412 Making It New: 1900–1945(1941) commemorates three days of a guerilla action in the Spanish Civil War
and celebrates the republican fight against fascism. “I suppose I am an anarchist,”
Hemingway had written to Dos Passos in 1932; and the novel, like To Have and
Have Not, shows a lonely individualist fighting while he can, not for a political
program, but for the simple humanist principles of justice and, above all, liberty.
But a more fundamental way to “live in it” is to live alone. In “Big Two-Hearted
River,” the story that concludes In Our Time, Nick starts out from the site of a
burned-out town in Michigan. “There was no town, nothing but the rails and
the burned-over country,” the reader is told. “Even the surface had been burned
off the ground.” The disaster that has annihilated the town aptly crowns the world of
violence and slaughter revealed in the vignettes that have interleaved the stories of
In Our Time. For Hemingway, wounded in World War I, life was war, nasty, brutal,
and arbitrary; and that is a lesson Nick has now learned. Putting this stuff of
nightmares behind him, Nick heads away from the road for the woods and the
river. Far from other human sounds, he fishes, pitches a tent, builds a fire, prepares
himself food and drink. “He was there, in the good place,” the reader is told. “He was
in his home where he had made it.” It is a familiar American moment, this sealing
of a solitary compact with nature. It is also a familiar concluding moment in
Hemingway’s work: a man alone, trying to come to terms with the stark facts of life
and death – sometimes the death of a loved one, as in A Farewell to Arms (1929),
other times, as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938), his own inevitable and immi-
nent dying. And what seals the compact, and confirms the starkness is, always, the
pellucid clarity of expression, the stark, simple economy of the terms in which
Hemingway’s lonely heroes are rendered to us. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,”
Hemingway observed. And he told that truth in a style that was a verbal equivalent
of the grace under pressure shown by his finest protagonists: concrete, contained,
cleaving to the hard facts of life, only disclosing its deeper urgencies in its
repetitions and repressions – in what its rhythms implied and what it did not say.
Hemingway called this verbal art the art of omission. “You could omit anything
if you knew that you omitted,” Hemingway reflected in A Movable Feast (1964), his
memoir of his years in Paris after World War I; “and the omitted part would
strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
He had begun to develop this art as a newspaperman: the copyroom of the Kansas
City Star, where he worked before World War I, was as much his Yale and Harvard
as it was for Mark Twain, or the whaling ship was for Herman Melville. “Pure
objective writing is the only true form of storytelling,” his closest companion on
the Star told him. Hemingway never forgot that advice; and he never forgot the
importance of his newspaper training to him either. “I was learning to write in those
days,” he recalled in Death in the Afternoon, “and I found the greatest difficulty ...
was to put down what really happened in action, what the actual things were
which produced the emotions that you experienced.” The “real thing,” Hemingway
remembered, was “something I was working very hard to try to get,” first in Kansas
and then in Paris, where he received encouragement in his pursuit of concrete fact,
and an example of how to do it, from Ezra Pound and, even more, Gertrude Stein.GGray_c04.indd 412ray_c 04 .indd 412 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM