Monday, December 7, 2009

some time to write and read...


The Paris Review



Copyright © 2009, The Paris Review. All Rights Reserved.


HEMINGWAY

You go to the races?


INTERVIEWER

Yes, occasionally.


HEMINGWAY

Then you read the Racing Form . . . . There you have the true

art of fiction.


—Conversation in a Madrid café, May 1954

Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the

Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special

workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest

corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing

to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there.

The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the

main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by

a heavy volume listing and describing The World’s Aircraft Engines.


ERNEST HEMINGWAY


The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south

letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.

The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high

bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite

walls. A large and low double bed dominates one section, oversized

slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside

tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove

stands a massive flat-top desk with a chair at either side, its surface

an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far

end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across

the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases

from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top

among old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters

bound together by rubber bands.

It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one

against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his

bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of

cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other

by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and

pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase

for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading board, five or

six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers

when the wind blows in from the east window.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway

stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers

on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading

board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a

pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter

paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the

left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from

under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the

paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with

his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper

with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more

boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often

the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it

facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of

the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading

board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the

writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid

myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard

packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a

mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily

output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the

higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t

feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

A man of habit, Hemingway does not use the perfectly suitable

desk in the other alcove. Though it allows more space for writing,

it too has its miscellany: stacks of letters; a stuffed toy lion of the

type sold in Broadway nighteries; a small burlap bag full of carnivore

teeth; shotgun shells; a shoehorn; wood carvings of lion,

rhino, two zebras, and a wart-hog—these last set in a neat row

across the surface of the desk—and, of course, books: piled on the

desk, beside tables, jamming the shelves in indiscriminate order—

novels, histories, collections of poetry, drama, essays. A look at

their titles shows their variety. On the shelf opposite Hemingway’s

knee as he stands up to his “work desk” are Virginia Woolf’s

The Common Reader, Ben Ames Williams’s House Divided,

The Partisan Reader, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic, Tarle’s

Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, How Young You Look by Peggy

Wood, Alden Brooks’s Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand,

Baldwin’s African Hunting, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, and two

books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.

The room, however, for all the disorder sensed at first sight,

indicates on inspection an owner who is basically neat but cannot

bear to throw anything away—especially if sentimental value is

attached. One bookcase top has an odd assortment of mementos:

a giraffe made of wood beads; a little cast-iron turtle; tiny models

of a locomotive; two jeeps and a Venetian gondola; a toy bear with

a key in its back; a monkey carrying a pair of cymbals; a miniature

guitar; and a little tin model of a U.S. Navy biplane (one wheel

missing) resting awry on a circular straw place mat—the quality of

the collection that of the odds and ends which turn up in a shoebox

at the back of a small boy’s closet. It is evident, though, that these

tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway

keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but

because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the

bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at

them,” he says.

Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers

not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have

can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing.

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.”

As a result, though a wonderful raconteur, a man of rich

humor, and possessed of an amazing fund of knowledge on subjects

that interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about

writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather

because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed,

that to be asked questions on them “spooks” him (to use

one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost

inarticulate. Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to

work out on his reading board. The occasional waspish tone of the

answers is also part of this strong feeling that writing is a private,

lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work

is done.

This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with

the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of

popular conception. The fact is that Hemingway, while obviously

enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does

—an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the

inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.

Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than

in the yellow-tiled bedroom—where early in the morning

Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of

his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to

another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as

a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily

vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline, which lasts until about

noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house

for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.

—George Plimpton, 1958


INTERVIEWER

Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable?


ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Very.


INTERVIEWER

Could you say something of this process? When do you work?

Do you keep to a strict schedule?


HEMINGWAY

When I am working on a book or a 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. You have

started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be

through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the

same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to

someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen,

nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again.

It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.


INTERVIEWER

Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on

when you’re away from the typewriter?


HEMINGWAY

Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is

acquired. It has to be.


INTERVIEWER

Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you

left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole

is finished?


HEMINGWAY

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped.

When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another

chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you

see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful

for these different chances.


INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?


HEMINGWAY

It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last

page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.


INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had

stumped you?


HEMINGWAY

Getting the words right.


INTERVIEWER

Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?


HEMINGWAY

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on,

knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always

juice somewhere.


INTERVIEWER

But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?


HEMINGWAY

Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would

happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all

right. The juice will come.


