I recently read this passage in an essay by Harry Golden titled “Are Writers Born?” (published in The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, 1970, out of print, I think.)
Ernest Hemingway did something of a disservice to young writers when he had himself photographed with a bottle of gin and a fishing pole and when he talked of how he cheered at the bull fights and of the adventures he had in Spain, in Cuba, in France and in Africa. Hemingway was a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest of this century, and it would have been just as nice to have had as many photographs of him reading as fishing or hunting. For he did more reading than he did fishing; he did more reading than he did drinking. He read every day of his life in a soundproof room for at least three hours. Pictures of him reading would certainly have done young writers as much good as those pictures of him triumphant over a fallen water buffalo. Ernest Hemingway read everything of consequence as fast as it came off the presses.
My first thought was that perhaps my tendency to desire long periods of solitude in which I can concentrate as much as my distractible mind allows on a book or story or article will lead me to greatness. Then, I thought, perhaps it will lead me to suicidal alcoholism.
I’ll take the risk of revealing my shame by admitting that I’ve read almost no Hemingway. I was “assigned” along with the rest of my class to read “The Big Two-Hearted River” in high school, largely, I think, because it takes place in the same general part of the world* in which we were learning our three R’s. I didn’t really “get it” back then, and a glance at it now still leaves me far less interested or inspired than I would like to be. Still, I can’t help but admire (actually, sit blinking in amazement at) the way the story manages to be minimalist and intricately detailed at the same time.
The point of the above quotation is that Hemingway was smart, well-read, and intensely familiar with the craft of the written word, and those characteristics informed his writing at least as well as his grand adventures did. Who wouldn’t want such a writer as a role model? Assuming one can pick and choose which parts of that model to emulate.
If I am to copy Hemingway in any way it is going to have to be in trying to become a voracious reader, or at least as voracious as my slow and distracted reading abilities allow. Three hours a day? I’m not sure I can make that happen (as much as I would like to), but a big pile of reading material and as much quiet as I can get definitely suit me more than a trout stream or a bullfighting ring. Oh, and I really can’t stand to drink gin.
*Here is a short piece about Seney, MI as related to "The Big Two-Hearted River." Note: the article refers to Michigan's Upper Penninsula as the Northern Penninsula. I've never seen that anywhere else. Nobody who actually lives there calls it that.
Coming next: The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov
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