Ernest Hemingway was the most important and influential 20th-century American fiction writer. He is our Kafka, our Proust, our Borges, our Joyce, our Premchand, our Hamsun, our Lu Xun, our Soseki, our Achebe. If we look at the impact that various 20th-century American fiction writers had on our literature and our national consciousness, there’s Hemingway far up at the top, and maybe Faulkner or Morrison in a distant second place.
His truly great work was written over a period of about fifteen years, from 1925 to 1940. After that point, he became much more famous with the general public, but he also became a bit of a joke. You can see this in the Lillian Ross profile of him in The New Yorker, where she follows the man around town, and records the stuff he says, subtly satirizing him:
[Hemingway] said he didn’t smoke. Smoking ruins his sense of smell, a sense he finds completely indispensable for hunting. “Cigarettes smell so awful to you when you have a nose that can truly smell,” he said, and laughed, hunching his shoulders and raising the back of his fist to his face, as though he expected somebody to hit him. Then he enumerated elk, deer, possum, and coon as some of the things he can truly smell.
Hemingway had made a reputation writing about war, bull-fighting, boxing—epic, manly pursuits. But it was possible for a long time for people to ignore how much Hemingway lived like he wrote. When they realized he actually spoke like he was in a Hemingway story, the literary world began to cool on him somewhat.
But in Hemingway’s best fiction, there’s a lot of depth. Although he obviously believes it’s good for men to face danger, fight bulls, go to war, and do all that stuff—his fiction doesn’t shy away from the ugliness.
For instance, one of his most famous stories: “The Capital of the World” is about a second-rate inn that’s full of run-down bullfighters.
Second-rate matadors lived at that pension because the address in the Calle San Jeronimo was good, the food was excellent and the room and board was cheap. It is necessary for a bull fighter to give the appearance, if not of prosperity, at least of respectability, since decorum and dignity rank above courage as the virtues most highly prized in Spain, and bullfighters stayed at the Luarca until their last pesetas were gone.
This inn has a young waiter named Paco who desperately wants to be a bull-fighter. His friend says the boy has no nerve and could never face a real bull—he will chicken out at the last minute. So they tape knives to the legs of a chair, and they decide to stage a mock bull-fight, with terrifying consequences.
Or there’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, about an important man who goes on an African safari, only to flee when he’s confronted with a lion. This story is largely told from the viewpoint of the safari guide, Wilson, whose viewpoint is deliciously, bitchily judgemental:
“I’d like to clear away that lion business,” Macomber said. “It’s not very pleasant to have your wife see you do something like that.”
I should think it would be even more unpleasant to do it, Wilson thought, wife or no wife, or to talk about it having done it. But he said, “I wouldn’t think about that any more. Any one could be upset by his first lion. That’s all over.”
Macomber forces himself to go back into the bush, to chase down this lion. He triumphs, but at a terrible cost.
Danger is dangerous. There is a reason that men are afraid of dangerous things. You can lose your life doing something absurd, something fool-hardy, something completely unnecessary. And why do it? Well, because that’s what men do.
This is the tension at the heart of Hemingway. At least in his fiction, Hemingway has respect for fear and for weakness—a respect that doesn’t necessarily come off in the bombastic pronouncements he makes when speaking in his own voice.
Hemingway is not canceled
Personally, I’ve been agonizing over this post for weeks, ever since I finished reading Hemingway’s collected stories. What is there to be said about Hemingway? He is great—everyone knows he is great. Nobody walks around thinking, “I bet that guy was a bad writer.”
You’re probably aware of the basic facts of Hemingway’s life. He was born in 1899, grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, as the son of a doctor. Enlisted in the Red Cross ambulance corps so he could get into World War I, was wounded and spent months recuperating in an Italian hospital—he was only 18. After the war, he wrote for a newspaper, The Toronto Star, and lived in Paris, where he became friends with a circle of artistic types: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. During this time he supported himself by writing pieces for the Toronto Star.
His story collection, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. And from the moment these books came out, while he was still in his mid-twenties, he was regarded as a major talent.
At some point he started publishing a lot of first-person reportage, often travel or sports writing. And this essayistic journalism established him as a personality—a larger than life figure who loved hunting, bull-fighting, travel, and all that kind of stuff. These pieces were critical both to his image and his bottom-line: they were a much more reliable source of income, and often paid much better, than his short stories or novels. However, although these pieces were a critical part of how he was perceived during his life, they are not a major part of his literary or artistic reputation today.
