Distinct
Writing style – an analysis
Ernest Hemingway's distinctive style caught the attention of critics since he began first writing in the 1920’s. He was often subjected to lavish praise as well as criticism but his was the voice that was not ignored.
The first thing that attracts the eye of the reader is his simple, straight forward style. His prose was modest and without the flowery adjectives to adorn his pieces to the extent possible. Ernest Hemingway’s training as a journalist might be an influence where clarity and succinctness is a virtue that shaped his ideas on writing. But what differentiates Hemingway from the Fleet Street men was that he was a master in delineating emotions and narrate a gripping story.
Hemingway did not believe in verbose description of places or character’s mental states. His prose which was simplistic and plain, and almost child-like, with only a smattering of describing words, was forceful nonetheless. He brevity, vividness, description of people and places were masterful uniquely his own. Critic Harry Levin states that “despite the thin diction, the technically weak syntax, the ‘not colorful’ adjectives, and the ‘not particularly energetic’ verbs, the style has ‘indubitable punch’ and ‘unexampled dynamics’.” (Kobler 96).
Most of Hemingway’s earlier novels were first person narratives and mostly portrayed the story from only one point of view. But when he penned For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he demonstrated a diverse array of narrative techniques; these included examples of soliloquys or monologues (the reader has access to the mind and thoughts of the individual), fast shifts in points of view, and a loosely knot structure was a marked departure from his earlier works. Hemingway believed that "a writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists” (Magill 1287).
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is perhaps his serious work. It offers very little comic relief for the reader. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is Hemingway’s attempt to portray a nation and culture he loved so much. It also used brutal honesty to deal with an extremely difficult period of history – a war which was complicated by the beliefs it spawned. (Gurko 127).
The hero’s in Hemingway’s works were aspirational to the readers – they were designed in such a way as the reader could align themselves with the hero in metaphorical sense. Hemingway wrote his heroes to be a macho man's man. They reflected Hemingway’s own way of life: numerous love affairs, machismo-fuelled hunting, bullfights, and a heavy drinker. Ernest Hemingway was involved in all of these typically masculine activities in which the average American man was unable to or even unwilling to participate in. (Rovit 56).
In contrast to the Hemingway heroes, his female characters were particularly masculine. They importance was restricted to the men in the stories and does not extend to exploring their inner worlds. The reader comes to view them as nothing more than love objects or as anti-love figures (Whitlock 231). One of the plausible reasons why Hemingway never seemed to have a high regard for women perhaps stemmed from his image of his mother. Hemingway saw her as manipulator who responsible to his father’s suicide. "The qualities he thought admirable in a man-ambition, and independent point of view, defiance of his supremacy-became threatening in a woman"(Kert 103).
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) "is a living example of how, in modern times, the epic quality must be projected" (Baker 132). Heroic action is an epic quality, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is on virtues of simple uncomplicated people. The men locked in the conflict are prepared to lay down their lives; they are exceptional for their deeds of daring and heroism (Baker 94).
Said one commentator on Hemingway’s influence,” Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories and sketches, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other. Colons clogged the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers to throw up their hands in exasperation. And then came Hemingway.”
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” serves as an excellent example of Ernest Hemingway’s style. In this story, there is no wonton sentimentality. The tale is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. It about an old man in conversation with two waiters, Hemingway keeps the background and character portrayals to the minimum. He allows a free rein to the characters. They speak and the reader discover the inner loneliness and prejudices.
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. The committee singled out his distinct writing style for praise “forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”
Hemingway has rightly recognized as a master of dialogue; in story after story, novel after novel, readers and critics would have felt convinced that these characters would in fact converse similar in real life. Hemingway strove hard to get that feel from a calculate emphasis and repetition that brought the conversation to one so readily identifiable.
