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This experience might not have shaped the philosophic attitudes of his works if the entire climate of intellectual history had not prepared an audience for him. The 20th century was primed for a philosophy of concrete things rather than abstract ideas, was ready for a psychology of sensations—for the brute fact, the tactile thrill, the stream of sensuousness that inundate the pages of Hemingway.
As a fledgling writer in Paris, Hemingway intuitively felt a double betrayal of language and ideals. The first thing the Lost Generation lost was its faith in words, big words. Says Lieut. Henry, the hero of A Farewell to Arms: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain ... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it." The big words were false, and life itself was "just a dirty trick," as the dying Catherine tells her lover in the same book. Hemingway's image for man's plight in the universe was that of an ant colony on a burning log. There was no hope of heaven or sustaining faith in God. In the short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, there is a parody of the Lord's Prayer built on the Spanish word nada, meaning nothingness ("Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name"). In The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, the hero narrator decides that "bread is the opium of the people."
Style for Its Own Sake. The pattern of what Alberto Moravia aptly calls Hemingway's "ingenuous nihilism" was early set, but even Hemingway could not sustain himself on nada, or on bread alone. If life was a short day's journey from nothingness to nothingness, there still had to be some meaning to the "performance en route." In Hemingway's view, the universal moral standard was nonexistent, but there were the clique moralities of the sportsman or the soldier, or, in his own case, the writer. So he invented the Code Hero, the code being "what we have instead of God," as Lady Brett Ashley puts it in The Sun Also Rises.
The Code Hero is both a little snobbish and a little vague, but the test of the code is courage, and the essence of the code is conduct. Conduct, in Hemingway, is sometimes a question of how one behaves honorably toward another man or woman. More often, it is a question of how the good professional behaves within the rules of a game or the limits of a craft. All the how-to passages—how to land a fish, how to handle guns, how to work with a bull—have behind them the professional's pride of skill. But the code is never anchored to anything except itself; life becomes a game of doing things in a certain style for the sake of style, a narcissistic ritual—which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously "Hemingway" writing but to a self-conscious "Hemingway" style of life.