Sometimes Hemingway’s fans will act like he got canceled. But that did not happen. He’s not like David Foster Wallace—there was never a cancellation moment with Hemingway. He was an immediate success, at least amongst cultivated people, in the late 20s. Then he achieved mass popularity in the 40s. Then his popularity waned a bit in the 50s—but his reputation came back again after his suicide in 1961, and he’s remained atop the heap ever since.
Definitely there exists a feeling that Hemingway was misogynist. One of my best friends from college was a huge Hemingway fan, and he would complain that when he talked to women (in particular) about Hem, they didn’t seem particularly interested. I’ve no doubt that many people feel a vague distaste for Hemingway. But many more people, of both sexes, feel a lot of fondness for his work. More people are discovering him every day: I challenge anyone to crack The Sun Also Rises or A Moveable Feast and not come away charmed.
I’m not saying people have to read him, but if they do read him, they’ll probably enjoy it.
The two Hemingways
Hemingway is most famous for his minimalist style, but I think the extent of this compression is sometimes overstated: some of his narrators are compressed and don’t say what they’re thinking, but many of them have a very distinctive method of expounding at some length upon their thoughts.
This comes across the most in his nonfiction, but it’s also evident in The Sun Also Rises and in many of his later short stories. There’s a brand of Hemingway narrator that’s unafraid of making sweeping judgements, as in this passage from his short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, where a safari guide is describing American women:
They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.
This type of Hemingway narrator tends to make these judgements using simple language and syntactical parallelism, which gives the impression that he is somehow holding back, even though he’s not—he’s telling you everything he’s thinking. And although this is just the thoughts of a character—these sorts of sentiments and this sentence style is very reminiscent of the way Hemingway himself would come off in interviews, magazine profiles, and his nonfiction.
The Heminway I’m supposed to love
But Macomber is one of the last short stories Hemingway wrote, and many of his earlier stories are much more restrained.
For instance, one of his most famous stories, “Cat in the Rain”, is about a couple staying at a hotel in Italy, and the woman sees a cat outside in the rain and tries to go rescue it, but can’t find it. When she comes back, she and the man have the following exchange:
“Did you get the cat?” he asked, putting the book down.
“It was gone.”
“Wonder where it went to,” he said, resting his eyes from reading.
She sat down on the bed.
“I wanted it so much,” she said. “I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.”
George was reading again.
This is the classic Hemingway style—much remains unsaid. There is a sadness here. The woman is unfulfilled, she is trying to connect somehow with the world, connect with this man. We don’t know her backstory, don’t know precisely what is happening, but these actions are somehow pregnant with meaning.
And it’s great! I have a lot of admiration for these more-laconic Hemingway stories.
However, if you put a gun to my head I would say that I am much fonder of his heavier, more bombastic narrators.
The book of his that I read, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, begins with four stories written in his late style (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, “Capital of the World”, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are the best of these four). I really enjoyed these stories. They felt very clear, very direct. They cut right to the heart of matters, as if Hemingway knew exactly what he was trying to say—that there is a certain kind of manliness that is both very good and very dangerous. To follow this path doesn’t guarantee happiness, health, or prosperity—rather the opposite in fact. If you pursue danger long enough, eventually you will lose your life! But…it’s still worth doing.
Later in the volume, there are a number of stories (“Indian Camp”, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “Cat In The Rain”) that are more ambiguous. In “Indian Camp”, the protagonist, Nick Adams, goes with his father to an Indian village—his father is assisting in a birth. When it’s over, they discover that at some point during the delivery, the father slit his throat, committing suicide. After they leave, Nick and his father have an exchange:
“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. “It was an awful mess to put you through.”
“Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” Nick asked.
“No, that was very, very exceptional.”
“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”
It’s unclear why the man killed himself—we can surmise that he was in a lot of distress and somehow the sight of his wife in so much pain was enough to send him over the edge. But we just don’t know why it happened. The effect on Nick is curious—he is exhilarated by his close encounter with death. The story ends:
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Objectively, this is probably a better story than “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, because it’s so striking, so ambiguous, so pregnant with meaning. But it’s just a lot less fun! It’s so self-important, it doesn’t have that bitchy self-awareness that Macomber has. “Indian Camp” is easier to admire, harder to love.
Papa
Sometimes people say Hemingway is inimitable—that his style seems like something anybody can do, but actually nobody could do it as well as him.
