By Bergotte
Where Fitzgerald reached for the green light, Hemingway turned away from it. His response to the same historical moment — the same lost generation, the same aftermath of a war that had destroyed the language of heroism and left nothing official in its place — was the opposite of enchantment: a radical stripping back, a refusal of everything decorative, a prose style so compressed and so deliberately stripped of the adjectives through which sentimentality operates that the emotion, when it comes, arrives through pressure rather than statement. Hemingway’s vision of the human condition is built on a wound — a specific wound, the wound of a world that has demonstrated its capacity for organised, industrial, meaningless death — and on the question of how a person lives with that wound without either lying about it or being destroyed by it. The answer he found, imperfect and costly and never quite sufficient, was style: the code, the discipline, the grace under pressure that is not the absence of feeling but its most controlled and most honest expression.
The Wound
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, the son of a doctor and a music teacher whose opposing temperaments — his father’s outdoor stoicism, his mother’s cultural ambition — he would spend his life trying to resolve in the direction of the father. He was eighteen when America entered the First World War, too young for the infantry, and went to Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver, where he was wounded by mortar fire at Fossalta di Piave in 1918 — severely wounded, over two hundred pieces of shrapnel, a long recovery in a Milan hospital where he fell in love with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who eventually declined to marry him. He came home changed, as all of them came home changed, with a relationship to fear and courage and the body’s vulnerability that no amount of Oak Park normality could restore to its pre-war condition.
He went to Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in 1921, part of the expatriate community that gathered around Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, and wrote the early stories and the first novels that established his method. He fished and hunted and drank and boxed and watched bullfights and covered wars — the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War — and married four times and lived in Paris and Key West and Cuba and Idaho, accumulating the experience and the wounds, literal and otherwise, that his fiction processed and transformed. He won the Nobel Prize in 1954, by which point the public legend of Hemingway — the Papa, the great hunter and fisherman and drinker and warrior — had become almost impossible to separate from the work, and the work had become almost impossible to read without the legend either inflating it or diminishing it.
He killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho, in July 1961, with a shotgun, having suffered two plane crashes, a serious concussion, liver disease, diabetes, hypertension, and the haemochromatosis that had destroyed his father before him. His father had also killed himself, with a revolver, in 1928. The inheritance was physical and psychological and literary: the fear of losing control of the self, the sense that a self diminished beyond a certain point is no longer worth maintaining, the absolute refusal of a slow, undignified ending. These are Hemingway positions. He lived them and died by them with a consistency that is either admirable or terrible depending on where you stand, and possibly both simultaneously.
The Iceberg
The technical innovation — the one that changed prose fiction as decisively as James’s central consciousness changed the novel’s interiority — is what Hemingway called the iceberg theory, or the theory of omission: the principle that a writer who knows something thoroughly can omit it from the text, and the omission will strengthen rather than weaken the work, because the reader will feel what is not said through the pressure of what is. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who does not know his subject well enough will be exposed by the omission. The writer who knows it completely will transmit, through the surface, everything beneath it.
This is a theory about the relationship between knowledge and expression, between what the writer knows and what the text says, that has implications far beyond the technical. It is also a theory about emotion: the claim that feeling expressed directly, named and explained, is weaker than feeling withheld and transmitted through pressure. The famous ending of A Farewell to Arms, in which Frederic Henry walks back to the hotel in the rain after Catherine’s death — without comment, without reflection, the grief too large for the prose to contain and therefore contained in the prose’s refusal to contain it — is the iceberg in its fullest expression. Everything is under the surface. The surface is all you see. The surface is everything.
The style that produces this effect is immediately recognisable and has been so extensively imitated and parodied that it is now almost impossible to read without the weight of its own influence. Short sentences. Simple words. Coordination rather than subordination. The repetition of and where a lesser prose would use a subordinating conjunction that would tell you how the clauses relate. The deliberate absence of adverbs. The refusal of abstraction in favour of the concrete, specific, observed thing. It is a style that trusts the reader to make the connections the prose declines to make for them, and it is a style that trusts the concrete object to carry the emotional weight that other writers assign to explicit feeling.
