ErnestHemingway

Notes p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. TB: No, Hem, I can’t say I do. p62 - “God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below. p98 - He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody.. But he never had no pity for himself either. p107 - Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to ddo and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. p128 - “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.” p144 - “What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?” || “You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.” Little casual domestic violence for the vintage Hemingway fans. p174 - I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I with I could do something about Marie. … I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. p176-177 - TB: there is a great little scene here where a writer observes a woman crossing the street. He has an internal monologue where he talks about how ugly she is and calls her a battleship. He starts to use her in his writing immediately and constructs a whole little tale to explain this woman that he’s seen crossing the street in tears. Hemingway does a great little smash cut at the end in the last paragraph identifying her and the reader immediately understands her tears and there is a new dimension to the mental cruelty of the writer. One of the phrases that Hem puts into this writer’s mental scribblings is, “It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true.” Probably Hem’s most central piece of writing advice is boiled down to, “write one true sentence.” This is how I know this little two page vignette is an artifact of self-hatred. There are a lot of artifacts of Hem’s self-hatred in this book. p185 - “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too.” TB: this whole paragraph is fantastic. More: “It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknosed love. You writer.” (TB: emphasis mine. Another artifact of Hem’s self-hatred. It’s no mistake he puts these words in the mouth of the writer’s wife.) p191 - “Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter?” (TB: really great emotional stuff from a Hemingway male character… Fuck this guy.) p195 - The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there. p202 - TB: there’s an exchange with some vets in this area, I guess 201-203 and maybe a little past that. I feel like there is more than what’s on the page. I expect I will re-read this someday. But here are parts that stand out to me: “Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?” … “I can take it” … “It’s a secret.” “Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?” “First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.” TB: Clearly they’re talking about pain, the context is basically taking punches. But it’s got to be a lot more than that. I think it’s Hem talking about being able to take emotional pain. That “Sometimes it feels good” seems to me like something a ruminator says. I’m a ruminator. Sometimes you imagine terribly dark things and you imagine people you love being very cruel or saying things they would never say. It doesn’t feel good. But I understand exactly what he’s saying. It feels terrible, but there’s something to it. Like smashing in your tear ducts. There’s something to it. p206 Related to previous note - “Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (TB: emphasis mine.) p212 - As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for. p221 - What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a moral sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. (TB: emphasis mine.) p225 - “A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it. p229 - TB: line here about a side-character being impotent. Interesting. Hem seems to have a lot of impotent or rumored-impotent characters (do I only think this because I just re-read Sun Also Rises? Maybe). It’s relatively interesting given all his affairs and all his characters’ affairs and the extreme heartbreak in so many of his works. p230 - “Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights?” (TB: character talking about how during the day it’s hard enough but at night it’s another matter. Two characters in this book have this thought and it’s the same thought that Jake in Sun Also Rises returns to. Things are harder at night. A lot harder.) Chapter 24, from page 227 to 247, has vignettes of other characters throughout the yachtyard. Just incredible. I loved all of them. p238 - Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (TB: emphasis mine.) p260 - I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes alright. … I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. … Nothing is any good to wish. … Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. … You just go dead inside and everything is easy. TB: emphasis mine. These are from Harry’s wife from pages 260 to 261 across several paragraphs of thought. Review Lots of spoilers in here. ...

Notes p11 - “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” p26 - “Don’t you love me?” “Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.” “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” … “And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t want to go through that hell again.” p27 - “It’s funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.” p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance. p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. p34 - This was Brett, that I felt like crying about.. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. p99 - Why I felt the impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t! p183 - “Do you still love me, Jake?” “Yes,” I said. “Because I’m a goner,” Brett said. “How?” “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.” … “Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this.” p197 - “Badly cogido,” he said. “All for sport. All for pleasure.” p239 - That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back.. And sign the wire with love. That was all right. p245 - [Jake] “I thought you weren’t going to talk about it.” “How can I help it?” “You’ll lose it if you talk about it.” Review I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice. ...

Notes p50 - That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly. p55 - “Take a good rest, small bird,” he said. “Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.” p60-61 - The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea. p64 There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence. He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all. p66 - “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” ¶ The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it. The page made me think of Hamlet. “…to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them…” Hamlet holds a special place in my heart and I suppose I see it in many things. p88 - I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. (TB: were it so easy.) p103 - “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” p104-105 - It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it. ¶ I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. p110 “I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him. I’m sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong.” (TB: feeling like you’ve ruined something in the seeking of it or the attainment of it, or of its vision, anyway.) Now is not the time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. p115 - What will you do now if they come in the night? What can you do? ¶ “Fight them,” he said. “I’ll fight them until I die.” p117 - I hope I do not have to fight again, he thought. I hope so much I do not have to fight again. Last. TB: Even knowing that Hem did not enjoy ideas of theme in story, it is hard for me to read this as anything but an analogy for the struggle of self against. Against nature, self, etc. Ideas of persistence, despair, hope, skill, and will. Also the idea of corrupting or destroying a thing in the seeking or achievement of it. Published 1952. Hem died by suicide in 1961. — # Review ...

Notes “He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained. “That’s right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards. Pages 46-48. Nick is exploring the end of his relationship and is clearly depressed and trying to put on a brave face in front of his friend. His friend is telling him all the ways in which he is better off, which is always high on the list of things you do not want to hear and do not believe, anyway. Then the idea of hope comes to him. Then, of course, he is happy. “He says he’s never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said. “He’s got a lot coming to him.” Review This short little book of short stories from Hemingway is good. I’ve read some of these, mostly the Nick Adams stories, before in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway which I’ve gotten about halfway through on my Kindle years ago. ...

Notes / Quotes Ch 1 What Writing Is & Does Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm (sic). Ch 2 The Qualities of a Writer 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. Good writing is true writing. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood. Ch 4 What to Write About The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other. Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damn hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you. Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice. … Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into [your] next book and sit back. Ch 5 Advice to Writers All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. Remember to get the weather into your god damned book—weather is very important. Ch 6 Working Habits Mice: Do you know what is going to happen when you write a story? Y.C.: Almost never. I start to make it up and have happen what would happen as it goes along. The minute I quit trying to write the rest of it is easy. Ch 7 Characters Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to by symbols. Ch 13 The Writer’s Life …Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father. But [Bernard Berenson] I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves… I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. All criticism is shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it except yourself. Review A nice little book collecting notes on writing from Hemingway over his career and across his publications. It is probably foolhardy to read a book about a writer’s habit in search of your own habit, but it is at least interesting to compare and contrast. I thought a lot about Stephen King’s On Writing while reading this. King writes 10 pages or thereabouts a day. Hemingway might write 400 words according to this book. Neither is right nor wrong, it’s just the work of the writer. ...

This was an impulse buy. I read this several years ago at the height of my Francophile days when I was able to speak French about half as well as I could read it. Now I can read it okay and speak it only when drunk, and quite poorly. My mom told me a week or two ago that she wanted me to think about going to Paris again. This is something I have wanted to do for years but I have never traveled internationally and not much domestically. You read Baldwin and Hemingway and Hugo and the others and see Paris as this imperfectly perfect place. Somewhere that a lost person can go to figure things out. I am not convinced any such place really exists outside of the mind, but in the same breath I’ll say context matters. Anyway I’m filling out passport paperwork again and maybe I will save enough to go and cheaply. ...