Hemingway Speaks His Mind

"The country a novelist knows is the country of his heart." On some of the good things in life: "Wine, bread, oil, salt, bed, early mornings, nights, days, the sea, men, women, love, honor, beloved motorcars, bicycles, hills and valleys, the appearance and disappearance of trains on straight and curved tracks, cock grouse drumming on a basswood log, the smell of sweet grass and fresh smoked leather, and Sicily."

On Love: "It is an old word, and each man takes it new and wears it out himself."

On Cuban Women: "Move down the street and look into the black eyes of these Cuban girls. You'll see hot sunlight in them."

On what he has learned from painting: "I learned how to describe a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum in Paris a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Cézanne was around he would like the way I make them and be happy I learned it from him. I learn as much from fine painters about how to write as from fine writers." On Goya: "He believed in blacks and in grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from plains, in movement, in his own cojones, in what he had seen, felt, touched, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain with, observed, loved, hated, feared, admired and destroyed. Naturally no artist has ever been able to paint all that but he tried."

On the sky: "The best sky is in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in the fall, and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba."

On the sea: "It's the last free place there is."

On Italy: "It's like having died and gone to heaven – a place you figured never to see."

On New York: "It's a phony town you come to for a short time. You stay too long and it's murder."

On Spain: "The people have that terrific spirit of alegría. I don't know just what the word is in English, but it means a deep-going happiness that nothing can kill." (continued on page 95)

Hemingway (continued from page 55) On bullfighting: "Formal bullfighting is an art, a tragedy and a business. To what extent it is an art depends on the bulls and on the men who are hired to fight them. I know of no modern sculpture, except Brancusi's, that is in any way equal to the sculpture of great bullfighting. However, as with any book on mountain climbing, skiing, sexual intercourse, wing shooting, or any other thing which it is impossible to make come wholly true on paper, it being always an individual experience, there comes a time when you must have climbed, skied, had sexual intercourse, shot grouse, or been to a bullfight so that you will know what we are talking about."

On showing displeasure at a poor performance in the bullring: "I believe firmly in the throwing of cushions of all weights, pieces of bread, oranges, vegetables, small dead animals of all sorts, including fish and, if necessary, bottles – provided they are not thrown directly at the offending bullfighter's head, and the occasional setting fire to a bullring if a properly decorous protest has had no effect."

On his published books: "A finished book is like a dead lion. Maybe someone comes along and gives you a prize for finishing off a big lion, and that good, but what you're interested in is the next lion."

On Hollywood's version of the snows of kilimanjaro: "I unfortunately was not able to sit through it, so I cannot tell how it came out."

On having done a good book: "If it is good, is about something you know, and is truly written, you can let the critics yip. Then the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are all out in the snow, and you are in your own cabin that you have built and paid for with your work."

On future work: "I have written and rewritten some 200,000 words of what eventually will be a very long book about the sea. It is divided into four volumes, any one of which could be published separately. Also, I have some 30,000 words done on poems. Then I have about ten short stories ready for another collection which Scribner's will bring out one of these days."

On daily work habits: "You begin in the cool of the morning and you write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next, and you stop there and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty, but filling, as when you have made love to someone you deeply care for."

On a day when the juice was up: "I wrote three short stories in one day in Madrid when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote The Killers. Then, after lunch, I got in bed to keep warm and wrote Today Is Friday. I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy. So I got dressed and walked to Forno's, the old bullfighter's café, and drank coffee, then came back and wrote Ten Indians. This made me very sad and I drank some brandy and went to sleep."

On observing: "You search for small things that make emotions; the way an outfielder tosses his glove without looking back to where it falls, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter's flatsoled gym shoes, the gray color of a con's skin when he has just come out of stir."

On what may be left out of a book: "The test of any book is how much good stuff you can throw away. I try to write on the principle of the iceberg: seven-eights of it is underwater. The Old Man and the Sea could have been a thousand pages long. But I had a good man and a good boy, and of course the ocean is worth writing about just as the man is. So I was lucky. I've seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I could leave that out. I've seen a school of more than fifty sperm whales and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length, then lost him. So I could leave that out. All the stories I heard from the fishing village I left out. But the knowledge was there – and it was what made up the underwater part of my iceberg."

