In the foreword to Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker wrote: “He was one of the foremost writers that America has produced, an epoch-making stylist with a highly original talent who spawned imitators by the score and dealt, almost single-handed, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby, the pretentious, and the false. The writing of fiction was hard for him. The intensity of his application was so great that a few hours of it literally exhausted him, and a day’s work for him normally did not exceed five or six hundred words.” Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923 by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions. The real breakthrough came in 1924 when Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press published in our time. This pamphlet comprised eighteen untitled sketches, mostly reworked versions of newspaper dispatches Hemingway had previously filed. To read the original newspaper versions and then to read Hemingway’s reworking of them is an education in itself for any reader or writer. These eighteen vignettes from in our time were inserted between the stories which made up Hemingway’s first commercially published book, In Our Time. This master work by an “epoch-making stylist” was published in 1925 by Boni and Liveright in an edition of 1,300 copies. The book changed writing in English. In those Paris years, Hemingway was experimenting passionately and forging the style that was to have such a massive impact on twentieth-century prose. He learned from Gertrude Stein, who, as he puts it in A Moveable Feast, “discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable...”. He also learned from her the need for clarity, for a language that would allow the reader to see and feel what the writer had seen and felt. This is the core of Hemingway’s achievement. Hemingway knew how far ahead he was of the reading public. In the following extract from A Moveable Feast, he recalls writing the early stories: It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. There is most certainly no demand for them. But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only needs confidence. It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them. Oh sure, I thought, I’m so far ahead of them now that I can’t afford to eat regularly. It would not be bad if they caught up a little. I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. He also recalls the artistic struggle in the following extract from A Moveable Feast: Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph. How revealing is that first sentence! I think his contrasting “make” and “describe” captures the essence of his writing. Hemingway was “making” his scenes; he was using English in ways it had never been used before. Ford Madox Ford once remarked of Hemingway’s writing that the words “strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook.” This illusion of freshness was the result of a new poetics of prose, new principles of architecture. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over”. He described the new prose further in one of the campfire chats in Green Hills of Africa: “The reason everyone now tries to avoid [literary writing], to deny that it is important, to make it seem vain to try to do it, is because it is so difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.” “What is this now?” “The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” “You believe it?” “I know it.” “And if a writer can get this?” “Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance that he succeeds.” “But that is poetry you are talking about.” “No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.” “And why has it not been written?” “Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.” Let us examine this “making” more closely. I have chosen to look at the first two paragraphs of Hemingway’s “In Another Country” because David Lodge has written an essay on them in his book, The Art of Fiction (1992), that provides a lengthier analysis than I can afford here. I urge Lodge’s essay, “Repetition”, on all who are interested in Hemingway’s style, and I warmly commend the book in general. The narrator of “In Another Country” is a soldier who has been wounded fighting on the Italian side in World War I. He and his companions at the hospital have been variously mutilated, and although they have escaped death they are perhaps condemned to a life not worth living. “In Another Country” is a story about men coping with trauma. The maimed soldiers are cut off from other people; they live, emotionally, “in another country”. Death, in this story, is always imminent. The story’s title is taken from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: “Thou hast committed—/Fornication? but that was in another country: and, besides,/the wench is dead” (IV.i.39-41). “In Another Country” was published in 1927 in Men without Women. Here are the first two paragraphs: In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference. David Lodge begins his essay as follows: If you have the time and inclination, get some coloured pens or pencils and draw a ring round the words that occur more than once in the first paragraph of Hemingway’s story, a different colour for each word, and join them up. You will reveal a complex pattern of verbal chains linking words of two kinds: those with referential meaning, fall, cold, dark, wind, blew, which we can call lexical words, and articles, prepositions and conjunctions like