The modernist writer — Part I

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

List of posts

There was some justice to Gertrude Stein’s biting remark that Hemingway “looks like a modernist and he smells of the museums”.

James R. Mellow in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences.

. . . Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction.

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism.

It will be well to make a little more certain of these matters by reading first Mr. Hemingway’s earlier book, The Sun Also Rises, and it soon becomes clear from this that, if Mr. Hemingway is ‘advanced’, it is not in the way that is to us most interesting . . .

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism.

Modernism is less a style than a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense; indeed the style of one work is no guarantee for the next.

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane,


The Name And Nature Of Modernism.

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty . . . Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.

Matthew J. Brucolli, in Scott and Ernest: 
The Authority

of Failure and the Authority of Success.

WHO, when practising in ‘the arts’, was a ‘modernist’ and what constituted ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ works is these days unhelpfully vague. In many ways Hemingway might well have been a ‘modernist writer’, as is accepted by many, but if so ‘his modernism’ was not deep-rooted, and in a sense was more a matter of appearances.

He initially looked like a modernist to his contemporaries, and so they accepted him as one; but it would be a distinct stretch to claim that any of the work he produced after the appearance in 1925 of In Our Time, his first volume of short stories, was notably modernist. Even that work, in hindsight and side by side with other literary works seen as modernist, doesn’t quite make the mark, despite its ‘shocking’, and thus ‘modern’, subject matter, and its unusual, and thus ‘modern’, syncopated style.

The Sun Also Rises, the novel much anticipated after the impact of In Our Time, disappointed more than a few critics and other writers, and they said so in their reviews. Hemingway’s follow-up novel, A Farewell To Arms, veered even more to the conventional, and when he published Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa — although admittedly neither was a work of fiction — he was firmly back in a traditional, often rather bad and, ironically, prolix mode of writing.

In her Essay In Criticism, which was nominally a review for the New York Times of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf (right) nails his supposed modernism succinctly

. . . Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction.

Pertinent here is Woolf’s mention of a ‘conception of fiction’.

One notable aspect of modernism and modernist artists was the thinking which underpinned their work and artistic aims; and although Hemingway often repeated that his aim when writing was to create a reality that was — to paraphrase him somewhat — ‘truer than true’ or ‘more real than real’, his notional modernism certainly had no philosophical or intellectual underpinning. Should it, you ask?

Well, the work of other modernist artists, writers and composers did and this might be what Woolf was indicating when she described him as ‘modern in manner but not in vision’.

Throughout his life and especially as a young man, Hemingway made a point of ostensibly and vociferously disparaging all talk of ‘art’, although colleagues on the Kansas Star and, later, his roommates in Chicago report that he took part in discussions on fiction and ‘literature’. Quite why he stood apart from addressing what might be regarded as the more philosophical aspects of modernism is anyone’s guess, because he was never reticent about laying down the law about what constituted ‘good writing’ and ‘literature’.

One explanation for his stance might lie in the many, often stark, contradictions in his character: just as the public braggart, the pugilist and bully was said by some friends to have been essentially a shy, kind and gentle man, they also insist that the ‘all talk of art is for poseurs and phoneys’ man he portrayed in public was, in private, intelligent and something of an intellectual.

But ‘Hemingway the intellectual’ was not an image Hemingway wanted the world to have of him: he wanted to be regarded as a no-nonsense, hard-drinking, down-to-earth action man who had not time for all that airy-fairy talk about art.

In fact, when his publishers Scribner’s advertised and marketed The Sun Also Rises, the notion of the effete writer as ‘the artist sequestered in his garret’ was firmly side-lined in favour of selling Hemingway as a ‘masculine’ action man who happened to write well.

. . .

To help formulate a working definition of modernism, certain general observations might help. Although many today equate modernism with the stark, jagged, sometimes brutal works of the post-World War I painters and composers, by the time much of these were produced modernism was already well-established.