On style: "I wish to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone."

On Rewriting: "Sometimes I will correct a short story forty or fifty times. I rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before I was satisfied."

On profanity: "My war stories have a good deal of profanity in them. That's because in war you talk profane, although during peace I always try to talk gently."

On war: "I hate war profoundly. You make the best of them. The first world war made little sense to me. The last one was different. Much of it made sense. Also, I had such good companionship, and it was the first time I ever had a chance to fight in my own language."

On solidering: "A good soldier does not worry. To live properly in a war the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. Danger only exists at the moment of danger. It is neither bad before nor after."

On Cowardice: "Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imaginations."

On being hit by a mortar shell in the first world war: "I felt my soul coming right out of my body, like you pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket. It flew around, then came back and went in again and I wasn's dead any more."

On reading your own obituaries: "It quickly becomes a vice and is, ideally, to be avoided."

On seeking death: "If you have spent your life avoiding death as cagily as possible, but also taking no backchat from her and studying her as you would study a beautiful harlot who could put you soundly to sleep forever with no problems, you could be said to have studied her, but you have never sought her."

On the deceased: "It is too bad there's no way of exchanging some of the dead for some of the living. I've known some very wonderful people who even though they were going directly to the grave managed to put up a very fine performance en route."

On the Nobel Prize: "I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. I would have been happy if the prize had gone to Isak Dinesen, or Bernard Berenson, and I would have been most happy to know that the prize had been awarded to Carl Sandburg."

On what makes a great book: "After you have finished reading it you feel that all of it happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people in it and the places and how the weather was."

On classics: "A new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic. All classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence."

On Mark Twain: "All modern American literature comes from one book called Huckleberry Finn."

On a Biography of Hemingway: "How would you like it if someone said that everything you've done in your life was done because of some trauma. I don't want to go down as the Legs Diamond of Letters."

On Critics: "Sometimes the worst of them give off an odor that you only smell in the armpits of traitors after they have been hanged."

On Dreams: "In my nocturnal wanderings I am always between twenty-five and thirty years old and am irresistible to women, dogs and, on one occasion, to a very beautiful lioness who subsequently became my fiancée."

On his good friend, Marlene Dietrich: "The Kraut's the best that ever came into the ring. If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and that timeless loveliness of face."

On gate-crashers: "It's chic to crash our gate. We get a lot of crazies and a lot of s.o.b.s.... The company of jerks is neither stimulating nor rewarding."

On candid Photographers: "They sit around me sometimes for a whole week waiting for me to let my mouth drop open. So I just don't open my mouth for a whole week."

On one of his many cats: "I have a cat named Boise who wants to be a human being. So Boise eats everything that human beings eat. He even chews Vitamin B Complex capsules, which are as bitter as aloes. He thinks I am holding out on him when I let him go to sleep without Seconal."

On drinking: "Once at the Floridita I drank steadily from ten-thirty in the morning till seven that night. It's better when you drink standing up because you can hold more that way. Of course this depends on whether or not you can stand up. Others may need to assist you."

On Boxing: "Never lead against your opponent unless you can out-hit him. Crowd a boxer, take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing, block a hook. Counter a jab with all you own – and never let them hit you solid."

On Honor: "There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ."

On Killing: "Killing cleanly and in a way that gives you esthetic pride and pleasure has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. At seventeen you would rather kill a grizzly bear than any other thing. At forty-five, having killed many, you would not kill a bear under any circumstances because you have learned over the years that he is your brother. But you will continue to kill your pheasants high and clean as long as you have eyes to do so."

On big game hunting: "You must be calm inside, as if you were in church, when a lion or a rhino will coming at you. A charging rhino will come in at a trot that turns into a gallop. I let him come much further than is good for either of us in order to be truly sure of my shot. Then I squeeze the trigger."

