Hemingway & Style

My parents were in Paris a few weeks ago and I asked them to stop at Shakespeare & Company, the famous English book store on the Left Bank. I had been to the location in New York and wanted a book from the Paris location as well. My mom bought me a new copy of The Sun Also Rises, plus a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poems. Well done, mom.

I went through a Hemingway phase when I first got into literature six years ago in El Paso. I read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and every story in the Collected Short Stories in about a six month time-frame. Which is a lot of Hemingway. And he connected with 23 year-old Toby in a far different way than he did the 29 year-old Toby who just reread The Sun Also Rises. When I was younger it was easier to see the adventure to the tales: the bull-fighting, the war-time ambulance-driving, the freedom-fighting, the romance of the abundant wine in the Spanish or French cafes, and to gloss over the despair running through every book. These were the works, after all, of a man who committed suicide, a man in anguish over the loss of religion and the comfort it brings. I still enjoy reading Hemingway, but it didn't consume me the way it did the first time around when I stayed up late at night to read through his corpus. 

Since that first flurry of reading I have read some criticism of Hemingway, criticism that seems to focus on his prose first, those short declarative sentences he is famous for writing. Here is an example:

“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout out any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.” (p 142)

I choose this paragraph, though it could really be almost any other, as quintessentially Hemingway. Hemingway catches a lot of flack for his terse sentence structure. And it can be funny, especially when read out loud. Corey Stoll, playing Papa in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, nailed the cadence of his speech quite well, as well as the bravado. But there is something arresting about it at the same time.

For one, it is easy to follow. Some authors seem to consider inscrutability as a hallmark of good prose, but Hemingway went for intelligibility. For another, it lays bare the events being described. You might not care to know how many pesetas Jake Barnes paid each night for a hotel room, but you will know and you will know that he thought it too much to pay. So much so that he decided to make up the difference by binging on the complementary house wine. In the excerpt above, Hemingway builds up nicely from the length and atmosphere of the fiesta of Pamplona to the effect it has on the speech and actions of the characters. The seven day party disbands the group, might destroy a marriage, ends in drunkenness and fisticuffs and regret. At the beginning of the paragraph a seven day fiesta sounds like a hell of a time. By the end, you just want the thing to be over already. Enough of the shouting.

Yet another attraction to me of the style is the almost poetic nature it can take. I chose the above excerpt for that very reason. The cadence you fall into while reading that paragraph sounds very much like a poem, unrhymed of course and with more than a hint of Homeric influence. One of my favorite poems of all time is Psalm 8, which begins and ends “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” We go on a journey in the meantime and when the line is repeated at the end it has new emphasis. Hemingway’s style can provide the same effect as that of the Psalmist, though to a different degree of course. And it can be quite lovely.

So give Papa a break, critics. His style may not be widespread and might have lost our to complex word webs, but he was a way better writer than you are and he understood what he was doing. And he was very good at what he did. And true and brave.