Ernest Hemingway and Modernism

Ernest Hemingway He was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Ill. – a Chicago suburb His father was a doctor, and the young Hemingway grew up in a very middle class home. He tried to enlist in the Army in WWI, but was rejected because of an old eye injury. He travelled to Italy in WWI and served as an Ambulance driver on the Italian front. In 1918, while delivering chocolate and cigarettes to troops in the trenches, his position came under mortar attack, and Hemingway was badly injured by machine gun fire.

Hemingway, continued... Hemingway was known for being a “tough guy” and a “man of action.” His life hobbies included big game hunting, deep sea fishing, boxing, attending bull fights. His first book of short stories, called In Our Time (1925), sold poorly. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), about directionless young Americans in Paris after the First World War, was a major critical success. The Sun Also Rises gave birth to the phrase commonly used in the 20’s and 30’s to describe Hemingway’s generation: “The Lost Generation.”

Hemingway, continued A Farewell to Arms (1929) was about his experiences during WWI He went on to write a dozens more novels, collections of short stories, nonfiction pieces, etc. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea, a short novel inspired by his time in Cuba, deep sea fishing. He died in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He is considered the writer who most affected literary style in the 20th Century.

The Hemingway Style A Journalistic Style – Hemnigway once said that everything he ever learned about being a writer, he learned from the Kansas City Star style book. He was taught to “get to the point” as a young writer. The Tip of the Iceberg – Hemingway’s writing is often spare in its use of detail. Often, the emotional reality is under the surface, and the story is told through dialogue and basic description. The Art of Evasion – Often, Hemingway will ironically create emotion by intentionally avoiding it and by sticking to simple environmental details (the rain), or dialogue. Modernism – Hemingway’s writing – especially his writing of the 1920’s occasionally veers into experimental, Modernist sections.

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. Henry James, “The Ambassadors” (1909)

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. -- Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country”

The Hemingway Style, continued.... Hemingway created a style “"in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.” – Henry Louis Gates This has been called Hemingway’s iceberg theory: “the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission."

Hemingway on his style: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an 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.” —Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Modernism In art and literature, “modern” refers to a specific period in time – roughly between 1914 and 1950. Technically speaking, we are not “modern.” Artists – largely those in Paris after the First World War --became interested in new ways of seeing the world and experimented with new perspectives. In painting: Picasso and cubism – a technique where the artist attempts to show multiple perspectives at the same time. In music: the age of jazz, modern music (Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring), experimentation with melody, rhythm, form. In literature: Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, the “open” form, interior monologue, stream of consciousness