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Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway

The Writer’s Drug of Choice

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Literature, Writing

≈ Comments Off on The Writer’s Drug of Choice

Tags

Alcohol, Art, Caffeine, Coffee, Drugs, Ernest Hemingway, Hysteria, John Bennet, literature, Oliver Sacks, Sasha Weiss, The New Yorker, tobacco, writers, Writing

Ernest Hemingway

Interviewer: John, you’ve been an editor for a very long time, and I imagine that you’ve worked with writers who have used various drugs to stimulate their writing.

John Bennet, New Yorker editor: Mostly caffeine and tobacco, and drugs of that nature. And simple hysteria.

I think it’s pretty hard to really write a complicated piece of writing if you’re hallucinating. That’s not to say that many of these writers haven’t done that in the past. But when they’re actually producing, they rely on caffeine, which is of course a drug.

Most writers I know write better than they’re able to write. That’s to say if it’s a good writer, he or she can write a great piece. But they do it by dent of great personal sacrifice. They tend to adrenalize themselves, whether it’s with caffeine or with just simple hysteria or panic, into this highly agitated state, whereby they are able to produce writing of the quality that they want to produce — that otherwise they feel they can’t produce.

And in general I must say it’s a rather destructive process to watch, when you work with writers who essentially have nervous breakdowns every time they have to write a piece. Which means it’s really a damnable profession, writing, because most people who are writers tend to be miserable — at least when they’re writing.

__________

Bennet, exchanging words with Sasha Weiss, story editor for the New York Times Magazine, in his joint interview with Oliver Sacks for The New Yorker Out Loud (Bennet’s remarks start at around 19:30 in the audio above).

You’ll find Sacks’s longer takes on this stuff in his highly acclaimed new memoir On the Move, which I plan to pick up in the coming weeks.

Read on:

  • Why I think the novel will never die
  • Why are so many writers alcoholics?
  • Why the world’s greatest advertiser added four words to a beggar’s sign

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Why the World’s Greatest Advertising Man Added Four Words to a Beggar’s Sign

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Writing

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Ad, Advertising, Art, Arthur C. Clarke, Creativity, David Ogilvy, Design, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Chimero, Mad Man, Mad Men, Story, Storytelling, The Shape of Design, Writing

David Ogilvy

“There’s an old story about David Ogilvy, one of the original mad men that established the dominance of the advertising field in the 50s and 60s, that seems to deal with storytelling as an avenue to create empathy. One morning on his walk to work, Ogilvy saw a beggar with a sign around his neck.

I AM BLIND

The poor man slouched in a corner and would occasionally hold the cup up to his ear to give it a rattle, because he was unable to tell how much money was in it by looking. Most days, the beggar didn’t hear much. Ogilvy was in good spirits that day. It was late April in New York, when the air is beginning to warm, and there’s a peaceful pause before the city falls into the oppressive heat of summer. He decided to help the beggar, and dropped a contribution into the cup. Ogilvy explained what he did for a living when the beggar thanked him, and he asked for permission to modify the sign around the man’s neck. Upon receiving consent, he took the sign and added a few words.

That night, on his way home, Ogilvy said hello to the beggar, and was pleased to see his cup overflowing. The beggar, frazzled with his success, and uncertain of what Ogilvy did to the sign, asked what words were added.

IT IS SPRING AND
I AM BLIND

Ogilvy was able to create empathy in the passersby, who would have ignored the blind man, by adding a story.”

__________

From The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero (You can download the entirety of this book on Chimero’s website).

Ernest Hemingway was once at lunch with a smattering of friends and other writers. As they waited for the bill, he made a wager with the table, betting that he could tell an entire story in just six words. Once his skeptical dining companions had eagerly tossed their bills into the center of the table, Hemingway jotted on a napkin and passed it around for each to read. On it was the six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Not one person at the table raised an objection as Hemingway smirked and scooped up the pile of cash.

Read on:

  • Ogilvy’s ten rules for writing
  • Sebastian Junger confronts the question of how to understand your relationship to your audience
  • I took every book I read last year and reviewed each in a sentence

David Ogilvy

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John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History

John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

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Hemingway’s First Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

A.E. Hotchner, Antonio Ordonez, bull fighting, cats, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fishing, Gertrude Stein, heaven, letter, literature, Midnight in Paris, Spain, Woody Allen, Zelda Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway

Burguete, Naverre, Spain.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a 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 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the /

Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both –

Yours,
Ernest

__________

A letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald sent on July 1st, 1925. You’ll find it and other gems from their correspondence in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923-1925.

The journey Hemingway was making, to the Fiesta de San Fermin at Pamplona, would provide the semi-autobiographical basis of The Sun Also Rises.

The two men had met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in May of that year, yet already in this letter we see Hemingway’s mixture of affection and condescension toward Fitzgerald. The truth, which Fitzgerald undoubtedly knew (though perhaps not yet), was that Zelda and Hemingway had a reciprocal distaste for one another; they did not, and never could, get along.

She thought he was a “materialistic mystic,” “a professional he-man,” and “a pansy with hair on his chest.” He thought she was debauched and psychotic alcoholic, a corrosive influence who purposefully interfered with Scott’s writing by spiking his anxiety and sapping his creative energy. Both seem to have been partially correct, though each failed to see their own relative flaws, most likely because they each coveted Scott’s attention. Zelda did distract Scott from his writing: in his journal he described June and July of 1925 as, “1000 parties and no work.” And Hemingway did often overplay the masculine card: perhaps he was always conscientious of the fact that he could never be more butch than Gertrude Stein.

The tension between Zelda and Hemingway is amusingly contextualized in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris.

Below: Hemingway in Zaragoza, Spain. In the top pictures he chats with Spanish matador Antonio Ordonez before a bullfight, and takes in the fight with his friend A.E. Hotchner. In the bottom pictures he is home on the couch, then feeding his cat, Cristobal Colon, one of six he had at the time.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway;Antonio Ordonez

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway in Paris

20 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Film, Humor, Speeches

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ernest Hemingway, Love, Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson, Woody Allen

“The assignment was to take the hill. There were four of us, five if you counted Vicente, but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off and couldn’t fight as could when I first met him. And he was young and brave, and the hill was soggy from days of rain. And it sloped down toward a road and there were many German soldiers on the road. And the idea was to aim for the first group, and if our aim was true we could delay them.

Have you ever made love to a truly great woman?…And when you make love to her you feel true and beautiful passion, and you for at least that moment lose your fear of death… I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who’s truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds. Until the return that it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.”

__________

From Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris.

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