"Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with magnificent lavishness. He keeps his words to their short path," writes American humorist and short-story writer Dorothy Parker in 1927.[1] Whatever one thinks of Ernest Hemingway's passions or actions in life, his writing can express feelings that reach into people's hearts.
His short-story "Hills Like White Elephants"[2] is a "delicate and tragic"[3] dialogue between a "young couple...arguing about whether the girl should or should not do something. The something is not immediately clear."[4] Each expresses feelings about an "operation," but the then taboo word abortion is omitted. Details of their age or relationship are also omitted.
From the opening words, "The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white," sparse details set the scene for the interaction between an "American and the girl with him," while they wait for a train. They are seated at a table outside a bar. Soon enough, their small talk about the hills or choice of drinks cannot gloss over the tensions between them.
The reader has only the turn-taking dialogue between the couple to infer how each feels about the "operation." And the successive, tense negotiations over what's "reasonable," or "natural," or being "happy" or "fine" all seem inadequate to bridge some deeper disagreement. The reader must experience the differing emotional nuances embedded in the dialogue to interpret the misalignments of the people.
In this way, Hemingway crafts real people having difficulty finding accommodation with each other. He once remarked that "The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings."[5] He felt that:
If a writer of prose knows enough about 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 the water.[6]
He coined the term for this approach as the ice-berg theory, or theory of omission.[7] This was a new way of writing at a time when the stories published would extensively describe locales and the character's actions, emotions, facial expression, or other features.
As Hemingway noted, "not a damn critic thought anything of [this short-story] when it came out."[8] The former Columbia University scholar Lionel Trilling observes that when Hemingway:
...first began to write and his stories were being steadily refused by the magazines, they were returned "with notes of rejection that would never call them stories but always anecdotes [or] sketches." One of these early stories was "Hills Like White Elephants."[9]
The story was stimulated by realities that Hemingway and his friends talked about "One night in Rapollo...and the cruelty of the law which did not allow young unmarried women to avoid having an unwanted child."[10] Yet much power of the story comes from his omitting details of description, explanation, or argument, to craft a powerful expression of feelings.
Through Hemingway's "unerring sense of selection,"[11] we are able to experience the interaction between the people. Our feelings are engaged.
References
1. Dorothy Parker (1927), "Constant Reader," New Yorker, 3 (29 October), pp. 92-94, in Robert W. Trogdon (Ed.), Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference, New York: Carol and Graf, p. 88
2. Ernest Hemingway (1987), "Hills Like White Elephants," in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons/Macmillan, pp. 211-214 [first published 1927]
3. Parker, p. 88
4. Robert McAlmon (1938), Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography, London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 155-159, in Trogdon, p. 25
5. Ivan Kashkan (1935), "Ernest Hemingway: A Tragedy of Craftsmanship," International Literature, No. 5, May, pp. 72-90, in Trogdon, p. 166; see also, Elizabeth Levin (2013), "In Their Time: The Riddle Behind the Epistolary Friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Ivan Kashkin," The Hemingway Review, 32(2), pp. 95-108, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265952710_In_Their_Time_The_Riddle_Behind_the_Epistolary_Friendship_between_Ernest_Hemingway_and_Ivan_Kashkin
6. Ernest Hemingway (1932), Death in the Afternoon, New York: Scribners, pp. 191-192, in Trogdon, p. 125
7. Paul Smith (1983), "Hemingway's Early Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission," Journal of Modern Literature, 10(2), Indiana University Press, pp. 268-288
8. Ernest Hemingway (1933), Letter to publisher Scribners, in Matthew J. Broccoli (Ed.), with assistance of Robert W. Trogdon (1996), The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway / Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947, New York: Scribner, pp. 202-204, in Trogdon, p. 145
9. Lionel Trilling (1967), The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries, Fiction, NewYork: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 305-306
10. McAlmon, in Trogdon, p. 25
11. Parker, p. 88