Saturday Review Archives What Hope Does for Man
September 24, 1950
Speaking of BooksBy J. DONALD ADAMS
s I remarked final calendar week, the latest version of the Hemingway heroine carries the dream- girl type to an ultimate conclusion. Beside her, even Catherine Barkley and Maria of the cropped head are vibrant with identity. All iii are abstractions as compared with the heroine of the first Hemingway novel, Lady Brett Ashley, only she was not of their company; Brett belongs in the other main grouping of female person characters favored by American male novelists, the horde of hussies to which contemporary fiction has given birth. Because they are positive rather than negative personalities, they more readily presume an air of reality than do their pliant and worshipful sisters.
Hemingway abased the type in his longer works of fiction, though she connected to make an occasional advent in the short stories. All the novels since "The Dominicus As well Rises" have enshrined the dream daughter. Her complete insubstantiality in "Across the River and Into the Copse" was pointed out in nearly all the reviews I have read. In what seems to me the best of them, Maxwell Geismar's, she is described as "useful in the novel merely as interlocutor for the Colonel'southward overwhelming narcissism." In that last word you lot have the central to all the Hemingway novels every bit well; in this volume the narcissism stands fully, and for the reader, painfully revealed.
So far I have read eleven reviews, plus the publisher'due south quotes from two others I have non seen. Of the xi, only 3 were definitely favorable (and two of these had modest reservations); they appeared in Newsweek, in the daily Times, and in this section; definitely unfavorable were the comments in the Saturday Review of Literature, the Earth-Telegram and Sun, the Nation, Time, The New Yorker and the Herald Tribune Book Review. The reviews in the daily Herald Tribune and in Harper's Magazine, while expressing some definite dissatisfaction, were more than kindly disposed.
The unkindest review, and one of the about censorious, was Sterling North's in the World- Telegram and Sunday; he presented the book as completely and deliberately constructed, a compounding of elements that its author had found to exist sure-fire. More than one review was pitched to a note of compassion, notably Mr. Geismar'due south, in the Sabbatum Review, which expressed the hope that the novel would serve as "an emotional release for an intricate and tormented talent, very much every bit 'The Torrents of Spring' [his burlesque of Sherwood Anderson] did in the earliest phase of Hemingway's career." This as well was somewhat the tenor of Malcolm Cowley'due south review in the Sunday Herald Tribune; he chosen it a "tired" volume. And Alfred Kazin, in the New Yorker, gave thanks that this novel will not remain Hemingway'due south terminal word.
These varying reactions seem to me worth noting considering of the indubitable fact that Hemingway has, since his first success, exercised more influence on American fiction than any other contemporary novelist. My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood--nearly perfectly displayed in some of the curt stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is non, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of homo life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to bully fiction.
Those who take this view of Hemingway must hope that this book is an aberration, and non what the reading of information technology, without regard to the circumstances under which it was written, would seem to indicate: that information technology is a crystallization of his mental attitude toward life and his understanding of it. As such, it would seem to them to merit the savagery of Time's review, and to justify Mr. Geismar's regret that the "wound" in his work, "the sense of hidden suffering and of shared anguish" has left of it hither only "the scab and the pus."
To me, the terrible thing--and I utilise that describing word with deliberation--about "Across the River and Into the Trees" is that a author could hold, at the center of his thinking well-nigh life, the conventionalities that unless a homo has killed he has non lived. To believe that is to renounce one'southward human birthright; it is to surrender all promise of ever creating a better world than the 1 in which we alive. For it is nonsense to pretend that this view of life is that of a Hemingway graphic symbol but; when a author has identified himself, consciously or unconsciously, with the man or woman about whom he is writing, 1 does non have to be psychic to exist enlightened of the identification, particularly when the procedure of arrival at that point of view has had so clearly marked a trail. To me, "Beyond the River and Into the Trees" is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to pity past the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, just because a bang-up talent has come up, whether for now or forever, to such a dead terminate.
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-speaking.html
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