On cooking lion steak: "First you must obtain your lion. Then you skin him and remove the two strips of tenderloin from each side of the backbone. These should hang overnight in a tree out of the reach of hyenas, and should be wrapped in cheesecloth to protect them from flies. The following day you slice the tenderloins, cutting them as thick or as thin as you like. Then grill the steaks, basting them with lard made from eland fat."

On his African friends: "I'm an honorary Negro."

On deep-sea fishing: "You fish with your legs. If your legs were cut off you could still fish and if both arms were cut off you could still fish, but you would have to rig differently. As long as charter boats are extremely expensive and both guides and their anglers want results above everything else, big-game fishing will be closer to total war against the fish than to sport. Of course, it could never be considered an equal contest unless, the angler had a hook in his mouth as well as the fish."

On boating tuna: "You've got to boat them fast to keep the sharks off. If you let them get tired or sluggish that's when the bastards move in."

On visiting the zoo: "I love to go to zoos, but not on sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around."

On professional loyalty: "Writers should stick together, like wolves or gypsies."

On writers, accidents and gunshot wounds: "You should not, ideally, break a writer's head open or give him seven concussions in two years or break six ribs on him when he is forty-seven or push a rearview mirror through the front of his skull or, really, shoot at him too much. On the other hand, leave the sons of bitches alone and they are liable to start crawling back into the womb."

On advising a would-be writer: "He should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of his hanging to commence with."

On the things that can harm a writer: "Politics, women, drink, money and ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money and ambition."

On whether the movie industry has ruined serious writers: "Most whores usually find their vocation."

On whether being eccentric can help a writer: "What difference does it make if a guy lives in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by three hundred feeble-minded goats? The question is: can the bastard write?"

On being a journalist: "It is valuable to the point that it forcibly begins to destroy your memory. A writer must leave it before that point. But he will always have scars from it."

On a writer's education: "Once I thought of establishing a scholarship and sending myself to Harvard, because my Aunt Arabelle has always felt very bad that I am the only Hemingway boy that never went to college. I only went to high school and a couple of military cram courses, and never took French. I began to learn French by reading the Associated Press story in a French paper after reading the American AP story, and from that it was only a jump to Dr. de Maupassant, who wrote about things I had seen or could understand. Then Dumas, Daudet and Stendhal. When I read Mr. Stendhal I knew that was the way I wanted to be able to write."

On the "Spillane School" of Literature: "I don't break a man's arm just to hear the bones crack or shoot a woman in the belly when there are lots of better things to do with her."

On symbols: "No good book has ever been published that had in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in like raisins in bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better."

On "Contemporary Themes": "As far as 'contemporary themes' are concerned, that is a lot of crap. The themes have never changed: love, lack of it, death and its occasional temporary avoidance which we describe as life, the immortality or lack of immortality of the soul, money, honor and politics."

On his politics: "If anyone thinks I am worried about anyone reading political implications in my stories, he is wrong."

On going to Russia: "The State Department asked me to go over there, but what the hell would I do? I don't know the language and you can't find out a damn tiling if you don't know the language. I'm OK any place they speak French, Italian, Spanish or Swahili."

On what he wants to do upon growing old: "I'd like to see all the new fighters, horses, ballets, bike riders, dames, bullfighters, painters, airplanes, sons of bitches, big international whores, restaurants, wine cellars and newsreels – and never have to write a line about any of them. And I would like to be able to make love good until I am eighty-five."

The majority of the quotations in Hemingway speaks His mind are from published interviews in magazines and newspapers, including: Conquest, Wisdom, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic, Newsweek, Bluebook, The Nation, Time, Holiday, Look, Life. Quotations from Hemingway's writings are: On Showing Displeasure at Bullring, On Goya, from Death in the Afternoon, © Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949; On the Sky, On what Can Harm a Writer, On Classics, from Green Hills of Africa, © Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935; On Soldiering, On Cowardice, from Hemingway's introduction to Men at War, © Crown Publishers, Inc., 1955; On Good Things in Life, from Hemingway's introduction to In Sicily by Elio Vittorini, © New Directions, 1949; On Killing, from Hemingway's introduction to Man and Beast in Africa by François Sommer, © H. Jenkins, 1953. Special research by William F. Nolan.