It is broadly thought to have begun to evolve in the last two decades of the 19th century and had firmly established itself in the first decade of the 20th century. The then younger generation of writers, philosophers, artists and architects, and composers throughout Europe were reacting against the traditions and conventions of their parents’ and grandparents’ (as younger generations usually do). Whereas ‘realism’ had been the aim for the previous generation of writers, modernist writers increasingly wanted to get beyond and beneath that ‘surface’ realism and examine the inner life of the individual.

In the 20-odd years leading up to the outbreak of World War I, the modernist movement was generally driven by optimism and positivity. Encouraged by advances in the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, new production techniques and the growing popularity of left-wing political theory, but also alarmed by the — what it regarded as dehumanising — effects of growing industrialisation, modernists were keen to apply these innovations to how society might be reformed for the better.

They reflected that aim in their art, but the optimism and positivity came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of war in 1914 and was destroyed by the subsequent four years of world-war horror, destruction and misery. Arguably, the fragmentation and often self-conscious ugliness of those stark, jagged, brutal works produced in the 1920s and 1930s with which ‘modernism’ is now popularly associated were more a reaction to the horror, destruction and misery than anything modernist ideas, hopes and notions might have suggested and inspired.

One useful way of viewing modernism (for which description I must thank Suzanne Lynch of the Irish Times) is that it

was an attempt to find new ways of capturing experience and identity, ways that would prioritise the individual and the interior mind, and push the boundaries of language and form to its limits. The focus was on experimentation and newness, and abandonment of the fixed point of view, driven by a restlessness with regard to the traditional structures of 19th-century realism.

With this description in mind, Hemingway might certainly be regarded as a modernist in aim and intention, in ‘prioritising the individual’ (though it should be noted that ‘the individual’ portrayed in his work was almost always a Hemingway proxy) and perhaps finding ‘new ways of capturing experience and identity’.

In other regards — ‘pushing the boundaries of language and form’, focusing ‘on experimentation and newness’, abandoning ‘the fixed point of view’ and ‘traditional structures of 19th-century realism’ Hemingway pretty much does not even progress beyond the first round.

He ostensibly briefly seems to have stepped out in that direction, but in the event did not stray too far from the straight and narrow of the Oak Park conservatism in which he was raised (an observation also made by most of his biographers of other aspects of his life).

Certainly, compared to what almost every other writer — although not all — was then producing, his prose style was ‘new’ and striking, and some might claim that he did push the boundaries of language and form. But the experiment was a limited, almost two-dimensional one, which is perhaps why Gertrude Stein, once a mentor and friend, later a bitter enemy, observed — admittedly once she was a bitter enemy — that Hemingway looked like a modernist and smelled of the museums.

The narrative routes of his three famous novels are decidedly linear, with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and the only ‘inner lives’ with which Hemingway concerns himself are those of each story’s and novel’s central character — and thus his proxy — Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan, Richard Cantwell, Thomas Hudson, David Bourne and his Spanish fisherman Santiago. In The Sun Also Rises, for example, we get to know some of Jake Barnes’s inner life (and possibly even a glimpse of the ‘private’ Lady Brett Ashley), but the depths of the other characters in The Sun Also Rises remain unplumbed.

Frederic Henry in A Farewell To Arms reveals some of his inner self, although we never discover just why he is telling his story and felt compelled to do so (a common failing of many ‘first-person’ narratives).

Despite some academics and critics trying to dignify Henry’s ‘love interest’ Catherine Barkley with ‘depth’, she (and the supposed passion she and Henry feel for the other) remain decidedly flat and distressingly insipid. The irony is that something psychologically complex must have been going on in Catherine: quite soon after losing in battle the man she regarded as the love of her life and apparently close to despair, she rapidly replaces that man with Henry after just one meeting.

Such a coup de foudre would not be unprecedented, and a psychologist — and a better writer — could chose to analyse why Catherine selected Henry as a substitute: a truly modernist writer might well have examined the complex ‘why’ of her behaviour. Hemingway does none of this: at the end of the day Hemingway was simply not interested and concerns himself solely with his proxy, Frederic Henry. The novel’s other characters, despite heroic attempts by some academics and critics to invest them with significance, serve only as a foil to Henry and also have little depth.