This isn’t true. Hemingway is extremely imitable. That’s why many writers have imitated him, and they have in fact built very long careers, full of praise and critical acclaim, on their basis of their Hemingway imitation. This imitation became so common that for decades his way of writing was baked into the very structure of the writing workshop, where all the advice was about leaving things out, allowing much to remain unstated, letting the images carry the weight of the emotions, etc.
The most famous Hemingway imitator was Raymond Carver, although, as I wrote in an earlier post, the imitation was something forced upon him by his editor, Gordon Lish. The other very successful imitator of Hemingway was Ann Beattie, who published dozens of stories in the New Yorker during the 1980s—these stories were usually about domestic situations that were reported in a very flat, matter-of-fact fashion, full of suppressed sorrow and longing. I attempted to read a collection recently by Ann Beattie and after about twenty stories I threw it up—didn’t really care for it. But she got very far with this style and was beloved by many people.
More recently, Hemingway has inspired a whole wave of affectless autofiction writers. Hemingway was a big influence on Bret Easton Ellis, who paired a flat, directly-reported style with extreme events (drug use, sex, murder, etc). And Bret Easton Ellis was the ultimate inspiration for most of the major American autofictions of the last twenty years.
Hemingway was the father of us all.
It’s true that sometimes when people get too far from the source, their Hemingway pastiches can fall flat. Like it’s one thing you imitate Hemingway, but if you’re imitating Ann Beattie then you start to lose the signal, and the result can seem a little thin.
War is good
I enjoyed the content of these stories. They are so manly! Approximately none of these stories are about people who have jobs, unless that job is: a) bullfighter; b) boxer; or c) big-game hunter.
That’s not literally true, because there’s that Nick Adams story that’s about his dad going out on a call as a doctor, and there’s the story about the waiter who’s a wannabe bullfighter. But still...the stories are very manly. They are concerned with heightened human experiences: war, hunting, bull-fighting, etc.
And the stories generally affirm those experiences, although usually the affirmation is not unmixed. For instance, there are several stories about shell-shock and the after-effects of war. There’s a great story, “In Another Country”, about a guy recovering in a hospital in Italy, and all the various disfigured soldiers in this hospital. The narrator feels ashamed because he was wounded and never really got to test himself in battle—as a result, he feels inadequate compared to some of the other guys, who are real war-heroes.
The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have turned out to be a hawk either.
Hemingway doesn’t come straight out and say, “War is good. Going to war is good”. But when you read Hemingway, you definitely come away with the sense that there is something good about war.
I don’t think this sort of theme would’ve been too unusual when Hemingway was writing. He was only writing a generation after Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad—two guys who didn’t exactly celebrate danger, but they didn’t not celebrate it. In Hemingway’s time, it feels like there was more of an acceptance that violence and danger were just part of being a man, and they were an accepted part of literature as well.
To me, this reads like a dispatch from another time. I have never read a contemporary literary work that celebrates war and violence and conflict in quite the same way. I don’t actually know if it would be possible for someone today to write this kind of book, because Hemingway really believed in this stuff. He really did seek out danger. He really did love violence and death. And most contemporary writers don’t love those things, so it would be disingenuous for them to write in praise of danger.
Yes, there’s lots of people nowadays who write thrillers, suspense novels, horror fiction, superhero books, and other forms of fiction that celebrate danger, but these are clearly fantasies. With Hemingway, it was fantasy, but...it was also reality. That’s what made Hemingway good, for him the fantasy was real.
The Complete Stories has a confusing arrangement
Finally, I have a few words on this book I’ve been reading, The Complete Short Stories of Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition. It has three parts. The first part is The First Forty-Nine Stories, which was published in Hemingway’s lifetime and incorporates most of his published fiction and all of his most famous stories. Then it’s got a second part that contains the short fiction that was published in his lifetime but never reprinted. And then it’s got a third part that contains his unpublished short fiction.
The part that is most confusing and difficult to read is the first part, The First Forty-Nine Stories. This part begins with four short stories, “The Short Happy Life...”, “Capital of the World”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Old Man At The Bridge” that were written in the late 1930s. These are amongst the last stories he ever published.
