In Mr. Hemingway's Country or Finding a Writing Mentor

Ernest Hemingway's birthday was yesterday. He was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois.

That was 112 years ago, if you're keeping track, which it's quite likely you're not.

You see, I can't help being aware that the books of Hemingway are no longer fashionable. If he's mentioned, he's controversial. He's gone from being a household brand-name author to a historical relic.
 

His two novels of war, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, though they're as anti-war as anything ever written by anyone, are unlikely to be Oprah picks anytime soon.

His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, has fared better. I know some of my students who have identified with Hemingway's take on the Lost Generation as his characters seek to assuage their post-war trauma through the pleasures of drink, sex, bull fighting,and trout fishing. It seems as if many of my students went through another kind of war, slogging through the days and years with one of their parents missing in action...

As for The Old Man and the Sea, perhaps Hemingway's greatest piece of writing, it made its debut as a special booklet bound into Life magazine for the entire nation to read.

This could be my finest garage sale find...
a Book Club Edition, but it's from 1952, the year of publication.

Nowadays this classic literary text's fate is different. It is solemnly delievered to high school students who can't read anything called a "novel" if it's more than 200 pages long.

What is going on here?

The Hemingway Problem(s)
Many people do not care for Hemingway's aggressive, testosterone-soaked personality and how his life made almost as much news as his books.

Some argue, with some justice, that he did a poor job of writing about women.

As for the famous Hemingway style, those pared down with a hunting knife series of almost adjective-less sentences, the longest ones being bricked together with conjunctions and conjunctions and conjunctions, guess what? That kind of writing now strikes many as mannered or just a gimmick.

Then there' the main thing Hemingway the writer set out to do--to render a scene and a sensation in such a way that it is as if it has been alchemically converted into nothing but WORDS.

This ability of his has lost some of it's luster and magic, made irrelevant by wonders of technology. Consider this paragraph of description from the short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro.":

In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shade of the trees that bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream...The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go across the top of the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and down across this meadow to the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was not big, but narrow, clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the birches...

The twenty-first century person seeking diversion and information might very well ask why they should bother to read all this up and down and over the road stuff with birch trees and whatever when it would be much easier and more accurate to simply switch on a high definition video camera. Or use Google Earth. Or just wait for the movie to come out.

Everything Hemingway meticulously mentions can be captured through the lens except for the smell, taste, and touch. And those elements seem minor compared to the great pillars of all writers' description: sight and sound.

Speaking of sound, what about Hemingway's famous ear for dialogue? Could it be that men and women used to speak differently? Because sometimes to modern ears what he puts on the page just doesn't sound right. Listen to this exchange between husband and wife in the story "Get a Seeing-Eye Dog."

"You remember better all the time. And you're getting strong."

"I am strong," he said. "Now if you--"

"If me what?"

"If you'd go away for a while and get a rest and a change from this."

"Don't you want me?"

"Of course I want you darling."

"Then why do we have to talk about me going away? I know I'm not good at looking after you but I can do things other people can't do and we do love each other. You love me and you know it and we know things nobody else knows."

"We do wonderful things in the dark," he said.

"And we did wonderful things in the daytime too."

"You know I rather like the dark. In some ways it is an improvement."

"Don't lie too much," she said. "You don't have to be so bloody humble."

"Listen to it rain," he said. "How is the tide now?"

 

On the Other Hand
Knowing all the foregoing objections, I could attempt to rebut them by spending time pointing out some compensatory factors. The chief one is that Hemingway was the first writer to do the equivalent of what Paul Simon has done with his music: Hemingway was an American who used his writing to bring the culture of other lands to our doorstep.

Just as Paul Simon is steeped in World Music, Hemingway exposed himself to languages and experiences in Europe, Africa, and Cuba that he could write about.

I admire such ambition. But that's still not why I turn to this writer more than any other.

A Writing Mentor
I've been writing and publishing here and there long enough that I've developed some theories about what might sustain and develop a person in this difficult and demanding craft. One thing that worked for me fairly early on was to find a mentor.

It was Hemingway. But he didn't come to me easily.

