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Ernest Hemingway: The Complexity of Simplicity

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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): The
Complexity of Simplicity

There is much more behind Hemingway's form

than people know

—James Joyce—

... it is poetry written into prose

and it is the hardest of all things to do

—Ernest Hemingway—

In 1958 George Plimpton asked Hemingway if he recalled an exact

moment when he had decided to become a writer, and Ernest

Hemingway answered that he had always wanted to be a writer

(Plimpton 1963: 124). It was as early as 19221 —four years before

the publication of The Sun Also Rises2, the novel which would make

him be regarded as one of the greatest writers of the time— that

Ernest Hemingway started to define the principles that would guide

his literary production throughout his life and would model his

unmistakable writing technique. Six years after the publication of SAR

he discussed these principles extensively in Death in the Afternoon3.

In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote about the

beginnings of his career as a writer in the early 1920s:

I always worked until I had something done and I always

stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.
That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But
sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could
not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and

1
See Baker 1969: 84.
2
Hereafter cited as SAR.
3
Hereafter cited as DIA.

1
 squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the
flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I
would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and
think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and
you will write now. All you have to do is write one
true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you
know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and
then go on from there. It was easy then because there
was always one true sentence that I knew or had
seen or had heard someone say. 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
(Hemingway 1964: 12; emphasis added)

The foundation stones of Hemingway's style are, therefore, truth and

simplicity: the writer has to write about things that he has

experienced and he has to tell them in the simplest way possible.

1) A true, simple sentence

When Hemingway says that the writer has to write true sentences he

is very succinctly establishing for himself the basic ethical principles

that will govern his work and that will influence his aesthetics. In

Hemingway's writing we can distinguish three different senses of

truth. The first one is that of experiential adequacy: the writer writes

about things he has experienced. Secondly, there is historical

adequacy in his narrative in the sense that he includes untransformed

facts in his fiction; this kind of adequacy makes certain people, places

and events in Hemingway's text easily identifiable. Finally, there is

truth in the sense of adequacy that emerges in the text in spite of the

transformation of reality (stylistic mediation) performed by the writer

through a very careful selective process.

2
1.1) Truth as experiential adequacy

Hemingway considered that one fundamental aspect of literary truth

was experiential adequacy, that is to say a correspondence between

what the writer writes and what he knows:

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up

it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of
life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when
he makes something up it is as it would truly be. If he
doesn't know how many people work in their minds and
actions his luck may save him for a while, or he may
write fantasy. But if he continues to write about what he
does not know about he will find himself faking. After he
fakes a few times he cannot write honestly any more
(Hemingway 1935: 215)

In Hemingway, ethics and aesthetics are very much intertwined. As

we have seen, he equals "good writing" to "true writing" and if the

writer keeps on writing about things that he does not know,

eventually he will not be able to write "honestly."

For Hemingway the writer must be honest and honesty in

writing is truth, writing about the things he has personally

experienced, conveying in his work his own vision of life. The

American writer struggles to produce texts that actually reproduce his

own experience, his own feelings in the reader and, as a

consequence, there is adequacy in spite of the transformation

undergone by reality when rendered into the narrative; that is

precisely the third sense of truth that we have distinguished.

Hemingway was, in the first place, a consummate observer with

a special ability for identifying the key elements that would later

convey a certain feeling in the reader when the writer reproduced his

3
own experiences on the page. He considered being constantly an

observer essential to the activity of the writer; the result is a store of

experiences to which the writer can resort when producing his fiction:

If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not

have to observe consciously nor think how it will be
useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But
later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of
things he knows or has seen (Hemingway, in Plimpton
1985: 133)

Carlos Baker (1972: 48-74) analyses the technique Hemingway

employs in order to recover for the reader what the American novelist

called "the way it was" (quoted in Baker 1972: 48). For Hemingway

this intention defined the ideal of the writer:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they
had really happened and after you are finished reading
one you will feel that all that happened to you and
afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad,
the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the
places and how the weather was. If you can get so that
you can give that to people, then you are a writer
(Hemingway 1934: 184)

Baker considers that the expression “the way it was” is “a

characteristically simple phrase for a concept of extraordinary

complexity” (Baker 1972: 48), which is, in other words, the concept

of literary truth. Baker maintains that, at the essence of this concept,

there are three aesthetic instruments at work: the sense of place, the

sense of fact, and the sense of scene (Baker 1972: 48).

