Loneliness, Male Companionship and the Hunt - 30 July 1999

Here are the opening sentences of two novels, both written 66 years ago. Here's the first.

"They drove, uncertainly, along the avenue that led to the house. The navy blue car was built high off the ground and the name on its bonnet recalled a bankrupt, forgotten, firm of motor makers. Inside the car was done up in a material like grey corduroy with folding seats in unexpected places, constructed liberally to accommodate some Edwardian Swiss Family Robinson."

Here's the opening of the second novel written the same year, 1933.

"You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings, before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars. Well we come across the square from the dock to the café to get some coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of a fountain. But when we got inside the café and sat down there were the three of them waiting for us."

The first passage is a piece of considered literary prose - it could have been written in 1923 or in 1913, written for an audience rather like the writer - I imagine - literary, sensitive, leisured. The second passage has all the leisure of a ticking time bomb. And in 1933 it was a shocker. The reader is addressed as an equal but there's no suggestion of a literary man anywhere. It's more like an anecdote a travelling salesman is telling to a buddy sitting up at a bar.

But what shocked most literary folk, both in Britain and America in 1933, was the boldness of the writing. Not an adjective or an adverb anywhere, just plain nouns hitting plainer verbs. And yet, as one or two critics reluctantly admitted, in no more than a sentence or two a picture has been painted - vivid, arresting - of a time and a feel for a place and there's a note of suspense struck at once - "There were the three of them waiting for us."

Well it had taken most of 20 years for the writer to be able to fashion such a sentence to his own satisfaction. The writer was Ernest Miller Hemingway who was born 100 years ago this past week. Midwesterner - schoolboy in a Chicago suburb - as a boy he went shooting in the woods with his father.

He already had the itch to write and he skipped college to work on a newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri. He'd hardly got his hand in at reporting when America was in the First War. And the 18-year-old Hemingway joined an ambulance unit attached to the Italian Infantry.

He was badly wounded four months before the Armistice, and when that happened he was still convalescing in a hospital in Milan.

In little more than a year a Toronto paper took him on as a foreign correspondent - a dashing life he'd only dreamed would ever come his way, and he travelled far and wide - in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany.

Two years after the signing of the peace treaty he was on the road in and around Greece following a surging population of refugees - much like the beaten families we saw deserting Kosovo.

One despatch reported: "In a staggering march the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia ... An old man marches bent under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labour in one of the carts to keep off the driving rain - she is the only person making a sound. Then his little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry and the procession keeps moving."

Plainly what he had was a descriptive gift but the plainness, the simplicity, was something he worked on consciously while he was still a newspaper man. Based, in his early 20s, in a room over a sawmill in Paris he appeared to belong to the circle of newly-arrived American ex-patriates. But, from the start, he shrank from their dilettantism. He was a professional writer who was going to achieve something new in the American language.

What moved him most, in those early days, were memories of shooting trips he'd taken with his father into the Michigan woods.

It cannot have been simply an amazing coincidence - I think rather an impulse welling up from his unconscious - that his very first stories about those boyhood excursions contained the elements of the romantic situation to which, for the rest of his life, he would be most susceptible - loneliness, male companionship and the hunt.

Especially the hunt, whether in the infantryman's first experience of hand-to-hand combat or in stalking game amid the green hills of Africa or in the bullring with its tension between human mettle and an animal's courage.

Nobody, before or since - not in English anyway - has been so deeply stirred by these three elements - loneliness, male companionship and the hunt.

However, it was not the themes that obsessed him so much as how they were to be written about: "To put down what really happened in action, what the actual things were which made the emotion and which would be valid in a year or 10 years."

He wrote hard and long every day, rarely more than 200 words a day, and spent the next day paring them down. He'd already found out that, for him, adjectives and adverbs when they were describing action or emotion were devices of delay, of tapping the teeth while getting ready to find the right word.

