recovery mission

Late last night, we recovered a few old friends who'd been M.I.A.

Behold T. C. Boyle's East is East, my father's college copy of The Sun Also Rises, and my first copy of A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. I acquired the Exley while employed at a temporary remainders-only bookstore and "gulped it down," as Rushdie said of Pynchon's Vineland because "it beats getting drunk."

 

Joan Didion and the new nonfiction

"He didn't know what to make of that, and he began to invoke the names of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow and William Styron, whom we surely regarded as literary giants. We said those writers didn't happen to be our models, and we mentioned people like Lewis Thomas and Joan Didion and Gary Wills. He had never heard of them. One of the women mentioned Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and he hadn't heard of that. We explained that these were writers we admired for their ability to harness the issues and concerns of the day."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."

~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry

happy birthday

Happy birthday, Papa.

West of Sunset

"The war dwarfed their problems. What was a broken molar when the Germans were pushing through the Ardennes? [F. Scott Fitzgerald] went to the dentist and Belgium fell. Luxembourg, the Netherlands. He thought of Gerald and Sara's villa, and Sheilah's brother in London. Ernest [Hemingway] was probably there somewhere, filing hot copy.

"They were on their way to the World's Fair in San Francisco when the radio broadcast the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was a victory, saving the British army to fight again, but there was nothing to stop the Germans from taking Paris. [Fitzgerald] was there every day, on the Quai du Louvre with Scottie, as Cary Grant in the Ritz bar. Selfishly, he felt it was his city, his past they were taking from him--the gray, rainy streets and scabby sycamores and hennaed doyennes walking their little dogs in the Jardin des Plantes. He wondered if he would feel the same if the Japanese bombed Los Angeles."

~~ from West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan

Hemingway on Algren

"OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I'll never fight you in Chicago. Ever."

According to Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real, Ernest Hemingway wrote the praise above inside his personal copy of The Man With the Golden Arm.

Le Jardin du Luxembourg

“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway  

James Joyce in France

"We were hungry again from walking and Michaud's was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where [James] Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through is thick glasses [while] holding the menu in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio, thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia, with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian."

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway 

Papa On Pleasing the Rich

"When  they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has,' I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the every day a fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them."


~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway

On Writing in the First Person

“When you first start writing stories in the first person if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway

no matter what Scott did

“When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

In Paris, then. . .

"In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries."

~~ from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

then suddenly

"How did you go bankrupt?"

 "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

~~ from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Lillian Ross

Lillian Ross passed away, and I learned this from social media due to numerous shares of this excellent piece on Ernest Hemingway which I happened to chance upon and read in full a summer or two ago.

Sontag and Hem on solitude and the writing life

Thanks to an Annie Rose Facebook share, I read Ernest Hemingway's thoughts on solitude and the writing life from his 1954 Nobel Prize speech. The entry begins with Susan Sontag:

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag observed. Solitude, in fact, seems central to many great writers’ daily routines — so much so, it appears, that part of the writer’s curse might be the ineffable struggle to submit to the spell of solitude and escape the grip of loneliness at the same time.

Follow the link for more.

the same obligation to be factual

A New Yorker article on Ernest Hemingway, which included a note about Papa's attack on Alfred Kazin after a bad review of Across the River and into the Trees, reminded me of a long quotation about Kazin from a book I'd recently come across.

"His memoirs tend to be even more memorable than his criticism, partly because when writing about himself he never felt the same obligation to be factual that he felt toward the writers he revered.
He constantly reshapes facts about his family and his marriages: the same wife gets different names in different books, marriages are conflated, he seems lonely, only child because his sister Pearl--she married the sociologist Daniel Bell--never gets mentioned."

~~from the Alfred Kazin section of Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers.

