Papa Hemingway – On Writing

Tags

A.E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway, Papa Hemingway, Paris, Writing

“Papa, I wanted to ask you…I know it’s hard to answer for someone else…”  I was embrarassed and wished I hadn’t started this.  “Well, I lived here for a while after the war, but that was just having fun and spending my severance pay.  Now, though–these weeks we’ve been here–the more I see of Paris with you, the more I feel I should give up job and country and seriously live here and find out if I can be a writer–that’s a pretty half-ass pronouncement, but I think you know what I mean.  So many men I know in New York work at jobs they say they don’t like and they’re always promising themselves that one day they will quit and do whatever it is they really want to do.  Writing is one of their favorite Canaans.  They tell you the plots for their novels and plays which the world is waiting for.  Well, I don’t want to belong to that fraternity–Alpha Gamma Frustration–but at the same time I can see that chucking an editorial job and rushing off to a Left Bank garret with beret and portable may be overly romantic.  It’s just that I’m young now and I remember the equation you once mentioned–‘hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.'”

Ernest looked down into his drink; then he looked up and studied our reflections in the speckled mirror behind the bar and talked to my mirror-self.  “Well, it’s tough advice to give.  Nobody knows what’s in him until he tries to pull it out.  If there’s nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man.  Those first years here when I made my run, as you say you now want to make yours, and I quit my foreign correspondent job with the Toronto Star to put myself on the line, I suffered a lot.  I had finally shucked off the journalism I had been complaining about and I was finally doing all the good writing I had promised myself.  But every day the rejected manuscripts would come back through the slot in the door of that bare room where I lived over the Montmartre sawmill.  They’d fall through the slot onto the wood floor, and clipped to them was that most savage of all reprimands–the printed rejection slip.  The rejection slip is very hard to take on an empty stomach and there were times when I’d sit at that old wooden table and read one of those cold slips that had been attached to a story I had loved and worked on very hard and believed in, and I couldn’t help crying.”

“I never think of you crying,” I said.

“I cry, boy,” Ernest said.  “When the hurt is bad enough, I cry.”  He stirred his drink meditatively.  “So, Hotch, just as you wouldn’t give a friend advice on whether or not to play the wheel, you can’t on this, except to quote the odds, which are a damn sight worse than roulette.  And yet…”  He turned away from my mirror-self and spoke to me directly, in that special way of his that made the words come to you through a corridor of intimacy.  “Yet, there’s this to consider as a guide, since it’s a thing I truly know: If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”

From: Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner (pgs. 56-57)

The Search

Tags

Alaska, Ben Kingsley, Elegy, Lost, Penelope Cruz, Restless, Search, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy, Woods

But things have suddenly changed.  My peaceful existence in Gentilly has been complicated.  This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search.

From: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (pg. 10)

Today, I am restless and confused.  I slept well last night.  Too well.  But when I woke up this morning, something was not right.  Nothing has radically changed in the last few days.  Perhaps what I sense is not a change but an absence.  The whole thing is confusing.  But when this experience comes over me, all I want to do is leave civilization and go get lost out in the woods somewhere and be alone.

I remembered the first time the search occurred to me.  I came to myself under a chindolea bush.  Everything is upside-down for me, as I shall explain later.  What are generally considered to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that worst of times was one of the best. […] There awoke in me an immense curiosity.  I was onto something.  I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search.  Naturally, as soon as I recovered and got home, I forgot all about it.

From: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (pgs. 10-11)

The other night I watched the movie, “Elegy” starring Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley.  I found the film very disturbing and beautiful.  The film was filled with the riches of human life.  But I was greatly put-off (and fascinated) by Ben Kingsley’s character: David Kepesh.

The plot revolves around an older university professor (age 62), David, who becomes romantically involved with Penelope Cruz’s character, Consuela (age 24).  I was disturbed on two levels.  First, I was annoyed that David could not get out of the 1960’s.  Why is it that human beings seem to get trapped in time?  Second, David is a 62-year-old man with incredible loneliness and no desire to go out and get lost in the woods.  Why are people so incredibly needy?  I have more thoughts on the film, but these are still being examined and refined.

However, last night, I watched “Wipeout” on TV, and then changed the channel to PBS and watched “Alone in the Wilderness,” a documentary about the life of Richard Proenneke who lived as a solitary in the wilderness of Alaska.  As I watched I kept thinking, “Now here is a guy who understood his need to go and get lost in the woods.”

And so today, I am restless…

But this morning when I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook (for writing down occasional thoughts), pencil, keys, handkerchief, pocket slide rule (for calculating percentage returns on principal).  They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues.  I stood in the center of the room and gazed at the little pile, sighting through a hole made by thumb and forefinger.  What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them.  They might have belonged to someone else.  A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it.  It is as invisible as his own hand.  Once I saw it, however, the search became possible.

From: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (pg. 11)

Tears On A Thursday

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Distraught, Grief, Mei Yao Ch'en, Screams, Sorrow

I was so distraught yesterday that I thought it was Friday.

There are moments in life, brief moments, when you hear the most shrill and terrifying screams.  Every nerve in your body seems to soak in the agony of the one in pain.  Then the moment is over and time moves on in confusing silence—all is calm and still.  In these collective moments, when everything returns to routine, you can still hear the echo of that piercing scream only it’s louder than before.  Perhaps that’s the problem, because the scream has come and gone, no one else hears it…but you.  Even the ones who watch from a distance must grieve.

