There is a famous picture of Ernest Hemingway taken in the last decade of his life. In the picture, he sits over a table, writing: he leans towards his thick left arm and writes with the other. He is both solid and graceful, not an airy grace but the true grace of a man who seems in absolute control and comfort, his collar opened low on his famous chest. His head inclines towards the left and downward, the eyes lowered to the page and obscured to the viewer. The white, trimmed beard is dignified, the coming together of his lips stern--as if the writing itself deserved a scolding, or the photographer--but also somehow satisfied; a few concise lines mark his forehead. He is a very good-looking and imposing man; actually, he looks a great deal like Sean Connery.

It is a fitting picture, and a fitting resemblance, to be chosen for the publicity of the Hemingway Centennial Conference: it was on posters, of free postcards; it lined the front of the seminar tables like bunting and--altered so that there actually appears to be a halo around the iconic figure--appears on the front of the Centennial's Conference Program. Hemingway attracted attention like a movie-star: at the conference's closing session, fellow Nobel laureate Derek Walcott called Hemingway "the first writer to become a real celebrity," and W.E.B DuBois Professor Henry Louis Gates proposed that "for some portion of the 20th century, Hemingway may well have been the most famous person on earth."

And while his literary production grew and he became a Nobel Laureate and one of the most important literary influences of the 20th century, Hemingway's public persona expanded as well, and threatened even to overshadow the writing: Hemingway the brave idealist, the avid fisherman, the boxer. The mythic man impinged on the literary production all the more so because his poise and his life ran together--some would say to the extent that the discussion of one can not help but bleed into a discussion of the other. There was a sportsman's code to which he held himself and all others, a code of scrupulous honesty, precision, self-control, courage, skill and stoicism: and the code which governed his life also pervades his spare and detached writing, dictating not only the actions and responses of his heroes and heroines from Nick Adams through the protagonist known to the American high-schooler only as the Old Man, but also the shape of his sentences and the white spaces he substitutes for adjectives and adverbs.

So maybe there was no way for the Hemingway Centennial Conference, held this past weekend at the John. F. Kennedy Library, which also houses Hemingway's archived papers, to avoid the iconic Hemingway. The conference assembled many of the world's greatest living authors to "celebrate Hemingway's life" and to "assess the nature of Hemingway's influence on world literature" through the discussion of "significant themes in Hemingway's writing career including Africa, war, nature, creativity and despair." The many panelists were great writers and journeymen, both: the Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe and Derek Walcott as well as critically and popularly acclaimed authors E. Annie Proulx, Tobias Wolff, Chinua Achebe, Frederick Busch, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton and dozens of others. A hundred years after Hemingway's birth and 38 years after his death, the subject of the conference was how Hemingway has held up--not just his works, but necessarily the man himself. What is so striking about the Hemingway photograph I have discussed is not only that the subject seems so consummately the perfect masculine celebrity, but also the eventual realization that the photograph seems almost completely unnecessary. The picture of Hemingway the man, down to the vague disapproval in the lips that seems to mask some deep sadness, springs fully formed from the pages of his fiction. Does it shock any reader of those tragic and romantic books, stately and muscular, that Hemingway's fingers are thick and his glasses a severe but stylish stainless steel? A man already visibly present in his works became nearly inescapable at the centennial, in the actual shadow of his huge iconic face, and the myths that surrounded his life seemed perhaps to be a fitting commentary to his literary legacy. Perhaps they began to seem as if they are one and the same as his artistic production.

Gradually, as the panelists told anecdote after inevitable anecdote about Hemingway's life, and as theyexplained their responses to his work, a patternbecame evident, and I think it would not be unfairto say that if Hemingway's legacy is determined inlarge part by which of his works are read andvalued and thought beautiful or useful--aneffective definition of the canon expressed at theConference by the novelist Francine Prose--thenHemingway as a writer has been dramaticallyreduced.

At the Centennial Conference, Hemingway wasknown and evaluated, with few exceptions, based onhis personal ideology and his life and based on thestylistic importance of a tiny slice of hisliterary production. As America's most respectedcontemporary authors--asked which of Hemingway'sworks they found important--read and rereadselections from the short-stories "Big Two-HeartedRiver" and "Killers" and from the 1929 novel AFarewell to Arms, it became clear that the vastmajority of the participants were either ignorantof Hemingway's oeuvre, or that they had judged thegreat mass of Hemingway's writing to be unworthyof consideration as a valuable literary legacy.

It is arguable that the size of Hemingway'scontribution to the writer's canon is unimportant:with some dissents, the majority of authorshonoring Hemingway's birth contended thatHemingway's gift to the craft of writing, and thusto literature, is exclusively "stylistic." NadineGordimer expressed in the conference's openingremarks what would be repeated a hundred times:Hemingway's was the art of omission andimplication rather than explication. Writers takefrom Hemingway the Biblical repetition, the artfulnonsequiter, the pacing, the avoidance of emotionthat brings on tears, the distanced voice. Theshort stories and A Farewell are enough,alone, to teach writers about this writing ofomission, writing that evokes sentiment withoutbeing sentimental, that somehow captures therhythms of both poetry and of common speech.

The logical continuation of the worship ofHemingway for his style alone was Francine Prose'sfinal comment to the closing plenary session ofthe Centennial conference. Sitting on a podiumalongside Saul Bellow, Henry Louis Gates and DerekWalcott, and Hemingway aficionados, Prose did notblink at asserting the necessity of the totallyinconceivable: "You have to ignore the content"she counseled, "and focus on the style." Not onlyhas Hemingway's valuable work been whittled downto a novel and some stories, but one is obligatedeven to sift away the bulk of those works,searching for what is valuable in the style alone.