The Code Hero
The figure who recurs throughout Hemingway’s fiction — Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Nick Adams in the stories — is the man who has been wounded and who has developed, in response to the wound, a code of behaviour that allows him to function without lying about what he knows. The code is not a moral system in the philosophical sense. It does not make claims about the nature of justice or the existence of God. It is a practical discipline: the set of practices — fishing, hunting, drinking in the right way, fighting with skill and without complaint, doing the work with full attention — through which a man maintains his dignity in a universe that is indifferent to whether he has any.
The concept of grace under pressure is the core of it: the idea that courage is not the absence of fear but the management of it, that what distinguishes the bullfighter or the soldier or the fisherman who operates the code from the man who does not is not their freedom from the knowledge of death but their willingness to perform, in full consciousness of that knowledge, the acts that give life its shape and value. The bullfight, which Hemingway returned to throughout his career as both subject and metaphor, is the purest expression of the code: a formalised ritual in which death is certain, in which the only question is the quality of the performance in its presence, in which style — precise, controlled, without waste — is the highest available value because it is the only response to mortality that does not lie about mortality’s finality.
Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, is the code hero at his most damaged and his most exemplary. He was wounded in the war in a way that has left him impotent — Hemingway is never explicit about this, the iceberg again — and in love with Brett Ashley, a woman with whom a full relationship is therefore impossible, in a Paris full of people who are drinking their way through the wreckage of the world the war made. The novel’s moral standard is not Brett, who is sympathetic and self-aware and genuinely kind but who cannot stop consuming the people who love her. It is not the other expatriates, most of whom are performing various versions of disillusionment without actually engaging with it. It is Jake himself, and his friend the bullfighter Pedro Romero, who does his work with complete skill and complete commitment and without any of the expatriate self-consciousness about what the work means.
What Jake knows — what Hemingway’s wound had taught him — is that the world will break you. Not might, will. The question is what you do with the breaking: whether you let it make you bitter and dishonest, or whether you find, in the specific disciplines of specific things done well, a way to live that the breaking cannot invalidate.
A Farewell to Arms and the Separate Peace
A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, is the novel in which the wound is most directly confronted. Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, and the novel is the story of their love against the backdrop of the Italian front — a love that achieves, briefly and improbably, the quality of the separate peace its title promises: a private world of two people maintained against the pressure of the war and the weather and the institutional machinery of the Italian army.
The separate peace is Hemingway’s image of what genuine love can do in a world organised for destruction: create a temporary zone of meaning, a human space within which the values the war has destroyed — tenderness, fidelity, the specific gravity of a specific person — can be briefly recovered. It is not a solution. It is explicitly temporary. Catherine dies in childbirth in Switzerland, in the neutral country to which they have escaped, and the ending — Frederic walking back to the hotel in the rain — is the iceberg at maximum pressure: the grief that cannot be spoken, expressed entirely through the refusal to speak it.
The novel is sometimes read as a love story and sometimes as a war novel, and it is both, but what it is most fundamentally is a novel about the relationship between love and death — about the way that the full apprehension of mortality, the direct confrontation with the fact that the people we love will die and that we will die, is both the thing that makes love most real and the thing that the structures of ordinary life are most elaborately designed to prevent us from fully facing. Catherine and Frederic face it because the war has stripped away the structures. The facing is terrible and it is clarifying, and the clarity is the most honest thing in the novel.
The Short Stories
The stories are where Hemingway’s method is most purely realised, freed from the length of the novels and able to work in the compressed, iceberg form that suits him best. Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Big Two-Hearted River, Indian Camp, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber — they constitute one of the great short story collections in the language, and they are, taken together, a complete statement of his vision of the human condition.
