"I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected and that will be very good for the Review."
- Ernest Hemingway
The Paris Review Interviews are the leanest and most substantial collection of pieces about writing that I know. And I'm a bit addicted to literary criticism. My blogroll links to the sixteen most interesting websites about books that I've found (so far - your suggestions are welcome), and
The Paris Review Interviews are worth as much to me as half a dozen of the other sites.
If you click on that link, you'll find more than 300 interviews with the best writers of the last 60 years, inquiring into the craft, methods and history of their creations. It's a bit like an Inside the Actors Studio for writers. You should go check out the website. If you don't have time to peruse it now, then bookmark it for later.
To give you a sense of the cornucopia of literary insight that awaits you, the site contains, among others, interviews with Achebe, Amis, Angelou, Ashberry, Atwood, Auden, Baldwin, Barnes, Beattie, Bellow, Bishop, Boll, Borges, Bradbury, Byatt, Calvino, Carver, Cheever, Delany, DeLillo, Didion, Dinesen, Eco, Eliot (T.S., not George - I did say the last 60 years), (Easton) Ellis, Ellison, Erdrich, Eugenides, Forster, Franzen, Frost, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Gordimer, Greene, Hazzard, Heller, Hellman, Hollinghurst, Huxley, Ionesco, Ishiguro, P.D. James, Jin, Kerouac, King, Kundera, Kushner, le Carré, Lebowitz, Lessing, Lethem, Levi, (Vargas) Llosa, Mahfouz, McCarthy, McEwan, Mitchell, Moore (Lorrie & Marianne), Morrison, Murakami, Murdoch, Nabokov, Neruda, (Carol) Oates, Oe, Pamuk, Parker, Pinter, (Anne) Porter, Pound, Rhys, Roth, Rushdie, Sagan, Saramago, (Bashevis) Singer, Sondheim, Sontag, Steinbeck, S. Thompson, Thurber, Updike, Vonnegut, Walcott, Waugh, Welty, Winterson, Wodehouse and Yourcenar. You can search authors by decade of interview, or alphabetically. If you only search alphabetically, some of the most recent interviews don't appear.
Today we'll be looking at some thoughts from a great writer of the 20th Century. I've read 50 of The Paris Review Interviews so far, and this is one of the best. If you want to read the whole Hemingway interview, you know where to find it.
Ernest Hemingway* was larger than life. He made a mark with his massive style, in two senses: in how he lived, and how he wrote.
*If you click on this link, you'll get a 30 second ad, followed by a three and a half minute biography of Hemingway (then you get two minute clips on his suicide, Nobel Prize, and macho lifestyle. Finally, there's an hour and a half biography). There's also a written synopsis.
When Hemingway started publishing, in the '20s, Modernism was being born. Ambitious writers were breaking down the chunks of experience into a more finely articulated vision, with a rich vocabulary and subtle awareness: doing with words what Monet did with paint in his Water Lilies series. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were all painting to the highest resolution on a busy canvas.
Hemingway went in the opposite direction. As he put it:
"What many another writer would be content to leave in massive proportions, I polish into a tiny gem...A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous."
- Ernest Hemingway
He pared away the adjectives, adverbs, even the punctuation most authors rely on, leaving only the pith. Applying exceptional craft and dedication, Hemingway was able to make this style stick, to resonate so powerfully that he influenced hundreds of writers through the '30s, '40s and '50s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954 for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in
The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."
The interview is preceded by three pages describing Hemingway's working environment and methods. It's a colorful account of his humanity and strangeness. You can find it all through this link:
Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. . . . 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. . . .
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.”
Hemingway was a man of strong character and large personality. His personality was attractive like a kaleidoscope, but his character was the inner light beyond, animating and driving the whole. Here was a big bear of a man, Papa Hemingway, who loved the outdoors, boxed, hunted, fished, studied bullfighting, drank his friends under the table, went to three wars (as an ambulance driver and a correspondent), lived through plane crashes, and married four women. All this helped make his fame, and put tangible sweat and grit into his writing.
Behind it all was his vocation, the writing that was sacred to Hemingway, that he felt was - more than all his other pursuits - the living measure of his worth. It seems to me that many things mattered to Hemingway, he was a passionate man - but, somehow, writing was the place where he went deepest, where he was most able to discover and express his essence.
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 which interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing. . . Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to work out on his reading board. . . .
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.
Now we're into the actual interview.
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.
Various conquests and victories meant a lot to him, but writing was where Hemingway measured his worth. He noted how many words he wrote daily and, if he was going deep-sea fishing on the morrow, he'd push himself further today to atone for it. This quote above goes further than that, implying that merely living was empty compared to the meaningfulness of literary creation.
