Oh, Hemingway!

I have a big fat crush on Ernest Hemingway. Last summer I read The Sun Also Rises, and I think it has the best ending out of any book I'v ever read:

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

And that just about wraps up that entire book. There's nothing more to say. 

This weekend I read A Farewell to Arms. It's beautiful. 

I was reading about him (wikipedia not going to lie), and interesting fact: his friend's wife called him a phony. His friend was F. Scott Fitzgerald. (She also called her husband a "fairy" and accused him of having a somewhat romantic relationship with Hemingway...I find this very fascinating.)

Also: his style was supposedly heavily influenced by a style guide from a newspaper he worked for. I have read a few style guides by magazines and newspapers and things (because I was forced to), and they aren't designed for the novelist. But it explains a lot because in journalism they're always telling you: short sentences, keep everything short. That's exactly what Hemingway is about. Self-consciously so, I think.

The thing I don't like about Hemingway is surprisingly not so much his extraordinary misogyny (for some strange reason I find it slightly endearing), but his transparency. It's all sort of right there for you, and as you read, you're thinking: "Got it. Got it. Okay. Oh this is sort of symbolic for that." I want to read it as simplicity - as intentional simplicity like in journalism - but sometimes I can't help but think: Maybe is this all the guy was capable of? Is transparency not simplicity, but lack of skill? Was Mrs. Fitzgerlad right? Was he a big, literary phony? 

Either way, he could tell a wonderful story. And I'd be lucky if I could write one half as well as he can.

It's more than telling a wonderful story, though. It's making the story's hero into the reader and the reader into the story's hero, and making you forget that there is a distinction. You get it and you sympathize completely and there is no world or mind outside the one you are reading.  I don't think this is simply because of the first-person narrative. It's something more subtle. Something that isn't simple or transparent or even self-conscious. It's something that cannot be learned from a style guide or in a classroom. I think you're either born with it or you aren't. You can either make a character and make him well and make him real, or you can't. He couldn't have faked that. 

And besides, I'm pretty happy Hemingway was apparently so influenced by a newspaper's style guide. Short sentences, after all, became pretty trendy and wit is in brevity.