“Hills Like White Elephants” showcases Hemingway’s masterful treatment of dialogues. The story opens to two characters, a man and a woman sitting at a table. The readers finally learn that the girl’s nickname is “Jig.” They also realize further down the plot that conversation between them is inside a cafe of a train station. But Hemingway does not add any description of them; their past or future. No even their ages are mentioned. The reader is deliberately left in the dark. The entire plot unfolds from the man and woman dialogue.
This spartan, honed, simple writing style was a result of his training as a journalist where he mastered to describe facts succinctly. Hemingway was perfectionist revisionist. It is believed rewrote as revision The Old Man and the Sea more than 200 times before it was sent for for publication.
Hemingway laboured hard on his writing; he revised tirelessly. “A writer’s style,” he said, “should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous.” Hemingway more than met his defined criteria for good writing. Hemingway was simplicity at its best and uniquely brilliant.
Hemingway did not believe in elaborate symbolism as he observed:
Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
Hemingway was so passionate about his craft that he wrote only to satisfy himself and not the unknown reader. He observed:
I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
As to the demands of the craft, Hemingway knew better.
The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn
Most critics acknowledge that Hemingway was a giant in American literature. Ernest Hemingway has often been described as a spokesman for the “lost generation” of disillusionment and scarred after the First World War. A Farewell to Arms, is a tragic love story of an American ambulance lieutenant and an English nurse. Hemingway was autographical to the extent that the plot resembled his own experiences on the Italian front. The prose is distinctly simple and unadorned, short clipped dialogue, and a undercurrent that presents the cynicism of the times. Critics were at first outraged about Hemingway's sexual frankness but they regarded him as a poineer of realism in writing. The feminist critics did not take kindly to his male bias. A Farewell to Arms is powerful work on the horrors of war as it unleashes on ordinary people.
Describing his way of writing, Hemingway wrote:
How can a writer train himself? Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until it drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had.
Y.C.: Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you're in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practise. And always think of other people.
Literature Review of Hemingway’s style:
Ernest Hemingway's, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933) is written in his characteristically simple and resigned style. The definition given for style is "the characteristics of language in a particular story and . . . the same characteristics in a writer's complete works" (Gioa and Gwynn, "Style" 861). Hemingway’s stunted and concise writing style is so paramount to his style, that there are imitation contests in which contestants emulate this stoic style (Gioa and Gwynn, "Style" 861). Hemingway’s style was also emulated further by his use of the theme of atheism and the view there is little more than our lives on Earth. With this view in mind, he clearly did not feel the need to embellish his writing with unnecessary details. This helped to emulate the story’s central spirituality or rather, its lack thereof.
A significant proportion of "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" is focused firmly on the dialogues and not descriptions and a lot of these are short words. It has been noted by many that Hemingway’s former role of writing for the Kansas City Star, which encouraged writers to "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness" (Desnoyers 2), could have helped to form his concise writing style. It seems unlikely that his entire writing style was formed because of his work for the newspaper but, that said, Hemingway himself said "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them" (Desnoyers 2). The following of these ‘rules’ certainly impacted upon his writing and lent it a definitely bluntness which puts it at odds with the flowery nature of Victorian ornamentation which had been the vogue before him. Equally, others have noted the influence that Paris had on Hemingway whilst he lived there between 1921 and 1927, as well as the influential figures he met whilst there: the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, both of whom took a strong realist approach to their work. Pound, who, in particular, had an influence over Hemingway, stated that the "direct treatment of the 'thing' . . . [and] the use of absolutely no word that does not contribute to the total design" (Goia and Gwynn, "Ernest" 370). A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, continues to be a favorite amongst Hemingway’s fans thanks, largely, to its distinctly Hemingway-esque style of writing which mirrors the plot’s spiritual emptiness.
