All his life Hemingway was plagued by strange incidents. A skylight fell on him in Paris, he broke his toe kicking a gate in, he gaffed a shark and while shooting it in the head with his Colt Woodsman .22, with which he could unerringly shatter wine bottles at 100 feet, the gaff broke and he shot himself in both legs. A lady hunter nearly blew his head off with a shotgun. Several auto accidents; concussion after concussion. The picadors are at work.
Hemingway could smell death. He suddenly left a chateau which he said had the stink of death about it, and after he left, the chateau was bombed and several people killed. And he could smell death on others. I have already related incidents.
Hemingway wrote himself as a character. He wrote his life and death so closely that he had to be stopped before he found out what he was doing and wrote about that. There is the moment when the bull looks speculatively from the cape to the matador. The bull is learning. The matador must kill him quick. Two plane crashes in a row, both near Kilimanjaro. The matador has to smash his head against the window of a burning plane. Otherwise he would have found out why two planes crashed near Kilimanjaro; he wrote it. He wrote it in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, where Death is the pilot. ‘He was pointing now, white white white as far as the eye can see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ That’s the last line.
He who writes death as the pilot of a small plane in Africa should beware of small planes in Africa, especially in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. But it was written, and he stepped right into his own writing. The brain damage he sustained butting his way out of the burning plane led to a hopeless depression and eventually to his suicide. He put both barrels of a 12 gauge shotgun, No. ‘heavy duck load, against his forehead and tripped both triggers. Fix yourself on that: ‘White white white as far as the eye can see ahead... the snows of Kilimanjaro.’
And unlike the French detective writer, Hemingway wasn’t cheating by the act of suicide. He was dead already.
Now suppose you had all the works of a particular writer and could only take some with you, which would be the first you’d throw away? I would get rid of No Man is an Island, Across the River and into the Trees, The Green Hills of Africa, and Death in the Afternoon. In Across the River etc. he was writing himself close, but it was not good — not good at all. It is just about the worst of Hemingway’s books.
But I would certainly keep The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which remains one of the greatest stories about death ever written, because he wrote his own death in that story. Perhaps he was too much of an egoist to write anything else.
Hemingway talks about looking at what is in front of you. Well, a young man who wanted to learn how to write went fishing with Papa Hemingway and asked him about writing. Papa replied, ‘Try to figure out why I cussed you out ten minutes ago and how the sun looked on the side of that marlin I just caught.’ But between Hemingway’s eyes and the object, falls the shadow of Hemingway.
Korzybski says the creative process takes place when you look at an object or a process in silence. And this I think is especially true of dialogue. If you can look at a character without talking, from inner silence, then your character will talk, and you get realistic dialogue. Take something that you actually heard someone say, then let him say that and look at him; pretty soon he’ll say some more in the same lines. I remember this amazing used car salesman, from Houston. He was the one who told me ‘You know all a Jew wants to do is doddle a Christian girl, you know that yourself.’ Well, I didn’t say anything, but if I sat him down right here, he could say a lot more along the same lines, I’m sure.
But Hemingway didn’t give his characters a chance to talk. He always talked for them, and they all talk Hemingway. Take The Killers; it reads well, a good story, and very carefully assembled. The dialogue sounds good, but how good is it? Here are the two killers waiting around for the Swede, gassing meantime with the counterman in this diner.
‘What do they do in this town?’
‘They eat the dinner. They all come here and eat the big dinner.’
‘That’s right’ says the counterman.
‘He says that’s right.’
And then they’re leaving, they’re deciding whether they’re going to kill the counterman or not.
‘What about sonny boy?’
‘He’s all right.’
‘You’ve got a lot of luck.
You should play the races.’
Of course, these last lines are purely Hemingway. And someone, maybe the counterman, says about the Swede: ‘He’s cowering in his room.’ Also: ‘I can’t bear to think of him just laying there, knowing he’s going to get it.’
‘Well you’d better not think of it then.’ It’s stylized. The killers never really get off the page, you can’t really see them. They don’t come across with any real menace to the reader.
The Great Gatsby
I would never think seriously about making a film on the Great Gatsby, but it would be an interesting exercise since the film has been made, to decide how one would make it, how it could be made, and if it could be made. And I think the answer is probably not. The picture can be made but I don’t think it would be any good. You learn more by considering a difficult book to film, looking at what can and cannot be adapted to the film media, rather than a book written as a film script like JAWS by Peter Benchley, about the great white shark.
Now look at Gatsby, you take the prose away and what is left. Wooden dialogue, creepy action and as for the reconstruction of the 20’s you can do that better with a selection of old stock footage. It would be a much better reconstruction of the 20’s than in the present film, which I haven’t seen yet, in all probability.
