Hard Boiled Prose, Hemingway Style

Hard, cold, and carved. The minimalist prose style made famous by Ernest Hemingway shook up avant-garde Paris in the 1920s and made him a best-selling author. Within a few years any American tough guy writer with a glass of bourbon beside his typewriter wanted to sound like Hemingway.

“They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of the hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard.” [in our time, Ernest Hemingway, 1924]

Everyone from Raymond Carver to the interwar Pulp hacks tried to imitate the terse and telegraphic tone of the Hemingway narrator. Everyone wanted to sound like an intellectual barbarian who thought deep but parceled out insights as if long words were banned that year.

Expatriates in Paris

In the early 1920s Hemingway was a wannabe author with a busted knee picked up in the war from an Austrian trench mortar. He lived in France with his well-off wife and worked as a foreign correspondent. Word count was king, especially when he had to telegraph his work to the office and each letter cost money. Fellow American Ezra Pound showed him how to take that talent for boiling down a story and make it art.

Pound had made his name in London’s cutting edge artistic circles before the war. He was a frizzy-haired poet sage with views that leaned so far right they were practically horizontal. His poetry movement Imagism pushed punchy Haiku-like short poems packed with clear visual images.

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ Petals on a wet, black bough.” [In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound 1912]

A few beautiful profiles pop out of the teeming masses leaving a Paris metro station and are immediately boiled down by Pound’s pen into colourful flower petals on a glistening dark surface. Poetry reduced to its barest essentials.

On the Cutting Edge

Pound had moved on from Imagism by the time he met Hemingway but never abandoned its key concepts of compression and clarity. He showed the young journalist how that minimalist approach could combine with the limited word count of foreign correspondent journalism to create art. Hemingway cut his prose to the bone and wrote about very personal themes: decadent American expatriates in Paris and the testing of courage in war and sport. He added lessons learned from Gertude Stein (repetition, repetition, repetition), Sherwood Anderson (small town frankness), and Ivan Turgenev (the meaningful in the unsaid).

It was a clean, carved prose style avant-garde enough to impress the expatriate artists in Paris but simple enough to hit big in mainstream America. Uniquely for cutting edge prose, it was easier to read than the purple prose of more mainstream writers. It also helped Hemingway’s rocket-fueled rise to best-selling author that his stories were often oblique takes on standard genres: A Farewell to Arms is a weepy war melodrama rewritten as literature; The Killers is his sideways version of a gangster tale.

By the 1930s every writer who fancied himself realistic or just tough-minded was imitating Hemingway’s minimalism. Even the crowd who wrote for the pulp magazine industry were big fans, ingesting it direct from the source or through intermediaries like Dashiell Hammett of Maltese Falcon fame. Pulp writer Theodore Roscoe managed to write an autobiographical sketch in a style even more clipped than Hemingway.

“Spent some time in Paris and Marseilles. Back to take a run into Canada. Saw something of Texas. Over to Madeira and the Canary islands. Traipsed across Spain a-ways, but didn’t see a bullfight. One day in Ireland. Down to Morocco.” [The Men Who Make the Argosy, Theodore Roscoe, 1930s]

All-American Minimalism

Hemingway’s influence continued to grow even after his shotgun suicide in 1961. His style became the default prose for hard boiled crime fiction and anything involving big game hunting. Young American authors in any genre had to work hard not to sound like him.

No-one made any formal advances until the 1970s when George V Higgins contrasted the descriptive minimalism with dialogue from Boston lowlifes as messy and incoherent as a real-world transcript. Then Raymond Carver and his editor cut the minimalism down even further into a skeletal vehicle for tales of the quiet desperation in everyday suburban lives. A thousand creative writing courses bloomed. Hemingway’s style had returned to the world of avant-garde literary fiction where it began.

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The Men from Miami: American Rebels on Both Sides of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution [or amazon.com]

The King of Nazi Paris: Henri Lafont and the Gangsters of the French Gestapo [or amazon.com]

Soldiers of a Different God: How the Counter-Jihad Created Mayhem, Murder, and the Trump Presidency [or amazon.com]

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion 1935-41  [or amazon.com]

Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World  [or amazon.com]

Franco’s International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War [or amazon.com]