Two Views of Life: Milne and Hemingway

THE title of Mr. Hemingway's latest work describes its essential virility. It is filled with the hard contacts, the bruising truths, and unpleasant realities of life as the author has observed it. In "Men Without Women", Mr. Hemingway presents a collection of fourteen short stories. Their protagonists are variously toreadors, snow birds, prize fighters, and other less important people. All the tales are tense, highly nervous situations, but in writing them. Mr. Hemingway does not himself become overwrought: with fine restraint, with a knife-like humor, the author recounts the tragedies and failures of his characters. He writes in the simplest possible terms, in starling pictures, as clear and sharp as snap-shots. In the dialogue, Mr. Hemingway maintains the tempo of his stories: exciting it is, intense, profane, and idiomatic, so real it might have been recorded on a dictaphone to be set down at leisure. This nimble athletic technique seems ideally suited to the short story form. Since he wrote, "The Sun Also Rises," the author has trained down fine: with a keen psychological insight he gives only the significant aspects of the brief dramatic incidents. There are no airs and graces about him, no strainings for effect. One will not find in him the vulgar American sin of falseness nor yet the favorite modern one of incoherence. In his prose we feel the wiry strength of steel springs: quickly, it moves with the panther's lithe, coordinate tread, so sure it is.

How "very cheerful ... and sane and lovely" it is to come to this healthy writing after the vain mouthings, the verbigeration and easy obscurity of the Neo-Joycian school!

The first story, "The Undefeated," tells of a pathetic, broken-down toreador. In "Fifty Grand," which lately brightened the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, there is a brutal convincing picture of the prize-ring in these days of the million dollar gate.

One must go far to find a more finely wrought story than "The Killers": cruelly, inevitably it moves to its appointed end, with never a word too much, with never a let-up in the swift relentless drama of the two gunmen and their victim. Some may find "A Canary for One" and "Today is Friday" a little overdone, a little obviously "tricky," but few will want to lay the book down before they have shared in all of Mr. Hemingway's many experiences.

Doubtless, some there are who will miss the finally rounded periods, the pretty, artificial prose of more leisurely men. They will object to the monotony of the author's direct, simple sentences. True, there is nothing leisurely about Mr. Hemingway's style: he goes quickly to seize the barest vital essentials, presenting them in the most concise, dram- atic manner. This directness, this simplicity is necessary to the author's purpose, the presentation of reality. What man, we may ask, with more complicated literary machinery, has ever come so near that goal? Mr. Hemingway finds life a very crude, a very various thing and so he represents it as he finds it, unpolished by the artifices of a more conventional style.

All those little men, the professional aesthetes and their ilk, will wonder how he does it and, wondering, wish that they might do as well, as simply. It will annoy them to find that it is possible to be modern as well as coherent. Perhaps, before long, we shall have a school of "Neo Hemingways", a bunch of these sleek fellows who have been the followers of every latest-ism since Dada was young. They will imitate him with diccrete modifications, without his balance and restraint, and probably they will be welcomed, for this, you remember, is America where we can never get too much of a good thing