INTERVIEWER

Thornton Wilder speaks of mnemonic devices that get the

writer going on his day’s work. He says you once told him you

sharpened twenty pencils.


HEMINGWAY

I don’t think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing

down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.


INTERVIEWER

Where are some of the places you have found most advantageous

to work? The Ambos Mundos hotel must have been one, judging

from the number of books you did there. Or do surroundings have

little effect on the work?


HEMINGWAY

The Ambos Mundos in Havana was a very good place to

work in. This Finca is a splendid place, or was. But I have worked

well everywhere. I mean I have been able to work as well as I can

under varied circumstances. The telephone and visitors are the

work destroyers.


INTERVIEWER

Is emotional stability necessary to write well? You told me

once that you could only write well when you were in love. Could

you expound on that a bit more?


HEMINGWAY

What a question. But full marks for trying. You can write any

time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather

you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing

is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would

rather not expound on that.


INTERVIEWER

How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good

writing?


HEMINGWAY

If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved

your work it would take much character to resist the temptations.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure

only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it

keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill

health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your

subconscious and destroys your reserves.


INTERVIEWER

Can you recall an exact moment when you decided to become

a writer?


HEMINGWAY

No, I always wanted to be a writer.


INTERVIEWER

Philip Young in his book on you suggests that the traumatic

shock of your severe 1918 mortar wound had a great influence on

you as a writer. I remember in Madrid you talked briefly about his

thesis, finding little in it, and going on to say that you thought the

artist’s equipment was not an acquired characteristic, but inherited,

in the Mendelian sense.


HEMINGWAY

Evidently in Madrid that year my mind could not be called

very sound. The only thing to recommend it would be that I spoke

only briefly about Mr. Young’s book and his trauma theory of

literature. Perhaps the two concussions and a skull fracture

of that year had made me irresponsible in my statements. I do

remember telling you that I believed imagination could be the

result of inherited racial experience. It sounds all right in good jolly

post-concussion talk, but I think that is more or less where it

belongs. So until the next liberation trauma, let’s leave it there. Do

you agree? But thanks for leaving out the names of any relatives

I might have implicated. The fun of talk is to explore, but much of

it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written

you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you

believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of

wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are

of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which

do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor

anybody else.


INTERVIEWER

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.


INTERVIEWER

How about people who’ve gone into the academic career?

Do you think the large numbers of writers who hold teaching

positions have compromised their literary careers?


HEMINGWAY

It depends on what you call compromise. Is the usage that of

a woman who has been compromised? Or is it the compromise of

the statesman? Or the compromise made with your grocer or your

tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later? A writer

who can both write and teach should be able to do both. Many

competent writers have proved it could be done. I could not do it,

I know, and I admire those who have been able to. I would think

though that the academic life could put a period to outside experience

which might possibly limit growth of knowledge of the world.

Knowledge, however, demands more responsibility of a writer and

makes writing more difficult. Trying to write something of permanent

value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are

spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well.

There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important

thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a

regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to

refill. I see I am getting away from the question, but the question

was not very interesting.


INTERVIEWER

Would you suggest newspaper work for the young writer?

How helpful was the training you had with the Kansas City Star?


HEMINGWAY

On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple

declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work

will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of

it in time. This is one of the dustiest clichés there is and I apologize

for it. But when you ask someone old, tired questions you are apt

to receive old, tired answers.


INTERVIEWER

You once wrote in the Transatlantic Review that the only

reason for writing journalism was to be well paid. You said: “And

when you destroy the valuable things you have by writing about

them, you want to get big money for it.” Do you think of writing

as a type of self-destruction?


HEMINGWAY

I do not remember ever writing that. But it sounds silly and

violent enough for me to have said it to avoid having to bite on the

nail and make a sensible statement. I certainly do not think of

writing as a type of self-destruction, though journalism, after

a point has been reached, can be a daily self-destruction for a

serious creative writer.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think the intellectual stimulus of the company of other

writers is of any value to an author?


HEMINGWAY

Certainly.


INTERVIEWER

In the Paris of the twenties did you have any sense of “group

feeling” with other writers and artists?


HEMINGWAY

No. There was no group feeling. We had respect for each

other. I respected a lot of painters, some of my own age, others

older—Gris, Picasso, Braque, Monet (who was still alive then)—

and a few writers: Joyce, Ezra, the good of Stein . . . .