Baker's sense of place is part of the wider aspect of

Hemingway's truth that we have labelled “truth as historical

adequacy.”

4
1.2) Truth as historical adequacy

The sense of place is essential to the truth of Hemingway's writing;

he considered that if you had not geography, background in the

narrative, there was a dramatic vacuum (Baker 1972: 49).

Hemingway's narrative does not take place in imaginary lands but in

real places that very often are referred to by their names. And thus,

SAR, for example, takes place in Paris, Bayonne, Pamplona,

Burguete, the Irati River, San Sebastian, Madrid... Places where we

can go, places which we can visit and touch; places that Hemingway

describes very precisely and that provide the stage for his narrative.

It is not only in the novels that Hemingway makes use of this sense

of place. Very often, the short stories are located in places whose

names are given explicitly. Sometimes we do not even need to start

reading the story because the sense of place is already conveyed by

the title, as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Up in Michigan” or “Wine

of Wyoming.” In some other cases the place is stated at the very

beginning of the story, as in the opening sentence of “Hills Like White

Elephants” (‘The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and

white...’), a short story in which very few other specific details are

given. And when there is not a direct mention of the location,

Hemingway introduces elements that indirectly refer to the place

where the action is developing, for instance in “A Clean Well-Lighted

Place,” which depicts a Madrid café where two Spanish waiters speak

to each other about an old customer. Hemingway's English narrative

characteristically scatters key Spanish words throughout the

dialogues; thus, Hemingway's using Spanish within his American

English text creates a sense of place that lets the reader know that
the action is taking place in Spain, without explicitly saying so.

5
 Hemingway's commitment to truth as historical adequacy goes

beyond achieving a sense of place and comprises also a series of

elements —such as explicit reference to historical circumstances,

people and events— taken from reality in an unaltered form. And

even in those instances in which there was some sort of alteration,

the American novelist stuck to his maxim of truth so that it is possible

in many cases to trace the sources of his fictional characters, places,

events, etc. in his own biography; they constitute the facts behind

the fiction4. However, it is important to bear in mind that we are

dealing with fiction here, not with historical research and, therefore,

any critical comment in this respect is out of place.

1.3) Truth in spite of transformation: stylistic mediation

We get now to the third sense of truth. Hemingway bases the

possibility of communicating his own experiences to the reader on the

fact that there is a common ground of human feeling and emotion. In

other words, human beings might experience similar feelings when

placed in similar circumstances; they also share a similar way of

interpreting utterances that makes the reproduction of similar

emotions —through the reading of a text— possible.

1.3.1) Sense of fact and sense of scene

Of the three aesthetic elements —sense of place, sense of fact, and

sense of scene— that Baker (1972) distinguishes in the writing of

Ernest Hemingway, the last two imply a certain transformation of

reality in the text. The sense of fact is a characteristic selective

4
This is precisely the object of the interesting research carried out by professor
Miriam Mandel, of the University of Tel Aviv (see Mandel 1995, 2001, and 2008).

6
presentation of reality that constitutes one of the most remarkable

features of Hemingway's narrative:

Speculation, whether by the author or by the characters,

is ordinarily kept to a minimum. But facts, visible or
audible or tangible facts, facts badly stated, facts
without verbal paraphernalia to inhibit their
striking power, are the stuff of Hemingway's prose
(Baker 1972: 51-52; emphasis added)

Hemingway's narrative is mostly a presentation of facts; and the

truth of facts —their “striking power”— is based upon the most

distinctive feature of Hemingway's style: simplicity, no “verbal

paraphernalia”. Hemingway's texts have been the subject of profound

symbolic or allegorical interpretations but, if we analyse the

narrative, we find bare facts.

