Last night after dinner, I had a choice: Watch the Oscar ceremony, or make sizable headway into For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, which I am reading out of the pure abject shame of not yet having the pleasure.
Initially I choose the Oscars. Yes, I am ashamed. I watched ridiculous celebrities decked out in peacockery, many of dubious talents, earnestly honor each other while the camera perpetually panned the bored-looking audience in search of reaction. Every category is predictable. Why, I haven’t seen 80% of the nominated movies/performances, and my guesses were scarily accurate. The affair was redeemed somewhat by the comedic riffing of Steve Martin (who plays a mean banjo) but I started to drift off right around the Oscar for Best Make-up. I mean, really, life is just too frigging short.
So I picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls. I am enjoying it immensely, owing completely to Hemingway’s masterfully sparse use of language. He is the opposite of me, in that he can go entire chapters without using an adverb. When his language does flourish, it is simple and poetic, like in the following sex scene (which adroitly obscures any dirtiness while retaining the obvious sensuality):
Where there had been roughness of fabric all was smooth with a smoothness and firm rounded pressing and a long warm coolness, cool outside and warm within, long and light and closely holding, closely held, lonely, hollow-making with contours, happy-making, young and loving and now all warmly smooth with a hollowing, chest-aching, tight-held loneliness.
I wonder how Hemingway would have written this passage if he were writing today? The strict literary morality of his times weighed heavily on Hemingway’s prose; his more informal writing is rift with sex and blasphemy, and infinitely more entertaining because of it.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. (in the Paris Review)
If you can’t say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment. (letter to editor of Esquire magazine)
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary. (A Moveable Feast)
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors. (letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald)
