Guilty. I too avoided Hemingway for the reasons you list here. And yes, that is an unfortunate pre-judgement, but as you say, the myth became so outsized it dampened my interest.
our article is sending me to the library tomorrow. Thank you.
And talk about clear sentences that allow me to drop into my imagination, I find your writing does this as well, Fred. Your inner Hemingway is showing!
I hear you, loud and clear. I had to get over the personalities and reputations of all artists years ago in order to go back and appreciate the work! My mother, who was a practicing artist, said that most great artists are driven by their art, and don't care about anyone or anyone else. They can also practice a persona in public to keep the riffraff away!
Here's another example of masterful use of words in forming music for mind pictures, but it's the chosen subject that is distasteful in this case: "Lolita" by Nabokov (Taurus-Virgo-Aries: https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Nabokov,_Vladimir). And Nabokov wasn't born to English! For me, it is the most beautifully written - taken artfully formed sentence by artfully formed sentence - book in the English language about a most distasteful subject, from the POV of a most distasteful human.
Thank you for this post. And yes, context is necessary to appreciate his writing. Hemingway, a complicated person with a simple, straight-forward style of writing. I've always felt like I could actually hear him speaking and appreciated not being distracted by complicated sentences. And Joan Didion, what a maven.
Your father and mine must have been the same age. They smoked and drank like Ernest. I was in Pamplona in '59, just seventeen, on my way home to Sevilla. I'd followed the races through Europe by thumb, and spent the night at a table outside a cafe. I ran the bulls in the morning. At home, I read everything Ernest wrote, and slept through my classes each day. I dreamed of being a racer, and a writer... Fuzz
Fredrick, thank you again for putting things into perspective. This was inspirational and is making me feel inspired to examine my own processes in writing and making me write. Which if left to my own devices this morning, I’d be reading the news.
You my friend, are exceptional in your writing. Every time I read one of your essays, I’m left pondering the content pretty much all day.
Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023Liked by Frederick Woodruff
Writing the "one true sentence" is, of course, the counsel of the saints. I always found it a bit oppressive.
If you write fiction as I do, as Hemingway did, it's really about "the one true lie." Novelists, like actors, are liars, and the strength of the lie depends on the commitment, as actors say, "to the bit." You must convince yourself before you can convince others. It is a work -- for some, a labor -- of the imagination.
When you lie in writing fiction, you ask yourself, is that true, is that what I can believe. Not *would* believe but *can* believe. Will I go along with the conceit that, say, Harry Potter casts spells by reciting Latin phrases? Asking yourself this is what rewriting is all about.. Hence, the added specifics, borrowed from the real world, from one's own experience, that lift the lie up, glaze it with the feel of legitimacy, of a kind of truth.
Hemingway is not above all a truth teller, but an aesthetiian. His one true sentence is really one beautiful sentence, one beautiful lie. Look at the paragraph quoted above from "A Farewell to Arms." The use of incantation in the repetitions of the "ands" the repetition of the "ins." This creates the motion of the flow that Joan Didion so beautifully described as "smooth rivers, clear water over granite." Repetition is hypnosis, the better to put the critical mind to sleep, to slip it into the dreamwork of the story. In the midst of all of Hemingway's pristine simplicity, the austerity of his vocabulary, quietly drops the one devastatingly poetic image that makes the lie sing:
"Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."
Just read this piece on Hemingway's writing. I must revisit his writing. I think I was too young when I encountered him in HS. I had a knee jerk reaction to what I deciphered to be his machismo seeping through his writing. If, indeed, he was able to sidestep his ego in his writing, I will be pleased. The paragraph you quoted certainly struck me as a series of true sentences; bare bones and yet profound in the recognition the sentences illicit. Good writing... More precisely, good novel writing must be more than a collection of true sentences. It must be good as a whole, as the cumulative meaning of all those true sentences. That may be where Hemingway disappoints (I am guessing, as I have not read him in something like sixty years!). I am thinking now of a very, very different writer and her book, Djuna Barnes and "Nightwood." I hope you have read it. BTW, it is the only credible piece of her writing; the rest of her work is, well, merd. I have read Nightwood many times and have always wondered how such a thing came from a writer of so little talent! It was almost as if inspired by an outer body experience. I digress. The point I wanted to make was that Nightwood is a collection of brilliant sentences, truthful sentences, but the novel is an aimless muddle. I reread it every few years simply for the joy of her sentences and of the monologues of her character, Dr. O'Connor. BTW, the novel is tedious until the appearance of Dr. O'Connor, perhaps ten or fifteen pages in. But once he takes the stage there is no stopping. As for your overarching theme, that art should not be judged upon the personalities of the artists making it, I wholeheartedly agree. It makes me crazy when I hear supposedly learned people opine that art cannot be separated from its creator, that if the artist was an asshole then his art must be so judged and banished. Oh what a dreary world we would live in if that were the case! Finally, after reading your Chapter Five teaser from your Dahmer novel, I cannot wait to read the entire work.