I began with a plan. I kind of liked it as it cost me no money (I was poor college student) and it involved no risk of asking, "Will you be my mentor?" and being humiliated as some great woman or great man turned me down. All I had to do was:

1 - Go to the library.

2 - Pick out an interesting author.

3 - Take down a book of theirs from the shelf.

4 - After I read that book, take the next one on the shelf down and read it.

5 - Repeat this process until I read all the author's books all the way across the shelf.

One caveat: I knew it might not be a good idea to choose someone like Charles Dickens or Henry James since reading the entirety of their oeuvre could be a monumental task. The mentoring is supposed to take a few years, not decades.

In my case, I began by reading everything I could get my hands on by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved the passions and elegance of the rich! So I sucked up everything Fitzgerald had to say about this world. I even rode the rickety elevator up to one of the high floors of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library where I could take off the shelf a rare and fragile copy of Fitzgerald's obscure play The Vegetable.

As I said, I read everything.

But there was a problem with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I could read all the words he wrote and love them, yet I still could not write similar elegant, poetic sentences myself. I didn't produce even a cheap imitation. My attempts were forced and purely verbose.

So I took stock and started over, without much enthusiasm, on Fitzgerald's contemporary and polar opposite in writing style, Ernest Hemingway.

That was when I made a surprising discovery. I could take 1/10 of Fitzgerald and add about 9/10 of Hemingway and suddenly I had my style. And when I had a style, people began to publish my work.

Finding my style was mostly due to Hemingway? How could that be? I wasn't a gun loving, sportsman-type young man. But then it dawned on me. A writer's style wasn't about what he or she wrote about. The style was about who the writer was--deep down.

I might be infected with F. Scott Fitzgerald's sort of romanticism on occasion, but at a bedrock level I was a straight forward, tolerate no B.S. personality like many members of my family, a bunch of Okies who knew more about red dirt than they did tinkling glasses of champagne.

Further, my personality had been shaped by where I had grown up: Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska. These were Hemingway-style places. Ice-age orphans. Hard, scoured, physically demanding. I'd grown up in empty spaces and that spaciousness had gone inside of me. I wasn't meant to be effusive; I was primed to write "lean."

He writes standing up!

Besides providing me with a style I found hospitable and that I could imitate, Hemingway helped me in another way. More than the other writers I'd read he didn't mind sharing a few tips about his craft. I think of scenes in Green Hills of Africa where everyone sits around the campfire and talks about great writers and great books. I think of some of the reflections in A Moveable Feast on how he got his work done. I think of his Paris Review interview from the 1950s.

Hemingway made me realize that writing is a serious business. Before I'd thought writing was just about filling up pages with words. I would be excited when I had covered every inch of a notebook or when I'd type up my drafts and now had a five-inch stack. When the writing flowed and came easily I thought I was doing great!
 Truth was, I was poised to be a hack. Someone who spends his words profligately.

Then I looked at Hemingway. He devoted himself to each sentence as if he were fashioning something of lasting importance. Where some scribbled, he sought to chisel. Writing was serious business.

“Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.”

I slowed down. I became more intentional. About everything I wrote. Finding the right words takes time.


Put Down Pen, Pick Up Book
There's one more thing I'd like to share about Hemingway's influence on me. It's how he's become a part of my normal summer routine. It's nothing less than a summertime tradition around here. Like putting on shorts or making potato salad.

Sometime during June, July or August I always re-read a book by Ernest Hemingway.



               My shelf of E.H. Yes, I sprang for the leatherbound complete works years ago...


For me summer and Hemingway go together. The timing is such that I have a bit of downtime and I also could use a refresher course in the kind of writing I aspire to. Think of it as an outdoor writing workshop, if you will, as Hemingway's immaculately constructed stories take me to the mountains of Spain, the Carribean sea, the plains of Africa, the forests of Michigan, or the cafes of Paris.

This year I'm re-reading Men Without Women, one of his early collections of short stories, which includes the classics "The Killers," "Hills Like White Elephants," "Fifty Grand." It will be like sitting down to chat again with an old writer friend, one who really knows what he's doing.

