THE FINAL ROUNDS

J U D Y  J O S M A L L and M I C H A E L  R E Y N O L D S
North Carolina State University

MOST OF THE documented facts concerning Ernest Hemingway's attack on Sherwood Anderson, his one-time mentor, have long been known. Eager to establish a reputation independent of Anderson and to break with Boni and Liveright, their mutual publisher, Hemingway wrote a satiric parody of Anderson's fiction, The Torrents of Spring He submitted it to Boni and Liveright, and, as he had anticipated, it was refused. When Scribner's published both the parody and his new novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway succeeded in publicly distancing himself from the older writer. During that fall of 1926 the two writers discussed the affair in a series of letters. Scholars have printed those letters and have recorded remarks made by the two writers about their only subsequent meetings, in Paris early in 1927. The matter has seemed to be closed, ending there at the point of Hemingway's rise and Anderson's virtual demise.

No one has recognized that each of the writers told the story yet once more, in two short stories that turn the episode into fiction. Hemingway's story, which appeared in Scribner's Magazine and in Men Without Women, is among his most famous. It is called "The Killers." Anderson's story, though it appeared in Vanity Fair and in his collection Death in the Woods, has gone almost entirely unnoticed. It is called "The Fight." Both stories treat the literary battle in terms of boxing. Each is splendid in its own right, but together they may well reveal their authors' deepest feelings about the personal and literary conflict between them.

In 1926 the smell of prize fighting was in the air. Preparations were being made for the championship about of 23 September, when Gene Tunney would at last take away the title from Jack Dempsey, "The Manassa Mauler." Dempsey had been heavyweight champion since 1919, the same year that Anderson's Winesburg Ohio had made him a sort of champion of the literary world. If Anderson noticed the parallel, he never said so directly. The fighter he identified himself with was another Jack Dempsey, the great middleweight fighter whom the later boxer (born William Harrison Dempsey) had taken his nary The original Jack Dempsey (born John Kelly) had reigned as champion from  1884 to 1891, during Anderson's boyhood and early adolescence; the original . Dempsey's nickname was "The Nonpareil." In two of his semi-autobiographical  works, self-deprecatingly, Anderson envisioned his younger self stirred by the aura of glory and power attached to the name of this middleweight hero. A Story Teller s Story (19~4) depicts the young Anderson shadow-boxing wildly in an effort to impress a girl: "She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett or that famous middleweight of the day celled 'The Nonpareil'" (boo) Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) shows the Anderson persona, a mere boy, suffering a tough lesson at the hands of Bill McCarthy, former sparring partner of "The Nonpareil, whom he calls here Kid McAllister (318).4

Hemingway, an avid fan of boxing, prided himself on his skill in the sport (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 191-192). But he never liked the heavyweight Jack Dempsey, and he bet against him at every opportunity; writing as if he were a cognizant insider in a 19~1 feature article for the Toronto Star, he debunked Dempsey's much-vaunted talent as mere "myth" ("Superman"). Several on-! published early Hemingway stories deal with boxers; one character becomes a champion to win a woman's love, another disappoints his father by losing in the ring, and a third leaves the ring and becomes a hero on the battlefront.  After Hemingway went off to write in Paris equipped with Anderson's letters of introduction to literary figures there, he wrote back to say that he was seeing Gertrude Stein frequently and "teaching [Ezra] Pound to box" (SL 6~). In the same letter, he mentioned prizefighters Benny Leonard and Pete Herman, continuing some previous boxing discussion. He gave no sign yet that he aspired to challenge the older writer, whose eminence in the literary ring had been confirmed by the Dial prize of 1921.

Hemingway began to sense Anderson's vulnerability as early as the fall of 19~3. Coincidentally or not, that was around the same time that critics started remarking Anderson's influence on Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems; "My Old Man" especially, they observed, resembled Anderson's story "I Want to Know Why." In November Hemingway wrote to Stein: "They are turning on you and Sherwood both; the young critical guys and their public. I can feel it in the papers etc." (SL 101). A couple of weeks later he wrote Edmund Wilson: "No I don't think My Old Man derives from Anderson.... I know I wasn't inspired by him. I know him pretty well but have not seen him for several years. His work seems to have gone to hell" (SL 105). The following February he told Pound, ''There is now a tremendous reaction in America against Anderson, die Broom Boys etc. You are comingback''(SL10). His excitement rings clearly in a May 1924 letter to Pound: "Galantiere in the Chi Tribune Sunday may. sets out to prove that the mantle of Abe Lincoln, Wm. Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson and yourself is descending upon me" (SL 115).

