Ernest Hemingway Sifts Through the Political Bullshit

The writer’s much-mocked style reveals a hatred for the exhausted language of euphemism

These days, everyone hates Ernest Hemingway, which is fine. There are many reasons to hate Hemingway. Most of them are good reasons and only a few of them are bad: The toxic masculinity, the cartoonishly macho hobbies, his inability to fathom the interior life of women. Above all, there is the union of this stunted emotional life with a pared down, minimalist prose style, one that had become ubiquitous for a time in creative writing workshops and literary journals.

Matthew Adams, writing in The Washington Post, summed this up what has become, I think, the general attitude toward Hemingway’s style. “Ernest Hemingway is the macho face of 20th-century prose,” Adams wrote in 2017.

His birth in 1899 marked the arrival of a man who wanted to dissociate literature from the taint of femininity it had acquired under the influence of Oscar Wilde and align it instead with a kind of hairy masculinity. Lilies and wallpaper were finished. In their place? Blood, battle, sex, hunts, death. Manly things. And to treat manly things properly, literature would require an appropriately manly style. Out with girly adjectives, rapt similes, elaborate metaphors, ethereal ruminations…