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.
