Here’s a rare recording from 1929 of the British author A.A. Milne reading a chapter of his beloved children’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne was a prolific writer of plays, novels and essays, but he was most widely known–much to his chagrin–as the creator of a simple and good-natured little bear.
Pooh was inspired by his son Christopher Robin’s favorite teddy bear. In Milne’s imagination, the stuffed bear comes alive and enters into little adventures (or one might say misadventures) with Christopher Robin and his other stuffed animals. The name “Winnie” was borrowed from a famous resident of the London Zoo: a black bear from Canada named for the city of Winnipeg. The young Christopher Robin liked visiting Winnie at the zoo. He also liked a graceful swan he saw swimming in a pond at Kensington Gardens, who he named “Pooh.” His father combined the two names to create one of the most popular characters in children’s literature.
Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared in stories and poems in popular magazines. In 1926 Milne collected them in a book, Winnie-the-Pooh, with illustrations by E.H. Shepard. Each chapter in the book is a self-contained episode or story. In the recording below, Milne reads Chapter Three (click here to open the text in new a window) “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle.”
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There’s a certain irony to Polish animator Piotr Dumala’s innovative style, a stop-motion technique in which he scratches an image into painted plaster, then paints it over again immediately and scratches the next. Called “destructive animation,” Dumala devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
Trained as a sculptor as well as an animator, Dumala’s award-winning films present strikingly expressionistic textures emerging from pitch black and receding again. The 1991 film Kafka (top) begins with the reclusive writer shrouded in darkness and isolation. He coughs once, and we are transported to Prague, 1883. Each frame of Kafka resembles a woodcut, and the sound design is as spare as the extremely high-contrast animation.
In Sciany (Walls), an earlier short film from 1988, Dumala uses light and shadow, and even more minimal music and sound effects to create a haunting, surrealistic piece that conjures the atmosphere of an interrogation room or solitary confinement cell. Like the strange, empty cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, Dumala’s art unsettles, with its skewed perspectives, shadowy, mysterious figures, and unexpected shifts in tone and scale.
Crime and Punishment, Dumala’s idiosyncratic half-hour Dostoevsky adaptation (which we’ve featured previously), uses “destructive animation” to similar effect as in Kafka and Walls, creating shadowy, minimalist set pieces that emerge slowly from darkness and return to it. But this time, Dumala incorporates color—greens, reds, and browns—and the images are much more detailed, almost painterly.
Stripping the Russian masterwork down to just two scenes—the murder and Raskolnikov’s meeting of Sonia—Dumala interprets the novel’s themes with the light-and-shadow intensity with which he renders all of his artistic visions, saying, “This is about love and how obsession can destroy love. In our life we are under two opposite influences to be good or bad and to love or hate.” In Dumala’s almost claustrophic worlds, the lines between light and darkness are stark, even if they’re also ever shifting and ephemeral.
In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday MinneapolisTribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson. Most of the texts you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. If the texts don’t appear in our eBook collection itself, you’ll find a link to the text directly below.
Hemingway reached over to his shelf and picked up a collection of stories by Stephen Crane and gave it to Samuelson. He also handed him a copy of his own novel, A Farewell to Arms. “I wish you’d send it back when you get through with it,” Hemingway said of his own book. “It’s the only one I have of that edition.” Samuelson gratefully accepted the books and took them back to the jail that evening to read. “I did not feel like staying there another night,” he writes, “and the next afternoon I finished reading A Farewell to Arms, intending to catch the first freight out to Miami. At one o’clock, I brought the books back to Hemingway’s house.” When he got there he was astonished by what Hemingway said.
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
When we think of Kurt Vonnegut, we tend to think of Slaughterhouse-Five. Maybe we also think of the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which gets assigned in class by slightly alternative-minded English teachers. Now that I think about it, I realize that those two works of Vonnegut’s have both become movies: George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five hit theaters in 1972, and Bruce Pittman’s Harrison Bergeron debuted on Showtime in 1995. But the belovedly cynical writer produced fourteen novels, eight story collections, and five books of essays, and even if we just explore further into those adapted for the screen, we find a perhaps under-discussed piece of Vonnegutia: Breakfast of Champions, his 1973 follow-up to Slaughterhouse-Five.
The novel examines Dwayne Hoover, a deeply troubled Pontiac salesman obsessed with the writings of pulp sci-fi author Kilgore Trout. You may remember Trout from his role in Vonnegut’s previous book, whose “unstuck-in-time” protagonist Billy Pilgrim he invites to his wedding anniversary. Breakfast of Champions sets Trout on a collision course with Hoover in the fictional American town of Midland City, bringing in a great variety of characters, themes, and elements from Vonnegut’s other work in so doing. In the clip above, you can hear the author’s very first public reading of the book, recorded on May 4, 1970 at New York’s 92nd Street Y. After it became available to readers three years later, Breakfast of Champions would become a favorite among the Vonnegut faithful. The 1999 Bruce Willis-starring film adaptation… less so.
Every great novel—or at least every finished novel—needs a plan. I remember well a James Joyce course I took in college, taught by a belligerent Irishman who began the first class meeting by slamming his decades-old copy of Ulysses on the table, sending clouds of dust and Post-It notes around his ears and shouting, “This is my Bible!” He proceeded over the next few months to unravel the dark mysteries of Joyce’s design, with chart after chart of floral symbology, musical motifs, Dante allusions, mythic and Catholic rewritings, and Dublin city maps. Needless to say I was intimidated.
But not every author requires the god-like foresight of Joyce. Witness, for instance, J.K. Rowling’s spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (top), hand-drawn on lined notebook paper. Fine, Rowling’s no Joyce, but no one can say her method didn’t yield impressive results. For a more canonically literary example, see William Faulkner’s plan for A Fable (above). Faulkner famously outlined his fiction on the walls of his Rowan Oaks study, in-between bottles of bourbon.