INTERVIEWER

When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by

what you’re reading at the time?


HEMINGWAY

Not since Joyce was writing Ulysses. His was not a direct

influence. But in those days when words we knew were barred to

us, and we had to fight for a single word, the influence of his work

was what changed everything, and made it possible for us to break

away from the restrictions.


INTERVIEWER

Could you learn anything about writing from the writers? You

were telling me yesterday that Joyce, for example, couldn’t bear to

talk about writing.


HEMINGWAY

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily

speak of other writers’ books. The better the writers the less they

will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a

very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to

jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able

to know what he was doing by reading it.


INTERVIEWER

You seem to have avoided the company of writers in late

years. Why?


HEMINGWAY

That is more complicated. The further you go in writing the

more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die.

Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you

write and have much the same contact with them as though you

were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic,

sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is

almost as good as talking. 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.


INTERVIEWER

What about the influence of some of these people—your

contemporaries—on your work? What was Gertrude Stein’s

contribution, if any? Or Ezra Pound’s? Or Max Perkins’s?


HEMINGWAY

I’m sorry but I am no good at these postmortems. There are

coroners literary and non-literary provided to deal with such matters.

Miss Stein wrote at some length and with considerable inaccuracy

about her influence on my work. It was necessary for her to do this

after she had learned to write dialogue from a book called The Sun

Also Rises. I was very fond of her and thought it was splendid she

had learned to write conversation. It was no new thing to me to

learn from everyone I could, living or dead, and I had no idea it

would affect Gertrude so violently. She already wrote very well in

other ways. Ezra was extremely intelligent on the subjects he really

knew. Doesn’t this sort of talk bore you? This backyard literary

gossip while washing out the dirty clothes of thirty-five years ago

is disgusting to me. It would be different if one had tried to tell the

whole truth. That would have some value. Here it is simpler and

better to thank Gertrude for everything I learned from her about

the abstract relationship of words, say how fond I was of her,

reaffirm my loyalty to Ezra as a great poet and a loyal friend, and

say that I cared so much for Max Perkins that I have never been

able to accept that he is dead. He never asked me to change anything

I wrote except to remove certain words which were not then

publishable. Blanks were left, and anyone who knew the words

would know what they were. For me he was not an editor. He was

a wise friend and a wonderful companion. I liked the way he wore

his hat and the strange way his lips moved.


INTERVIEWER

Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you

have learned the most from?


HEMINGWAY

Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy,

Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant,

the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare,

Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch,

Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San

Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember

everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an

erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the

people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t

an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and

requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started

to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as

from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day

of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and

from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.


INTERVIEWER

Did you even play a musical instrument?


HEMINGWAY

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole

year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability,

but I was absolutely without talent. We played chamber music—

someone came in to play the violin; my sister played the viola, and

mother the piano. That cello—I played it worse than anyone on

earth. Of course, that year I was out doing other things too.


INTERVIEWER

Do you reread the authors of your list? Twain, for instance?


HEMINGWAY

You have to wait two or three years with Twain. You remember

too well. I read some Shakespeare every year, Lear always. Cheers

you up if you read that.


INTERVIEWER

Reading, then, is a constant occupation and pleasure.


HEMINGWAY

I’m always reading books—as many as there are. I ration

myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.


INTERVIEWER

Do you ever read manuscripts?


HEMINGWAY

You can get into trouble doing that unless you know the

author personally. Some years ago I was sued for plagiarism by a

man who claimed that I’d lifted For Whom the Bell Tolls from an

unpublished screen scenario he’d written. He’d read this scenario

at some Hollywood party. I was there, he said, at least there was a

fellow called “Ernie” there listening to the reading, and that was

enough for him to sue for a million dollars. At the same time he

sued the producers of the motion pictures Northwest Mounted

Police and the Cisco Kid, claiming that these, as well, had been

stolen from that same unpublished scenario. We went to court and,

of course, won the case. The man turned out to be insolvent.


INTERVIEWER

Well, could we go back to that list and take one of the

painters—Hieronymus Bosch, for instance? The nightmare

symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.


HEMINGWAY

I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people

have. But you do not have to write them down. Anything you can

omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will

show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show

like holes in his writing.


INTERVIEWER

Does that mean that a close knowledge of the works of the

people on your list helps fill the “well” you were speaking of a

while back? Or were they consciously a help in developing the

techniques of writing?