Then it skips backward and reprints the text of his first collection In Our Time. But this collection is itself a composite of two things. First, he wrote a chapbook that was composed of eighteen short vignettes about a man going to war in Europe. Then, later on, he intercut these vignettes with a bunch of short stories, which are often about a kid named Nick Adams who grows up as a doctor’s sun in Michigan and then goes off to war. The Nick Adams stories some of the weakest in the collection (not universally true, some, like “Indian Camp” are quite good, but many of them seem formless and meandering), and the structure of In Our Time, with these intercut vignettes, doesn’t really work. It’s so confusing. And then the vignettes just end, because now the book has segued seamlessly into the stories from Hemingway’s second collection, Men Without Women. Generally the stories from this collection, and from his third, Winner Take Nothing, are better than the ones from In Our Time.
So just be prepared: if you open this book, you’re going to read four incredible stories that are in more of a late-Hemingway style (much more narration, much less minimalist), then you’re going to read a bunch of stories and vignettes that seem not quite fully-formed. Then, after a few hundred pages, you’re going to get to the classic Hemingway stories that are what he’s truly famous for.
The second section of the book (the uncollected stories) is diverting, though the two best stories formed the basis for his novel To Have And Have Not, and are probably best read in that volume. The third section of the book (the unpublished stories) is no good--none of the stories in this section are really worth reading.
“What is this? What am I reading?”
Like I said, I’ve been agonizing for weeks over this post. The same thing happened earlier in the year when I was writing about Moby-Dick. With these kinds of writers, it’s hard to find a new angle. Hemingway is great! He remains the GOAT. He is not canceled. He is still extremely famous. When I was doing a cursory google to see what scholarly material there was on this guy, I was shocked by the amount. The writing world really is winner-take-all. With Hemingway there is a wealth of material on even the smallest aspects of his life, while with someone like O. Henry there is very little, and for Edna Ferber there is virtually nothing.
My history with this volume, The Complete Stories of Hemingway, actually spans the last five months. I first picked up this volume in May, after I did my Raymond Carver post, because I was like, “Maybe it would be fun if I wrote about more of these classic short-story writers who I’ve never really read in depth.”
But I read a few of the stories in the Hemingway volume, and then I started thinking to myself, “What is this? What am I reading?” Remember, I spent the first half of this year reading a lot of classic 19th-century American fiction. And the jump between that fiction and Hemingway seemed so vast that I struggled to understand where it had come from.
That’s why I decided to go back and fill in the gaps. That’s what led me to read O. Henry, and that’s what got me interested in the early 20th-century magazine ecosystem.
As a result, I started to understand Hemingway a lot better.
Basically, in 1925, you had these journals like Scribner’s, which had been publishing for a very long time, but which had limited circulation (maybe 50-150k). They had long since been overtaken both in circulation and cultural importance, by the slicks—The Saturday Evening Post and Women’s Home Companion both had circulations in the two million range.
During this time, there were a number of writers who were both award-winners and best-sellers, and most of these people wrote primarily for the slicks. Edna Ferber won the Pulitzer in 1924—she wrote mostly for the slicks. Similarly, Booth Tarkington got the Pulitzer in 1918 and 1921—he too had written a lot of stories for The Saturday Evening Post. Both of these writers were huge bestsellers. Ferber and Tarkington both topped the bestseller lists for many years in the 1920s. And these writers wrote in a straightforward realist style that seems to be an orderly advance upon Edith Wharton and the early Henry James—you’ve got an omniscient narrator who just sits down and tells you a tale about people who behave in relatively explicable, understandable ways.
But...there were new ideas in the air. New ways of writing. The key figure here really seems to be Sherwood Anderson. The stories in Winesburg, Ohio definitely feel like some midway point between Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. In Winesburg, Ohio, you still have a more intrusive narrator, more prone to editorializing, but there’s also something very unassimilable and inexplication about these characters (who the narrator calls “grotesques”). They behave in strange ways and function on some symbolic level that goes beyond traditional realism.
Obviously, many other writers were doing something similar, most notably H.P. Lovecraft in Weird Tales. But, unlike those writers, Sherwood Anderson got a lot of appreciative critical attention of the same sort as Hemingway would later get. With Hemingway, although the stories are still realist stories, there’s something not-totally-accessible about them. There is a withholding, which forces the reader to linger much longer on lines and on images than they would in, say, an Edna Ferber novel.
Hemingway, while he was not an immediate best-seller, was highly-respected by people who cared about these emerging trends in literature. He hung out in Paris with avant-garde writers and painters. He published first in little magazines with tiny circulations, then started publishing in The Atlantic and Scribner’s. Like Gertrude Stein, he was a link that connected the American literary world to the fancy new ideas coming out of Europe.
