I have been thinking about Hemingway recently. Yes, Ernest Hemingway, that great American author who swallowed a shotgun blast in 1961. The writer of such brilliant works as Green Hills of Africa, To Have And To Have Not, Dangerous Summer, The Sun Also Rises, and (my personal favorite) Islands In The Stream. There were many more, of course, but these are the ones which I consider to be brilliant.
Hemingway's books strike me at a gut level. It is not generally at an intellectual level. His books are designed to be easy to read. He was a journalist before he was a novelist and he wrote in the journalistic style (never publish anything a 4th grader could not understand). He summed up his writing philosophy beautifully in his posthumous novel The Garden Of Eden: "Know how complex a thing is, and then state it as simply as you can." There was always so much more going on beneath the words then there ever was on the surface, and his word choices, sentence and paragraph structures, and the overall moods that his words inflicted on my spirit I remember with great fondness. Not all of his books were depressing. Not all had obvious social messages. But all of them contained this utter sophisticated simplicity which he strove so hard to produce that kept me coming back book after book. I have read most of them. Not in years, but I have read most of them.
I believe I will read another. His charming simplicity will I remember until I forget.
