Green Hills of Africa. Ernest Hemingway

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СКАЧАТЬ they were never a part to a newer England that they were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of Unitarians; men of letters; Quakers with a sense of humour.’

      ‘Who were these?’

      ‘Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that you ask for it.’

      ‘Go on.’

      ‘There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau. I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her that makes the rest unimportant.’

      ‘But what about Thoreau?’

      ‘You’ll have to read him. Maybe I’ll be able to later. I can do nearly everything later.’

      ‘Better have some more beer, Papa.’

      ‘All right.’

      ‘What about the good writers?’

      ‘The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.’

      ‘Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.’

      ‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’

      ‘What about the others?’

      ‘Crane wrote two fine stories. The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. The last one is the better.’

      ‘And what happened to him?’

      ‘He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start.’

      ‘But the other two?’

      ‘They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they got older. I don’t know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers into something very strange.’

      ‘I do not understand.’

      ‘We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.’

      ‘Who are these writers?’

      ‘Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have written, become frightened, and be impotent again.’

      ‘But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.’

      ‘I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the fighting. They become leaders. It doesn’t matter who they lead. If they do not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money. He never did, of course.’

      ‘And you?’

      ‘I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.’

      ‘And what do you want?’

      ‘To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.’

      ‘Hunting kudu?’

      ‘Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.’

      ‘What other things?’

      ‘Plenty of other things.’

      ‘And you know what you want?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?’

      ‘Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.’

      ‘One is not better than the other?’

      ‘One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.’

      ‘Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to you, really?’

      ‘Truly.’

      ‘And you know what you want?’

      ‘Absolutely, and I get it all the time.’

      ‘But it takes money.’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