Today is the 50th anniver­sary of the death of Ernest Hem­ing­way. In remem­brance, we bring you the writer’s own voice from 1954, read­ing his Nobel Prize accep­tance speech at a radio sta­tion in Havana, Cuba. Hem­ing­way’s influ­ence on Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture was pro­found, both for the orig­i­nal­i­ty of his prose and the trag­ic alien­ation of his heroes. One of the most beau­ti­ful and fre­quent­ly quot­ed exam­ples of Hem­ing­way’s style is the open­ing para­graph of A Farewell to Arms:

In the late sum­mer of that year we lived in a house in a vil­lage that looked across the riv­er and the plain to the moun­tains. In the bed of the riv­er there were peb­bles and boul­ders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swift­ly mov­ing and blue in the chan­nels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised pow­dered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell ear­ly that year and we saw the troops march­ing along the road and the dust ris­ing and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the sol­diers march­ing and after­ward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

“Hem­ing­way’s appre­ci­a­tion of the aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties of the phys­i­cal world is impor­tant,” wrote Robert Penn War­ren in 1949, “but a pecu­liar poignan­cy is implic­it in the ren­der­ing of those qual­i­ties; the beau­ty of the phys­i­cal world is a back­ground for the human predica­ment, and the very rel­ish­ing of the beau­ty is mere­ly a kind of des­per­ate and momen­tary com­pen­sa­tion pos­si­ble in the midst of the predica­ment.” That predica­ment, wrote War­ren, “in a world with­out super­nat­ur­al sanc­tions, in the God-aban­doned world of moder­ni­ty,” is man’s full con­scious­ness of his own impend­ing anni­hi­la­tion. Here is a stark pas­sage from “A Clean, Well-Light­ed Place”:

What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a noth­ing he knew too well. It was all a noth­ing and a man was noth­ing too. It was only that and light was all it need­ed and a cer­tain clean­li­ness and order. Some lived in it and nev­er felt it but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy king­dom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our dai­ly nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliv­er us from nada; pues nada. Hail noth­ing full of noth­ing, noth­ing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shin­ing steam pres­sure cof­fee machine.
“What’s yours?” asked the bar­man.
“Nada.”

Caught in an exis­ten­tial cul-de-sac, Hem­ing­way’s char­ac­ters find mean­ing through adher­ence to what War­ren called the Hem­ing­way Code: “His heroes are not defeat­ed except upon their own terms. They are not squeal­ers, welch­ers, com­pro­mis­ers, or cow­ards, and when they con­front defeat they real­ize that the stance they take, the sto­ic endurance, the stiff upper lip mean a kind of vic­to­ry. Defeat­ed upon their own terms, some of them have even court­ed their defeat; and cer­tain­ly they have main­tained, even in the prac­ti­cal defeat, an ide­al of them­selves.”

Fifty years ago today, after endur­ing years of declin­ing health, Ernest Hem­ing­way met death upon his own terms. Look­ing back on it in 1999, Joyce Car­ol Oates wrote: “Hem­ing­way’s death by sui­cide in 1961, in a beau­ti­ful and iso­lat­ed Ketchum, Ida­ho, would seem to have brought him full cir­cle: back to the Amer­i­ca he had repu­di­at­ed as a young man, and to the method of sui­cide his father had cho­sen, a gun. To know the cir­cum­stances of the last years of Hem­ing­way’s life, how­ev­er, his phys­i­cal and men­tal suf­fer­ing, is to won­der that the belea­guered man endured as long as he did. His lega­cy to lit­er­a­ture, apart from the dis­tinct works of art attached to his name, is a pris­tine and imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able prose style and a vision of mankind in which life and art are affirmed despite all odds.”

The high points of this doc­u­men­tary on the great J.R.R. Tolkien, from the BBC Series In Their Own Words: British Nov­el­ists, are the moments that ful­fill the promise of the series’ title. Skip over the dis­tract­ing “man on the street” inter­views and long pans of the land­scape, meant per­haps to invoke Mid­dle Earth. In fact, you can skip over every scene that isn’t just the author’s mag­nif­i­cent talk­ing head.

