Hemingway - Green Hills of Africa
As I walk home from work in the afternoons I read. I usually read white papers from work or magazines that I don't have time to catch up on, or even, rather clumsily, the city paper. But once a month I'll knock out a book. This month I looked down at my Hemingway collection and realized I had only really read about 5 of the 12. So I picked up Green Hills of Africa. For the first time in my life, as I was walking I had to sit down and take a break because what I was reading moved me that much. And it wasn't that it was groundbreaking or even that well written it was just something to spoke directly to me. The same way a sad song in a car radio would speak to someone who just lost his girlfriend. Maybe it dejavu. Maybe it was a strange mix of honestly and remember what I had once said but that it was now backed up by Hemingway made it seem all the more powerful.
Some quotes from that part of the book -
Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence.
Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her that makes the rest unimportant.
We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.
After I got done reading these and sort of catching myself I realized that they weren't very groundbreaking and that, quite perhaps, they were poking fun at someone just like me. Someone who, would have the laziness to copy and hunt for something that has already been written and put it somewhere where others could feed off it. Either way I feel as though I learned some sort of lesson.
"The reason every one now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is important, to make it seem vain to try to do it, is because it is so difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible."
"What is this now?"
"The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if any one is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten."
"You believe it?"
"I know it."
"And if a writer can get this?"
"Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance that he succeeds."
"But that is poetry you are talking about."
"No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards."
"And why has it not been written?"
"Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do you say? Should we talk about something else?"
