The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway
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Summary
How did one of history s greatest writers develop his indelible style and infuse his narratives with memorable life and compelling tension? Today, we delve into the answers to those questions with Hemingway scholar Mark Torino, who is a Professor of English, the editor and author of half a dozen books on Hemingways, including Thought in Action. And the host of the One True Podcast, which covers all things related to Himmingway.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast how did one of
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history's greatest writers ernest hemingway get going with his craft develop his indelible style
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and infuse his narratives with memorable life and compelling tension today we delve into the
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answers to those questions with hemingway scholar mark torino who's a professor of english the
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editor and author of half a dozen books on hemingway including ernest hemingway thought
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in action and the host of the one true podcast which covers all things related to papa mark and
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i begin our conversation with how hemingway cut his teeth with writing as a journalist how the
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iceberg theory underlay his approach to writing as a novelist and how his years in paris and the
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books people and art he encountered there influenced his work and the trajectory of his career we then
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discuss how his travel and recreational pastimes allowed him to write with a vivid firsthand
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understanding of certain places and pursuits what his writing routine was like and how the characters
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in his novels explore the tension between thought and action we enter conversation with mark's
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recommendation for where to start reading hemingway if you've never read him or haven't read him
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in a long time and what mark thinks was hemingway's one true sentence after the show's over check
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out our show notes at awm.is slash hemingway mark joins you now via clearcast.io
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mark torino welcome to the show thanks brett you're an english professor and you've made
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ernest hemingway the focus of your career you have a podcast called one true podcast where you discuss
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ernest hemingway you're the editor of several journals about hemingway you've written a book
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hemingway thought and action you also got a new book coming out one true sentence all about
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hemingway so you're the hemingway guy how'd that happen how did you make hemingway a career for
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yourself yeah it brett it really snowballed i think probably my origin point with hemingway i grew up
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in a house full of readers my father was a journalist my mother was a writer so my mother was always reading
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books my dad was always was always reading newspapers so i just gradually read through the
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bookshelves their bookshelves were always full and then when i was about 20 or 21 i got to hemingway
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and i just it he just really grabbed me the language the clarity of his language subject matter so yes i
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read all his novels i read his short stories and i just was hooked i was hooked so yeah hemingway is a
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huge part of my teaching and my research without a doubt yeah i think hemingway like if you grew up
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like my parents had copies of him they had like like you know these old hardbound books of all of
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hemingway's stuff fitzgerald's stuff and yeah i was kind of like you when i got into high school
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i somehow like i was bored and we didn't have fortnight back then so i was like oh okay i'll read
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for whom the bell tolls and it was great yeah and you know so i think i probably started with
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the sun also rises just because it was probably shorter than for whom the bell tolls and looking
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back i can't imagine i understood what i was reading because it's it's some of the stuff in
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hemingway is not apparent on the surface i don't know if brett if you felt the same way i did but
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there was something about the atmosphere like the way the characters spoke that it just i loved being
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in that world even though i wasn't a hundred percent sure what was going on no i felt the
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same way too sometimes you have to read it a couple times to for it to sink in no doubt yeah no doubt so
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what i like to do with this episode is talk about hemingway's life in general but also his work and
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his influence because hemingway is one of those he's one of those virile writers right he he did
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manly things bullfights hunted went to war and then he wrote about those things let's talk about how
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did hemingway find his way into writing was you know could you see when he was a kid growing up in
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you know illinois outside of chicago that he was going to be a writer he really could actually his
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mother was into the arts was a music teacher in addition to being a doctor his father was
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a naturalist you know a hunter and extremely knowledgeable about all things nature hemingway also
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had his ancestors were in the civil war and so all of the elements that would come to define
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hemingway were were there really early on it's really funny to look at hemingway's high school
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prophecy and he said i want to travel and write and i don't know if any of your listeners when you
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were a senior in high school could nail your future so perfectly i want to travel and write well