Start at minute 2:49, where he describes first writ­ing the immor­tal words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hob­bit.” The anec­dote should inspire belea­guered grad­u­ate stu­dents and teach­ers every­where: He came up with the line while grad­ing exams.

We also loved Tolkien’s con­fes­sion about trees, start­ing at the 7:00 minute mark: “I should have liked to make con­tact with a tree and find out how it feels about things.”

You can watch the doc­u­men­tary on YouTube in two parts. The first part is above, the sec­ond here. The mate­r­i­al also appears in our col­lec­tion of 250 Cul­tur­al Icons.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Talk­ing Lit­er­a­ture with Great British Nov­el­ists

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

Best­selling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite con­tem­po­rary nov­els Moth­er­less Brook­lyn — has a new short sto­ry fea­tured in the sum­mer edi­tion of the Paris Review. The sto­ry is called “The Emp­ty Room,” and, once again, the back­ground, child­hood, moves to the fore­ground. It begins:

Ear­li­est mem­o­ry: father trip­ping on strewn toys, hop­ping with toe out­raged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys him­self. He once brought a traf­fic light home to our apart­ment on the thir­ty-some­thingth floor of the tow­er on Colum­bus Avenue. The light, its taxi yel­low gone mat­te from pen­du­lum-years above some pol­lut­ed inter­sec­tion and crack­led like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been over­tight­ened and then eased, sat to one side of the cof­fee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an appro­pri­ate top. In fact, the traf­fic light would fol­low us up the Hud­son, to Dar­by, to the house with the emp­ty room. There it nev­er escaped the garage.

Anoth­er mem­o­ry: my play­mate Max’s par­ents had bor­rowed, from mine, a spare set of chi­na plates. I spent a lot of time vis­it­ing with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s old­er broth­er. So I was present the after­noon my father destroyed the chi­na set. Max’s fam­i­ly lived in a duplex, the base­ment and par­lor floor of a brown­stone, a palace of abun­dance . . . Max and his broth­er had sep­a­rate rooms, and a back­yard. All this would pale beside the spa­cious­ness of our Dar­by farm­house. That was the point.

You can read the full text here. And please note: the Paris Review has just launched its first dig­i­tal edi­tion, let­ting you read the famous lit­er­ary jour­nal on your com­put­er, iPad or mobile device. More on that here. H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Paris Review Inter­views Now Online

Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Mar­tin Amis will nev­er win a pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test. Nor did Nor­man Mail­er. Back in 1960, Mail­er famous­ly stabbed his wife after a din­ner par­ty in New York City, and even when things weren’t so extreme, he was often behav­ing bad­ly. Take for exam­ple this appear­ance on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal in 1971. It’s hard to find a less sym­pa­thet­ic fig­ure, at least dur­ing his ear­ly years.

As for Amis, he has nev­er worked hard to make friends, stak­ing out con­tro­ver­sial posi­tions on Mus­lims and euthana­sia and then, ear­li­er this year, going out of his way to mock writ­ing for chil­dren: “Peo­ple ask me if I ever thought of writ­ing a chil­dren’s book. I say, if I had a seri­ous brain injury I might well write a chil­dren’s book, but oth­er­wise the idea of being con­scious of who you’re direct­ing the sto­ry to is anath­e­ma to me, because, in my view, fic­tion is free­dom and any restraints on that are intol­er­a­ble.” You get the drift.

But good writ­ers rarely win pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tests. And few will deny that Mail­er and Amis have put their stamp on the Anglo-Amer­i­can lit­er­ary scene. So here you have it — Mar­tin Amis inter­view­ing Nor­man Mail­er in 1991, upon the release of Mail­er’s sprawl­ing 1400-page CIA epic, Har­lot’s Ghost. The first clip (above) starts with the nov­el, the remain­ing parts move in many dif­fer­ent direc­tions. The writ­ing life, writ­ing about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, the state of cap­i­tal­ism, Amer­i­ca after the Cold War, Mail­er’s lega­cy — it’s part of the 40 minute con­ver­sa­tion. Find Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

You can find this video per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our new col­lec­tion of 235 Cul­tur­al Icons.

via Metafil­ter