Actors as Writers: 5 of the Most Commonly Portrayed Literary Lions on Film | IndieWire Actors as Writers: 5 of the Most Commonly Portrayed Literary Lions on Film Actors as Writers: 5 of the Most Commonly Portrayed Literary Lions on Film Nov 2, 2012 3:20 pm Share This Article Talk He helped craft some of America's most respected literary works, and now — thanks to Colin Firth, Michael Fassbender and FilmNation Entertainment — the spotlight is back on Scribner's editor extraordinaire Maxwell Perkins. FilmNation announced Thursday that it's shopping the film "Genius" to AFM buyers as a Firth/Fassbender vehicle helmed by theater director Michael Grandage. With a screenplay by "Hugo" scribe John Logan, "Genius" has been in the works since at least 2010, when Sean Penn was in talks to play Perkins. READ MORE: Bond, Batman & Bridget Jones: The 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' Cast (Hearts) Sequels Based on A.

Scott Berg’s biography “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius," the project explores the working and personal relationships between "Look Homeward, Angel" and "Of Time and the River" novelist Thomas Wolfe and his longtime editor. Besides Wolfe's efforts, Perkins had a hand in novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender is the Night"; Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms"; James Jones' "From Here to Eternity"; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Yearling"; and Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country." The work of Perkins' writers has spawned numerous Hollywood productions over the years, while the writers themselves have also become characters on the big screen. That trend comes full circle with "Genius," as Michael Fassbender joins the ranks of actors who have portrayed these American men and women of letters: Ernest Hemingway "Big Papa" attracts some big names when it comes to his big-screen persona.

Clive Owens tackled him in HBO's "Hemingway & Gelhorn," Anthony Hopkins starts shooting "Hemingway & Fuentes" opposite Andy Garcia in January and Albert Finney was "Hemingway, The Hunter of Death" in 2001. Even Sandra Bullock tried her hand at Hemingway lore opposite Chris O'Donnell in 1996's "In Love and War," Richard Attenborough's portrait of the writer during his stint as a WWI ambulance driver (and hospital patient). Most recently, Corey Stoll took on the tough-talking role in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." READ MORE: CANNES 2012: Philip Kaufman Talks Tumultuous Romances and Trying Out TV With 'Hemingway & Gellhorn' F. Scott Fitzgerald The influential Jazz Age author — who died at 44 years of age — has been portrayed by Gregory Peck ("Beloved Infidel"), Jeremy Irons ("Last Call") and Richard Chamberlain (TV's "F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'The Last of the Belles'"). Fitzgerald received the social butterfly treatment in 1994's "Mrs.

Parker and the Vicious Circle," with Malcolm Gets in the role, and he showed up with Hemingway in "Midnight in Paris," in which Tom Hiddleston oozed just enough charm to make him seem like a decent enough fellow. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Mary Steenburgen starred as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author in "Cross Creek," a film directed by Martin Ritt ("Sounder," "Norma Rae"). It premiered at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, where a pregnant Steenburgen described the challenge of acting in writing scenes to Roger Ebert . "We actors like to chew up the scenery," she said, "and Marjorie wanted to sit and watch life unfolding. I had to make a writer external, and it's not, it's an internal experience." Maxwell Perkins Malcolm McDowell had a brief role in "Cross Creek" as Perkins himself, who visits Rawlings in Florida after a fishing trip with Hemingway in Key West. McDowell was married to Steenburgen at the time.

Ring Lardner Perkins is credited with having tremendous faith in Lardner, a sportswriter, playwright and novelist whose "How to Write Short Stories (With Samples)" put him on the literary map in 1924. Lardner the sportswriter made an appearance in the 1988 baseball drama "Eight Men Out" via John Sayles, who did triple duty on the film as writer, director and actor. Sayles' Lardner and Studs Terkel's Hugh Fullerton spend their time on screen commenting on the action unfolding both on and off the baseball field. Ernest Hemingway Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver Hemingway, Ernest Biography of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in suburban Oak Park, IL, to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Ernest was the second of six children to be raised in the quiet suburban town. His father was a physician, and both parents were devout Christians. Hemingway's childhood pursuits fostered the interests that would blossom into literary achievements.

Although Grace hoped her musical interests would influence her son, young Hemingway preferred to accompany his father on hunting and fishing trips. This love of outdoor adventure would be reflected later in many of Hemingway's stories, particularly those featuring protagonist Nick Adams. Hemingway also had an aptitude for physical challenge that engaged him throughout high school, where he both played football and boxed. Because of permanent eye damage contracted from numerous boxing matches, Hemingway was repeatedly rejected from service in World War I. Boxing provided more material for Hemingway's stories, as well as a habit of likening his literary feats to boxing victories. Hemingway also edited his high school newspaper and reported for the Kansas City Star, adding a year to his age after graduating from high school in 1917. After this short stint, Hemingway finally was able to participate in World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was wounded on July 8, 1918, on the Italian front near Fossalta di Piave. During his convalescence in Milan, he had an affair with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky.

