A Dialogue on Facts, Fiction, History

Pamuk / Eco




novels are about sensations, diz Pamuk. Hemingway is so good writing about sensation, about how it feels to drink a coffee, how it feels to wake up in the morning (...)
Eco dizia: eu nunca seria capaz de escrever uma história de amor, como Füsün, eu teria medo de mostrar alguma coisa privada. assim escrevo sobre nada. escritores que falam de si e de outros.

as Viagens de Tabucchi não são sobre lugares, são sobre escritores. ele não foi à descoberta de um sítio, em particular, mas da sensação de ser aquele escritor ali. outras viagens, as viagens de outros.

'adventurer-writer', ou 'obsessively self-absorbed'

"Having children also makes it difficult to get out of the house. With a child you certainly can’t be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one’s inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.", Louise Erdrich na Paris Review.

mesmo sem filhos, não sei se poderia correr com os touros de Pamplona.

passado dourado

"While they were eating they all talked. From this conversation Yegorushka gathered that all his new acquaintances, in spite of the differences of their ages and their characters, had one point in common which made them all alike: they were all people with a splendid past and a very poor present. Of their past they all -- every one of them -- spoke with enthusiasm; their attitude to the present was almost one of contempt. The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living. Yegorushka did not yet know that, and before the stew had been all eaten he firmly believed that the men sitting round the cauldron were the injured victims of fate. Panteley told them that in the past, before there were railways, he used to go with trains of waggons to Moscow and to Nizhni, and used to earn so much that he did not know what to do with his money; and what merchants there used to be in those days! what fish! how cheap everything was! Now the roads were shorter, the merchants were stingier, the peasants were poorer, the bread was dearer, everything had shrunk and was on a smaller scale. Emelyan told them that in old days he had been in the choir in the Lugansky works, and that he had a remarkable voice and read music splendidly, while now he had become a peasant and lived on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings. Vassya had once worked in a match factory; Kiruha had been a coachman in a good family, and had been reckoned the smartest driver of a three-in-hand in the whole district. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, lived at ease, enjoyed himself and had known no trouble till he was twenty, when his stern harsh father, anxious to train him to work, and afraid he would be spoiled at home, had sent him to a carrier's to work as a hired labourer. Styopka was the only one who said nothing, but from his beardless face it was evident that his life had been a much better one in the past. ",

Chekhov, em A Estepe, para ler toda aqui.
a viagem de Chekhov fez-me em tudo lembrar As I Lay Dying, de Faulkner- um, o princípio, e outro o final. que relacionamento interessantíssimo.



"Shortly before Chekhov's death, Faulkner listed him among the writers whose books he reread every year."

(ou "Only Chekhov, in "The Steppe," has recorded a more vivid journey through barren prairie country.", num artigo que não consigo ler)

Scott

true sentence

"But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to write is one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write a true sentence and go on from there."

Hemingway na p. 22 da minha A Moveable Feast, a 'restored edition'.

"It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest. The patron had said to him, 'You are all a génération perdue.'

'That's what you are. That's what you all are,' Miss Stein said. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.'

'Really?' I said.

'You are,' she insisted. 'You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death...'"

na p. 61 e,

"But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.", na p. 62.

também aqui, na Life de 10 Abril 64.

'On writing in the first person'

"When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader's experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do."  (...)

E. Hemingway, 'On Writing in the First Person' em A Moveable Feast.
---

não acredito que seja possível discutir a lost generation sem ler este livro.

"Across the river and into the trees"

Publicado em 1950, Adriana substitui Tadzio sem o ultrapassar. Veneza, a morte que imaginou dez anos antes da sua própria. apesar das más críticas, ainda assim admirável, uma história de morte com Dante, com Mann, Othelo e com todos os regimentos perdidos nas Grandes Guerras. de certo modo, e talvez por isso o excesso, espreitar para dentro de um soldado, como eram os soldados, como sempre foram, e andando mais ainda, espreitar as razões do mundo ter crescido desta maneira.