It was with a certain bravado, then, that Hemingway reviewed Anderson's A Story Teller's Story. He made a point of mentioning-twice-that "many people writing today think [Anderson] cannot write"; he agreed that Many Marriages was "a poor book" and disparaged Anderson's pretensions to erudition and his "banal idea of things" even as he paid homage to the "craftsmanship" discernible in the new book, arguing that Anderson was still "a very great writer" ("Lost" 7~73). Significantly, the passage that Hemingway chose to exemplify Anderson skill was the scene where the autobiographical protagonist gets beaten up: he singled out for praise Anderson's "very definite sharp picture of the baseball player, drunk, sullen and amazed, knocking him down as soon and as often as he got up while the two teamsters watched and wondered why this fellow named Anderson had picked a fight when he couldn't fight" (73). Then, to convey his idea that Anderson had allowed his talent to be corrupted, Hemingway returned as if compulsively to the image of the author as boxer. New York intellectuals, he said, had loaded Anderson down with traits "that he needs as much as a boxer needs diamond studded teeth."

When Anderson helped to secure Live right's acceptance of In Our Time, Hemingway thanked him (SL 161-6z). But by that fall of 1925, disgruntled that In Our Time was selling slowly while Liveright was "putting Sherwood over big" and Dark Laughter became "a best seller," Hemingway began to write his parody, hoping to knock out the man he saw increasingly as an obstacle to his own career (Reynolds, Paris Years 330-31).

It must have seemed natural to Hemingway to use the metaphor of boxing when, on 21 May 1926, he wrote to tell Anderson about the literary blow he was delivering "You see I feel that if among ourselves we have to pull our punches, if when a man like yourself who can write very great things writes something that seems to me, (who have never written anything great but am anyway a fellow craftsman) rotten, I ought to tell you so" (SL 205).

Anderson understood that the younger writer was challenging his title. Resenting Hemingway's "patronizing" tone, he protested, "Come out of it, man. I pack a little wallop myself. I've been middleweight champion myself.

 You seem to forget that.... I think the Scribner book will help me and hurt you. Spite of all you say, it's got the smarty tinge" (Modlin, Letters 80). On the whole, though, Anderson's letter was polite, even friendly; he invited Hemingway and his wife for a visit at his new house in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. And he added a wry postscript: "D'you ever hear of Kid McAllister  -- the nonpareil -- that was me."

 It is unclear what Hemingway would have made of that reference, for, [though he surely recognized the nickname of the now deceased middleweight Jack Dempsey, he could not have understood the Kid McAllister reference until it appeared the following November-unless of course he and Anderson hat used that fictitious name either in conversation or in a now-lost letter. His reply ignored Kid McAllister but continued the discussion in boxing parlance. He agreed not to "headslip" Anderson's charge that Hemingway had-been "snooty, but would "take it on the nose"; acknowledging Anderson as "middle weight champion and as such not having a glass jaw, Hemingway bragged that he did not have a glass jaw either and had "had a grand time writing [ Torrents of Springs," had been paid "five hundred dollars for it" and felt "fine about its; furthermore, he would "counter [Anderson's] lead "by pointing out that when he decided to "sock [Anderson] on the jaw" he had had the courage to do it in manly fashion-with forewarning, in public combat (SL 210). The letter closet with elaborately polite formalities. Especially, "It would be Rand" to visit Anderson, either in Virginia or in Paris.

Anderson's response opened with a boxing reference: "I see by the papers that 'pop 'em' Paul Berlenbach got popped last night by Jack Delaney" (Modlin, Letters 810). Another champion down. This seemingly casual bit of news may have been a taunt or an appeal, possibly something of both. Though "the publishers and reading public" were almost enough to make an author "die of discouragement," Anderson said, he had always felt that Hemingway had "the ability to take it n In a way it was a compliment, but it may also have contained a question: while inevitably authors had to "take it" from outsiders, did they really have to dish it out to each other?

