Issues for His Prose Style
Andrew O’Hagan: Hemingway, 7 June 2012
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22
edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon.
Cambridge, 431 pp., £30, October 2011,978 0 521 89733 4 Show More
edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon.
Cambridge, 431 pp., £30, October 2011,
“... Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives ... ”
