word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive and bloated, the whole machinery of social and individual thought and order goes to pot.' In the principles of Imagism, which Pound articulated for poetry during the years 1912 to 1915, he promoted a poetic language 'austere, direct, free of emotional slither.' This technique of verbal economy and precision was supplemented with a psychology of impersonality, encouraging the poet to adopt many voices, masks, or personae in place of poetic subjectivity or personal commentary.
During this same period, Pound along with the artist, critic, and writer Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska began to augment the formalism of Imagism with an emphasis on the creation of energy and the celebration of violence that they shaped into a short-lived movement called Vorticism, and whose chief product was a highly avant-garde journal that began publication in June 1914 called Blast: The Review of the Great English Vortex. This movement included among its inspirations the 1909 manifesto by the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti with its glorification of war, violence, virility, and speed: 'We wish to glorify War — the only health giver of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for women.' These values anticipate those of the fascist ideology that would engulf Italy and Germany in the thirties, and that swept not only Marinetti but also Pound and Lewis into its destructive philosophical vision. Pound and Lewis's Blast was first published in June 1914; within -317- three months war was declared, and the conflict that we call World War I began: the first fully mechanized modern war fought for four years, 1914-18, with machine guns, mortars, bombers, aerial dogfights, tanks, and poison gas — much of it in seemingly endless and stalemated trenches. The unprecedented slaughter and horror of this war created a virtually indeterminable number of casualties. The conservative estimate is 10 million dead and 20 million wounded, and the dead included a generation of European poets and writers, claiming T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Alan Seeger, Julian Grenfell, and Rupert Brooke among the English, the Germans Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Ernst Stadler, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pound's friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. The war poetry produced by these writers before their deaths reflects the state of art in their countries at the time of the war. The English poets struggled with mixed success to free themselves from the Georgian pastoralism that was the established and accepted form of English poetry at the same time that Pound and his American cohorts were turning it upside down with their modernist manifestos. The Germans and the French, in contrast, were using the avant-gardism already flourishing in their countries to produce a far more experimental, ironic, and nihilistic poetry, like that of August Stramm, for example, who uses destroyed syntactic forms to express the destroyed worlds and consciousnesses of dying soldiers. Because America did not enter the war until 1917, American soldiers largely escaped the 'troglodyte war' (as Paul Fussell calls it in The Great War and Modern Memory [1975]) of the claustrophobic, nightmarish trenches, and the American literary treatment of World War I is consequently different as well. The American 'high modernists,' Pound and Eliot, treat World War I chiefly as a metaphor, a sign or symptom of a spiritually rotten modern world. 'There died a myriad/ And the best, among them,/ For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization,' Pound wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1919.
In the work of Ernest Hemingway, the young American novelist whom Pound praised as a prose 'imagist,' the high modernist remedy of using a disciplined, muscular, classical style to redeem the fragmentation, loss of value, and chaos both symptomatized and produced by the war, without wasting the energy of its violence, achieved its most successful fictional realization. Even before Pound -318- gave Hemingway a moral theory of style, Hemingway learned to think of writing as a rigorous craft of producing clarity, simplicity, and strength of statement and expression while working as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star. This early journalistic training was interrupted by his decision to volunteer for Red Cross service as an ambulance driver and canteen operator for Italian soldiers in the summer of 1917 — an experience itself disrupted when he was wounded in the leg by machine gun fire and shrapnel. Over ten years later, his fictionalized version of this early adventure was published as A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of a young American serving as ambulance driver for the Italian army, who deserts and escapes the horror of the war with a young English nurse, only to have his idyllic sanctuary destroyed by her death in childbirth. Compared with Erich Maria Remarque's horrific and despairing tale of trench warfare published nearly at the same time (All Quiet on the Western Front), Hemingway's novel could be construed as romanticizing the war by displacing it onto a tragic love story. But the clean, hard prose keeps any sentimentality or idealism at bay: 'He said there was so much dirt blown into the wound that there had not been much hemorrhage. They would take me as soon as possible. He went back inside. Gordini could not drive, Manera said. His shoulder was smashed and his head was hurt. He had not felt bad but now the shoulder had stiffened.' The simple declarative sentences built on a strong scaffolding of substantives have been stripped of adverbial or descriptive excess and poetic adornment to the point where Ihab Hassan refers to Hemingway's style as an 'anti-style.'
But its modernistic impersonality, the way Hemingway replaces direct emotional expression with what T. S. Eliot called an 'objective correlative,' that is, the displacement of mood and feeling onto an impersonal and objective image, scene, or description that evokes, rather than names or speaks the emotion, allows him to transform style — in writing, gesture, and living — into an ethical act. He does this quite strikingly with a daring rhetorical maneuver in his first, and perhaps major novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, in which the protagonist narrator, Jake Barnes, is a man literally castrated by the war, whose language must emblematize a mode of coping with the sterility, nihilism, and corruption of the postwar modernity without self-indulgence or self-delusion. The jaded coterie of -319- the opening Paris episodes of the novel was based on a circle of Hemingway friends that gives The Sun Also Rises the status of a roman à clef — Brett Ashley derived from Duff Twysden, Robert Cohn from Harold Loeb, Pedro Romero from the bullfighter Cayetano Ordonez. The plot describes the quest of this group (a quest often read by critics as a mythic variant of the same Grail legend whose themes of impotence and regeneration served T. S. Eliot as poetic paradigm for The Waste Land) for an alternative to the forced gaiety and shallow pleasures of the Paris café scene by way of a bucolic fishing trip to Burguete ('Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down') and a fiesta visit to the Dionysian running of the bulls in Pamplona in Spain.
In the figure of the perfect bullfight Hemingway offers his emblem of modernist art as redemption of modern sterility and futility by interpreting its ritual as the transformation of violence, by discipline and control, into art and beauty. Hemingway's description of Romero's technique might double as a description of his own craft as a writer:
Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time.
Hemingway's own straightness and purity of line, that is, his refusal to contrive inflated emotional effects or extravagant plots and ornamental prose, become the stylistic equivalent of the protoexistentialist stoicism that makes Jake Barnes able to accept and face existence as it is — without the crutch of romanticism, idealism, or illusion. The novel ends in a famous line announcing Jake Barnes's naming and resisting of romantic delusion. To Bretts' mourning the loss of their love — 'Oh, Jake…we could have had such a damned good time together' — he responds, 'Yes…. Isn't it pretty to think so?'
One of the few moderns without a college education, Hemingway tended to be regarded as the least intellectual of the modernists, -320- called the 'dumb ox' by the critics for his promotion of unreflective brawn in his fiction. But Hemingway read widely during the twenties, borrowing books assiduously from Sylvia Beach's lending library at Shakespeare and Company, and he read under the productive tutelage of Stein and Pound. From both he learned to value Flaubert; from Pound he learned the importance of the stylistic inventions of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Hemingway seems not to have read philosophy widely or deeply, but he may have acquired the vision we now recognize as his proto-existentialist code of courage and fatalism in the face of nada, nothingness, from reading the Russians, particularly Dostoevsky ('Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia'), Tolstoy ('I thought about Tolstoi and what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer'), and Turgenev. This code generates the figure of the solitary individual coming to terms with an existence of meaningless violence and extremity, the soldier, the hunter, the bullfighter, the fisherman, the writer, obliged to prove not only physical
