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PARTISAN REVIEW
pseudo-science, grotesque ugliness, illogical confusions, and its own
special brand of inhumanity. Perhaps this tenninological, methodological,
and valuational tangle can
be
cleared up only by someone outside the
field, by the sort of rational analysis which Dalbiez made of Freud some
years ago.
If
successful it could be extended to sociology, which needs
it very badly, and to those areas of literary criticism where the same
practices abound. Any bright young logicians who will take on this
task can be assured of profitable employment for a good many years
to come.
Robert Gorham Davis
THE DYING GLADIATOR
ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES. By Ernest Hemingwoy.
Scribners. $3.00.
Hemingway's supreme virtue-I think it might almost
be
said, his only virtue-has been the clarity and immediacy of his relation
to language. In his best work he achieves an almost absolute congruence
of form and content whereby the rhythms and tone of his prose seem as
much the creators of his experience as its expression. To be sure,
this
near-perfection is the product of certain gross simplifications, but in
general the simplifications belong to the writer's personality rather than
his ideas-Hemingway has always tried to protect himself from ideas–
and are in that sense "natural" and therefore convincing; he has often
(though not always) had the good fortune to see only as much as his
prose is designed to express, and because of this he could make it ap–
pear that he had seen all that was relevant.
In most American writing, style means only more or less grace of
language, or certain recurrent idiosyncrasies; at best, as with Faulkner,
it is a form of rhetorical commentary, the willful imposition of meaning
upon the "given." (This is not to say that Faulkner does not have his
own "universe," but only that it has more than one level.) With Heming–
way, despite his self-conscious seeking for "real" experience, the world
itself comes sometimes to seem contained in language: the "real" is
the way he writes as much as the things he writes about; or, to state
it differently, certain "realities" seem to derive their existence largely
from the peculiarities of Hemingway's vocabulary and sentence structure.
In this inextricable unity of language and perception (when he achieves
it), as well as in the somewhat morbid constriction of vision that makes