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what better definition of hemingway than those two activities because those are the two things that
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would come to be his trademark no yeah and one thing too if i i read you know preparing for this
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podcast i read uh carlos baker's seminal biography and one thing it talked about hemingway when he was
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a kid like he loved to tell stories and like some of the like when he would tell people like what
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happened like something an experience that he had he would embellish it like and he would sort of he
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was kind of cutting his teeth and kind of creating he was creating himself into a storyteller yeah that
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never changed in fact much to his own detriment even when hemingway did impressive things like go to
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world war one as a red cross volunteer as an ambulance driver in world war one on the italian front
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when he came back he would embellish it and if you look at his letters they're filled with a lot of
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fiction and so sometimes the fiction and the non-fiction blur and so you're saying like
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hemingway's greatest fictional character that he ever created was himself that that kind of blustering
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papa hemingway figure that to some people might be unattractive because there's something
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inauthentic about it you know i i know that you said he you know he did virile things and manly things
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and depending on how you define those things what it what does it mean to be manly what does it mean
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to be virile i know those are chief concerns of your podcast is it also virile or manly to then
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inflate those things or to boast about them or is it better to be understated and so these are things
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that at various stages of hemingway's life are intention and you're reading the baker biography which
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makes his life story it's so extremely interesting and then and then also can be a little bit sad
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that whatever he did however impressive it was somehow was never enough yeah yeah i mean i i got
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i got that sense that he was always trying to grasp for something more and you know it's interesting too
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with the being a braggadocio if you look at different times in the history of masculinity
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there's been periods where being a braggart was seen as a virtue and it was celebrated
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at other times it was criticized and you know so maybe maybe that's why people often have
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conflicted feelings about hemingway let's talk about you know how did he he did some writing when he was
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in high school he wrote some short stories um that got you know his teachers like this is really good
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he ends up eventually working as a journalist at the kansas city star how did that experience influence
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his writing style that we'd see throughout the rest of his career right so i think i think it was
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was huge it was a enormous impact the the writing that he did for the kansas city star and then also
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the toronto star as a correspondent so first of all stylistically being a journalist taught him
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how to do more with less in other words get to the point be clear be declarative
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these are traits that would come to define hemingway's writing style even though it may not
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encompass it totally it is certainly part of his early style is that hemingway was direct and clear
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this is one of the things that can be so refreshing to read a hemingway novel or a hemingway short story
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as opposed to like henry james right it's that journalistic clarity the objective fact that will then
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convey the emotion to the reader without actually saying it so that was certainly a big part of it
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i would also say that in kansas city he was covering characters so in other words he would cover crime
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stories he would be out on the streets he would learn he would maybe see a side of life that he hadn't
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seen in oak park before so he was he was sort of accumulating characters and experiences i think those
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were those were extraordinarily important and then as we get a little bit later when he is a foreign
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correspondent when he's in europe writing for the toronto star he is then reporting on wars like in
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smyrna 1922 and the peace conference in lausanne so he's traveling around the world he's meeting you
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know mussolini and denunzio and all all these characters so on the one hand as you were suggesting it's
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certainly made a huge difference with respect to style but also the experience which later emerged
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in his writing right and i think if anyone has read a hemingway novel they'll notice that sort of just
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short declarative sentences right it's just there's no he doesn't waste anything with like lots of commas
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and semicolons it's just bob bob bob and it and like you think it'd get monotonous but it doesn't it
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seems really fresh and punchy and it also can convey a lot of emotion and i think that's just
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part of that something he was able to hone throughout his career yeah at his best brett he
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certainly does what you're describing his early short stories big two-hearted river for instance
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soldier's home he'll write exactly as you're describing it and somehow the reader will get more
