338
PARTISAN REVIEW
been invested with so much of her feeling that he puts an end
to
feeling. Colette does "finish him off," but she doesn't end with
him;
her
writing goes beyond this one emotional situation. As we think of Colette's
great production, we can even see this not so much as an aspect
of
cultural difference alone, but as a clue to her talent and her remarkable
endurance; for it is a question how long the material of fiction can
resist the demands of the secret images of a single feeling.
Sonya Rudikoff
HEMINGWAY AND THE IMAGE OF MAN
ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
By
Philip Young. Rinehart. $3.00.
To write a study of a living master must be very
difficul~
and it is especially difficult if that master happens, like Hemingway,
to
be contemptuous of critics. But Mr. Young has written an excellent
book, neither grudging nor blindly worshipful, free of imitative longings,
not in the least academic, serious but not "square" and biographical
without being snoopy. Hemingway is a glamorous person; his art
and
his wounds make him respected; his vanity and his peculiar attitudes
provoke envy and anger; his fans are often maddening and his detrac–
tors include some of the prize goops of our troubled time-Wyndham
Lewis, for example. Clearly Hemingway, whether we like it or not,
has
found out some of the secret places of our pride and trouble.
Is it because he so persistently writes his autobiography that
he
fascinates us? "There cannot be many writers who stick so rigorously
to writing of themselves," says Mr. Young, "and- in a way-for them–
selves, asking at the same time that an audience take an interest
in
what they are doing...." Undoubtedly Hemingway's self-absorption
contributes a great deal to his dramatic power and his success.
The
fearful struggle of a deaf, isolate self, mutilated and peculiarly ignorant
though stubborn and brave, to work out a style of survival is not so
very rare. But it
is
usually an internal struggle and Hemingway stirringly
externalizes it. He tests and examines himself like many purely psycho–
logical writers, like characters in the novels of Svevo, or-if I may
go
outside of fiction-like Leo Stein who devoted a lifetime to daily study
of his own psyche. A career of supreme egomania, this may at first ap–
pear, until we bethink ourselves and realize how common such desperate
self-devotion
is.
Moreover, there is this to say for Hemingway, that
he
felt a challenge to master himself in action and that he was not saris-