In the story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway’s hero, the writer Harry — yet another proxy — ruminates on his past in what could be described as a ‘stream of consciousness’ as he lies dying of gangrene. Harry’s death-bed ruminations — his self-reproach for living off his wealthy wife’s money echo Hemingway’s own guilt at the time about doing the same — are made up almost exclusively of Hemingway’s own memories.

One might, of course, argue that the dying man’s ruminations do constitute ‘a stream of consciousness’, but they are also oddly two-dimensional. Other ‘modernist’ writers played with the passage and nature of time, with alternative, often conflicting, narratives, they examined the contradictions of differing perceptions of the same events and utilised a variety of styles. Hemingway essayed no such experiments.

At times it seems the extent of his ‘modernism’ was, in keeping with the instruction from his ‘mentors’ Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, merely trying to ensure his prose was simple and unadorned; and even in that regard, in the work he produced after 1930, he became less successful at doing so, even as he increasingly saw himself as ‘a great writer’.

Hemingway once stated that his aim was to try

in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not to just depict life — or criticise it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing.

The obvious question is: was this not what many other writers were also trying to achieve, including those who were and are not now regarded as ‘modernist’? Was Victor Hugo not trying, in his novel Les Miserables, to get his readers to ‘feel’ what it was like to take part in the June 1832 uprising?

Then there’s the problem that many readers might report that a writer has made an experience come ‘alive’ for them, but, unhelpfully, each such ‘felt’ experience is unique and subjective. The obvious question is (and it has no answer): am I experiencing what Hemingway is trying to make me experience? How can I be sure? I might be experiencing something, but is it what Hemingway was trying to make me feel? Are you and I sharing the same experience (which would be a reliable indicator that Hemingway had succeeded)? Who knows? The point is there is and can be no way of knowing.

. . .

The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, a year after the appearance of In Our Time, Hemingway’s first volume of short stories that had so excited the critics and established him as a coming man in the literary landscape. When writing those stories, and those which had previously appeared in the privately published volumes Three Stories And Ten Poems and in our time [sic], Hemingway was self-consciously trying something new. 

Under the tutelage of Pound and Stein, he wanted to write simple prose shorn of ornamentation — out went most adjectives and all adverbs (although his style was not unique and reminded many — much to Hemingway’s annoyance — of the work of his mentor Sherwood Anderson). The prose in that first commercially published volume, variously described by reviewers as

‘fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean’

and

‘terse, precise and aggressively fresh’

was markedly different to much that had gone before which is what caused much of the excitement. Hemingway’s subject matter was equally unconventional. The critics, thus, had high hopes for the young writer’s debut novel, but it’s reception was mixed. Typical of the enthusiast who rated it was the view of an early Hemingway champion, the literary young turk Edmund Wilson. He wrote

The barbarity of the world is also the theme of . . . The Sun Also Rises . . . The whole interest of The Sun Also Rises lies in the attempts of the hero and heroine to disengage themselves from this world, or rather to arrive at some method of living honorably. The real story there is the story of their attempts to do this — attempts by which, in such a world, they are always bound to lose in everything except honor.

The New York Sun commented

Every sentence that [Hemingway] writes is fresh and alive. There is no one writing whose prose has more of the force and vibrancy of good, direct, natural, colloquial speech. . . It seems to me that Hemingway is highly successful in presenting the effect that a sensual love for the same woman might have on the temperaments of three men who are utterly different in this position and training

and the New York Herald Tribune gushed

The dialogue is brilliant. If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it. It is alive with the rhythms and idioms, the pauses and suspensions and innuendos and short-hands, of living speech. It is in the dialogue almost entirely Mr Hemingway tells his story and makes the people live and act.

Others reviewing The Sun Also Rises were, though, less enchanted. Time magazine (founded three years earlier and notably in later years a Hemingway stalwart as he became a public figure) observed

A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young author Hemingway. His short work [In Our Time] bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately . . . Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables . . . the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake’s favorites, and presumably, author Hemingway’s, too, ‘Oh, what the hell’.

