Category: Lit & Crit

You can bet on thatYou can bet on that

“No horse named Morbid ever won a race.” — Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees

Are there not many fascists in your country?Are there not many fascists in your country?

The three were at the table now and the others sat close by except Pablo, who sat by himself in front of a bowl of the wine.  It was the same stew as the night before and Robert Jordan ate it hungrily.

“In your country there are mountains?  With that name [Montana] surely there are mountains,” Primitivo asked politely to make conversation.  He was embarrassed at the drunkenness of Pablo.

“Many mountains and very high.”

“And are there good pastures?”

“Excellent; high pasture in the summer in forests controlled by the government.  Then in the fall the cattle are brought down to the lower ranges.”

“Is the land there owned by the peasants?”

“Most land is owned by those who farm it.  Originally the land was owned by the state and by living on it and declaring the intention of improving it, a man could obtain title to a hundred and fifty hectares.”

“Tell me how this is done,” Agustín asked.  “That is an agrarian reform which means something.”

Robert Jordan explained the process of homesteading.  He had never thought of it before as an agrarian reform.

“That is magnificent,” Primitivo said.  “Then you have a communism in your country?”

“No.  That is done under the Republic.”

“For me,” Agustín said, “everything can be done under the Republic.  I see no need for other form of government.”

“Do you have no big proprietors?” Andrés asked.

“Many.”

“Then there must be abuses.”

“Certainly.  There are many abuses.”

“But you will do away with them?”

“We try to more and more.  But there are many abuses still.”

“But there are not great estates that must be broken up?”

“Yes.  But there are those who believe that taxes will break them up.”

“How?”

Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked.  “But the big estates remain.  Also there are taxes on the land,” he said.

“But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes.  Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary.  They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,” Primitivo said.

“It is possible.”

“Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.”

“Yes, we will have to fight.”

“But are there not many fascists in your country?”

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

“But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?”

“No,” Robert Jordan said.  “We cannot destroy them.  But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”

— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Helps in other endeavors, tooHelps in other endeavors, too

“In combat there must be discipline.  For many things are not as they appear.” — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Otherwise, it couldn’t care lessOtherwise, it couldn’t care less

“No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes.  The cat is the best anarchist.” — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Front and centerFront and center

“Every damned thing is your own fault if you’re any good.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

The exquisite odor of solitudeThe exquisite odor of solitude

“If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

The plight of bookish folkThe plight of bookish folk

“We have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been.  A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable.  People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them.  Also it is very hard to do.  So what?” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

The difficult yearsThe difficult years

“At a certain age the men writers change into Old Mother Hubbard.  The women writers become Joan of Arc without the fighting.  They become leaders.  It doesn’t matter who they lead.  If they do not have followers they invent them.  It is useless for those selected as followers to protest.  They are accused of disloyalty.  Oh, hell.  There are too many things that happen to them.  That is one thing.  The others try to save their souls with what they write.  That is an easy way out.  Others are ruined by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for them.  Or they do nor know what they want.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Filling the troughFilling the trough

“It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually.  Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught.  They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop.  It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried.  Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well.  Because they are ambitious.  Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.  Or else they read the critics.  If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Fearful scribes angling for academic postsFearful scribes angling for academic posts

“Writers should work alone.  They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then.  Otherwise they become like writers in New York.  All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.  Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion.  But once they are in the bottle they stay there.  They are lonesome outside of the bottle.  They do not want to be lonesome.  They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Getting out of your own wayGetting out of your own way

“The way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper and ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way.” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

They can’tThey can’t

“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” — Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

Blow the factory whistle, storm the palace gatesBlow the factory whistle, storm the palace gates

“The great thing is to last and to get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.  Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.  Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly.  The thing to do is work and learn to make it.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Even worse than a head for figuresEven worse than a head for figures

“Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

The great turkey shootThe great turkey shoot

“Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race.  Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing.  One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, where it is the disproportionately increased importance of the fraction of a moment that it takes for the shot that furnishes the emotion, is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering.  Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment.  But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it.  This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.  These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin, and a pagan virtue.”  – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Populating the workPopulating the work

