ABSTRACT
Though the critics have found many things to praise in Hemingway, his mind was seldom one of them. Dwight Macdonald, in a funny if unoriginal essay, seems to express the consensus in saying that there is little evidence of thought in his writing, that for all his sureness of “instinct” as a writer, he strikes one as not particularly intelligent.1 And Leslie Fiedler points to a pervasive humorlessness, a shortcoming of mind, in him as a writer.2 If the critics have been sharks to Hemingway’s Santiago, it is also a case of man bites shark. Who more proudly flaunted his contempt of them? Who was the first to make megalomania part of the novelist’s personal style-as if critical intelligence were exercised only by those who live life all the way from the neck up? Yet Hemingway was a writer whose diction, whose tone, whose very existence as an artist imply a relationship with literary culture no less certain than that of the mythical New York beasts he excoriates.3