In Britain the Times Literary Supplement wrote

There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different

and The Observer was even more direct

‘Mr Hemingway began brilliantly, with a set of short stories called In Our Time. But Fiesta as [The Sun Also Rises was known in Britain] gives us neither people nor atmosphere, the maudlin, staccato conversations — evidently meant to be realistic in their brokenness and boringness — convey no impression of reality; and the characters, both men and women, in Paris and in Spain, are so consistently soaking themselves with alcohol as to lose all human interest . . . Why does Mr Hemingway, who can draw flesh-and-blood, waste his time on the bibulous shadows?’

Worse, Hemingway’s then good friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, was scathing in his review of the novel for the left-wing journal New Masses, and taking his cue from the its two epigraphs wrote

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises is] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival.

It should be noted, though, that Dos Passos was then firmly ‘of the left’ (and in later life he drifted firmly

 to neo-conservatism) and the New Masses was an avowedly left-wing publication, so his scorn for The Sun Also Rises’s decidedly ‘bourgeois’ protagonists getting drunk at a Spanish fiesta might be viewed in that light.

In fact, Dos Passos (left) later apologised to Hemingway for his review, although biographers believe this was probably more of a ‘diplomatic’ apology to spare the feelings of a man who he still thought of as a close friend.

The friendship did endure for a few more years, but the review angered Hemingway, and although he often entertained Dos Passos at his Key West home in the early 1930s, as far as he was concerned it damaged that friendship.

Never one to ignore what he regarded as slight, Hemingway then parodied Dos Passos in his mid-thirties novel To Have And Have Not, as Richard Gordon, a second-rate, left-wing novelist who is treated with contempt by his wife.

Overall, though, reviews were favourable and the novel sold (and continues to sell) steadily, although its popularity was certainly not universal.

The modernist writer — Part II is here.

The modernist writer — Part II

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

List of posts

There was some justice to Gertrude Stein’s biting remark that Hemingway “looks like a modernist and he smells of the museums”.

James R. Mellow in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences.

. . . Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction.

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism.

It will be well to make a little more certain of these matters by reading first Mr. Hemingway’s earlier book, The Sun Also Rises, and it soon becomes clear from this that, if Mr. Hemingway is ‘advanced’, it is not in the way that is to us most interesting . . .

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism.

Modernism is less a style than a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense; indeed the style of one work is no guarantee for the next.

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane,


The Name And Nature Of Modernism.

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty . . . Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.

Matthew J. Brucolli, in Scott and Ernest:


The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.

THERE is nothing in The Sun Also Rises which would today dismay any reader, but in uptight, teetotal, God-fearing Oak Park just outside Chicago where Hemingway grew up, once described as ‘where the bars end and the churches begin’, it disgusted his parents Ed and Grace Hemingway. In a letter to her son, his mother described his novel as

one of the filthiest books of the year . . . surely you have other words in our vocabulary besides “damn” and “bitch” — every page fills me with a sick loathing’.

His parents’ outrage was shared by thousands of like-minded folk elsewhere in the country, and it would not have needed much to persuade the good burghers of mid-America that this new writer was one of those ‘moderns’. Just why the novel caused such a stir can be gauged from the following observation of Middle America by Michael Reynolds in his biography Hemingway: The Paris Years:

Those were the days when Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple MacPherson led Bible thumpers down the fundamentalist trail that Americans periodically seemed compelled to travel. We remember the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, but forget that the school teacher lost, that the law forbidding Darwin’s presence in the classroom was upheld. We forget about the Anti-Saloon league and the Clean Books Bill. We forget that the Little Review lost its case in the first Ulysses trial and that the meanest sort of reactionary spirit resulted in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. American voters filled their presidency with conservative men determined to keep America isolated from the world, pretending that an inflated dollar was good for business. We all remember Lindbergh’s daring 1927 flight across the Atlantic, but forget that he later admired Hitler’s well-oiled military machine.

