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Though he relied on the common speech of the commonest men—race-track touts, prizefighters, soldiers—Hemingway wrote brilliant dialogue that was highly stylized, just as an X ray is a highly stylized picture of the body. It revealed more than it ever laconically said. Though he never went to college, he picked his prose teachers well, starting with the King James Bible. His love of nature and the vernacular, together with a kind of barefoot male camaraderie, linked him fraternally with Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Hemingway was the first of the '205 expatriates to knock on Gertrude Stein's door, and he learned the most. She taught him the impact of simple repetition and the rhythm of words.
From Flaubert, whose bust he used to salute while crossing the Luxembourg Gardens to his Montparnasse flat, Hemingway learned precision, the right word in the right place. But there is an emotional intensity in a random Hemingway sentence that the teachers do not account for and the imitators and parodists never capture. The effect of "In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels" depends on a special quality of vision. Everything in Hemingway is seen as it might be looked at by a man on the day he knew he would die.
Grace Under Pressure. He never toyed with minor themes. He wrote of life and death, of time and towns (which he called cities), and of the courage he liked to call "grace under pressure." He never had much stomach, or much head, for politics, and his literary reputation may wear the better for it, since nothing dates like a paper barricade.
He once said: "Let those who want to save the world if you get to see it clear and as a whole." Seeing it clear and whole did not involve for him, as it did for Tolstoy, the high politics of a philosophy of history. In War and Peace, Tolstoy speculates at length on whether heroes and leaders influence events or whether everything is impersonally determined like the rise and fall of tides. Hemingway had an underdeveloped social sense, and he put his characters in situations where society had already broken down. He pictured the social order as disorder, a kind of natural catastrophe like a river in flood. The individual could save himself only by relying on himself.
Of love, Hemingway wrote with peculiar implausibility. The love affair in A Farewell to Arms is a kind of modern Romeo and Juliet. Most of the other love stories read like adolescent male fantasies. In Hemingway there are only two kinds of women—the bitches like Margaret Macomber who shoots her husband the moment he displays courage, and the somnambules like Maria, who sleepwalks into Robert Jordan's sleeping bag. Lady Brett Ashley is a special breed, a likable bitch. Ibsen's Nora wanted to be her own woman. Promiscuous, aggressive Brett, with her habit of calling everybody "chap," is both her own woman and her own man, with the fatal sterility of being able to give herself to no one.