Is it possible you still don't like/appreciate Hemingway? No problem! There are lots of writers out there. If you're interested in writing yourself, what I'd do is find one. Ride their coattails as you feast your eyes this summer on words that resonate with you. The next time you sit down to write, you will be rewarded. - V.W.


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The National Nudity Considered

I've commented quite often on posts at The Van Winkle Project that it's difficult, if not impossible, to filter out all the news.

Bits and pieces of news stick to me like lint to a sweater.

- A word in a headline briefly glimpsed.

- Something accidentally overheard in a conversation.

- A bumper sticker innocently read that turns out to be fraught with timely implications.

Or even a T-shirt--like the those the Dallas Mavericks fans were wearing back in early June...

Latest Indiscretion
Recently our family was on vacation. This is usually a time when even under non-Van Winkle conditions I fall out of touch with the news. Vacation is about living in the moment and getting out and doing new things instead of being tied to a computer or a TV or having a daily newspaper arrive on the doorstep.

Still, I had problems this vacation.It began with the now ubiquitous flat-screen TVs in the airports, all of them tuned to 24/7 cable news and with their volume turned up loud; if you plug your ears, there remains the visual assault of the crawl at the bottom.

Later, as I hung out with relatives the pollutant became words and phrases dropped into conversations.

"What this country is coming to."

"Trillions. It boggles the mind!"

"Government broke."

And, yes, like a monk who has resolved to give up women but who still has to go into the city, I glimpsed the equivalent of some cleavage and legs courtesy of the newspapers lying around my sister-in-law's house.

My Speculation
Okay. So I sorta think I might know kinda what's going on back in Washington the past couple of weeks. On the other hand, I don't have any details or why or wherefore.

When I went to "sleep" back last September the economic and political talk was still of 1) the unemployment rate, 2) bailouts,  and 3) health care. I honestly don't remember "trillions" of anything being in the conversation.

But times bring change. Maybe America is waking up with a big hangover. A collective national problem. For years we've been ignoring this problem, covering it over with a fig leaf if you will.

Now the leaf has dropped. Citizens are stirred up.So imagining that I've intuited what this news must be about I've dreamed up an op-ed piece.

My apologies if I've garbled reality. Perhaps I have misunderstood?

THE PROBLEM OF THE NATIONAL NUDITY

by Seymour Sitazon

America is a great country! One that is built on the idea of ongoing opportunity leading to prosperity for as many as possible. Yet we recognize, almost instinctively, that prosperity and the big wild good life ought not to derive from an excess of nudity.

In the past America has approached its national nudity with caution. When there was too much nudity the government acted and brought redress. The national nudity declined, although it never went away entirely.

It is notable that during the Reagan years the national nudity began to rise for the first time in a most alarming way. President Reagan implemented tax cuts, but he did not cut nudity. Nudity, in fact, became a way of playing with our toys today and deferring the costs of those toys until tomorrow.

Some of the toys the national nudity made possible were quite large: houses, SUVs, hot tubs, and everything at Sam's Club.

Surprisingly, it was President Bill Clinton who gave us a glimpse of what it might be like to see a decline in the national nudity. It may have been his policies or it may have been luck, but he proved to be no fan of nudity. Not even Monica Lewinsky could deter him from doing something about the national nudity. In fact, as the economy grew along with tax revenues during Clinton's watch there was the hope of decreasing the national nudity once and for all.

Then came two expensive wars abroad and a financial collapse.

The national nudity is now of extreme proportions. When you add it up, day by day, there must be trillions of instances! It seems we'll never be rid of it. Our children's children's children will inherit nudity that staggers the mind. How will they end up? Totally tragically naked?

Having laid out this problem I'd like to end by making an unexpected turn. What if the national nudity is not the rampant evil we suspect?

I mean look around you. Have you noticed thats even with such high levels of national nudity the people of this nudity-ridden nation still lead normal lives?

They drive down the road. They stand in the check-out line at the grocery store. They eat their hamburgers at McDonalds. We have national nudity, but we function. Indeed, as a people we seem to smile a lot.