Hills Like White Elephants is the most technically pure: a conversation between a man and a woman at a train station in Spain, about something that is never named — an abortion, we infer — in which everything the story is about is below the surface and the surface is the conversation and the hills and the beer and the curtain of beaded strips in the station doorway. The story has no explicit moral, no authorial comment, no resolution. It ends mid-conversation, the drinks finished, the train not yet arrived, the decision not made. The reader is left with the full weight of everything that has been implied and nothing resolved, which is exactly the condition of the people in it, and exactly the condition of life in the Hemingway world: full of things that cannot be said directly, requiring the management of feeling rather than its expression, demanding the code because the code is all there is.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is the story in which Hemingway’s philosophical position is most explicitly stated, and it is stated — characteristically — not as a position but as a condition. An old waiter, alone in a café after closing, reflects on the old man who drinks there every night, and on what the café provides: light, cleanliness, order, the simple human comfort of a well-maintained space against the dark. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. The nada prayer — the Lord’s Prayer rewritten with nada in place of every theological noun — is Hemingway’s most direct statement of what the wound revealed: that the universe is indifferent, that there is no consolation from outside, that the clean, well-lighted place — the maintained space, the performed code, the work done with care — is both all there is and, properly understood, enough.
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 and the work cited by the Nobel committee, is the simplest and the most allegorical of the major works — a quality that has led some readers to find it thin and others to find it distilled. Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish, hooks a giant marlin and fights it alone at sea for three days, and returns to shore with nothing but the skeleton, the great fish having been consumed by sharks on the way back.
He is defeated in the practical sense. He has caught the fish and lost it and is exhausted and alone. And he is not defeated in the sense that matters: he has done everything a man could do, has performed the work at its highest level, has maintained the code under the maximum possible pressure. The distinction is Hemingway’s most direct statement of what the code is for: not to win, because winning is not always available, but to be fully equal to the thing you are doing while you are doing it, to bring everything you have to the encounter with whatever the sea sends, and to let the quality of the performance be its own justification.
The boy Manolin, who loves the old man and tends him when he returns, is the code’s continuation: the human connection, the fidelity, the transmission of the discipline from one generation to the next. It is the closest thing to consolation that Hemingway allows, and it is not nothing.
What Hemingway Costs
Hemingway is the writer in this series who has been most comprehensively consumed by his own myth, and reading him now requires a particular kind of patience: the willingness to separate the work from the performance of the work, the actual prose from the self-regarding legend that eventually swallowed it. The performance — the Papa, the sportsman, the man’s man, the writer who had done everything and drunk with everyone — was always partly in service of the work and partly its enemy, the mask that the man behind it could not remove even when it was suffocating him.
What the work says, beneath the legend, is something that the legend was designed to make bearable: that the world will break you and that there is no external consolation for the breaking, no God who will make it meaningful, no social order that will protect you from it, no love sufficient to make it unfinal. What there is, is the work, and the code, and the specific practices through which a person maintains their dignity against the pressure of a universe that has no investment in whether they do or not. This is a hard vision and an honest one, and the prose style — the compressed, withheld, pressure-bearing sentences — is not decoration. It is the vision made visible: language that has stripped itself of everything unnecessary because the unnecessary is a lie, and the lie, in the end, is what the wound does not permit.
He walked back to the hotel in the rain. He did not look back. He kept walking.
Sources and Further Reading
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner, 1926.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Scribner, 1929.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scribner, 1940.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. Scribner, 1952.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Scribner, 1987.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. Scribner, 1964.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. Scribner, 1932.
Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. Scribner, 1935.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. W. W. Norton, 1999.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. Scribner, 1969.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. Harper and Row, 1985.
Wilson, Edmund. “Hemingway: Gauge of Morale.” In The Wound and the Bow. Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
Trilling, Lionel. “An American in Spain.” In The Partisan Reader. Dial Press, 1946.
Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press, 1990.
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