Ernest Miller Hemingway is an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. He termed his understated and economical style as iceberg theory and had greatly influenced the fiction of the twentieth century. He was greatly admired by later generations because of his public image and adventurous lifestyle. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, he produced the majority of his works. In 1984, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in literature. In total, he published six short-story collections, seven novels, and two nonfiction works. He published three novels, three nonfiction works, and four short-story collections posthumously. Most of his works are usually considered as the classic of American literature.
Ernest Hemingway Biography
Early Life
Ernest Hemingway was born on 21st July 1898 in Oak Park. His father was an apothecary or country physician and taught Hemingway fishing and hunting. Hemingway’s mother was a fairly religious woman and active in the activities of the church. She made Hemingway sing in the choir and play the cello. His mother was a dominant figure in the family. Hemingway depicts the lack of courage of his father in the short story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” His father committed suicide that left an emotional scar in Hemingway’s life.
Hemingway received intense outdoor life and popularity in high school and was known as an athlete and scholar; however, he twice ran away from home. In 1917, he, for the first time, got a real chance to escape from the home. He enlisted himself in World War I (1914-1918). In the war, he was enthusiastic about serving his country. He volunteered for infantry; however, he was rejected due to weak eyesight.
Then, Hemingway registered himself in the Red Cross medical service. He would drive the ambulance to the Italian front, taking wounded soldiers to the aid station. He himself got badly wounded by shelling. He was then shortlisted for infantry and fought on the Austrian frontline. He was awarded an honor of bravery by the government of Italy. After the war, Hemingway returned to the home and was greeted as a hero.
Literary Career
Soon after his return to the home, Hemingway started working for the Toronto Star, in the Near East, as a foreign correspondent. When he went back to Michigan, he had already decided to pursue a career in literature and writing fiction. The well-known author Sherwood Anderson was immensely impressed with Hemingway’s journalism and the several short-stories that he published in the magazine for the experiment. Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein when Hemingway decided to go back to Europe. Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein were the two American writers in Europe. Hemingway married Hadley Richard in 1921, and the two traveled to Paris. Over there, he met the two authors and learned a lot from the. Though the monetary resources were meager, this period of Hemingway’s life was the happiest one and artistically productive.
Hemingway published his first collection of fiction, Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923. The poems did not receive any admiration; however, the short-stories were the one which paved a path for an emerging genius. In the novel, With In Our Time, published in 1925, Hemingway describes his own experiences at Michigan to illustrate the beginning of the world of pains and violence in the life of his character Nick Adam. Nick Adam was then a model for the upcoming fictional heroes of Hemingway.
In 1926, Hemingway returned to the United States. He took the manuscripts of several short stories and two novels along with. In May 1926, Hemingway published his second novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is mainly about the lost generations and illustrates a group of Englishmen and Americans who have suffered both physically and mentally from the war.
Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms in December 1929. The novel is a masterpiece and expresses Hemingway’s code of man’s helplessness in the violent age of war. In 1932, Hemingway published a nonfiction work Death in the Afternoon. In 1932, the African safari of Hemingway provided his content for his other nonfiction work, The Green Hills of Africa published in 1935, two best short stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Hemingway published his most ambitious novel For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940.
World War II
After receiving the critical success from the novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway did not publish another book for a decade. This literary silence was due to his energetic activities in the Second World War.
Hemingway met Mary Welsh in 1944 and soon married her. Mary Welsh was a reporter of Time. He had been married thrice before to Hadley Richardson, Martha Gelhorn, and Pauline Pfeiffer ended in divorce. After the war, Hemingway started living near Havana, in Cuba.
Last Works
Hemingway published a novella The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. The novella was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, and in 1953, it was awarded the Pulitzer. In 1954, Hemingway won a Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the last years of his life, Hemingway’s physical and mental health was deteriorating, and he was not able to write. In 1952, Hemingway and his wife planned to travel to Africa; however, the journey ended in a plane crash. Hemingway met severe internal injuries and burned from which he never recovered. In the following year, Hemingway was forced to leave his home near Havana by the Cuban government.