Now, if Hemingway had been locked in a room with nothing to do but write, he might have found that empty too. He certainly thrived on strenuous exertion, and needed it. But it seems to me that sports fed his animal appetites, while writing gave him something brand new, a place to grow his soul. Okay, it's pretty clear by now that I'm drawn to Hemingway because he expresses things that I feel, about writing, dedication, and self-creation. So I expect I'm projecting some of myself onto his canvas.
Q: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
A: 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.
Q: 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?
A: 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.
This puts the writer in the middle, in a more balanced perspective. I've been focussing on the inner flame of creativity, as a source of life and a place to discover more of yourself. But Hemingway found new subjects and milieux for his books because he kept exploring outwards. For your writing to get richer, you need to keep devouring new material. You look for knowledge in both directions, probing deeper into the human heart and also further afield in the outer world of experience.
Hemingway says "I would think though that the academic life could put a period to outside experience", but he's really speaking of a larger condition, which the tenured life can lend itself to: being comfortable and getting stuck. If you find yourself in any comfortable groove in life, where most of what you're doing is repetition, then it's easy to settle, to stop growing and discovering. If you're as deep as Proust, you can retire to a cork-lined room, plumb yourself, and find a world there (though even Proust only did this after a few decades of intense observation of society). Hemingway was able to write worlds which spoke to his whole generation, because he looked far and wide for particular knowledge and the universals behind it.
Perhaps Hemingway was better at probing outward than into the heart. There was a lot of darkness in Hemingway: fear, craziness, thanatos. He sometimes portrayed these precisely, but I'm not sure that he consciously understood them. He was not comfortable with femininity in himself, and the women he wrote matter most for how they affect his heroes - they are not developed as individuals. Now, I'm analyzing beyond my grasp here. I sure hope I'm not projecting my own issues. But, if intuition serves me, Hemingway did try to map out a universal code, and found some vigor and some dignity there. But this code, which he discovered and tried to live up to, was missing some essential aspects of humanity. So both Hemingway's fictional world and personal life lacked wholeness and balance. What he found was true, it just wasn't complete.
Throughout the interview, there are questions probing for the essence of Hemingway's creative process, and these are the ones he's quickest to sidestep and knock down. The matters of the heart are the hardest to express, or the ones most dangerous to express wrongly. There's a contradiction in Hemingway's writing, in how he tells things he refuses to say. He clearly poured his heart into his writing. He once said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." When he writes of a matador and the bull he faces, Hemingway can make you feel the passion thrumming between man and beast. But he always shows the heart sideways, through action and gesture, never through direct expression. So there is a lot of heart in his writing, yet there is also an emotional aridity, a lack of human warmth. Or at least a lack of softness, a refusal to be open and vulnerable.
A: 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. . . .
Q: Could you say how much thought-out effort went into the evolvement of your distinctive style?
A: 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.
I emboldened that idea, because it's an interesting thought, which I have come across in several places. I've been carrying it around in my pocket, taking it out now and then to chew upon. The radically original work of art makes us uncomfortable when we first encounter it. Write a
Rite of Spring, or an
Anarchy in the UK, and you'll start a riot. Write a
Moby Dick, or paint like Van Gogh, and it'll be decades before people get what you were getting at. But if you create a body of work of sufficient power and grace, like Shakespeare or Jane Austen, you can shift the whole field around you, so that your new strangeness sets the standard for future generations of imitators. Radical popular art expands the world of our shared cultural understanding. Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles made our world larger, and helped to invent the '60s, and modern Rock.
Q: So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.
A: 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.
Hemingway was a hugely talented writer. More than half his talent lay in his understanding of his own truth, of what was essential to the stories he told, and in his willingness to do all the work. Thousands of writers have tried to craft the hard, clear, sparkling gem-like prose that Hemingway at his best could carve. Very few of them had the patience to work out a thousand page tale, and then the ruthlessness to leave seven eighths of it off the page.
A: I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Q: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
A: Getting the words right.
I'll finish up my own thoughts now, so that I can end with my favorite part, Hemingway's last words from the interview. For your convenience, again, you can find
the whole Hemingway interview here.
I'm not an expert on Hemingway, so I hope some of you who have read his books will read this and weigh in on what you like and dislike in Hemingway's writing, which of his books are your favorites, what you think of his literary influence: all opinions are welcome. You know I love conversation, so this includes your opinions on my armchair psychoanalysis, the writer's craft and what it takes, any other Paris Review Interviews, any other writers, Modernism in the '20s, what makes a classic, the strangeness of original art, the invention of the '60s and modern Rock, or what you happen to be drinking right now.
I always find Hemingway worth reading, because he aims for clear, lean, pithy tales, and he usually hit his mark. These skills lend themselves to shorter forms so, while he wrote several good novels, I'd rank his collected short stories among the top ten or twenty of all time.
Q: 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?
A: 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.
Q: 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?
A: 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?