Hemingway Wrote Biblically

An under-appreciated author and why the bible is hard to read.

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I.

When I say Ernest Hemingway (seven novels, six short-story collections, one Nobel Prize for Literature, present at the liberation of Paris from the Nazis and namesake of innumerable bars) is under-appreciated, I do not mean that he is not popular, or that people do not consider him an influential or even great writer. He looms over 20th century Western literature and for many decades was perhaps unbeatable (a word he would have probably chosen, for its connotations of physical contest) in the writing of novels and especially short stories. His curse is that he succeeded in his pursuit of a distinctive style, and now, like Jordan Peterson says of Freud, “all that’s left are his failures”, because his strengths are so absorbed they have become hard to see.

Every time I have read a book, article or tweet from the last few decades that mentioned Hemingway, the writer referred to him with a kind of pity. Ah, Hemingway, that master of precision and clarity, so tragically stoic and hyper-masculine. What might have been, if only he hadn’t been so severe, so macho in his prose. Time and again this attitude surfaces, until one starts to wonder whether these critics are skipping the novels and simply reading each other’s reviews. The Woody Allen film ‘Midnight in Paris’ has a portrayal of Hemingway that is so laughably exaggerated and one-dimensional that it has come to spoil the film for me on repeat viewings. The perception (perhaps not shared by you, dear perceptive reader, who are no doubt above the median intelligence in literary things) of Ernest Hemingway is that he leans on the simple, dry, masculine facts of life out of a kind of fear or inability to open himself up to the emotional (female) things in life.

Here is a section from his novel Islands in the Stream, when the protagonist gets a telegram:

He read it. Then he put it in his pocket and went out the door and sat on the porch by the sea. He took the radio form out and read it again. YOUR SONS DAVID AND ANDREW KILLED WITH THEIR MOTHER IN MOTOR ACCIDENT NEAR BIARRITZ ATTENDING TO EVERYTHING PENDING YOUR ARRIVAL DEEPEST SYMPATHY. It was signed by the Paris branch of his New York bank.

Eddy came out. He had heard about it from Joseph who had heard about it from one of the boys at the radio shack.

Eddy sat down by him and said, “Shit, Tom, how can such things happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Thomas Hudson. “I guess they hit something or something ran into them.”

“I’ll bet Davy wasn’t driving,” Eddy said.

“I’ll bet so too. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Thomas Hudson looked out at the flatness of the blue sea and the darker blue of the Gulf. The sun was low and soon it would be behind the clouds.

This comes at the end of chapter 14, almost halfway through the novel, after thirteen chapters describing a holiday Hudson’s sons spent with him. The reader knows and loves these children, has seen the father’s interactions with them and knows that he loves them too, and the suddenness of their death is a moment of total shock, separating the first half of the book from the second. What is fascinating is how Hemingway portrays the non-physical or emotional elements of this moment. He basically doesn’t, it seems. All the descriptions of Thomas Hudson are external: “he read… he sat… he looked”. The dialogue is simple, with no “he wept” or “he said sadly” to imply a tone. Even the description of the landscape at the end is plain and its only adjectives are factual colour ones. At first glance, it would appear that Hudson has no reaction to the death of two of his sons and his ex-wife in tragic circumstances.

Another quotation from the man Hem-self:

“First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he has read something it will become part of his experience and seem actually to have happened.”

Hemingway’s approach does not involve laying out the internal life of a character. That approach, he believes, will always fail because the emotions of a character are not produced by descriptions of other emotions but by the experience of actual events. The things Thomas Hudson experiences in this scene will undoubtedly have an extreme effect on his inner life but Hemingway understands that trying to describe those effects can only ever go so far. Instead, he allows the reader to experience everything Hudson has experienced, until we feel what he feels for ourselves. The reader collaborates with the writer and provides that entire side of the story by entering into the story world imaginatively and emotionally. Hemingway’s writing appears factual and superficial precisely because the world outside us is those things . In other words, it’s not that Hemingway is uninterested in the emotions and the inner life, it’s that he thinks it’s his job as a writer to produce those emotions in us as readers, rather than to describe them for our benefit on the page.

In addition to this experience-focused approach, we ought to consider the famous ‘iceberg theory’ Hemingway pioneered:

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

The emotions and inner life of Hemingway’s characters, the theological and metaphysical elements, the poetic depth of significance are all submerged under the iceberg-tip sparseness of his prose. It’s a much more involved kind of reading than we might be used to, a kind that repels many readers by its requirements of attention and imagination. Can you guess where I’m going with this? The Hebrew Bible does the same thing. Well, almost the same.

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II.

Here is one of the best and most famous passages from scripture.

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. 

