Friday, June 21, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 20: Ernest Hemingway on Being Hungry in Paris

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.
So starts Ernest Hemingway's essay "Hunger was Good Discipline" in A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir about his Paris years, published three years after his death. This 41-word sentence is striking for several reasons:

  • The use of you. This thrice-used rhetorical device would get under an English teacher's skin, but Hemingway brings his readers into the experience, regardless of whether they have visited Paris.  
  • The verb got. The vernacular might irritate a stylist looking for elegance of expression, but it is plain, understandable language.
  • The adverbs very and such. Most writing instructors say that adverbs are often usually useless. True, these words do not add much value to the description, but they complement the colloquial style. 
  • Nondescript words like good and things. Why not at least delicious instead of good to describe the food in the window? What about croissants or macaroons or crusty bread to replace things? Because Hemingway trusts us to imagine what we will.
  • No commas. A grammar snob would call for at least one comma after windows, and arguably another one after Paris. But Hemingway wants to move us along a bit quicker to the next sentence.
  • Redundancies. Bakeries could cover for bakery shops, and on the sidewalk eliminates the need for outside. Here Hemingway wants a rhythm to the sentence that is better served by the verbiage.
  • Plain sense words. We saw and smelled the food. We do not need much more for our eyes to be riveted on the bakery window as the open door releases an irresistible aroma of freshly baked bread. We've been there, done that; we had the multi-sensory experience without the author needing to say more than he did. 

This sentence reminds us that we are all capable of writing if we capture interesting human reactions to the world we encounter.

 Read previous installments of  "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
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