Spitball Army

Recently, I re-read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.  Other than having read The Old Man and the Sea in school, it is the only Hemingway I have ever read.  That surprises me, thinking on it now, as I really loved the experience of reading Sun.  I retained the thrill of the language of that book in my mind.  That normally would have motivated me to track down and read other Hemingway books, but it never happened.  I can’t even recall accurately when I had previously read this book.  I am guessing that it was in high school.  I don’t know for sure.

One of the impressions that the book left me with – the first time – was how quixotically romantic it would be to spend lazy afternoons in a Spanish outdoor cafe sipping port and reading the racing columns.  Even though I am not a fan of port.  Port and sherry were a staple at early evening gatherings in college and I tried it several times, but our relationship never developed beyond a few cordial sips.  And racing and other forms of gambling are alien to me.  And I’ve never been to Spain.  Just as in the song.

This time around, I fell completely in love with Hemingway’s use of language.  I posted a vignette from the novel here, and it is representative of the rest of the book.  I zipped through the book this time much more quickly than when I was in high school and, while decelerating after the read, felt a hunger for more.  So I picked up A Moveable Feast.

Even though I have made tentative mental plans to travel to Europe, I have never made the trip.  I would love to see Vienna, the rolling stone walls of Cornwall and Yorkshire, the rocky landscape and walled villages of Andalucia, the Hebrides.  My impressions of these places are all informed by books and film: The Third Man, the James Herriot books, Don Quixote, Michael Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going.  Now I can add Paris to the list.

However, I doubt that the Paris of today would resemble the Paris of the 1920s that Hemingway writes about in A Moveable Feast.  Hemingway spends his days wandering the districts of the city, visiting friends, chatting up the local merchants and artists, going to the races, drinking, and spending just enough time at his writing “job” to provide for the most basic living amenities.  Today, he wouldn’t be able to live like that, but in the ’20s it could be managed.  A recent article in the Birmingham News quoted the successful author [read: sells a lot of books] Walter Mosely as saying that his “writer’s life” consists of three hours a day of actual writing.  I suppose the rest of the day is spent gathering ideas from everyday activities.  If so, Hemingway seems to have done his job well.

One of my favorite chapters in the book, titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” details a period when Hemingway could barely afford the minimum requirement of food and drink necessary.  He describes his afternoons walking, mapping out new routes through Paris that would take him past the fewest cafes and food shops, and reflecting on how this hunger fueled his art.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.  When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.  There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.  I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.  I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.  It was one of those unsound but illumintaing thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry.  Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.

He ends up selling a story unexpectedly, and takes the money to buy himself a meal of beer, potato salad and sausages, which he describes in sensual detail.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a Graham Parker song, and found myself prattling on in the most self-indulgent way about a guy who had introduced me to Parker’s music.  I read that passage over several times and just hated it.  I am grimacing right now thinking about it, and only inflict it upon you now as an example.  It went something like this:

Previously, I had seen him only on the outskirts of my experience, hanging around the communal grill, playing foosball, wearing a black mechanic’s jacket zipped up to his chin, smoking cigarettes, reading a paperback Penguin Classics volume in a corner of the courtyard.  When I visited their suite, he usually stayed in his room with the door closed, playing music sometimes but mostly quiet.  During one of my visits, he passed through the room, where we were fruitlessly attempting to dissect meaning from the Scottish band Big Country’s album The Crossing, and slowed only long enough to mutter his approval of the music.

This was becoming more a character study and less a piece about a talented songwriter.  With A Moveable Feast fresh in my mind, I thought, how would Hemingway approach this dilemma?  I closed my eyes and sliced away:

Prior to this exchange, the only musical idea he had shared was his admiration for Big Country’s The Crossing.  Now, however, I viewed him as a person of substance.

I could always write a character study later.  The lessons I have been learning from reading more Hemingway – eloquence through brevity, for example – served me well in this instance, and maintained focus on the subject of the post.