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from Ethnic Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Delmore Schwartz argued in 1951 that Hemingway’s style was neither primitive nor proletarian:
Its devices include eloquent reticence, intensely emotional understatement, and above all the simplified speech which an American uses to a European ignorant of English....
Hemingway’s style is a poetic heightening of various forms of modern colloquial speech – among them, the idiom of the hardboiled reporter, the foreign correspondent, and the sportswriter. It is masculine speech. Its reticence, understatement, and toughness derive from the American masculine ideal, which has a long history going back to the pioneer on the frontier and including the strong silent man of the Hollywood Western. The intense sensitivity to the way in which a European speaks broken English, echoing his own language’s idioms, may also derive from the speech of the immigrants as well, perhaps, as from the special relationship of America to Europe which the fiction of Henry James first portrayed fully.
Schwartz’s linking of Hemingway’s “Americanness,” employment of the international theme, and possible reliance on immigrant speech was perceptive. “Hemingway spoken here” might well have been the motto of much prose writing of the 1930s, and American ethnic writers gave ample testimony to their indebtedness.
Meyer Levin, a Jewish novelist from Chicago who wrote the trilogy-length novel The Old Bunch (1937) and was later instrumental in publishing Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1952) in English translation, started his career with two Hemingwayesque novels. Reporter (1929), a city desk book, and Frankie and Johnnie (1930), the story of a failed romance with such sentences as: “All the time Johnnie was thinking these things Frankie wasn’t riding home on the L at all. All that time, Frankie was riding home on the bus.”
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