E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

Hemingway is a magnificent artist whose work will outlast Malraux’s because it more clearly honors the literary act for its intrinsic value. But he too has written a political novel expressive of a national myth. His novel as conceived happens to accord perfectly with the American abhorrence for political theorizing, big systematic solutions, and utopian dreams. His aesthetic places the artist’s idea of himself centrally in the American heartland. The notion that we are the self-reliant independent entrepreneurs of ourselves is a national heritage. Working people in the United States, unlike their European counterparts, refuse to identify themselves as a class. They tend to define themselves not by their work but by what they own from their work, or by their ethnic background, or their social activities. For the independent entrepreneur of himself there can be upward mobility, at least across generations, and there is the road—he can hit the road when things go bad, pull up stakes and move on. All this, including the writer’s idea of what he can allow in his art and what he cannot, celebrates our great operative myth of rugged individualism. It is the myth tied to American historical accomplishment. It is a constituent of our freedom. Given a nation of self-reliers, you can make the case for American exceptionalism.

The economic metaphor for this myth is the “free market.” In politics it is a dependable source of a candidate’s appeal. Presidential candidates tend to run as outsiders even though they may come from well-established political dynasties. The current president [George W. Bush] has no patience for the United Nations, wants to go it alone, and has gone to war alone. He advertises himself as the rugged individualist par excellence. Of course, none of this cynical exploitation of a means of our national identity is Hemingway’s responsibility. But it is at least possible that his long-standing popularity with the public and among young writers might be due in part to his service on behalf of a prevailing societal myth. Entrepreneurial self-reliance had come in for some rough treatment from Melville in Moby-Dick, from Dreiser in Sister Carrie, and from Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, but Hemingway found its most romantic face. Distrust of society, a principled loneliness, have been preponderant motifs in our fiction ever since Robert Jordan withdrew from hope for his life and for the antifascist cause and waited for death as he looked out over the barrel of his machine gun on the last page of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

From “Malraux, Hemingway, and the Spanish Civil War,” in Creationists: Essays 1993-2006 by E.L. Doctorow.