The other day I was at a baseball game, eating a foot-long hotdog, and thinking about the rampant national nudity.

I looked up at the cheering fans--men, women, boys and girls. I looked at the handsome boys of summer. "So much national nudity!" I said to myself. Then "Crack!" the bat made contact with the ball and we all went "Aw!"

That's when I had an epiphany.

National nudity is as American as baseball. It's ingrained into the American skin like a wavy tattoo of Scooby Doo. We don't need fig leaf solutions to national nudity dreamed up by Congress or the president.

We need another hot dog with mustard and relish. And if I can't find my wallet to pay for it, well, blame it on the national nudity and let's get back to watching the game!

- V.W.

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Escape to Alaska: Denali is the Finale

We went looking for a mountain.

It sounds a bit odd to say we were hunting for a mountain when the mountain in question is Denali, officially known (according to Congress) as Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain on the North American continent and possibly the most impressive upthrust of rock and snow on the entire planet.

But Denali can be difficult to spot. Blame it on the weather.

The bus driver who takes you into Denali National Park tells you that you have only a 30% chance of seeing the mountain. When Denali does make one of its much coveted appearances, people speak of it as if referring to a shy person or a hermit who has emerged from a cave. "The mountain is out today," they say. The rest of the time? The mountain is not out; it is shrouded in clouds.

There wasn't much suspense involved in our trip into the park. Given that we had had slashing rains during the night, we were pretty sure that clouds still had the upper hand from the mountain's 20,320-foot peak to nearly its base. So we did what all other tourists on the bus did; we concentrated on spotting wildlife.

We saw moose, bears, caribou, and a fox. Unlike most of the others aboard the bus, I didn't rush to the window and stick my camera out and press the shutter release. I could see the animals clearly, all right, but it wasn't a photoworthy moment unless one had a giant telephoto lens. I just relaxed. I enjoyed the ride.

It was an 8-hour round-trip over the dirt road.

 We stopped every hour or so to use the park facilities and snap a few more photos.

An aptly named "braided river"...

The variegated colors of Polychrome Pass

Our driver, Joe, provided lots of interesting commentary about the history of the park and the features of the rocks, plants, and animals.

Did you know that an arctic squirrel hibernates but that brown bears don't? The latter are actually in a trance-like state in which they don't eat or eliminate waste, but they can be aroused awake during the winter. Winter hikers beware!

Did you know that due to climate change the boreal forest is moving north? With warmer temperatures, plants and trees are able to live at higher elevations and latitudes than before. Recent photographs of the park compared with those from nearly a hundred years ago show forests in places that were barren before.

Did you know that Mt. McKinley was named after Senator William McKinley not President McKinley? That a goldminer with ties to the Eastern newspaper establishment named the mountain to call attention to the senator from Ohio who (happily from the miner's point of view) supported a gold standard for the nation's currency base rather than a silver standard. The senator went on to become president.

Or did you know that one Alaskan town wanted to name itself after the state bird, but residents had trouble spelling P-t-a-r-m-i-g-a-n, so they became Chicken, Alaska.

Interesting stuff, but I still wished my wife and son could see the mountain the way I'd experienced it as a young man. Back then, five friends and I rode all the way to the end of the park road, got out, and camped in the shadow of Denali. And it was "out."  In fact, it looked just like the photo in the souvenir booklet that Joe the driver distributed to us at the end of the day.

As I looked at that photo I realized that the mountain was like a lot of things in life. It has to be there all the time even when it's not registering on the senses.

Like joy. A gloomy day comes along and one wonders was I ever happy a single time in my life?

Like love. When you're alone you wonder have I ever had a friend in this world? Has anyone ever really appreciated me?

Or the transcendent. If the world is making no sense it's easy to start to think there's never been a glimpse of some kind of presence behind this reality, some larger thing that actually cares that humanity and I are doing our best (or worst) to survive another orbit around the sun on this little rock we call planet earth.

But then I remember: I glimpsed it once. It was there. It was enormous and real. And even if I never see it again, it's still there, just the other side of the obscuring clouds.

