When I had finished reading Hemingway, I started writing at a much higher level. Hemingway had taught me how to say one thing while suggesting something else, how to make the resulting tension serve as a substitute for plot. I loved the challenge of writing a scene without dialogue labels, and the marvellous effect of doing this: I felt as if I were floating inside the room with my characters.
By the time I was in my twenties, though, I had become irritated with Hemingway. The explanation I offered for my dislike was that the guy seemed to know nothing about human beings. So many of his characters were stoic and brave. Actual humans tend to be confused, vibrating, changing. They doubt themselves and then blame themselves and others for the doubt. I argued that Hemingway should be read as a life-style writer or a self-help guru. This was what I said to others, but the truth was that, when I first read Hemingway and fell in love with art, I believed that it would rescue me from my feelings of uselessness, from sexual envy, from worries about money. Because all these remained, I had to put my peevishness somewhere.
For decades, I didn’t reread any of Hemingway’s major novels. But, whenever a previously unpublished story was discovered, I read it. “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” which was included in “The Complete Short Stories,” seemed so obviously great and in such a different way from Hemingway’s other stories that I felt immature for having thought I could judge him.
I recently decided to reread “The Sun Also Rises.” I read the first line but the sentence’s balance and the stillness this generates didn’t impress me. It felt like the sort of solution to a pacing problem that an M.F.A. student would come up with. And the second sentence with its “that”s seemed less clever and brave than so many other examples of the same device I now knew. For example, the opening of Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Gambler”: “I’ve finally come back from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days.” Here, the opening sentence is disconcerting because the speaker is coming back to a physical space, but is returning from an absence, which is not a physical space. Can one return from an absence? If one cannot return from an absence then one is not back.
