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Gabriel Garcia
Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway
By GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
The New York Times
July 26, 1981
recognized him immediately, passing with his wife Mary Welsh on the
Boulevard St. Michel in Paris one rainy spring day in 1957. He
walked on the other side of the street, in the direction of the
Luxembourg Gardens, wearing a very worn pair of cowboy pants, a
plaid shirt and a ballplayer's cap. The only thing that didn't look
as if it belonged to him was a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, tiny
and round, which gave him a premature grandfatherly air. He had
turned 59, and he was large and almost too visible,but he didn't
give the impression of brutal strength that he undoubtedly wished
to, because his hips were narrow and his legs looked a little
emaciated above his coarse lumberjack shoes. He looked so alive
amid the secondhand bookstalls and the youthful torrent from the
Sorbonne that it was impossible to imagine he had but four years
left to live.
For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I
found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn't know
whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express
my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I
faced the same great inconvenience. At the time, I spoke the same
rudimentary English that I still speak now, and I wasn't very sure
about his bullfighter's Spanish. And so I didn't do either of the
things that could have spoiled that moment, but instead cupped both
hands over my mouth and, like Tarzan in the jungle, yelled from one
sidewalk to the other: ''Maaaeeestro!'' Ernest Hemingway understood
that there could be no other master amid the multitude of students,
and he turned, raised his hand and shouted to me in Castillian in a
very childish voice, ''Adiooos, amigo!'' It was the only time I saw
him.
At the time, I was a 28-year-old newspaperman with a published
novel and a literary prize in Colombia, but I was adrift and
without direction in Paris. My great masters were the two North
American novelists who seemed to have the least in common. I had
read everything they had published until then, but not as
complementary reading - rather, just the opposite, as two distinct
and almost mutually exclusive forms of conceiving of literature.
One of them was William Faulkner, whom I had never laid eyes on and
whom I could only imagine as the farmer in shirtsleeves scratching
his arm beside two little white dogs in the celebrated portrait of
him taken by Cartier-Bresson. The other was the ephemeral man who
had just said goodbye to me from across the street, leaving me with
the impression that something had happened in my life, and had
happened for all time.
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only
to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't
satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we
turn the book around to find the seams. In a way that's impossible
to explain, we break the book down to its essential parts and then
put it back together after we understand the mysteries of its
personal clockwork. The effort is disheartening in Faulkner's
books, because he doesn't seem to have an organic system of
writing, but instead walks blindly through his biblical universe,
like a herd of goats loosed in a shop full of crystal. Managing to
dismantle a page of his, one has the impression of springs and
screws left over, that it's impossible to put back together in its
original state. Hemingway, by contrast, with less inspiration, with
less passion and less craziness but with a splendid severity, left
the screws fully exposed, as they are on freight cars. Maybe for
that reason Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my
soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft
- not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the
aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing. In his historic
interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, (Hemingway)
showed for all time - contrary to the Romantic notion of creativity
-that economic comfort and good health are conducive to writing;
that one of the chief difficulties is arranging the words well;
that when writing becomes hard it is good to reread one's own
books, in order to remember that it always was hard; that one can
write anywhere so long as there are no visitors and no telephone;
and that it is not true that journalism finishes off a writer, as
has so often been said - rather, just the opposite, so long as one
leaves it behind soon enough. ''Once writing has become the
principal vice and the greatest pleasure,'' he said, ''only death
can put an end to it.'' Finally, his lesson was the discovery that
each day's work should only be interrupted when one knows where to
begin again the next day. I don't think that any more useful advice
has ever been given about writing. It is, no more and no less, the
absolute remedy for the most terrible specter of writers: the
morning agony of facing the blank page.
All of Hemingway's work shows that his spirit was brilliant but
short-lived. And it is understandable. An internal tension like
his, subjected to such a severe dominance of technique, can't be
sustained within the vast and hazardous reaches of a novel. It was
his nature, and his error was to try to exceed his own splendid
limits. And that is why everything superfluous is more noticeable
in him than in other writers. His novels are like short stories
that are out of proportion, that include too much. In contrast, the
best thing about his stories is that they give the impression
something is missing, and this is precisely what confers their
mystery and their beauty. Jorge Luis Borges, who is one of the
great writers of our time, has the same limits, but has had the
sense not to try to surpass them.
