The most any writer can reasonably hope to gain for his troubles is a fair hearing in life and a little appreciation after he’s gone. Ernest Hemingway achieved the rare feat of becoming the world’s most famous novelist while he was still very much alive. For his trouble he received a Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and at least one good pot shot from most of the literary lights of his day.
William Faulkner attacked his simple, declarative sentences by saying “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Vladimir Nabokov dismissed his overtly “masculine” subject matter as nothing more than “deep” boy stories. Gore Vidal, who hated everyone, seemed unable to forgive Hemingway for the way he treated older writers who had helped him get his start, namely Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
As the 20th century drew to a close the P.C. brigade had added predictably and for good measure that he was a misogynist, a homophobe and a racist. By 1992, Hemingway was so deeply out of fashion that Frederick Busch of the New York Times felt the need to apologize for even admiring him, which he did in an unfortunate little article entitled, “Reading Hemingway Without Guilt.”
One thing even his critics never discounted, however, was the enormous influence his style had on other writers. This was already apparent in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for “his mastery of the art of narrative … and for the influence he has exerted on contemporary style.” Fifty years after his suicide on July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, it is taken for granted that Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any writer of the 20th century.
Until recently, I found this preoccupation with Hemingway’s style a bit off- putting. It seemed to imply a lack of substance — why else would all the focus be on his style? Thinking thus, I avoided him for the first several years of my reading life.
When I did finally decide to read Hemingway for myself, the first thing I noticed was that I didn’t notice his style. What stood out to me was not his tough, terse prose or his repeated use of “and” in place of commas, rather it was just how deeply substantive he was.
My favorite Hemingway short story provides a good illustration. In “The Butterfly and the Tank,” a man is killed in a crowded Madrid bar for playing a practical joke. This is the story, but it is not the point. The story begins, “On this evening I was walking home from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of the shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather.”
Chicote’s is crowded; full of smoke, singing, laughter, men in uniform and the smell of wet leather coats. As the singing grows louder, a civilian in a brown suit squirts a waiter with a flit gun. Everyone laughs except the waiter, who is indignant. Delighted with his success, the man squirts the waiter twice more, lightheartedly. By now the music is dying down and three men in uniform grab the man and rush him out into the street where you hear the smack of a fist hitting his mouth. Moments later the man comes back into the bar. “He had the flit gun again and as he pushed, wide eyed and white faced into the room he made one general, unaimed, challenging squirt, holding it toward the whole company.” Almost immediately the man is pushed into a corner of the bar and shot.
When the narrator returns to Chicote’s the next day the manager solemnly informs him that “in the flit gun … he had eau de cologne. It was not a joke in such bad taste, you see?” As they ponder the previous night’s events, we learn that the man had bought the flit gun and cologne to use for a joke at a wedding and had announced his intention. He had bought them across the street. There was a label on the cologne bottle with the address. The bottle was in the wash room and it was there he had filled the flit gun. He had come into Chicote’s on account of the rain.
Eventually the manager, with his “relentless Spanish logic,” concludes that it was really just gaiety and that no one should have taken offense. “Listen,” said the manager, “How rare it is. His gaiety comes in contact with the seriousness of the war like a butterfly … like a butterfly and a tank.”