 This series of letters played a crucial role in shaping Hemingway's "The Killers," where a doomed heavyweight fighter named Ole Anderson resignedly faces the inevitable. The character "Ole Anderson" undoubtedly is a version of Sherwood Anderson, the "old" literary champion Hemingway had in real life attacked. For surviving manuscripts show that the boxer was named "Ole Anderson" before his name was changed to "Ole Anderson."

Hemingway had written at least two drafts of his story before he began to call the character "Anderson," and these drafts are very different in form from the finished product. The revisions that Hemingway made to his early drafts were decisively influenced by his transatlantic correspondence with Anderson. Hemingway had composed an untitled first version of the story in the fall of 19~5 about the same time that he wrote "Fifty Grand" and Tile Torrents of Spring, he typed a revised and extended version of the story in Madrid on 16 May 19~6; and he added nine holograph pages some time later, making a few last revisions as he typed the final draft in Paris before mailing it off to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's (Reynolds, Paris Years 331-33, and American Homecoming 28, 56).8

In the manuscript of 1925, now catalogued as KL/EH 535 in the Kennedy Library, Nick walks to a lunch room, eats a sandwich, and drinks several shots of whiskey. Two men called Al and Max come in and order food, and the draft ends as Al and Max begin to eat There- is no indication that they plan to kill anybody, and nothing about a boxer.

The second manuscript, catalogued as KL/EH 536, consists of a ten-page typescript titled "The Matadors" and a handwritten nine-page addition. The typed narrative, omitting the opening pages of the previous draft, begins where Al and Max enter the lunch-room, details the conversation during which Al binds up Nick and the cook; it proceeds shortly beyond the point at which Al and Max leave the lunch-room but stops before George proposes that Nick go see the intended victim. In this typescript Max says to George, "We're going to kill a wop. Do you know a wop named Dominick Nerone?" Nothing suggests that Nerone has any connection with boxing.

Hemingway made his handwritten revisions of the Madrid typescript after he received Anderson's 14 June letter responding to Torrents-that is, between the first of July and mid-August, when he typed his final draft (KL/EH 536A). Both the penciled revisions and the handwritten pages added to the typescript show the influence of the letter in which Anderson referred to himself as "middleweight champion." It is in the holograph addition to this typescript that the intended victim acquires the name "Anderson" and is first described as a boxer: "He had been a heavy weight prizefighter and he was almost too long for the bed., The typed words "wop" and "Dominick Nerone" are crossed out, and the handwritten "big Swede" and "Ole Anderson" are added. The spelling, plainly, is "Anderson," not the "Anderson" of the published text. Evidently it was at the same time that Hemingway changed the title, as no longer appropriate; typed Matadors" is crossed out and penciled "Killers" is written in.

 Similarly, the handwritten "Summit " is substituted for typed "Petoskey."So this became the only one of the early Nidk Adams stories "not set in Michigan" (Flora 97). The setting becomes another due linking the story to Sherwood Anderson and to the "Chicago School of Literature" ridiculed by The Torrent' of Spring Summit, Illinois is located almost exactly between Oak Park, where Hemingway grew up, and Palos Park, where Anderson lived during the months when he and Hemingway became friends.

Most important, the portrait of the old prizefighter, lying in bed staring at the wall, is drawn from the grim resignation Sherwood Anderson expressed these letters, his general mood of discouragement, his reference to himself as a past champion, his retreat to his farm, and his refusal to fight back. Walls are a recurrent emblem of psychological-spiritual imprisonment in Anderson work; Hemingway's repeated emphasis on the old boxer's telling gesture is surely derivative, even faintly parodies Sherwood Anderson is transformed into one of his own grotesques as Anderson (Anderson in the manuscript) says, "There sent anything to do . . . I'm through with all that running around. "The portrait captures something of the attitude that Anderson articulated to his friend Marietta Finley on z6 June: "Hemingway did a book satirizing Dark Laughter. He wrote me a long letter rather patronizing.  'I hate to hit you but I must.' That sort of thing. As though I hadn't the power to hit if I were so minded. I'm not. Got my fill of hitting long ago" (Sutton, Letters 065). By making him a heavyweight rather than a middleweight, Hemingway paid Sherwood Anderson a compliment, but the caricature left no doubt that the old pro was a goner.

