It seems I keep finding myself in the position of defending Ernest Hemingway against (among other things) charges of mediocrity. Not that Papa especially needs my help; his prose is fine enough to stand alone. Granted, he’s no Willa Cather, but he’s certainly a damn sight better than a mediocrity.
Yes, he is a hit or miss writer. He should have had a firmer editor to keep nonsense like A Farewell to Arms on a tight leash. But when he hits, he hits hard. “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, has reached the status of being so universally read that people forget to acknowledge how eloquent it is in making the reader notice the unspoken. This is a hard thing to do, and to do it elegantly, hiding the seams so that no one can see how much work went in–that is the work of a master craftsman.
Consider Fitzgerald, for the sake of comparison. Fitzgerald is also a hit or miss writer, and his prose at times collapses under its own flowering weight (a fair chunk of Tender Is the Night springs immediately to mind). But the difference in aesthetics, both in failure and in success is instructive. Fitzgerald is more obviously a Writer; Hemingway is not, perhaps due to his time as a reporter.
I think perhaps I am being unclear, and in the interest of clarity, I am going to coopt Jos?? Ortega y Gasset’s metaphor of the window and the garden from The Dehumanization of Art, and use it in a slightly different context. Imagine that, as a reader, you stand before a window, looking out onto a garden. The garden is what is happening in the novel. The window is the prose. Fitzgerald’s window is stained glass–bright colors, exquisite workmanship, and so on, very clearly art. Hemingway’s window seems like a simple view onto the garden–until the observer looks closer and notices that this is also a stained glass window, but the glass is so thin and the colors so delicate that it is easy not to notice how much workmanship went into the thing.
I have the inclination towards the same sort of aesthetic in others’ prose and poetry (I prefer Auden to Yeats, for example), and I expect the preference is a temperamental one; falling into the “subtle stained glass” camp, in my view at least, are Cather, Sherwood Anderson and Graham Greene, to list a few. With all of these writers, the writing itself is second to the power of observation on the part of the writers; there are no unnecessary curlicues to prove what a fine writer the author is. The work is in doing more with less.
It is hard work to wring evocative writing from ordinary language; I suspect it is less hard to bring it forth from elevated language. Both methods have their pitfalls: with the former, the author risks boring the reader, and with the latter, the author risks absurdity (or unreadability–see: Finnegans Wake).
Hemingway, when he misses, is boring and sentimental. More generally, Under Kilimanjaro and The Sun Also Rises aside, he has the damnedest time writing believable women. But when Hemingway gets it right, he coaxes beauty from ordinary language, and that is no mean feat. He is not the best writer to do this, or even the first, but as the first writer I read as a youngster who worked this way, he has a special place for me. I suppose we all have those writers, the ones we love more than they deserve simply because they were the first to introduce us to an idea or aesthetic we treasure. They deserve our attention, our respect, and–yes–defense against their detractors. In the world of the Best of List, we should not forget there is room for the good as well as the great–and that sometimes, even if it is only for a novel, they, too, are great.