Books: Dramatist of Violence

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND THE FIRST FORTY-NINESTORIES—Ernest Hemingway —Scribner ($2.75).

More than any other writer of his rank, Ernest Hemingway tells his stories by means of pungent, unexpected, abbreviated dialogue. Characters are revealed in sharp, blind, tormented speeches which break through commonplace talk. In some of Hemingway’s stories, notably Fifty Grand and The Killers, so much of the narrative is implicit in the dialogue that they read almost like acting versions. For these reasons many a reader has wondered how Hemingway would be as a playwright.

In The Fifth Column they can get a good idea. This melodrama of Loyalist counterespionage in Madrid was written last year when Hemingway was a war correspondent in Spain. He wrote it in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, between visits to the front 1,500 yards away, hiding the manuscript under his mattress when he was away. In his introduction, Hemingway explains why the play has not been produced: one producer died as he was casting it, another got into financial difficulties.

Its hero is Philip Rawlings, an ambiguous, hardbitten, adventurous undercover operator who is hunting fascist spies in Madrid. Its heroine is Dorothy Bridges, a beautiful, blonde, not very bright American girl who writes magazine articles and helps take Philip’s mind off his work. Its action revolves around the capture of a fascist observation post which is directing the shelling of the city.

Many of the scenes of The Fifth Column would make hair-raising melodrama on almost any stage, and the nightmarish confusion in which the whole thing takes place is something new in Hemingway’s writing. But it breaks off abruptly just as it gets well under way; Dorothy is such a dunce that an incredibly handsome actress would be necessary to explain her hold on Philip; big scenes—like the shooting of a captured German officer—take place off stage; and all Philip’s long explanations of his reasons for aiding the Loyalists prove nothing except that he is not clear about it himself.

The stories published with The Fifth Column make up an even stronger criticism of the play. These 49 tales include all those published in Hemingway’s three volumes of short stories, and several new ones, add up to 495 pages of superb prose, and make the collection one of the biggest literary bargains of the year. Best of the new tales. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, sums up Hemingway’s fundamental credo as well as anything he has written. In comparison with such brief and finished works which combine psychological subtlety with adventure, The Fifth Column seems ragged and confused. This Hemingway explains by saying that “in going where you have to go … and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with.” He adds that it can be sharpened again, and after it is sharpened he knows he will have something to write about—he wants to live long enough to write three more novels and 25 more stories. Readers of his new book are likely to hope that he sticks to stories and novels and keeps off plays.