HEMINGWAY

I wish I could remember for certain which of Ernest Hemingway's books I read first. My best guess, about which I am nearly ninety percent sure, is that it was The Old Man and the Sea. What I do remember is this: the first time I read him I was changed. It was the first time I read something and became fully aware of the power of words. Before Hemingway, I read for a kind of passive enjoyment, but after Hemingway I was a serious reader. I also came to love short stories because of Hemingway and it was in reading his work that I first felt stirred to write something of my own.

Through my high school years I read everything I could by Ernest Hemingway and prowled used bookstores for old and battered copies of books by him that I already owned. Of course, it was in those years that I became overly serious anyhow and so, thinking of myself as a serious reader, whatever that means, and as some sort of artist was simply a part of trying to understand where I fit in the world at that age. As a young man it was nearly impossible to avoid devouring the overwrought masculinity of Hemingway and his characters. Fishing for marlin, hunting lions, drinking, cussing, soldiering, shooting, being noble and literate and gigantic -- it was a veritable wonderland for a teenage boy. It was not possible, of course, to model my life after his. But, it was altogether possible to model my writing after him and to learn from him that writing is work and takes discipline and sweat and that it asks you to give something completely of yourself.

I made my pilgrimage to his Key West home when I was seventeen and stared with awe into his writing room, taking deep breaths, trying to soak something of him into my soul. I walked slowly around that place in pure disbelief that I was standing where he had stood and where he had lived a piece of that mythical life of his. To this day I am hindered by an overdone reverence for him. He was a man who loomed large in life, but who looms ever larger as a legend, so much so that penetrating into the truth of who Hemingway was is no longer possible, but there are glimpses. Last year I read one of the more amazing books I have ever read, Hemingway's Boat, by Paul Hendrickson. In focusing on the years Hemingway owned his beloved Pilar, Hendrickson was able to cut a little closer, I believe, to the core of who Hemingway really was.

I came across recently a well known interview of Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton, one of the founding editors of The Paris Review. Here is where Hemingway talks about his iceberg theory of writing -- that, like an iceberg, the largest and most important parts of a story lie underneath the surface. You see here also the Hemingway attitude and contempt, but there are snippets that are fascinating for what he says about writing and his writing process. You know from reading this blog that I am a student of the craft of writing, the art and process of it, and this interview is one of the very few records we have of Hemingway discussing it at length, if that can even be said. For, as Plimpton notes in the introduction,

"Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny--'that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.'"

This near superstition that Hemingway had about his work is prevalent in his words here. He sees writing as both craft -- mysterious, artistic -- and discipline -- work.

I certainly hope you will read the interview, but here are my favorite excerpts.

"When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again . . . It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."

"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come."

"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work."

"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."

PLIMPTON: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY: Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

"But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness."

"It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading."

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"