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.
In the last decades of his life, the Papa legend undermined the literary reputation and exposed the underlying fissure between the two Hemingways: the private artist and the public spectacle. When his writing slacked off and he attempted to live up to and feed on the legend, his exploits seemed increasingly empty. His shotgun blast shattered the heroic myth — and led to a different persona. After his death, he became either the genius destroyed by accidents and doctors or a failed writer who had never achieved artistic greatness.
Jeffery Meyers, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Autumn 1984.
The discrepancy between eloquence and maudlin self-indulgence was often visible on a single page; I never knew when he would soar and when he would lapse into the fabled macho pose that has proved so irresistible to parody.
James Atlas, associate editor The Atlantic, Oct 1983
on re-reading Hemingway’s novels.
on re-reading Hemingway’s novels.
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to
Maxwell Perkins, Scribner’s.
Even people who rarely read novels are driven by curiosity to investigate a story supposedly based on real people and events. When such a novel is additionally acclaimed by the critics and widely hailed as the Bible of a whole generation, the furore increases geometrically. Over a period of years information purported to be ‘the truth’ about the novel and its prototypes multiply and are synthesized, resulting in a confusing array of legends which not infrequently contradict each other. Thus has it been with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Bertram D. Sarason, Hemingway And The Sun Set
The tall stories and outright lies he told — increasingly in the last fifteen years of his life which is now thought to be caused by the mania phases of his bi-polar condition — often beggar belief.
Hemingway’s various biographers record that he was often extremely nasty, yet he was often extremely kind; that the publicity-conscious show-off was essentially a very shy man; that he was regarded by some as thoughtful and intellectual, but publicly he chose to play the ostentatious and cynical sceptic about art and all things ‘arty’.
How do we reconcile the ‘brawling braggart’, the excessively didactic ‘expert on everything’ who liked to be the centre of attention with the courteous man who listened to you intently and, some said, made you feel to be the centre of the world?
What do we make of a man who liked to be thought of as a hyper-masculine and a ‘bad boy’ womaniser but who biographers record as a diffident, essentially conservative and buttoned-up middle-class son of Oak Park who often enjoyed taking the submissive role in sex?
The ‘Hemingway enigma’ extends rather further than just ‘how did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to square a circle, but it might be sanest to conclude that attempting to do so is not just futile but unfair to Hemingway.
Rather than shoehorn the man into our pseudo-psychological pigeonholes and subject him to the lightweight analytical scrutiny popular with the Sunday supplements, it would be simpler and certainly more honest to concede that many men and women are often ‘hard to understand’.
More to the point, though, none of it the contradictory behaviour, the shyness, the bragging and all the rest matter: none of it has anything to do with the work he produced, the work upon which his reputation as a supposed ‘great writer’ rests.
. . .
The many details we know about a writer might interest us, but ultimately they have no bearing on the artistry and purported aesthetic ‘worth’ of an individual work. In that respect they are irrelevant.
Roland Barthes suggested that once a piece of writing — and, I suppose, once the creation of any work of art — is deemed by its creator to have been concluded and the work is then presented for the attention of others, it takes on an existence of its own which — crucially — is independent of its creator.
In that sense, from there on the creator is of no consequence. That a work must stand or fall ‘in itself’ is also essentially what Wimsatt and Beardsley suggest in their paper The Intentional Fallacy (although they were discussing poetry).
The suggestion that a work of art takes on an independent existence is, of course, not an ontological ‘fact’; it is merely a convenient way of considering how we might evaluate ‘works of art’ and do so with a clear head.
Usefully, that approach clarifies the distinction between ‘a work’ and ‘the creator’, and stresses that no knowledge of ‘the creator’ is necessary for the evaluation of each work. Would those who read Hamlet’s soliloquy rate or enjoy it any less if they did not know it was written by William Shakespeare?
Can we evaluate an anonymous poem, short story or novel if we know nothing of its author? Of course we can, and we do. We have no idea who ‘Homer’ was or even whether he was just one person or a name we now give to a collection of poets; yet the Odyssey and the Iliad are in no way thus diminished.