In other words, Hemingway might have gained the respect of a minority, the narrow literary world of New York and other major cities and of its acolytes, the ‘open-minded’ and ‘enlightened’ folk in various parts of the country; but the majority of that country were less than pleased by the appearance of a novel in which — shamelessly! — words such as ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ were prominent.

Max Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, certainly rated him as a writer, but he had to overcome initial in-house resistance to publishing The Sun Also Rises. He and Scribner’s younger editors were aware that competition in publishing was growing and that Scribner’s was regarded as more than a touch fusty. The house had been founded 80 years earlier, to publish religious tracts, and in the 1920s John Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton were more typical of its stable of authors. The younger editors feared the Scribner’s was in danger of being regarded by younger readers as too staid, and they

 

Old school: From left, Edith Wharton, Johns Galsworthy and Henry James still
sold well in the 1920s but were decidedly not ‘modernist’

hoped to rejuvenate it by publishing work such as Hemingway’s novel (and, a few years earlier, Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise and its follow-up, The Beautiful And The Damned).

To strengthen his case with the board, Perkins had persuaded Hemingway to moderate his text: for example, a reference to a bull’s ‘balls’ was changed to the bull’s ‘horns’, and language considered unacceptable was toned down (although obviously not enough for Grace Hemingway).

These moderations managed to blunt the board’s reluctance, but they did little to assuage the outrage of Middle America which also thoroughly disapproved of the novel’s casual attitude to sex and adultery. It wasn’t, though, the approval of Middle America Perkins wanted and, ironically, every instance of public outrage and disapproval was, in fact, welcome.

Perkins had begun his publishing career in Scribner’s advertising department and knew such outrage was good publicity and great for sales: as much as older folk hated the novel, younger folk would love it. Reviewing Hemingway’s short memoir, A Moveable Feast, many years later, The New Republic’s then film critic, Stanley Kauffman recalled the extraordinary impact Hemingway’s first two novels and first two collections of short stories had on him and his young contemporaries. He wrote:

To younger readers, those who came to Hemingway after World War II, he could not possibly look the same as to previous generations because the later group saw him in a different context. . . . Those who began to read him in the mid-20s, or soon after, experienced a small epiphany, saw a powerful and incredibly timely writer appear, almost as a saviour bringing curt truth to a windy and shaken society.

Here the important word is ‘context’, and it is perhaps not surprising that as the 1920s became the 1930s, then the 1940s, then the 195os, and as the ‘context’ changed and each new ‘young generation’ demanded its own heroes, what had startled and excited young readers when Hemingway burst onto the scene and made him ‘modern’ and apparently ‘modernist’ became not just far less startling and exciting, but not in the slightest startling and exciting. That is a truism, of course, but it is a truism those who still champion Hemingway’s fiction and style seem to ignore or forget.

. . .

‘Context’ is also relevant when one considers ‘Hemingway the modernist’ and whether he even was one. Certainly, a reading public in the mid-1920s more accustomed to the polite and elegant prose of John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton, both also published by Scribner’s, will have been willing to accept that he was ‘a modernist’ (as the critics assured them, of course — even today few readers dare hold an opinion publicly until it has the imprimatur of ‘a respected critic’).

His prose was decidedly different, and it is easy to see why it might be regarded as ‘modernist’. In its review of In Our Time, the Times Literary Supplement had noted — though rather tartly — that

Mr Ernest Hemingway, a young American writer living in Paris, is definitely of the moderns. It is not merely a deliberate taste for writing ungrammatically now and again which points the way to Mr Hemingway's literary camp; it is rather his own concern for the conventional features of good writing. The short stories in the volume entitled In Our Time . . . achieve their affect by normal and rather puzzling means . . . Only one story in the book — Indian camp, the first — has anything like a straightforward appeal, and even here the actual method is as elusive as in the rest of the tales.

In his review for the New York City Sun, Herbert J. Seligmann observed that

The flat even banal declarations in the paragraphs alternating with Mr Hemingway’s longer sketches are a criticism of the conventional dishonesty of literature. Here is neither literary inflation nor elevation, but a passionately bare telling of what happened.

