Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and the rest of the first and best Lost Generation wrote some of their greatest work in 1920s Paris. What they created about their homeland in expatriation intrigues me.
Joyce’s Ulysses is many things: the greatest novel ever, the worst novel ever, allegory, confusing, illuminating, bragging rights at a party if you’ve read it, really heavy in a bag, obscene . . . It is also a love letter to Dublin. Joyce wrote about the city in such detail that pilgrims still trace Bloom and Dedalus’ paths over the course of their extraordinary day. It is one of the Irish people’s most revered texts. There’s also a good deal of stout consumed in it.
And he wrote the whole thing while in France.
He knew which buildings were where, containing which businesses—if he was ever unsure of anything, he wrote a friend in Ireland for details—but the point is he wasn’t in Dublin for any of it.
Henrik Ibsen wrote the greatest of his plays—all set in Norway—while living in Germany and Italy.
Stein did it, so did Fitzgerald. Hemingway commented in A Moveable Feast—a book written about France while he was travelling in Spain and then Cuba, decades later—that the best way to write about a place is when you are not in it.
This is funny for me. I mean, I like writing about places. I have an idea for a Viking novel set in Norway and Iceland that I have felt for some time requires me returning to those countries. I’d also like to write about some of my time living and teaching in Asia, but I feel that I need to go back again to get a feel for my old home.
What Hemingway has made me think is that you can get a better feel for a place away from it than in it.
The fantasy is that writing about a place while there allows for you to employ more of the pertinent and accessible imagery. You’re experiencing it, you’ll remember it. Little, seemingly meaningless sights, smells—sooo important, the sounds; anecdotes that strike you as worth putting in; basically, things that I’m worried I’ll forget after the fact. These are all things that matter to the people there, but don’t to anyone reading me who isn’t there. There’s creating the flavour, and then there’s dumping the whole spice rack in the soup.
The Ah-ha moment. These little things, though charming, are distractions. When you’re tasting another culture soup, every little flavour makes you want to add it. However, your reader might not care about the garnish and instead just want to get down to deciding whether it’s a milk or water base.
Writing about a place when away, then, might be the best idea, because you can distil what matters from that setting and let it aid you, rather than hinder you, in twisting things to produce something good and true.
Hem did say that only 10% of what a writer knows should go into his work, with 90% sitting under the surface just waiting to wreck the reader. Iceberg writing, soup writing: the seasonings should be subtle but not absent. Don't write the Campbell's condensed version yourself: they have Reader's Digest for that after you're famous.
ReplyDeleteMoving away from a place you love is like breaking off a passionate romance. Like any lost love you long for it, ache for it, wish you still smoked so you had a reason to sit out on the balcony and pine for it; you excuse its shortcomings and fondly recall its flaws.
The only way to get over your loss is to tell the tale. Once that's done, you can accept the loss, be warmed by the love that was, and go on with your life. Distance distills and distorts while love enhances, so you are left with an image of the best possible place seen through the best possible lens.
My problem is that I love to tell stories, and trying to write them later is like trying to re-create the perfect paper that your dog/computer ate: never as clever, brilliance bled out. B+. Blah. Hem also had a strict rule about never talking about anything he was writing about, and I suspect that if he hadn't, A M F would never have gotten written.