HEMINGWAY

They were a part of learning to see, to hear, to think, to feel

and not feel, and to write. The well is where your “juice” is.

Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourself. What you

know is if you have it, or you have to wait for it to come back.


INTERVIEWER

Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?


HEMINGWAY

I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If

you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned

about them. 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.


INTERVIEWER

Continuing with just one question on this line: One of the

advisory staff editors wonders about a parallel he feels he’s found

in The Sun Also Rises between the dramatis personae of the bull

ring and the characters of the novel itself. He points out that the

first sentence of the book tells us Robert Cohn is a boxer; later,

during the desencajonada, the bull is described as using his horns

like a boxer, hooking and jabbing. And just as the bull is attracted

and pacified by the presence of a steer, Robert Cohn defers to Jake

who is emasculated precisely as is a steer. He sees Mike as the

picador, baiting Cohn repeatedly. The editor’s thesis goes on, but

he wondered if it was your conscious intention to inform the novel

with the tragic structure of the bullfight ritual.


HEMINGWAY

It sounds as though the advisory staff editor was a little bit

screwy. Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as is a

steer”? Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and

his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of

all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them.

The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not

psychological and that he was not emasculated.


INTERVIEWER

These questions that inquire into craftsmanship really are an

annoyance.


HEMINGWAY

A sensible question is neither a delight nor an annoyance. I still

believe, though, that it is very bad for a writer to talk about how

he writes. He writes to be read by the eye and no explanations or

dissertations should be necessary. You can be sure that there is

much more there than will be read at any first reading and having

made this it is not the writer’s province to explain it or to run guided

tours through the more difficult country of his work.


INTERVIEWER

In connection with this, I remember you have also warned that

it is dangerous for a writer to talk about a work in progress,

that he can “talk it out” so to speak. Why should this be so? I only

ask because there are so many writers—Twain, Wilde, Thurber,

Steffens come to mind—who would seem to have polished their

material by testing it on listeners.


HEMINGWAY

I cannot believe Twain ever “tested out” Huckleberry Finn on

listeners. If he did they probably had him cut out good things and

put in the bad parts. Wilde was said by people who knew him to

have been a better talker than a writer. Steffens talked better than

he wrote. Both his writing and his talking were sometimes hard to

believe, and I heard many stories change as he grew older. If

Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest

and least boring talkers. The man I know who talks best about his

own trade and has the pleasantest and most wicked tongue is Juan

Belmonte, the matador.


INTERVIEWER

Could you say how much thought-out effort went into the

evolvement of your distinctive style?


HEMINGWAY

That is a long-term tiring question and if you spent a couple

of days answering it you would be so self-conscious that you could

not write. I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only

the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something

that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble

other previous classics. At first people can see only the awkwardness.

Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very

awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and

many copy them. This is regrettable.


INTERVIEWER

You once wrote me that the simple circumstances under which

various pieces of fiction were written could be instructive. Could

you apply this to “The Killers”—you said that you had written it,

“Ten Indians,” and “Today Is Friday” in one day—and perhaps to

your first novel, The Sun Also Rises?


HEMINGWAY

Let’s see. The Sun Also Rises I started in Valencia on my birthday,

July 21. Hadley, my wife, and I had gone to Valencia early to get

good tickets for the feria there which started the twenty-fourth of

July. Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having

a difficult time writing a paragraph. So I started the book on my

birthday, wrote all through the feria, in bed in the morning, went

on to Madrid and wrote there. There was no feria there, so we had

a room with a table and I wrote in great luxury on the table and

around the corner from the hotel in a beer place in the Pasaje

Alvarez where it was cool. It finally got too hot to write and we

went to Hendaye. There was a small cheap hotel there on the big

long lovely beach and I worked very well there and then went up

to Paris and finished the first draft in the apartment over the

sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs six weeks from the

day I started it. I showed the first draft to Nathan Asch, the novelist,

who then had quite a strong accent, and he said, “Hem, vaht do

you mean saying you wrote a novel? A novel huh. Hem you are

riding a travhel büch.” I was not too discouraged by Nathan and

rewrote the book, keeping in the travel (that was the part about

the fishing trip and Pamplona) at Schruns in the Vorarlberg at the

Hotel Taube.

The stories you mention I wrote in one day in Madrid on May

16 when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote “The

Killers,” which I’d tried to write before and failed. Then after

lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote “Today Is Friday.”