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however he didn't you can't say that that style maintained consistently throughout his career it
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it's really prominent in the 20s one sort of technique that he developed to as you say when
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hemingway writes something you read it and you're like well there's more going on here and hemingway
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is actually that was intentional by him way he had this thing he called the iceberg theory what is the
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iceberg theory that hemingway developed oh yeah well the iceberg theory is is really crucial to
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understanding hemingway as you as you said it's probably the most important aesthetic statement he
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ever made about his own work and so in in 1932 and in his bullfighting treatise called death in the
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afternoon it's mostly about bullfighting but occasionally he does also talk about art and he says in that
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book he says if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that
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he knows and the reader if the writer is writing truly enough will have a feeling of those things
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as strongly as though the writer had stated them now think about that actually we can go beyond
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hemingway and even beyond literature and just think about that as an artistic statement where
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when is it better for an artist to withhold information to withhold facts to withhold
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any kind of expression in the hope that the reader or the audience will supply the rest
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so in other words if you use understatement what you're essentially doing is forming a collaboration
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with the reader so i'll give the reader i'll give the reader half and then i think the reader will
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come the rest of the way let me just give you one example that i think might clarify what he's talking
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about a lot of hemingway's characters are soldiers or veterans well brett i know you have a lot of
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soldiers and veterans on your program how do they usually talk about the war are they usually effusive
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and forthcoming and you tell me about the war oh good i'm glad you asked and then they go on for 45
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minutes no the ones that i've ever met are usually laconic and they're they they answer in kind of
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objective ironic sort of terse statements because it's not pleasant to think about it's not it's it's
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like the emotion of the story is too valuable so in fact it adds to the value by understating
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does that make sense no that makes sense no that makes sense and there's a in thought and action
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your book you wrote about hemingway you have a few examples of that where you had i think there
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were short stories that hemingway wrote where you had soldiers they were obviously veterans going off
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into the wilderness to kind of get away from it all but in the short story hemingway never says
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that they were veteran i mean it was sort of implied like he never made it explicit though
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yeah that's exactly right so i think the the best example of that that you're bringing up is a
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short story called big two-hearted river which is an early short story that was published in 1925
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in our time in that collection of short stories and as hemingway would later describe that story
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he said it was it was it was a story about the war with no mention of the war so the boy nick adams
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goes on a camping trip to kind of recuperate from the trauma of world war one and so what ends up
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happening is we we learn about the camping and the fishing and making dinner in excruciating and when
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i say excruciating it's wonderful it's not it's it's just that he it's painstaking detail he tells us
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everything about the camp but what he doesn't tell us is why he's there so in other words he nick adams
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the character is trying to banish the war from his mind in the same way that hemingway has banished
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the word war from the story itself or at least from the text of the story a second example of that that
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perhaps your listeners would have would be familiar with is hills like white elephants from 1927
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which is a story about a man and a woman in spain arguing about whether she should get an abortion
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abortion and again the word abortion is not brought up so the reader really has to bring
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his or her own interpretive powers creativity own experience into the act of reading
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and like you said that's kind of that's that replicates life a lot of times people do things
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and there's a reason for it but they don't talk about it you know it's as simple as if someone
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says how is your day and you say oh well i'm glad you asked so the alarm clock went off in the morning
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and you know don't you hate one alarm clock they start they give you every single thing or you say
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like how is your day how was work ah don't talk to me about work uh works work or if you know if they
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say something all right well that's not really giving me much but you know what i can infer
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i can infer that the meeting didn't go well it was a rough day you got yelled at you know there was
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tension going on so i can i have to participate if somebody tells me every detail from the alarm clock
