The theory [of omission] may well have been new to Hemingway. But most of his literary friends in Paris in the 1920s, like Ezra Pound, would have seen it as a version of the commonplace that the structures of literature, like the sentences of the language, imply more than they state and make us feel more than we know.
Paul Smith, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
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 Max Perkins, 1945.
The prize sentence in the [Green Hills Of Africa] runs forty-six lines . . . This is simpler than most, but it shows the new phase. Usually the material is not so factual as this and we are supposed to get, besides the sense, some muscular effort or some effect of color or movement that is latent in pace and rhythm rather than in words. But, however earnest the intention, the result is a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing.
Bernard de Voto, Green Hills Of Africa,
Saturday
Review Of Literature, October 26, 1935.
QUITE soon in his career and after publishing just two volumes of short stories and two novels, Hemingway came to regard himself as an authority on writing. In Death In The Afternoon, his third substantial work (published in 1932) which was intended as a guide for English speakers to bullfighting, its history, practice and lore and matters Spanish, he also pontificated on writing and literature (and, to my mind rather tenuously, compared writers to matadors). Ironically, as far as the writing was concerned and given the earlier praise in a New York Times review in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises for his
six years on a contemporary review of Death In The Afternoon in the same paper noted that in his new book Hemingway was
Hemingway again laid down the law when F Scott Fitzgerald, nominally still a ‘close friend’, asked for his comments on Tender Is The Night, his fourth novel and one it had taken him eight years to write. Hemingway, by now the mentor where once he had taken Fitzgerald’s advice — notably ‘get rid of the of the opening two chapters of The Sun Also Rises’, or at least that’s how Hemingway took it — was brutal and unsparing in what he had to say about the new novel (although he did in later years, warm to it and admit it was better than he had at first thought).
lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame,
guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear. He enters, indeed, into a stylistic phase which corresponds, for his method, to the later stages of Henry James.That must have hurt.
Hemingway again laid down the law when F Scott Fitzgerald, nominally still a ‘close friend’, asked for his comments on Tender Is The Night, his fourth novel and one it had taken him eight years to write. Hemingway, by now the mentor where once he had taken Fitzgerald’s advice — notably ‘get rid of the of the opening two chapters of The Sun Also Rises’, or at least that’s how Hemingway took it — was brutal and unsparing in what he had to say about the new novel (although he did in later years, warm to it and admit it was better than he had at first thought).
. . .
Hemingway was by no means the first writer to hand out advice on how to ‘write’, and he will certainly not be the last. A brief internet search for ‘rules on writing’ will gather so much advice from so many authors that one gets the impression no self-respecting writer feels she or he dare not hand it out: Stephen King, Anne Enright, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, V. J. Naipaul, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Jonathan Franzen, Diane Athill, Roddy Doyle, Denis Lehane and Mark Twain are just a very few among a host of authors who have all added their two ha’porth worth.
The various ‘rules’ laid down range from the very practical and sensible to the arcane and precious. Stephen King, a successful writer by any standard (although the sniffier critics and academics might choose to argue his work ‘is not literature’) advises ‘to avoid distraction’, ‘write for yourself’, ‘write one word at a time’ and to ‘read, read, read’. On a technical note he advises to ‘avoid adverbs’.
Anne Enright is equally practical and encourages would-be authors simply to ‘have fun’. She also strikes a down-to-earth note when she insists (and notably splits an infinitive as she does so, although these days only bores and dullards are bothered by that kind of thing) that
the way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on paper.Neil Gaiman and A.L. Kennedy similarly soberly advise would-be to writers simply to ‘write’, and Ms Kennedy adds with disarming (though for many hopeful writers possibly unwelcome) honesty
No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.V. J. Naipaul’s ‘rules on writing’ are puzzling. Naipul, who like Hemingway reputedly had a high opinion of himself, informs would-be writers that they should ‘not write long sentences’. A sentence ‘should not have more than ten or 12 words’, and he adds that
each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.What then, one wonders, did Naipaul make of, for example, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Gissing or Henry James, all of whom are acknowledged as fine writers, but none of whom was known for writing short sentences ‘of no more than ten or 12 words’?
As for Naipaul’s insistence that ‘each sentence should make a clear statement’, that would rule offside any writer who, for one reason or another, specifically does not want to make ‘a clear statement’,
someone who might be striving for a certain effect by not making a statement. So if a ‘clear statement’ is Naipaul’s ideal, I should imagine he must have been less than impressed by Jack Kerouac’s debut opus On The Road (waspishly described by Truman Capote — although several others are also said to have made the gibe — as ‘that’s not writing, it’s typing’).
Jack Kerouac, one of the Fifties’ Beat Generation’s darlings, made rather more opaque contributions with his rules on writing. He advised would-be writers to
be in love with your life
accept loss forever
keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning.
I’m even more baffled by Jonathan Franzen’s insistence that
You have to love before you can be relentless.
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.It is strictly without the scope of this project to mention it, but I do take exception to the implication that ‘literature’ which isn’t composed from the purest of motives — to create ‘art’, say or, apparently a staple of late 20th and early 21st century British literary creation, to ‘investigate the human condition’ — is somehow ‘second-rate’. And daring to write with an eye on possibly making a living from your work— good Lord, the cheek of it! That bloody Charles Dickens certainly had something to answer for!
Hemingway, at least in his first rule, also opts for something rather more quasi-metaphysical than practical. To get started, he advises
all you need to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Equally unhelpful is Hemingway’s admonition to writers
Don’t describe an emotion — make it.
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
Some writers certainly manage to create emotion, though for me Hemingway — whose prose is often as flat as a pancake — doesn’t, and his advice would be more helpful if he suggested how a writer might attempt to ‘make emotion’.
. . .
Certainly advice and guidance handed out by published, experienced and successful authors – that is women and men who might be thought to know what they are talking about – is worth attending to; but it does beg the question as to what kind of work a would-be writer wants to produce and, depending upon that, whether some of the advice one adopts is appropriate or even useful.
If you intend to write, say, thrillers or romantic or science fiction — and hope to sell your work — does Hemingway’s advice to ‘write the truest sentence that you know’ make much sense? Elmore Leonard advises ‘don’t go into great detail describing places and things’ — but readers of thrillers and romantic and science fiction might well want such great detail and, furthermore, a lot of it — Hemingway certainly does, especially in For Whom The Bell Tolls.
‘Oh,’ I hear you say, ‘but we’re talking about serious literature here, not thrillers or romantic and science fiction and that kind of thing’. If that is your point, it begs the question as to what ‘serious literature’ is.
‘Oh,’ I hear you say, ‘but we’re talking about serious literature here, not thrillers or romantic and science fiction and that kind of thing’. If that is your point, it begs the question as to what ‘serious literature’ is.
If you insist that there is some kind a literary hierarchy, with ‘serious literature’ at its apex and lesser forms of writing — those, for example, produced ‘for money’ — at descending tiers depending upon their assigned literary worth, I suggest Hemingway’s ‘masterpiece’ The Sun Also Rises comes nowhere near the top. Try that on for size.
Then there is For Whom The Bell tolls, many passages of which would not be out of place in modern chick-lit. ‘Serious literature’? If so, then we are stretching the definition to breaking point. It is pretty much just a Boy’s Own adventure tale with a very unconvincing ‘love story’ tacked it.
Rather more perplexing than Hemingway’s take on ‘rules on writing’ is his ‘theory of omission’, also known as his ‘iceberg theory’. This is how he sums up its essence in his 1932 book Death In The Afternoon:
. . .
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 iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action.At first blush one wonders whether Hemingway really is saying what he seems to be saying. Certainly a good writer does not necessarily need to reveal every detail of a character or action: if a character is skilfully drawn and brought to life, the reader might well add his or her own details to flesh out what the writer has provided, although such details would surely be individual to each reader.
But Hemingway seems to be going further: he seems to be claiming — in a process it would not be facetious to describe as mystical — not just that ‘truths’ the writer ‘knows’ can be conveyed, but that ‘facts’ can similarly be conveyed.
