The explanation for that lies, I think, in the insecure division between man and artist in Hemingway.
But as soon as he talks in his own person he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin.” Now though this new narrative is written not in the first person but in the fictional third person, still it is precisely the element of the fatuous and the maudlin that predominates in it. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations that obsess him, are externalized and objectified and the result is an art which is severe, intense, and deeply serious. Thus Lionel Trilling has observed that the artist in Hemingway is at once conscious and possessed of a kind of innocence while the man is self-conscious and naive and Edmund Wilson has remarked that “something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in his own person. This cleavage between man and artist was long ago perceived by his more acute critics. And the man in Hemingway-in his literary appearances at any rate-has nearly always struck one as the parasitical double of the artist in him. Here he really goes too far in the exploitation of it, indulging himself in blatant self-pity and equally blatant conceit, with the result that certain faults of personality, and the moral and intellectual immaturity which he was never able to overcome but which heretofore, in the greater part of his creative work, he managed to sublimate with genuine artistry, now come through as ruling elements, forcing the reader to react to Hemingway the man rather than to Hemingway the artist. In this latest book, however, the legend suffers irremediable damage. For it can be said that not since the days of Dickens and later of Mark Twain has a writer of fiction in English succeeded in beguiling and captivating his readers to the extent that Hemingway did and his success had a quality of ease and naturalness that was essentially exhilarating.
This novel reads like a parody by the author of his own manner-a parody so biting that it virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway that has now endured for nearly three decades.
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