power must adopt the opposite in office of what it announced as its desires when it was out of power. It is metaphorically similar to the change in personality which you may have noticed in some of your friends who came to marriage after living together for years.
NEXT WEEK: CANDIDATE X WILL BE NAMED, AND THE PRIZEWINNER, IF THERE SHOULD BE ONE, WILL BE GIVEN HIS OR HER $20 .
Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part II
(1956)
YES, IT MAY SEEM a trifle fantastic at the first approach, but the man I think the Democrats ought to draft for their presidential candidate in 1956 is Ernest Hemingway.
I have had this thought in mind for some months, and have tried to consider its merits and demerits more than once. You see, I am far from a worshipper of Hemingway, but after a good many years of forever putting him down in my mind, I came to decide that like him or not, he was one of the two counterposed aesthetic forces in the American novel today—the other being Faulkner of course—and so his mark on history is probably assured.
Now, what I think of Hemingway as a writer would be of interest to very few people, but I underline that I am not a religious devotee of his work in order to emphasize that I have thought about him as a presidential candidate without passion or self-involvement (or at least so I believe it to be). As for his merits and even more important his possibilities for victory, I will try to discuss them quickly in the limits of this column.
To begin with, the Democratic Party has the poorest of chances against Eisenhower, and whether it be Stevenson, Kefauver, orsome other political half-worthy, the candidate’s personality would suffer from his unfortunate resemblance to a prosperous undertaker. There is no getting around it—the American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life, and Eisenhower, whatever his passive vicissitudes, looks like he has had a good time now and again. I would submit that this is one of the few healthy aspects of our unhealthy country—it is indeed folk wisdom. A man who has had good times has invariably also suffered (as opposed to the unfortunate number of people who have avoided pain at the expense of avoiding pleasure as well), and the mixture of pain and pleasure in a man’s experiences is likely to give him the proportion, the common sense, and the charm a president needs.
Hemingway, I would guess, possesses exactly that kind of charm, possesses it in greater degree than Eisenhower, and so he would have some outside chance to win. His name is already better known in America than was Stevenson’s in 1951, and his prestige in Europe would be no mean factor in the minds of the many overeducated middlebrows who think in such collectivized words as our-prestige-in-Europe. There are, after all, as passing examples, Hemingway’s Nobel Prize and his fluency in French, Spanish, and Italian.
In the small towns of America, where Eisenhower has such strong roots, Hemingway, by the grace of his thorough knowledge of hunting and fishing, would exercise a most human and direct appeal to the instincts of small-town men. On the other hand, city women would also be drawn toward him. It has been my experience that a man who has been married a few times interests more women than not. It is of course defeating to say this out loud, but then there would be no need for the Democrats to advertise it, the Republicans might consider it wiser to refrain from dirty politics, and the word would get around from living room to living room.
Another of Hemingway’s political virtues is that he has an interesting war record, and that he succeeded in becoming a man of more physical courage than most—and this is no easy norunexhausting attainment for a major writer. Whether the Village will like it or not, most Americans like warriors, indeed so much that they have been ready to swallow the bitter pill of an Army
NEXT WEEK: CANDIDATE X WILL BE NAMED, AND THE PRIZEWINNER, IF THERE SHOULD BE ONE, WILL BE GIVEN HIS OR HER $20 .
Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part II
(1956)
YES, IT MAY SEEM a trifle fantastic at the first approach, but the man I think the Democrats ought to draft for their presidential candidate in 1956 is Ernest Hemingway.
I have had this thought in mind for some months, and have tried to consider its merits and demerits more than once. You see, I am far from a worshipper of Hemingway, but after a good many years of forever putting him down in my mind, I came to decide that like him or not, he was one of the two counterposed aesthetic forces in the American novel today—the other being Faulkner of course—and so his mark on history is probably assured.
Now, what I think of Hemingway as a writer would be of interest to very few people, but I underline that I am not a religious devotee of his work in order to emphasize that I have thought about him as a presidential candidate without passion or self-involvement (or at least so I believe it to be). As for his merits and even more important his possibilities for victory, I will try to discuss them quickly in the limits of this column.
To begin with, the Democratic Party has the poorest of chances against Eisenhower, and whether it be Stevenson, Kefauver, orsome other political half-worthy, the candidate’s personality would suffer from his unfortunate resemblance to a prosperous undertaker. There is no getting around it—the American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life, and Eisenhower, whatever his passive vicissitudes, looks like he has had a good time now and again. I would submit that this is one of the few healthy aspects of our unhealthy country—it is indeed folk wisdom. A man who has had good times has invariably also suffered (as opposed to the unfortunate number of people who have avoided pain at the expense of avoiding pleasure as well), and the mixture of pain and pleasure in a man’s experiences is likely to give him the proportion, the common sense, and the charm a president needs.
Hemingway, I would guess, possesses exactly that kind of charm, possesses it in greater degree than Eisenhower, and so he would have some outside chance to win. His name is already better known in America than was Stevenson’s in 1951, and his prestige in Europe would be no mean factor in the minds of the many overeducated middlebrows who think in such collectivized words as our-prestige-in-Europe. There are, after all, as passing examples, Hemingway’s Nobel Prize and his fluency in French, Spanish, and Italian.
In the small towns of America, where Eisenhower has such strong roots, Hemingway, by the grace of his thorough knowledge of hunting and fishing, would exercise a most human and direct appeal to the instincts of small-town men. On the other hand, city women would also be drawn toward him. It has been my experience that a man who has been married a few times interests more women than not. It is of course defeating to say this out loud, but then there would be no need for the Democrats to advertise it, the Republicans might consider it wiser to refrain from dirty politics, and the word would get around from living room to living room.
Another of Hemingway’s political virtues is that he has an interesting war record, and that he succeeded in becoming a man of more physical courage than most—and this is no easy norunexhausting attainment for a major writer. Whether the Village will like it or not, most Americans like warriors, indeed so much that they have been ready to swallow the bitter pill of an Army
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