A Farewell To Arms
...and journalistic. These
are all good words; they all apply. Perhaps because of his
training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the
declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has
been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts
and rights coming at us without pause. Take the following
passage: We were all cooked. The thing was not to
recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked
would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on
somebody's staff? No. He was. It was all balls. The style
gains power because it is so full of sensory detail. There was
an inn in the trees at the Bains de l'Allaiz where the
woodcutters stopped to drink, and we sat inside warmed by
the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon in it.
They called it gluhwein and it was a good thing to warm you
and to celebrate with. The inn was dark and smoky inside
and afterward when you went out the cold air came sharply
into your lungs and numbed the edge of your nose as you
inhaled. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly
from Hemingway's and his characters'--beliefs. The punchy,
vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these
are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored.
And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions
like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead
he seeks the concrete, the tangible: "hot red wine with
spices, cold air that numbs your nose." A simple "good"
becomes higher praise than...
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