In fact, although in a slightly opaque manner, Hemingway is simply describing what has been accepted for many years: that a skilful writer — a ‘good’ writer — can convey over and above what is apparently there ‘in the words on paper’. Why then did he persuade himself he had discovered a ‘new way of writing’; and what, one wonders, did Hemingway think other writers had been doing?
In a monograph examining Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’, the Hemingway scholar Paul Smith, of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, summed up the dilemma of establishing what it was Hemingway was trying to say:
In fact, although in a slightly opaque manner, Hemingway is simply describing what has been accepted for many years: that a skilful writer — a ‘good’ writer — can convey over and above what is apparently there ‘in the words on paper’. Why then did he persuade himself he had discovered a ‘new way of writing’; and what, one wonders, did Hemingway think other writers had been doing?
In a monograph examining Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’, the Hemingway scholar Paul Smith, of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, summed up the dilemma of establishing what it was Hemingway was trying to say:
The theory [of omission] may well have been new to Hemingway. But most of his literary friends in Paris in the 1920s, like Ezra Pound, would have seen it as a version of the commonplace that the structures of literature, like the sentences of the language, imply more than they state and make us feel more than we know.In the first half of his monograph, Smith traces the evolution of Hemingway’s theory and establishes that Hemingway was, in fact, convinced he was coming up with something new and wasn’t simply redefining a traditional writing practice.
According to Hemingway’s friend the poet Archibald MacLeish, he actively avoided taking part in any kind of literary discussion (as, surprisingly, did James Joyce, according to George Plimpton, who co-founded and edited the Paris Review, quoting Hemingway himself); so developing a literary theory of his own, his ‘theory of omission’, was unusual.
That notwithstanding, over the years Hemingway seems to have taken ‘his theory’ increasingly seriously. He first alludes to it, almost in passing, in a letter to F Scott Fitzgerald in late 1925. From that letter it is clear that in the atmosphere of the self-conscious modernism of his peers in Paris and ensconced as he was in his self-image as a serious young writer, Hemingway did think his theory had substance. Furthermore, from his letter to Fitzgerald he appears to believe his theory is an original one.
The theory makes its second, more definite, appearance seven years later in his paean to bullfighting Death In The Afternoon in which he observes that
I can’t even begin to imagine what he is trying to say. Would it be overly pedantic to point out that if a writer ‘doesn’t know’ something, she or he is in no position to omit it, because ‘omitting’ presupposes you are consciously leaving something out? Similarly if a reader were to detect ‘holes’ in a piece of writing, she or he is conscious of an absence.
That notwithstanding, over the years Hemingway seems to have taken ‘his theory’ increasingly seriously. He first alludes to it, almost in passing, in a letter to F Scott Fitzgerald in late 1925. From that letter it is clear that in the atmosphere of the self-conscious modernism of his peers in Paris and ensconced as he was in his self-image as a serious young writer, Hemingway did think his theory had substance. Furthermore, from his letter to Fitzgerald he appears to believe his theory is an original one.
The theory makes its second, more definite, appearance seven years later in his paean to bullfighting Death In The Afternoon in which he observes that
Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.The possibility notwithstanding that I am a little dense, the first part of the above is unclear and decidedly badly written. And what does Hemingway mean when he goes on to write
When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing?
As with some of Hemingway’s ‘rules on writing’, you think you know what he’s getting at, but then you realise you don’t. The most likely explanation is that Hemingway simply did not think through what he was trying to say. You understand the complaint by the anonymous New York Times reviewer of Death In The Afternoon that in the book Hemingway was
Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’ had to wait for more than 20 years before it had its next airing. This was in an ‘interview’ with George Plimpton, a founder and editor-in-chief of the Paris Review in which it appeared. In his monograph Paul Smith suggests that Paris interview was not, as one might assume, a face-to-face affair, but was largely written up and published — in 1958, several years after an initial meeting in Spain — from a series of questions submitted by Plimpton to which Hemingway provided written answers.
guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear.
. . .
The interview does read very much as though it had taken place face-to-face, but curiously when Hemingway briefly refers to his ‘theory of omission’ and his ‘iceberg theory’, what he says in the printed version of Plimpton’s interview is word for word what he had written in Death In The Afternoon 26 years earlier.