I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and I had

about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked to

Fornos, the old bullfighters’ café, and drank coffee and then came

back and wrote “Ten Indians.” This made me very sad and I drank

some brandy and went to sleep. I’d forgotten to eat and one of the

waiters brought me up some bacalao and a small steak and fried

potatoes and a bottle of Valdepeñas.

The woman who ran the pension was always worried that I

did not eat enough and she had sent the waiter. I remember sitting

up in bed and eating, and drinking the Valdepeñas. The waiter said

he would bring up another bottle. He said the Señora wanted to

know if I was going to write all night. I said no, I thought I would

lay off for a while. Why don’t you try to write just one more, the

waiter asked. I’m only supposed to write one, I said. Nonsense, he

said. You could write six. I’ll try tomorrow, I said. Try it tonight,

he said. What do you think the old woman sent the food up for?

I’m tired, I told him. Nonsense, he said (the word was not nonsense).

You tired after three miserable little stories. Translate me

one.

Leave me alone, I said. How am I going to write it if you don’t

leave me alone? So I sat up in bed and drank the Valdepeñas and

thought what a hell of a writer I was if the first story was as good

as I’d hoped.


INTERVIEWER

How complete in your own mind is the conception of a short

story? Does the theme, or the plot, or a character change as you

go along?


HEMINGWAY

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as

you go along and have no idea how it will come out. Everything

changes as it moves. That is what makes the movement which

makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem

to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.


INTERVIEWER

Is it the same with the novel, or do you work out the whole

plan before you start and adhere to it rigorously?


HEMINGWAY

For Whom the Bell Tolls was a problem which I carried on

each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But

I invented what happened each day I wrote.


INTERVIEWER

Were The Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, and

Across the River and Into the Trees all started as short stories and

developed into novels? If so, are the two forms so similar that the

writer can pass from one to the other without completely revamping

his approach?


HEMINGWAY

No, that is not true. The Green Hills of Africa is not a novel

but was written in an attempt to write an absolutely true book to

see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s

action could, if truly presented, compete with a work of the

imagination. After I had written it I wrote two short stories, “The

Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis

Macomber.” These were stories which I invented from the knowledge

and experience acquired on the same long hunting trip one month

of which I had tried to write a truthful account of in The Green

Hills. To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the

Trees were both started as short stories.


INTERVIEWER

Do you find it easy to shift from one literary project to another

or do you continue through to finish what you start?


HEMINGWAY

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these

questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized

severely. I will be. Don’t worry.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself in competition with other writers?


HEMINGWAY

Never. I used to try to write better than certain dead writers of

whose value I was certain. For a long time now I have tried simply

to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better

than I can.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think a writer’s power diminishes as he grows older?

In The Green Hills of Africa you mention that American writers at

a certain age change into Old Mother Hubbards.


HEMINGWAY

I don’t know about that. People who know what they are doing

should last as long as their heads last. In that book you mention,

if you look it up, you’ll see I was sounding off about American

literature with a humorless Austrian character who was forcing me

to talk when I wanted to do something else. I wrote an accurate

account of the conversation. Not to make deathless pronouncements.

A fair percent of the pronouncements are good enough.


INTERVIEWER

We’ve not discussed character. Are the characters of your work

taken without exception from real life?


HEMINGWAY

Of course they are not. Some come from real life. Mostly you

invent people from a knowledge and understanding and experience

of people.


INTERVIEWER

Could you say something about the process of turning a real-life

character into a fictional one?


HEMINGWAY

If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a

handbook for libel lawyers.


INTERVIEWER

Do you make a distinction—as E. M. Forster does—between

“flat” and “round” characters?


HEMINGWAY

If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from

my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know,

there should be all the dimensions.


INTERVIEWER

Which of your characters do you look back on with particular

affection?


HEMINGWAY

That would make too long a list.


INTERVIEWER

Then you enjoy reading over your own books—without

feeling there are changes you would like to make?


HEMINGWAY

I read them sometimes to cheer me up when it is hard to write


and then I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly

impossible it was sometimes.


INTERVIEWER

How do you name your characters?


HEMINGWAY

The best I can.


INTERVIEWER

Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing

the story?


HEMINGWAY

No. I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the

book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating

them, sometimes all of them.


INTERVIEWER

And you do this even with a story whose title is supplied from

the text—“Hills Like White Elephants,” for example?


