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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-