"All Stones End . . ."

To HAVE AND HAVE NOT--Ernest Hemingway--Scribners ($2.50)

In the eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began to be bruited that Hemingway was just another case of veteran with arrested development and total recall.

But among the more conscientious watchers of U. S. letters, the question still smouldered: What's to happen to Hemingway? On the twin assumptions that (1) once an author had chosen a given field he could not depart from it, and hence (2) once he had exhausted that field or the public had tired of it, he was through as a writer, Hemingway was through. He had made himself the principal spokesman of the violence, aimlessness, brutality of war and the wartime generation. Violence, aimlessness, brutality were pretty well washed up as literary material. Ergo, Hemingway too was washed up--unless he scurried around quick and found some new stream in which to pan his gold.

Hemingway himself did little to encourage any other attitude. With The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927) and Farewell to Arms (1929), he had found himself in the unique position of being not only a best-seller but also a writer whom first-line critics intensely admired and respected. Younger writers all imitated him. Wielder of a style of unmatched clarity and precision, master of the art of conveying emotions, particularly violent ones, with an effect almost of first-hand experience, he seemed to have established himself as the most powerful direct influence on contemporary literature. After these three books, however, came the slump. Apart from Win, er Take Nothing (1933), a volume of short stories, the eight succeeding years saw only two books, both failures. To most readers Death in the Afternoon (1932) was an impossibly verbose testimonial to the author's enthusiasm for the spectacle of bullfighting. Green Hills of Africa (1935) was an exhaustive and exhausting account of a month's big-game shooting, marred by the ill-temper of its gibing digressions on critics and fellow writers. The first had been letdown enough, but in the second it seemed that Hemingway had definitely given over his precise eloquence to ignoble uses--that, carried away by his peculiar gifts, he had turned from the deeper study of the human tragedy to revel in the mere shock and suddenness of wanton killing. War was already too much in the air to make such an attitude agreeable. It was a time too of increasing political and economic strain, when the pressure was great, both from the Right and the Left, on every writer to stand and declare himself. Since he stubbornly refused to do so, the consensus* was that Author Hemingway was rapidly becoming as dead as his subject matter.

Overlooked, however, was the fact that Hemingway is far from being a run-of-the-mine writer, and so not entirely subject to such standards. Disregarded also were certain further clues. Green Hills of Africa, by its very ill-temperedness, hinted that the author, too, was worried. Death in the Afternoon, from one aspect a kind of huge "Anatomy of Death," contains much information on its author's basic philosophy. "All stories," he remarked there, "end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. . . . There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it." This almost Elizabethan idea of death as the ever-present alter ego of life is one of Hemingway's fundamental concepts.

The Book. Death forms the background of Hemingway's tenth and latest book, his only novel with a U. S. background. But readers of previous love & death stories by Hemingway will find in To Have and Have Not a maturity which reflects the more serious turn his personal life has taken in the last year. For the queasy, it should be added that many of the killings (twelve) in To Have and Have Not are perpetrated with much goriness; for the straitlaced, that the book brings to naked print practically all the four-letter words extant, contains scenes in which copulation and masturbation are impressionistically but vividly presented.

The scene of the book is Key West and Cuba. The story is a sort of saga, disconnected and episodic, of one Harry Morgan, burly, surly, hard-natured "conch" (as Key West natives call themselves), whose life has been spent in the single-minded effort to keep himself and his family at least on the upper fringes of the "have-nots." Owner of a fast motorboat, he charters it to big-game fishermen, also uses it for running contraband. At the book's outset he is seen in a Havana cafe considering and refusing another such shady proposition--this time on the part of three young Cuban revolutionaries, who want him to save their skins by transporting them to the U. S.

The Cubans are shot down by gunmen as they leave the cafe, thus making their comrades suspect that Morgan had betrayed the trio. Morgan returns to his tourist fishing parties, only to have his fishing tackle lost overboard by a tourist, who at cruise-end welches on making the loss good. The tackle cost $360, must be replaced if Morgan is to continue as a party-boatman. The rest of the story relates the more & more dangerous expedients he is driven to.