It would, incidentally, be interesting to know what Seligmann regarded as the ‘conventional dishonesty of literature’. On the face of it, it is just another of the myriad hi-falutin’ phrases conjured up by critics to give their judgments an all-too-often spurious heft and authority.

After the excitement created by In Our Time and its unconventional style and subject mater, one might see why Hemingway’s ‘debut novel’ The Sun Also Rises left some critics underwhelmed. Arguably, the

fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean

which so enthused the New York Times and served the stories in In Our Time well did lesser service in the novel. The New York Times was impressed by The Sun Also Rises, observing that

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of the Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame

(and again it would be useful to be told what ‘more literary English’ should be ashamed about). But writing in the New Yorker Dorothy Parker had her doubts. She wrote

Now, The Sun Also Rises was as “starkly” written as Mr. Hemingway’s short stories; it dealt with subjects as “unpleasant”. Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.

One might raise an eyebrow for her claim on the basis that at the time Hemingway had published just 16, often very short, stories Hemingway, but the point here is that she was one of several critics who felt The Sun Also Rises fell a little short of what was promised and what they had expected. The Times Literary Supplement was quite candid in its view:

Now comes Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises] . . . more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different . . . The Spanish scenes give us something of the quality of Mr Hemingway’s earlier book, but they hardly qualify the general impression of an unsuccessful experiment.

Contemporary critics reviewing the novel upon its publication, including that of The Times Literary Supplement, would and could not have known what Hemingway’s biographers now tell us: Hemingway’s prime motivation for writing the novel was not based on modernist idealism, but to build a career for himself as a writer, and to do that he knew he had to follow up his first volume of short stories with a novel — and sooner rather than later.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it sits uncomfortably with the young Hemingway’s oft-stated claim that he was not interested in fame and that he just wanted to write. In Hemingway And His Conspirators, Leonard J Leff examines the extent to which Hemingway actively set about ‘becoming famous’. He tells us that

Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in [publicity] photographs, Book of the Month club editions, and stage or movie adaptations that could bring an author fame and fortune; he wrote, in other words, ‘for the relief of [his] own mind and without thought of publication’. Certainly he wanted an audience to hear what he had to say about valour or love or the anatomy of fiction. And certainly he needed money to sustain the grand life he had after 1929. Beyond that, however, he radiated personality and cultivated publicity even as he pretended to scorn it. In his first letter to Perkins he mentioned — not wholly facetiously — that it would be ‘worthwhile to get into Who’s Who’. In short he wanted fame in both the Renaissance and the contemporary sense.

One does wonder what his contemporary modernist writers, artists and composers, many of whom were inclined to left-of-centre views and who were at odds with the established ethos of capitalist ambition and chasing prosperity, would have made of Hemingway ambition.

. . .

The use of the phrase ‘banal declarations’ by the New York City Sun’ Herbert Seligmann is both interesting and telling. Consider this paragraph:

In the morning it was bright and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town. 

If you do not recognise the passage and if I told you it is a short excerpt from the travel diary of one Lewis Monroe, of Rockbridge, Illinois, written on his trip to Europe in his graduation summer in 1954, I don’t doubt you would accept what I’m saying without question. But it isn’t — it is the opening paragraph of chapter 10 of The Sun Also Rises.

It is, admittedly, an excerpt specifically chosen to make a point, but it is a crucial point: could this prose really be described as ‘fibrous and athletic’ and ‘aggressively fresh’? And although I have chosen that passage as being notably banal, flat and unimpressive, there are many other similar passages in Hemingway's first novel.

Yet it is puzzling even today to be assured by academics and critics that Hemingway’s prose is still top-notch writing (and, furthermore, it would be interesting to know what today’s Hemingway champion make of the turgid and often incomprehensible prose in Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa).

It is possible that Hemingway, in ‘modernist’ mode, intended the tone of that paragraph – the novel is written in the first person – to sound so banal (‘Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river.’). He might, for example and for whatever reason, have wanted to give the reader an insight into his main protagonist’s mindset. Yet if that was his intention — and I doubt it was — it would be wholly at odds with how Jake Barnes, the novel’s cynical, worldly-wise ‘I’, is portrayed elsewhere in the novel.