the, of, in, and, which we can call grammatical words. Hemingway rejects traditional rhetoric. “The words are simple,” says Lodge, “but their arrangement is not”. It is impossible not to notice the repetition of the word “and”, which joins together the simple declarative statements. Good writing demands elegant variation of vocabulary and syntax, but Hemingway defies the rules to create an incantatory, elegiac rhythm, the repeated lexical words sounding again and again. Of these words, Lodge writes: The American word for autumn, fall, carries in it a reminder of the death of vegetation, and echoes the conventional phrase for those who die in battle, “the fallen.” Its juxtaposition with cold and dark in the second sentence strengthens these associations. The brightly lit shops seem to offer some distraction (an effect heightened by the fact that there is no lexical repetition in this sentence) but the narrator’s attention quickly focuses on the game hanging outside the shops, further emblems of death. The description of the snow powdering in their fur, and the wind ruffling their feathers, is literal and exact, but tightens the association of fall, cold, dark, wind, blew, with death. Three of the repeated words come together for the first time in the last sentence with a poetic effect of closure: “It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.” The mountains are where the war is going on. Wind, so often a symbol of life and spirit in religious and Romantic writing, is here associated with lifelessness. God is very dead in these early stories of Hemingway. The hero has learned from the trauma of combat to distrust metaphysics as well as rhetoric. He trusts only his senses, and sees experience in starkly polarized terms: cold/warm, light/dark, life/death. I disagree with Lodge that “The brightly lit shops seem to offer some distraction”; rather, I think the brightly lit shops are an example of what Lodge later calls an “implied simile”. The shops are bright and warm while the street is dark and cold; the narrator is outside the shops, his being outside looking in yet another expression of his being “in another country”. The animals hanging outside the shops, emblems of death, also suggest in the detail of the description something of the indignities of death, the birds’ feathers being ruffled out of place, the foxes’ tails twirling in the wind, the deer, once graceful and aquiver with nervous life, hanging “stiff and heavy and empty”. “Empty” is a powerful but curious word to use to mean simply gutted, and I think its use in combination with “stiff” suggests also the emptiness of the maimed soldiers. It’s helpful to think of this first paragraph as an image in itself, the statement of the melody, the story in miniature. What might seem to the careless reader to be a comment on the weather and a description of Milanese butchers’ shops is, in fact, a poetic distillation of the story’s heart, an example of that prose which Hemingway described in Green Hills of Africa as “a prose that has never been written.” The second paragraph is also radically innovative. Here the key words are “hospital”, “bridge”, and “canal”. Lodge suggests that the word “hospital” is repeated so inelegantly because it is the centre of the men’s lives, and the repetition reinforces its emotional importance to them. The flat rehearsal of the possible ways of getting to the hospital suggests to us the unnumbered times the narrator has made the journey, the duration and tedium and ineffectiveness of the medical treatment. Lodge wonders if the canal is intended as a “faint suggestion of the river Styx in the underworld”; I would be much firmer. Crossing the bridge is a daily going into “another country”. All the journeying in the paragraph carries a poetic implication; it is all a going in and out, a crossing over to “the other side”. The funeral processions that start from the courtyard of the old hospital also have to cross the bridge. Lodge says of the roasted chestnuts that they are “warm in the pocket like the promise of life—except that Hemingway doesn’t use that simile, he merely implies it”. Even such a superficial examination of these paragraphs illustrates what Hemingway meant by the sentence, “Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do” (A Moveable Feast). Don DeLillo said in a recent New Yorker profile: I think fiction comes from everything you’ve ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you’ve read and haven’t read. It comes from all the things that are in the air. At some point, you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don’t sound like other writers’. And for me the crux of the whole matter is language, and the language a writer eventually develops. If you’re talking about Hemingway, the Hemingway sentence is what makes Hemingway. It’s not the bullfights or the safaris or the wars, it’s a clear, direct, and vigorous sentence. It’s the simple connective—the word ‘and’ that strings together the segments of a long Hemingway sentence. The word ‘and’ is more important to Hemingway’s work than Africa or Paris. Writers make this simple point about language over and over. Just as an appreciation of music is enhanced by the ability to read music, an appreciation of writing is enhanced by understanding something of how it’s done, of writing’s nuts and bolts. Most academic critics seem profoundly incapable of understanding even a tittle of this. John Metcalf is a writer and the editor of Porcupine’s Quill Press and of Canadian Notes & Queries.