Books: Men Without Women

Men Without Women

The Stories.* The Undefeated is about an old bull fighter, fighting in a dark arena. “Manuel was facing the bull again, the muleta held low and to the left. The bull’s head was down as he watched the muleta. . . . He felt the sword buckle as he shoved it in, leaning his weight on it, and then it shot high in the air, end-over-ending into the crowd. Manuel had jumped clear as the sword jumped. The first cushions thrown out of the dark missed him. Then one hit him in the face, his bloody face looking towards the crowd. . . . ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ Oh, the dirty bastards. … As he tripped on a cushion he felt the horn go into him. . . . “He looked at the bull going down slowly over on his side, then suddenly four feet in the air. . . . They carried him across the ring to the infirmary. … To hell with this operating table. He’d been on plenty of operating tables before. He was not going to die. There would be a priest if he was going to die.” The Killers is about two men who go into a restaurant to shoot Ole Anderson. First they put the cook and the waiter in the kitchen. Then they talk to the proprietor and wait for Ole Anderson to come in. At five minutes to seven they decide he is not coming in. Nick — the cook — goes to see Anderson at his house. He says: ” ‘They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper.’ ‘There isn’t any thing I can do about it.’ ‘Maybe it was just a bluff.’ ‘No, it ain’t just a bluff.’ ” Then Nick goes back to the restaurant. ” ‘I’m going to get out of this town,’ Nick said. ‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

Fifty Grand is about a prize fighter. Today is Friday is about Christ. A Pursuit Race is about a snowbird. There are nine other stories in the book.

The Significance. The Sun Also Rises, published last winter, made critics realize that at least one of the Americans who live in Paris can do something more important than sit about in restaurants. Its little hard sentences were like round stones polished by rain and wind, not a Mason’sgrading. The book had the sharp determined rhythm of a person walking upstairs; there was no literary gesticulation, no wasted energy, no flourishing. The stories in Men Without Women have the same qualities. Their intention is to present life at its own tempo; unbraked by conceits, unhurried by artifices. Totally objective, they are as clear and crisp and perfectly shaped as icicles, as sharp as splinters of glass. It is impossible to read them without realizing that sel dom if ever before has a writer been able to cut so deeply into life with the 26 curved tools of the English alphabet. The Author. His father was a doctor in Oak Park, Ill. Author Hemingway was a football star and a boxer at school. In the War he was severely wounded, serving with the Italian Arditi, of whom he was almost the youngest member. Since the Armistice he has lived, like many another American, several of whom he is reported to have described in The Sun Also Rises, in Paris. Every spring he goes down to Pamplona to watch the bullfights; on an occasion when he entered the arena himself, several of his ribs got broken by a bull. He expects soon: to return to the U. S., perhaps to> stay. With him he will bring his second and a small bullfight cinema film which he made himself.

Carry On

CARRY ON, JEEVES!—P. G. Wodehouse — Doran ($2). “‘Resource and Tact’—that is my motto,” says Jeeves, gentleman’s personal gentleman to Bertram Wooster. In the episodic chapters of this latest vehicle for his superlative talents, he continued to rescue his master and his master’s somewhat capricious companions from a series of entanglements whose infinite complications do not begin to tax the abilities of this valet plenipotentiary. Most astonishing of all the successive dilemmas is the one in which Jeeves simultaneously circumvents the literary eccentricities, of Mrs. Bingo Little, provides Mrs. Travers with a new cook, reinstates, Bertram in the affections of his; uncle and secures for himself a neat nest egg from every participant of the transaction. Only to, be more marveled at than the resources of Jeeves are the resources; of Author Wodehouse, who could make Chinamen laugh at their ancestors and can make Caucasians laugh at anything he writes about.

*MEN WITHOUT WOMEN—Ernest Hemingway—Scribners ($2).