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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21959, 10 May 1941, Page 4

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S new novel J For Whom the Bell Tolls, which has been a best-seller in America for several months has now been published in an English edition by Jonathan Cape. The story, one full of Hemingway vigour, is worked qut against a background of the Spanish civil war. The book has been received with moderate critical enthusiasm by The Times Literary Supplement which said: “It is an episode full of drama that rings very true. Yet the story for all its passion, is less successful than Mr Hemingway might have made It. Constant effort of a kind that one would wish to be spared is required to cope with his peculiarities of style here. Altogether, indeed, the style is something of a problem. The familiar Hemingway locutions present no difficulty, but there is, first, a steady flow of dialogue In the manner of a literal translation from the Spanish that is too often worrying. The habitual use of the second person singular is by

itself a bit of a strain, but in conjunction with English, not to speak of American, colloquialisms, it is a Httld absurd: “Look after thy stuff” (a couple of packs filled with sticks pf dynamite) will not dp at all. Then there is the unwearied suggestion of path-besprinkled Spanish speech in the remorseless use of words like “unprintable,” “unnameable,” “obscenity,” and the like. On top of all this there are passages of soliloqy, mostly of a lyrical nature, that come close to the developed manner of Gertrude Stein. The point about such passages is not that they are good or bad in their kind, but that in the case of somebody as expressive as Mr Hemingway in his own idiom it seems a mere evasion to write like that.”

Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu will shortly be issued by Chatto and Wlndus in its English edition. Remembrance of Things Past, in twelve uniform volumes: a translation for which C. If, Scott Moncrieff was mainly responsible. Several of the volumes have hitherto been available only in limited editions. At the moment the publishers are unable to supply the complete work in any form. "It seems to us,” they say, “that not even the war IS sufficient excuse for allowing a classic of this magnitude to remain unprocurable.” It is rumoured that James Joyce had almost completed a sequel to Finnegan’s Wake and that the MS. will shortly be despatched to the United States. This is surprising news, for Finnegan appeared only last year and Joyce was never a quicker worker. Consider his past record. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, begun in 1804, was not completed until 1914 and ran for two years as a serial in Ezra Pound’s magazine the Egoist before making its first appearance in book form in 1918. Dubliners, written in 1904, did not appear until 1914; the reason for the delay was Joyce’s insistence on making deletions and alterations in the -MS. Tire first of his major works, Ulysses, occupied him throughout the last war and was not published until 1922, though parts of it had appeared serially in a New York review between 1918 and 1920. He began Work in Progress (later to be known as Finnegan's Wake) about 1922, and seventeen years passedbefore it was completed. When he was halfway through he was reported to have said that he did not believe he would ever finish It. The writing of both Ulysses and Finnegan was often interrupted by attacks of blindness. At one time he worked on large sheets of white paper with a red pencil and had to read his copy with a magnifying glass. As a Dubliner, and therefore a neutral, Joyce was allowed to continue his work uninterrupted after the Germans occupied Paris. It is said that, impressed by his international reputation, they even made an attempt to pay him homage.

Ernest Rhys, who has spent a large part of a long life in making the classics pf literature cheaply available and of pocket-size, has compiled a list of 21 books to form a small but tempting bookshelf "to turn to as an escape from ourselves into a world carefree and unconditioned save by art and imagination, wit and humour.” These “old and true” books are a pressing need of these cruel times. The authors named by Mr Rhys are Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Homer, Defoe, Lamb, Thackeray, W. H. Hudson, Melville, Plato, Boswell, Cervantes, Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, Palgrave (“Golden Treasury”), Samuel Butler, Emily Bronte, Sir Arthur Eddington. Balzac and Montaigne. Mr Rhys’s list is an appendix to a delightful little essav written by him, A Breviary of Books in War-time, which is No. 1 of a series of Everyman Leaflets. Mr Rhys mentions that in the last War Lady Simson (Lena Ashwell) devised a series of talks to British soldiers in France on current topics, books and plays. "Some of us went over to the Harfleur Valley as exponents of ‘The Book Adventurous.’ Wonderful how well our men took to it, discussing Shakespeare’s plays, English and. Russian novels like Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with zest and keen critical intelligence.”