Malcolm Cowley on Faulkner re: TRP

[Bekah]

I can see that -  "grace under fire"  as merely behaving in a very graceful manner while being attacked.    I think that's a bit different from TRP's use in ATD.   

Bekah


On Dec 3, 2012, at 4:33 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> 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...