The third aesthetic instrument that Baker identifies in

Hemingway's craft is the sense of scene:

If an imaginative fusion of the sense of place and the

sense of fact is to occur, and if, out of the fusing process,
dramatic life is to arise, a third element is required. This
may be called the sense of scene. Places are less than
geography, facts lie inert and uncoordinated, unless the
imagination runs through them like a vitalizing current
and the total picture moves and quickens (Baker 1972:
52)

This is “the true craft” (Baker 1972: 54) because the sense of scene

is achieved by means of precise lexical selection and ideational-

syntactic economy, which leave no room for verbal paraphernalia.

Baker exemplifies this point with two examples. The first one is

a passage, taken from SAR, which describes how the first bull killed

7
by Romero is taken out of the bullring5; here the sense of scene is

achieved by means of

the seven verbs, the two adverbs, and the five adverbial
phrases which fuse and coordinate the diverse facts of
place and thing and set them in rapid motion … The
pattern in the quoted passage is that of a task
undertaken, striven through, and smoothly completed:
order and success (Baker 1972: 53)

The second scene that Baker brings to illustrate this point is taken

from DIA; it reflects the cowardice of a bullfighter who is trying to kill

his bull6; the text is “so arranged as to show the precise opposites —

total disorder and total failure” (Baker 1972: 53). It is the syntactic

arrangement, lexical selection, verbal tenses, etc. that achieve the

effect.

1.3.2) The discipline of double perception

The combination of the three senses —place, fact and scene— results

into vivid portrayals of reality. This depiction of external events may

appear to be a merely extrinsic preoccupation; however, Hemingway

aimed at higher goals. In a letter to his father, written in 1925, the

American writer explained what he intended with his writing:

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of

the actual life across—not to just depict life—or

They had hitched the mules to the dead bull and then the whips
cracked, the men ran, and the mules, straining forward, their legs
pushing, broke into a gallop, and the bull, one horn up, his head on
its side, swept a swath smoothly across the sand and out the red
gate (SAR 154)
6

[I]n your mind you see the phenomenon, sweating, white-faced and
sick with fear, unable to look at the horn or go near it, a couple of
swords on the ground, capes all around him, running in at an angle
on the bull hoping the sword will strike a vital spot, cushions sailing
down into the ring and the steers ready to come in (DIA 226)

8
 criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that
when you have read something by me you actually
experience the thing. You can't do this without putting
in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things
aren't that way. It is only by showing both sides—3
dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I
want to (Hemingway 1925: 153; emphasis added)

The extrinsic events described have to somehow appeal to the

intrinsic emotions of the reader so that he “actually experiences the

thing.” In the first chapter of DIA, Hemingway talks of his attempts to

achieve this at the beginning of his career as a writer:

I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly

what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed
to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down
what really happened in action; what the actual things
were which produced the emotion that you experienced …
the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact
which made the emotion and which would be as valid
in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it
purely enough, always (DIA: 2; emphasis added)

The last part of the quotation is particularly interesting. Hemingway

aims at identifying in experience “the real thing, the sequence of

motion and fact which made the emotion” because that is precisely

what gives consistency and validity to the statement of it in written

words —the creative writer's translation of the real world into fiction,

and “if you stated it purely enough, [it would be valid] always.” In

other words, Hemingway's ideal is to become a classic (which he is

already), that is, to produce a type of writing that gives rise to

emotions of universal value, which will always be valid in the same

way in which a poem written centuries ago can still move us because

it appeals to our feelings as human beings, not as context-bound

individuals. Even more interesting than his wish to produce works

9
that can be called classical, is his view on how to achieve it: “state

[the real thing] purely enough.”