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to how the coffee tasted to the commute i have no role in the anecdote or in the communication
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and so i think you can see that it's very risky to write in this way because you're depending
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on the energy of the reader and you know i i would even liken this to movies if you if you look at
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the way actors used to act in the you know films from the 1930s all of their expressions and gestures
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are operatic you know it's like over the top and now if you know if someone has just gotten some
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terrible news sometimes an actor won't even react i'll just move his eyes or something it'll be in
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a close-up and you have to say as as a audience member like well how would i feel if i were in that
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position if i got that news and there's something a lot more intimate something a lot more inclusive
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about this technique okay so the iceberg theory that can help a lot of people who have read hemingway
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they're like i don't know what's going on here like understand that he he's saying he's left a
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lot of stuff unsaid and that's part of the process and you got to kind of fill in the blanks well yeah
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and brett let me just say it's called the iceberg theory obviously because one eighth of an iceberg
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is visible and the bottom seven eighth is submerged and so you know he's like i when i was a kid i was
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like well why did the titanic why didn't they just steer around the iceberg well it's like okay i didn't
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realize it was a mountain underneath the water you know and so think about if in all of human
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communication the vast majority of what is communicated what is expressed is not the words
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it's gesture it's unspoken emotion it's suggestion it's things that are implicit and so perhaps this is
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literature that hemingway is aiming for that replicates that realism of human expression okay
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so when hemingway is a young man he goes off to italy joins the red cross as an ambulance driver gets
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his leg blown up and he comes back but then he he goes back to europe and this is like the part like
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i always i'm always like dumbfounded by this this part of hemingway's career because he goes back to
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he moves to paris in his early 20s and he joins these cool authors like these are like the leading
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you know modernist intellectual writers and he just shows up they're like okay this journalist from
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oak park illinois you can hang out with us i'm always like every time i read that i'm like how did
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that happen it'd be like you know someone just some kid going up to cormac mccarthy hey cormac can i
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just hang out with you he's like yeah i don't think that would happen so why did hemingway decide to
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move to paris and how did he get in with you know like gertrude stein and like i mean james he hung
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out with james joyce like well how did that happen yeah i find that astounding as well so the story
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is that he originally he and his first wife hadley had intended to move to italy and sherwood
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anderson author of winesburg ohio a writer who is one generation older than than he is actually
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suggested paris and also said that he would write letters of introduction to him to various
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established writers who are around paris and he did he just switched and he went to paris and you
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know if he had gone to rome instead of paris i'm not even overstating this i think 20th century
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literature would have been totally different it really changed and i think as you're saying i i look
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at his life and even more astounding than his writing ability his vision for his own art what is
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really astounding is the gusto with which he networked how he hit the ground and he was so determined
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to be a success and you're you're absolutely right he's hanging around with fitzgerald joyce gertrude
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stein i think it was very important that he went to the bookstore shakespeare and company the english
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language bookstore owned by sylvia beach which was like a hotbed for expatriates and the sort of
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literati around around paris but yeah hemingway as much of a gift for writing as he had he really
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had a gift for self-promotion well going back to that yeah he's he's like the greatest story
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hemingway ever told was this hemingway that was the greatest story he was creating that yeah that's
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right yeah he saw where he wanted to go and was absolutely single mon he was you know monomaniacal
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f scott fitzgerald who had just published the great gatsby became his great advocate and he fitzgerald
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convinced scribner you know the leading literary house to publish the sun also rises sight unseen
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and i mean as you're saying in your question brett like imagine any other guy in his mid-20s
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showing up to paris and having that kind of heavyweight support it's just so improbable
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it wouldn't have happened in italy but it certainly did happen in paris he found himself
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right where he needed to right where he needed to be well besides the networking and the contacts
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that he developed there did his time in paris that that did that influence his writing at all like
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did you know gertrude stein said you need to do this with your writing kid to make to get better