One similarly wonders about other passages in the novel. Once Jake Barnes and his pal Bill Gorton have travelled south from Paris but before they settle in Pamplona and meet the friends who will be joining them, they take off in a charabanc for several days fishing in the hills north of Pamplona.

Describing their journey to Burguete near where they plan to fish, Hemingway treats us to long passages describing how the charabanc is loaded and boarded by its passengers and then of its journey into the hills. It is not surprising that in his review for the New Masses of The Sun Also Rises Dos Passos insists, taking his cue from the novel’s two — contradictory — epigraphs, that

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [it] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight.

He added

When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona . . . reminds you of a travel book . . . it’s time to hold an inquest.

Dos Passos’s view is also worth bearing in mind when once comes to the following 224-word description of the bus journey to Burguette: 

‘The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road, we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. There were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind. There were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by fences and the white house of Burguette ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.’

Hemingway’s biographers tell us that Cezanne was one of Hemingway’s favourite painters and that he claimed he wanted to ‘write as Cezanne painted’. But if one heeds and accepts W K Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s view (in their 1946 paper The Intentional Fallacy which I touch upon elsewhere) that a work — they were discussing verse, but arguably their thesis can be broadened — can and should only be judged on and in itself, the passage becomes a little deflated.

A reader unaware of Hemingway’s fondness for Cezanne’s work and his desire to ‘write as Cezanne painted’ might be more than willing to accept he or she was reading just another excerpt from the travel diary of Rockbridge’s Lewis Monroe or, for that matter, any travel book about Spain. More to the point, whether or not you rate the flat, veering on banal, style of the two passages quoted, it is difficult to see how they might have come from the pen of a ‘modernist’ writer.

. . .

These and other passages are also notable in that they ignore one of the rules Hemingway himself laid down for writers. In 1934, once Fitzgerald (also oddly classified as a modernist by some commentators) had finally managed to complete and publish Tender Is The Night — his chronic boozing didn’t help — he asked Hemingway for his candid opinion of the work.

By 1934 Hemingway had scored more success with his second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, and his novel A Farewell To Arms, although quite a bit of the sheen had come off Hemingway’s reputation with the publication, in 1932 of Death In The Afternoon (and even raised a few eyebrows). Yet by 1934 he regarded himself as an authority on writing.

Whereas he had once relied on the then already commercially successful Fitzgerald for guidance — and taken his advice to cut several thousands words from the beginning of The Sun Also Rises which Fitzgerald deemed only spoiled the novel (Hemingway claimed it was his idea and that Fitzgerald had concurred) — he now felt qualified to dispense it himself.

In his response to Fitzgerald, he is highly, even brutally, critical of Tender Is The Night, and Fitzgerald cannot much have liked what Hemingway had to say. But in his letter to Fitzgerald there is particular stricture Hemingway lays down which is relevant to his own work.

First, consider the following two paragraphs (from the opening of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises), which I give in full:

‘In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the Rue Soufflot for coffee and a brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with a coffee then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on the S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the black platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opera, and up to my office. I passed the man with the jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to avoid walking into the thread with which his girl assistant manipulated the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded hands. She was urging two tourists to buy. Three more tourists had stopped and were watching. I walked on behind a man who was pushing a roller that printed the name CINZANO on the sidewalk in damp letters. All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to being going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office. Upstairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s work. At eleven o’clock I went to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Novell-Revue-Francaise diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions by news servicemen who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d’Orsay with Woolsey and Krum.’

Considering the above in the light of what Hemingway had to say when Fitzgerald asked him to comment on Tender Is The Night is illuminating. In his letter Hemingway advises Fitzgerald

but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you

which might well be summed up as ‘leave out the irrelevant bits’. So what are we to make of those two paragraphs above in the context of the novel as a whole? What purpose do they serve?

The style is not quite as flat — for which one might even read ‘banal’ — as Lewis Monroe’s alleged effort (and parts could well have come from Dos Passos’s travel book), but it is fair to ask quite what a modernist novel which purports to deal with the lives, disillusionment and despair of a mooted ‘lost generation’ is aiming to achieve with the above description of a mundane journey to work.

