Hemingway for Juveniles

Hemingway for Juveniles

A Farewell to Arms? Hemingway with 12 Gauge, Double-Barrelled Shotgun (Probably the Gun that Killed Him)

I find Ernest Hemingway’s prose a bit juvenile. He is widely praised for his simple direct style, but some might call it simplistic not simple. His characters are stiff, and often have comical monosyllabic names like Jake, Brett, Nick, Dick, Bill, Sam, Max, etc. Women are girls. Men are MEN.

Here he is talking about the night:

… that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

Not bad, I suppose, although I can explain the night with my eyes closed, not knowing if it is day or night. Here is the great Irish writer, James Joyce, describing the night sky:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

See the difference? Hemingway’s prose lacks beauty.

He was a lout, a brute, a vulgarian, a hypermasculine clown, an egomaniac, and a cruel drunk too, but that’s another story. (It is said that his mother dressed him as a girl for the first two years of his life. Maybe it triggered him.) He shot rhinos for “sport,” and liked to hone his boxing skills on innocent bystanders. Why do so many Americans love this odious — and somewhat ridiculous — figure? It is embarrassing. We should forget him.

Unfortunately, Hemingway’s commonplace simplified American English has become the norm in both speech and writing here in the US. It makes a sharp contrast to Joyce’s Hiberno-English, a venerable, colorful, and ancient form of the tongue.

Hemingway’s style has been described as journalistic. If you like works of journalism, it may suit you. I prefer works of art. (Imagine a painting done in a “journalistic” style. It would look like a photograph, wouldn’t it?)

Papa has a lot to answer for.