WILSON ON HEMINGWAY
Hemingway kept it simple and it seemed to work out pretty well
Saturday is the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death.
So we’ll talk about his talents a little. But first, a message from Donald Trump:
“I know words; I have the best words … But there is no better word than ‘stupid.’”
Trump said that at a campaign rally in December. And last month Washington Post writer Allison Jane Smith included that quote in a piece headlined: “Donald Trump speaks like a 6th-grader. All politicians should.”
She said that “from a linguistic perspective, Trump is right. Why say ‘idiotic,’ ‘misguided’ or ‘disingenuous’ when plain old ‘stupid’ will do?”
She wrapped up the column with a famous exchange between novelists. William Faulkner insulted Hemingway by saying, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway’s reply: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
We’re just back from a first-time visit to Chicago and it wasn’t all deep-dish pizza and old blues clubs. One afternoon we took the ‘L’ out to the suburb of Oak Park and toured the house where Hemingway was born. Oak Park is a quiet, prosperous place, but our guide told us Hemingway was happy to leave it behind.
Down the street, Hemingway has a museum. And there you learn that in his first job, with The Kansas City Star, he quickly took the style guide to heart: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.”
Hemingway won a Nobel Prize in 1954 for “The Old Man and the Sea.” A panel in the museum quotes Hemingway when the novella was released:
“This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit.”
But there came a time when he could not keep it short. Beneath a picture in the museum of Hemingway posing with a bullfighter, there’s this caption:
“During Hemingway’s extended stay in Spain in 1959, Life asked him to do an article on the mano a mano then in progress, testing Spain’s two top matadors … He was happy to oblige. But he was showing signs of emotional instability, and even in his writing, he was beginning to lose perspective. The Life piece that was supposed to be 10,000 words ended up being 120,000.”
Two years later, July 2, 1961, Hemingway took a favourite shotgun from the basement storeroom of his home in Ketchum, Idaho and ended his struggle. He was 61.
In this business, we all want to make our writing as clear and powerful as Hemingway’s. So it makes sense to try to write like a grade schooler.
People ask about that sometimes, with a dash of derision.
“What grade do you guys at The Spec write for anyway?” they say.
The answer — the lower, the better. If you check out The Spec’s archives — free on the Hamilton Public Library website — you’ll discover that some mysterious algorithm used by NewsBank calculates the readability/ grade level of every story.
My piece last week, about a man raised by drunks and saved by music, gets a Grade 6/7. I’m pleased about that. But Hemingway did better. “The Old Man and the Sea” scores a reading level of Grade 4.
No matter how clear and simple I try to make my writing, I’m now in big trouble.
That has everything to do with the retirement in just days of Margaret Houghton, archivist at the library’s Local History and Archives department. I call her She Who Knows All. I look back at stories I’ve done just recently — a bright blue house causing a stir on Main West, swastika symbols rising from the earth after a demolition.
I leaned on Margaret for background on both those, and hundreds more through the years.
Many will miss you, Margaret, but none more than I.