from Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.
A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
. . .
[He intermittently stares at the girl while writing a story, probably "The Three-Day Blow."] I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
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4 comments:
I thought of this passage last night at ‘the commonwealth’s’ as we had several “dark and stormys” (Gosling rum and ginger beer) before venturing out into winter. Something about rum that makes you light and airy—evidenced by the commonwealth’s pirouetting and prancing across the ice and slush.
I can think of few passages that are so characteristically “Hemingway”—good and bad at the same time. I love the sentence about the girl’s hair as “black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.” He uses figurative language for the most basic detail (color), while using concrete language to describe the shape. The simile of the crow’s wing effortlessly glides from color to shape, and it is striking against the smoothness of her “rain-freshened skin.” It would be grotesque to say that her hair cut across her face like a crow’s wing—but to subtly suggest it really works.
Unfortunately, three paragraphs later—and I left this out of the post, because, well, you will see why—he writes, “I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all of Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” And then, a paragraph later: “I hope she’s with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.”
Hey, Hemingway, shit like this is why people don’t fucking like you. I’d include the “bad Hemingway” label on the sentence about “boyhood, youth and young manhood”* and the one that follows it. The sentence that begins “After writing a story I was always empty” verges on “bad Hemingway” in a different way through its unique and utterly characteristic combination of strained earnestness and self-congratulations. Plus, he uses in all seriousness the phrase “made love,” which should be stricken from the language. Hemingway's signature monosyllabic, “one true sentence” style creates a sense of naivete that is often at fundamental odds with, for lack of a better word, “the story’s” perspective and reality. While this is what really works in the Nick Adams stories (about “youth and young manhood”), it can come across as overly engineered in other places, especially in autobiographical writing.
However, there is much to admire here and, having more or less come to reading through Hemingway and Norman Maclean, I have an abiding affection for him. So onto the very good stuff. I think it is in that Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan movie City of Angels where a character reads the part about the rum, oysters, then wine, and says that no one could describe taste like Hemingway. This seems right especially in regard to the oysters, their “strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste.” Most people could come up with “taste of the sea,” but Hemingway balances it (strong/faint) against their “metallic taste.” But is it true with regard to the rest of the passage? Tasted wonderful; warm me; cold white wine; sea taste; succulent texture cold; crisp. This isn’t so much descriptive as it is simply listing the essential characteristics of what he’s consuming. It seems to me that what makes Hemingway such a distinctive “eating and drinking” writer is not his descriptions of taste but rather the detail by which he catalogues the processes and effects of eating and drinking.
*Kings of Leon—referencing A Moveable Feast? Incidentally, I really like that album.
What's this?! Five days of uninterrupted posts--some from Costa Rica, no less--and now nothing? Do you feel entitled to time off for Presidents' Day or something? For shame!
I had the honor of discussing po campo’s fine commentary with him in person yesterday. He anticipated much of what I would say about the passage. It's remarkable how frank Hemingway is in one paragraph and disingenuous in another. Both with purpose, I think.
Mentioning how the weather in his story comes from such a magical compositional source as, well, looking out the WINDOW, seems like a betrayal of the magician's colored scarves. He does it with such aplomb that you’re forced to imagine how many more of these secrets he could reveal, more than he’ll ever tell. By demystifying one corner of the room, he creates a vast space of enigmatic, writerly wonder. The romance that set sail to a thousand MFA programs!
But comparing a draft to sex is silly. Particularly since he notes how he won't know the true quality of the writing until the next day, which means he's finished a *first* draft. I'm guessing Papa's first drafts were as imperfect (relatively speaking) as anyone's. Rather than showing "how good" it is, morning light will more likely reveal his new story has more in common with a blockish, veteran whore than the freshly minted girl he pondered while he ate oysters and drank wine.
The difference between Hemingway and most writers is that he could do something about it. And then eat more oysters. He knew that about himself and about his competition, too.
Laura, I wasn't going to post today but you goaded me into it. With the bres in Costa Rica and the cw absorbed into setting up fantasy baseball, I didn't want there to be a 2-day gap--though I was happy to see Amos get into the mix (with a great passage).
Anyway, a literary gallimaufry blog is like a shark--a jaguar shark!--in that if it stops moving forward, it dies.
Amos, nice reply. I am hereby going adding "the romance that set sail to a thousand MFA programs" as a label for the post. I think we'll get some use out of that.
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