Guilty. I too avoided Hemingway for the reasons you list here. And yes, that is an unfortunate pre-judgement, but as you say, the myth became so outsized it dampened my interest.
our article is sending me to the library tomorrow. Thank you.
And talk about clear sentences that allow me to drop into my imagination, I find your writing does this as well, Fred. Your inner Hemingway is showing!
I hear you, loud and clear. I had to get over the personalities and reputations of all artists years ago in order to go back and appreciate the work! My mother, who was a practicing artist, said that most great artists are driven by their art, and don't care about anyone or anyone else. They can also practice a persona in public to keep the riffraff away!
Here's another example of masterful use of words in forming music for mind pictures, but it's the chosen subject that is distasteful in this case: "Lolita" by Nabokov (Taurus-Virgo-Aries: https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Nabokov,_Vladimir). And Nabokov wasn't born to English! For me, it is the most beautifully written - taken artfully formed sentence by artfully formed sentence - book in the English language about a most distasteful subject, from the POV of a most distasteful human.
Thank you for this post. And yes, context is necessary to appreciate his writing. Hemingway, a complicated person with a simple, straight-forward style of writing. I've always felt like I could actually hear him speaking and appreciated not being distracted by complicated sentences. And Joan Didion, what a maven.
Your father and mine must have been the same age. They smoked and drank like Ernest. I was in Pamplona in '59, just seventeen, on my way home to Sevilla. I'd followed the races through Europe by thumb, and spent the night at a table outside a cafe. I ran the bulls in the morning. At home, I read everything Ernest wrote, and slept through my classes each day. I dreamed of being a racer, and a writer... Fuzz
Fredrick, thank you again for putting things into perspective. This was inspirational and is making me feel inspired to examine my own processes in writing and making me write. Which if left to my own devices this morning, I’d be reading the news.
You my friend, are exceptional in your writing. Every time I read one of your essays, I’m left pondering the content pretty much all day.
Big hug to you,
Windi
Writing the "one true sentence" is, of course, the counsel of the saints. I always found it a bit oppressive.
If you write fiction as I do, as Hemingway did, it's really about "the one true lie." Novelists, like actors, are liars, and the strength of the lie depends on the commitment, as actors say, "to the bit." You must convince yourself before you can convince others. It is a work -- for some, a labor -- of the imagination.
When you lie in writing fiction, you ask yourself, is that true, is that what I can believe. Not *would* believe but *can* believe. Will I go along with the conceit that, say, Harry Potter casts spells by reciting Latin phrases? Asking yourself this is what rewriting is all about.. Hence, the added specifics, borrowed from the real world, from one's own experience, that lift the lie up, glaze it with the feel of legitimacy, of a kind of truth.
Hemingway is not above all a truth teller, but an aesthetiian. His one true sentence is really one beautiful sentence, one beautiful lie. Look at the paragraph quoted above from "A Farewell to Arms." The use of incantation in the repetitions of the "ands" the repetition of the "ins." This creates the motion of the flow that Joan Didion so beautifully described as "smooth rivers, clear water over granite." Repetition is hypnosis, the better to put the critical mind to sleep, to slip it into the dreamwork of the story. In the midst of all of Hemingway's pristine simplicity, the austerity of his vocabulary, quietly drops the one devastatingly poetic image that makes the lie sing:
"Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."
Just read this piece on Hemingway's writing. I must revisit his writing. I think I was too young when I encountered him in HS. I had a knee jerk reaction to what I deciphered to be his machismo seeping through his writing. If, indeed, he was able to sidestep his ego in his writing, I will be pleased. The paragraph you quoted certainly struck me as a series of true sentences; bare bones and yet profound in the recognition the sentences illicit. Good writing... More precisely, good novel writing must be more than a collection of true sentences. It must be good as a whole, as the cumulative meaning of all those true sentences. That may be where Hemingway disappoints (I am guessing, as I have not read him in something like sixty years!). I am thinking now of a very, very different writer and her book, Djuna Barnes and "Nightwood." I hope you have read it. BTW, it is the only credible piece of her writing; the rest of her work is, well, merd. I have read Nightwood many times and have always wondered how such a thing came from a writer of so little talent! It was almost as if inspired by an outer body experience. I digress. The point I wanted to make was that Nightwood is a collection of brilliant sentences, truthful sentences, but the novel is an aimless muddle. I reread it every few years simply for the joy of her sentences and of the monologues of her character, Dr. O'Connor. BTW, the novel is tedious until the appearance of Dr. O'Connor, perhaps ten or fifteen pages in. But once he takes the stage there is no stopping. As for your overarching theme, that art should not be judged upon the personalities of the artists making it, I wholeheartedly agree. It makes me crazy when I hear supposedly learned people opine that art cannot be separated from its creator, that if the artist was an asshole then his art must be so judged and banished. Oh what a dreary world we would live in if that were the case! Finally, after reading your Chapter Five teaser from your Dahmer novel, I cannot wait to read the entire work.