HEMINGWAY IN ITALY
have never before been described in Italian literature, though I would
be
at a loss to quote anything like them. But open any book of Hem–
ingway, and you will find the model. Take for instance this passage
from "Big Two-Hearted River":
Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier.
He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti
into the frying pan.
"I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I'm willing to carry it,"
Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening wood. He did
not speak again.
He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the axe
from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs
down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill
over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed.
Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble,
making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was
a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four
slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat
down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about
half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate.
Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He
knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire,
then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue.
For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never
been able to wait for them
to
cool. His tongue was very sensitive.
I said before that I cannot remember anything like this kind of
description in Italian literature, and I may as well say, in any other
literature I know.
If
such minute operations have ever been described
before, there was no emphasis on them; they were not meant to
stand out like something particularly significant. With Hemingway
they have ceased to be part of the background; they are presented
as important episodes. And the same has happened with the seem–
ingly insignificant details of ordinary conversation. Before Hemingway,
dialogues in fiction or on the stage were the result of a selection: all
immaterial portions were left out; questions and answers followed
a more or less rigid pattern dictated by
art.
The utmost artificiality
prevailed in the stichomythy of the Greek tragedies, as in Alex–
andrian couplets of the French plays, or the witty repartees of
Restoration comedy; but even the dialogues in the novels of the
naturalist school of the nineteenth century, for all they pretended
to be copied from real life, are arranged so that, so far as the author
can help, there is nothing superfluous. Hemingway has shown the
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