"You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it." (hemingway)
"I really believe the addict-the sex or the drug addict-is closer to the deepest truth than the mere moralist. I think the addict is looking for the very best thing in some of the very worst places. He's looking for heaven; he's looking for a transcendence of self-consciousness and moral responsibility; he's looking for the state of mind that the saints in heaven have and the mystics have for brief moments on earth." (kreeft)
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” (hemingway)
6 comments:
me too me too. great quotes
In her book "Reading like a Writer" Francine Prose admits that she never really understood what Hemingway meant by a "true" sentence, in the context of fiction... (It's a good point, since he never really defined it.) She suggests that maybe he means a "beautiful" sentence (p.62). What do you think it means?
I don't know who anonymous is, nor do I know who Francine Prose is, but I do not believe that Hemingway ever equated true with beautiful. Quite the opposite, in fact, his writing came after the Romantics, for whom beauty was a priority. I think Hemingway, after WWI, thought that an emphasis on beauty was lying, and he rather wrote everything to be as real as possible....as if the reader was in the midst of the scene.
In a letter to his father in 1925, he wrote "You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it."
I agree with you, that it has nothing to do with beauty, but more to do with being real: "...there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say." He implies that beauty is farthest from his mind when he says "If I started to write elaborately... I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simplest declarative sentence I had written."
I forgot to reference those quotes: from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast".
Yeah, I like a moveable feast (I wrote my thesis on hemingway). I think he thought authenticity was the most valuable, and beauty was allowed only so far as it was authentic.
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