The endlessly repeated Hemingway-cliché is that he wrote simple declarative sentences.
He didn’t write declamations like Dickens, if that’s what you mean.
Declamatory, exclamatory: Oh pioneers!
Call me Ishmael.
The greatest opening line in American literature, followed by an ocean of Melvillean oratory.
What else is there but declarative sentences?
Questions interrogative
Commands imperative
Exclamations expletive
Orations orotund (with rounded mouth)
Odes, Oh-you-there listener--
Every newspaper is full of declarative sentences; every academic treatise, most novels. Much of how we talk-- not so grammatically if you record it and play it back, but cleaned-up, declarative enough.
Take a look at the opening lines of The Sun Also Rises (1927).
Robert Cohen was once middle-weight champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohen. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.
The first sentence qualifies as simple declarative. The punch is in the following lines, which aren’t.
Or this, from For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941).
El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop. He did not like this hill and when he saw it he thought it had the shape of a chancre. But he had no other choice except this hill and he had picked it as far away as he could see it and galloped for it, the automatic rifle heavy on his back, the horse labouring, barrel heaving between his thighs, the sack of grenades swinging against one side, the sack of automatic rifle pans banging against the other, and Joaquin and Ignacio halting and firing, halting and firing to give him time to get the gun in place.
Perhaps Hemingway got the reputation as a simple declarative writer from the short stories in In Our Time (1926) with their vignettes from his newspaper days in the early 20s:
They shot the six cabinet members at half past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves in the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
Or this, tell-it-like-it-is about a bullfight in Spain:
The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped, and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the barrier and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and he tried to slug the men carrying him away, and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came on and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he could hardly get the sword in. He could hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down on the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bullring.
This is not exactly Dick and Jane: Jump, Dick, jump. See Jane jump too. Something else is going on besides simple and declarative.
Some of it is sarcasm:
It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across a bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to go over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.
Some of the simple declarative comes from Hemingway’s ear for uncomplicated people’s dialogue. (from The Killers, 1928):
He wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.
‘Give me bacon and eggs,’ said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter.
‘Got anything to drink?’ Al asked.
‘Silver beer, bevo, ginger-ale,’ George said.
‘I mean you got anything to drink?’
‘Just those I said.’
‘This is a hot town,’ said the other. ‘What do they call it?’
‘Summit.’
“Ever hear of it?’ Al asked his friend.
‘No,’ said the friend.
‘What do you do here nights?” Al asked.
‘They eat the dinner,’ his friend said. ‘They all come here and eat the big dinner.’
‘That’s right,’ George said.
‘So you think that’s right?’ Al asked George.
‘Sure.’
‘You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?’
‘Sure,’ said George.
‘Well, you’re not,’ said the other little man. ‘Is he, Al?’
‘He’s dumb,’ said Al. He turned to Nick. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Adams.’
‘Another bright boy,’ Al said. ‘Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?’
‘The town’s full of bright boys,’ Max said.
Hemingway is expert at capturing tones of voices. Simple and declarative doesn’t begin to capture what it’s about.
Another thing going on is Hemingway being economical, especially when he wants to describe a scene without repeating a lot of unnecessary grammar. (from A Way You’ll Never Be, 1934)
The attack had gone across the field, been held up by machine-gun fire from the sunken road and the group of farmhouses, encountered no resistance in the town, and reached the banks of the river. Coming along the road on a bicycle, getting off to push the machine when the road became too broken, [he] saw what had happened by the position of the dead...
In the grass and the grain, beside the road, there was much material: a field kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the calfskin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, sometimes one butt-up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt, they had dug quite a little at the last; stick bombs, rifles, entrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine-gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers.
There were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college annual; now they were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backwards over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting on her head. There were many of these inciting cards which had evidently just been issued before the offensive. Now they were scattered with the smutty postcards, photographic; the small photographs of village girls by village photographers, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters. There was always much paper about the dead and the debris of this attack was no exception.
In The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1933) a dying man’s memories:
There was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the lake... Then that log house was burned down and all the guns that had been on deer-foot racks above the open fire-place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with the lead melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of ashes that were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked Grandfather if you could have them to play with, and he said, no. You see they were his guns still and he never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any more. The house was rebuilt in the same place out of timber now and painted white and from the porch you see the poplars and the lake beyond; but there were never any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the wall lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched them.
Death in the Afternoon (1932) ends with a peroration about being a writer of one’s own life:
If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it. The Prado, looking like some big American college building, with sprinklers watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white mud hills looking across towards Carabanchel; days on the train in August with the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them; chaff blown against the car in the wind from the hard earthen threshing floors; the odour of grain and the stone windmills...
...the cafe where you got your education learning who owed who money and who chiseled this from who and why he told him he could kiss his what and who had children by who and who married who before and after what and how long it took for this and that and what the doctor said. Who was so pleased because the bulls were delayed, being unloaded only the day of the fight, naturally weak in the legs, just two passes, poom, and it is all over, he said, and then it rained and the fight postponed a week and that was when he got it. Who wouldn’t fight with who and when and why and does she, of course she does, you fool, don’t you know she does? Absolutely and that’s all and in no other fashion, she gobbles them alive and all such valuable news you learn in cafes. In cafes where the boys are never wrong; in cafes where they are all brave; in cafes where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble tops among the shucked shrimps of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in cafes.
What else should it contain about a country you love so much? ... We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it. No. It is not enough of a book, but still there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be said.
Hemingway is a master of repetition for the sake of rhythm; prose that approaches poetry without trying to be poetic. And master of punctuation, bearing in mind that a period means full stop; semi-colon, half-stop; comma, brief pause; just plain ‘and’ means no pause at all, just keep the rhythm rolling and whatever you’re describing too.
Bits of simple declarative, the building blocks.