When I believe that, it's a lot easier to move on through the curtains of rain. To appreciate the other, smaller things the sun illuminates when it finally breaks through the overcast.  To say that as long as today is today, this will be enough. - V.W.

Escape to Alaska: Funky Talkeetna

We were on the road to Denali National Park. It was raining, but we knew we were getting a bit closer to what some might call the "real" Alaska. Out there in the wilds where men and women live close to the land and...the animals.

It had been raining all morning and now seemed like a good time to go find a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee. That's how we ended up at the Flying Squirrel Cafe just outside Talkeetna, Alaska where they had pasted the bear warning sign.

We decided to drive a few more miles and take a look at Talkeetna.

Back when I lived in Alaska, I'd heard of what the locals fondly refer to as Tee-Kay. It's long been a base for mountain climbers who fly from there to make an assault upon the summit of Mount McKinley. It's also home to dog mushers, eccentrics and misfits, making it a rowdy, deadhead, redneck Northern Exposure kind of town of 800 or so.

It's a bit more touristy these days I discovered--lots of rafting tours and gift shops and an explosion in microbrew possibilities at the town's numerous drinking establishments.

The "bad-boy" image of the town is probably more calculated than actual.

After all, this is a town that goes all out to impress visitors with its love of pots of beautiful blooming flowers.

In fact, Tee-Kay is so civilized that I found myself having return to Van Winkle high alert status. Yes, that was a vending box with a newspaper whose headline was trying to tempt me away from my news ban.

I walked on by. It was time to hit the road and keep on heading north. - V.W.


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Escape to Alaska: A Tale of Two Fish Cities

Fishing boats lined up in front of the processing plant.

Every summer the salmon return from the ocean to find the original streams in which they were born years earlier.

It's one of the largely unexplained mysteries of nature. After so many years of maturing in salt water, how do the fish make the change to fresh water and get all the way home? How do they survive the mishaps and predators along their route? How do they keep from getting caught by the innovations of humans, including hooks, traps, and nets?

Most of them don't. It's  been estimated that for every 25 million salmon eggs that are laid, only two fish arrive home to complete the cycle and spawn in the stream beds.

Yet the salmon keep on coming. By the thousands. Every summer.

We took a stroll along the docks of a cannery that my brother-in-law worked in decades ago when he was an 18-year-old looking for his first good paying job.

This was back when Alaskan salmon marketed to the word was in 16 oz and 8 oz tin cans. You should know that canned salmon is to fresh salmon what canned tomatoes are to fresh tomatoes. Yes, you can eat it, but it's hardly memorable. But canned salmon was all technology would allow at that point.

Gary showed us where a congregation of young and old, male and female, Filipinos, Alaska Natives, and whites worked in those summers long ago. The work was wet and filthy, especially near the so-called "Iron Chink" which was a machine that sliced off the fish heads and tales. Guts and slime abounded.

Wash it all down the drain...

It so happened that Gary had one of the best jobs, towards the end of the assembly line. He was charged with using a machine to tip the sealed cans into their cases.  The box of cans then went to the gluing machine. He held the record at one time for processing 750 cases in an hour.

Today the cannery is closed, but someone has purchased the buildings and attempted to turn it into a restaurant and tourist attraction. Signs explain the original purpose of each building. Unfortunately, when we arrived it appeared that this money-making repurposing of the old cannery was not a going concern. Nothing appeared to have been opened in a while. We stared through windows into empty buildings.

Next door the processing of salmon went on in a more modern fashion. The new plant takes the salmon and flash freezes the whole fish. In this form the salmon is much more valuable than in its humble canned form. It's a delicacy that can be brought to the table at the restaurant and served at a premium price.

I have to admit that it's hard for me to contemplate going back to purchasing a can of salmon and forming it into a fried salmon croquette (my mom's favorite recipe). This defunct salmon cannery seems quaint. But still I can appreciate what this place represents: lives bumping together for a few months in the summer, all in the name of industry and a paycheck. Something important happened here and I can still feel it. - V.W.

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