For one, there’s this– which is helpful.
And this– which I’m glad already exists, for I thought of making myself.
Although, I think it ought to also include some other sites:
I also must put to word to web that “A False Spring” is true. That every song that has ever sung of anything true is singing of “A False Spring.” That chapter is exactly like it is. That’s exactly how it is.
But really I just want to record the parts of this book which have cut a neat incision through my chest and grabbed my heart with no neatness at all. How to live better and write better. Hemingway walks everywhere and sees everything and turns it into beauty like some alchemist’s miracle.
From A Good Café on the Place St.Michel:
“A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table ear the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are watiing for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. Hames without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph adnt hen I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.
… After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.”
From Miss Stein Instructs:
“It was wodnerful to walk down long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in ffront 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 out over the roods of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will wrote now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then becasue there was alwyas one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaoratelu, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declaraive sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was tryig to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
It was in that room too that I learned not to think aobut anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I ahd worked welll, adn that needed luck as well as disciploine, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.”
From “Un Génération Perdue”:
“When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kep thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was vetter than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still somethin gthere in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
From Miss Stein Instructs:
“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg wher ethe great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went htere nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute in Chicage. I was learning somethin gfrom the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences dar from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put into them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.
…
‘Yes, yes, Hemingway, ‘ she said. ‘But you were lviing in a milieu of criminals and perverts.’
I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated.
…
The park was closed so I had to walk down along it to the rue de Veugirard and around the lower end of the park. It was sad when the park was clsoed and locked and I was sad walking around it instead of through it and in a hurry to get home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The day had started out so brightly too. I would have to work hard tomorrow. Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now.”
From “Un Génération Perdue”: