PARTISAN REVIEW
basis than an interest in one's own adventure. Proletarian authors should
find it easy to' outgrow this kind of immaturity, for they ought to be
capable of impersonal analysis and clear understanding. There remains,
however, the problem of the full and convincing presentation of their per·
d!ptions. Form is not somethivg that is imposed upon material according
to some magical formula; it is inherent in the material and in the author's
attitude towards that material. But one must not think that this inherent.
-this essential-form reveals itself with immediate and effortless clarity.
Its discovery, on the contrary, requires the most patient and thoughtful
study, study of a sort that proletarian authors must learn to engage in.
GRANVILLE HICKS
WINNER TAKE NOTHING,
by Ernest Hemingway. Charles Scribner's
Sons. N.
Y. $2.00.
ERNEST HE;"\lINGWAY is a man of athletic sorrows. He began as a
writer aClltely dissatisfied with reality, only to succumb later to a Spartan
attitude based on nothing more than his inabilitv to apprehend reality
rationally. Losing himself in the acrid, small, and uneasy happiness of
pure animal feeling and external action, he developed an illusion of virility
as a substitute for thought and fundamental social emotion.
In the more serious literary journals
Winner Take Nothing,
in which
Hemingway's typical motifs and qualities are reproduced intact, was
reviewed by the critics with almost uniform disfavor; and for the most
p,art the reason given was an alleged falling off in the author's thematic
range and psychological penetration. To the writer of these lines this
reason seems but a flimsy rationalization sucked out of thin air by people
trying to escape the logic behind their conclusions. These new stories of
Hemingway's differ in no way from those in preceding volumes. He who
is seemingly enamored of the total mode of expressIOn represented by
Hemingway violates his own preferences when he negates the significance
of this collection. To my mind, the unstated logic behind the
mis~ivings
of the critics is really derived from the fact that receptivity for the
Hemingway type of writing has narrowed down to a mllllmum. Those
who, some years ago, were highly gratified by him can no longer be
deeply affected by mere saturation in the sensual. In the nineteen–
twenties the stimulus to "second-hand nihilism" offered by the Heming–
way mode was necessary to many middle class readers whose own abject
ideological poverty mirrored itself in him. Today these readers
are beginning to be repelled by what formerly aroused their
enthusiasm.
True, he is still
111
full control of his formal
effects-that dry and racy freshness that is almost unique in modern
58
