The Good Life According to Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

Overview

“Scholars and [fans] will delight . . . provide[s] a window into the multifaceted mind of a literary giant. A tasty bonus is roughly 150 mostly rare pix.” —Library Journal

In the fourteen years that A. E. Hotchner traveled with Ernest Hemingway, he collected a lifetime's worth of Hemingway's experiences, anecdotes, and observations on the backs of matchbooks, napkins, and slips of paper. Speaking on everything from war to women to writing, Hemingway's words are at turns funny and poignant, revealing a rich portrait of the American literary giant and the world he took by storm.

Complete with black-and-white photographs that cover nearly two decades of Hemingway's life, The Good Life According to Hemingway is an exuberant celebration of his remarkable genius and the chaotic adventure of his life.

“[E]ntertaining.” —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062042668
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	150
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

A. E. Hotchner is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Papa Hemingway, Sophia Loren, Doris Day, and Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties. He is also the longtime business partner with actor Paul Newman in Newman's Own, the hugely successful food empire that donates all of its profits to charities, including Hole in the Wall Camps worldwide, dedicated to supporting children with life-threatening illnessess.

Read an Excerpt

The Good Life According to Hemingway

Chapter One

Writing

When a man has the ability to write and the desire to write, no critic can damage his work if it is good, or save it if it is bad.

In the beginning I was not making any money at it, and I just wrote as well as I could—the editors didn't like it, but someday they would. I really didn't care about criticism. The best thing about your early days is that you are not noticed. You don't have to deal with criticism, and you really enjoy your workdays. You think it's easy to write and you feel wonderful, but you're not thinking about the reader, who is not having much enjoyment. But when you start to mature and begin to write for the reader, writing becomes more difficult. In fact, when you look back on anything you've written, what you recall is what a tough go it was. Every day the rejected manuscripts would come back through the slot in the door of that bare room where I lived over the Montmartre sawmill. They'd fall through the slot onto the wood floor, and clipped to them was that most savage of all reprimands—the printed rejection slip. The rejection slip is very hard to take on an empty stomach, and there were times when I'd sit at that old wooden table and read one of those cold slips that had been attached to a story I had loved and worked on very hard and believed in, and I couldn't help crying. When the hurt is bad enough, I cry.

When a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn't get any; then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and, finally,if the writer's any good, he doesn't get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.

There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman—once lost, it is never recovered.

Fiction is inventing out of what knowledge you have. If you invent successfully it is more true than if you try to remember it.

This is where I wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro, upstairs here [Key West], and that's as good as I've any right to be. Pauline and I had just come back from Africa, and when we hit New York, the newsboys asked me what my next project was, and I said to work hard and earn enough money to get back to Africa. It ran in the papers that way and a woman who read it got in touch with me and asked me to have a drink with her. Very classy society woman, extremely wealthy, damn attractive. We had good martini conversation and she said if I wanted to return to Africa so badly, why put it off just for money when she would be very happy to go with me and my wife and foot the bill. I liked her very much and appreciated the offer but refused it. By the time we got down here to Key West, I had given a lot of thought to her and the offer and how it might be if I accepted an offer like that. What it might do to a character like me whose failings I know and have taken many soundings on. Never wrote so directly about myself as in that story. The man is dying, and I got that pretty good, complete with handles, because I had been breathed upon by the Grim Reaper more than once and could write about that from the inside out.

I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by viewing his paintings at the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times on an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I write them and be happy that I learned it from him.

Never yet sold a share of stock I bought, never had to. I can ride out any depression as long as they put me in a chair and give me a pencil and paper.

A big lie is more plausible than truth. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars. As they get further and further away from a war they have taken part in, all men have a tendency to make it more as they wish it had been rather than how it really was.

After you finish a book, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing. The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away.

When I'm working on a book I try to write every day except Sunday. I don't work on Sunday. It's very bad luck to work on a Sunday. Sometimes I do, but it's bad luck just the same.

A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I like to write standing up to reduce the old belly and because you have more vitality on your feet. Who ever went ten rounds sitting on his ass? I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

I have always made things stick that I wanted to stick. I've never kept notes or a journal. I just push the recall button and there it is. If it isn't there, it wasn't worth keeping.

The Good Life According to Hemingway. Copyright © by A. E. Hotchner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Over the past half century, A. E. Hotchner has written novels, plays, memoirs, and essays, but he is perhaps best known for his Papa Hemingway, a 1983 gathering of affectionate reminiscences about his longtime friend. In The Good Life According to Hemingway, Hotchner crystallizes the famed novelist's most memorable insights about hitting life's sharp curves. Touching personal reflections.

A lifetime's worth of Hemingway quotations, running the gamut from clever observations to drunken misogyny, are collected in this heavily illustrated compilation. Hotchner, who chronicled his relationship with Hemingway in Papa Hemingway and a collection of their correspondence, literally cleaned out his desk to provide the material for this book. The resulting work is for those interested in Hemingway's notoriously large ego rather than his writing. Hotchner provides us with Hemingway on hunting ("In shooting you've got to be careful, not worried"), Hemingway on war ("Why the hell do the good and the brave have to die before everyone else?"), and, of course, Hemingway being nasty about fellow writers (on Faulkner: "Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"). Outside of his brief and enjoyable foreword, Hotchner provides no editorial commentary, leaving the reader in an endless Hemingway echo chamber with no one to separate his lies and exaggerations from his actual wisdom. Some of the longer passages will prove entertaining to hardcore Hemingway fans, particularly his complaints about the film adaptations of his novels. 150 b&w photos. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Scholars and armchair aficionados will delight in this volume—any new material is always welcome . . . they provide a window into the multifaceted mind of a literary giant. A tasty bonus is roughly 150 mostly rare pix, many as much a treat for fans as Ernesto’s musings.” — Library Journal

“. . . offer[s] fascinating glimpses into the mind of one of America’s finest writers.” — Hartford Courant

From the Publisher

. . . offer[s] fascinating glimpses into the mind of one of America’s finest writers.

Hartford Courant