Hemingway, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 2007, photo © 2007-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
I stumbled on an online blurb, Hemingway’s 5 Tips for Writing Well, when I was researching blogs the other day. It reminded me that I have a copy of A Moveable Feast on my shelf that I’ve been wanting to read. I’m adding it to my “must read this year” list.
I haven’t read a lot of Ernest Hemingway, even though he received the Nobel Prize in Literature the year I was born. But I find him to be one of the most quoted writers out there. Did he have a good publicist? Or was he just *that* good.
Maybe it was the way he lived his life. He was part of that wave of literary modernists, the Lost Generation. There was a woman in the December retreat who said she had been friends with his granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway.
In some ways, it seems like a tragic lineage. It reminds me that writers take a lot of criticism. A need for thick skin comes to mind.
Here are the 4 tips Hemingway often quoted from The Kansas City Star’s style guide where he was a reporter for a short time in 1917:
- Use short sentences
- Use short first paragraphs
- Use vigorous English
- Be positive, not negative
Copyblogger’s Hemingway’s 5 Tips for Writing Well explains in more detail, adds a 5th tip, and a final quote from a comment Hemingway made to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934:
5. Never have only 4 rules.
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
– Ernest Hemingway
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
There is shame in admitting that I have not read Hemingway. I dated someone named Hemingway once, though.
A good assignment. Here’s to a Saturday night with a good book. I’m on my way to the used Bookstore as soon as I log out.
Thanks for the inspiration.
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Ah, good. I like the idea we all talked about of us reading the same book at the same time and commenting on it. I just pulled A Moveable Feast off of my shelf. And it’s memoir. Perfect. Let’s read it!
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[…] Ranch, New Mexico? It throws a whole other perspective on a lifetime of painted desert. What about Hemingway’s early days in Kansas City, Missouri. Or Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, […]
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Watched a documentary on Hemingway last week-end. Was wonderful to see all the old photographs of artistic members of the Lost Generation in the 1920’s (from the link):
The term “Lost Generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. It would be Hemingway who would popularize the term, quoting Stein, “You are all a lost generation,” as an epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises.
This period would see an explosion in American literature and art, which is now considered to include some of the greatest literary classics produced by American writers….and the first flowering of jazz.
The enriching gifts from the Lost Generation included: The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot), The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway), Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner), “An American in Paris” (George Gershwin).
What a power struggle between Stein and Hemingway. And between Hemingway and his mother (and father). Two of Hemingway’s sons were also in the documentary. They had different mothers. Hemingway was quite the womanizer. I’m wondering now if we’ll visit some of his Kansas City haunts when there at the end of April.
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Forgot to mention, also watched an older movie about T. S Eliot, Tom & Viv. I wasn’t impressed. What a depressing movie. Eliot put his wife away for, what was it, 10 years, and never went to visit her. It was for something hormonal that could be easliy treated today. (Remember when they put women away for being “hysterical?” You could also see evidence of this in the movie Changeling) I honestly don’t know Eliot’s poetry or writing. But I’m not sure I would have liked him. I did see that he wrote a poem about Ash Wednesday (which happens to fall today):
Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Reminded me of ybonesy’s post for Ash Wednesday and Lent: But My Chicken Was Cold-Blooded — It Killed Grubs At Random (LINK)
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I saw that movie, QM, when it came out. Yes, it was so heavy, so depressing.
It was fun to read such a long-ago post, QM. Glad the documentary revived interest in it. Good tips from Hemingway. I would like to know more about his life. I did go a bar in Old Havana where he hung out and drank mojitos, I think. It was the bar’s claim to fame. I bet if I search on Hemingway in Cuba I’d find the name.
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Yes, the documentary mentioned his trips to Cuba. Apparently, he used to go there to help his friends smuggle rum back into the U.S. That would have been cool to visit the bar in Old Havana. He also frequented a bar in the Florida Keys, the name escapes me now as well. I’ll have to Google that one, too. He was a champion fisherman, loved the sailfish. Have you ever seen a sailfish? They look prehistoric.
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Oh, I found this cool link of Hemingway with his son, Jack, and a sailfish. Good article on Jack Hemingway, too, by Mark Hume. And check out the photo of Ernest & Jack Hemingway with the sailfish (at bottom of page). Jack was one of the sons in the documentary. He remembered some of his time as a boy with his dad and mom in Paris. His mom was Hadley Richardson, love of Hemingway’s life (which doesn’t mean he was faithful):
Jack Hemingway: He Lived the Life His Father Dreamed Of by Mark Hume — on A River Never Sleeps (LINK)
I read his 1986 book after I met him, because I liked what I’d seen on the Thompson. And after I put down his 1986 memoir, “The Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa”, I was left with two thoughts.