Baker calls Hemingway's attempt to identify the emotions and

their causes, “the discipline of double perception” (Baker 1972: 55)

and he uses T. S. Eliot's words to refer to the external cause of the

emotions:

This second class of things and circumstances, considered

in their relations to the emotional complexes of the first
class would be precisely what T. S. Eliot called “objective
correlatives”7 (Baker 1972: 56)

The main difference between Eliot and Hemingway is that, very often,

Eliot's objective correlatives are complex literary symbols and

intertextual references. In the case of Hemingway, objective

correlatives

are to be traced back not to anterior literature and art

objects, but to things actually seen and known by direct
experience of the world (Baker 1972: 56)

Which does not mean that Hemingway did not resort to

intertextuality. On the contrary, as Wagner-Martin shows, “during the

1920s and the 1930s particularly, Ernest Hemingway was pioneering

in what has today become known as 'intertextuality'” (Wagner-Martin

2000: 173)8. However, Hemingway's intertextuality is normally

7
Eliot introduced this concept in 1919 in an essay entitled "Hamlet":

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an

'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;
such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked (Eliot,
1919: 145)

8
In her article Wagner-Martin analyses specifically several instances of
intertextuality in SAR.

10
between the lines, will only be detected by specialists, and will not

affect what we can call an average reader interpretation of the text.

This characteristic of Hemingway's writing makes it more accessible

to interpretation and, therefore, readable to a wider audience: both

the ones who can identify the hidden reference and the ones who are

only able to perceive the literal “tip of the iceberg.”

We have so far tried to understand the way Hemingway

captures “the way it was,” which constitutes the necessary basis for

the production of true sentences. As we have seen, it can be

explained in terms of his trying to get the double perception of

things, that is, the identification of the emotional reactions and of the

elements that actually caused the emotions. And all this has to be

“stated purely enough” if the writer wants to produce writing that is

valid always.

“Purely enough” means in the first place that the writer has to

put aside superfluous details, elements that do not contribute to the

re-creation of what the writer actually felt. Hemingway criticized in

DIA those writers who include in their narratives things that are not

essential:

No matter how good a phrase or a simile [the writer] may

have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary
and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the
Baroque is over (DIA 191)

Connected with this idea is Hemingway's “principle of the iceberg;”

the good writer knows the things he is writing about, but he does not

show everything he knows; only a part of it appears on the surface,

there is a lot more —which includes the hidden intertextuality I have

11
just referred to— that remains below. Let us see now more in detail

what Hemingway's iceberg consists of.

1.3.3) Hemingway's stylistic principle: the iceberg-text theory

The first time Hemingway mentioned this principle was in DIA (192)9;

later in his life he talked about this principle in George Plimpton's

interview:

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There

is seven eighths of it under water for every part that
shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only
strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show.
If a writer omits something because he does not know it
then there is a hole in the story (Hemingway, in Plimpton
1963 [1985]: 133)

The principle of the iceberg is, therefore, a form of omission, but a

multi-facet one. Maekawa (2001) analyses different forms of omission

widely used by writers in order to identify which new nuance

Hemingway's iceberg adds to the traditional craft of omission. More

specifically Maekawa discusses three techniques of omission: 1)

Eliot's “objective correlative,” which I have just discussed, 2) irony,

as a particular form of omission, and 3) the deletion of the personal

experiences of the writer. Hemingway makes use of all these three

techniques, which are not his own invention; nevertheless, the

American writer was certain of having contributed something new to

the history of literature with his principle of the iceberg:

The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it

being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not
know them only makes hollow places in his writing (DIA 192)

12
 [W]hen Hemingway referred to his iceberg theory in A
Moveable Feast as “my new theory” (75), we sense a
different note in his voice—a touch of pride, or even
exhilaration in his own discovery of the method, or a
feeling that amounts to satisfaction in its newness in the
history of literature. This belief is supported by
Hemingway's own words in Green Hills of Africa: “It is
much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has
never been written” (27). Therefore, we have to make a
distinction between this new theory of his and other
conventional methods of omission (Maekawa 2001: 41)

Maekawa distinguishes two levels of omission in Hemingway. On the

one hand those which the reader can easily find through implications;

for instance, in SAR, the fact that Jake is impotent as a consequence

of a war injury. On the other hand there are omissions with which

“readers face difficulty finding what is concealed though they may

feel something large lurking beneath the surface” (Maekawa 2001:

43). Maekawa gives the example of “Big Two-Hearted River,” in which

the issue lurking below the surface is the war that is not mentioned.