From a psychobiographical standpoint, the revisions Hemingway made that summer are illuminating. In the author's mind the old prizefighter was as closely linked with Sherwood Anderson as Nick was with himself Once this is understood, several conclusions become dear. First, Hemingway depicted Nick, his sometime surrogate, as an innocent bystander and unfortunate victim of men who want to kill the old prizefighter, evidently for "something" he "got mixed up in" in Chicago; Nick comes as a kindly sympathizer to warn the boxer and to try to get him to do something to prevent his death. Hemingway thus displaced his hostility against the more successful Anderson onto a couple of small-time thugs and gave himself a more attractive role. As he reconstructed the affair, it was the other literati who were plotting to destroy Anderson; Hemingway was merely trying to get him to stand up again and write like a man.

Second, Nick's recognition of what it means to be past one's prime betrays Hemingway's anxiety about his own future. Certainly Hemingway's moral uneasinesS about what he had done to his benefactor surfaces in Nick's final remark, "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful." But Nick's reaction also indicates Hemingway's fearful suspicion that no career of outstanding performance in the public arena could ever guarantee that people would not turn against a champion for some vague "something" he had done somewhere along the way. As the younger writer contemplated the older, he could not help dreading that he too might become discouraged, jaded, susceptible. ls

Hemingway's story places great demand on readers' powers of inference (Wright 360n). Since the actual murder, which the plot seems to build towards as its climax, does not happen during the course of the story, readers must grasp why whet is given constitutes a completed action. Readers also must infer why the hired killers are willing to shoot a man they have never met, why the cook does not want to know anything about the affair, why no one calls the police, why Anderson does not resist, why Nick "can't stand to think about him" and why he decides to flee. Finally, readers are left to make sense of a conundrum often remarked by critics-nothing is what it seems. Henry's lunchroom is operated by George, Mrs. Hirsch's rooming house is run by Mrs. Bell, Max eats the food that Al ordered and vice versa, the dock is twenty minutes fast, and the supposed killers are vaudeville-like gunmen who don't kill anybody. "We're through with it," they say as they exit in the middle of the story The solution must lie in the pervasive pattern of displacement: the real killers are not (or not only) the two hired guns but the supposed friends who stand by conjecturing that Anderson-Andreson must have, as they say,"Double-crossed somebody. That's what they kill them for" and then try not to think about it. The story's climax is Nick's horrified recognition of how tough the world is. But behind his dread is Hemingway's own oblique confession.

Hemingway answered Anderson's July letter on 7 September 1926, after "The Killers" had been accepted for publication in Scribner's. On the same day he wrote to Scott Fitzgerald to exult: Max Perkins had cabled immediately to say the story was Ugrand," he crowed-"even cynical little boys like Ernest get pleasant surprises" (SL ~16). Not surprisingly, he did not mention the new story in his letter to Anderson, yet he could hardly have avoided wondering whether Anderson would see it and recognize in Ole Anderson the caricature of himself, worn out and washed up. The letter begins Jovially but subsides into something like sympathy before turning to personal confession and then plummeting into virtual apologia

Thanks for the swell letter. Troutdale sounds very fine and I envy you the falL . . . You can put enough weight on a horse so he can't have a chance of winning and in America (and Americans are always in America-no matter whether they call it Paris or Paname [sic] ) we all carry enough weight to kill a horse-let alone have him run under it. I've been living this side of bughouse with the old insomnia for about eight months now. And it's something you can take with you to any country but I'm glad that I was built on the tough side and maybe it will all work out. I still feel badly about having ever written to you in an ex cathedra or ax-catheter . . . manner but I think that is just that the young have to be very sure always, because the show is really very tough and it is worrying all the time and unless you know everything when you're twenty five you don't stand a chance of knowing anything at all when it's had time to shake down and you're thirty five. And we've all got to know something. Maybe. (SL Zl8-lg)

 If the need to be tough and to win was a justification for the insult of Torrents, it also might serve as an excuse for "The Killers" But the brash protest about toughness and having "to be very sure" does not hide the shame, the foreboding, the uncertainty. The apology contained barb. Anderson, who was now turning fifty, had been forty when he published his first book.

