Fifty years ago this week Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Idaho home. Though parodied often (and as recently as in Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris), there’s no debating the impact of Hemingway’s outsize personality and distinctive prose. Below, in an essay from our New Literary History of America, the author Keith Taylor considers Hemingway’s style and its roots.
-----
Hemingway’s Paradise, Hemingway’s Prose
Keith Taylor
By 1943, just three years after the enormous success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway was already an iconic figure, as much a captive of his public image as he was its creator. The war in Europe was not his war, despite his slightly comic, albeit officially sanctioned efforts to turn his fishing boat, the Pilar, into a submarine destroyer for hunting German U-boats off the coast of Cuba. His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was taken more seriously as a war correspondent than the forty-four-year-old novelist could hope to be until he got back to Europe. She would soon leave him. While thanking his sister Ursula for her birthday greetings that year, he said he remembered “the smell of cedars” in the northern forest, but he knew he couldn’t return to the idyllic place in his memory.
“Windemere,” with all its connections to the romantic poets and their English Lake District, was the name of the family cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. Dr. Clarence Hemingway bought the land in 1899, the same year his first son was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Every summer the mother and children would leave Oak Park as soon as school was out, head north by steamer to Harbor Springs, Michigan, then take a train to the village of Walloon Lake, where a boat would run them the several miles down the lake to their cottage. The family would stay as long as they could before heading back to their suburban life and the confines of school and winter. Hemingway spent every summer of his childhood at Walloon Lake, learning to hunt and fish, first from his father and then from the children of the local native people who still lived in “Indian camps” around the lakes, usually working as barkpeelers for the logging businesses or as day laborers for the new group of upper-middle-class “summer people” who, like the Hemingways, were beginning to buy up the land. Although that northern landscape had been devastated by loggers in the previous generation and by the fires that had burned through the slash left behind, for Hemingway it became an Edenic image, wild and free from parental or institutional control, that would recur in his work throughout his writing life. It was there that he learned to be confident in the natural world, where he learned the specific names for plants and animals, and where he learned about the relationships between them. After being severely wounded while serving as an ambulance driver attached to the Italian army during World War I, Hemingway returned to northern Michigan to recover, and he was married there to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1921. He left shortly after and never returned, most likely because of ongoing disagreements with his mother and his uncomfortable relationship with his increasingly fragile father. It is also likely that he didn’t want the altered environment to sully his childhood memory of the place that became central to his first stories.
He wrote most of those early stories about the northern forest while living in Paris; they would become part of the collection In Our Time, as published in 1925. While working on them, Hemingway developed the prose style that he would use for the rest of his life, a style that would be much parodied, yet would remake the expectations for English prose for the rest of that century. The declarative directness of the sentences Hemingway was using was certainly influenced by his early stints as a journalist and by his childhood education in the importance of the specifics of nature, but his real discovery came from combining the partial examples of several major modernist figures into a style that a general audience was now ready to accept. From Sherwood Anderson he learned the power of a simple unadorned sentence. Gertrude Stein provided the example of repetition and parallel construction, although, unlike Stein, Hemingway would never push those techniques toward pure sound and away from their connections to character and narrative. From Ezra Pound he learned a larger sense of the music words could make, received a lesson in the rigor of the written arts, and internalized Pound’s dictum that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” From Ford Madox Ford—for whom the young Hemingway worked at the Transatlantic Review, a small literary journal then published in Paris—he absorbed the Flaubertian demand for le mot juste, the almost mystical belief that the perfect word could be found for any particular situation.
Hemingway learned these lessons from writers who may have been more inventive, more experimental than he was, but the measure of his success as a stylist is found in the way he combined their ideas. “Indian Camp” is one of the earliest stories of In Our Time, and its author was only in his own early twenties when he wrote it, but the prose already bears the clear imprint of the lessons Hemingway had learned from his more avant-garde mentors and is also very clearly Hemingway’s prose, a style that would remain recognizable through all of the subsequent books, even though many of his later sentences would accumulate more clauses around the core of action: “The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.” This straightforward exposition was often combined with flat, clipped dialogue. Although there was nothing natural about the speech of Hemingway’s characters, it became the standard for dialogue in much of the literary fiction and the popular noir fiction written in the following decades, from which it was translated into film and then back into the general culture. Hemingway’s written speech became American speech—at least for a while and among a significant part of the population.
Hemingway also borrowed his effective narrative technique from earlier, more experimental writers. In the short stories of Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce, he found an indirect narration, where much of the surrounding narrative information and certainly all of the authorial comment on the story was left to the reader’s imagination. In Death in the Afternoon, his first attempt to apply the techniques he had mastered in his fiction to a book of nonfiction, he described this approach, his “iceberg theory” of composition: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
But all of this work developing a style and an attitude toward fiction would have made Hemingway simply another figure circling through the bohemian culture of post–World War I Montparnasse if he had not found subjects that were both appropriate to his style and that touched a resonant cultural chord. His first important novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, brought style and subject together in a way that reached out to a larger reading public and gave the first indication that its author might be able to write the touchstone books of his age.
