Mot juste

Mot juste is the ideal of choosing the one exact word a sentence requires. Ernest Hemingway presents it as a critical principle Ezra Pound believed in and taught him, but his recollection also sets that ideal against Dostoyevsky’s ability to make characters come alive without consistently using the mot juste.

Definition and Critical Discipline

Hemingway describes the mot juste as “the one and only correct word to use.” The phrase makes precision more than a preference for elegant diction: it imagines that, for a given sentence, one word is right and alternatives are not. Pound’s related instruction was to distrust adjectives, a discipline Hemingway says he learned from him. Together, the principle and the instruction direct attention toward exact choice and away from language that adds description without earning its place.

Pound as Teacher

Hemingway recalls Pound’s influence in a particular setting: after they had played tennis on Boulevard Arago, Pound invited him into his studio for a drink. Hemingway trusted Pound more than anyone as a critic at that point, and valued his commitment to the mot juste. This authority matters to the recollection because Hemingway does not present the principle as an abstract maxim alone; it comes from a critic whose judgment he relied on and whose advice had shaped how he read and assessed language.

Dostoyevsky and the Principle’s Limits

The conversation began when Hemingway asked Pound what he thought of Dostoyevsky. Pound answered that he had never read the Russians. Hemingway regarded it as a straight answer, consistent with Pound’s verbal honesty, but felt badly: he had wanted the judgment of a trusted critic on a writer whose achievement seemed to complicate Pound’s standard. Dostoyevsky, as Hemingway describes him, almost never used the mot juste, yet could make his characters come alive as few other writers did. The contrast does not erase the value of precision; it shows that Hemingway’s own critical admiration could not be contained by a single rule. Pound’s advice was to keep to French, where Hemingway still had much to learn, while Hemingway acknowledged that there was much to learn everywhere. The principle thus remains a rigorous discipline, not a complete measure of literary life.