Writing back, he could not resist taking a jab at twenty seven-year-old Hemingway: "My God man, I have always thought of you as a horse for strength. It shocks me to hear that you don't sleep. Aren't there any real huskies in the world?" (Modlin, Letters 86). Mainly, though, this letter was cordial, modest, and a bit paternal: "Anyway old dear don't take me from the chatterers. Most of the time I don't know a thing. I get older in my body but can't seem to get it up into my head. No one gets very wise I guess. At least I know I don't" (87). Making no claim to knowing much himself, Anderson mildly chided his young friend's arrogance. As he saw it, they were fellow writers, with common failings and common problems. Neither of them could win all the time, at least not in the heavyweight class.l7

The short story that Anderson finally wrote about the episode conveys some of the tone of this letter. But he did not write his story until after he had seen Hemingway again, several months later in Paris. The recorded details of their meetings there are sketchy, to say the least. Hemingway said that he and Anderson spent "a couple of afternoons"together and that Anderson "was not at all sore about Torrents" (SL Z41). Actually, lingering bitterness simmered below their jovial politeness. Anderson's wife complained that Hemingway had been, rude when he dropped by their hotel, and Anderson recalled their meeting as rushed and awkward: "Here's how," they said, gulping a beer together, whereupon Hemingway "turned and walked rapidly away" (Elizabeth Anderson 130-31; Memoirs 465). All in all, Anderson confided to a friend afterward, "it made me pretty sick seeing Hemingway this winter" ( Jones-Rideout, Letters 173).

His story "The Fight," which he wrote that summer after his return to Virginia during the prelude to the Dempsey-Tunney rematch of 22 September 1927-draws deeply upon these feelings. One or more magazines had asked Anderson to write a piece about the upcoming bout, and he had refused to do what he evidently felt to be hack work (Jones-Rideout, Letters 176). But such requests may have prompted him to write this tale, based on his own bout with Hemingway. The world of boxing enters the story only as it animates the imaginations of the two characters, respectable Midwesterners whose personal antagonism erupts in a fist fight.

"The Fight" takes place in an unnamed Chicago suburb, at the home of a lawyer named John Wilder. The Edenic setting resembles Anderson's home in Virginia: there is a stone wall at the end of the garden, a hill, apple trees. As the story opens, John Wilder is struggling to be polite to a guest, his cousin Alfred Wilder, a scientist who does "some sort of experimental work . . . in another city'' (Death in the Woods 95). Alfred, a "rather bulky" man, is also "trying to be polite." Both men were "born in the same Middle-Western American small town," and both are now almost fifty. Both belong "to athletic clubs in their respective cities" (1os). A flashback explains the antipathy that has rankled between them since childhood: "There had always been something wrong with their relationship. When they were small boys they always wanted to fight. They never did" (96). Instead, they behaved properly and gave each other presents, so that everyone always mistakenly "presumed that they had for each other a cousinly feeling."

Though passing years and separation do nothing to abate the hatred both men feel, they continue to exchange "elaborately polite" civilities and courteous  notes-"for family reasons" (1 to 1). When Alfred stops in one day "for a casual call," John perversely urges him to stay: "The more he hated Alfred the more he kept urging him. That was because he felt guilty. He hated himself for being such a fool" (102). During an evening walk the long-repressed antagonism bursts into open violence. The Wildersshove, hit, and tear clothes and flesh, grunting and gasping for breath. Remembering prize fights they have seen, they "try to be scientific."" But the whole thing is plainly absurd. There is no discernible reason to fight. They are "past the fighting age" (105). They settle nothing. So they feel rather silly as they nurse their wounds-John's black eye, Alfred's bloody nose. They part, politely, hating each other as much as ever. In the story's last line, John hopes that "the punches he had got in on Alfred's body would make him so sore that in the morning on the train he would be unable to get out of his berth" (108).

