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His briefcase was lying open on a chair near the desk, and the manuscript pages
were protruding from it; someone seemed to have stuffed them into the
briefcase without much care. Hemingway told me that he had been cutting the
manuscript. “The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away,”
he said.
“When I’m writing it, I’m just as proud as a goddam lion. I use the oldest words
in the English language. People think I’m an ignorant bastard who doesn’t
know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older
and better words which if you arrange them in the proper combination you make
it stick. Remember, anybody who pulls his erudition or education on you hasn’t any.
Also, daughter, remember that I never carried Teddy bears to bed with me
since I was four. Now, with seventy-eight-year-old grandmothers taking
advantage of loopholes in the G.I. Bill of Rights whereby a gold-star mother can
receive her son’s education, I thought of establishing a scholarship and sending
myself to Harvard, because my Aunt Arabelle has always felt very bad that
I am the only Hemingway boy that never went to college. But I have been so
busy I have not got around to it. I only went to high school and a couple
of military cram courses, and never took French.
I began to learn to read French by reading the A.P. story in the French paper
after reading the American A.P. story, and finally learned to read it by
reading accounts of things I had seen—les événements sportifs—and from
that and les crimes it was only a jump to Dr. de Maupassant, who wrote
about things I had seen or could understand. Dumas, Daudet, Stendhal, who
when I read him I knew that was the way I wanted to be able to write. Mr. Flaubert,
who always threw them perfectly straight, hard, high, and inside. Then Mr. Baudelaire,
that I learned my knuckle ball from, and Mr. Rimbaud, who never threw a fast ball
in his life. Mr. Gide and Mr. Valéry I couldn’t learn from. I think Mr. Valéry
was too smart for me. Like Jack Britton and Benny Leonard.”
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