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Ernest Hemingway: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

"I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied."

"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work."

--Ernest Hemingway, 1958

Ernest Hemingway

I've put off Hemingway's interview for far too long.  I didn't mean to.  It's just that the best thing about the interview doesn't translate well into brief summary or quotes.  I'm talking about his readiness to call the interviewer--or his questions--stupid.  When what he considers a good question is asked, he answers at length.  When a "not interesting" or "old, tired" question is asked, he replies with rhetorical questions, jabs, and frank boredom.  The interviewer asks him if he thinks teaching compromises a writer.  Hemingway retorts: "Is the usage that of a woman who has been compromised?  Or is it the compromise of the statesman?  Or the compromise made with your grocer or your tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later?"  The interviewer asks him if it's good for a writer to take a newspaper job like Hemingway once did.  Hemingway throws back a cliché: "Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."  And when the interviewer starts up about symbolism in his work, Hemingway brushes the whole thing aside: "It's hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well.  Also it deprives the explainers of work."  Not to be cowed, the interviewer fires off similar questions.  Hemingway parries.

Interviewer: Could you say something about the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one?

Hemingway: If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.

In deciding what to present from the interview, then, I let Hemingway decide.  He said a line twice, almost verbatim.  The first time was in response to one of those "uninteresting" questions, but the subject -- violence -- could have struck home.

Interviewer: Well, could we go back to that list [of people who influenced him--the discussion of which Hemingway described scathingly as "postmortems"] and take one of the painters -- Hieronymus Bosch, for instance?  The nightmare symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.

Hemingway: I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people have.  But you do not have to write them down.  Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show.  When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.

Here, Hemingway talks about Authority.  The interviewer didn't it, instead going after more "postmortems" and more potential "symbolism" in his novels.  Hemingway, patient, generous, banters on.  He gets his chance later, after a dull question about titles that he answers twice.  Now he presents his writing-as-iceberg principle:

If a writer stops observing he is finished.  But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful.  Perhaps that would be true at the beginning.  But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.  If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg.  There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.  Anything you know you can eliminate an it only strengthens you iceberg.  It is the part that doesn't show.  If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera.  That is done excellently and well by other writers.  In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily.  So I have tried to learn to do something else.  First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.  This is very hard to do and I've worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed.  The luck was that I had a good man and good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things.  Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is.  So I was lucky there.  I've seen the marlin mate and know about that.  So I leave that out.  I've seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him.  So I left that out.  All the stories i know from the fishing village I leave out.  But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.

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