Hemingway and Curwood

I've finished reading Personal Injuries and I enjoyed it very much, though the ending was kind of sad.

In the meantime, I've been reading another of my books to my mother over the phone: Nomads of the North, by James Oliver Curwood. I think she's enjoying it, although she would probably agree with me that the author does get a bit carried away with description from time to time.

Curwood wrote in the early 20th century and was very popular in his day. Nomads of the North was published in 1919, at a time when detailed description in novels was expected and commonplace. As I was reading the novel, it struck me that Ernest Hemingway, who began publishing in the early 1920s, offered the reading public a style that at the time must have seemed terribly stark and annoyingly spare of information. These days it is Hemingway's journalistic style that's commonplace, so it's hard for us to appreciate what a shock that kind of minimalist writing must have been to readers used to the florid prose offered by writers such as Curwood.

Here is an example of what I mean. Following is a passage from Nomads of the North:

He was about to gasp his last gasp when the force of the current, as it swung out of the whirlpool, flung Neewa upon a bit of partly submerged driftage, and in a wild and strenuous effort to make himself safe Neewa dragged Miki's head out of water so that the pup hung at the edge of the driftage like a hangman's victim at the end of his rope.

In this passage, the narrator is attempting to describe a life-or-death struggle, but by the time the reader slogs through all the words to get to the action, the terror of the moment is lost.

Compare with this passage from Hemingway's story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," which also depicts a life-or-death struggle:

the gun-bearer shouted wildly and they saw him coming out of the bush sideways, fast as a crab, and the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them.

Hemingway was a master at this style of writing, sometimes referred to as journalistic. The theory behind it, called the iceberg theory, requires that most of the meaning of a passage remains below the surface. Here is a Wikipedia article that elaborates on it: Iceberg Theory.

I've found an October 31, 1926 New York Times' review of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises that shows how new this technique was to readers at the time. Here's an excerpt:

The "more literary English" this reviewer refers to may be the kind employed by Mr. Curwood and his ilk as opposed to the "lean, hard, athletic narrative prose" that Mr. Hemingway became synonymous with in his lifetime.

My next book will be non-fiction, I think. One of the "T" books, of course. Perhaps I'll go to Studs Terkel next. I'll keep you posted, in any event.