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yes without a doubt in at least two ways the first way was he was exposed to art and i mean visual art
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so hemingway was always he was never ignorant of art because of his his mother was cultured and you
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know he lived right outside chicago but when hemingway talks about influence in that time i mean
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you should read i'm sure you have a movable feast his memoirs he talks as much about the painters as he
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does about writers so he was influenced by visual art too and of course paris would have been
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the ideal place for that also secondly hemingway didn't have a college education i mean he did well
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in high school but his college was you know going to italy in world war one and bouncing around as as
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a journalist so what he really did was he read omnivorously he read the people that his mentors
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told him to read and those were really russian writers french writers so things that he really would
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not have been exposed to you know hanging around in oak park but he became much more cosmopolitan
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and those were the types of books that really influenced his great work of the 1920s well what
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are some of those like russian always like dostoyevsky like who was he who was he yes dostoyevsky
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turganiev tolstoy when jake barnes and the sun also rises is reading a book
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in pamplona before he goes to sleep he's reading turganiev's sportsman sketches so you can think
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of it he's like shouts out to turganiev in the middle of the sun also rises basically you know
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tipping his cat thanks for the thanks for the inspiration yes he read but he also read flaubert
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stendhal it was like a college education it was just on his own it's really interesting the shakespeare
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company has the their their lending cards available and so you can really see literally what he and his
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wife checked out in the 20s and it's a lot of it's amazing that most they're mostly european writers
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as opposed to keeping up on the american literary scene i think you also mentioned in thought and
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action like he also read freud like he started reading all that stuff too and you could see that
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influence in his in his works he did and i think he read my if i'm thinking about what freud might have
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meant to hemingway my suspicion is that you know did hemingway actually read the interpretation of
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dreams i doubt it but i think being in paris being an intellectual being alert to you know hanging around
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smart people in the 1920s i think he would have been aware about modern psychology william james and
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freud and bergson and so forth even if he didn't kick back and read freud on a rainy sunday you know
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we might also add brett that freud said that the human brain was like an iceberg so seven-eighths of
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what's going on in our mind we're not even aware of it's the subconscious as opposed to the one-eighth
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that we're actually conscious of so anyway more beneath the surface than than above the surface
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we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors
00:24:53.480
and now back to the show so something about hemingway he was extremely competitive and he's
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also very critical of other writers like in yeah in paris he called everyone phonies like ah these are
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phony said as a poser but were there any writers that he could openly admit to admiring
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well i mean do you know those people who like they can't give you a compliment without a
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qualification or an exception the back the backhanded compliment you get yeah yeah it's like there it's
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like oh you know if you did this you'd be good or hey when you do this you're good or this one time
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you were and and so if you it's actually a really fun game if you can go through hemingway and try to
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find unqualified compliments especially to other writers and they're so rare it's actually an aspect
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of hemingway's personality i find incredibly unattractive just how ungenerous he is to other
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writers now you asked if there were writers to whom he was completely complimentary only a couple come to
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mind i think james joyce although i can think of things that he criticized about joyce but he really
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did revere joyce and shakespeare however he said like about joyce in and i know we're we're speaking
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in the hundredth anniversary of ulysses he would say oh and joyce bloom is great but stephen dedalus
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is not that great so one of the characters was great the other character was not that great molly was
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great steven was not that great and you're like are you kidding me you know to be so to be critical
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of ulysses you know the greatest english language novel of the of the 20th century even writers like
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dostoyevsky tolstoy tryganev who we were talking about fitzgerald stein sherwood anderson who actually
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gave him his big break in paris hemingway was critical of everybody he he could he could compliment
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he could compliment them occasionally but he was very sparing with that a great example of this also
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just to conclude here would be mark twain so everybody remembers that he said all modern