Tennessee Williams, in The New York Times, wrote: "I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway's new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy. It will probably be a popular book. The critics may treat it pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man's heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done."  --na wiki.

lido numa versão-oferta que acompanhou um qualquer jornal ou revista e onde se traduz character por caracter. ainda assim vive. e eu bem gostaria de ter todo o Hemingway em casa.

foto da foto, num artigo de Clara Ferreira Alves para a Única, neste verão.

todos os

anos lhes tiro o mesmo retrato. ao contrário de Hemingway, na cidade da água não fui ao Harry's nem bebi nenhuma das herdeiras das misturas de Cipriani. gostaria de dizer que fica para o próximo inverno. gostei de saber dos rapazes de Torcello. neste caso, 'os rapazes' diz muito. Hemingway, como muitos dos do seu pais, foi um fundador de religiões.

a farewell to arms (2)

tenho poucas ideias, tão poucas que as estico e repito sem fim para que possam preencher todo o espaço. uma delas é esta, escrever é no limite da vida. imagens de Hemingway na sua guerra italiana, daqui.

a farewell to arms

"In print, the words "shit", "fuck" and "cocksucker" were replaced with dashes ("----"). There are at least two copies of the first edition in which Hemingway re-inserted the censored text by hand, so as to provide a corrected text. One of these copies was presented to Maurice Coindreau; the other, to James Joyce. Hemingway's corrected text has not been incorporated into any published edition of the novel.", na wiki.

depois de

ter lido "Tell the Women We're Going", parte de Beginners de Raymond Carver, esquecido por um tempo nos meandros do Kindle.

---

In three early stories written during the 1960s, there are accounts of violence rendered in three distinct literary modes that Carver was imitating on the road to finding his own style. “Furious Seasons” is a Faulknerian tale narrated by using the device of repeating the scene leading up to a murder four times.

With the exception of Hemingway, Carver quickly left early influences behind. And Carver’s realism is a much closer rendering of the lives of everyday Americans than Hemingway’s ever was. While Hemingway was preoccupied with war in Europe, Carver portrays the everyday battles that take place on the real home front: in domestic realms of America. Carver’s stories are more often than not about family relationships, especially marriage. The existence of marital violence has become so pervasive in American society that it risks becoming commonplace4, and it is a pervasive presence in Carver’s stories as well.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is considered a seminal book in what came to be known as literary minimalism, a pared-down style Carver developed as a sort of extreme form of Hemingway’s telegraphic realism. Though Carver moved quickly beyond the minimalist aesthetic of this volume in his next works, the treatment of women and violence bears the characteristic traits of this movement. Carver made massive cuts to the stories in this volume while preparing it for publication5, replacing some violent episodes with ellipsis, and leaving much to suggestion. Some of the stories take domestic situations similar to those in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to absurd ends, providing compressed, dark humor in the place of narrative exposition. In the title story of What We Talk About When We talk About Love, two couples get drunk while discussing the nature of love, and debate, among things, whether a husband who beats his wife then kills himself can really feel love for her. The fusing of the themes of sex, love and violence reaches no conclusive resolution, as the gin runs out and the lights dim on the characters. This story sets the tone for a collection in which people commit sudden acts of violence that are more extreme than in the previous volume, yet less contextualized and sometimes seemingly random.

The story “Tell the Women We’re Going” contains the volume’s most horrific account of violence; in it the male perpetrator moves outside the family sphere and into the world at large. The protagonist Bill and his friend Jerry decide to take a Sunday afternoon off from their families. On their way driving home, the men encounter two women biking, and later follow the women onto a hiking trail. Jerry presumably kills them both, though the concluding scene is elliptic: “Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon, then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (66)

--
parágrafos fora de ordem e não sequenciais de um ensaio interessante sobre Carver, as mulheres e violência. se bem que a versão acima seja diferente da que li, um ponto para críticos. reavaliando o que gosto e porquê.

poética das despedidas

por vezes vejo a vida como uma sucessão de perdas, com neste Hemingway de Farewell to Arms: perda de ideais perda de lugares de pessoas de objectos de coisas de lugares até se pensar que tudo foi e ainda se perder essa última coisa. e por fim a vida, “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” o tempo é outra palavra para dizer perda.

se bem que ele viaja em linhas horizontais e prefiro autores que mergulham no escuro. em algumas destas noites têm passado sonhos vívidos, como passam filmes, de que me lembro de manhã, pouco usual em mim que não sonho nunca. uma galeria de medos.

(não, não ganhamos o céu) agradecer hoje o que se mantém ainda, tão frágil.

