"It was a good book, because it was an honest book" - Ernest Hemingway

I guess that most of you have seen the movie "Midnight in Paris", or at least have heard about it in classes because Mr. Villa mentioned it. Well, I have found a very short scene of this movie in youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzoOA473wq0

The main character, Gil, is transported back to the Belle Époque at midnight. There, he is introduced to important writers from the 1920s.
In the scene you can see that Fitzgerald (yes, the author of "The Great Gatsby") takes Gil to meet Hemingway, and just in a matter of seconds Hemingway expresses two main concepts that we talked about in class: morality in writing (which has to do with being truthful) and the ordering code (which has to do with the hero who fights with honor so dies gracefully).

I want to focus on the former: the idea of morality in writing. Hemingway says firmly "it was a good book, because it was an honest book" which reflects how concerned he was with truth in his writing. As said in classes, Hemingway stated that being truthful is to be right. For being truthful he put down what he saw in the simpliest way, avoiding saturation and extremely editing.
About this, I think that it was an exaggerated point of view, because a good book doesn't necessarily need to be honest. What about books that are full figures of speech? We enjoy them; they appeal to our emotions, plus we can clearly understand and feel what we are reading. If "the sun is smiling" we know that it is shining, we imagine its bright and can almost feel its warm. If the sun can't literally smile it doesn't mean that what was written is a lie, because we are able to interpret the writers intention; we get what he meant anyway and it's true.

Maybe Hemingway was too focused on describing real facts the closest to truth, so he didn't appraise a book for its complexity.