Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

A Moment From Gibson's "Zero History"

For me, this passage resonates . . . though probably not in any obvious ways.

That's one of the things I like about books, fiction and non-fiction: the often twisted, offset, or slanted ways they enter and illuminate your life, or how they may do so. Of course, there are plenty of books I turn to that offer much more straightforward echoing and modeling: Homer's Odyssey, Fowles' Daniel Martin, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Hiaasen's Basket Case, Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay. And yet you'd probably need a map or a strong dose of intuition to see the "obvious" connections in the works I just mentioned. The richest connections are often more associational and emotional than linear and logical. Certainly, I've found that I tend to avoid books about middle-aged college English instructors, for I find those stories far less illuminating than most bystanders would imagine.

(A good book offers characters and a story, perhaps multiple stories; a good book also offers a mirror --or mirrors-- to see oneself more clearly. Frankly, a good reader looks around, looks beyond, and looks within.)

Reading was probably my "first drug" too.

Here's that passage from William Gibson's fairly recent novel:

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he'd arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

"Quit staring," he said to the dressmaker's dummy as he stepped into his room. "I wish I had a book." It had been quite a while since he'd found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He'd look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

--from pages 92-93 of William Gibson's Zero History, published in 2010 By G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York City.

P.S. Gibson is an old favorite, a writer to whom I return year after year, though a full year may pass without my picking up one of his novels or stories. And yet when I do, I'm always happy I did. I am often mesmerized how he moves within and from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and so forth. Connections between writers and readers may differ from book to book, and within a single book, those connections may rely on character, conflict, plotting, narrative strategies, or even simple phrasing. Each time I pick up Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, I probably connect with a different aspect and find a different point of connection and enjoyment.

P.P.S. Check out Chapter 23: Meredith of Zero History if you want a quick sense of Gibson's deft touch with supporting characters as well as his utter command of the less obvious but nevertheless true springs of life. Note Meredith's back-story on pages 117-119, especially, for one example of the way a life can flow unpredictably and yet still make absolute sense.

Then, note how "easily" Gibson tells her story; there are lessons in narrative craft on every page.

Byron claimed that "easy reading" is not the result of "easy writing," but the author's job is to make it seem so. I know Gibson knows his Byron because I asked him in an eight-minute conversation back in the mid-1990's and because in The Difference Engine (by Gibson and Bruce Sterling), Gibson revises the dead lord's fate, defying history to have Byron survive fever and the Greek Revolution to become prime minister of England . . . . Byron's daughter Ada helped create the "Difference Engine," after all, historically and in that novel.

Okay, I'll quit revising and adding to this entry now.

Check out Zero History; do yourself that favor.