too many Daves

My re-infatuation with Hemingway is even more ardent than it was when I wrote about it here ten days ago. Since then, I’ve finished For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises. Both were audiobooks. My friend Josh insists this doesn’t count. I’ve started listening to The Sun Also Rises a second time. By Josh’s count, very soon I will have not really experienced the novel twice.

Here’s a passage I would have noticed in The Sun Also Rises if I’d actually read it:

When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. They would race through the streets and out to the bull-ring. I had been sleeping heavily and I woke feeling I was too late. I put on a coat of Cohn’s and went out on the balcony. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up the street toward the bull-ring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together.

Knowing I’m not the first person to read Hemingway and that I am sure to repeat what many, many, many others have written elsewhere over the decades, I’ll keep this short. Hemingway kept it short. That’s what floors me here. His characters are in Pamplona. Pamplona equals Running Of The Bulls; Running Of The Bulls equals Pamplona. Hemingway’s in charge. He’s the writer. He could stop time. He could go frame by frame. He could do a whole slow-mo chapter on this iconic Pamplona ritual. Instead, we get this paragraph, these dozen or so sentences. The bulls pass in a blur, but Hemingway knew he didn’t need to write “blur” to create the blur. Hemingway also knew enough to leave the bulls unmentioned and unseen in the sentence that already included “more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running.”

Enough of this. My title claims this post is about Plimpton’s Hemingway interview in The Paris Review, so let’s get there. I know I read the interview about 15 years ago, but I didn’t remember any of it. I read it because I wanted to be a writer and Hemingway was this officially great writer who’d been interviewed by a publication that interviews officially great writers. So I read and forgot. Now, suddenly, the interview thrills me. How great that The Paris Review gives it away for free online. Greater still that George Plimpton persevered to make the interview work despite what he delicately described in his intro as the “occasional waspish tone of (Hemingway’s) answers.”

“Waspish” like this:

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it easy to shift from one literary project to another  or do you continue through to finish what you start?

HEMINGWAY

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these  questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized  severely. I will be. Don’t worry. 

But there’s gold, too:

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of  the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part  that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only  strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand  pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the  processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore  children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers.  In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have  tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience  to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will  become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have  happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this  time and could convey the experience completely and have it be  one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good  man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still  are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man  is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about  that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than  fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that  out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But  the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg. 

Decades of Paris Review interviews are here. Some are free. In my experience, the ones that aren’t free are worth buying or, at minimum, worth a visit to the library.