No picker and chooser of ways and means, he turns a neat trick on a bunch of Chinese by arranging to ferry them over from Cuba to the Keys, accepts their money, then kills their leader and abandons the rest. Then his luck turns bad. A flier at rum-running results in the confiscation of his boat, the loss of an arm. So the way is paved to the last, most desperate venture of all--an attempt to provide a getaway, in a borrowed boat, for a quartet of bank robbers fleeing from a hold-up at Key West. Morgan's previous forays had been characterized by double-dealing on the part of all concerned, but in this one the cards are on the table: he knows that unless he kills them first the four will most certainly kill him, as soon as he has landed them in Cuba and his usefulness to them is ended. He kills them, but not before he has received his own death-wound. In the Coast Guard cutter that has picked him up, half-delirious, dying, he tries to voice the dictum that is the book's real motto: " 'A man,' he said. " 'Sure,' said the "captain. 'Go on.' " 'A man,' said Harry Morgan, very slowly. 'Ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out.' He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke . . .

"The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. 'Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere ... I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.' He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry's lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.

" 'A man,' Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. 'One man alone ain't got. No man alone now.' He stopped. 'No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody --* chance.'

"He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.''

The major part of the book is given over to Morgan's career. This, with its hard, brisk sea-scenes, its sudden shocks of death, is uniformly convincing. Interspersed in the chronicle, however, are snapshot glimpses of life on its various planes on the Keys: War veterans sent to build the Keys highway, punch-drunk and turbulent, brawling in one of the bars; writers from the artists' colony amorously intriguing; rich yachtsmen, cabdrivers. These candidoes, written too deliberately from the "slice-of-life" point of view, too fortuitously presented in the plot, are not always so fortunate. But most readers will agree that Author Hemingway can rest well content with the knowledge that in Harry Morgan, hard, ruthless, implacable in his lonely struggle, he has created by far his most thoroughly consistent, deeply understandable character.

The Author. Ernest Miller* Hemingway ("Hem" to his friends) has seen much of the war and violence he so aptly describes. Born July 21, 1898, at Oak Park, Ill., second of a family of six, he was only two when his father, a doctor who was also a sports enthusiast, handed him a fishing rod, was not yet in his teens when he graduated to shotgun and rifle. On long hunting trips in northern Michigan he was his father's regular companion. In other respects, he was not so filial. His father had hopes of his becoming a doctor; his mother, artistically inclined herself, wanted him to be a cellist and rigidly enforced hours of supposed practice in which non-musical Hemingway, by "just sitting thinking," now says he gained most impetus for his writing career.

Headstrong always, at 15 he ran away, was returned home to finish high school. On graduation in 1917 he was off again, this time to Kansas City, where as a cub on the Star he nosed the beaten track of hospital, morgue and jail. War was in all minds, however, and a few months later he joined an ambulance unit bound for the Italian front. There he transferred to the Italian infantry; soon after, in a trench-mortar explosion, got a wound that retired him from active service. Of his War experiences, Author Hemingway speaks modestly, says usually, "I spent most of the time in hospitals." He carried this attitude so far that when his War-novel (A Farewell to Arms) was being cinematized he took pains to deny all publicity stories of a more glamorous military career, scotched plans for a "world premiere" at Piggot, Ark. (where he happened to be staying), by fleeing the town before the film's arrival.

As a result of his wound, he still wears an aluminum kneecap, grafted bonebits here and there, as well as a score of body scars. (A deep scar on his forehead is not war-gotten, but the mark of a bathroom skylight that fell on him.) He claims to have learned more about war from his post-War reporting of battles in the Near East than he ever did through his own soldiering. This reporting was done for the Toronto Star in the early '20s. Hemingway was by that time married (to Hadley Richardson, childhood Michigan friend), comfortably established in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. In his spare time he diligently wrote the short stories later to be published as Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923), and in our time (1924). Both were issued by small advance-guardist presses in Paris. Neither created any stir. Since, copies of the Paris edition ot in our time have brought as high as $160 at rare-book sales.

Hemingway's chief mentors of the Pans period were Ezra Pound, erudite, eccentic poet and expatriate, who helped get Hemingway's first books published; Gertrude Stein, who, besides godmothering Hemingway's first child, John Hadley, had a lasting influence both on Hemingway's style and point of view. The friendships were not so lasting. "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it," summed up Hemingway in his early career. "Gertrude was always right." The Stein-Hemingway feud has been one of the most persistent literary squabbles of the generation.