Hemingway was then suffering from depression and hypertension and was admitted to the Mayo clinic for treatment. He was given electroshock therapy and radical therapy. Bitter with his illness and physically humiliated, Hemingway shot himself to death on 2nd July 1961.
Many of his works were published after his death. He is recognized as one of the most influential writers of twentieth-century America.
Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Style
The distinctive writing style of Hemingway was a source of controversy and comments among the critics. Essentially, he has a direct, simple, and unadorned style, which is most probably resulted from his journalism and newspaper training. He does not use an unnecessary adjective in his work. Unlike his Victorian Predecessors, he skillfully describes his emotions without using the flowery language, and it greatly inspired the readers. Harry Levin, in the chapter “Observation of Style of Hemingway,” in his book Contexts and Criticism, says that while writing, Hemingway’s more emphasis is on nouns among all parts of speech. This is because nouns come nearest to things, threading them side by side by using conjunctions. Hemingway approaches the actual flow of experience in his writings.
Hemingway is considered to be a master of writing dialogues. When the readers, for the first time, we’re introduced to his writings, they agree that it is the way for characters to talk appropriately. However, when his dialogues are examined closely, it does not belong to the ordinary speech of ordinary people, and people rarely talk like this. It is due to the fact that Hemingway’s emphasis is calculated, and there is repetition, which makes us remember the dialogues. It is surprising to know that when Hemingway attempted to write a play, he encountered failure.
The views of critics vary significantly in the writing style of Hemingway. Hemingway describes his own writing in a collection of his observations on life and death and love and art that he gave to Wisdom Foundation in California, sometime before his death. The collection was published in January 1693 by Playboy Magazine. In the collection Hemingway writes that his most works are done in his head; he never start writing until he orders his ideas in his head; he, frequently, recite his dialogues as if they are written on a piece of paper and censor them through his ears; and he never writes any sentence until he assured that it would be clear to everyone.
Moreover, he writes that he also consider his writing to be more suggestive than direct; to understand his writing, the reader should either use his own imagination or lose most elusive part of his (Hemingway’s) thoughts; he takes great effort to write his works; constantly revising and trimming them; he cares for his works from his heart; he cut them with endless care, and polish them until they appear to be brilliant. He also says that the idea that others, while writers try to give in long sentences, he polished them and presented them in a “tiny gem.”
He summarizes his writing style by suggesting other writers how they must write. He says that the style of the writer must be personal and direct with rich and earthy imagery; his words must be simple yet vigorous; brevity is a gift of brilliant writers, the greatest writers, indeed, are hard workers, attentive scholars, and proficient stylists.
The following are the detailed descriptions of the writing style of Hemingway.
A Truly Simple Sentence
Truth and simplicity are the milestones of Hemingway’s style. Hemingway asserts that the writer must write about what he has experienced and express them in the most simple way possible. By stating that writers must write true sentences, Hemingway briefly established the founding principle for himself that governed his work and influenced his aesthetics. There are three different types of truth in Hemingway’s writing.
The first truth is of experimental adequacy: he writes about what he has experienced in real life, the second is historical adequacy: in his narratives, Hemingway includes the untransformed facts from history in his work; due to this adequacy, the readers can easily identify the people, places, and events in the text of Hemingway. The third is stylistic meditation: the adequacy that emerges in Hemingway’s text even when facts are transformed; it is only possible for the writer when he is a writer with a careful and selective process.
The complexity of simplicity
The writing of Hemingway may appear to be simple; however, the apparent simplicity of Hemingway’s style is sustained by an extraordinary complexity of different levels. Hemingway asserts that “prose is architecture, not interior decoration,” and writing prose is the hardest thing to do. By this statement, he means that the process of selection of lexical items and the accurate syntactic arrangement must be done carefully. Indeed, Hemingway was a very painstaking writer. He defined his writing as a process of “getting the words right.”
