1925 In Paris during the twenties Hemingway taught Ezra Pound how to box, and Pound taught him to distrust adjectives. Or at least that’s how the novelist remembered it in A Moveable Feast (1964). Certainly Pound’s imagism – the concrete image standing alone, without modification or explanation, to evoke an emotional response in the reader – is a key into Hemingway’s famously plain style.
That style made its debut in In Our Time (1925), a collection of short stories, each prefaced by a short inter-chapter seldom more than a page long. In some stories Nick Adams features as a sort of alter ego for Hemingway himself – whether in youth, as in ‘Indian Camp’, in which Nick watches his doctor father deliver a Native American baby, or as a war veteran in ‘Cross Country Snow’, in which Nick and George regret having to leave the Swiss Alps to return to the States.
Its inter-chapters were the real innovation, though. Here is part of one:
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water.
The short declarative sentences, free of dependent clauses; the documentary edge to the precise time of day; the concrete details like the pools of water – all work to establish that off-hand tone so typical of Hemingway’s prose. Hard boiled it may be, yet it’s hardly without feeling, what with that sombre irony of the hospital backdrop: the caring institution with its shutters ‘nailed shut’.
The most daring thing about the passage is what might be called its pseudo-reference. What cabinet ministers? Who are the ‘they’ who shot them? What’s the occasion? The definite article ‘the’ implies that readers know the context, but of course we don’t. But then we don’t need to; it’s an atmospheric sketch, not a history – nor, for that matter, a conventional novel – and it’s very Hemingway.