Hemingway

Papa, I can see that my work is being sabotaged by my own self-doubt. (Is it really Hemingway online? Will anybody believe it? If they do, will they care? If they would, can I put the material into an enjoyable, accessible format? Etc.)

How would you expect to avoid such doubts? That’s part of the territory. You know the writer’s three fears.

I do. I have nothing to say, I can’t say it, nobody would care anyway.

Well, if you know they are common fears, why give it to them when they visit you? Or dwell within you, if that’s the case?

It takes a monumental self-confidence, it seems to me, to be so sure that what you’re doing is worthwhile and can be done.

Yes, or courage to do it without being sure.

All right. Sort of like me working on the novel, not really knowing how I’m going to do it, not having any surer footing — at all — in what I am doing now.

So? That’s part of the admission ticket.

 

Monday, October 31, 2011

5:45 AM. Papa, the fourth and fifth dimensions: Time, and then Beyond Time?

Close enough. Or you might say viewpoint over time, viewpoint beyond viewpoint, or overall viewpoint, or really view without the distortion of viewpoint. Now, you can see that to write in such a way as to hint at (for you cannot actually do it) going beyond viewpoint is very difficult, and requires not only skill and luck in the writer but, let’s say, skill and attention in the reader. Luck, too, perhaps, for the reader has to be in the right mental space to be able to comprehend it.

That’s what I was trying for in Across The River. I told the story seemingly from inside Colonel Cantwell’s head, but not precisely. Within his mind — the nonphysical mechanism we all live in, as you recognize — he moves across elements of his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand through reading or other instruction or from appreciating, as in a picture. I believe I achieved that fourth dimension, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized — because of Renata, of course.

Now here is something nobody sees. I achieved the fifth dimension with Santiago, who lay dreaming of the lions at the end. My achieving it was not at the end, though, but throughout, because in careful recounting of his moment by moment actions, and his moment by moment thought or memory, and his moment by moment emotion, I was so close to the moving present that we get beyond time to the timeless. Where else do you think that strange aura around the story comes from?

It is not told fromSantiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, or the guys upstairs, or the part ofSantiago that lives outside time and space. It is our life described neither from within it nor from without it.

Yes, there is the story itself — the old man striving, and winning, and losing, and remaining himself. There is the effect on the boy. But beyond all that is the strange penumbra that people feel but don’t quite understand, and this is because the story’s atmosphere talks to us of things beyond the story.

I could not have produced the story to order. And it came as a gift, and I passed on the gift. Those who think it’s simple or simpleminded are only one eyed; they cannot sense the presence of that extra dimension.

It is a curious paradox, isn’t it? To get beyond time, one way is to sit on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways — Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale — but this was mine.

 

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

7 AM. Reading Hotchner’s Hemingway And His World, now. A reason that people can’t get his life straight is that there are too many parts to remember. So, if there’s a long stretch when he isn’t publishing (regardless if he is writing) it looks like a blank patch. Or if he isn’t even writing, clearly lost time. Yes, Papa?

It’s natural enough. You want to tell somebody life story, you find a couple themes and follow them — his work, his loves, his families (the one he is born into, and the one he creates). You might throw in his hobbies or other things, but it’s only a few themes. They won’t all be very communicable. They won’t be equally important, and they won’t be equally important at any given time in his life. And they won’t be the whole of his life, and they can’t ever be.

This whole idea of understanding somebody’s life is oversimplified. You can find a mainspring sometimes, and tell the story of the mainspring and how it plays out, but even there you’re going to get — let’s say, you’re going to get one external facet of the man — one place where what he is interacts with what he experiences of the world. And since you can’t get the internal connection between that part of him and other parts, you’re going to get a very superficial, almost static, view of even that one part of him. It would be all right if you just could remember that you’re mostly missing him.

Well, I am certainly beginning to see it with you. A few others make it clear too. Jefferson, for instance. A lot of facets to examine, and no practical way to hold them all in mind, and no practical way to express them all within a sufficiently small compass that the reader can hold it.

Movies or TV could do it, to some extent, but the basic fact is that it takes more than a lifetime to understand and absorb a lifetime, so what are you going to do?

Like anybody else, I get discouraged, sometimes. But, like anybody else (including the Beatles) I get by with a little help from my friends.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

6 AM. A little bit discouraged, Papa. I have just about roughed-in the first draft, and I am wondering if I am not on the wrong track. What I’m putting out isn’t all that new, most of it.

It isn’t that the information is new, but the interpretation. You know that. One of two things the historian can bring to his subject, new information or new interpretation.

But what I offer that is new is really only that you are the one saying it. In other words,

Continue reading Hemingway: The purpose of our book