existence. “Guage of morale,” Edmund Wilson once called him, and it is true that he has been sensitive to the characteristic tone of the age. His philosophic development from nihilism to partial faith testifies that man cannot sustain himself for ever on a negative attitude to life however fatally attractive the cult of despair may be.

Death is a recurring theme in Hemingway; and courage tempers his death-haunted vision and inspires him to declare: “There’s beauty in death...a calmness, a transfiguration that is not frightening to me.” In the war-turn world of violence which he lived through, death made life a purgatorial ordeal–an ordeal in which some spirits were crushed while others emerged unscathed and found a compensatory value in the cult of courage.

Hemingway’s philosophic attitude follows a curve–never simple but full of ambivalences–from despair to faith. He was a progeny of “the lost generation,” an exponent of the theme of nada (nothingness) (“our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name.”) He fills his pages with what Frued has termed “the discontent in our civillisation.”

Hemingway’s attitude was shaped by his shattering experiences as an ambulance volunteer. During an encounter at Fossalta he was so badly wounded in a burst of snell-fire that he felt life slip from his body “like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.” This experience was to be the turning point in his career for “he picked up a fear of his own fear and the lifelong need to test his courage.”

Hemingway at 19 had seen cruelty under conditions that made all talk about moral law a mockery. In the absence of faith in a moral order of the universe, he sought a compensatory value in terms of his code-hero–“the code being what we have instead of god.” His characters–fishermen, bull-fighters–all take pride in doing their vocation in a characteristic style and in accordance with a code of honour.

The “code-hero” is a minor note of affirmation of an agnostic sceptical of metaphysical systems, who really was on a quest of faith.

Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway’s code-hero par excellence, acting in the best tradition of a professional fisherman. As a critic has remarked, “He (Santiago) is a born fighter, to whom the consicousness of being matched against a strong adversary suffices and, who can dispense with success or failure.” The individual an give himself only by self-reliance. “I’ll fight them until I die,” says Santiago. “I’ll show them what a man can do and what a man endures.” On the very threshold of defeat he affords us a glimpse of the valiance of the true human will.

It is a significant fact that such of the writers of the post-war generation who failed to emancipate themselves from the morass of despair found their creativity gradually stunted. Belief in some value is imperative to man’s spiritual existence; who can be a greater spiritual bankrupt than one who has lost his faith?

Thus, though to Hemingway, the nihilist, life was “a short day’s journey from nothingness tonothingness,” he found a meaning to the “performance en route” in the pragmatic morality inherent in his concept of the code-hero. The agnostic, severely tried in the purgatory of war, at last found a haven of a viable faith.