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When Hemingway Meets Twitter

Trevor Butterworth
This article is more than 10 years old.

No writer has dominated American journalism less for what he wrote than for how he wrote it than Ernest Hemingway. Mentored by the Kansas City Star to embrace the "simple declarative sentence," encouraged to distrust adjectives by the lunatic Ezra Pound, Hemingway honed his style until it was the equivalent of Johnny Weissmuller's pectoral muscles--sharply defined and impregnably masculine, a motif for modern America. (For Hemingway on writing, see interview here.)

Hemingway still stands as a model for emphatic prose, so much so that his spirit has been summoned as a guide to the age of Twitter. In response to a New York Times article declaring that the most circumscribed means of communication since the telegraph would defy critics and endure, one letter writer ventured that its true muse was Hemingway:

"Hemingway claimed that development of his laconic style was based on 'cables'--the necessary shortening of news dispatches to limit expensive telegram costs. One hopes that Twitter--and text-message costs--can teach a new generation the same lesson."

The cable may have changed many things, but is this really the lesson in style offered by Hemingway?

As Frank O'Connor--Ireland's Chekov--points out, you cannot take Hemingway's terse simplification and say, "behold, I give you Hemingway;" you must also acknowledge that it is embedded in near-hypnotic repetition. Apply italics, for example, to the "beautiful" opening to Hemingway's "In Another Country" and see what your inner ear is actually hearing:

"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall in Milan, and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powder in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tales. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind, and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains."

As O'Connor puts it: "There! You have realized how cold and windy it was that fall in Milan, haven't you? And it didn't really hurt, did it?" Not for the general reader, perhaps; but one can imagine blood on the copy editor's desk.

Hemingway absorbed this technique, if not a love of adjectives and adverbs, from Joyce (think of the end of "The Dead" with its loops of snow "falling softly" and "softly falling"); and the point was to duplicate experience--if not actually replace it in a combination of images. Conventions in punctuation and word placement were all bent in this quest for pictorial mood, and this is what makes the arrival of both writers so startling in the history of prose.

This is why Hemingway's journalism is so compelling, says O'Connor. "He could take an incident--any incident, no matter how thin or trivial--and by his skill as a writer turn it into something one read thirty years ago and can still read today with admiration and with pleasure."

But there are disadvantages: drama loses the compulsion it derives from objectivity; narrative acquires the diction of a drunk or a drug addict, as in "Hills like White Elephants":

"Well, the man said, if you don't want to, you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."

"And you really want to?"





"I love it."

When such exchanges--and this is but a flavor--really do occur in important conversation, journalists, not without justification, turn to paraphrase. More to the point, they distinguish between what is important and what is unimportant; hanging over O'Connor's meditation is the suspicion that Hemingway was so enthralled to stylization, he was forever "a technique in search of a subject."

Still, if skill allowed Hemingway to raise journalism to a minor art, he was clear about the consequences of it becoming "a daily self-destruction for a serious creative writer." For nothing is so inviolable in journalism as convention, not least the convention that Hemingway's genius resides in short, muscular declarative sentences. But half the art is not the measure of the artist at all; and poor Hemingway now sits as chief eunuch in the temple of basic English, a position from which Twitter will neither save him nor us.

Next week - Who should we turn to as our muse in the age of Twitter?


Read more Forbes opinions here .

Director, Sense About Science USA, which advocates for an evidence based approach to science and technology and for clinical trial transparency. Editor,, a…

Director, Sense About Science USA, which advocates for an evidence based approach to science and technology and for clinical trial transparency. Editor,, a collaboration between the American Statistical Association and Sense About Science USA. Visiting Fellow, Cornell University. I have written about data and statistics and how they are interpreted in our so-called "knowledge economy," especially in relation to risk and regulation. I've written for the New Yorker online, Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. I speak regularly about the media's coverage of science and statistics and scientific communication. Educated at Trinity College Dublin, Georgetown, and Columbia.