Not knowing who wrote a poem, a short story or a novel should not bother us at all if the writing is obliged to stand on its own. If we believe a work is interesting, engaging, well-written or otherwise laudable, would — or should — it make any difference to our judgment if we were subsequently told the piece had been written by a rapist? The piece would still stand or fall on its own merits.
Our new knowledge might influence our decisions on how we treat the work — refusing to include it in an anthology, perhaps — but it can and would have no bearing on how we evaluate it artistically.
Earlier, I cited the dilemma faced by museum and exhibition curators when in 1989 a biography of the British sculptor Eric Gill revealed that he had been an incestuous paedophile. I suggested that although
Would it have been reasonable or even made sense to suggest that henceforth graphic artists and printers should stop using Gill Sans, the font he designed?
On the one hand some might argue that ‘we still think Gill’s work succeeds artistically, but think it inappropriate to exhibit it’; others might argue that, conversely, Gill’s incestuous paedophilia somehow diminishes the work artistically.
A committee might be convened to discuss Gills work should be exhibited or not. It might reach a consensus, but their decision would have nothing to say on the ‘objective’ artistic worth of any piece of Gill’s work.
. . .
That we might be urged to ignore extraneous matters and treat a work hermetically when evaluating it is, of course, simply the theory. The practice is muddier: try as we might, it could prove to be impossible to discount everything except the work itself.
Once a writer has made her or his name with a first work as Hemingway did, judgment passed on subsequent work will almost certainly be influenced by, for example, what we thought of that first work and we think the new work compares.
When evaluating subsequent work, we might ask ourselves ‘has the writer sustained the promise initially shown and is this new one a development and an improvement?’
Attempting an ‘impartial’ evaluation would most likely not be at all straightforward. In addition, the publisher’s marketing department, with both eyes on maximising sales, will be telling the world about ‘an exciting new talent’, as Scribner’s did when it published The Sun Also Rises.
The advertising and marketing campaign proclaimed Hemingway to be a new kind of writer, one who as not the effete kind mouldering away in a cold garret but a man of action who was also an artist dedicated to writing.
Ideally when reading a manuscript from an unknown author (and one who did not come with an advance endorsement as did Hemingway with F Scott Fitzgerald singing his praises) a publisher will proceed on what she or he reads.
Whatever details about the writer were supplied in a covering letter or by an agent would have little bearing on the publisher’s verdict on the work’s artistic worth. Back in the real world, it is more likely that the publisher will note that this or that new author comes on the recommendation of an agent whose judgment in the past he or she has trusted.
The publisher’s concern is ‘will the reading public buy this?’ rather than ‘is this a good book?’ (or even ‘is this an extraordinary piece of art?’) Personal details of the writer might well be one factor as far as sales potential is concerned, but there is certainly no natural equivalence between ‘how good’ a book is in literary terms and whether ‘it will sell’. Here, Hemingway provides a good case study.
In Our Time, his first collection of short stories made its mark not necessarily because the fiction was excellent, but because it was different and, crucially, new. Because markets sooner or later reach a point where the ‘consumers’ — and that, like it or not, is what the ‘reading public’ are to the publisher — demand ‘something new’, Hemingway’s collection fitted the bill.
And not only were In Our Time’s stories new in both style and content, Scribner’s also realised their young author had ‘novelty value’: it didn’t matter that ‘Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald’s friend in Paris’ was an unknown name — he was ‘new’ and possibly ‘being unknown’ helped a little.
Ironically, twenty-three years later, however, Scribner’s imperatives had changed and the situation was reversed: when Hemingway’s fifth novel, Across The River And Into The Trees, was published in 1950 ‘the name’ mattered far more than the book’s artistic qualities.
The novel was almost universally derided by the critics, with Hemingway’s erstwhile close friend John Dos Passas even asking, in a letter to Edmund Wilson,
how can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?Yet in commercial terms Across The River And Into The Trees was a huge success: it topped the New York Times bestsellers list in October and November 1950 and remained a bestseller for the first few months of 1951.
