A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, 1929.

It is very possible that Ernest Hemingway’s true métier was the short story, a form in which he excelled. In fact, In Our Time went some way toward creating the type of short story that would dominate American magazines for decades to follow. He was a master of excision and reduction, boiling a story down until the bare-boned words that remain tell more than swaths of pretty prose. Silences and elisions speak volumes. In short, it’s not what’s said but what’s left unsaid. His forceful minimalism stripped out a lot of the Victorian weeds that had strangled the language of fiction. Because his style, made up of both journalistic directness and modernist experimentation, became, in some regards, the dominant prose style of the century, we may easily forget just how vigorous and fresh it seemed at the time.

Hemingway, always a tough guy, measured himself in boxing terms against the great and good of days gone by. He knew that to be a true contender he had to have a novel. He had to have the prestige that it brought (and the royalties would not be unwelcome to a struggling young writer). He accomplished this with his first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises, which was hailed as a great American novel (his first published novel, rarely mentioned even by his fans, is Torrents of Spring, a vicious parody of his former friend Sherwood Anderson, written with the express purpose of breaking Hemingway’s contract with Horace Liveright so that he might switch to Scribner, who published him for the rest of his career).

The Sun Also Rises captured the rudderless lives of what Gertrude Stein, Hemingway’s friend and mentor (his direct, repetitive style owes a debt to her) called the “Lost Generation,” those twenty-somethings disillusioned and emotionally scarred (when not physically crippled) by the Great War. In his next, highly-anticipated novel, Farewell to Arms, he took the reader back to the trenches, drawing heavily on his own experiences fighting in northern Italy at the Battle of Caporetto, where he was wounded (Hemingway believed that even if the events portrayed in a novel are entirely invented, the force of felt experience must lay beneath). He enjoyed a passionate relationship with American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky while recuperating in a Milan hospital. In the novel, the two become Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. As much as he admired strength (boxers, toreadors, warriors), Hemingway gives us something else in this spare, sad story. The battle-hardened Henry believes he has no interest in love, but it overcomes him: “I went out the door and suddenly I felt lonely and empty. I had treated seeing Catherine very lightly. I had gotten somewhat drunk and had nearly forgotten to come but when I could not see her there I was feeling lonely and hollow.”

Henry loses everything. His unit turns up in time to see the Austro-Hungarians, aided by the newly-arrived and much feared Germans, sweep the Allies from the field at Caporetto. After the crushing defeat by Axis powers, he is reduced to a bedridden second infancy, nursed slowly to health again. Even after he finds love with Catherine—“God knows I didn’t mean to fall in love with her”—he ultimately loses her and his child when she expires in childbirth. Our hero is left alone to walk “back to the hotel in the rain.” Here we see an early glimmer of what, years later, Hemingway would write in The Old Man and the Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Hemingway’s punchy, masculine prose is deeply unfashionable today, as is his macho swagger. People don’t go in for “papas” anymore. Bare-chested adventurers inspire guffaws. Hemingway was a creature of his age, and he was responsible for some awful writing (see the execrable To Have and Have Not and ludicrous Across the River and Into the Trees), but he distilled some timeless truths out of the events of his day and his own life, which was itself both triumphant (his late success with Old Man and the Sea after years of ridicule) and tragedy (eventually he found himself unable to write and, like his father, shot himself).

Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis, 1922.

It’s rare that a novel or one of its characters enters everyday language. Most people can identify Captain Ahab or Hester Prynne, and their circumstances or personalities may be summoned to make a point about obsession or hypocrisy. But only rarely does a novel get right to the heart of a matter the way Sinclair Lewis’s lambasting novel of small-town smugness did. In a whirling Jazz Age of flappers, bohemians, and political activists, we encounter one George F. Babbitt: middle-aged but still somehow trustingly boyish, a sanctimonious member of the comfortable new bourgeoisie, real estate man, booster, thoughtless racist, bombastic fool, tool of the elite, lover of status, scourge of the new, a man too eager to be liked, sometimes sad and uncertain, dutiful if dull husband, loving if narrow-minded father, trustworthy friend and suspicious upright citizen.

Babbitt embodies all that Sinclair found hypocritical and just plain awful about small-town America. Behind the trumpets of civic pride lurks a venal oligarchy, bent on preserving its own privilege at all costs. But there is more. Because he probably just couldn’t help himself, Sinclair infused Babbitt with enough humanity to make him sympathetic to all but the most judgmental reader. Babbitt examines a moment and a type in American history (though it is remarkably fresh and relevant today), yet it is also a marvelous assessment of the dreaded “mid-life crisis.” Poor, bumbling Babbitt, trapped on his societal rung, yearning for approval from those above while snubbing those below, aching for escape from his routine while defending the foundations of decent society, craving youthful adventure while lecturing others about responsibility and decorum: he’s a sucker, but we feel he isn’t an impossibly hateful man. He’s what my father would have called a complete horse’s ass. He’s not evil, just mediocre and painfully bland, pulled this way and that by new social trends (some progressive, others reactionary) and the chance to advance himself (often at the expense of others) and support his family in a manner to which they’ve become accustomed, as we say.

Surely Babbitry is to be frowned upon, and “Babbitt” remains a terrible epithet to drop on an enemy. To do so is to suggest that a person lacks imagination, dignity, empathy, and some essential goodness. But let’s lay off Babbitt for just a while and remember that’s he’s actually just a regular guy, trying to get ahead, struggling to figure out what (and who) to believe, and hoping for one last chance at a childish enthusiasm that seems to have drained out of his life. He’s made up of equal parts good and bad, stuck in a stifling belief system that he’s not bold enough to break out of. There are worse things. So feel sorry for Babbitt. Laugh at him. You will. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself suddenly feeling a bit sorry for him, and, heaven forefend, even identifying with him every now and again.