Francis Macomber's single shot at the lion demonstrates a great
deal as a lesson in hunting, but also as a summation of the science
of writing. In one of his stories, Hemingway wrote that a bull from
Liria, after brushing past the chest of the matador, returned like
''a cat turning a corner.'' I believe, in all humility, that that
observation is one of those inspired bits of foolishness which come
only from the most magnificent writers. Hemingway's work is full of
such simple and dazzling discoveries, which reveal the point at
which he adjusted his definition of literary writing: that, like an
iceberg, it is only well grounded if it is supported below by
seveneighths of its volume.
That consciousness of technique is unquestionably the reason
Hemingway won't achieve glory with his novels, but will with his
more disciplined short stories. Talking of ''For Whom the Bell
Tolls,'' he said that he had no preconceived plan for constructing
the book, but rather invented it each day as he went along. He
didn't have to say it: it's obvious. In contrast, his
instantaneously inspired short stories are unassailable. Like the
three he wrote one May afternoon in a Madrid pension, when a
snowstorm forced the cancellation of a bullfight at the feast of
San Isidro. Those stories, as he himself told George Plimpton, were
''The Killers,'' ''Ten Indians'' and ''Today Is Friday,'' and all
three are magisterial. Along those lines, for my taste, the story
in which his powers are most compressed is one of his shortest
ones, ''Cat in the Rain.''
Nevertheless, even if it appears to be a mockery of his own fate,
it seems to me that his most charming and human work is his least
successful one: ''Across the River and Into the Trees.'' It is, as
he himself revealed, something that began as a story and went
astray into the mangrove jungle of a novel. It is hard to
understand so many structural cracks and so many errors of literary
mechanics in such a wise technician - and dialogue so artificial,
even contrived, in one of the most brilliant goldsmiths in the
history of letters. When the book was published in 1950, the
criticism was fierce but misguided. Hemingway felt wounded where he
hurt most, and he defended himself from Havana, sending a
passionate telegram that seemed undignified for an author of his
stature. Not only was it his best novel, it was also his most
personal, for he had written it at the dawn of an uncertain autumn,
with nostalgia for the irretrievable years already lived and a
poignant premonition of the few years he had left to live. In none
of his books did he leave much of himself, nor did he find - with
all the beauty and all the tenderness - a way to give form to the
essential sentiment of his work and his life: the uselessness of
victory. The death of his protagonist, ostensibly so peaceful and
natural, was the disguised prefiguration of his own
suicide.
When one lives for so long with a writer's work, and with such
intensity and affection, one is left without a way of separating
fiction from reality. I have spent many hours of many days reading
in that cafe in the Place St. Michel that he considered good for
writing because it seemed pleasant, warm, clean and friendly, and I
have always hoped to find once again the girl he saw enter one
wild, cold, blowing day, a girl who was very pretty and
fresh-looking, with her hair cut diagonally across her face like a
crow's wing. ''You belong to me and Paris belongs to me,'' he wrote
for her, with that relentless power of appropriation that his
writing had. Everything he described, every instant that was his,
belongs to him forever. I can't pass by No. 12 Rue de l'Odeon in
Paris without seeing him in conversation with Sylvia Beach, in a
bookstore that is now no longer the same, killing time until e six
in the evening, when James Joyce might happen to drop by. On the
Kenya prairie, seeing them only once, he became the owner of his
buffaloes and his lions, and of the most intimate secrets of
hunting. He became the owner of bullfighters and prizefighters, of
artists and gunmen who existed only for an instant while they
became his. Italy, Spain, Cuba - half the world is filled with the
places that he appropriated simply by mentioning them. In Cojimar,
a little village near Havana where the solitary fisherman of ''The
Old Man and the Sea'' lived, there is a plaque commemorating his
heroic exploits, with a gilded bust of Hemingway. In Finca de la
Vigia, his Cuban refuge, where he lived until shortly before his
death, the house remains intact amid the shady trees, with his
diverse collection of books, his hunting trophies, his writing
lectern, his enormous dead man's shoes, the countless trinkets of
life from all over the world that were his until his death, and
that go on living without him, with the soul he gave them by the
mere magic of his owning them.
Some years ago, I got into the car of Fidel Castro - who is a
tenacious reader of literature -and on the seat I saw a small book
bound in red leather. ''It's my master Hemingway,'' Fidel Castro
told me. Really, Hemingway continues to be where one least expects
to find him -20 years after his death - as enduring yet ephemeral
as on that morning, perhaps in May, when he said ''Goodbye, amigo''
from across the Boulevard St. Michel.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the author of ''One Hundred Years of
Solitude,'' ''The Autumn of the Patriarch'' and other novels. This
article was translated by Randolph Hogan of The Times cultural news
staff.
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