Elaine Blair's "Hemingway's Consolations"

Ernest Hemingway (Portrait by Sébastien Plassard)

To me, it’s a serious mistake to write about Hemingway without mentioning his incomparable style. Yet, that’s exactly what Elaine Blair does in her “Hemingway’s Consolations” (The New York Review of Books, September 23, 2021). “Humiliation,” “violence,” “death,” “failure,” “hate” – these are the words she invokes to assess Hemingway’s work. “Beautiful,” “sensuous,” “poetical” are nowhere to be found. 

Hemingway created one of the most sublime styles in all of literature. Ho hum, we know that. No, we don’t. His stylistic achievement is in danger of being buried under criticism such as this: 

It takes a simple statement—and it must be simple—to get to the bottom of the emotional truth of a situation. You can speak of Hemingway’s verbal economy in relation to modernism, or realism, or personal style. But at their most powerful, his brevity and simplicity are in service of emotional release. Hemingway’s work consoles us, if it does console us, according to the verbal principles of a good psychotherapeutic interlocutor. [“Hemingway’s Consolations”]

Well, okay, maybe so. All I can say is that Hemingway’s work consoles me in a completely different way – in service of the pleasure principle. For example, consider this beauty:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. [A Farewell to Arms, 1929]

Each word is a painterly touch. Hemingway’s hero was Cézanne. Like Cézanne, he had an extraordinary feel for life’s sensuous surfaces. “He wrote pleasure far better than violence,” Adam Gopnik says, in his excellent “Hemingway, the Sensualist” (newyorker.com, June 26, 2017). He’s right.