Stiff Upper Lip

WINNER TAKE NOTHING--Ernest Hem-ingway--Scribner ($2).

Ernest Hemingway's critics are beginning to call him a professional Hard Guy, hint that at bottom he is an adolescent sentimentalist. His followers crane their necks up at him as if he were a Paul Bunyan of literature, striding from strength to strength. Plain readers read him because he sometimes writes stories that hold them breathless. All three will find what they are looking for in Hemingway's latest book. Nobody now could mistake a Hemingway story for anything else. His language may appear hard-boiled but it is really a carefully artificial dialect. His subjects, as carefully chosen as his style, are almost always illustrations of the same theme: the sportsman caught in an unsportingly tight place and, with various versions of the Hemingway stiff upper lip, taking it like a sportsman. The motto on his title-page states his creed more explicitly than before: "Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself."

Nine of these 14 stories are here published for the first time. One, "A Natural History of the Dead," is reprinted from Death in the Afternoon, "a rather technical book," says Author Hemingway, "which sold, or rather was offered for sale, at $3.50."

The subjects Hemingway chooses are seldom light or sweet; it is not surprising that only four of these stories were published in magazines. An adept at creating sinister atmospheres, Author Hemingway has never whistled up an eerier spirit than in "After the Storm," a story of a Florida beach comber who discovers the submerged wreck of a liner. Some of the other tales: A terrified adolescent tries to castrate himself with a razor. Two lovers part when the girl turns Lesbian. The manager of a Mexican matador who is a miser and a pervert finally gets fed up with his stinginess, but is unable to insult him. A shell-shocked U. S. soldier horrifies his Italian brothers-in-arms by getting the horrors in public. A little boy with fever lies waiting for death all day because he does not know the difference between Fahrenheit and Centigrade.

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