His idol, Mark Twain, had had something to say about that. I have to throw in a background note here that in America what in England is known as a firefly is in America "a lightning bug." Mark Twain wrote: "The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

The critics did not take kindly to Hemingway's first books. They thought that here was an author who'd created a self-conscious, tough-guy, no-nonsense style. That's because most of the critics lived in London, New York - in a metropolis - did not have in their childhood background the vernacular which Hemingway distilled and refined into a personal style.

It was nothing more mysterious or synthetic than the ordinary speech of ordinary people of the Mississippi Valley - as bare as the prairie and as sinuous as the 54 rivers that feed it. Just the speech you will hear all around you any day in the smallest spurts of conversation of farmers, garage mechanics, salesmen, soldiers, gardeners, merchants, anywhere from Cairo, Illinois, to Duluth, Minnesota.

But what the mass of Hemingway's readers - a new generation of young non critics - what they recognised were themselves and their emotions nakedly and truly expressed. And in time even some of the intelligentsia came to concede that Hemingway had managed, in a very bare idiom, to show that the emotions of ordinary, even illiterate, people were just as fine and complex as their very own.

Like all true originals Hemingway was too often judged by people who didn't know the difference between the true Middle Western vernacular and the crude imitations of it which were being practised - thanks to Hemingway - everywhere from Glasgow to Hollywood.

Striking proof that he had achieved "the real thing", transmuted that Midwestern ore and passed on something original into literature, is suggested by the fact that in the Nobel country itself, which gave him the Literature Award, his example, they say, transformed Swedish fiction.

As for the English-speaking world, I think I ought to remind us, the main thing about Hemingway is that as a narrator - a teller of tales - he more than anyone in this century revolutionised the English sentence.

For myself I would add that he brings to relationships between the old and the young a certain touch of tenderness and there's always that strain of suspense. The best way I can express my own admiration for Hemingway is to do an outrageous thing.

Years ago an American monthly magazine ran a competition for a parody of Hemingway. I entered it and I did not win. I got a letter back from the judge saying - "This is preposterous. This isn't a crude parody which our readers would recognise as such, this is too true, this is essence of Hemingway - which book did you steal it from? Sorry."

Well maybe it will say more in fewer words than I have used to convey what to me is touching, dramatic, comically grave and suspenseful about his writing. It's a very short story. I've called it A First Time For Everything, and it's simply about an old man and his grandson in Florida stopping at a lunch counter to get a hamburger.

The old man and the boy went in and sat down on the swivel stools and behind the counter there were two of them waiting. One was a black man in a white apron and the other was a big blonde with corn coloured locks. It was the boy's first time down there in Florida and his hands showed up on the counter like baby white fish against the brown arms of the old man that were blotched with the benevolent skin cancer.

The old man nodded without speaking and the black man who knew all the signs dropped on the shiny stove something that looked like a red coaster you would put a drinking glass down on and later would look like a brown coaster. Then he lifted his arm high and snatched from a shelf a fat white roll between his splayed thumb and little finger the way he would receive a throw cleanly like in the high school play-offs.

The boy looked up at the old man.

"They are the rolls," the old man said, "first baked by Macdonald of the Isles, a Scottish chieftain who in the manner of the Scots called them baps with their floury but crisp outsides. But these are closer to what the English call buns, which are softer but not as soft and delicate as the good buns they made in the old days in the Basque country - Basque buns are best."

"Will they come together to enclose it?" the boy asked.

"They will enclose it good," said the old man.

The black man had finished now and scooped the coaster between the two halves of the bap and slid the whole onto a clean white plate. The big blonde extended her right hand and whisked the plate with a single turn of her buttocks in front of the boy. It reminded the old man of the way the great Manolete performed a veronica in the forgotten afternoons when the sun went low in the good times. The boy lifted the thing to his lips.

"Now," said the old man, "you are having your first Big Mac."

"Truly?" asked the boy.

"Truly," said the old man.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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