Books: Writer

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IN OUR TIME—Ernest Hemingway—Boni & Liveright ($2).

Here is a writer, a young new U. S. writer, who instinctively differentiates between the hawk of living and the handsaw of existing. He appears to have lived considerably himself, in unusual ways and places. He knows how trout-fishing in Michigan feels; how Yankee jockeys, straight and crooked, ride on European tracks; how half-breed squaws bear their children back of the logging camps; how bulls and toreros slaughter one another in Spain. He knows what it is like to pot German soldiers scaling a garden wall; to ski in the Tyrol; to bum on Canadian freight trains; to be in love, just at first and then really. How he knows things you cannot say; he writes so directly, without fuss and feathers, with so little explanation of himself. He is that rare bird, an intelligent young man who is not introspective on paper. His stories are often incomplete; just facets of life, color and touch, like Katherine Mansfield's "stories," only more masculine, and (sometimes) brutally natural. Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-"literary" transcriber of life—a Writer.