"I of my own knowledge…"

One of the joys of keeping a journal, however diligently or not one does it, is the occasional review, the look back at roads trodden. Naturally, year-end is a convenient time. Found this conversation with Papa Hemingway which was of interest.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

7 AM. So, Papa, talk to me about loneliness. For I got a clear sense, last night, of how lonely you got, and how often.

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Original article at http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/dec/18/exhibit-highlights-hemingway-prose/

Exhibit highlights Hemingway prose

BY BRIAN HICKS

bhicks@postandcourier.com

Sunday, December 18, 2011

In the spring of 1935, Ernest Hemingway was lamenting the placement of his home on a list of Key West tourist attractions.

His regular Esquire magazine column was devoted to his tongue-in-cheek protest that he had no desire to compete with the Turtle Crawls (No. 3 on the map), the open-air aquarium (No. 9) or the Sponge Lofts (No. 13).

“Yet there your correspondent is at number 18 between Johnson’s Tropical Grove (number 17) and the Lighthouse and Aviaries (number 19),” Hemingway wrote. “This is all very flattering to the easily bloated ego of your correspondent but very hard on production.”

The idea of Hemingway actually writing must have seemed a curious concept to readers of the day.

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Papa, I can see that my work is being sabotaged by my own self-doubt. (Is it really Hemingway online? Will anybody believe it? If they do, will they care? If they would, can I put the material into an enjoyable, accessible format? Etc.)

How would you expect to avoid such doubts? That’s part of the territory. You know the writer’s three fears.

I do. I have nothing to say, I can’t say it, nobody would care anyway.

Well, if you know they are common fears, why give it to them when they visit you? Or dwell within you, if that’s the case?

It takes a monumental self-confidence, it seems to me, to be so sure that what you’re doing is worthwhile and can be done.

Yes, or courage to do it without being sure.

All right. Sort of like me working on the novel, not really knowing how I’m going to do it, not having any surer footing — at all — in what I am doing now.

So? That’s part of the admission ticket.

Monday, October 31, 2011

5:45 AM. Papa, the fourth and fifth dimensions: Time, and then Beyond Time?

Close enough. Or you might say viewpoint over time, viewpoint beyond viewpoint, or overall viewpoint, or really view without the distortion of viewpoint. Now, you can see that to write in such a way as to hint at (for you cannot actually do it) going beyond viewpoint is very difficult, and requires not only skill and luck in the writer but, let’s say, skill and attention in the reader. Luck, too, perhaps, for the reader has to be in the right mental space to be able to comprehend it.

That’s what I was trying for in Across The River. I told the story seemingly from inside Colonel Cantwell’s head, but not precisely. Within his mind — the nonphysical mechanism we all live in, as you recognize — he moves across elements of his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand through reading or other instruction or from appreciating, as in a picture. I believe I achieved that fourth dimension, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized — because of Renata, of course.

Now here is something nobody sees. I achieved the fifth dimension with Santiago, who lay dreaming of the lions at the end. My achieving it was not at the end, though, but throughout, because in careful recounting of his moment by moment actions, and his moment by moment thought or memory, and his moment by moment emotion, I was so close to the moving present that we get beyond time to the timeless. Where else do you think that strange aura around the story comes from?

It is not told fromSantiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, or the guys upstairs, or the part ofSantiago that lives outside time and space. It is our life described neither from within it nor from without it.

Yes, there is the story itself — the old man striving, and winning, and losing, and remaining himself. There is the effect on the boy. But beyond all that is the strange penumbra that people feel but don’t quite understand, and this is because the story’s atmosphere talks to us of things beyond the story.

I could not have produced the story to order. And it came as a gift, and I passed on the gift. Those who think it’s simple or simpleminded are only one eyed; they cannot sense the presence of that extra dimension.

It is a curious paradox, isn’t it? To get beyond time, one way is to sit on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways — Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale — but this was mine.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Papa, why did you conceive of the land, sea, air book? The scope was way too big to be accomplished. As you recognize, you didn’t have time enough to learn air warfare let alone air realities in the first place. But was Across The River the land book, and Islands the part of the sea book?

