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By Root 1038 0

The primitive syntax is the equivalent of Pollock’s “drip and dribble” technique and, like it, is a declaration of war against the genteel and academic style. There is also a parallel with the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, whose “Less is more” applies to Hemingway’s style, which gets its effect from what it leaves out. (Maybe this is the characteristic twentieth-century manner in the arts: I’m told that in the music of Webern and the jazz of Thelonious Monk one should listen not to the notes but to the silences between them.) Because Mies van der Rohe’s buildings are simple in form and without ornamentation many people think they are functional, but in fact they are as aggressively unfunctional as the wildest baroque. The same goes for Hemingway’s style which is direct and simple on the surface but is actually as complexly manneristic as the later James. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration,” Hemingway once said, “and the Baroque is over.” But there is Baroque with curlicues and Baroque with straight lines, Baroque with ornamentation and Baroque with blank spaces, seventeenth-century Baroque and twentieth-century Baroque.

“Refinements in the use of subordinate clauses are a mark of maturity in style,” writes Albert C. Baugh in A History of the English Language. “As the loose association of clauses (parataxis) gives way to more precise indications of logical relationship and subordination (hypotaxis), there is need for a greater variety of words effecting the union.” Hemingway was a most paratactical writer. Not because he was primitive but because he was stylistically sophisticated to the point of decadence. Supremely uninterested in “precise indications of logical relationship,” he needed very few words; his vocabularly must be one of the smallest in literary history.

I can see why, in the ’twenties, the two paragraphs quoted above were fresh and exciting, but today they seem as academically mannered as Euphues or Marius the Epicurean. This is, of course, partly because Hemingway’s stylistic discoveries have become part of our natural way of writing, so that they are at once too familiar to cause any excitement and at the same time, in the extreme form in which Hemingway used them, they now sound merely affected. This kind of writing is lost unless it can create a mood in the reader, since it deliberately gives up all the resources of logic and reason. But I was, in 1961, conscious of the tricks—and impatient with them. Why must we be told about the two ways of walking to the hospital and the three bridges and the chestnut seller? The aim is probably to create tension by lingering over the prosaic—writers of detective stories, a highly artificial literary form, have learned much from Hemingway—just as the purpose of stating that it is warm in front of a fire and that newly roasted chestnuts feel warm in one’s pocket is to suggest the coldness of Milan that fall. But these effects didn’t “carry” with me, I just felt impatient.

A Farewell to Arms is generally considered Hemingway’s best novel. It has aged and shriveled from what I remembered. I found myself skipping yards of this sort of thing:

“We could walk or take a tram,” Catherine said.

“One will be along,” I said. “They go by here.”

“Here comes one,” she said.

The driver stopped his horse and lowered the metal sign on his meter. The top of the carriage was up and there were drops of water on the driver’s coat. His varnished hat was shining in the wet. We sat back in the seat and the top of the carriage made it dark.

[Half a page omitted]

At the hotel I asked Catherine to wait in the carriage while I went in and spoke to the manager. There were plenty of rooms. Then I went out to the carriage, paid the driver, and Catherine and I walked in together. The small boy in buttons carried the package. The manager bowed us towards the elevator. There was much red plush and brass. The manager went up in the elevator with us.

There is a great deal of paying cab drivers and finding it dark at night inside a closed carriage.

I found both the military part