Getting to know the author.
Ernest Hemingway is a well-known writer who is admired for his prose but, at the same time, criticized because of it. He has numerous short stories, novels and poems published and he is very recognized even by those who dislike him. He even won a Noble Prize in Literature for The Old Man and The Sea “which the awards committee lauded for its ‘powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration.” (Bloom, H., 1999).
Ernest Hemingway was the most famous representative of the so-called “lost generation”, that group of young writers who contributed to one of the greatest outpourings of modern literature in our history. They were young men who were either directly or indirectly involved in World War I. (Pidgeon, J. A., 2006).
He also participated in World War II. He had a very conflictive relationship with women, perhaps influenced by his lack of mother-son bond. He was an alcoholic and felt great passion for boxing, long fishing and hunting trips. He was a journalist and a reporter, used to observe reality and write about it in the most objective and brief way possible.
Hemingway was both a swaggering adventurer and a skillful craftsman. He revised his work endlessly, laboring to catch the most subtle of emotions with his sparse, telegraphic language. He lived life as largely as he could, endlessly generous to friends yet quick to anger, exuberantly joyful yet shadowed by the ever-present fear of failure and death. His work is largely pessimistic, recognizing the spirit of nada, nothingness that lurks behind the glories of fame and fate. Nonetheless, below this darkness lies a deep compassion, a sense of some ephemeral love and truth that can exist in the passing moment of human existence. He brought a new spirit of realism to American literature, a new ability to capture what really is and what makes us who we are. (Bloom, H., 1999).
Getting to know his style.
Hemingway is characterized by a very direct style, economy of language, repetition of certain words and rhythm. His dialogues are very simple and close to the everyday dialogues. Ezra Pound influenced Hemingway in a strong way; he actually follows Pound’s Principles in his writing.
The story must be composed of a series of melodic gestures; it is tone poem based on repetition of archetypal images and sounds within the implicative structures of unstated but implicit meanings. (Junkins, D., 1985)
Hemingway is known for a very uncommon style and indeed he is a master of the economy of narrative. He describes with precision and vividness using American English because he actually thought that the British were not a culture that had to be imitated or looked up to. He is ironic and pessimistic due to his war experience. He can sometimes transmit suffering, sentimentalism or disillusionment in his stories.
Hemingway distrusts all the emotions, except the simplest and most primitive (physical satisfactions, eating, drinking, making love) which are the pursuit of action for the action’s sake. His characters are never moved, they are never touched by aspiration, except emotions that are the product of physical desire or satisfaction. (Adams, Donald J., 1939)
The use of simple and everyday words is very common in Hemingway’s short stories. For instance, In The Killers Hemingway says: “Two other people had been in the lunchroom. Once George had gone out to the kitchen and made a ham-and-egg sandwich “to go” that a man wanted to take with him.” In Hills like White Elephants, ““The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.”
It is also very evident the use of short and simple sentences. He does not abuse language, he just delivers the ideas in a very natural and, I would risk saying, juvenile way. His sentences are built in a way that you can follow and understand without any problem. Sometimes, you can encounter short sentences that give the reader the impression of emphasis and economy followed by a notoriously long sentence. As an example, In Another Country he writes:
I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that Ì would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when back to the front again.
He always begins his stories with a short first paragraph in which the reader can foresee where everything is taking place but nothing else. He always includes descriptions in this first paragraph but it all gets very confusing unless the reader continues reading. In Another Country, it all begins with:
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
In Hills like White Elephants, he presents the story with the following:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
In The Killers, he starts with: “The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.”
Hemingway’s style is very concise and in his descriptions he always uses the repetition of words to emphasize the message he is trying to deliver. In Another Country, “The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart.” In Hills like White Elephants, “The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl.”
His descriptions are very detailed in order to show the reader the whole scenario, to present the situation as Pound encouraged. In Hills like White Elephants:
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
In Another Country:
Although, as we walked to the Cova through the though part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to et by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.
Hemingway is a fantastic writer when it comes to the use of metaphors. In Another Country, he presents the paradox of machines repairing what guns (machines likewise) provoked. He made a mockery of the imaginary that machines and technology can make everything work out and that the Americans have that power.
In Hills like White Elephants, It is full of metaphors regarding the main subject of the story. It all revolves around the dialogues of this couple that is deciding whether they should have an abortion or not. Then, we have the metaphor of the white elephant that refers to the burden that having a baby implies economically speaking.
How his life influenced his style, his own rule: Write what you know.
Many literary critics indeed see in each of Hemingway’s characters a representation of himself, their creator. It could be part of his doctrine that consisted on writing about what the author knows, creating real characters but not writing about real people.
Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway's life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it. (Benson, J. J., 1989)
Hemingway wrote about war, wounds, threat, alcoholism, love disappointment, boxing, fishing and hunting. His stories take place in Spain, Paris, Africa, places that he had visited and even lived in.
Because of Hemingway's fame, because of his identification with his characters, because be advertised himself as writing from experience, and because he gradually failed to provide his fictions with sufficient distance, the attraction of the biographical fallacy has seemed nearly irresistible. (Benson, J. J., 1989)
Conclusions
Hemingway followed an unconventional path in his writing. He was an innovator and he was great at this. There is no doubt that he was a troubled man who felt terribly lost, and perhaps this is why he committed suicide.
Hemingway’s essential message is that man is a helpless victim of a malevolent environment, an environment which inflicts violence and pain. He believed that life wounds all of us unreasonably: If we love something we will lose it because life will rob us of it. (Pidgeon, J. A., 2006).
Hemingway was a genius and his short stories are a great accomplishment not only in its style, but also regarding their theme. He went beyond all boundaries and ended up with impressive “short” pieces of art.
References
Adams, Donald J. (1939). Ernest Hemingway. The English Journal. Vol. 28. N° 2, Part 1, 87-94.
Benson, J. J. (1989). Ernest Hemingway: The life as fiction and the fiction as life. American Literature, 61(3), 345.
Bloom, H. (1999). Biography of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Bloom's Major Short Story Writers: Ernest Hemingway, 11.
Fuschs, D. (1965). Ernest Hemingway, literary critic. American Literature, 36(4), 431.
Gajdusek, R. E. (1981). On the definition of a definitive text: Hemingway. Hemingway Review, 1(1), 18.
Guang, W., & Xuan, L. (2007). Striking style of writing in Hemingway's powerful novel: A review of the sun also rises. US-China Foreign Language, 5(8), 67-70.
Junkins, D. (1985). Hemingway's contribution to American poetry. Hemingway Review, 4(2), 18.
Lambadaridou, E. A. (1990). Ernest Hemingway's message to contemporary man. Hemingway Review, 9(2), 146.
Nakjavani, E. (1984). The aesthetics of silence: Hemingway's ‘The art of the short story’. Hemingway Review, 4(1), 38.
Pidgeon, J. A. (2006). Ernest Hemingway. Modern Age, 48(1), 90-92.
Smith, P. (1987). Impressions of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway Review, 6(2), 2.
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