Aphorisms from Hemingway: that is the gist of A.E. Hotchner’s new book about his friend Ernest Hemingway (he has two previous books, Papa Hemingway, and Dear Papa, Dear Hotch). Hotchner says in the foreword to The Good Life According to Hemingway (published 2008) that this book contains all the remaining quotations and untold anecdotes and what he calls “ruminations” of Hemingway. Everything Hotchner couldn’t use in his previous works, he has gathered up and placed into categories for easy perusal.
Complementing the words with photographs, many of which I’d never seen before, this book is fun and light. Unfortunately, it is not really worthy of the writer who was Hemingway. Hemingway was a man who took his words very seriously; he demanded the most of his writing, making each word count and cutting out all excess, any froth. For a writer who rewrote and perfected his stories and novels and reportage, the throw-away lines and silly anecdotes in this volume seem half-assed. And Hemingway was never half-anything about anything.
And yet there are certainly gems here, both in fabulous photographs (there is an especially hysterical one of Hemingway standing naked in shallow water, with only some kind of shell fastened around his manhood) and in words. For aspiring writers, Hemingway’s lines offer good advice: “You invent a novel from what you know, from all the things you’ve ever learned — and then you write it down, as if you’re telling the story to yourself or to your kids” and “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
Two more favorites of mine (can you tell I am an aspiring writer?): “You have to repeat yourself again and again as a man but you should not do so as a writer” and “The writer must have a devotion to his work that a priest of God has for his.”
And as for summing up the point of a novel, Hemingway does a good job: “The themes have always been love, lack of it, death, and its occasional temporary avoidance which we described as life, the immortality or lack of immortality of the soul, money, honor, and politics.”
The worst of the lines in this book come, as to be expected, under the heading “Women”: “What makes a women good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone” and “When women have any guilt, they tend to get rid of it by slapping it onto you.”
His advice for remembering a woman is actually pretty good and generous guidance for remembering anyone who has been important in your life: “no matter how they turned out, you should remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.” We would all carry fewer angry memories around and greater happier ones, if we followed such a maxim.
The very, very best of Hemingway’s words, qualifying as wisdom and as most required reading for all world leaders, come under the heading “War”: “Never think that war, nor matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” And:
“I believe that all people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.”
Amen.