Hemingway received two decorations from the Italian government, and he joined the Italian infantry. Fighting on the Italian front inspired the plot of A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Indeed, war itself is a major theme in Hemingway's works. Hemingway would witness firsthand the cruelty and stoicism required of the soldiers he would portray in his writing when covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 for the Toronto Star. In 1937, he was a war correspondent in Spain, and the events of the Spanish Civil War inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls . Upon returning briefly to the United States after the First World War, Hemingway worked for the Toronto Star and lived for a short time in Chicago. There, he met Sherwood Anderson and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. On Anderson's advice, the couple moved to Paris, where he served as foreign correspondent for the Star. As Hemingway covered events on all of Europe, the young reporter interviewed important leaders such as Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Mussolini. The Hemingways lived in Paris from 1921-1926.

This time of stylistic development for Hemingway reached its zenith in 1923 with the publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems by Robert McAlmon in Paris and the birth of his son John. This time in Paris also inspired the novel A Moveable Feast , published posthumously in 1964. During this period following the birth of his first child, Hemingway began to acquire a series of nicknames that eventually culminated in the well-known moniker “Papa.” Hadley and John referred to him as “Ernestoic,” “Tatie,” and “Tiny,” and he was also known as “Ernie,” “Hem,” “Wemedge,” and “Hemmy” at various points in his life. “Papa” came about for a number of reasons, including, according to official biographer Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s desire to be respected, admired, and obeyed. In addition, “Papa” dovetailed with Hemingway’s reputation as a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman and adventurer. In January 1923, Hemingway began writing sketches that would appear in In Our Time , which was published in 1924.

In August of 1923 he and Hadley returned to Toronto where he worked once again for the Star. At this point, he produced no writing that was not committed to publication, and in the coming months, his job kept him from starting anything new. However, this time off from writing gave him renewed energy upon his return to Paris in January of 1924. During his time in Toronto he read Joyce's Dubliners, which forever changed his writing career. By August of 1924, he had the majority of In Our Time written. Although there was a period when his publisher Horace Liverwright wanted to change much of the collection, Hemingway stood firm and refused to change even one word of the book. In Paris, Hemingway used Sherwood Anderson's letter of introduction to meet Gertrude Stein and enter the world of expatriate authors and artists who inhabited her intellectual circle. The famous description of this "lost generation" was born of an employee's remark to Hemingway, and it became immortalized as the epigraph for his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises . This "lost generation" both characterized the postwar generation and the literary movement it produced.

In the 1920s, writers such as Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein decried the false ideals of patriotism that led young people to war, only to the benefit of materialistic elders. These writers held that the only truth was reality, and thus life could be nothing but hardship. This tenet strongly influenced Hemingway. The late 1920s were a time of many publications for Hemingway. In 1926, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises were published by Charles Scribner's Sons. In 1927 Hemingway published a short story collection, Men Without Women. In the same year he divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfieffer, a writer for Vogue. In 1928, they moved to Key West, where sons Patrick and Gregory were born in 1929 and 1932. 1928 was a year of both success and sorrow for Hemingway. In this year, A Farewell to Arms was published, and his father committed suicide. Clarence Hemingway had been suffering from hypertension and diabetes.

This painful experience is reflected in the pondering of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In addition to personal experiences with war and death, Hemingway's extensive travel in pursuit of hunting and other sports provided a great deal of material for his novels. Bullfighting inspired Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932. In 1934, Hemingway went on safari in Africa, which gave him new themes and scenes on which to base The Snows of Kilamanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa, published in 1935. In 1937 he traveled to Spain as a war correspondent, and he published To Have and Have Not. After his divorce from Pauline in 1940, Hemingway married Martha Gelhorn, a writer. They toured China before settling in Cuba at Finca Vigia (Look-out Farm). For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in the same year. During World War II, Hemingway volunteered his fishing boat and served with the U.S. Navy as a submarine spotter in the Caribbean.

In 1944, he traveled through Europe with the Allies as a war correspondent and participated in the liberation of Paris. Hemingway divorced again in 1945 and then married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, in 1946. They lived in Venice before returning to Cuba. In 1950 he published Across the River and Into the Trees, though it was not received with the usual critical acclaim. In 1952, however, Hemingway proved the comment "Papa is finished" wrong, with The Old Man and the Sea winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1960, the now aged Hemingway moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where he was hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression. On July 2, 1961, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. He was buried in Ketchum. "Papa" was both a legendary celebrity and a sensitive writer, and his influence, as well as some unseen writings, survived his passing.