Since we were first married

Seventeen years have past.

Suddenly I looked up and she was gone.

She said she would never leave me.

My temples are turning white.

What have I to grow old for now?

At death we will be together in the tomb.

Now I am still alive,

And my tears flow without end. ~ Mei Yao Ch’en (1002 – 1060)

 

From: One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (pg. 45)

 

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief.  Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort.  Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.  Even shaving.  What does it matter now whether my check is rough or smooth?  They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.  Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.  It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

From: A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (pg. 5)

Tears On A Friday

Tags

Archimandrite Sophrony, Death, Faith, Friday, Job

“From out of the city the dying groan,

and the soul of the wounded cries for help,

yet God pays no attention to their prayer.” ~ Job 24:12

 

I have often been struck by the beautiful passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that wrestle with the “problem of God.”  Too often in our culture, faith is nothing but a flight from the brutal realities of life.  Indeed, I believe that faith does not lessen the stress and burden that is laid upon the soul, but rather we are stretched to the point of overwhelming pain.  Faith that refuses to stare directly at the truth of the world is nothing less than an opiate, a drug.  Perhaps this is why there are so few saints.  Perhaps faith was given to us in order that we might dive into the pit of darkness that surrounds our existence and not use faith as a pair of earplugs to shut out the chilling screams of the world.  These are my thoughts–tears on a Friday.

In closing, I wish to leave a passage written by Archimandrite Sophrony from his book entitled, St. Silouan the Athonite (pgs. vii-viii):

Revelation concerning God declares, ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’  How difficult for us mortals to agree with this!  Difficult, for both our own personal life and the life of the world around us would appear to testify to the contrary.

Indeed, where is this light of the Father’s love if we all, approaching the end of our lives, in bitterness of heart can lament with Job, ‘My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart…If I wait, the grave is mine house…Where is now my hope?’  And that which from my youth my heart has sought secretly but fervently—‘Who shall see it?’

Christ Himself attests that God is concerned for all creation, that He does not ignore a single small bird, that He clothes the grass of the field, and His concern for people is so incomparably great that ‘the very hairs of our head are all numbered.’

But where is this Providence that is attentive to the last detail?  We are all of us crushed by the spectacle of evil walking unrestrained up and down the world.  Millions of lives that have often hardly begun—before they are even aware of living—are strangled with incredible ferocity.

So whyever is this absurd life given to us?

And lo, the soul longs to meet God and ask Him, ‘Why didst Thou give me life?…I am surfeited with suffering.  Enveloped in darkness.  Why dost thou hide Thyself from me?  I know that Thou art good but wherefore art Thou so indifferent to my pain?’

‘Why art Thou so…cruel and merciless toward me?’

‘I cannot fathom Thee.

 Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.  Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.  Amen.

“Not Love, but Death”

Tags

Death, Fr. Abram J. Ryan, God, Grief, Hope, Love, Poem, Sorrow, Valentine's Day

“Is it indeed so?  If I lay here dead,

Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?” ~ Elizabeth Browning

 

I met a young woman today but only very briefly.  I don’t really remember her face except to say that her eyes seemed hollow and sunken.  She had probably cried so much that there were no more tears left to shed. 

We met but only very briefly, this young woman and I.  Only after she had come and gone did I learn why she was weeping.  Her beloved died yesterday…on Valentine’s Day.  Apparently, his death was an accidental suicide.  This young woman lost her boyfriend, never to return, on Valentine’s Day.

Can you imagine the pain?  She was such a young woman, a girl really, and to have lost her boyfriend to death at such an early age.  But of all days, why on Valentine’s Day?  Can you imagine the pain?  Everyone complains about “Single Awareness Day.”  Can you imagine?  Everyone sulks and is sad.  Why?  For petty reasons.  But she will wear a downcast face on every Valentine’s Day.  Why?  Because her beloved is dead.  Such a mess of petty reasons why her beloved is dead.

These are the terrible and frightening moments, when the veil of time seems to be removed, and the value of the present moment blindingly shines into our careless, dull, and selfish lives.  The whole world is upside-down. Not love, but death.

Several years ago I visited a Trappist monastery in Iowa: New Melleray Abbey.  In the mailroom is a small board where slips of paper are put up with prayer requests from all over the country.  One day while I was there I looked up and read the following simple note: “Our prayers are requested for a young family.  Their little son just drowned.”  I cried right there. 

I have always kept a copy of that simple note with me.  Now I use it as a bookmark in a book of poems, Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous by Abram J. Ryan (pg. 209).  The following is for those who have experieneced, not love, but death.

Hope

 

Thine eyes are dim:

                A mist hath gathered there;

Around their rim

                Float many clouds of care,

                And there is sorrow every—everywhere.

 

But there is God,

                Every—everywhere;

Beneath His rod

                Kneel thou adown in prayer.

 

For grief is God’s own kiss

                Upon a soul.

Look up!  the sun of bliss

                Will shine where storm-clouds roll.

 

Yes, weeper, weep!

                ‘Twill not be evermore;

I know the darkest deep

                Hath e’en the brightest shore.

 

So tired!  So tired!

                A cry of half despair;

Look!  at your side—

                And see Who standeth there!

 

Your Father!  Hush!

                A heart beats in His breast;

Now rise and rush

                Into His arms—and rest.