It is no coincidence that during the depression more Americans look to swinging golf clubs than ever in the past. Not one duffer in twenty realizes that the event which started this infection in our blood occurred at Brookline,Massachusetts, in the summer of 1913, when a high-school boy beat the visiting Englishmen, Vardon and Ray, in a play-off tor the Open Championship. This, ‘the most momentous win in all golfing history,’ as Bernard Darwin calls it, did more to popularize the game than all the Scotch professionals put together. The boy in question was Francis Ouimet, and his reminiscences, A Game of Golf (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), form one of the most agreeable records of sportsmanship I have had the pleasure to read. His love of the game, the fine friendliness with which he speaks of his opponents, the calm advice and sage psychology he can pass on to duffers, are reasons why we follow this champion with delight.
To move from green to ringside is to notice a subtle change in the air. A Man Must Fight, by Gene Tunny (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), is an honest, unassuming account of success on a hard road. The writer takes himself seriously; he writes without a trace of the humor which lights up Ouimet’s page, nor is he able to shake off a kind of phrase-paralysis which — as when, for instance. he is telling of his managerial difficulties or describing the fight racket in Chicago — really deprives his account of either sting or naturalness. Tunney is at his best when he describes the strategy of his various battles — how you outbox a left-hander, how you use the sporting page to provoke an opponent, what goes through your mind when, sagging on the canvas, the referee begins to count you out. This is his shop talk, and he sets it down without artifice. But to convey the emotions of a fighter, cither in the understatement of Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’ or more directly, is beyond him.
Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, owe much of their brilliance to the exceptional vividness with which he depicted the action that took place in a trout stream, prize ring, race track, or bull ring. He knew by experience the science of the sport and the skullduggery which sometimes mined it, and in his description he aimed ‘to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you [the participant] experience.’ ‘The only place,’he goes on to say, ‘where you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in a bull ring, and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest tilings. . . .’ Death in the Afternoon (Scribner, $3.50) is the result of ten years’ study.
It is first made graphic to an unacquainted reader that a bullfight is no simple killing. To explain it ‘both emotionally and practically’ Hemingway adopts the autobiographic manner. He tells you the physical properties of the ring, the best seats to occupy, and the season’s itinerary of fights; he tells of the teamwork of picadors, banderilleros, and matadors, and leads skillfully up to the three acts of each fight.; he describes the good matadors and the cowards, and discusses their incomes, their sex life, and their wounds; he spends much time and respect on the bulls and the formal movements by which they are led to death in the blazing afternoon. Most of this is in monologue, but for occasional relief there are dialogues between the author and an old lady who ‘feeds’ Hemingway his humorous lines. These passages provide amusing satire, they ease up on the technicalities, and they indulge the author in a certain amount of nose-thumbing. The narrative moves in circles, repetitious, formless, the sentences at times crude and obscure, but as the circles widen in a pond, so one’s impressions of this spectacle are extended until the death itself becomes the climax of the whole. I like it, and I like it despite the deliberate obstacles which the author has imposed in the way of the reader. I dislike the deliberate circumlocution of his style, I am bored as much as amused by his sexual license, and I resent his occasional pose as ‘the hard guy’ in literature. But I am frankly and unequivocally absorbed by the complete, if brutal, story and by the striking pictures his book contains. With such good stuff, it seems a pity to strut it.
