Mid-page 13 of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast has him sitting in a cafe on the Place St.-Michel,drinking rum St. James, working on a story -- transplanting himself is how he describes it -- and then reflecting to the reader "The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it."
How does a story write itself? An intriguing question, yes, and incomprehensible to me. Is this an example of an innate ability which launches an author into that elite group of writers whose works become classics? Great writing is something which cannot be learned? It does not seem fair.
I have not yet formed an opinion on Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea was, as I recall, unremarkable. But perhaps a different story would speak more clearly to me about courage and overcoming obstacles than one starring a giant marlin. Feast's book jacket says that it "captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s."
Maybe I'll understand Hemingway's brilliance when I am through. Or maybe it was just the rum talking.
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Maybe you have to be drinking rum to read him. I have personally picked up the Old Man at least 5 times to read and I just couldn't complete it. I think we have to understand that some books are classics in their generation. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was just a story going nowhere. Not nowhere fast, but nowhere slowly, about people doing nothing impressive, with nothing at the end but two people looking at each other saying "what the hell was THAT all about?!". Ok, the last part was my uncle and me after we finished listening to it on tape on a road trip. (I thought, oh, how ironic would it be to read this. We listened to David Sedaris and John Grisham the next 1,200 miles.) However, it was a first of its kind type of novel in its day. Many times I've started, and left unfinished, such venerated and recommended books as "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "Don Quixote de la Mancha", "Anna Karenina" and "The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood". Any writer that can create a reader I give props to and I am glad that we have Papa and Jack but I'd prefer to stick to Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Austen and Cussler. IMHO
ReplyDeleteI am OK with Kerouac, by the way, did he write anything else?, but please do not ask me to read anything by Faulkner.
ReplyDeleteMB--how'd that Grisham work out for you?
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