Hemingway At Work

This morning I was reading Norberto Fuentes beautifully written book, Hemingway in Cuba. In contrast to his busy and active years in Europe and Key West, Fuentes writes in fascinating detail of the domestic life Hemingway enjoyed at the Finca Vigia. The Finca was the first home that Hemingway owned and it provided him a more tranquil life, although he was always looking for solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote the introduction of Fuentes’ book, in which he imagines Hemingway’s first glimpse of Havana in 1928 and the room in the Ambos Mundos Hotel where Hemingway wrote. A room so austere, Marquez suggests, that no woman would disturb him.

This made me think about how often Hemingway remembers his solitude with pleasure; the quiet hours of his life. In A Moveable Feast, written decades after he left Paris, Hemingway remembers the room overlooking the rooftops of the cold winter city, a room he kept for himself. “It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it cost for a bundle of small twigs, to make a fire that would warm the room.” Sometimes, when it was too cold, he went to nearby cafes to write alone. “It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.”

From early on, Hemingway alternated from almost frenetic activity and social interaction to the solitude necessary to make sense of it. By the age of 25, the chaos of war, the drama of the bullring, and the heart-wrenching experiences of love, friendship and expatriatism would provide him with the pulse of his first book. But to write of his noisy and compelling outer life, Hemingway had to find and defend the quiet that was necessary for his inner life.

From biographies we know that he spent several weeks in Hendaye by himself, working to finish The Sun Also Rises. By that time, he had established a routine of getting up early in the morning to write, a commitment he would keep for his entire life. In his 1958 interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway said that he wrote “every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.”

Plimpton’s interview gives us a glimpse of how Hemingway worked. At the time of the interview, he lived in Cuba, the place where Hemingway lived the longest. (And as Marquez points out, a writer’s true home is where his books are.) Plimpton writes, “Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom – where early in the morning gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes – slave of a self-imposed discipline.”

Plimpton continues, “A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.” “He keeps track of his daily progress – ‘so as not to kid myself’ – on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head.”

But not all of the places Hemingway wrote had walls. Here is a passage from Fuentes’ book: “Sometimes Hemingway would weigh anchor and hide out for a few weeks at Cayo Paraiso(Paradise Key), called Megano de Casigua in the navel charts. It lies approximately five miles off La Mulata Bay, in Pinar del Rio province. The writer would go there with his wife and Gregorio, his Royal portable, a few reams of writing paper, and half a dozen number-two pencils. He found a good place to work among the barrier reefs of Cayo Paraiso, a private place, one the press never knew about.”

Fuentes continues, “He would make ambitious plans about what he was going to do and what he was going to write about on the island, keeping the same disciplined regimen that he followed at the Finca Vigia.” This was in the late forties and early fifties. He enjoyed lunch and siesta with Mary “and in the afternoon Ernest had another session with the Royal portable under a palm tree, out of the sun.”

It is remarkable how portable Hemingway was, traveling, taking pencil and paper and even his typewriter with him wherever he went, committing himself to his career. With his discipline, he bought his freedom, even if it meant withdrawing from the life around him for a time. I think of how men must have admired his freedom in the twenties, and in the great depression and still later, in the fifties. When men in the suburbs straightened their ties in the morning before work, it was hours after Hemingway had started his own shift, the rest of his household asleep, his words moving across the page.