Hemingway’s final and third set of comments on his ‘theory of omission’ were in his posthumously published memoir of his early Paris years A Moveable Feast and in an essay he wrote on The Art Of The Short Story. The essay was to have been the preface to a new collection of some of his short stories that’s was initially intended for school students.
Hemingway’s final and third set of comments on his ‘theory of omission’ were in his posthumously published memoir of his early Paris years A Moveable Feast and in an essay he wrote on The Art Of The Short Story. The essay was to have been the preface to a new collection of some of his short stories that’s was initially intended for school students.
Later it was decided the collection should be for adult readers. Unfortunately, although the suggestion for a new collection of stories with a preface by Hemingway had come from Scribner’s, the house later indicated it was not keen on the preface had written and eventually changed its mind about publishing it and the collection never appeared. The preface — Hemingway’s essay on the art of writing short stories — was also never made public.
Hemingway’s essay The Art Of The Short Story makes very odd reading indeed. He informs us that he wrote it as though he were giving a lecture to students and speaking off the cuff. That might explain why it seems either to have been dashed off in a hurry or Hemingway was drunk when he wrote it; it certainly gives the impression that it was never revised — or even re-read — by Hemingway.
Hemingway’s essay The Art Of The Short Story makes very odd reading indeed. He informs us that he wrote it as though he were giving a lecture to students and speaking off the cuff. That might explain why it seems either to have been dashed off in a hurry or Hemingway was drunk when he wrote it; it certainly gives the impression that it was never revised — or even re-read — by Hemingway.
However unlikely that might be, of course — he lambasted his one-time mentor Gertrude Stein for never revising her work — but judge for yourselves. I have made a copy of it available and there is a link to it (as to many other reviews, essays and commentaries referred to on these pages) elsewhere on this website.
Dealing with Hemingway’s The Art Of The Short Story, Smith is kinder: he writes of the essay that
Whichever is closer to the truth, it does beg the question why a published and well-known author with, by then, more than 30 years experience, a Noble Laureate and a man described as ‘a writer of genius’ should be content to release for publication an ‘essay’ which in part reads as though it had been written by a fifth-form or tenth-grade student. It’s not surprising Scribner’s rejected it.
In his essay, Hemingway makes a number of unusual claims which echo what he had to say about his ‘theory of omission’. For example, he writes
Dealing with Hemingway’s The Art Of The Short Story, Smith is kinder: he writes of the essay that
The diction is colloquial, the syntax casual, and the attitude at times defensive, at times belligerent . . .
. . .
If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.
Hemingway also claims
The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit.
It is all unconvincing, though at one with Hemingway’s self-image as an ‘important writer’; and this is from a man who not only regarded himself as an authority on writing but had trained as a journalist and who should have been aware of the imperative of clarity in communication.
I suspect Hemingway is unclear simply because he hasn’t thought through what he wants to say and, crucially, doesn’t even understand it himself.
Scanlan comments
But let me play Devil’s advocate and present a possible case for the validity of his ‘theory of omission’ by quoting a Chip Scanlan who attempts to do exactly that.
After two decades working as a journalist, in 1994 Scanlan joined the staff of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida where he taught reporting and writing. In a piece for the website Poynter.org in 2005, he tried to elucidate Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’ — which he admits puzzled him when he first read it — by referring to the novelist’s training as reporter and his short journalistic career.
Scanlan explains that when a reporter or writer ‘investigates’ or ‘researches’ a feature, she or he ends up with mass of material, not all of which — in fact, most of which — can be used. If, he says, ‘the desk’ wants a 500 word new story, a journalist can’t insist on supplying far more because the information gathered is ‘good’.
After two decades working as a journalist, in 1994 Scanlan joined the staff of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida where he taught reporting and writing. In a piece for the website Poynter.org in 2005, he tried to elucidate Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’ — which he admits puzzled him when he first read it — by referring to the novelist’s training as reporter and his short journalistic career.