In 1964, A Moveable Feast was published; in 1969, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War; in 1970, Islands in the Stream; in 1972, The Nick Adams Stories; in 1985, The Dangerous Summer; and in 1986, The Garden of Eden . Hemingway's own life and character are as fascinating as in any of his stories. On one level, Papa was a legendary adventurer who enjoyed his flamboyant lifestyle and celebrity status. However, deep inside lived a disciplined author who worked tirelessly in pursuit of literary perfection. His success in both living and writing is reflected in the fact that Hemingway is a hero to intellectuals and rebels alike; the passions of the man are equaled only by those in his writing. Study Guides on Works by Ernest Hemingway Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby book by Harry Crosby | 2 available editions | Alibris Books Dec 6, 2012 Harry Crosby Diary Reading Harry Crosby's diary proved to be an interesting experience.

It gave me a glimpse of Paris in the 20s, of life as the American expatriates lived it, but from the angle of someone who was wealthy. Before I came across Crosby's diary, most of my notions about Paris in the 20s (and 30s) had been derived from the works of writers, journalist, commentators, editors who had lived in Paris on small incomes or on no incomes at all. Quite a few of them lived on very little money or had to scrounge to get a meal or borrow from friends and loved ones. I am thinking of Hemingway, of course, and of Gertrude Stein, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle and Malcolm Cowley and certainly Henry Miller. I was aware that the 20s saw the growth of immense wealth and quite a few wealthy people had also made Paris their home. But since very few among the rich left written records of their, the lives remained unknown to me. Caresse and Harry Crosby appear to be a breed apart: not only fabulously rich but also totally immersed in the world of art and literature, in culture, in fact, as an artifact of human endeavor.

Wealth in itself was meaningless to Harry unless it could be put to use to beautify and enhance life. To this end he devoted himself. Living life with taste and grace and style was what he wanted. Making money was not as important as spending it well, spending it in the service of Beauty and Excellence. Harry had come very close to dying during his stint as an ambulance driver in WWI. This experience he shared with Hemingway. But the two young men reacted very differently to this experience. Hemingway decided to devote his life to making art; Harry wanted to make life itself an art. Harry's wealth robbed him of the discipline he needed to submit to in order to learn the craft of writing. Hemingway's poverty imposed on him the necessity of submitting to this same discipline. Ultimately, Hemingway also ended his life in suicide. But he only conceded to death after a lifetime of dedicated work and effort and struggle. Harry blew his brains out because the struggle of life meant nothing to him. After all the drinking and the drugs and sex and the seductions and life became a weariness from which he wanted to escape.

And yet in his diary he leaves behind an intriguing record of a keen mind, an evolved sensibility and a sensitive soul. For anyone interested in this time period and in Paris the way it was in the 20s, this diary provides a marvelously detailed portrait of people and places. Hans Jan 10, 2008 An intimate portrait of a complex mind. Shadows of the Sun is the collected diaries of one of the most interesting poets of the 20th century. Harry's life burned with a bright incandescent heat & his poetry is a vivid reflection of this. When Harry served as an ambulance driver in the first World War he narrowly escaped a certain death. It was after this close brush with death that Harry began to explore his writing talent. This book captures some of Harry's most personal writings & also includes several of his poems. It is a rare chance indeed when we are given the opportunity to witness a poets evolution so thoroughly in one book. Not to be missed! Why Ernest Hemingway was important: his life and legacy Tibi Puiu Ernest Hemingway is famous for being one of the most appreciated American fiction writers. However, his personal life is no less interesting.

A tough, hard-driving, hard-drinking, larger-than-life figure who hunts big game on the savannah, cheers toreadors, covers wars and always, always writes. Reading the countless biographies and reports of Hemingway’s life, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that Hemingway also suffered from some serious mental health conditions. He was a real badass for sure, but he could also be a real prick! Hemingway is also a genuine survivor, too. He lived through anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, skin cancer, hepatitis, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, a crushed vertebra, and a fractured skull. It seems like the only thing that could kill Hemingway was Hemingway himself. Alas, this was exactly what happened. He believed the FBI would ransack his things and follow him around. This, and other borderline psychotic episodes prompted his wife to admit him in a mental hospital. There, he received electric shocks until he couldn’t remember his name anymore, let alone write. He killed himself shortly after his 36th electric shock.

