Ford on Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway: passport photo from 1923

I came across an extract taken from the New York Evening Post Literary Review from 3rd January 1925 that I found interesting. It appears in the excellent collection, edited by Max Saunders, of War Prose by Ford Madox Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, pp 219-221).

It contains some of Ford's thoughts on Hemingway and his sparse writing style:

Mr Hemingway [...] writes like an angel; like an archangel: but his talk - his matter - is that of a bayonet instructor.

Ford also provides an example of Hemingway's prose that is worth re-producing (I thought it might be from Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises however, it wasn't published until 1926/7. Perhaps it is from one of his short stories - if anyone knows where it's from I'd be pleased to know):

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out and he lay in the sand and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he could not get the sword in. He could hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull-ring....

First things first: how long is that second sentence without containing any punctuation! And where are the adjectives! In relation to the above, Ford writes:

That is very marvelous writing. If the American Father and Mother will just for a moment withhold their protests against the blood on the sand, they will realise that they now possess an incomparable picture and that that picture has been presented with almost fewer words than is believable.

It's not difficult to reach the conclusion that, in 1925, Ford was a great admirer of Hemingway's approach to writing. I wonder if the feeling was reciprocal....