It is, though, doubtful the book was bought by thousands who had — somehow or other and despite the views of the critics — been assured it was a great novel. One wonders how many copies were acquired simply to grace the nation’s coffee tables as ‘the latest by Hemingway’. In that respect the observation by Scott Donaldson is certainly relevant that
. . . the most pernicious danger of Hemingway’s celebrity lay in the overpowering temptation to assess the writing in terms of the writer’s life and legend.We should thus be cautious about equating sales with artistic excellence or even artistic worth. Had those who helped make Across The River And Into The Trees a bestseller all been asked, many might have agreed that ‘Ernest Hemingway was a great writer’, mainly because that’s what Time and Life and the other magazines they bought told them.
How much the critics would have concurred in that question is a moot point: by the beginning of the 1950s Hemingway’s literary reputation was certainly more a function of his national celebrity than the work he was producing.
Knowing about a writer and her or his life and previous work might for some add to their engagement in and enjoyment of the work; and there can be no denying that. It does, though, highlight a second dilemma, one especially for those who would like it to be ‘a fact’ that ‘Ernest Hemingway was great writer’.
If evaluation and judgment are thus personal — if what you enjoy and rate as ‘good’ might not be what I enjoy and rate as ‘good’ — they are thus subjective. So where does that leave the orthodox insistence that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’? Is that just another subjective judgment? Well, yes, it is, although those who make the claim would far prefer a copper-bottomed ‘fact’ to a mere ‘opinion’.
For one thing, if it is not ‘a fact’, whoever proclaimed that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’ would necessarily have preface that statement by — although possibly just implied — ‘in my view/it is my opinion that/I believe’ or some such phrase. That would rather diminish Hemingway’s supposed grandeur and literary status.
If the retort is then made that it is also just ‘an opinion’ that ‘Hemingway was neither a genius nor even a very good writer’, I would agree: it is just another opinion. But I would also be pleased that you have accepted my contention that there can be no objective judgment of Hemingway’s talent and his work.
Related and equally as sticky questions are: what makes this writer but not that writer ‘great’? What do we expect of ‘a great writer’? Does ‘greatness’ transcend popularity? Is ‘greatness’ permanent, semi-permanent or just occasional?
In the face of those questions we might be better off agreeing on the length of a piece of string. Poets, playwrights and writers from previous centuries are still acknowledged and honoured because there is a consensus that the essential qualities we admire in their work have survived over the decades and centuries.
Since William Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago, the meaning and pronunciation of many words he used have changed, and some of his rhymes, puns and jokes no longer immediately work for a 21st-century reader and listener.
Sometimes his work is even a little obscure to modern ears. Yet quite apart from the pleasure we still get in hearing and reading his verse, his thought and, for example, his ability succinctly to convey insights into human behaviour have not aged at all.
Although Henry Fielding, Jane Austen and George Eliot were writing more recently and their more rotund, less modern style is noticeably from a different era, what we appreciate in their work has also transcended time.
Could the same be said of Hemingway sixty years after his death? Is a modern reader who comes across the short vignettes in In Our Time, his first volume of short stories, as impressed by them as they impressed many critics when that volume was published almost 100 years ago?
A 21st-century high school or college student reading them and that volume’s longer stories might well be at a loss to understand why they should be regarded as ‘great’. Do they still have an intrinsic artistic worth or are they today notable merely because they were part of Hemingway’s first collection of short stories? Is their significance now simply historic and no longer literary?
Arguably, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the novels of Fielding, Austen and Eliot still have an intrinsic literary worth which is still apparent to and appreciated by a modern reader.
On the other hand ‘to get’ Hemingway a student might now need to be told how his fiction compared with most of the other fiction then being written, in both style and content. Frankly, without that necessary context, very little of the early work Hemingway wrote leaves much of an impression.
