Even though I’m terrible with numbers, I can understand and appreciate multi-variable algebra, because I feel it’s a lot like reading: you are trying to solve for X based on its relationship to other known variables.

Reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast I was struck by the algebraic nature of his writing, especially in his chapter “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” where he reveals his famous “iceberg” theory that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

He claims to have come to this theory while writing an early story, “Out of Season,” a story in which Hemingway omits “the real end in which the old man hanged himself.”

My interest in it isn’t purely technical—any close reader of “Indian Camp,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” or, the most famous, “Hills Like White Elephants,” can see and feel the way omission creates psychological tension and drama.

What I’m interested in is how his theory is connected to hunger.

Late in the same chapter, Hemingway writes: “It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them.” (Emphasis mine.)

Just what “it” refers to here is not clear, but it would seem he means the discipline that hunger teaches—the self-control to not spend an entire check from a magazine publication on a meal out, but to go to the grocery and celebrate modestly at home.

I think it takes stepping back a little to get it. Hemingway begins the chapter by explaining that he has given up journalism and that he is writing “nothing that anyone in America would buy.”

Then, he spends several pages describing the way he must chart a course through Paris to avoid tantalizing aromas from cafés and the visual allure of bright produce carts, before finally laying out his theory of omission and telling us that stories characterized by such omissions are not in demand.

I have read this chapter now several times, and each time there is a sense of the kind of omission he speaks of that makes people “feel something more than they understood.” With each pass I sense that there is something “right” about what he is saying—I feel compelled to agree, but I don’t quite know why.

If I were to approach it in algebraic terms, it might look something like this:

If A=B and B=C , then A=C.

A is what we are solving for—the unknown character and quality of Hemingway’s work that he can’t sell. B equals stories American magazines won’t buy, and C equals stories characterized by omission.

Even someone has quantitatively-challenged as me can now solve for A: No one appreciates his stories of omission.

However, if we consider the story that Hemingway is telling us in this chapter of A Moveable Feast—his life as starving artist in Paris, and how he motivates himself to write despite his hunger—the thing which he has omitted to strengthen the story is a precise definition of “hunger-thinking.”

What is it? What effect does it have on the writer that can potentially cause him to not be able to “handle” himself, as Hemingway warns?

To define it we must now think in terms of what is not A or not C.

The answer?

Stories in which nothing is omitted; stories that, if we read Hemingway’s tone, pander.

We sense, then, that he feels that hunger can compromise art; that being too eager or dependent on pleasing (or pleasure) leads to work that is lacking in art. Elsewhere in the book he hungers for the “one true sentence,” a sentence without ornament or posture, a declarative sentence that establishes a strong foundation for action.

In this way, Hemingway’s view is an ascetic one. He sees hunger as the enemy, the tempter that inspires compromise and lying, a primal force driving us at our most basic level. And yet it drives us at our highest levels, too. We hunger and thirst for justice, for righteousness, for transcendence.

Initially, it’s hard to see Hemingway’s hunger in these terms, as “Papa Hemingway,” his larger-than-life, bull-fighting, ambulance driving, Big Two-Hearted persona, looms large over his work.

But could it be that he, like so many men, omit out of a basic shyness when it comes to the big issues: infidelity; abortion; the existence of God; mortality.

When I think of Hemingway now in this light, it’s possible for me to see myself in these aborted attempts at true conversation and connection.

The thing is, that’s what I thought I had been doing all these years, though I really wasn’t. I wasn’t seeing myself at all. I was seeing an image of the young Hemingway living hand to mouth in the City of Light, visiting with Gertrude Stein in her salon, and day-tripping through the French countryside with Scott Fitzgerald in an open car, and believing that that was what I should aspire to.

I realize now that his stories satisfied a hunger for my life as a writer to look and feel, and smell the same without having to pay any of the dues along the way.

Caught up in the mythos of the writer living the writing life, his technique of omission allowed me to feel a sense of assurance about the way a particular story might mean, and to feel smug in my knowing because I believed it to be a game; that being able to intellectually grasp the thing omitted meant that I was now in some way like him.

This is the danger of Hemingway’s theory: that I know and understand more than I do, more than I have perhaps earned, and in doing so I take for granted the universal hunger present in his characters, the forgivable hunger for peace, for some assurance that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” A peace I find absent in his work.