i like hemmingway a lot despite finding his novels arrogant, insufferable and tiresome to read. partly because his short stories are simple, and beautiful, and amazingly, achingly, heartbreakingly true. but mostly because of the constant tension in all but his very longest and very polished of pieces, where the words are a little bit strained and desperate and hoarse, like when someone is telling a very long, very good and happy-but-sad story that they believe in, either very late at night or too early in the morning, and their throat is just a little bit too tired and thin and unexpansive to properly accommodate the swellingness of everything they want to say. i think most people can recognise it and appreciate it, because well for me at least there has been nothing that i have ever really wanted to say- like, really truly say and mean- which i haven’t struggled with. i distrust effortlessness as a rule, because i think if you lose something without the struggle and because i think with smoothness and ease it is so hard not to slip into brass and condescending glibness even with things that you really feel, and mean. so this is why i tend to like terseness in short stories where the words are limited and you have a very small, very frustrating lack of space to say what you need to say, despite really enjoying volubleness in long novels about decade long love affairs set in the sultry jungles of lush south america or whatever. and i think hemmingway is one of the few writers who leaves that straining in, so that you can really, palpably feel it, either because it is so intrinsic to the way that he writes that you simply cannot take it out without smashing it all to bits, or because he understood what it meant and was proud of it and did not want to smooth his words over for the sake of semantic slide.
