Mr. Hemingway’s Dry-Points

From The Dial, October 1924, Vol. 77, No. 4.


Mr. Hemingway’s poems are not particularly important, but his prose is of the first distinction. He must be counted as the only American writer but one—Mr. Sherwood Anderson—who has felt the genius of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and has been evidently influenced by it. Indeed, Miss Stein, Mr. Anderson, and Mr. Hemingway may now be said to form a school by themselves. The characteristic of this school is a naïveté of language, often passing into the colloquialism of the character dealt with, which serves actually to convey profound emotions and complex states of mind. It is a distinctively American development in prose—as opposed to more or less successful American achievements in the traditional style of English prose—which has artistically justified itself at its best as a limpid shaft into deep waters.

Not, however, that Mr. Hemingway is imitative. On the contrary, he is rather strikingly original, and in the dry, compressed little vignettes of In Our Time has almost invented a form of his own:

“They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.”

Mr. Hemingway is remarkably successful in suggesting moral values by a series of simple statements of this sort. His more important book is called In Our Time, and below its cool objective manner really constitutes a harrowing record of barbarities: you have not only political executions, but criminal hangings, bullfights, assassinations by the police, and all the cruelties and enormities of the war. Mr. Hemingway is wholly unperturbed as he tells about these things: he is not a propagandist even for humanity. His bullfight sketches have the dry sharpness and elegance of the bullfight lithographs of Goya. And, like Goya, he is concerned first of all with making a fine picture. He is showing you what life is, too proud an artist to simplify. And I am inclined to think that his little book has more artistic dignity than any other that has been written by an American about the period of the war.

Not perhaps the most vivid book, but the soundest. Mr. Hemingway, who can make you feel the poignancy of the Italian soldier deciding in his death agony that he will “make a separate peace,” has no anti-militaristic parti pris which will lead him to suppress from his record the exhilaration of the men who had “jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge” and who were “frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.” It is only in the paleness, the thinness of some of his effects that Mr. Hemingway sometimes fails. I am thinking especially of the story called “Up in Michigan,” which should have been a masterpiece, but has the curious defect of dealing with rude and primitive people yet leaving them shadowy.

In Our Time has a pretty and very amusing cover designed from scrambled newspaper clippings. The only objection I have to its appearance is that the titles are throughout printed without capitals—thus: “in our time by ernest hemingway—paris.” This device, which used to be rather effective when the modernists first used it to call attention to the fact that they had something new to offer, has now grown common and a bore. The American advertisers have taken it over as one of their stock tricks. And it is so unsightly in itself that it is rather a pity to see it become—as in the case of Mr. Hemingway’s book and Mr. Hueffer’s transatlantic review—a sort of badge of everything that is freshest and most interesting in modern writing.