It is difficult to name the mode in which Burke writes. It is not
comic; nor is it humanistic. But whatever its name, it is in the style in
which weak men of minor talent make a bid for acceptance to the side
they think will win. Despite his relativism and moral nihilism Burke
cannot offer a workable ideology to the political tendency of which he is
a fellow-traveller. The stern necessities of totalitarian communism cannot
be rationalized in basic metaphors or psychoanalytic myths. Its deeds are
too stark and bloody. Burke will find before long that he has chosen
a perspective which will obscure his vision. The ideological homogeneity
he so warmly embraces will induce a creeping paralysis of the creative
centers which means death to the craftsman.
SIDNEY HOOK
62
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE SOCIAL MUSE AND THE GREAT KUDU
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT.
By Ernest Hemingway. Charles Scribner's
Sons. $2.50.
Since Ernest Hemingway's recent activities of a public nature have
forewarned us of a shift in his creative interests, the news that in his
latest novel he has succumbed to the social muse is at the present moment
hardly overwhelming. Yet his surrender, after nearly a decade of being
wooed and reviled in turn by the critics of the Left, is an important
literary event. It seems to have been the Spanish War that finally reo
leased him for a trial-flight into new country; and in this he has been
true to his own legend. While in its ideological guise the significance of
the social struggle seemed to him a mere superstition of the perverse
. intellect-and many are the sardonic asides he has written concerning
the saviors of the world and revolution as an opium of the people-it is
something else again to see one's favorite theme of human endurance
and valor in the face of physical annihilation enacted on the stage of
world events. Once these events acquire a personal meaning, one has
gotten hold of the individual link, peculiar to oneself alone, connecting
one's old values with the new. And if we are conscious of the Heming-
way mode as a whole, the fact that he comes into contact with the revo-
lution precisely through its violence should convince us of his sincerity,
rather than make us doubt it.
Hemingway's imagination defines itself most intimately within the
pieties of combat. Hence, regardless how bizarre or naive it may appear
to most of us, it must be realized that to him the difference between
slaying the great kudu who roams the green hills of Africa and slaying
the ogre Franco is as yet far from organic. At both alike he looks through
the sights of a rifle. And the failure of the novel can be explained, I
think, by his failure to understand this difference. In it he tries to recon·
cile elements that cannot function together and that, in the end, cancel
each other out. If the book lacks unity of tone and structure, it is largely
due to the contradiction between the old Hemingway manner and his
new social direction.
What are Hemingway's values? To be alone, to be inarticulate, to be
solemnly male and sense the world through an alert, supple, self-suffi-