First, that he was a very good writer. And second, that he’d lived the life his father only dreamed of.
On the riverbank Jack Hemingway was a jovial companion. He was open and warm and talked with great affection about his family. In his book you come to understand that his father was a great writer – but not much of a dad. He had a famous father and famous children: actress Mariel Hemingway, actress-model Margaux, who died of a drug overdose in 1996. And yet he was happy with his relative obscurity. He left behind an older daughter too, Muffet, who, like him, was not famous.
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[…] redbuds. We stood by the Missouri River, drove past hundreds of limestone houses (including Hemingway’s), and ate 50 pounds of Kansas City barbecue. The Spring weather was perfect; everything was in […]
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[…] writer and they had a long chat about writing that ended with Stein’s sadness at her friend Ernest Hemingway and “the change that had come with The Sun Also Rises,” […]
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I finished A Moveable Feast today. I enjoyed reading about Ernest’s early days as a writer, before his first novel…when everyone around him could see something big was going to happen.
And, I’m no longer jealous of that famous expatriate group who lived in Paris…Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Ezra, and the rest. If Hemingway’s account of them is accurate, there was way too much ego, backbiting, drunken brawls, and jealousy to interest me.
Hemingway devotes one whole chapter to Fitzgerald’s insecurities about the size of his masculine appendage. Who does that? After Fitz’s behavior in Paris he deserves some payback…but still.
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Teri, in answer to your question: Lots of men.
I loved The Moveable Feast because I thought it was possibly the only book where Hemingway came across as human (of the ones that I have read). It also seemed to be the only one in which his male appendage didn’t write the book (if you get my drift).
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Bob,
I absolutely get your drift, and I’m laughing out loud about your first sentence.
Yes, I agree with you. He comes across as tender toward many people, and humble about his own work. I read the “Restored Addition,” the one where the parts his fourth wife edited out were put back in. And though he left Wife #1 in Paris, he writes kindly about her deserving (and finding) a better man than he was.
This is my favorite paragraph from the book:
“The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
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Teri and Bob, how great to come home to these comments. And what a strange turn they’ve taken. Didn’t know about the appendage references. I read A Moveable Feast about the time we started this blog, I think. I kind of want to read it again though. I love that Fitzgerald, Stein, all those Bohemian writers tootled around together in Paris. Baldwin was there later. Lots of others.
Thanks for checking in on this post, Teri. I always appreciate that so much. I like the quote about people. People as limiters of happiness. Sometimes I notice how negative people can be, in attitude and their ability to support others. Then, there are those who just light up the night. 8)
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Oh, Teri and Bob, wasn’t it amazing visiting Hemingway’s haunts in Kansas City? I just loved that. I still want to post the photographs sometime. I did a little research on them, too, after that visit. There is always so much I want to post, and so little time. But I haven’t forgotten our romp around Kansas City, Missouri.
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When I was reading A Farewell to Arms, I read online that Hemingway wrote it in Mission Hills, Kansas…the fancy suburb that Bob took us to.
I remember us driving up and down a road, trying to get to a Hemingway house and we ended in the back somehow. That’s the one, right, Bob? On Indian Road?
I like looking at the brick I “lifted” from the burned down Hemingway house while I read his work.
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Teri, I still have my brick, too. I keep it on my desk in the studio and think of Hemingway every time I look at it. I also think of all of you and the last time in Kansas City. We had some of that KC BBQ sauce tonight on our pulled pork. I guess KC MO is coming up a lot lately.
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I laugh when I think of the two of your combing through the rubble of the burned out house for bricks. Too bad you didn’t get to see the house before it burned. It was unique.
Yes, the house we drove around trying to see is the house where he wrote “A Farewell to Arms”, the book chosen by the KC Public Library for the “Big Read” last year. We saw the house on Indian Lane.
It’s zero outside this morning.
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Bob,
Are you involved with “The Big Read”? I’ve just gotten turned on to it through the CDs at the library. There’s going to be an event in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin (just over the Minnesota border) in February for “Our Town” and “Bridge Over San Luis Rey.”
I don’t really know what happens at these events, but I’m going to check into it. Do you know?
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Bob,
I’m closing in on the conclusion of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The appendage is definitely leading the way in this book. Was Ernest Hemingway ever banned?
Despite the “bodice-ripper” quality to the love story, I still like the book.
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In the last few pages of “Tolls,” the protagonist, Robert Jordan, considers suicide. Under the circumstances he’s under, it is an absolutely reasonable choice. He had me nearly convinced he should do it.
It wasn’t too much of a leap from those pages to considering what Hemingway decided in 1961.
