Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true. I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject.  When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true. Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze.  I'm not an expert on the field.  I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me.  [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.)  So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity.  "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, w...

Certainly it is easy to create a literary aesthetics of brevity. The haiku and the aphorism have their admirers. Ernest Hemingway is widely thought to have invented a perfect short story in the form of a classified ad: "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Edgar Allen Poe famously developed a theory for why short stories are superior to novels. His explanation of that theory was, IMHO, longer winded than it had to be. The point, though, was that a story should have a unitary impact and this could be achieved best with a work that could be read in a single sitting. Yet one shouldn't let the aesthetics of the short haul have the last word. The world has room for Melville's and Tolstoy's and Victor Hugo's novels, and creating a Reader's Digest version thereof will never be the same. As for Hemingway's six word story? He didn't really write it. It is the work of a playwright named  John deGroot who created a one-actor play about "Papa...

I often see Ernest Hemingway quoted for a definition of courage, or "guts," as "grace under pressure." Too lazy to research the specific source, I asked Yahoo!Answers, and received the following. Hemingway used it in a profile piece written by Dorothy Parker.  Parker asked Hemingway: "Exactly what do you mean by 'guts'?" Hemingway replied: "I mean, grace under pressure." The profile is titled, "The Artist's Reward" and it appeared in The New Yorker on November 30, 1929.  The first published use of the phrase, however, was in an April 20, 1926 letter Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. The letter is reprinted in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker, pages 199-201.   Thank you, Yahoo!

A personal letter, sent on July 1, 1925, from Burguete, Navarra: Dear Scott -- We are going to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda? I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt—havent drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.   To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I wo...

Working writers, aspiring writers, and struggling writers have often encountered the hint, sometimes even phrased as a rule, "Eliminate adjectives." Usually Hemingway is invoked just before or after that is propounded. Since the first word of this blog entry served as its first adjective, you might already have grasped that I don't take that hint to heart. But don't listen to me. I'll invoke a higher authority:  Roald Dahl. "He had a fine white mustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face." That is how Dahl describes the title character in his short story, "The Umbrella Man." That sentence breaks at least three of the rules associated with the authoritative manuals. It uses a weak predicate (the verb is a form of "to have," which is almost as bad as "to be"!) It says something in a lot of words that it might have said in fewer ("he was old but still healthy" might do it for a minimalist). And i...

One of my Facebook friends posted this exchange recently. I like it so I'll simply repeat it, with thanks to Leon Gettler and, behind him, to the Paris Review . Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you? Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.