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american literature begins with huckleberry finn you think like wow can you have a better compliment than
00:27:12.560
that well keep reading the quote because the quote continues it goes however if you read it you have to
00:27:18.880
stop when the boys meet back up with jim right and like so in other words the last quarter of the book
00:27:25.860
is faking so even this great compliment what some people say is like the most you know the most colossal
00:27:32.020
compliment in literary criticism it's only a half compliment and i find that really sad even when
00:27:38.360
when hemingway reached the status that nobody could ever you know pulitzer nobel he was still he was still
00:27:47.840
pretty catty well yeah like what what do you think drove that i mean it's kind of petty like what do
00:27:52.520
you think drove that what was behind that do you have any i mean this again you're just psychoanalyzing
00:27:56.240
here of course insecure i mean i would say that when i that for the same reason if you know you and i
00:28:02.320
were hanging out with somebody who was acting like that i would say it's insecurity so you know we
00:28:08.940
talked about earlier that hemingway he led a very active life he hunted he fished he traveled he was
00:28:13.880
an aficionado of bullfighting how did all that stuff impact his writing well you can't even separate
00:28:21.320
it it was a symbiotic relationship where he did all of those activities to feed into the writing
00:28:29.000
and in writing he sort of explored the magic behind all of those activities so with hemingway you can't
00:28:38.120
really imagine one without the other you know we started this conversation by talking about
00:28:42.740
hemingway's childhood when he was really exposed to fishing and hunting he went to war as an extremely
00:28:49.280
young man right he was 18 years old when he was blown up in italy so all of these pursuits were
00:28:57.020
really part of him they were just baked into who he was and so that when he was writing about them
00:29:04.500
they were very natural and like for instance you know bullfighting is a great example i've never
00:29:10.240
seen a bullfight uh never attended the bullfights i really don't to be honest don't really have much
00:29:15.580
interest in doing it however what hemingway wanted to do he didn't just want to write like oh let's set
00:29:20.820
a novel at the bullfights he wanted to find that kind of magic or glory or something that was
00:29:30.980
that only somebody who truly understood the bullfights could impart so that when you read the
00:29:39.340
sun also rises even if you're not you know a particular fan of bullfights you need to know
00:29:45.700
that he loved the bullfights and that he understood the bullfights and his characters did and so to me
00:29:51.760
that's good enough you know what i'm saying it's like he under he had a real insider's appreciation for
00:29:58.740
all these activities even drinking i might add well he reminds me a lot of uh theodore roosevelt he's
00:30:04.660
the same way he was very active but roosevelt also turned his his stuff that he did into writing like
00:30:10.720
you know the reason yeah he went hunting in africa and he turned that into a book yeah the the great
00:30:16.820
the great uh hemingway biographer michael reynolds he said that i mean he points out that
00:30:23.460
like any other american boy born in 1899 or thereabouts you know theodore roosevelt would
00:30:32.020
have been the icon that you would have looked up to and so when hemingway goes to africa in the 30s
00:30:37.960
and then again in the 50s you know that's all sort of under the spell of what theodore roosevelt
00:30:44.100
how he projected manhood so one of the you know there's kind of this image again that hemingway
00:30:50.740
has and i think he perpetuated it he kind of spurred it on his ideas like this party animal
00:30:56.840
you know living big you know drinking etc did that carry over to his work or was he pretty regimented
00:31:03.140
with his work so i hesitate to make a blanket statement because i think during his life his work
00:31:09.780
habits changed you're absolutely right and when you say party animal well the european title for
00:31:17.400
his first novel was fiesta right for the sun also rises was actually called fiesta so he's often seen
00:31:23.720
as somebody who celebrates the you know the festival of san fermin and and and so forth i think the best
00:31:31.020
way to think about hemingway is that he was disciplined for most of his life in that he would wake up
00:31:37.080
really early and he would write so he'd wake up early and maybe he would do some correspondence and
00:31:43.400
then he would put in a morning's work and that could be two three four hours and then around lunchtime
00:31:52.160
the drinking would begin and so he would be drinking he would be maybe he would go fishing or he'd go
00:32:00.200
hunting he'd see people so that would really be and and so there was a discipline to the way that he
00:32:08.020
approached alcohol for much of his life it wasn't like he would be writing while he was drunk but
00:32:15.060
that's how much of his life was structured yeah he took his writing really seriously in fact he called
00:32:21.460
it the awful responsibility of writing and i really like this quote from the the carlos baker biography
00:32:27.680
he said that for hemingway nothing could match a writer's satisfaction and making a new piece of
00:32:33.540
the world and knowing that it would stand forever writing was what he had come to earth to do it was
00:32:39.660
his true faith his church his politics his command so yeah i mean even if he had you know stayed up late
00:32:46.780
the previous night or he's hung over i mean the guy still got up at 5 30 or 6 in the morning and got
00:32:52.260
down to work and like you said you know he kept his drinking till after work but it was hard to
00:32:57.440
maintain that lifestyle and i i mean it did catch up with him and his health and we also had some
00:33:03.560
like serious injuries throughout his life that oh yeah probably affected i mean what i mean i
00:33:08.100
yeah i was reading the biography and it's like man this poor guy like he fell on his head like five
00:33:12.180
times in a plane crash car accident car accidents i mean he got blown up in italy so yeah a lot of
00:33:18.520
physical trauma that he experienced throughout his life yeah and we would you know there's there's a
00:33:23.420
a there's a book out called hemingway's brain that really makes the argument that by andy farah who
00:33:30.600
makes the argument that essentially hemingway might have had cte you know like the concussion
00:33:35.700
malady that football players and boxers have yeah i mean he got his head knocked around every
00:33:40.840
every you know frequently he was also a boxer and you know he kept you know he would crack his head
00:33:47.820
open on his boat the pillar yeah so yeah he was he was certainly accident prone yeah and his cte
00:33:54.500
might also have contributed to some of his bad behavior as well as his suicide so when hemingway
00:34:01.640
went about his work he wrote like i know jack london another virile writer soon as he wrote like he was
00:34:08.100
done with it he didn't want to look at it again was hemingway like that or did he like to read over
00:34:12.360
and edit his own work yeah so that's another excellent question that also depends on the
00:34:20.060
era of hemingway that we're talking about it's a famous story that in a farewell to arms he would
