Advise for young writers

The best advice any aspiring writer can receive came the way of Ernest Hemingway early in his career. Hemingway was lucky. While an unknown writer in Paris in the early 20s he attracted powerful mentors: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound all of whom greatly influenced his writing and shaped his reputation. By the end of the decade Hemingway was one of the most famous writers in the world.

And now ? Literary fashion is as fickle as the English weather. Great reputations that bestride the literary world in one decade dissolve into obscurity the next. Who today remembers the much praised and wildly fashionable Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell? He was hailed as the new Proust in the late fifties . Now he is out of sight, out of mind , out of print and taught only in remote French universities. Does anyone read Muriel Spark with her sentences like well brushed teeth, as someone said, or Barbara Pym. Barbara who? I hear you say. Exactly.

So let us observe how the sun also sets on the reputation of Ernest Hemingway .With his chest beating macho, his delight in bullfighting ,prize fighting, soldier fighting , big game shooting and fly fishing for monster trout in the streams of Idaho, Hemingway is out of step with these times.

This is an age when we confer instant sainthood on a talented singer called David Bowie and mourn rock stars and actors as if they were cultural deities; an age when a book titled “All The Light We Cannot See “wins the Pulitzer Prize. It is a good book, but that title ? For The Sun Also Rises Hemingway drew his title from the bible, Ecclesiastes to be precise, and from John Donne for For Whom The Bells Tolls and from a 16th century English poet for A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway was a modern who delighted in the classics. His early book titles proclaimed him as the serious and well read writer that he was.

If fashion has turned on Hemingway where does that leave the books? They are still taught in English lit classes and they retain their appeal to an older generation .But in terms of character, plot and dialogue they seem very old fashioned.

But that is not the point. What makes Hemingway forever great is style .Papa Hemingway was quite simply the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century. Therein lies his lasting appeal .A recent exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York made this clear to anyone who looked through the collection of diaries, manuscripts, letters, proof pages and endlessly revised drafts . Revision Revision Revision; that was the key to the short, honed sentences that lift out of Hemingway’s prose and hold the eye like humming birds. Typically he rewrote the final paragraphs of A Farewell to Arms sixteen times, driving his publisher to distraction. Only then was he happy.

The American critic David Bromwich, Professor of English at Yale, in a review of the exhibition, said ”Hemingway was the foremost defender of revision as a proof of serious craft. The more you could throw away, he said, the surer you could be that something of substance was there to begin with “.

This explains why the original first two chapters of The Sun Also Rises are not in the book. Hemingway threw them away.

Which brings us back to the advice given the young Hemingway in Paris, advice which holds good for any novice writer today. He sent the poet Gertrude Stein, a fellow American exile, a collection of short stories. She returned them with the words:” Begin over again and concentrate.”