Hemingway’s principle was a complex selective presentation of

reality which, in fact, avoids the provision of explicit interpretive

contexts and thus allows a vast array of possible readings. This

selective presentation of reality is perhaps one of the most

remarkable characteristics of Hemingway's style; his power of

observation achieved the recreation in the text of feelings and

atmospheres by just including a few key elements; there is no need

to include the whole picture in order to make the reader's experience

similar to his original one. It is the translation to the literary mode of

the technique of impressionist painters, whose works are not a

detailed picture of the reality they are representing. The American

novelist said that he had learned how to write by watching the

Impressionists when he was in Paris. In A Moveable Feast,

13
Hemingway wrote about his visits to the museums in the early

1920s:

I went [to the Musée du Luxembourg] where the great

paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to
the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly
every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and
the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first
come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was
learning something from the painting of Cézanne that
made writing simple true sentences far from enough to
make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to
put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was
not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it
was a secret (Hemingway, 1964: 12-13)

Apparently, Hemingway revealed the secret —which is the second of

the two epigraphs that open this paper— to his wife Mary: “Nobody

really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret.

The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest

of all things to do.” The quote appeared originally in Mary

Hemingway's, How It Was (1976: 352). I have taken the quote from

Ernest Hemingway On Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips (1984: 4).

Thomas Hermann compares Cézanne and Hemingway in their

technique of omission, which allows the reader of the text or the

beholder of the picture a wider scope for interpretation and,

consequently, a more intense personal implication:

In Hemingway's prose the context is further intensified by

the use of strictly denotative words which, free of any
traditional connotations, share a similarity to Cézanne's
colour patches and, through their relative
meaninglessness, are made open to new and different
interpretations. … Hemingway was convinced that an
author can delete the most important things from his
story, provided he knows enough about what he is
deleting. Thus, the readers are invited to fill in the white

14
 spots on the canvas of this tale10 (Hermann 1997: 142-
43)

Apart from concentrating on the essential —which is what the

principle of the iceberg is basically about, stating things “purely

enough” (DIA 2) also refers to the form in which these essential

things are expressed. It is very difficult to draw the line between form

and content; in fact, concentrating on the essential elements

necessarily leads to simplicity in the form to express things.

Nevertheless, I will discuss now, a bit more specifically, the formal

aspects of Hemingway's way of writing: the simplicity of his

sentences and the structural complexity that sustains it.

2) The complexity of simplicity

No matter how simple Hemingway's writing might seem at first sight,

the apparent simplicity is supported by a remarkable complexity at

various different levels. When Hemingway says that “prose is

architecture, not interior decoration” (DIA 191) and that it is the

hardest of all things to do, he means that there is a very careful

process of selection of lexical items and their accurate syntactic

arrangement in the text. Hemingway was a very conscientious writer.

In the above mentioned interview he told Plimpton of his daily routine

when writing. Starting early in the morning with the rewriting 11 of

what he had done up to the point where he had stopped, stopping

only when he knew what would happen next and had something to

start writing the following day, his struggle for “getting the words

10
Hermann has exemplified this point with an analysis of "Big Two-Hearted River."
11
Rewriting was a fundamental part of the work of Hemingway. In Plimpton's
interview he admitted to having rewritten the last page of A Farewell to Arms
thirty-nine times (Plimpton 1985: 123).

15
right,” not recalling when he had decided to become a writer because

he had always wanted to be a writer (Plimpton 1985: 122-124).

2.1) Getting the words right

Baker summarizes the essence of what “getting the words right”

consisted of in the case of the American writer:

Hemingway always wrote slowly and revised carefully,

cutting, eliding, substituting, experimenting with syntax
to see what a sentence could most economically carry,
and then throwing out all words that could be spared
(Baker 1972: 71-72; emphasis added)

Economy, simplicity; these words define Hemingway's ideal in his

effort to get the words right. Hemingway always tries to avoid

superfluous words and, given the choice, he opts for the item that is

more common and more easily understandable —architecture, not

interior decoration. But, as Terrence Doody says, Hemingway's style

is not “simply simple” (Doody 1998: 103); apart from having “worked

so well to recover for us (in Merleau-Ponty's phrase) 'a naive contact

with the world'” (Doody 1998: 105), the different ways in which he

uses this simplicity of style are aimed at achieving specific effects

upon the reader, at recovering the way it was. We will now look at

some examples.

