The War About God
7 AM Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The 20th century could be called The War About God, and that would be as close a clue to it as any.
Started rereading For Whom The Bell Tolls last night. What an achievement.
Papa, what do you know of the war against God? You certainly left enough clues scattered about in your writings.
Monday, May 3, 2010
7 AM. Reading Burke’s biography of Perkins in great hopes, I came to Tom Wolfe’s picking a quarrel with Perkins — for more or less unconscious reasons — and thought, “oh yes, I remember that kind of thing!” The letter full of a different viewpoint that can’t possibly be addressed successfully because the other person can’t distinguish between viewpoint and objective reality.
How many times! And it’s the kind of situation where explanations only compound the confusion and lack of sympathy. How many times! And the closer the sympathy that had entered into it, the less the difference could be breached.
I know I’ve read this book before, but none of it is familiar, and when I did I must have had something in mind — Hemingway and Perkins exclusively? — because I can’t remember knowing or caring much about Fitzgerald or Rawlings or Wolfe, let alone S.S. Van Dine. Nor do I remember about Perkins and his wife, nor Elizabeth in Virginia. It is as if I never read it.
Well, Papa, I don’t want to veer off to Max Perkins. You and I are perhaps in the middle of something but I don’t know that it centers on your relationships with others, even important others.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Papa, I know you liked Max Perkins, and I know that you nonetheless struggled with him. Tell us about your relationship.
The thing about Max was that he listened. He knew what worked and didn’t work. Didn’t always know how to fix a problem, but he could hear, loud and clear, that the problem was there. That’s the only thing he could hear loud and clear!
And of course, the fact that he could hear the manuscript meant that he could hear the author (as author). I mean, simply, that he knew when to pay attention to somebody because he had something.
When Perkins believed in you, he believed in you. Now, that’s a nice trait in anybody, but in this case it
I wandered a bit, sorry.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
8:30 AM. 10 years out of your life, eh, Papa?
Fucking right. 10 years out of my writing life, which is my closest, most precious, part. Everything else in my life was sort of relaxing from it, or holding it away.
And from 1940 to 1950 you weren’t able to punish anything but Men At War. (I don’t know why I wrote “punish” instead of “publish.”)
Friday, April 30, 2010
All right, Papa, you came home from the war and what happened externally is a record. What happened on the inside, and how conscious were you all that at the time? And — if you don’t want to talk about this but about something else instead, we can do that.
As soon as you can get yourself focused, and all of that other stuff out of your mind.
Yes. I am having a little trouble. Hang on a second –. Okay, I’m more here now.
Using my method of Intuitive Linked Communication, or ILC — The guys upstairs suggested the name, years ago — I have for the past few years been “conversing” (I don’t know how else to describe it) with several not-currently embodied people with whom I seem to share a resonance. Most prominent, recently, has been Ernest Hemingway, who seems to have come through for reasons of his own. Herewith, the first of a series of conversations thatmay be of interest, to be run on successive Mondays. They’re not just literary chit-chat!
Speaking to “dead” people involves a lot of guesswork even after the fact. This morning I went fishing to see what Papa Hemingway thought about a book, and — more to the point, for me — how certain aspects of communication between this side and the other side work. Or, sometimes, don’t work.