When Joseph Conrad died, Ernest Hemingway, by way of an obituary notice, wrote a little piece in the TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW, in October 1924, and what he said was that if it could be shown that by grinding T. S. Eliot down to a fine powder, and by sprinkling the powder upon Conrad's grave, then Conrad would immediately jump out of his grave and commence to write, then he, Hemingway, would leave for London immediately with a sausage grinder in his luggage.

As a diversion we might consider nominating, from among contemporary novelists, candidates for the honor of being sprinkled upon Ernest Hemingway's grave. However, we should bear in mind that this year's list would undoubtedly differ from last year's; this decade's even more from last decade's. The further back we look, the stranger are the ups and downs of reputation. Is anybody safe? Edmund Wilson, who is very good on Hemingway, was saying in 1930 that it had become fashionable to disparage him. There were many people who would have cheerfully sacrificed Hemingway upon the graves of writers now long forgotten. (The vagaries of reputation can be seen across space as well as time: in France after the war, and for a long time after it, one of the most highly regarded English novelists was Charles Morgan, who was comparatively little read in his own country; while the French, I am told, were thoroughly bewildered by the way that the English gave Albert Camus a stature hardly lower than Sartre's.)

Hemingway, or course, had fame as well as reputation, a public fame which no doubt worked against his literary reputation even as it made his one of the best-known names on earth. In the smaller world of Hemingway's first American and British readers, the name H. L. Mencken must have seemed just as ineradicable in the twenties. In THE SUN ALSO RISES there is a two-and-a-half-page passage, when Jake and Bill are fishing, in which affectionate fun is made of Mencken ¹. These two and a half pages must be baffling, and perhaps expendable, to many of Hemingway's present readers. If it crossed the author's mind that he was taking a bet on Mencken's posterity, it probably seemed a fairly safe bet at the time. I happen to like Mencken, but I don't know more than two or three people in England who have read him, let alone heard of him. I am dwelling on this ebb and flow between reputation and oblivion only to make a much-delayed point, that an entire conference on Ernest Hemingway, not to mention the existence of periodicals entirely devoted to him, in both senses, accords very well with my own opinion of his work and his lasting importance.

And this, apparently, requires some explanation. Several people, familiar with my own work, find it surprising that I should be a Hemingway enthusiast. Perhaps it is. I am not capable of confronting this puzzle head-on, but I ought to confess that this will be a somewhat egocentric talk; I will try to explain something of why I got bitten by Hemingway and stayed bitten.

One gets badly bitten by writers perhaps only two or three times, between the ages of eight and 18. The first passion I remember was for a boys' stories writer, Arthur Ransome, when I was eight. I remember writing Runyon short stories in my teens, and a couple of Truman Capote short stories after I had left school, but I don't think I got thoroughly bitten again until I was about 20, late for Hemingway. The general influence of Hemingway's style is, of course, much more pervasive than that of, say, Runyon or Capote. It seems much simpler to copy. Writers have been trying to copy it for over half a century now. The other day I looked up a short story published about 20 years ago, and the first of my texts is a quotation from this story:

It had taken me days to get that far, from Avignon where they dropped me off. I had a bad time to Narbonne and in the square after the cafe closed it rained through the plane trees and the lights of heavy lorries swung big and yellow through the rain going south, but in the morning it was hot walking over the bridge and down the long straight between the vineyards, the country steaming brightly, and the first lift was a good one to Barcelona and after that it was pleasant coming down the coast all the way round through Magala with the mountains arid-brown in the corner of your eye ².