Evelyn Waugh on Ernest Hemingway

“You have to be an accomplished writer to imitate Henry James. Any journalist can produce a not quite passable imitation of Mr Hemingway. But it was not only the invention in technique that impressed us in Fiesta. It was the mood. English literature is peculiarly rich in first-class Philistine novelists – Surtees and Mr P. G. Wodehouse, for example. But their characters were always happy. Mr Hemingway has melancholy, a sense of doom. His men and women are as sad as those huge, soulless apes that huddle in their cages at the zoo.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls was not at all what the socialists wanted. They had been busy denying atrocities; Mr Hemingway described them in detail with relish. They had denied the presence of the Russians; Mr Hemingway led us straight into the front door of the Gaylord Hotel. He made Marty and la Passionaria as comic as any New Yorker correspondent could have done. From then on he was on the wrong side of the barricades for the socialists, while his pounding revolutionary heart still drove him from civilization.”

“Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry – respect for women, pity of the weak, love of honour – which keeps breaking in.”