EDITORS have ventured backstage for years in search of an actress or an actor capable of writing a good book about the theatre. But it is a sad truth that books dealing with that most glamorous of professions are usually as wooden as an actor in Shakespeare.
It is our luck to discover the exception this year: I mean If Memory Serves, by Sacha Guitry (Doubleday, Doran, $3.00). Sacha Guitry was to the theatre born. His father, Lucien, was a famous actor; for nine years he played leads in the Imperial Theatres of Russia, and in that country his talented younger son was born and christened. After the oddest kind of education, Sacha came to know the great figures of the Freach stage in the golden days before the war; he himself began to act, to write plays, and for years he endeared himself to that most critical body of people in the world, a Paris audience. Then, having crossed the meridian of fifty, the thought occurred to him to relive the recent past, and the memoir which resulted is as gay, as witty, and as spirited a volume as has come from France in a decade. Here are the great figures of before the war, Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane, Guignol, Talbot, Antoine, as a friend saw them off stage and on. Here for once is an account of real stage fright. Here is a skillful analysis of the temper and distemper of a Paris audience. Here are the feuds, the laughter, and the affections of that small race who live in the glare of footlights and love it. Sacha’s reconciliation with his father after a quarrel of thirteen years’ duration is the high point in a volume which is as French as garlic. I must add that it has been admirably translated.
Ernest Hemingway has been in Africa, flirting with death (I use the phrase not too solemnly) and leading the vigorous life with T. R. gusto. The Green Hills of Africa (Scribners, $3.00) is a chronicle of his African days. I am not a hunter; I have a city-bred aversion for safaris and for bloodletting whether rhinos or snipe be the target, yet I must say that I found this book absorbing. I like it because of its complete candor. I respect it because it so well measures Hemingway’s skill. I enjoy thinking about it because it holds, more than any of his other works, the philosophy of the writer.
With entertaining candor Hemingway takes you into the confidence of a hunting party; present are himself and his wife, their friend Karl, and Pop, the English professional hunter, and at their heels are the native gun bearers, trackers, and the lesser attendants. You see Africa as they motor or work through it on foot; you smell it: the foul trail after the baboons have passed, the savor of the great kudu in the rainy wood. You learn the trickiness of the wind, the fatiguing strategy of tracking, and how to squeeze, not pull, the trigger; you feel, in a borrowed sense, the elation of killing and—more patently — the pathos of wounded game, the spinning hyena, the groaning rhino; you know the irritations — sore feet, the brain-cooking sun, the jealousy among hunters for the best shot; you overhear, without restraint of speech, the badinage of the men as they relax at noon over beer, in the evening over their Scotch. Most readers, like myself, will never have a hand in such a preoccupation; to redeem it to make it authentic without being pompous, to make it engrossing, is a considerable test of Hemingway’s skill.
You know what to expect: dialogue which is at once so natural and so unexpected that it swiftly reveals the people speaking. Next, those passages of ’landscape painting’ in which Hemingway, intent on the perfection of his style, fuses together the sensual and the intellectual, piles phrase upon phrase until he has built up comprehensively but without obscurity (this troubled him earlier) the picture in his mind. In my judgment the African evening (pages 5, 6), the Gulf Stream, the Masai tribe, and the killing of the kudu are as fine and coördinated prose as he has ever written. Thirdly, you meet a self-portrait which is masterful. In such strength there are, of course, limitations: Hemingway’s presence overshadows the others in the story. I have to remind myself that Pop is intended for an Englishman and that Karl is not Hemingway’s somewhat suppressed younger brother. Those two dark portraits, M’Cola and Garrick, — Hemingway’s bearers, — are brilliantly sketched. I could wish that the whites came off as well.
Some readers will find the Maine-guide colloquialisms hard to swallow. Well, that undoubtedly is how men talk whether fishing, hunting, or playing golf. Some will be misled by the poorly managed transition between chapters one and two. No matter: keep your eye on the best that’s here; dig for the underlying credo; mull over this candid self-examination by a man who is a powerful and sensitive writer.