00:34:26.920
literally read the entire book up until the point where he was writing and then continue that day's
00:34:32.800
work so imagine that that you're literally rereading that book over and over and over again to get into
00:34:38.820
the world of the book and then you continue on whatever new writing you have that day now i don't
00:34:44.840
say he always did that hemingway also it's it's i've i've been very lucky that i've studied hemingway's
00:34:52.280
manuscripts a lot so there's a lot of hemingway archives are in boston at the john f kennedy library
00:34:58.700
which is like nirvana for a hemingway scholar you get to see essentially how the sausage was made you
00:35:04.720
know and you you get a really good sense of hemingway as a craftsman where hemingway would
00:35:10.580
labor over syntax and word choice and you could really see how he kind of whittled his sentence
00:35:19.820
down until it was at its most powerful however later in life like a novel that i've spent a lot
00:35:26.920
of time with is called across the river and into the trees which was published in 1950 and he was a much
00:35:33.000
less careful editor in that book he seemed like he was almost in love with his own voice and his
00:35:42.540
character's voice and he would just let them ramble on and he didn't pare that down the way he might
00:35:48.040
have 25 years earlier well i think there was one point in his career when i think it was more
00:35:52.840
meticulous like he really took both the craftsman approach and then he also but he believed in like
00:35:57.440
the the artistic like the muses like sometimes you just get hit with something and it just comes out of
00:36:02.080
you but he's able to synthesize the two sort of approaches yeah i think that's a good point he you
00:36:08.820
know there's a famous statement that he made about fitzgerald in his memoir immovable feast where he says
00:36:15.500
fitzgerald had the talent that was as natural as the pattern that dust makes on a butterfly's wing
00:36:22.700
but then once fitzgerald became conscious of it he you know he spoiled it and then he couldn't he
00:36:28.100
couldn't fly anymore and so in other words like fitzgerald was this sort of preternaturally
00:36:33.560
talented precocious guy who couldn't didn't have the discipline to foster his own talent to kind of
00:36:40.140
take care of it whereas hemingway sort of like worked for every word it was like a brick layer that
00:36:47.180
he would just lay down the words and so like hemingway was blue collar sort of a craftsman
00:36:52.960
while fitzgerald was like an artist yeah and i think that that dichotomy is a little bit too easy
00:37:00.160
it really it really i mean if you look at the manuscript of the great gatsby no yeah labored
00:37:06.140
yeah oh he worked he worked he had to do the work you know just like nothing comes out of you that's
00:37:11.740
the great that sounds like the great gatsby just because you got lucky but i think what is important
00:37:16.740
about that is that that shows what hemingway valued and hemingway loved the self-image that he was
00:37:24.480
maybe not as talented as fitzgerald but through hard work and discipline and professionalism
00:37:32.520
he became more successful than fitzgerald so one of the criticisms that's levied at hemingway
00:37:38.720
is that his characters are you know these like kind of one-dimensional action-oriented he-men
00:37:44.660
right but you make this really compelling case in your book ernest hemingway thought and action
00:37:49.580
which i yeah i really enjoyed this well thank you that if you read hemingway closely you actually
00:37:54.920
discover that hemingway's characters are actually very extremely thoughtful and introspective how did
00:38:01.600
hemingway's books explore the tension and dynamic between you know introspection and action yeah i
00:38:08.280
brett i think that really is is the crux of it and and that's what i i explore in that book thought
00:38:15.580
and action so really there is a cartoon image of hemingway and maybe to some extent hemingway is to
00:38:23.000
blame for a lot of this but if you look at his characters his characters are are intellectual you know
00:38:29.960
they're either journalists or you know frederick henry in a farewell to arms wants to be an architect or
00:38:35.440
they're writers or they're painters you know they're not um they're not really tradesmen or
00:38:42.000
like blue collar workers they're really not so what hemingway i think what hemingway's approach was
00:38:49.020
is to say okay men of action doing things that are active is not that interesting intellectual people
00:38:57.500
who are busy in thought that's not that interesting what's interesting is when somebody who is thoughtful
00:39:06.600
is forced to act and so if you are how do intellectual sensitive vulnerable introspective
00:39:17.820
people behave at war or when they're hunting or when there's a crisis
00:39:26.980
how does the mind work under that kind of stress so what do you do when thought is either not
00:39:36.360
appropriate or it's not useful or actually it's even injurious it's it can detract from your behavior
00:39:44.880
one of my favorite statements about this is what when hemingway's talking about he says the greatest
00:39:50.780
gift for any soldier is the ability to suspend imagination however imagination is the most
00:39:59.240
important trait for a writer so go ahead now go try and figure out that contradiction like so how do you
00:40:06.180
how do you function if you have and if your brain is telling you don't think about this don't think
00:40:12.140
about that don't think about this but that's the way your brain is structured and i think that is
00:40:18.280
where a lot of tension comes in hemingway novels i think all of us have experienced that where
00:40:24.640
we yes where thought gets in the way we like we're in a crisis right or we're in this problem like
00:40:29.800
actually thinking about the thing too much is going to prevent you from from succeeding
00:40:34.580
yes except that and hemingway said another thing hemingway said he said the reason very few
00:40:42.900
good soldiers ever become good writers is because if during the battle you were thinking about the
00:40:50.920
battle or let's say reacting to the battle or doing what you were told or functioning as a professional
00:40:56.620
soldier well then you probably weren't able then to create the scene fictionally and so he says of
00:41:08.380
shakespeare the reason shakespeare he said shakespeare writes like he was a soldier he's like
00:41:13.820
shakespeare's able even though shakespeare never went to the military was not in the military he writes
00:41:19.560
like he did and to hemingway you you know you can't offer higher praise than that you know let me if i
00:41:26.120
could just add one thing brett uh hemingway around world war ii edited a collection an anthology
00:41:32.880
called men at war where he essentially assembles his favorite war writing that uh has ever been
00:41:41.160
published so in other words it'll be things from it could be things from the bible it could be
00:41:47.900
stephen crane's red badge of courage stendhal tolstoy etc etc and it's a really interesting window
00:41:53.660
into hemingway's reading and how he viewed this dichotomy of of thought and action
00:41:59.880
did he ever solve the tension did he figure it out do you think between thought and action
00:42:06.040
yeah uh at his best he i think i think he did at his best he he did and so in other words to show