Fiction is not autobiography. But, read in the context of events that had transpired between Anderson and Hemingway, the story has a great deal to offer. Almost certainly it reveals much about how Anderson saw their whole relationship, at least from the retrospective vantage point of that summer of 19~7. First, whereas "The Killers" contains a strong Oedipal element (Ole Anderson is a father-figure for Nick), Anderson's fictional version of the conflict suggests that he felt the age difference between himself and Hemingway to be inconsequential; they were peers, fellow Midwesterners, virtual cousins. There was no obvious reason they should hate each other; they just did. Anderson's portrait of the Welder cousins suggests that beneath the civilities so politely carried out-Anderson's letters of introduction, Hemingway's letters of thanks-them had never been any of the warm "cousinly feeling" that others assumed they felt. Just as in the story the deepest emotion the Welder cousins harbor for each other is raw rivalry, so it must have seemed to Anderson that he and Hemingway had felt themselves to be competitors from the very first and had always longed to do each other in. It was because they were peers that each fat the need to assert his superiority over the other. The mythic parallel is Cain and Abel, conceived as twins.

Second, the story leaves no doubt that Anderson was sore. Animosity governs the relationship of his fictional cousins. Hemingway's parody was no warning-it was an injury. Yet as Anderson portrays it, the injury was minor' nothing more than a black eye. Nobody had been killed. He certainly wasn't dead. Some years later, he would reiterate the point: it had all been a mere "quarrel"-"It didn't amount to much" ("They Come" 129). Still, he could not help hoping that Hemingway had received a few bruises, too, as a result of their encounter. Maybe when Hemingway read "The Fight," he would wince. And surely people would see, as Anderson did, that "A man's gotta have character to be a great writer and he [Hemingway] hasn't got no character.''

Above all, Anderson's story makes it clear that, passionate though it had been, the fight had also been pretty silly. Driven by some primitive instinct, boys fight to establish who is champion of the neighborhood; so these two grown-up writers, each propelled by a ridiculous desire for dominance, had engaged in a petty brawl. On the surface they were respectable, even somewhat distinguished adults, but they had behaved like a couple of adolescent boys. Penning punches, they had imagined themselves great prizefighters. They were fools. The theme is a familiar, even characteristic, one in Anderson's fiction, and it seems to reflect his sincerest understanding of the episode. Nevertheless, Anderson wanted to inflict one last blow on Hemingway, that is the insight that would have hurt most. Hemingway could not bear to be considered puerile.

 One of the best parts of Anderson's story is a narrated episode from the Wilders' childhood. It begins with a classic situation and ends unforgettably. John gets a pup, and his mother makes him give it away. He doesn't want to get rid of the dog, so he gives it to Alfred, hoping that it will with loyal affection come back home to him, as dogs are supposed to do. He imagines that it would "never desert" him but keep on coming back again and again, howl over his grave after his death, and at last, grief-stricken, expire in an ideal romantic tableau: "Snow on his grave, a dead pup lying across the grave. It had died of grief. Tears came into John's eyes when he thought of the scene" (98). But of course, the pup turns out to be fickle. When John goes to Alfred's house to see it, it growls at him. The bitterness of this is too much for the boy to swallow, and he vents his hostility against his cousin and the dog by shooting it. He takes morbid pleasure in the act and invents elaborate rationalizations to justify it, at the same time deeply ashamed. This narrative episode is not a specific allegory, but it does make rich imaginative use of the authors' actual relations, their exchanged gifts and mutual rancor. In the days of their Chicago friendship, reluctantly or not, Anderson had given Hemingway certain gifts-advice and recommendations to influential people as well as insights about the craft of writing. Hemingway in turn, when he left for Paris, had given Anderson a giant knapsack of food; it was a "nice" thing to do for "a fellow scribbler," Anderson would say later ("They Come" 129). The killing of the dog partly parallels Hemingway's shocking retaliation against the literary "cousin" to whom he had once given gifts. But John is the character linked more closely with Anderson, and the shooting of the dog can also be seen as Anderson's own guilt-ridden ~j fantasy-fulfillment of a vindictive desire to destroy the literary success that Hemingway was enjoying at his expense. In a way, Hemingway was sort of like a pup, lively and charming; and, if in those early Chicago days he had seemed a devoted follower, the speed with which he took to new masters after Anderson sent him off to Paris undoubtedly rankled in the heart of the former master. Hemingway's published growl, the story implies, was a painful betrayal.