The Torrents of Spring (1926), a hasty burlesque of Sherwood Anderson's books, was written, so tradition has it, at the instigation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to end Hemingway's relations with his publisher, Horace Liveright. Plot was that Liveright, annoyed at the ribbing of his star author, Sherwood Anderson, would refuse the manuscript, thus leaving Hemingway free to join Friend Fitzgerald at Scribners. At any rate, so it turned out. Scribners took the dud Torrents of Spring, thus securing a bestseller, The Sun Also Rises, as well as all Hemingway's subsequent books. From then on, Author Hemingway was sitting pretty. In spite of the failure of Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa, his eight books published in the U. S. have sold the respectable total of 280,000 copies.

The Man. Tall, heavily-built, dark-skinned and square-featured, Hemingway is still a bullfight aficionado (fan), likes also big-game fishing, hunting, plays tennis regularly to keep his weight down. Divorced (1926) from his first wife, he was remarried a year later to Pauline Pfeiffer, then a Paris fashion writer for Vogue, has had by her two sons, Patrick and Gregory Hancock. Since 1930, he has made his home at Key West, living there in a thick-walled, Spanish-built house, its garden somewhat incongruously inhabited by peacocks. His 30-ft. launch El Pilar he uses for casual pleasure jaunts, trips to Cuba (90 miles away)--and fishing.

So assiduously has Hemingway followed this favorite sport that he was elected (November 1935) vice president of the Salt Water Anglers of America, leading big-game fishermen's association; so earnestly that he now sends odd catches to Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences (where his good friend, Henry Weed Fowler, is chief ichthyologist). He is proud that a species of rosefish has been named Neomerinthe hemingwayi in his honor. His business trips are chiefly to Manhattan, where, shying away from tea-fighting literary circles, he sees only Scribners' Editor Max Perkins (whose decorous office framed the Hemingway-Max Eastman brawl of last August), old friends Robert Benchley, Waldo Peirce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, few others. Contributor of a monthly page to Esquire up to a couple of years ago, it is said he is soon to become a regular correspondent of the nearly-nascent Esquire-owned magazine Ken (TIME, Sept. 20). A Roman Catholic, he is also very superstitious: he never travels on Friday, touches wood constantly, is upset if a black cat crosses his path. Writing (in longhand), he works regular hours, revises conscientiously.

Such, at least, was his pleasant routine till a year ago. when the outbreak of the Spanish War touched off a hitherto well-hidden social consciousness, enlisted him violently on the Loyalist side. No longer big-incomed, he managed to raise $40,000 on his personal notes and dispatched the sum to buy ambulances for Madrid, followed soon after (with Joris Ivens, John Ferno, John Dos Passos) to film The Spanish Earth. Returning last June to soundtrack his commentary on the film, he paused long enough to pronounce before the League of American Writers, in his first public speech, a scathing indictment of Fascism, to collect at one private showing of the film in Hollywood $15,000 for Loyalist aid. Though still less "proletarian" than "pro-underdog," this awakened political consciousness has undoubtedly broadened his field of interest, added welcome contemporaneity to his literary life. Last August he was off to Spain again as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance -- to the scenes of violence he once reveled in but now deplores.

Death, as it must to all Hemingway stories, has not yet come to finish Ernest Hemingway's. At 39, in life's prime, he has chosen to be in the midst of death. Madrid, whence last fortnight he cabled a first dispatch to the N. Y. Times, was what he described as quiet; but a shell hit the hotel where he was shaving one morning. Whether his remaining chapters are to reach a further climax, are to be torn off unfinished or peter out in a dull decline, time alone can tell. But no matter what is to happen to Hemingway, U. S. readers last week could reassure themselves that U. S. writers still have a front rank and that he is still in it.

*Gertrude Stein's remark to him ("You are all a lost generation") he used as motto for The Sun Also Rises, whence it took its wide currency. *Croaked the N. Y. Herald Tribune's Isabel Paterson: ''There is no loftiness of spirit in his books, and a book must have a soul to be great." Max Eastman accused Hemingway of having "... a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest. . . ." J. B. Priestley spoke of ". . . Mr. Ernest Hemingway's raucous and swaggering masculinity, which I am beginning to find rather tiresome. It is time some friend spoke sharply to Mr. Hemingway." The N. Y. Times's John Chamberlain asked: "Can it be that Hemingway has been writing pidgin English from the start?" *Obscenity deleted. *Discarded in his signature since 1923-

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