In Harry Levin's classic analysis of Hemingway's style12 the

critic identifies the essentials of its simplicity and several instances of

how the writer uses the language:

12
It seems pertinent here to state that, following Finch, I consider style to be "a
selection from a range of syntactic and lexical possibilities according to the purpose
of the communication" (Finch 2000: 189).

16
 We need make no word count to be sure that his literary
vocabulary, with foreign and technical exceptions,
consists of relatively few and short words. The corollary,
of course, is that every word sees a good deal of hard
use. Furthermore, his syntax is informal to the point of
fluidity, simplifying as far as possible the already simple
system of English inflections (Levin 1985: 74)

Basically, therefore, we can say that Hemingway's simplicity is based

on the repeated use of very few words and a simplified —at times

even distorted— syntax. Levin continues enumerating and

exemplifying "his restricted choice of adjectives," his verbs, which are

neither "numerous [n]or varied [n]or emphatic," the predominance of

the "verb to be … characteristically introduced by an expletive" 13, and

"a tendency to immobilize verbs by transposing them into gerunds"14

(Levin 1985: 76). But the central element of Hemingway's prose is

the noun:

Hemingway puts his emphasis on nouns because, among

parts of speech, they come closest to things. Stringing
them along by means of conjunctions, he approximates
the actual flow of experience. For him … the key word is
and, with its renewable promise of continuity,
occasionally varied by then and so. The rhetorical scheme
is polysyndeton15 —a large name for the childishly simple

13
Levin illustrates this point:

[T]he first story of In Our Time begins, and the last one ends, with
the storyteller's gambit: “there was, there were.” In the first two
pages of A Farewell to Arms nearly every other sentence is of this
type, and the third page employs the awkward construction, “there
being.” (Levin, 1985: 76)
14
And also this point:

Instead of writing they fought or we did not feel, Hemingway writes

“there was fighting” and “there was not the feeling of a storm
coming.” The subject does little more than point impersonally at its
predicate: an object, a situation, an emotion (Levin, 1985: 76)
15
Terrence Doody has also noticed this use of polysyndeton to preserve the
intended closeness to things:

17
 habit of linking sentences together. The subject, when it
is not taken for granted, merely puts us in touch with the
predicate: the series of objects that Hemingway wants to
point out (Levin 1985: 77)

In chapter twenty of DIA we can read one of the finest pieces of

prose produced by Hemingway —and probably the most beautiful

passage ever written about Navarra— with the noun as the central

element16:

[I]f 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 garlics; earthen pots; saddle bags
carried across the shoulder; wine skins; the pitchforks
made of natural wood (the tines 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 (DIA 275)

The paragraph is actually much longer and it starts with a series of

veiled references to events related to Navarra that Hemingway knew

about (see Mandel 2001). I have just quoted the part where the noun

is most distinctively the center; in fact, what we have is a list of very

carefully selected objective correlatives, presented with no

adornment or subjective appreciation whatsoever. This is just a list of

things. The genius here lies in the selection of things and their

This polysyndeton Hemingway generally directs against the habits

and assumptions of perception that organize experience into
hierarchies of abstraction, value and time. For polysyndeton
democratizes sensations and impressions; and in giving them all their
equality, it preserves the primitive fullness and immediacy that is the
hallmark of Hemingway's prose (Doody 1998: 105)

Doody analyses some examples taken from SAR in which, through the device of
polysyndeton, the narrator's voice produces different types of effect.
16
Chapter twenty of DIA starts as follows: “If I could have made this enough of a
book it would have had everything in it” (DIA 270). Then Hemingway goes on
mentioning all the things that he would have included in the text if he “could have
made [it] enough of a book.”

18
minimalist —if I may use this term— presentation; the big

achievement here is having been able to draw the picture of a region

with a mere list of the things that made a lasting impression. Those

of us who have lived in Navarra and know the places Hemingway

mentions can realize how acute this selection of elements is.