The dumbfoundingly naive notion that form andcontent can be neatly separated was hardly uniqueto Prose: remarkably--and despite the earlierassertions of the writer E. Annie Proulx and thecritic Seven Birkerts that style is not merely thearrangement of words but rather expressive of andinextricable from the author's entireworldview--nobody sitting on the podium with Proseseemed immediately bothered by her assertion. And,in Hemingway's case, perhaps it is not hard tounderstand why: if one can separate style fromcontent, one can perhaps remove from the text andfrom literary legacy the offensive of ErnestHemingway.

Because the summary judgment of the last 30years is that while he was a fascinating andromantic figure, Hemingway was a colossal jerk.He is seen, at best, as ignoring women and atworst as a vicious misogynist; he is cast asanti-Semitic; he is pronounced guilty of writingAfrican-American and native African characters outof his works and of racism when he does includethem. And even when Hemingway is not offendinganybody, he has been labeled infantile. Writerslike Tobias Wolff mark their adulthood at thepoint when they cease to be entranced byHemingway's bravado; and perhaps many--like PeterMathiessen, who smugly pronounced the author a"brave coward"--take a certain joy in Hemingway'ssuicide, which proves once and for all that theman was really a posturer, masking fear withmachismo.

Some of those who would separate style andcontent are authors like Frederick Busch, whoclaims that Hemingway is "not interested inpeople, or social circumstances" and is then ableto praise Hemingway's work because he has confinedthe man's entire project to a stylistic endeavor.Then there are critics like Chinua Achebe, theNigerian author of Things Fall Apart, whois comfortable addressing Hemingway's stylisticcontributions to literature even while expressinghis disinterest in Hemingway's subject matter,because Achebe feels the content of the work hasno particular relevance to him as an African.Finally, there are those whose distaste forHemingway as a person forces them pastdisinterest--which, of course, functions nearly aswell as absolute antipathy in terms of its effectson Hemingway's legacy--into resentment and anger:take for example the nature writer Sue Hubbell,who in one of the Centennial Conference's moreridiculous moments scolded Hemingway, "You don'tdeserve to write this well!"

Even imagining the separation of style andcontent requires a conception of style as simplywords on a page: one must not be interested in theimplications of Hemingway's omissions but merelyin the fact of omission. And it is here, I think,that Hemingway's place in the canon of what isread and appreciated by contemporary authors isslipping most rapidly. As those who grew to famewith Hemingway could easily see and as can perhapsbe easily forgotten today, what is implied byHemingway's subtlety is a set of social andhumanistic concerns of real depth and emotivepower. Malcolm Cowley considers Hemingway'sgreatest achievement to be not the short stories,or A Farewell to Arms, but For Whom the BellTolls, the novel that at the Hemingway CentennialConference was looked down upon as a failed ifambitious attempt at broad social criticism, ananomaly in Hemingway. But maybe Cowley,Hemingway's contemporary, understood somethingimportant about Hemingway's social concerns that,by and large, escaped the writer/critics at theCentennial.

There is a strange inversion which occurs whenthose who would see Hemingway's writing as mereform assume a total merging of form and meaning inthe bravado and masculine ritual thatcharacterized Hemingway's writing and his cult ofpersonality: it is imagined that what appearsadolescent and foolish is merely adolescent andfoolish, driven by the same insecurities thatdrive adolescents. Thus there is only scorn forthe behavior described by Malcolm Cowley in 1925,just a year after the publication of Hemingway'sfirst full-length collection of short stories:

"The back room was full of young writers andtheir wives just home from Paris. They were alltelling stories about Hemingway, who first book hadjust appeared, and they were talking in what Iafterward came to recognize as the Hemingwaydialect-tough, matter-of-fact and confidential, Inthe middle of the evening one of them rose, tookoff his jacket and used it to show how he woulddominate a bull."

The question of what this behavior meant, andmeans, is exactly as simple as Hemingway's prose:what is implied runs deeper than most otherwriters could ever state, Cowley explains thatHemingway's "heroes live in a world that is like ahostile forest, full of unseen dangers, not tomention the nightmares that haunt their sleep.Death spies on them from behind every tree. Theironly chance of safety lies in the faithfulobservance of customs they invent for themselves."

Perhaps the tragedy of Hemingway's legacy isthat it appeals with visceral force only those ofhis generation, the young men who would dance withbulls in cafes, imitating the master. The crucialfact is that the famous epigraph to The Sun AlsoRises--Stein's "You are all a Lost Generation"--isneither pretentious nor empty: for Hemingway andfor many of his contemporaries, the assertionthrough life and through writing of theunflinching code of sportsmen’s honor was not asilly return to childhood but a search for a codeof behavior that meant something in a post-Warworld where the land of childhood was far away andthe doctrines of established morality hadshattered.

The elimination of moral codes, however, didnot prevent Hemingway from the impossible attemptto assert value, through language and throughaction. As Frederick Henry discovers in A Farewellto Arms, it is precisely because "You could not goback" that you were forced to rebuild. In AFarewell to Arms. Henry discovers that "If you didnot go forward what happened?" The authentictragedy in Hemingway is the hopelessness of thehuman situation: "The world breaks everyone. Butthose that will not break it kills. It kills thevery good and the very gentle and the very braveimpartially." But it is Hemingway's discovery,momentous in his time and in ours, that the deathof bravery is not a sufficient reason for notbeing brave.CrimsonAmanda L. Bumham