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said,  “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

Without wanting to sound overly simplistic, doesn’t this passage read like something Hemingway might have written, based on what we saw above? No description of the emotions and inner life, simple portrayals of landscape and surroundings, wide gaps from one piece of information to the next… and yet this story pulls like gravity on the mind of almost everyone who has read it. Why is that?

I suspect the force of this story lies in the absence of any description of Abraham’s emotional state. If we knew he was cold and obedient, we could place his willingness to sacrifice Isaac in the “sad and dangerous religious nut” category, far from ourselves. If we knew he was distraught but bound to submit, we could file him under “man of ideals and principle”. If we knew– as the book of Hebrews knows– that Abraham’s faith in God led him to trust that there could be no bad end to the story, we could place him above us as a hero of faith, someone more pious and therefore more richly rewarded.

Whatever you think of each of these conclusions, none of them appear more supported by this text on its own merits than the other. Hebrews’ account of Abraham as one who trusts in the resurrecting power of God draws on his belief that God will give him numerous descendants (Gen 15:6) which obviously implies that God will not really allow Abraham’s only son to die; Abraham knows this, and thus expects Isaac to be saved despite the severe command, a belief vindicated later by the life of Christ. But this is implication, interpretation, imposition upon the story of Genesis 22 of a version of events that is not required by it. There are simply too many gaps in the story we have above to allow us to draw conclusions about Abraham, unless we lean on earlier stories and much later interpretation (which is fine, that’s probably what we ought to do).

The gaps in Genesis 22 are not the same as the gaps in Hemingway’s writing, but the fact that both intentionally employ gaps as a way to engage the reader is curious. I can’t stop thinking about Hemingway’s statement that the writer can leave out “things that he knows” and still somehow communicate them to the reader. In this scheme, the story exercises a kind of authority on the reader, an instructive or inductive authority that only opens the door to a certain kind of reading. You cannot for example get a Hemingway story if you think that what’s most important for a person’s life is contemplation of their inner state. To think that way and read a Hemingway story is to guarantee frustration and disappointment, if not outright antagonism. His ideas about what matters, what you should care about, how you ought to interpret reality are built-in to the way he tells his stories and if you spend enough time reading them you will come to think of the world this way both inside books and outside them.

Setting aside for the moment the unanswerable questions around who wrote what and what they meant and how clearly we can interpret their original meaning, is it not worth asking whether a story like Genesis 22 is written the way it is in order to encourage a certain kind of personal formation in its readers? If the gaps in the story are not intended to be blind-spots that slide by unnoticed but are in fact crevasses that pull the reader up short and demand an interpretation: “God told Abraham to go and kill Isaac, so Abraham went and saddled his donkey and…” “Hey what do you mean he just went and saddled the donkey, you mean he didn’t freak out?” I wonder whether this latter response ought not to be ours also, if that’s part of the power of a story like this, that it continues to exert an influence precisely because we still cannot agree (even with ourselves) on how the gaps ought to be filled.

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III.

Part of what I so often find frustrating about religious, specifically Christian, readings of the Old Testament is the ease and flatness with which the conclusion is reached that the story under discussion is deep down the same story as the one told in a few verses of Paul. This is more of a flinch or urge than a reasoned disagreement, and I have wondered for a while why I keep feeling this way.

In thinking about Hemingway and how he wrote, I wondered whether part of the reason I find the Old Testament so beautiful is because it, like him (or perhaps because he, like it), shows the reader the stuff of life that gives rise to great experiences of spiritual truth, rather than always providing the interpretation alongside the event. This isn’t simply a desire not to be told what to think (though I do find that hard to accept sometimes) but a strong sense that to interpret and explain is inevitably to disfigure and diminish. It is less good to me to hear Genesis 22 explained than simply to hear it read over and over, just as I would despise the person who paused a movie every four minutes to explain what that dialogue signified or what the landscape symbolised. I know that instruction and interpretation is the burden of the teacher in the church, and I do not want to suggest that this is wrong, or that my feelings ought to be universally observed (deep horror). Perhaps what I really am objecting to, given the observations about gap-filling, is having those gaps filled on my behalf. If the text is written in order to engage the reader imaginatively and constructively, then for someone else to fill those gaps is to commandeer my imagination, to respond on my behalf to God who has ordained these words for my benefit.

This is some way from Hemingway, perhaps, but I don’t think it is all that different. If I’m supposed to be involved in the building of a world inside my head as part of reading the Hebrew Bible, just as if I were reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, then is taking the gap-filling out of my hands any less inappropriate for one the the other?

The writer is aware that this approach is tragically self-centred and individualistic, and would probably be best resolved by spending more time with other believers, or people in general, but that is a long term solution and one that could not be reached in time for the publication of this blog. Your patience is appreciated.