The Hemingway Patrols by Terry Mort

Author:Terry Mort
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

But what else was driving him? Hemingway could not have regarded his U-boat hunting on a purely literal level. A creative artist does not disengage his imagination when he is not working. The same images and habits of mind, the same tendencies to look for meaning, the same ways of thinking and imagining are simply applied to the current reality—perhaps inescapably. To Hemingway the U-boats must have been both real and symbolic. Metaphorically they were the close cousins of the sharks in The Old Man and the Sea—sinister forms appearing suddenly to turn a calm sea into a scene of bloody carnage. Looking for them was therefore both a useful service and a kind of quest with its own meaning and significance related to, but independent of, its military value. These are not the sorts of things an artist, or anyone for that matter, can say about himself without sounding a little self-important or absurd (not that Hemingway always, or even usually, avoided such traps). But they are the sorts of things an artist can think when he is alone on the bridge of his boat looking for gray shapes or periscopes in the distance. And they are the kinds of thoughts that he can then convert into his art.

Nor was this a death wish, despite Hemingway’s habit of going on and on about the subject in his conversations. A quest is not a search for death. It may turn out that way, but that is not the object. However, the long odds against success in this venture (that is, long odds if he tangled with a U-boat) may have appealed to Hemingway, some of whose heroes took grim satisfaction in facing impossible odds without flinching. Perhaps Hemingway, like T. E. Lawrence—another individualist with complex motivations—believed “there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.” 5 We know that Hemingway had long ago dismissed such words as honor, especially in military grandstanding of the kind that led to the insane butchery of World War I:

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