I’m Going to Like Creative Writing
I’ve never read much Hemingway. For some reason he was shunted out of high school english books, and Hemingway is so intimidating to me that I wasn’t about to start reading his stuff until I was required to.
For our second class we were asked to read three short stories (what a better way to spend a Friday morning than waking up, showering, and sitting down to read the greats?). One, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, is by Fitzgerald. The title and the author are enough to hook me. I do love Fitzgerald.
Professor Loge, the one I’m in love with, loves Fitzgerald too, but he told us that the writing we turn in for his class should be like Hemingway’s. Short. To the point. It’s practical really. He wants us to be able to produce memos. Two pages maximum. He’s never been asked to make a longer memo. So no fanfare. No pomp. No grand introductions like on any kind of television or Politico story. If there’s something to say, say it.
So there was another reason I was excited to read Hemingway for the first time. The other two stories belonged to him. The first, “A Clean and Well Lighted Place,” was beautiful to be sure, but I know I haven’t understood it the way I should. The second, “Soldier’s Home,” is the reason I’m writing any of this.
I can see everything in it. There’s a young man, hardened but not too hardened by war, come home too late to be a hero, to a quiet town that’s moving on. He sits on the porch reading, eats a sandwich for lunch, walks into town, and enjoys observing the girls with their dutch collars and bobbed hair (how that had changed) walk past, in the sun and in the shade. He wouldn’t mind having a girl, but he doesn’t want the politics of courting and he doesn’t want to talk.
I see all of this. I feel all of this. Perhaps it’s a part of that burning desire for summer, for June and July and August, that is at its strongest in January. But I see a white house in a small town. I see a rap around porch and the chair he sits in reading. I see the girls walking past on the road, passing through the shadows of the trees. I see that perfect blue sky and the clouds drifting ever so slowly across it. I can’t describe it like he did. But if you read that story, you’ll see it. You’ll never be able to forget this place you’ve never been, except you have been there. I want all of it.
I want to sit on that porch and feel the sun and the wind on bare skin and eat a sandwich and watch as people pass through the shade. And if I can do all that with a notebook in my lap and a pen in my hand, writing with a tenth of Hemingway’s skill, that’s all of it.
