Malcolm Cowley on Faulkner re: TRP

[alice wellintown]

>>  How does one define Hemingway's kind of Grace---Courage is grace under fire.

The Grace of Hemingway, while related to the Grace in O'Connor and
Pynchon has more to do with the new American Hero, the Post_Great War
hero, the one Hemingway gave to American Literature. He is not
Cooper's Hero any longer, though he is certainly related to him and
resembles him a great deal.

But the Frontier is closed and the New Frontier, though emerging, and,
as we see in GR, soon to be an off the map Zone, is not yet on the
map.


 Like Cooper's hero, Hemingway's hero is a warrior, a man of action, a
tough man, a competitor, and like the Hero in the Cooper tradition, he
has a code of honor, one that is built around courage and honor,
endurance, perseverance, and incredible human resourcefulness. He
shows grace under enormous pressure, as the modern world hurls
confusion, unbolts the center from its hold, spins a gyre into a chaos
while mere anarchy is loosed upon the ceremony of innocense and all
certitude is drowned in a blind man's battle fallen into the bloody
ditch.

He has grace, but not Grace, for his thorough disallusionment is inexcapable.

As young P, who loved this frightening modern state of modern man, and
so skillfully and comically injected it into his first novel,
demonstrated, the modern Hero found nothing when he pushed through the
pasteboard---Nothing...Nothing is at the center of the mystery, at the
center of the ALL,

so, at least for Hemingway, faith, in grace, is the Faith in one's own
skill, in one's courage, in one's toughness...