00:42:14.840
how precious thought is he would what he would do would be like i must not i mean if you read for
00:42:24.600
for i think probably the best example of this or at least the most striking example is is for whom the
00:42:28.720
bell tolls underline every time he says i must not think about this i must not think about that
00:42:34.360
i must he's he's coaching himself on what is going to be useful thinking and what is not useful what is
00:42:43.320
going to distract him and so that's kind of that's called metacognition which is to when you have
00:42:50.340
thoughts about your thoughts uh you're saying like what would be useful to think about in this
00:42:55.240
circumstance and what will end up getting me killed and getting my friends killed so what's your
00:43:01.640
favorite hemingway novel and why is that and then like also this is the follow-up question like let's
00:43:05.460
say someone's listening to this and they haven't read hemingway since college or whatever like what
00:43:09.300
would you recommend to start up with and why yeah so my terrible answer for my favorite hemingway novel
00:43:15.740
is always the novel i'm about to teach okay so i teach lots of hemingway novels and on rotation
00:43:21.840
so i don't get bored of them and like the next one i'm going to teach is the sun also rises so that's
00:43:27.140
what i'm most excited to to teach what i would recommend to people who are let's say just getting
00:43:32.720
into hemingway is i i would start with the short stories so you know hemingway published 49 short
00:43:39.280
stories the first 49 and of which like 10 or 12 are fantastic i would read the killers hills like
00:43:47.720
white elephants indian camp the snows of kilimanjaro you know any number of those great short
00:43:53.860
stories and then if you like them you know the old man in the sea is only about 90 pages and you
00:44:00.080
could read that in a day or two and then if you like that you can go on to the the longer novels like
00:44:05.040
a farewell to arms for whom the bell tolls the sun also rises what's your favorite bread for whom the
00:44:10.620
bell tolls yeah right yeah that's a good one i've read it a couple times well that's a big one you
00:44:15.660
know that's a you have to admit that's a that would be a big one to to bite off first but it's
00:44:21.180
a it's a it's like i don't know i didn't feel laborious to read it's just it's a it was an
00:44:25.740
enjoyable read so you are the host of one true podcast and that takes the show takes its name from
00:44:32.120
a famous quote of hemingway's where he said this he said all you have to do is write one true sentence
00:44:37.940
write the truest sentence that you know so you often ask your guests that you have on your show
00:44:42.680
what they think was hemingway's one true sentence so and i'm gonna turn the tables on you what do
00:44:48.780
you think was his one true sentence and why so one true sentence really started because when i when
00:44:56.140
i teach hemingway i often start with one sentence as kind of an entrance into this broader topic that
00:45:03.080
is hemingway so i can give you i can give you several one true sentences but here i think is the
00:45:09.020
one that i would i would choose by way of context in 1922 so when hemingway was a young man still
00:45:17.080
unpublished as a fiction writer he was covering a conference in switzerland as a journalist and his
00:45:25.160
wife brought him all of his writing his unpublished work in a suitcase in a paris train station
00:45:34.080
that suitcase was stolen which means that hemingway lost a year or two of his writing now this is of
00:45:42.180
course in the days before flash drives and sending it to yourself on email and so forth so hemingway and
00:45:49.540
you can picture hemingway's first wife had to go tell hemingway that all of his material had been
00:45:54.660
had been lost so apparently hemingway as he tells it in a movable feast he rushes back to paris
00:46:01.460
because he can't believe that all this stuff is gone and then here's the sentence it was true all
00:46:07.560
right and i remember what i did in the night after i let myself in the flat and found it was true
00:46:14.680
so he says it was true all right and i remember what i did in the night after i let myself in the flat
00:46:22.740
and found it was true and the reason to me that is a magnificent one true sentence is because it is
00:46:31.920
probably the best encapsulation of the iceberg theory that i've ever seen in one sentence
00:46:37.720
because what he tells you in that sentence is that yes it is true and that he remembers what he did
00:46:44.280
but of course he doesn't tell you what you really want to know which is what did you do
00:46:50.900
did he tear up his his apartment did he resolve to break up with his wife did he go out and get
00:46:58.280
drunk did he do something violent did he do something he was ashamed of and what are the
00:47:03.440
range of things that he might have done as a reaction to losing all of his writing and i love
00:47:10.220
that in this sentence all he is telling us that 30 years later 35 years later he remembers what he did
00:47:19.580
so that's a pretty good iceberg sentence isn't it that is a good one you also you have a book coming
00:47:25.100
out where you have people talk about their one their favorite one true sentence yes so we have a book
00:47:31.820
coming out july of 2022 this is it's called one true sentence writers and readers on hemingway's art
00:47:39.720
it's coming out from godine and yes exactly it's a collection of these types of interviews with our
00:47:47.700
guests where we ask them the first question of every interview is what is your one true sentence
00:47:52.300
and why and then we take it from there and so we have elizabeth strout sherman alexi a scott berg and
00:48:00.100
on and on and on a lot of hemingway scholars and different people who have different experiences with
00:48:07.520
hemingway and they have different reasons for responding to some of these sentences uh ken burns and
00:48:14.600
lynn novick wrote the introduction so we're really excited about the book and it's it's actually
00:48:19.580
a nice way to kind of sample hemingway for people who might be like okay well what's your what is your
00:48:26.020
take on hemingway uh so we hope that this book does a good job of that well mark this has been a
00:48:30.820
great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work well we are on twitter at one
00:48:37.400
true pod so the number one true pod and one true pod.com so o-n-e true pod.com and yeah we hope
00:48:46.260
you listen if you're interested in hemingway well mark torino thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:48:51.240
brett thanks so much for having me my guest today was mark torino he's the author and editor of
00:48:56.980
several books on ernest hemingway including ernest hemingway thought in action he's also the host of
00:49:00.960
the one true podcast available on all podcast players check that out if you want to go to a deep
00:49:05.360
dive on ernest hemingway also check out our show notes at aom.is slash hemingway where you find
00:49:09.540
links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the
00:49:20.740
aom podcast make sure to check out our website at art of manless.com where you find our podcast
00:49:24.380
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00:49:27.520
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