Some might argue that it is ‘the novel’ overall which is modernist and thus it is unfair to select distinct passages as examples. That’s one point of view, but I repeat: what do the passages provide for the novel as a whole? If, ideally, the disparate elements of a work of art work together to create that work of art, and if elements — such as the passages I have quoted – can be deleted from the novel with no effect on it, do the even have any place in it? Isn’t that exactly what Hemingway was getting at in his letter to Fitzgerald?

As it happens, here, as elsewhere in the novel, there is a great deal of scope for profound exegesis from true believers. After all, Hemingway, almost universally acknowledged — for many years, anyway — as ‘a writer of genius’ will have known what he was doing, they will say. So we might not immediately understand what Hemingway intends, but there is certainly something deeper going on.

He’s setting the scene, they might suggest, the apparent banal mundanity of it all (‘I read the papers with a coffee then smoked a cigarette’, ‘I got on the S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the black platform’) intended — who knows, perhaps ironically? — to throw into relief the inner turmoil of the man, a man rendered impotent by a war wound, no less.

It’s plausible enough, and I don’t doubt there might be other, equally plausible, interpretations. But let us apply the principle of Occam’s razor — also known as the Principle or Law of Parsimony — that the simplest explanation is most probably the right one: that passage is padding. A true ‘writer of genius’ might well have boiled down the above 363 words to fewer, far shorter, but far more telling — and thus more interesting — paragraphs. As for the alleged ‘modernism’, there isn’t a whisper of it.

These are not isolated examples: early on in the novel there are several other instances where, apparently for no reason at all, Hemingway describes his passage through various streets of the Left Bank. Once he and his characters have arrived in Pamplona and the reader is treated to other such descriptions, it might be argued that the Pamplona passages serve as a mise en scene, but that explanation holds no water for the Paris descriptions, not at least given how they are written.

In a novel famous for purportedly portraying the lives and despair of a ‘lost generation’, these passages  seem more than oddly superfluous, notwithstanding the caveat that the novel should be regarded ‘as a whole’. But note: I am simply holding Hemingway to his own rule — ‘don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you’.

Yet the ‘padding’ (for arguably that is what is was) was necessary: had Hemingway ‘left out’ the irrelevant bits, his work might not have been long enough to be submitted as a novel. But he knew that if he wanted to get his literary career off the ground, nothing but a full-length novel would do.

. . .

Guided by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein in the early 1920s, Hemingway developed a style which might superficially have resembled modernism, but that style did not survive for long. Initially, he did keep his

Hemingway mentors: Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound who reputedly did not much like each other

sentences brief, eschewed adverbs and kept adjectives to a minimum. His stated intention was simply to describe without passing judgment.

The prose of In Our Time is in keeping with these principles and that approach might well be seen by some as ‘modernist’. Yet even in the stories of Men Without Women, his second collection, published a year after The Sun Also Rises, his style is already far more conventional, and Hemingway again begins to ignore his own strictures.

In The Undefeated, the central character, the washed-up bullfighter Manuel (who is looking for work), says something ‘hopefully’, then something else ‘reproachfully’. Later, the picador Zurito, a second character reads a newspaper ‘laboriously’, ‘forming the words with his lips’.

In Che Ti Dice La Patria (which Hemingway included in his second volume of short stories and had re-worked from a feature published in The New Republic) the young Fascist who demands a lift ‘looked annoyedly’ when the car’s radiator begins to boil.

The obvious question is: was Hemingway aware of these adverbs? For a man who reputedly ‘worked hard’ on his writing and, we’re told, revised obsessively, you must conclude that he was. So why did he let them through? One has to wonder just how diligently he did revise his work. As for being a ‘modernist’, forget it.

Yet Hemingway, as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’, almost always gets a pass when such matters are raised. As Matthew Brucolli astutely observed

[Hemingway’s] best work was done before he was thirty . . . Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.

The modernist writer — Part I is here.