Anderson's recoil is expressed with double-edged irony. The boy's romanticizing about the ever-returning dog is naive and sentimental: the dog can hardly be blamed for shattering his childish illusions-it simply acts according to its nature. Analogously, the story contains a sort of recognition that Hemingway had a right to his independence and that it would have been childish to expect him to remain a devoted protégé. Yet Anderson could hardly have written this passage without stinging consciousness of a further, more private irony. At almost exactly the same, time he had received Hemingway's letter announcing the forthcoming Torrents, accompanied by a "complimentary" copy of the book, Anderson had completed a story he had been trying to write for years, in which an old woman died alone in the snow_"Death in the Woods "21 Around her danced a pack of dogs; she had fed them during her life, and now-reverting to their wolf-like nature-they ate the food she carried on her corpse. As he wrote "The Fight" a year later, he must have recognized that he had been a "feeder" like the old woman; he had fed the literary dogs that gathered round. Hemingway, like a favored dog become wolf, had turned on him. He might have expected *. But it was ghastly all the same. The deepest fear lurking among the several implications of this covert allusion is Anderson's sense that maybe he was dead, after all.

The two short stories show, then, how different the literary battle seemed from Hemingway's perspective and from Anderson's. For Hemingway it was a tale of youth and age, precipitated by an offense committed by the older man, and the outcome was imminent death for the old ax-champion, terrifying adult knowledge for the young man who prepares to take his place. For Anderson it was a tale of kinship rivalry, fumed by petty vanity and a masculine drive to dominate; the outcome was a trivial wound or two-there was no victor, only a residue of nagging dread. Hemingway's story is hard-boiled: boys grow up by recognizing how relentlessly tough the world is and how fragile success. Mastery is all that counts. The gentle cannot survive. Anderson's story, in contrast, presents a world where success is not so much fragile as * is shallow, since men never really outgrow their boyish aggressions and boyish posturing.

The stylistic differences between the two stories epitomize the split that developed between the two authors. Technique is at least half of the battle, after all, in the arenas of writers as well as of boxers, and narrative technique was central to the bout between Anderson and Hemingway. During the chief year of their dispute, Hemingway charged Anderson with being "too god damned sentimental" (Church 22). Anderson in turn charged Hemingway with having "little imagination" and with "making a virtue out of his limitations" by writing only descriptions of "things he himself has observed" (Samsell 15Z). In "The Killers" Hemingway seems determined to avoid any taint of his now ex-mentor's diffuseness and subjectivity. The narrative is terse,~ultraspare, even for Hemingway" (Flora 94). Nearly everything is dramatized. The text consists primarily of quoted conversation. Narration is scant and restricted almost entirely to externally observable details. In "The Fight,nconversely,Anderson seems determined to stress his imaginative mastery of the nuances of the inner life; even the climactic fistfight balances description of the external action with description of the simultaneous mental action. The storyteller's voice narrates almost everything, summing up years of experience and probing the characters' conscious thoughts and unconscious feelings. There are only four lines of disconnected speech. The substance of the story is the flow of anxieties, longings, memories, self-recriminations, rationalizations, and self-aggrandizing fantasies that constitute the inmost life of the characters.

Still, beneath the differences in technique and in tone, the stories have much in common. Rich in psychological insight and complex in tone, "The Fight" confirms that actually Anderson was very much alive. His story is not at all sentimental; irony permeates it, and its cynical view of human motivations and human capacities is only slightly relieved by sympathy. Nor is Hemingway's story devoid of imagination; the observable surface action and dialogue imply a welter of unstated emotions going on beneath. The meaning of the story lies largely in all that remains unstated, that is, in its cynical view of human motivations and human capacities, which is alleviated by sympathy.

The fact that "The Fight" has received almost no critical attention while ~ "The Killers" has been scrutinized and discussed at length again and again confirms that Hemingway (like Gene Tunney) won the literary fight in the public eye. But the two stories also demonstrate that, despite irreconcilable differences that split them apart, Anderson and Hemingway were indissoluble kin. For neither writer did the hurt ever quite go away.