So perhaps Kazin could be perceived as a "Critic Laureate" at the Less United States of Kudera, as he continues to get mention at this blog. I wonder what the author of On Native Grounds would write about the current literary scene, both in and outside the academy.

from A Moveable Feast

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

(Both quotations are from Chapter 5, "A False Spring"; I'm rereading the book as included in The Restored Edition, which is, according to this edition, the one Hemingway had completed when he passed.)

the old man and the sea

I reread The Sun Also Rises in early May 2012, and I'm rereading The Old Man and the Sea in early May 2014. 

Who else could get away with "the Yankees of New York" or the "Indians of Cleveland" or the boy, the man, the fish, and a gigantic feat of "hand game" (arm wrestling) against a powerful "Negro" that then causes said opponent to lose all confidence? 

Nevertheless, I recommend, and I see Powell's has one for sale at the airport!

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." 
--Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Hemingway, Hunger, and "My Old Man"

There are novels I've read at least three times, and both Hunger and The Sun Also Rises would fit this category. In the most recent rereads, I'm getting a lot more from the Hamsun than the Hemingway; for the former I've written down several quotations whereas when I was reading Papa in Suzhou, I found the book did not wear well with me.

In fact, just like my story "My Old Man" which began as a parody of a Hemingway story, or maybe, more so, a parody of my life, The Sun Also Rises, read in 2012, seemed to be an elementary tale about a bunch of drunks who were or felt like failed writers. That struck more than anything, that everyone from the opening Jew, Robert Cohn, to the narrator had a novel or an aborted effort somewhere in his dossier. So that's the ultimate writer's novel, but it's also the essential parody of all of us.

In the past though, particularly when reading it at my father's in his 1990s, $400-per-month studio by the sea in Ponte Vedra, Florida, I appreciated the book a lot more. Here's a section on Hemingway's slim novel that I wrote into my twenty-page story almost twenty years ago:

      Out of the sun, and with the wind blowing from the water and cooling his place, I have energy for the first time since morning. As my father drifts off, I peruse his bookshelf, looking for something special among a shelf of sallow paperbacks. He has kept all his trade-paper Russians and Kunderas, and more recently added newer self-help and how-to-writes for memoir and screenplay, but I select from a section of Hemingway and pick out The Sun Also Rises.
      It is my father’s copy from college, the Scribner Classic edition. When I was in Paris, I felt proud to read the same copies of Dostoyevsky as Hemingway read at Shakespeare & Company. Hemingway wrote his first stories in Paris, and as a busboy, un commis, I broke my first wine glasses there and wrote only a little in a journal each day.

I'd certainly still recommend The Sun Also Rises if you've never read it. But if you only have room for one Hemingway in your life, I'd go with A Farewell to Arms or my personal favorite, his memoir, A Moveable Feast. For the latter, I have yet to read the new "restored edition" that includes chapters cut from the first published version.

As a final note, yesterday, from a public library sale, for fifty cents I picked up some poetry by Lucille Clifton, another Dave Newman favorite, and this old Paris Review paperback with an all-star cast of more contemporary writers. From the library's lending side, I checked out The Old Man and the Sea, which I haven't read since high school, and To Have and Have Not, a title I've yet to read.

vintage selfie

Colin Powell took time to post a vintage selfie, and it reminded me of my dad's efforts at such from the 1970s.

Below my father's photo rests his college copy of The Sun Also Rises, which I enjoyed rereading in Suzhou, China in May of 2012. The book, as in the copy depicted (originally posted two years ago), figures prominently in "My Old Man," a story included here, about visiting my father when he had only forty dollars in his pocket but was happily living by the beach, writing poetry, and soon to return to the world of work as a cashier at a local gas station's convenience store. That was twenty years ago when I first plucked it off Jay's shelf near St. Augustine, Florida, began reading, and took it back with me to Philly (not my first time through that novel, but my first time through my father's copy).

In Suzhou, among other places, I read from it in a faux Italian gelato cafe in a small shopping mall near my daughter's four-year-old kindergarten. Alas, I'd feel I was dissembling if I didn't also confess to doing much of my editing and proofreading at a McDonald's in the same "retail environment."