The point is, that just asking yourself, how could this book be filmed will lead you to take a closer look at the book and a closer look at Gatsby. As Wolfshine says, ‘I saw right away, he was a fine appearing gentlemanly young man. And when he told me he was Oxford, I knew I could use him good.’ In stolen bonds you want someone who looks good, but people aren’t paid the kind of money Gatsby was making just to look good. In those days $200 a week could buy someone to look good. Young Oxfords like Gatsby, of course this is on the level old sport. Or old dignified good lookers to sit around the front office and Myer Wolfshine was not a man to put out money for nothing, or to put out any more money than he had to for anything. The answer is then, not only was Gatsby in shady and illegal business, he was also very good at covering it up. Stupid people can get rich in a legitimate business just by being there at the right time. I’ve seen this happen. But no dummy splits the take with Myer Wolfshine, the man who fixed the World Series. And yet, there is scarcely any indication of intelligence in anything that Gatsby says in this book. Occasionally, an indescribable but familiar look on his face indicates that the Gatsby playing in Wolfshine’s league is there. But this whole side of Gatsby is not even hinted at, something reasonably acute is when Caraway says about Daisy, ‘her voice is full of money.’ Ride on. Don’t take the boy for dumber than he is. He couldn’t have been dumb at all Then why does he act so dumb. All this old sport and Oxford routine and lies about his past, tiger hunting and all that bullshit. Buying a big house and filling it with mooching drunks to impress Daisy. Did he have other more accessible girls. Well, we never see them. And why Daisy? Plenty of nice girls falling all over themselves to marry that kind of bread.
In fact, the more closely you look at Gatsby, the more mysterious he becomes. Was he actually psychotic, a split personality, one hand not knowing what the other hand was doing. It doesn’t seem likely. You need both hands to function in Wolfshine’s area. Were these emotions and this improbable dream skillfully grafted on to him by the author — is that the real secret. That he was a hybrid, a synthetic being, literally created by Fitzgerald’s prose, who could not possibly have existed in any other medium. Every now and then that indescribable but familar look comes over his face and he says, ‘Pardon me, old sport’ and nips into his palatial bathroom, sunken bathtub in pink marble, gold faucets and all the
trimmings. And there on the mirror written in silver letters is a passage of what he needs, pure F. Scott prose. He’s thin, he can’t see his face in the mirror at this point, he reaches under the washstand for his works — antique silver tablespoons, syringe and spike — and the prose drains into the spoon. He draws up a horse syringe full and shoots it in the main line. Now he can see himself. He smooths his hair and straightens his exclusive silken tie and comes out old sporty, a fine appearing Oxford. Well, the wind-up is of course that he runs out of prose, shoots the whole book up and that look is getting more and more familiar. Very much the Jekyll and Hyde theme I think.
He swindles Tom out of all his money, Daisy divorces him under the circumstances to keep her voice full of money and marries Gatsby. Now we’re five years later. She’s taken to drink, always nipping at a bottle around the house. Gatsby isn’t such a gentleman anymore. There he is slapping her around with a wet towel, he has some business connections coming to dinner. But he isn’t the kind of man you’d like to take home to introduce to your mother and sister anymore. Hardly the kind of man you’d want to be in the same room with anymore.
Indescribable old sport. Besides he is getting greedy. Wolfshine rather reluctantly puts through a phone call to Chicago and they get him in the swimming pool
Well take a look at that take, Gatsby on a pneumatic mattress, floating around the pool, tracing a thin red circle in the water. How about that. What was he shot with, a 22 short? It didn’t go through and sink the mattress out from under him. Well, in short I think Gatsby is best left alone.
Cut-up from THE GREAT GATSBY and some other sources
It was an extraordinary gift for hope not likely I will ever find again — what dock? The wind had blown off his dreams. Described the fallout as eating the trees. An ashen figure to this blue lawn. And his dream was standing by the swimming pool. Inessential houses began to melt away human dreams the quiet lights in grass outside ... darkness blew through the room pale flags like ashen trees twisting and then rippled a transitory moment face shadow. What I had almost remembered old unknown world Gatsby borne back into the past. The green light at the end of romantic readiness loud night wings foul dust floating in the wake of negligible fallout. A fragment of lost words frosted wisp of startled air. A breeze blew through the room blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags at the end of Daisy’s dock. Lips parted a wisp of startled air a small gust of wind the touch of a cluster of leaves revolved its slowly tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. Paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found how raw the sunlight was on the scarcely created grass, a new world material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about like that ashen figure gliding towards him through the Old Metropole filled with faces dead and gone so he waited listening for a moment to a tuning fork struck upon a star one autumn night five years before they had been walking down a street when the leaves were falling and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight already crumbling through the powdery air. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust you perceive the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg blue and gigantic looking out from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles brooding over the solemn dumping ground.