In 1932, Death in the Afternoon was publiushed; it was a non-fiction book, which Hemingway utilized in an attempt "explain that spectacle [bull fighting] both emotionally and practically" (The Hemingway Resource 2). Hemingway’s fascination with Spain and its culture (including bullfighting) often focused on the role of quietly strong men: "the stoical hero facing deadly opposition while still performing his duties with professionalism and skill, or 'grace under pressure,' as Hemingway described it" (The Hemingway Resource 2), something which fits in with Hemingway’s traditional use of the macho hero. A year later, he had published "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which also utilized the Spanish culture and the quietly heroic type protagonist: the character, an older man who keeps his café open for those who need the place to go and get clean and who displays a bleak outlook on the ‘nothingness’ of life. Hemingway initiates this character’s world view when stating:
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew
too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. . . . Some lived in
it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.
Our nada who art in nada. (Hemingway, "A Clean" 374)
In this extract, it is clear that the waiter is expressing a loss of faith which was the product of World War One. This character cannot have a flamboyant nature: his personality is distinctly stoic and somewhat defeated and is unlikely to display a flowery use of language. The waiter accepts the adversity of life and opts to take action despite this; offering a place to go for his equally as alienated comrades.
When asked about his written style, Hemingway stated: "If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written" ("One True" 376). His reference to the phrase ‘simple, declarative sentence’ was chosen carefully to mirror the nature of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: a story which portrayed an unrelentingly honest view of how men in the 1930s felt in view of the godless landscape which the war presented. Hemingway’s style emulates that world view in the sense that the men of the 1930s would need to forge their own way in the world.
Following A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway composed Death in the Afternoon, a non-fiction account of Spanish bullfighting. His aim in writing this was to make the sport more accessible to those who had previously held no interest in it and it was his impassioned view of the Spanish culture that made it so readable. Equally, his highly perceptive views on the various aspects of Spanish culture (including its food, history and people) made the book an instant success. Hemingway describes the purpose of his Spanish book, "It is intended as an introduction to the modern Spanish bullfight and attempts to explain that spectacle both emotionally and practically. It was written because there was no book which did this in Spanish or in English." It was this perception and passion which Hemingway presented in his usual direct manner, making it interesting and un-fussy.
Despite it being a non-fiction work, Death in the Afternoon is still exemplerary of Hemingway’s typically quiet hero: men who work under deadly circumstances whilst still performing well under pressure. However, despite this, many were dismissive of the change in Hemingway’s writing: shifting the focus from artist to real individuals in his word. Most notably, this was argued when Hemingway discussed Spain’s writers as he often adopted a more in-depth tone. This in itself demonstrates the ferocity of loyalty that Hemingway demonstrated to his stoic style of writing: something his fans had come to expect and love.
References
Cooper. Michael. The Writing style of Hemingway. [Online] Accessed http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Writing-Style-of-Hemingway&id=70613
Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy." The Ernest Hemingway Collection. 12 December 2002. John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. 20 August 2003. <http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/eh.htm>.
Gioia, Dana, and R.S. Gwynn. "Ernest Hemingway." The Longman Masters of Short Fiction. Eds. Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2002. 370-372.
Gioia, Dana, and R.S. Gwynn. "Style." The Longman Masters of Short Fiction. Eds. Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2002. 861-862.
Hemingway, Ernest. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." The Longman Masters of Short Fiction. Eds. Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2002. 372-375.
Hemingway, Ernest. "One True Sentence." The Longman Masters of Short Fiction. Eds. Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2002. 375-376.
Kobler, Jasper Fred. Ernest Hemingway, journalist and artist. Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985. Print.
Sjostrom, Heidi. Style Reveals the Theme in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place". [Online] Accessed http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/mary.warner/Handouts/Fiction_sample.htm
The Hemingway Resource Center. "Ernest Hemmingway Biography>Key West." The Hemingway Resource Center. LostGeneration.com. 20 August 2003. < http://www.lostgeneration.com/keywest.htm>
West, Key. Ernest Hemingway Biography. The Hemingway Resource Centre. [Online] Accessed http://www.lostgeneration.com/keywest.htm