Whether or not Hemingway was ‘a great writer’ and whether or not one does get any kind of pleasure from reading his work — and I don’t — as Bruccoli, Didion and Johnson highlight, he certainly did leave his mark on literary history, and that is an achievement that cannot and should not be denied.
But is it enough to justify the appellation of ‘a great writer’ or even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’? I suggest it is not. Hemingway did have a certain — as I put it — ‘middling’ gift, but it was a journalistic gift, not a literary gift.
As the very short (and inconsequential) pieces he sold to the Toronto Star as a freelance in 1919 and 1920 and later the pieces he filed from Europe show, he did have a way with words and often an excellent turn of phrase. But so did and do any number of journalists.
Once he had arrived in Paris, he put himself under that tuition of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and self-consciously worked at creating a new prose style. But a new prose style is not per se interesting or effective: the interest it holds and its effectiveness are qualities over and above its novelty value.
And whether or not Hemingway’s new prose style was interesting and effective that, too, unavoidably is also a matter of opinion. Furthermore, the prose style Hemingway adopted in his first two or three publications was simply not strong enough to survive. When the
Over the next twenty-four months he produced a second volume of short stories and another novel which both sold well, but as Mathew Bruccoli observes,
The post-World War I Western world saw the evolution of nofel marketing and advertising techniques, not least the practice of treating authors as a commodity to be packaged and sold. The media and the burgeoning film industry worked symbiotically to produce the celebrity culture with which we are now familiar but which was still in its infancy.
Then there was, of course, the ever-present demand of the public, especially the young public, for novelty. Hemingway benefited from all these developments.
A Farewell To Arms was published on September 27, 1929, and was greeted with the same fanfare that The Sun Also rises enjoyed. Just under a month later, on Thursday, October 24, 1929, Wall Street’s stock market crashed, and the United States entered a decade of hardship and misery for millions of its citizens and underwent further drastic changes.
Over that decade, Hemingway’s career paralleled America’s decline, although far less dramatically. As biographer Michael Reynolds put it in a piece for the New York Times almost thirty years after Hemingway’s death
In the 1930s, when Hemingway moved into non-fiction with Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935), neither his established audience nor the New York Times knew quite what to make of his new direction.
comeback (and thus they no longer looked quite as stupid for backing him).
Yet, eighty years on, For Whom The Bell Tolls has also not survived the test of time. It is very much a curate’s egg. Even twenty years after it was published, writing in the New York Times on the first anniversary of Hemingway’s death, Maxwell Geismar was already rather scathing:
It is certainly fair to ask: just how ‘great’ a writer was Hemingway? On the credit side was the boost he gave to a new stylistic departure in English-language literature. On the debit side was a notably slim and decidedly patchy corpus of work. Two of the three novels he published bombed badly, possibly because as biographer Kenneth Lynn put it
. . .
Knowing about a writer and her or his life and previous work might for some add to their engagement in and enjoyment of the work; and there can be no denying that. It does, though, highlight a second dilemma, one especially for those who would like it to be ‘a fact’ that ‘Ernest Hemingway was great writer’.
If evaluation and judgment are thus personal — if what you enjoy and rate as ‘good’ might not be what I enjoy and rate as ‘good’ — they are thus subjective. So where does that leave the orthodox insistence that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’? Is that just another subjective judgment? Well, yes, it is, although those who make the claim would far prefer a copper-bottomed ‘fact’ to a mere ‘opinion’.
For one thing, if it is not ‘a fact’, whoever proclaimed that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’ would necessarily have preface that statement by — although possibly just implied — ‘in my view/it is my opinion that/I believe’ or some such phrase. That would rather diminish Hemingway’s supposed grandeur and literary status.
If the retort is then made that it is also just ‘an opinion’ that ‘Hemingway was neither a genius nor even a very good writer’, I would agree: it is just another opinion. But I would also be pleased that you have accepted my contention that there can be no objective judgment of Hemingway’s talent and his work.