é isto

"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. " de tudo o que venha a ler que Hemingway tenha escrito, não vai haver nada com o qual eu concorde mais. o curioso é que este autor seja visto como modelo de masculinidade acima de tudo pelo seu envolvimento em guerras e pelo seu comportamento com as mulheres. não admira que os modelos de masculinidade necessitassem de um radical-make-over. as grandes guerras mataram muitas ideias erradas que apesar de mortas, continuam por cá. relendo Hemingway, deste modo reatando um conhecimento de há muitos anos atrás, como farei este fim-de-semana. pouco a pouco vou recordando porque gostei tanto destes livros há trinta anos atrás em tardes longas e de sol no sofá da sala. --

"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.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

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 and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

da entrevista na Paris Review, aqui.

"I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied."

descobrindo

a parataxe.

baroque

li que Hemingway escreve como as imagens de Antonioni, antes dele Twain, depois dele Carver.
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over." um resumo do dia.

"Hills Like White Elephants", Ernest Hemingway

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
‘What should we drink?’ the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
‘It’s pretty hot,’ the man said.
‘Let’s drink beer.’
‘Dos cervezas,’ the man said into the curtain.
‘Big ones?’ a woman asked from the doorway.
‘Yes. Two big ones.’
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.
‘No, you wouldn’t have.’
‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’
The girl looked at the bead curtain. ‘They’ve painted something on it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’
‘Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.’
‘Could we try it?’
The man called ‘Listen’ through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
‘Four reales.’ ‘We want two Anis del Toro.’
‘With water?’
‘Do you want it with water?’
‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘Is it good with water?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘You want them with water?’ asked the woman.
‘Yes, with water.’
‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.
‘That’s the way with everything.’
‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’
‘Oh, cut it out.’
‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’
‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’
‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’
‘That was bright.’
‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’
‘I guess so.’
The girl looked across at the hills.
‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’
‘Should we have another drink?’
‘All right.’
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
‘The beer’s nice and cool,’ the man said.
‘It’s lovely,’ the girl said.
‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all.’
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
‘I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.’
The girl did not say anything.
‘I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’
‘Then what will we do afterwards?’
‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.’
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.
‘And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.’
‘I know we will. Yon don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.’
‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterwards they were all so happy.’
‘Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’
‘And you really want to?’
‘I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.’
‘And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?’
‘I love you now. You know I love you.’
‘I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?’
‘I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.’
‘If I do it you won’t ever worry?’
‘I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.’
‘Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t care about me.’
‘Well, I care about you.’
‘Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.’
‘I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.’
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said we could have everything.’
‘We can have everything.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can have the whole world.’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘We can go everywhere.’
‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’
‘It’s ours.’
‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.’
‘But they haven’t taken it away.’
‘We’ll wait and see.’
‘Come on back in the shade,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t feel that way.’
‘I don’t feel any way,’ the girl said. ‘I just know things.’
‘I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do -’
‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ‘I know. Could we have another beer?’
‘All right. But you’ve got to realize – ‘
‘I realize,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we maybe stop talking?’
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘ that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’
‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.’
‘Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.’
‘Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.’
‘It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.’
‘Would you do something for me now?’
‘I’d do anything for you.’
‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?’
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
‘But I don’t want you to,’ he said, ‘I don’t care anything about it.’
‘I’ll scream,’ the girl said.
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. ‘The train comes in five minutes,’ she said.
‘What did she say?’ asked the girl.
‘That the train is coming in five minutes.’
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
‘I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,’ the man said. She smiled at him.
‘All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.’
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
‘Do you feel better?’ he asked.
‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.’

(daqui)

serão

múltiplos choques culturais, ou a prova da multiplicidade: revendo as Ervas Daninhas de A. Resnais enquanto a gila borbulha doce limão-canela-cravinho e sigo o Farewell to Arms decorrendo em Gorizia onde parece que Hemingway afinal nunca esteve. tempo de preparação: um ano, que cumpri à risca. Dele diz John dos Passos: Hemingway's 'A Farewell to Arms' is the best written book that has seen the light in America for many a long day. By well-written I don't mean the tasty college composition course sort of thing that our critics seem to consider good writing. I mean writing that is terse and economical, in which each sentence and each phrase bears the maximum load of meaning, sense impressions, emotions." e assim utilizo três dois pontos em tão curtas linhas. encontrei uma carteira, vermelha. esta carteira aqui, abrindo a curiosidade do olhar alheio. [será que a relva foi pintada, como no Rio de Renoir?]

períodos de chuva, vento moderado

final de uma semana cinzenta aguada arrastada com intervalos. ainda agora a água. "Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or nor.", diz Hemingway em A Farewell to Arms. ('resentful cryptogram', feminist criticism is often skyrocketing out of this world, mas porque não bater-lhes de volta)