Scanlan explains that when a reporter or writer ‘investigates’ or ‘researches’ a feature, she or he ends up with mass of material, not all of which — in fact, most of which — can be used. If, he says, ‘the desk’ wants a 500 word new story, a journalist can’t insist on supplying far more because the information gathered is ‘good’.
If 2,000 words have been written, they must be trimmed to 500 (admittedly a job often better undertaken by a good copy/sub editor or commissioning editor than by the reporter or writer, but Scanlan makes no mention of that.) The unused information — facts and quotes — however, is not discarded Scanlan says: while writing the story or feature, the reporter or writer will still have all that background information in mind when the piece is composed and this will inform what he writes.
Scanlan admits that when he first came across Hemingway’s dictum — that if
he did not understand what Hemingway was getting at until he realised the quotation was incomplete: the following had been left out:Scanlan admits that when he first came across Hemingway’s dictum — that if
a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, [my commas for the sake of clarity] 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 iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
The same principle holds in writing. What makes a story powerful is all the work — the process of reporting and writing — that lies beneath. It isn’t wasted effort, as many of us fear, but instead constitutes the essential ingredient that give writing its greatest strengths.I can see what Scanlan is getting out, and I agree that a journalist can perhaps compose a far stronger piece, whether a news story or a feature, given her or his background knowledge and familiarity with facts and quotes that could not be included because of a tight brief. Furthermore, a well-written news story or feature might arguably — by choice of word and turn of phrase — even be able to convey some of that background. But of his attempt to bolster and validate Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’ I have to tell Scanlan: nice try, but no cigar.
Whether reading a news story or a piece of fiction written by someone who had additional ‘knowledge’ that was not included in the piece, the reader is simply in no position to judge whether that piece is ‘better’ or ‘stronger’ than it might otherwise have been.
So much for Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’. And it is notable that although in the course of his life he returns to it three times, he doesn’t feel oblige to develop it or expand on it. It is also notable that like what else he has to say about ‘writing’, it is all rather too foggy to be of much use to a student hoping to learn ‘to write’. Again, nice try but no cigar.
. . .
In his monograph and investigating Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’, Smith goes on to consider the deletions and additions in revision (from still extant manuscripts) in Hemingway’s long story Big Two-Hearted River which concludes his first collection of short stories, In Our Time. For the technically minded, Smith analysis of the story’s ‘structure’ and his comparison of what was deleted and what was added will make interesting reading.
Yet Smith’s detailed treatment of the story has nothing at all to say on what Hemingway later declared was the story’s ‘meaning’, broadly the spiritual recuperation of a young man returned from war.
For those who like this kind of prose, Big Two-Hearted River is an engaging and very detailed account of a fishing and camping trip.
Malcolm Cowley, who had been acquainted with Hemingway and came to champion his (and demanded in his introduction to 1944’s The Portable Hemingway that the writer should be taken far more seriously as an artist) believed there was a link with Hemingway’s later declared ‘meaning’ in various ‘rituals’ undertaken by the story’s protagonist.
He lists the ritual of hiking to the spot were he will camp, the ritual of setting up his camp, the ritual of cooking his supper, the following days ritual of preparing for and then engaging in fishing for trout, and so on.
It’s all very plausible, but that his analysis is plausible is neither here nor there.
When one considers ‘plausibility’ and the evolution of Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’, one suggestion might be that when writing to Fitzgerald the young, keen would-be writer (who had eagerly discussed ‘literature’ in Kansas and Chicago with colleagues and friends, though he later ostentatiously shunned such debate) rather fancied himself ‘having a literary theory’.
This was then — slightly — expanded when the by then established author pontificated on writing in Death In The Afternoon; then it was resurrected and treated with what was thought to be the reverence due the globally famous Hemingway a year or two before his death.
It might, though, be best to remind ourselves of that Smith believes it was essentially
a rather commonplace idea was used on various occasions to serve various ends.
Smith believes
The theory may well have been new to Hemingway. But most of his literary friends in Paris in the 1920s, like Ezra Pound, would have seen it for the commonplace that the structures of literature, like the sentences of the language, imply more than they state and make us feel more than we know.
Quite.