Related and equally as sticky questions are: what makes this writer but not that writer ‘great’? What do we expect of ‘a great writer’? Does ‘greatness’ transcend popularity? Is ‘greatness’ permanent, semi-permanent or just occasional?
In the face of those questions we might be better off agreeing on the length of a piece of string. Poets, playwrights and writers from previous centuries are still acknowledged and honoured because there is a consensus that the essential qualities we admire in their work have survived over the decades and centuries.
Since William Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago, the meaning and pronunciation of many words he used have changed, and some of his rhymes, puns and jokes no longer immediately work for a 21st-century reader and listener.
Sometimes his work is even a little obscure to modern ears. Yet quite apart from the pleasure we still get in hearing and reading his verse, his thought and, for example, his ability succinctly to convey insights into human behaviour have not aged at all.
Although Henry Fielding, Jane Austen and George Eliot were writing more recently and their more rotund, less modern style is noticeably from a different era, what we appreciate in their work has also transcended time.
Could the same be said of Hemingway sixty years after his death? Is a modern reader who comes across the short vignettes in In Our Time, his first volume of short stories, as impressed by them as they impressed many critics when that volume was published almost 100 years ago?
A 21st-century high school or college student reading them and that volume’s longer stories might well be at a loss to understand why they should be regarded as ‘great’. Do they still have an intrinsic artistic worth or are they today notable merely because they were part of Hemingway’s first collection of short stories? Is their significance now simply historic and no longer literary?
Arguably, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the novels of Fielding, Austen and Eliot still have an intrinsic literary worth which is still apparent to and appreciated by a modern reader.
On the other hand ‘to get’ Hemingway a student might now need to be told how his fiction compared with most of the other fiction then being written, in both style and content. Frankly, without that necessary context, very little of the early work Hemingway wrote leaves much of an impression.
. . .
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.
Matthew J Bruccoli, introduction to Hemingway
And The Mechanism Of Fame.
. . . we sometimes forgot that this was a writer who had in his time made the English language new, changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would speak and write and think.
Joan Didion, The New Yorker, October 25, 1998.
[Hemingway] set himself the task of creating a new way of writing English and fiction, and he succeeded. It was one of the salient events in the history of our language and is now an inescapable part of it. He devoted to this task immense resources of creative skill, energy and patience. That in itself was difficult. But far more difficult, as he discovered, was to maintain the high creative standards he had set for himself. This became apparent to him in the mid-1930s, and added to his habitual depression. From then on his few successful stories were aberrations in a long downward slide.
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals.
Whether or not Hemingway was ‘a great writer’ and whether or not one does get any kind of pleasure from reading his work — and I don’t — as Bruccoli, Didion and Johnson highlight, he certainly did leave his mark on literary history, and that is an achievement that cannot and should not be denied.
But is it enough to justify the appellation of ‘a great writer’ or even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’? I suggest it is not. Hemingway did have a certain — as I put it — ‘middling’ gift, but it was a journalistic gift, not a literary gift.
As the very short (and inconsequential) pieces he sold to the Toronto Star as a freelance in 1919 and 1920 and later the pieces he filed from Europe show, he did have a way with words and often an excellent turn of phrase. But so did and do any number of journalists.
Once he had arrived in Paris, he put himself under that tuition of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and self-consciously worked at creating a new prose style. But a new prose style is not per se interesting or effective: the interest it holds and its effectiveness are qualities over and above its novelty value.
And whether or not Hemingway’s new prose style was interesting and effective that, too, unavoidably is also a matter of opinion. Furthermore, the prose style Hemingway adopted in his first two or three publications was simply not strong enough to survive. When the
fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean languageof In Our Time and a year later the
lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shameof The Sun Also Rises are singled out for praise, we are obliged to ask ‘so what the hell happened within just a few years as his career progressed?’