The essence of “getting the words right” is summarized by Baker that Hemingway would always write slowly and revise his text carefully by eliding, substituting, cutting, and experimenting with syntax to see if it is economical and then write all those words that are safe and comprehensive.
The words economy and simplicity define the ideal of Hemingway when he struggles to get the words right. In his writings, Hemingway avoids using superfluous and flowery words. When he has a choice among words, he will use the one which is ordinary and understandable.
However, Terence Doody says the style of Hemingway is not “simply simple.’ He says that, though Hemingway worked hard to polish and restore for us his naïve experiences in the world, he uses his simplicity of style in different ways to achieve certain effects upon the reader; more precisely, he wants to recover his experiences in the mind of readers.
For example, in the classic analysis of Hemingway’s style, Harry Levin recognizes the essential simplicity of Hemingway’s style and his use of language. He says that the literary vocabulary of Hemingway is not widespread and consists of short words. Due to which every word has hard use. Moreover, the syntax of sentences is informal and appears to be flowing. It is so simplified, so is the extent of the simple system of English inflections. Therefore, one can say that simplicity of Hemingway’s writing is based on repetitive use of words. Moreover, Hemingway’s more emphasis is on nouns among all parts of speech. This is because nouns come nearest to things, threading them side by side by using conjunctions. Hemingway approaches the actual flow of experience in his writings. For him, nouns are the keywords, and with it, a promise of continuity varies occasionally.
The rhetorical scheme of Hemingway is polysyndeton. Polysyndeton is the simple childish habit of linking together sentences. The subject of a sentence is linked with the predicate, provided it is not taken for granted. In chapter twenty of the Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway produced one of the finest pieces of prose, and most probably, it is the best passage written about Navarra. He focuses on the nouns and says
“If I could … make clouds come fast in shadows moving over wheat and the small, careful stepping horses; the smell of olive oil; the feel of leather; rope soled shoes; the loops of twisted garlic; earthen pots; saddlebags carried across the shoulder; wineskins; the pitchforks made of natural wood (the tiny were branches); the early morning smells; the cold mountain nights and long hot days of summer, with always trees and shade under the trees, then you would have a little of Navarra. But it’s not in this book.”
The passage is much longer in the text. In this passage, the emphasis is mainly on nouns; there is a carefully selected list of objective correlatives; he presents the details with no ornaments or subjective appreciation. The genius of Hemingway lies in the selection of objects and their simple presentation. He draws the picture/image of a region merely by listing them, and this is the biggest achievement and makes a lasting impression on the minds of readers. The acuteness of the selection of elements by Hemingway can be realized by those who have lived in Navarra in Hemingway’s time.
Poetry is written into prose
Another striking quality of Hemingway’s prose is its rhythm. The rhythm of the prose of Hemingway’s plays an important role in the reader’s perception of the text. For instance, in the passage taken from the novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway reproduces the beating of drums, noises of the fiesta and rhythm of music with the rhythm of sentences:
“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, and the drinking kept up, the noise went on.”
The monosyllabic words assist the rhythmical distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables in the sentences. In the passage, eighteen out of twenty-six words are monosyllabic. The three-times repetition of the syntactic scheme and the three tome repetition of the phrasal verb “keep up” functions as the connection between the second and third sentences. The above-quoted chapter twenty of Death in the Afternoon is also highly rhythmic.
To conclude, the style of Hemingway can be described in three words: simplicity, truth, and poetry. The truth in experimental adequacy, the truth in non-transformed historical adequacy, and the truth are transformed historical adequacy. Simplicity in Hemingway’s style is sought to transfer the pure and true experiences, determined enough to inculcate the absolutely necessary and irreplaceable fact in the text. Lastly, poetry emerges with the intention of the author to get the words right. It is a distinctive writing style of Hemingway that makes him a master figure and his works the masterpieces of twentieth-century American English literature.