HEMINGWAY

Yes. The title comes afterwards. I met a girl in Prunier where

I’d gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew she’d had an abortion.

I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home

I thought of the story, skipped lunch, and spent that afternoon

writing it.


INTERVIEWER

So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer,

looking for something which can be of use.


HEMINGWAY

Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does

not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful.

Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything

he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of

the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part

that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only

strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer

omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole

in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand

pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the

processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore

children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers.

In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily.

So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have

tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience

to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will

become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have

happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this

time and could convey the experience completely and have it be

one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good

man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still

are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man

is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about

that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than

fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned

one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that

out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But

the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.


INTERVIEWER

Archibald MacLeish has spoken of a method of conveying

experience to a reader which he said you developed while covering

baseball games back in those Kansas City Star days. It was simply

that experience is communicated by small details, intimately

preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole by

making the reader conscious of what he had been aware of only

subconsciously . . .


HEMINGWAY

The anecdote is apocryphal. I never wrote baseball for the

Star. What Archie was trying to remember was how I was trying

to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the

unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an

outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell,

the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym

shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just

come out of stir, and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You

saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way

he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things

which moved you before you knew the story.


INTERVIEWER

Have you ever described any type of situation of which you

had no personal knowledge?


HEMINGWAY

That is a strange question. By personal knowledge do you

mean carnal knowledge? In that case the answer is positive.

A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes

out of knowledge personal and impersonal and sometimes he

seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from

forgotten racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing

pigeon to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery,

or a hunting dog his nose? This is an elaboration or a condensation

on that stuff we were talking about in Madrid that time when my

head was not to be trusted.


INTERVIEWER

How detached must you be from an experience before you can

write about it in fictional terms? The African air crashes you were

involved in, for instance?


HEMINGWAY

It depends on the experience. One part of you sees it with

complete detachment from the start. Another part is very involved.

I think there is no rule about how soon one should write about it.

It would depend on how well adjusted the individual was and on

his or her recuperative powers. Certainly it is valuable to a trained

writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important

things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is

conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and

all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a

writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one

has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-givenand-

no-quarter-received fights that they make to do something as

they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit

early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because

they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised

cowardice are more human and more beloved.


INTERVIEWER

Could I ask you to what extent you think the writer should

concern himself with the sociopolitical problems of his times?


HEMINGWAY

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules

about how a conscience should function. All you can be sure about

in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will

have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called

politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently. This is very

exciting to them and to their political-literary reviews. Sometimes

they even have to rewrite their viewpoints . . . and in a hurry.

Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.


INTERVIEWER

Has the political influence of Ezra Pound on the segregationist

Kasper had any effect on your belief that the poet ought to be

released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital?


HEMINGWAY

No. None at all. I believe Ezra should be released and allowed

to write poetry in Italy on an undertaking by him to abstain from

any politics.* I would be happy to see Kasper jailed as soon as

possible. Great poets are not necessarily girl guides nor scoutmasters

nor splendid influences on youth. To name a few: Verlaine,

Rimbaud, Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide should not have

been confined to prevent them from being aped in their thinking,

their manners or their morals, by local Kaspers. I am sure that it

will take a footnote to this paragraph in ten years to explain who

Kasper was.


INTERVIEWER

Would you say, ever, that there is any didactic intention in

your work?


HEMINGWAY

Didactic is a word that has been misused and has spoiled.

Death in the Afternoon is an instructive book.


INTERVIEWER

It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas

throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or

two ideas?

* In 1958 a Federal court in Washington, D.C., dismissed all charges against Pound, clearing the way for his release

from St. Elizabeth’s.


HEMINGWAY

Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who said

it possibly had only one or two ideas.


INTERVIEWER

Well, perhaps it would be better put this way: Graham Greene

said that a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a

system. You yourself have said, I believe, that great writing comes

out of a sense of injustice. Do you consider it important that a novelist

be dominated in this way—by some such compelling sense?


HEMINGWAY

Mr. Greene has a facility for making statements that I do not

possess. It would be impossible for me to make generalizations

about a shelf of novels or a wisp of snipe or a gaggle of geese. I’ll

try a generalization though. A writer without a sense of justice and

of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for

exceptional children than writing novels. Another generalization.

You see, they are not so difficult when they are sufficiently

obvious. 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.


INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do

you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact,

rather than fact itself?


HEMINGWAY

Why be puzzled by that? 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?

§

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