Almost every year since 1901, the Swedish Academy has apportioned one fifth of the interest from the fortune bequeathed by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel to honor, as Nobel said in his will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Many of the greatest writers of the past 112 years have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but there have been some glaring omissions right from the start. When Leo Tolstoy was passed over in 1901 (the prize went to the French poet Sully Prudhomme) he was so offended he refused later nominations. The list of great writers who were alive after 1901 but never received the prize is jaw-dropping. In addition to Tolstoy, it includes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.
But the Nobel committee has honored many worthy writers, and today we’ve gathered together seven speeches by seven laureates. Our choice was restricted by the limitations of what is available online in English. We have focused on the short speeches traditionally given on December 10 of every year at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. With the exception of short excerpts from Bertrand Russell’s lecture, we have passed over the longer Nobel lectures (which typically run about 40 minutes) presented to the Swedish Academy on a different day than the banquet.
We begin above with one of the most often-quoted Nobel speeches: William Faulkner’s eloquent acceptance of the 1949 prize. There was actually no prize in literature given in 1949, but the committee decided to award that year’s medal 12 months later to Faulkner, citing his “powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” Faulkner gave his speech on December 10, 1950, in the same ceremony with Bertrand Russell. Unfortunately the audio cuts off just before the finish. To follow along and read the missing ending, click here to open the full text in a new window. Faulkner stumbles a few times during his delivery. You can listen to his smoother 1954 reading of a polished version of the speech here.
Bertrand Russell, 1950:
The British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of several prize-winners in literature who were primarily known for their work in other fields. (The short list includes statesman Winston Churchill and philosopher Henri Bergson.) In addition to his ground-breaking contributions to mathematics and analytic philosophy, Russell wrote many books for the general reader. In 1950 the Nobel committee cited his “varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” Above are two short audio clips from Russell’s December 11, 1950 Nobel lecture, “What Desires are Politically Important?” You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
Ernest Hemingway, 1954:
The American writer Ernest Hemingway was awarded the 1954 prize “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” Hemingway was not feeling well enough in December of 1954 to travel to Stockholm, so he asked John C. Cabot, United States Ambassador to Sweden, to deliver the speech for him. Fortunately we do have this recording from sometime that month of Hemingway reading his speech at a radio station in Havana, Cuba. You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
John Steinbeck, 1962:
The American writer John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, was awarded the Nobel in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” To read along as you watch Steinbeck give his speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
V.S. Naipaul, 2001:
Jumping ahead from 1962 all the way to 2001, we have video of the speech given by the Trinidadian-British writer V.S. Naipaul, author of such books as In a Free State and A Bend in the River. Naipaul was cited by the Nobel committee “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” You can click here to open a text of Naipaul’s banquet speech in a new window.
Orhan Pamuk, 2006:
The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of such books as The Museum of Innocence and Snow, received the prize in 2006. The Nobel committee praised the Istanbul-based writer, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” To read Pamuk’s banquet speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010:
The prolific Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa, author of such novels as Conversation in the Cathedral and Death in the Andes, was cited by the Nobel committee in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” To read along with Vargas Llosa as he speaks, click here to open the text in a new window.
Given the prominence of “Gatsby” brand men’s hair products over there, I can’t claim that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed literary icon of the American Dream goes totally unrecognized in Japan. But according to Haruki Murakami, the country’s best-known living novelist, “Japanese readers have never truly appreciated The Great Gatsby.” This he ascribes, in an essay (read it online here) from the new collection In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, to the datedness, despite the excellence, of most Japanese-language editions of the book. “Although numerous literary works might properly be called ‘ageless,’ ” he explains, “no translation belongs in that category. Translation, after all, is a matter of linguistic technique, which naturally ages as the particulars of a language change. Thus, while there are undying works, on principle there can be no undying translations.”
Hence his own translation of Gatsby, a project he originally set for his sixtieth birthday, by which time he hoped his “skill would have improved to the point where [he] could do the job properly.” Despite starting the translation years ahead of schedule, he found himself just wise enough to understand the task’s complexity. “At strategic moments,” he remembers, “I brought my imaginative powers as a novelist into play. One by one, I dug up the slippery parts of Fitzgerald’s novel, those scattered places that had proved elusive, and asked myself, If I were the author, how would I have written this? Painstakingly, I examined Gatsby’s solid trunk and branches and dissected its beautiful leaves.” Asked why he chose to translate Gatsby, he gave this reply:
When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby.
So everyone knows Hemingway was a bruiser. Some of the best stories of his macho posturing involve fellow writers. There was, of course, that time he and Wallace Stevens slugged it out in Key West. I’ve been told Stevens asked for it, drunkenly telling Hemingway’s sister Ursula that her brother wrote like a little boy. I don’t know whose version of the story this comes from, but by all accounts, Hemingway knocked the bear of a poet down several times. The two made up soon after. Then there’s the story of Hemingway and James Joyce; the diminutive Irish writer apparently hid behind his pugnacious friend when trouble loomed.
There are many other such yarns, I’m sure, but one I’ve just learned of shows us a much more passive-aggressive side of Papa H. As the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library blog informs us, Hemingway once sent F. Scott Fitzgerald a typescript of A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald sent back ten pages of edits and comments, signing off with “A beautiful book it is!” You can see Hemingway’s first reaction above (signed EH). In later drafts, it seems, he took some of Fitzgerald’s advice to heart.
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Here’s a rare recording from 1929 of the British author A.A. Milne reading a chapter of his beloved children’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne was a prolific writer of plays, novels and essays, but he was most widely known–much to his chagrin–as the creator of a simple and good-natured little bear.