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Teri, that’s intense (did I just date myself with that phrase?). It seems like you are gaining a lot of insight into Hemingway’s state of mind by reading his work. It’s always so sad when people commit suicide. It’s like they don’t feel that they matter in the world anymore.
I was listening to a woman on MPR while driving yesterday; she’s written a book about her mother who committed suicide when she (the author) was a young girl. Her mother struggled with depression and was possibly bi-polar at a time when they didn’t really diagnose it. She wrote the book to try to make sense of her mother’s death.
It made me think a lot about suicide — when people feel like the world would be a better place without them. But the families sure do suffer when that happens. So I’m curious in “Tolls” — what made it seem like a reasonable choice? It’s not likely I will read it so am intrigued by your perspective.
Are you going to go to that Big Read event in WI?
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Oh, Teri, the “bodice-ripper” quality made me laugh. I had no idea. I wonder if it was racy for that time? What was censorship like then. More or less strict. It’s strange how it goes through different phases depending on the political nature of the times.
Bob, I also laughed at the image of Teri and me “searching through the rubble for bricks.” I have a clear image of it in my mind’s eye. I was so excited to be there. I think of it everytime I look at the Hemingway brick. 8)
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Okay, Teri, Ernest Hemingway has THREE books that appear on a list of the 100 most challenged books in America: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Island in the Sun. I don’t think they were all “challenged” (a nice word for an attempt to “ban” and book) because of the “bodice-ripper” quality, but I don’t know. I know A Farewell to arms wasn’t popular because is was anti-war (in a way).
Some scholars believe that the trait of sucide in the Hemingway family: Ernest, Ernest’s dad, and Ernest’s granddaughter might have to do with a weird blood disorder they have in the family. I read about it some time ago.
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Bob,
I didn’t know about three books being on the challenged list. But it doesn’t surprise me. The multi-execution scene in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is just the sort of reality people don’t want to hear about when it comes to war. It’s so much easier to just think about lofty ideals instead of how it can turn people into animals.
I like hearing your insights, as Hemingway has been a part of your life/town/thinking for so much longer than mine.
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QuoinM,
Regarding the “suicide consideration” in For Whom the Bell Tolls…the main character (an American named Robert) is helping fight fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1930s). It is clear at the end of the book he is about to be captured or killed by them, and taking his own life is a better solution than letting the enemy decide his fate. Hemingway doesn’t tell you what he does. You just know in the last paragraph that Robert *will* die.
Regarding The Big Read in Wisconsin, I’m going to call St. Croix Falls this week to get the skinny. Can anyone go? Just Wisconsinites? Thornton Wilder was born in Wisconsin, so I suppose that’s why they’ve picked him.
David Rhodes (author of Driftless, man we saw at the Mpls library) is one of the speakers. Cool, eh?
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Teri, ah, that makes much more sense about the suicide. A deathwish to keep himself from a worse fate. About the Big Read, I think it would be fun to see David Rhodes again. I liked hearing him speak at the downtown Minneapolis library last year. Very grounded. Doesn’t pull any punches. Was able to answer any question thrown at him. I liked him.
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I found out the scoop on The Big Read in St. Croix Falls. It’s a 3-part event. The first two are free; the second one involves a ticket.
Feb 27: David Rhodes is keynote speaker, everyone gets two free Thornton Wilder books + an audio introduction. There is a photojournalism display from the St. Croix River Valley. They tell you how you can be a part of an online book discussion about Wilder’s books.
March 14: Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca will talk about writing memoir. There will be a reader’s theater from oral histories that have been collected from the St. Croix River Valley.
March 25th-28th: The Festival Theater performs “Our Town.”
I want to go on February 27th for sure. Anyone up for a short road trip?
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Teri, wow, so much going on. February 27th sounds really fun. And check out the loot. I’m going to think about that and check the calendar. How far of a drive is it again? And would you drive down and back in one day from the Twin Cities?
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It was interesting to talk to the librarian; St. Croix Falls has done The Big Read two other times (My Antonia and Call of the Wild). She said people who never read come because of the free books. 🙂
St. Croix Falls is 55 miles from Minneapolis. The event on February 27th is from 2-5. There’s a French restaurant (Huh? I’m not kidding) in St. Croix Falls called Grecco’s. Good reviews. Dinner afterwards perhaps?
Absolutely a day trip.
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I’m halfway through “The Sun Also Rises.” Is Hemingway making fun of The Lost Generation? I was getting tired of the short book (and certainly not caring about any of the characters) until it occurred to me that he was naming how lost they really were.
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I cannot say that Hemingway always followed all of these rules himself. Perhaps it’s more of an editing guide. You either feel how to write, or should study 5 years with loads to rules and restrictions. And in the second case, there’s no guarantee you’ll end up writing well.
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