You’re confusing yourself a bit. Yes, Across The River was my land war book, and maybe I could have done better to leave out the love story — though I don’t see how I could have, and to have Cantwell fall in a less impossible love wouldn’t have fit in either. But the indirect description of the aftereffects of battle and warfare was as well done as I could. If it was a bridge too far for my critics, I can’t help that. In time the book will rise or sink, and it won’t have much to do with the judgment of the critics of 1950.

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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

7 AM. Reading Hotchner’s Hemingway And His World, now. A reason that people can’t get his life straight is that there are too many parts to remember. So, if there’s a long stretch when he isn’t publishing (regardless if he is writing) it looks like a blank patch. Or if he isn’t even writing, clearly lost time. Yes, Papa?

It’s natural enough. You want to tell somebody life story, you find a couple themes and follow them — his work, his loves, his families (the one he is born into, and the one he creates). You might throw in his hobbies or other things, but it’s only a few themes. They won’t all be very communicable. They won’t be equally important, and they won’t be equally important at any given time in his life. And they won’t be the whole of his life, and they can’t ever be.

This whole idea of understanding somebody’s life is oversimplified. You can find a mainspring sometimes, and tell the story of the mainspring and how it plays out, but even there you’re going to get — let’s say, you’re going to get one external facet of the man — one place where what he is interacts with what he experiences of the world. And since you can’t get the internal connection between that part of him and other parts, you’re going to get a very superficial, almost static, view of even that one part of him. It would be all right if you just could remember that you’re mostly missing him.

Well, I am certainly beginning to see it with you. A few others make it clear too. Jefferson, for instance. A lot of facets to examine, and no practical way to hold them all in mind, and no practical way to express them all within a sufficiently small compass that the reader can hold it.

Movies or TV could do it, to some extent, but the basic fact is that it takes more than a lifetime to understand and absorb a lifetime, so what are you going to do?

Like anybody else, I get discouraged, sometimes. But, like anybody else (including the Beatles) I get by with a little help from my friends.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

6 AM. A little bit discouraged, Papa. I have just about roughed-in the first draft, and I am wondering if I am not on the wrong track. What I’m putting out isn’t all that new, most of it.

It isn’t that the information is new, but the interpretation. You know that. One of two things the historian can bring to his subject, new information or new interpretation.

But what I offer that is new is really only that you are the one saying it. In other words,

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Shortly after midnight, July 8, 1918, not-quite-19-year-old Ernest Hemingway was in the trenches among Italian soldiers when the central event of his life took place without warning. The following, slightly edited, is what Hemingway conveyed to me about it via Intuitive Linked Communication.

Papa, let’s talk about your wounding, the out-of-body (or near-death) experience, the aftermath.

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July 2, 2011, makes 50 years since Ernest Hemingway made his escape from the prison his body and life had become. His suicide, which put an end to his physical life, did not put an end to him. Hemingway lives, and not only in the sense that his memory and his brain children — his books and stories — are as  alive in us as ever. This is true, but beyond that, he lives! Regardless whether he thought there was such a thing as an immortal life, he is now in the midst of it, and quite happily.

In  commemoration of the greatest writer of the 20th century, I thought I’d pass along this that I received  from him by means of Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC) a couple of years ago. (As this had to pass through my mind to be expressed, you must not expect it to come out sounding as it would if he had been in the flesh to extensively revise and polish it. Still, nice to have it.) Hemingway, from his new perspective, describes what it was like to write from the imaginal world while firmly within the physical.

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I haven’t forgotten that the over-arching question underlying this blog is, “What is the meaning of life?” Although it may seem sometimes as if the matters I pursue here are merely of personal interest, I suggest that the underlying question is always there, and is important to us all, at one level or another.

This particular entry was written while I was visiting England four years ago. I had just bought and read Michael Reynolds’ The Young Hemingway.

This entry begins with my addressing Hemingway and ends with the guys on the other end of the line prodding me to do something I was reluctant to undertake. (Exposing my own shortcomings may be a way to make real what otherwise might remain only abstraction. Consider it my gift to you.) I feel like the writing and publication of The Cosmic Internet is partial fulfillment of this commitment.

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