With Edna Ferber and Booth Tarkington, nothing was mysterious about their careers—they were immensely popular, sold lots of books, made lots of money. But I was a little curious about how where Hemingway’s money was coming from, so I looked into his finances. Hemingway’s novel advances were nothing special—the real money came from serialization rights (Scribner’s paid $14,500 to serialize A Farewell to Arms, the most they’d ever paid) and from movie rights ($80,000 in 1932 dollars for the movie rights to A Farewell to Arms, which would be $1,500,000 in modern dollars). Throughout the thirties, he also wrote for Esquire, for at first $250 and then $500 per article. During the Spanish Civil War, Esquire paid him $1000 a month. ($250 in 1933 dollars was $5,600 today).
For the first twenty years of his career, Ernest Hemingway was embraced neither by the mass audience, nor by the critical establishment—he did not sell fiction to the highest-paying journals, his novels did not top bestseller lists and he did not win prizes. In fact, the head of Columbia University, Nicholas Mannes Murray, overruled the Pulitzer jury’s recommendation and prevented For Whom The Bell Tolls from being awarded the prize in 1940, instead the committee issued no award that year.1
But, right from the beginning, Ernest Hemingway was pretty cool! And just like today, coolness and popularity were at odds with each other. He was cool precisely because he wasn’t accepted by everyone: he was cool because he wasn’t Sinclair Lewis or Edna Ferber or Booth Tarkington. And there was a way in which this coolness could get turned into money—Esquire paid him twice what they paid their other contributors, and I am sure his film rights also sold for more money than they otherwise would’ve.
Even now, even today, there exist many authors who’ve made a living from being cool. And the mechanisms are different-but-similar. If you’re cool, you earn more for film rights, you get more film/TV work, you get more magazine assignments, etc.
Later in life, Hemingway became extremely popular. In 1952, The Old Man And The Sea was printed for an audience of 5 million people in Life magazine and it won the Pulitzer. But, because he was so popular, he turned into a figure of derision. Dwight MacDonald lambasted Old Man And The Sea as an example of ‘midcult’ and Lillian Ross satirized Hemingway in The New Yorker. Critics turned against his later work, saying he’d lost his touch.
After his suicide, I don’t know that Hemingway was ever in danger of being forgotten. Certainly, he’s gone through no period where he was out of print. Even today, there’s no Library of America edition of his work because, I believe, his work remains in print and remains highly lucrative for Scribner, which doesn’t want to cannibalize their potential sales (EDIT: This was true last time I looked into it, but is no longer true, now there are two Hemingway LOA volumes. Should’ve double-checked sorry.)
As with Elvis, his image will forever be tarnished by his later years, and by the way in which he slowly turned into a figure of fun. He’ll never again be quite as cool as he once was. But his influence as a writer is much higher today than it was during his life. This whole highbrow-literary ecosystem that we write about, with all of these Beatties and Carvers and Ellises—all of them—is built upon lessons that people learned from reading Hemingway.
And also the stories are pretty good.
Elsewhere on the Internet
Last week I spoke to Tom Watters at
. I had a great time, he’s a wonderful interviewer. We talked a lot about my fiction—always a strange experience. For the first year of my publishing short stories on Substack, it was a sort of oddity—it didn’t really come up much when people wrote about me. They were more interested in hearing about my novel or about the Great Books or the publishing industry. Whereas now my tales tend to be the main thing people want to discuss! Here’s me on the genesis of the tale form:NAOMI: [Reading The Decameron] just made me feel like I didn’t have to hew to these models that are not really very old. Like I don’t have to write the way that Lori Moore writes. You know, I was taught a lot of rules in my MFA program—We work within a certain form as literary short story writers, but that’s not the only way to write a story.
One notable thing about Hemingway’s influence: not only does he inform “workshop” fiction and autofiction—you know, these folks who think they’re not doing “genre”—he also informs genre fiction! American crime fiction, thrillers in general and, I would say, espionage fiction in general would not exist as we know them without him. Hammett basically took the atmosphere and conventions of pulp fiction and combined them with Hemingway-esque prose style and … attitude, I guess you’d say. For the most part, the crime fiction genre as practiced in America flows from that.
He is great and not cancelled. I also don’t think he hated women but he had serious questions about what it means to be a man in a world ping-ponging between the expectations set by war and an emerging professional class. When a Hemingway man isn’t injured by war, he is injured by missing a war. I’m reminded of the Princeton boxer who savages the bull fight in TSAR, because he can’t tell the difference between bullying and courage/artistry.
I’m a Fitzgerald man, though.