Quote of the Day (Isaac Babel, on the Impact of Literary Style)

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” —Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940?), “Guy de Maupassant,” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Nathalie Babel (2001)

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, With One of the Great Openings in American Literature)

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. 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. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”—Nobel Literature laureate and American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Farewell to Arms (1929)

In a post from nine years ago, I discussed how, by force of will—anywhere from 39 attempts (the author’s estimate) to 70—Ernest Hemingway came up with an ending to A Farewell to Arms that finally satisfied him.

I don’t know if Hemingway struggled quite so much with his opening to this novel from his golden period, but I do know that it is magical in a way that his bleak conclusion isn’t, and probably couldn’t be.

The cadences of the sentences—filled with short words, but featuring multiple clauses that add complexity—feel inspired by the King James Bible in their constant repetition of “and.” The details of the landscape were born of close observation by a writer who, on childhood fishing trips with his father, developed a lifelong love for nature.

Put all of this together and the results are lyrical. But Hemingway has also slipped in, as naturally as the pebbles and dust he notices, three symbols that will dominate the rest of the novel: the plain, the mountains, and the river.

The plain is the scene of suffering and death, created in this case by the havoc caused by World War I. Even the movement of troops through the village disturb the natural order, raising dust on the trees. The mountains come to represent refuge and home, the transitory “separate peace” that narrator Lt. Frederic Henry and his lover Catherine Barkley treasure.

The river signifies rebirth, a departure from the devastation of war into a new realm of freedom and love, where Frederic will dive to escape the carnage and madness of war.

World War I wounded civilization as a whole and Hemingway in particular. The wound to the then 18-year-old ambulance driver on the Italian front was physical (fragments from a mortar shell entered his right foot and knee, striking his thighs, scalp and hand—and, most ominously, the first in a series of concussions) and psychological (a belief that violence could intrude at any time on life).

For all the granular physical description in the opening of A Farewell to Arms, it paradoxically gains power through the blurring of other details. “In the summer of that year”—which year? “A village”—which one? Likewise, the river and mountains go unnamed. It is all so mysterious that the reader wants to know more, but at the same time the experience has become universal, beyond a particular time and place.

Although Hemingway has been frequently criticized for his treatment of the women in his life and his fiction, two female writers were looked beyond his blustering macho and found inspiration in the powerful opening of A Farewell to Arms. Joan Didion analyzed it in a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, but had already hailed it in a 1978 interview for The Paris Review:

“He taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”

Equally seismic was the impact on the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, one of Hemingway’s most perceptive and eloquent advocates in the Ken Burns biography of the Nobel laureate. In her own 1984 interview with The Paris Review, she explains how she first encountered this passage:

“Shortly after I arrived in London I saw an advertisement for a lecture given by Arthur Mizener [author of a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise] on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You must remember that I had no literary education, but a fervid religious one. So I went to the lecture and it was like a thunderbolt—Saul of Tarsus on his horse! Mizener read out the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and I couldn’t believe it—this totally uncluttered, precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my urgency to write.”

Quote of the Day (Pat Conroy, on Why ‘Good Writing is the Hardest Form of Thinking’)

“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.” —Southern novelist Pat Conroy (1945-2016), My Reading Life (2010)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on ‘Artificial Style’)

"This artificial style, that's all the fashion,
Has neither taste, nor honesty, nor passion;
It's nothing but a sort of wordy play,
And nature never spoke in such a way."— French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on How Books Are Made)

“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.” —English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), A Room of One's Own (1929)

Few could construct sentences, let alone books, like Virginia Woolf, born 140 years ago today. She turned out, by this count, 34 books—essays, biographies, novels, and diary entries. As part of the Bloomsbury set of writers, artists and intellectuals, she also made it possible for others to find their creative voices.

Remarkably, she wrote all of this while being afflicted repeatedly with influenza and, ultimately and more damagingly, what are now believed to be episodes of bipolar disorder. The latter condition led her to commit suicide in 1941.

Woolf is one of the few authors whose work has become voluminous enough and life documented sufficiently to warrant not one, but several blogs devoted to her and/or the Bloomsbury circle, including Blogging Woolf.

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on ‘The Only Secret of Style’)

“People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” —English critic-poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), quoted in G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1904)

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on the ‘Rainbow Edge’ to Prose)

“I suppose, yes, I do find it easier to write than some writers, and maybe harder than some others, because I'm aware of the need to write--especially in a time when there are so many alternative claims on our entertainment budget….All that, I think, makes it more urgent than ever that a book be more than just the news, that it be the news plus something extra, some shiver, some rainbow edge to the prose. You can't really control your writer’s voice. It’s a lot like your handwriting—you can't stop it. You can try to alter it, but it always comes out as you. My prose tends to come out as me, and I know it turns off people, because I really ask you to read a little slower than maybe you read the newspaper—but my feeling is that's what makes a book different than a newspaper and more lasting.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), “A Conversation With John Updike” (interviewed by Leonard Lopate on C-Span, Nov. 28, 2000), edited and reprinted in Leonard Lopate, “Interview: The Writing Life and Times of John Updike,” The Writer, 2001

Quote of the Day (Ursula K. Le Guin, on ‘The Sound of the Language’)

“The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing depend on these sounds and rhythms.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on a Woman With Style)

"She had the kind of style that didn't go on with her make-up, and she was about my age. As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too. The trouble is that most of them are married." ― Ross Macdonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962)

Quote of the Day (Louisa May Alcott, on ‘Good Strong Words’)

“I like good strong words that mean something.”— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)

Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on 2 Sorts of Eloquence)

"There are two sorts of eloquence. The one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, which glitter, but convey little or no light to the understanding. This kind of writing is for the most part much affected and admired by people of weak judgment and vicious taste…. The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse of this; and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the excellence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty, which is a double character, so difficult to be united, that it is seldom to be met with in compositions merely human."—Laurence Sterne, "Sermon 42: Search the Scriptures," 1760, in The Works of Laurence Sterne: Sermons (1790)

(The image of the Tristram Shandy novelist accompanying this post is the 1760 Sir Joshua Reynolds painting in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)