Over the next twenty-four months he produced a second volume of short stories and another novel which both sold well, but as Mathew Bruccoli observes,
. . . Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success.Bruccoli then neatly identifies a factor which was crucial in creating the ‘fact’ that ‘Ernest Hemingway was one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’:
Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.This draws our attention to an odd aspect of Hemingway’s rise to literary prominence: as absurd as it might sound, he came to be acknowledged as ‘a great writer’ not because of the work he produced, but because he told people he was ‘a great writer’. The puzzle was, as Bruccoli sums it up, that
Hemingway got away with his braggadocio because his readers wanted to believe him.But adds, crucially
Why they wanted to believe him is unclear.Other non-literary factors also helped to boost Hemingway’s career and reputation, then and later. His talent for self-promotion, at work among the ex-patriate community in Montmartre long before his name became more widely known, as much as his sincere conviction that he was a great writer dovetailed with social and commercial changes in Twenties’ America.
The post-World War I Western world saw the evolution of nofel marketing and advertising techniques, not least the practice of treating authors as a commodity to be packaged and sold. The media and the burgeoning film industry worked symbiotically to produce the celebrity culture with which we are now familiar but which was still in its infancy.
Then there was, of course, the ever-present demand of the public, especially the young public, for novelty. Hemingway benefited from all these developments.
. . .
Over that decade, Hemingway’s career paralleled America’s decline, although far less dramatically. As biographer Michael Reynolds put it in a piece for the New York Times almost thirty years after Hemingway’s death
In the 1930s, when Hemingway moved into non-fiction with Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935), neither his established audience nor the New York Times knew quite what to make of his new direction.
His style, once so ‘lean’, was in Death in the Afternoon’ sometimes so complex that it was difficult to ‘distinguish the subordinate verbs from the principal one,’ according to the Times reviewer (who compared the style to Henry James) . . .
His third collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing was also weaker and did not sell as well as his first two collections.
Although his third novel, To Have And Have Not did sell well — probably because it was by Hemingway — it did not impress the critics at all. The question is: was this work also the output of ‘a great writer’?
Hemingway had to wait until 1940 for his next success and that came with the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Sales were spectacular and the critics loved it, although biographers later pointed out that their enthusiasm was as much relief that the erstwhile Wunderkind they had hailed had finally made a
His third collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing was also weaker and did not sell as well as his first two collections.
Although his third novel, To Have And Have Not did sell well — probably because it was by Hemingway — it did not impress the critics at all. The question is: was this work also the output of ‘a great writer’?
Hemingway had to wait until 1940 for his next success and that came with the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Sales were spectacular and the critics loved it, although biographers later pointed out that their enthusiasm was as much relief that the erstwhile Wunderkind they had hailed had finally made a
comeback (and thus they no longer looked quite as stupid for backing him).
Yet, eighty years on, For Whom The Bell Tolls has also not survived the test of time. It is very much a curate’s egg. Even twenty years after it was published, writing in the New York Times on the first anniversary of Hemingway’s death, Maxwell Geismar was already rather scathing:
Sometimes called Hemingway’s best novel, too, [For Whom The Bell Tolls] is a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbably or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.Even at the time of publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald was unimpressed and wrote that the novel was
so to speak Ernest’s Tale Of Two Cities though the comparison isn’t apt. I mean it is a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of Rebecca.Then came another arid period in Hemingway’s writing career: over the next ten years he published no fiction at all. Across The River And Into The Trees appeared in 1950 and two years later came the last book Hemingway published in his lifetime, The Old Man And The Sea. That was then it.
It is certainly fair to ask: just how ‘great’ a writer was Hemingway? On the credit side was the boost he gave to a new stylistic departure in English-language literature. On the debit side was a notably slim and decidedly patchy corpus of work. Two of the three novels he published bombed badly, possibly because as biographer Kenneth Lynn put it
A master miniatuarist, a poet essentially, Hemingway was not accustomed to the amplitude of the novel form, and he partially lost control of his materials.Even Dorothy Parker, a Hemingway stalwart, was not convinced Hemingway was the full deal. In the New Yorker in response to the publication of The Sun Also Rises she observed that
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.So once again: just how ‘great’ a writer was Hemingway?
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