The Johnson Family
I first heard this expression in a book called You Can’t Win by Jack Black, the life story of a burglar. The book was published in 1924 and I read it as a boy fascinated by this dark furtive purposeful world, I managed to get a copy and re-read the book with poignant nostalgia. Between the reader in 1924 and the reader in 1980 falls the shadow of August 6, 1945, one of the most portentous dates of history.
Train whistles across a distant sky. This is a peep show back to the world of rod-riding yeggs and peat men and cat burglars, bindle stiffs, gay cats and hobo jungles and Salt Chunk Mary the fence in her two storey red brick house down by the tracks somewhere in Idaho. She keeps a blue porcelain coffee pot and an iron pot of pork and beans always in the fire. You eat first and talk business later the watches and rings sloped out on the kitchen table by the chipped coffee mugs. She named a price and she didn’t name another. Mary could say no quicker than any woman I ever knew and none of them ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by or a citizen comes up with a load of 00 buck shot into your soft and tenders.
In this world of shabby rooming houses, furtive gray figures in dark suits, hop joints and chili parlors the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He’s a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble making person.
You get to know a Johnson when you see one and you get to know those of another persuasion. I remember in the Merchant Marine training center at Sheepshead Bay when the war ended. Most of the trainees quit right then and there was a long line to turn in equipment which had to be checked out item by item; some of us had only been there a few days and we had no equipment to turn in. So we hoped to avoid standing for hours, days perhaps in line for no purpose. I remember this spade cat said, ‘Well, we’re going to meet a nice guy or we’re going to meet a prick.’ We met a prick but we managed to find a Johnson.
Yes you get to know a Johnson when you see one. The cop who gave me a joint to smoke in the wagon. The hotel clerk who tipped me off I was hot. And sometimes you don’t see the Johnson. I remember a friend of mine asked someone to send him a cake of hash from France. Well the asshole put it into a cheap envelope with no wrapping and it cut through the envelope. But some Johnson had put it back in and sealed the envelope with tape.
Years ago I was stranded in the wilds of East Texas and Bill Gains was sending me a little Pantapon through the mail and he invented this clever code and telegrams are flying back and forth.
‘Urgently need pants.’
‘Panic among dealers. No pants available.’
This was during the war in a town of 200 people. By rights we should have had the FBI swarming all over us. I remember the telegraph operator in his office in the railroad station. He had a kind, unhappy face. I suspect he was having trouble with his wife. Never a question or comment. He just didn’t care what pants stood for. He was a Johnson.
A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn’t stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car. Kells Elvins, a friend of mine, was doing 90 in his Town and Country Chrysler on the way from Pharr, Texas to Laredo. He comes up over a rise and there is a fucking cow right in the middle of the road on the bridge. He slams on the brakes and hits the cow doing 60. The car flips over and he is pinned under it with a broken collar bone covered from head to foot with blood and guts and cowshit. So along comes a car with some salesmen in it. They get out cautiously. He tells them just how to jack the car up and get it off him but when they see that blood they don’t want to know. They don’t want to get mixed up with anything like that. They get back in their car and drive away. Then a truck driver comes along. He doesn’t need to be told exactly what to do, gets the car off Kells and takes him to a hospital. The truck driver was a Johnson. The salesmen were shits like most salesmen. Selling shit and they are shit.
The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position where good and evil are in conflict and the outcome is at this point uncertain. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory.
Which side are you on?
I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little cafe on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier... after lunch a dead empty space ... Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about 50 or older, shabby, obvio
usly very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison
‘My God that’s a harmless looking person!’
He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on their way to the Comisario to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.
He passed and I never saw him again. But I recognized him. He was a Johnson. You get to know a Johnson when you see one... the cop in New Orleans who slipped me a joint to smoke in the paddy wagon, the doctor who gave me a shot of morphine in the hospital while a colleague was muttering about the moral questions involved, the hotel clerk who tipped me the law is on its way, better move out fast.
February 3, 1982 ... A program on El Salvador... a reporter has contacted a guerrilla group. One look at those faces and I know where I stand. I know them all. They are Johnsons. The reporter is checking the contention of the junta and the Reagan administration that the guerrillas are armed with Soviet weapons via Cuba and Nicaragua...