2.2) Poetry written into prose

Another very important aspect of Hemingway's prose is the one

referred to in one of the epigraphs that open this paper (“poetry

written into prose”), because the rhythm of the prose plays a

fundamental role in the perception of the text by the reader. In the

following passage taken from SAR, for instance, it is very clear how

the rhythm of the sentences reproduces the beating of drums, the

rhythm of the music, and the noisiness of the fiesta:

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for
seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up,
the noise went on (SAR 142)

The rhythmical distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables in

this passage is facilitated by the predominance of monosyllabic words

(in the second and third sentences eighteen words out of a total

twenty-one are monosyllabic), the repetition, three times, of the

same syntactic scheme (the + noun + verb + preposition), and the

repetition —three times— of the same phrasal verb (“keep up”),

which serves as a nexus between the second and third sentences.

Chapter twenty of DIA is also paradigmatic as far as the “poetry

into prose” technique is concerned. In 1999 —the year of

Hemingway's centennial— the Caribbean poet, playwright, and Nobel

19
Prize, Derek Walcott, delighted his audience with the recitation of

some bits of the paragraph from chapter twenty of DIA that I have

quoted. On that occasion, he said:

[T]his passage, or this whole section at the end of Death

in the Afternoon, is phenomenal in the sense that it
arrives at a pentametrical rhythm without being verse, …
with the intention of functioning as prose. But what
happens is astonishing in terms of the achievement, and
the achievement in that passage to me is superior to
anything in poetry, which would include Pound and
include Eliot and include Auden (Paul 1999)17

The following year, in January 2000, Walcott was keynote speaker of

the IXth International Hemingway Conference held in Bimini,

Bahamas. His lecture was a eulogy in which he said that

[Hemingway's] subject changes into epiphanies,

condensations, crystallizations of experience that have
the instinct of compression that exists in lyric
poetry, not idealized by language but made as real as
possible, and the two instincts are the same, they blend
in their moral as well, as their aesthetic responsibilities,
to tell things truly. The “trulyness” is Keats's “Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,” even in the humble reality of
experience (Walcott 2000: 10; emphasis added)

Walcott's words recapitulate somehow what I have been discussing so

far about Hemingway's true, simple sentences. It is a double

compromise with truth and beauty; a beauty that Hemingway finds in

the “humble reality of experience” and conveys with the “compression

[of] lyric poetry.” Derek Walcott ended his lecture by reciting part of

chapter twenty of DIA18, which he introduced with the following

words:

17
Taken from the personal transcript of Steve Paul, journalist of the Kansas City
Star; this lecture has not been published.
18
He started at the paragraph where it reads “And why should it not have the
cavalry crossing another stream at a ford … ” (DIA 274) and went on down to the
end of the passage I have quoted above, “ … then you would have a little of
Navarra. But it's not in this book” (DIA 275).

20
 The truest more beautiful and believable time of
Hemingway's work was not only at its sunrise; it reached
its truest a little past its zenith in the early afternoon
career—in the believable light of the epilogue to Death in
the Afternoon (Walcott 2000: 12-13)

There are other testimonies of poets concerning the poetic quality of

Hemingway's prose. For instance, in a letter to José Rodríguez Feo

dated November 26, 1945, the American modernist poet Wallace

Stevens wrote: “No-one can read more than a few pages of

Hemingway without becoming very much aware of the fact that he is

a poet” (Stevens 1945: 520)19.

We must not forget that Hemingway's first book —Three Stories

and Ten Poems, published in Paris in 1923— included some poetry20

along with three very promising short stories21. Although Hemingway

19
In the volume of collected letters of Wallace Stevens that I have been using, this
is not the only time that Stevens talks of Hemingway as a poet. There is a letter to
Henry Church (July 2, 1942) where he says: “Most people don't think of Hemingway
as a poet, but obviously he is a poet and I should say, offhand, the most significant
of living poets, so far as the subject of EXTRAORDINARY ACTUALITY is concerned”
(Stevens 1945: 411-12; emphasis as in original). And in a letter to Leonard C. van
Geyzel (May 16, 1945) we read: “Someone told me the other day that Ernest
Hemingway was writing poetry. I think it likely that he will write a kind of poetry in
which the consciousness of reality will produce an extraordinary effect” (Stevens
1945: 500).
20
As Baker tells us when talking about Hemingway's conversations with the editor
and publisher Robert McAlmon, “Ernest obviously fancied himself as a poet” (Baker
1969: 111). Eventually, these talks led to the inclusion of both poetry and prose in
Hemingway's first book. There is an edition of the complete poems of Ernest
Hemingway (Gerogiannis [1992]).
21
In an unsigned notice that appeared in the Kansas City Star (20 December 1924,
6) we read:

A little, unpretentious appearing book, with the simple descriptive

title, 'Three Stories and Ten Poems,' written in English, but published
in Paris, contains some of the best writing that I have seen from the
pen of contemporary American authors. I say this primarily of the
stories. In the poems one feels some of the excellent quality that
appears in the prose, but somehow the verse more or less obscures
it. The stories, simple, direct, revealing, one of them set in the
middle West [“Up in Michigan”], the other two in Europe [“My Old
Man” and “Out of Season”], are the real stuff (in Meyers 1982: 65)

21
did not publish any book of poetry afterwards, these early attempts

into the poetic field obviously marked, as we have seen, his

subsequent literary production to the point of having confided to his

wife Mary that the secret of his writing was that it was "poetry written

into prose" (Phillips 1984: 4).

Hemingway's style can be described with just three words:

truth, simplicity, poeticality. Truth as experiential and historical

adequacy; truth in spite of transformation. Simplicity which seeks to

convey experience “purely enough” by striving to include in the text

only what is “absolutely necessary and irreplaceable” (DIA 191). And

poetry that emerges from the writer's determination to get the words

right.

22
Works cited

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story. New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1969.
—————. Hemingway. The Writer as Artist. 4th ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972.
—————, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961.
New York: Scribner's, 1981.
Doody, Terrence. “Hemingway's Style and Jake's Narration.”
Hemingway. Seven Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Wagner-
Martin. 1998 ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 1974. 103-117.
Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet.” Selected Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. 1951 ed.
London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1919.
Finch, Geoffrey. Linguistic Terms and Concepts. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 2000.
Gerogiannis, Nicholas, ed. Ernest Hemingway. Complete Poems.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Letter to Dr. C. E. Hemingway.” Ernest
Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker.
New York: Scribner's, 1925. 153.
—————. The Sun Also Rises. 1996 ed. New York: Scribner, 1926.
—————. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1932.
—————. “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba.” By-Line:
Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. 1998 ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1934. 213-220.
—————. “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” By-Line:
Ernest Hemingway. Ed. William White. 1998 ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1935. 213-220.
—————. A Moveable Feast. 1996 ed. London: Arrow Books
Limited, 1964.
Hemingway, Mary Welsh. How It Was. New York: Alfred Knopf,
1976.
Hermann, Thomas. Quite a Little About Painters. Art and Artists in
Hemingway's Life and Work. Tübingen: Basel: Francke, 1997.
Levin, Harry. “Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway.”
Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Harold Bloom. 1985 ed. New York:
Chelsea House, 1957. 63-84.

23
 Maekawa, Toshihiro. “Hemingway's Iceberg Theory.” North Dakota
Quarterly 68.2&3 (2001): 37-48.
Mandel, Miriam. Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions.
Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1995.
—————. Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon: The Complete
Annotations. Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press,
Inc, 2001.
—————. Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer. The Complete
Annotations. Lanham (Maryland), Toronto & Plymouth (UK):
The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2008.
Meyers, Jefrey. Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Phillips, Larry W., ed. Ernest Hemingway On Writing. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984.
Plimpton, George. “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway.” Ernest
Hemingway. Ed. Harold Bloom. 1985 ed. New York: Chelsea
House, 1963. 119-136.
Stevens, Wallace. “Letter to José Rodríguez Feo.” Letters of Wallace
Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1945.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Intertextual Hemingway.” A Historical
Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. New
York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Walcott, Derek. “Hemingway Now.” North Dakota Quarterly 68.2&3
(2000): 5-13.
—————. "[T]his passage, or this whole section..." Personal
transcript of Steve Paul, 1999.

24

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