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters.  A character is a caricature.  If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book may remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.  If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel.  If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off.  No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism.  Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.  For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.  People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.  If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.  A good writer should know as near everything as possible.  Naturally he will not.  A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge.  But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge.  There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.  They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.  Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from.  If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.  The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.  A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.  A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay.  And this too remember: a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer.  A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (emphases in original)

A double shot of Mr. Molotov’s cocktailA double shot of Mr. Molotov’s cocktail

“After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action.  If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Licensed to thrashLicensed to thrash

“Where you see gratuitous cruelty most often is in police brutality; in the police of all countries I have ever been in, including, especially, my own.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Any way you look at itAny way you look at it

“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.  Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.  There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife then outlived her.  If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Keeping it realKeeping it real

“If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes.  If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense.  True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly.  Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality.” – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

What security, indeedWhat security, indeed

“I ask you what confidence you would have in a Court thus constituted—a Court composed of partisan Judges, appointed on political grounds, selected with a view to the decision of questions in a particular way, and pledged in regard to a decision before the argument, and without reference to the peculiar state of the facts. Would such a Court command the respect of the country? If the Republican party cannot trust Democratic Judges, how can they expect us to trust Republican Judges, when they have been selected in advance for the purpose of packing a decision in the event of a case arising? My fellow-citizens, whenever partisan politics shall be carried on to the bench; whenever the Judges shall be arraigned upon the stump, and their judicial conduct reviewed in town meetings and caucuses; whenever the independence and integrity of the judiciary shall be tampered with to the extent of rendering them partial, blind and suppliant tools, what security will you have for your rights and your liberties?” — Senator Stephen A. Douglas, 1858

Surf’s up!Surf’s up!

“A feeling of doom can be productive, if you know how to surf it.” – Victor Lodato, “P.E.”

Gotta start someplaceGotta start someplace

“It is fair that each man shall pay taxes in exact proportion to the value of his property; but if we should wait before collecting a tax to adjust the taxes upon each man in exact proportion with every other man, we should never collect any tax at all.” – Abraham Lincoln, “Speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment”

Not looking to need thisNot looking to need this

“Nothing justifies the suspending of the civil by the military authority, but military necessity, and of the existence of that necessity the military commander, and not a popular vote, is to decide.  And whatever is not within such necessity should be left undisturbed.” – Abraham Lincoln, “To Benjamin F. Butler, August 9, 1864″

Free variationsFree variations

“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” – Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland, 1864″ (emphasis in original)

After you, my dear AlphonseAfter you, my dear Alphonse

“The advice of a father to his son, ‘Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee,’ is good, and yet not the best.  Quarrel not at all.  No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.  Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and the loss of self-control.  Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own.  Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right.  Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.” – Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to James M. Cutts, Jr.”

Not in the power of the parties, eitherNot in the power of the parties, either

“It is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem it necessary for the public safety, from time to time, to adopt.” – Abraham Lincoln, “To the Workingmen of Manchester, England”

Justly shore ’em upJustly shore ’em up

“That Congress has the power to regulate the currency of the country can hardly admit of doubt; and that a judicious measure to prevent the deterioration of this currency, by a reasonable taxation of bank circulation or otherwise if needed, seems equally clear.  Independently of this general consideration, it would be unjust to the people at large to exempt banks, enjoying the special privilege of circulation, from their just proportion of the public burden.” – Abraham Lincoln, “To the Senate and House of Representatives”

The choice is clearThe choice is clear

“It is not the qualified voters, but the qualified voters who choose to vote, that constitute the political power of the state.” – Abraham Lincoln, “Opinion on Admission of West Virginia into the Union” (emphasis in original)

And Purgatory is a ski resortAnd Purgatory is a ski resort

“Hell is a place on earth.  Heaven is a place in your head.”  David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives