For almost a century, writers and other creative people have found inspiration and a profound sense of validation in the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet. Many a sensitive soul has felt as if Rilke’s letters, written to a young man who had asked him for advice on whether to become a poet, were addressed directly to him or her. One of those people was the actor Dennis Hopper.
“Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is a great book,” Hopper says in this short film from 2007. “For me the letters are a credo of creativity and a source of inspiration. After reading Rilke it became clear to me that I had no choice in the matter. I had to create.” The ten-minute film, Must I Write?, was directed by Hermann Vaske and photographed by Rain Li. Hopper reads the first of the book’s ten letters, in which Rilke tells the young man to stop seeking approval from others:
You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can help and counsel you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places in your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all–ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
Hopper is reading from the 1934 translation by M.D. Herter Norton. There are a few minor slips, in which Hopper deviates slightly from the text. Most seriously, he inverts the meaning of a passage near the end by adding (at the 7:23 mark) the word “not” to Rilke’s phrase, “Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.” That passage, one of the most memorable in the book, reads:
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no other advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.
Ernest Hemingway took a dim view of Hollywood. He once said that the best way for a writer to deal with the movie business was to arrange a quick meeting at the California state line. “You throw them your book, they throw you the money,” he said.“Then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.”
But Hemingway became a little more involved when it was time to film his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, as this 1971 CBC interview with Ingrid Bergman reveals. Hemingway sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures in part because he wanted his good friend Gary Cooper, who had starred in A Farewell to Arms (which you canfind in our collection of 500 Free Movies Online), to play the lead role of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who is given a dangerous mission to blow up a bridge. Cooper was under contract with Paramount.
Bergman first came to Hemingway’s attention when he saw the young Swedish actress in the 1939 Hollywood remake of Intermezzo. Despite her Nordic appearance, Hemingway thought Bergman would be perfect for the role of the young Spanish woman Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Bergman explains in the interview, Hemingway sent her a copy of the book with the inscription, “You are the Maria in this book.”
The problem was that Bergman was under contract with another studio, Selznick International Pictures. But studios occasionally made arrangements with one another to share actors, and David O. Selznick became convinced that the high-profile Hemingway project would be great for his young protégé’s career. So in typical fashion, Selznick pulled out all the stops. On January 31, 1941 Selznick sent a note to Kay Brown, his talent scout who had discovered Bergman in Sweden, describing his efforts to win Bergman the part. In a passage quoted by Donald Spoto in Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, Selznick writes:
I pinned Hemingway down today and he told me clearly and frankly that he would like to see her play the part. He also said this to the press today. However, he tells me also that at Paramount he was told she was wooden, untalented, and various other things. Needless to say, I answered these various charges.… I am also personally supervising a publicity campaign to try to jockey Paramount into a position where they will almost have to use her. You will be seeing these items from time to time. Incidentally, Ingrid wasn’t in town today, or I could have brought her together with Hemingway. However, we are arranging for her to fly today to see Hemingway in San Francisco before he sails for China. If he likes her, I am asking him to go to town with Paramount on it. If she doesn’t get the part, it won’t be because there hasn’t been a systematic campaign to get it for her!
As part of Selznick’s systematic campaign, he invited Life magazine to photograph Bergman’s lunch with Hemingway and his wife, Martha Gellhorn, at Jack’s Restaurant in San Francisco. The magazine published a series of photos along with a caption quoting Hemingway as saying, “If you don’t act in the picture, Ingrid, I won’t work on it.”
Despite Selznick’s machinations, Paramount gave the part to one of its own contract actresses, the ballet dancer Vera Zorina. Bergman had to content herself with the female lead in a little black-and-white film called Casablanca. But after several weeks of shooting the Hemingway film in the Sierra Nevada, Paramount became unhappy with Zorina’s performance. Just as Bergman was wrapping up Casablanca, her wish came through and she was given the role of Maria. For Whom the Bell Tolls became the blockbuster hit of 1943, and Bergman received an Oscar nomination for her performance. Ironically, though, it was her role in the low-profile Casablanca that sealed Bergman’s fate as a film icon.
I’ll be the first one to admit it, The DaVinci Code isn’t exactly an easy fit on a site that promises to talk about “the best cultural media” out there. But Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery novel has sold north of 80 million copies and now finds itself translated into 44 languages. And the Louvre figures centrally in the book’s plot. That gives it some cultural cred, no? Okay, maybe not! Anyway, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book’s publication, Doubleday has decided to give away copies of the bestseller through March 24, making the book available as a free download on multiple ebook platforms: Amazon, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Google, Sony Reader, and Kobo. According to Galleycat, the download will include “the prologue and first chapter of Inferno, Brown’s upcoming novel.”
We’ve had a lot of fun—and some debate—lately with reading lists from people like Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and even Marilyn Monroe (via her library). And we’ve featured undergraduate syllabi from the teaching days of David Foster Wallace and W.H. Auden. Now for something more-or-less formal than those. This one comes via a 2003 piece by Kevin Moffett in McSweeney’s spin-off The Believer (10 years old this month—I know, right?). The list (first page above and full list below) has a somewhat illustrious heritage. Compiled by postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme for his students at the University of Houston, it then made its way to Barthelme’s student, Southern writer Padgett Powell. The list then came to Moffett when he was a student of Powell’s at the University of Florida.
Consisting of 81 books, mostly novels and short story collections (and the work of Samuel Beckett—“entire”), and mostly twentieth-century modernist fiction, the list came to Powell with Barthelme’s instruction to attack the books, “in no particular order, just read them.”
This Moffett did, and his story of how he sought the books—in the used bookshops, warehouse sales, and libraries of north Florida—lends to his experience the air of a suburban knight’s quest tale, with Moffett as underdog hero. The list spans a range of difficulty, from the academic obscurantism of Roland Barthes to the general accessibility of Updike (Barthelme modestly exempts himself). But the text that turns Moffett from diffident to avid reader, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” also turns his “resolution into a vow.” It’s almost as though his engagement with Barthelme’s list initiates him into a mystical order of language.
The list itself, as you can see from the scans, shows the wear of several pairs of hands—hands holding late-night coffees in college-town cafes and felt-tip pens with which to make tiny checkmarks of accomplishment. We do not know from Moffett’s piece whose hands did the coffee-spilling, checkmarking, and annotating, whether Powell’s, Moffett’s, or some student or private reader unmentioned. Some of the books left unchecked are those with which I have had readerly epiphanies: Borges’ Other Inquisitions, Barthes’ Mythologies, Beckett (“entire”), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. And what strikes me, as with all such lists, are the number of books I haven’t read but have wished to, meant to, promised that I would. Perhaps it’s not too late to turn a resolution to a vow and hit the stacks.
When Marilyn Monroe died in August, 1962, she left behind a lot of broken hearts and some good books. Once married to playwright Arthur Miller, Monroe stocked about 400 books on her shelves, many of which were later catalogued and auctioned off by Christie’s in New York City. A quick scan of the titles in the auction catalogue reveals one thing: The image Monroe projected in her private life hardly squared with the “dumb blonde” character that made her famous. Over at LibraryThing, you can sort through 262 books in Monroe’s collection, which included no shortage of great literary works — everything from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, to Ulysses by James Joyce, to Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Plays Of Anton Chekhov. Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory, a work that inspired Bob Dylan and other troubadours, shared shelf space with The Roots Of American Communism by Theodore Draper, still considered the definitive history of the American Communist Party. But alongside the heady texts of Freud, Proust and Bertrand Russell, there were the more quotidian texts that may … or may not .… reveal something about Monroe’s personal life: Pet Turtles by Julien Bronson, Sexual Impotence In The Male by Leonard Paul Wershub and, of course (like everyone else), Baby & Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock.
“The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory,” said the Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner in his 1958 Paris Review interview. “Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice.”
All the same, Faulkner offered plenty of advice to young writers in 1957 and 1958, when he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. His various lectures and public talks during that time–some 28 hours of discussion–were tape recorded and can now be heard at the university’s Faulkner audio archive. We combed through the transcripts and selected seven interesting quotations from Faulkner on the craft of writing fiction. In most cases they were points Faulkner returned to again and again. Faulkner had a way of stammering when he composed his words out loud, so we have edited out the repetitions and false starts. We have provided links to each of the Virginia audio recordings, which are accompanied by word-for-word transcripts of each conversation.
1: Take what you need from other writers.
Faulkner had no qualms about borrowing from other writers when he saw a device or technique that was useful. In a February 25, 1957 writing class he says:
I think the writer, as I’ve said before, is completely amoral. He takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly because he himself hopes that what he does will be good enough so that after him people will take from him, and they are welcome to take from him, as he feels that he would be welcome by the best of his predecessors to take what they had done.
2: Don’t worry about style.
A genuine writer–one “driven by demons,” to use Faulkner’s phrase–is too busy writing to worry about style, he said. In an April 24, 1958 undergraduate writing class, Faulkner says:
I think the story compels its own style to a great extent, that the writer don’t need to bother too much about style. If he’s bothering about style, then he’s going to write precious emptiness–not necessarily nonsense…it’ll be quite beautiful and quite pleasing to the ear, but there won’t be much content in it.
3: Write from experience–but keep a very broad definition of “experience.”
Faulkner agreed with the old adage about writing from your own experience, but only because he thought it was impossible to do otherwise. He had a remarkably inclusive concept of “experience.” In a February 21, 1958 graduate class in American fiction, Faulkner says:
To me, experience is anything you have perceived. It can come from books, a book that–a story that–is true enough and alive enough to move you. That, in my opinion, is one of your experiences. You need not do the actions that the people in that book do, but if they strike you as being true, that they are things that people would do, that you can understand the feeling behind them that made them do that, then that’s an experience to me. And so, in my definition of experience, it’s impossible to write anything that is not an experience, because everything you have read, have heard, have sensed, have imagined is part of experience.
4: Know your characters well and the story will write itself.
When you have a clear conception of a character, said Faulkner, events in a story should flow naturally according to the character’s inner necessity. “With me,” he said, “the character does the work.” In the same February 21, 1958 American fiction class as above, a student asked Faulkner whether it was more difficult to get a character in his mind, or to get the character down on paper once he had him in his mind. Faulkner replies:
I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical.
5: Use dialect sparingly.
In a pair of local radio programs included in the University of Virginia audio archive, Faulkner has some interesting things to say about the nuances of the various dialects spoken by the various ethnic and social groups in Mississippi. But in the May 6, 1958 broadcast of “What’s the Good Word?” Faulkner cautions that it’s important for a writer not to get carried away:
I think it best to use as little dialect as possible because it confuses people who are not familiar with it. That nobody should let the character speak completely in his own vernacular. It’s best indicated by a few simple, sparse but recognizable touches.
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
7: Don’t make excuses.
In the same February 25, 1957 writing class, Faulkner has some blunt words for the frustrated writer who blames his circumstances:
I have no patience, I don’t hold with the mute inglorious Miltons. I think if he’s demon-driven with something to be said, then he’s going to write it. He can blame the fact that he’s not turning out work on lots of things. I’ve heard people say, “Well, if I were not married and had children, I would be a writer.” I’ve heard people say, “If I could just stop doing this, I would be a writer.” I don’t believe that. I think if you’re going to write you’re going to write, and nothing will stop you.
Here’s a flawed but fascinating little film about the life of Vladimir Nabokov, examined through the prism of his most famous book.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita?first aired on British television in 2009. The host is Stephen Smith, a culture correspondent for BBC Newsnight. We don’t know the rest of Smith’s resume, but in watching the documentary we get the feeling he may have picked up a little of his journalistic sensibility from the British tabloids.
The problem referred to in the title is the sense–at least among Smith’s friends–that there is something “pervy” about Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, and that this raises certain questions about the author’s own sexual penchants. “Was it a morality play,” Smith asks at the outset, “or the fantasy of a dirty old man?”
It’s a contemptible point of departure. But How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita? manages to be worthwhile in spite of itself. It’s filled with interesting old footage of Nabokov talking about himself and his work, as well as contemporary footage of the writer’s old haunts in Russia, America and Switzerland. The film is a kind of travelogue. Watching it is like taking a one-hour tour through a fascinating landscape with an amiable but slightly annoying guide.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is often portrayed as a natural-born writer. “His talent,” says Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, “was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.” But Fitzgerald saw himself in a different light. “What little I’ve accomplished,” he said, “has been by the most laborious and uphill work.”
Last week we brought you Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction. Today we’re back with a similar list of advice from Hemingway’s friend and rival Fitzgerald. We’ve selected seven quotations from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, which was edited by Larry W. Phillips and published in 1985 as a companion to the Hemingway book. As in the previous post, we’ve organized the advice under our own headings and added some brief commentary.
1: Start by taking notes.
Fitzgerald made a habit of recording his stray thoughts and observations in notebooks. He organized the entries into categories like “Feelings and emotions,” “Conversations and things overheard” and “Descriptions of girls.” When Fitzgerald was giving writing advice to his mistress Sheilah Graham in the late 1930s, he advised her to do the same. In her 1940 memoir, Beloved Infidel, Graham quotes Fitzgerald as saying:
You must begin by making notes. You may have to make notes for years.… When you think of something, when you recall something, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may never recapture it quite as vividly the second time.
2: Make a detailed outline of your story.
When Fitzgerald was working on a novel, he would surround himself with charts outlining the various movements and histories of his characters. In a 1936 letter to novelist John O’Hara, he advises the younger novelist to start with a big outline:
Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.
3: Don’t describe your work-in-progress to anyone.
Fitzgerald’s policy was never to talk with other people about the book he was working on. In a 1940 letter to his daughter Scottie, he says:
I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
4: Create people, not types.
Fitzgerald was known for creating emblematic characters, but he said it was accidental. “I had no idea of originating an American flapper when I first began to write,” he said in a 1923 interview for Metropolitan magazine. “I simply took girls who I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines.” In the opening sentence of his 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy,” Fitzgerald explains the principle:
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created–nothing.
5: Use familiar words.
In a 1929 letter to his college friend and fellow writer John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald says:
6: Use verbs, not adjectives, to keep your sentences moving.
In a 1938 letter to his daughter, Fitzgerald writes:
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement–the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes.
7: Be ruthless.
A writer has to make some hard choices. Fitzgerald warns about the danger of becoming too attached to something you’ve written. Keep an objective eye on the whole piece, he says, and if something isn’t working get rid of it. In a 1933 Saturday Evening Post article titled “One Hundred False Starts,” he writes:
I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England conscience–developed in Minnesota–and my greatest problem:
“Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back?”
Shall I say:
“I know I had something to prove, and it may develop farther along in the story?”
Or:
“This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over.”
The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional. There are often occasions when such a decision is doubly difficult. In the last stages of a novel, for instance, where there is no question of junking the whole, but when an entire favorite character has to be hauled out by the heels, screeching, and dragging half a dozen good scenes with him.
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