In a move that feels like a signature even though it may not be, Hemingway began The Sun Also Rises with two epigraphs, a long one from the Bible that explained the title, and one taken from conversation with Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” She was referring to the generation of American writers who had survived World War I and who chose to stay in Europe to take advantage of the favorable exchange rates on the dollar. In The Sun Also Rises the war is barely mentioned, although the main character was wounded and is impotent because of that. The characters move through Paris, then take a trip to Spain to witness the bullfights that would become part of the Hemingway myth. Along the way they stop and fish in the streams of northern Spain in a scene that echoes the earlier stories Hemingway placed near his childhood summer home. Although the generation as seen in the novel is certainly lost—psychologically and spiritually—most of its members recognize a dignity in action, a courage in the face of meaninglessness, that would become the most pointed theme of Hemingway’s work, and the one that would continue to intrigue his contemporaries, even if later generations might occasionally find it tedious.
When Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms in 1929, he completed the combination of style and subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life. In addition to the defining hunting and fishing tales that reflected his summers in northern Michigan, and the explorations of lost characters trying to find meaning within particular codes of conduct, Hemingway now became an author who would write centrally about war. Although A Farewell to Arms is a love story—and one that seems a bit too sentimental for some tastes—its most vivid writing is in battle scenes that take place in northern Italy. By perfecting his ability to describe men at war, Hemingway broke out of the group of writers associated only with the 1920s and prepared himself for much of his later work.
A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway’s first best seller and brought him into the fairly new circle of cultural celebrities, those people whose private lives and adventures were written about by the popular press and who became known and discussed by an audience that was not likely to read their work with serious engagement. Although Hemingway did not pander to this type of journalism, and even though he was often impossible to find for interviews, he tried to control his image in the public eye. The outdoorsman, adventurer, and hard-drinking macho warrior independent of all outside influence made much better press than the careful craftsman who worked hard to learn his trade from his older contemporaries. In many ways, Hemingway became his public self.
For much of the rest of his life, until his suicide in 1961, Hemingway tried to find a balance between the work he felt compelled to do and the public’s perception of him. His exquisite novella The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, brought together his old theme of man’s defining and ultimately tragic encounter with the natural world and the stylistic clarity he had learned in writing those early stories. It may have been the last important publication during his lifetime, and its popularity contributed to his selection as winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
During the last decade of his life, Hemingway was increasingly debilitated by a growing depression and the effects of alcohol abuse. The depression seems to have come, at least in part, from a congenital predisposition to the disease; Hemingway’s father had committed suicide in 1928 and a couple of his siblings would fight similar battles. But through all of this, Hemingway continued to write, often quite vigorously, although he was not able to bring most of this work to a conclusion that satisfied him. Nonetheless, his posthumous publications have changed our perceptions of him.
Some of these books, like True at First Light, his structurally loose and flabby account of an African safari, published as late as 1998, deserve the criticism they received. But others of the posthumously published books are among his most interesting. A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early years in Paris, is one of the best books we have about a writer’s discovery of his craft. Parts of the novel Islands in the Stream contain some of his clearest writing on art and war. In The Garden of Eden he was able to write about an ambivalent sexuality that completely alters our sense of the aggressive masculinity that often defined and limited an understanding of his work. And even as late as the 1950s, sick and famous and sick of being famous, he still returned to his childhood memories of northern Michigan. He still felt compelled to recover his own lost Eden. His unfinished long story “The Last Good Country” first appeared in 1972 in The Nick Adams Stories, the effort to pull all the work about Hemingway’s youthful alter ego together into a chronology that followed the life of the character. All of the plot elements in “The Last Good Country” are left unresolved, but there are moments of wonderful writing in it. Nick and his youngest sister run away from home because government officials are looking for the boy to prosecute him for poaching. The children head off across fields and through areas recently logged. After climbing through the almost impenetrable logging slash, they enter a stand of white pine. “This is all the virgin timber left around here,” Nick tells his sister. They continue:
“But I always feel strange [here]. Like the way I ought to feel in church.”
“Nickie, where we’re going to live isn’t as solemn as this, is it?”
“No. Don’t you worry. There it’s cheerful. You must enjoy this, Littless. This is good for you. This is the way forests were in the olden days. This is about the last good country there is left. Nobody gets in here ever.”
By the time he wrote this, Ernest Hemingway knew that the old forests were gone forever. Sickened by the excesses of his success and close to death, he forced himself to remember his early education in the northern forest. He was still able to recall and re-create a fragment of his vanished paradise.
(Electronically reproduced from A New Literary History of America, by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.)
For more about A New Literary History of America, and for the full text of another handful of its more than two hundred essays, visit www.NewLiteraryHistory.com