Ironically, the FBI admitted they were following Hemingway and ransacked his belongings. “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” At times, it’s difficult to decipher where Hemingway’s life and his legend part. Luckily there is an overwhelming amount of information on his life. From his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, through the novels that were taken from his own experiences to his death at 62, Hemingway’s life was thoroughly documented. It’s easy to fall in the deep well that was Hemingway’s life and never come out, though. “If you get too fixated on Hemingway, you lose the ability to understand him,” says Michael Reynolds, author of several books on Hemingway’s life. Hemingway was born in 1899, and like any child born at the dawn of a new century, his childhood was marked by a period of rapid progress and change that swept the US. His father was a doctor while his mother was a musician. Together, Hemingway’s parents greatly influenced the writer and got him interested in sciences and objective reasoning, but also arts.

“He really grew up with a rich environment of culture, religion and the sciences,” says Redd Griffin, historian and board member of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. After graduating high school, Hemingway moved to Kansas City where he got a job as a cub reporter for the Star, covering the local beat that included fires, work strikes and crime. This brief stint between 1917 and 1918 went to greatly influence him as a writer, as Hemingway himself later acknowledged. In was during this time that Hemingway formed his streamlined prose infused with “short declarative sentences.” A born explorer, Hemingway enlisted in the army to fight in the war. Due to medical reasons, he wasn’t allowed to serve as a soldier, so instead he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He was wounded in both legs by mortar and machine-gun fire. That didn’t stop him from getting his fellow soldiers to safety and out of the line of fire, which earned him the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor , despite not even being Italian.

Hemingway kept the piece of shrapnel, along with a small handful of other “charms” including a ring set with a bullet fragment, in a small leather change purse. While hospitalized in Milan, Hemingway fell in love with a nurse. The experience, scholars say, inspired him to write the classic “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) – the story of a World War I ambulance driver who is injured in action and falls for his nurse. The ending is a lot more tragic, though. US writer and journalist Ernest HEMINGWAY with soldiers at the front lines in Spain. December 1937. Though he didn’t fight in any war, he did, however, work as a war correspondent in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II, having landed on Normandy for D day on the seventh wave, in an LCVP commanded by Lt. (jg) Robert Anderson. In fact, during WII Hemingway equipped his fishing boat with direction-finding equipment, a machine-gun, and grenades to hunt for Nazi U-boats in the Atlantic. In his memoirs, Hemingway’s son wrote that they only saw one sub.

It was far away and was way too fast for them to ever catch so nothing came of it. They also practiced how they would throw the grenades at the subs by blowing up sea turtles. Hemingway never had any respect for animals, a widely known fact. Nevertheless, no American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable frontlines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works. “Going back to Africa after all this time, there’s the excitement of a first adventure. I love Africa and I feel it’s another home, and any time a man can feel that, not counting where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.” Ernest Hemingway poses with a water buffalo in Africa, 1953-1954. An accomplished outdoorsman, Hemingway loved to hunt and fish. He felt equally at home stalking lions in Africa or cruising the Gulf Stream in search of marlin and tuna. According to personal accounts and letters sent to friends, though, it was on safaris in Africa that Hemingway felt most alive.

He was such a good hunter that during his second safari the local game warden even left him temporarily in charge of the district he was quartered in. Hunting and fishing were an integral part of who Hemingway was, which is no wonder that the themes are often reflected in his masterful works of fiction, from his famous account of an African safari in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” to passages about duck hunting in “Across the River and into the Trees”. He also wrote a whole book about his hunting experiences called “Hemingway on Hunting”, which features selections from his best-loved novels and stories, along with journalistic pieces from such magazines as Esquire and Vogue. “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.” Hemingway boxing in Africa. His other life passion was boxing. He practiced the sport since childhood and was quite good at it, at one point being considered a successful amateur boxer. He even had a boxing ring built in the backyard of his Key West home, right next to the pool, so that he could spar with guests. When he wasn’t boxing himself, he would sometimes act as a referee.

One time, he was the referee in a match where one of the fellows was receiving a serious beating to the point of abuse, but the fighter would never back down and rise each time he would get knocked down. The fighter’s manager “Shine” Forbes at one point had enough and threw the towel on the floor to signal the concede. Not your typical ref, Hemingway took the towel and threw it out of the ring. This went back and forth for a couple of times until Shine, furious like a bull, stepped into the ring and punched the ref. It was only later that Shine learned the man he had punched was none other than Ernest Hemingway. Embarrassed he visited Hemingway’s home to apologize. Hemingway was not bothered at all by the incident and tho two eventually became quite close friends. In another famous instance, Hemingway demonstrated not only his superior boxing skills but also his fishing abilities. While on a fishing tournament in Bimini, Hemingway enraged the locals after he fished the waters better than some of the previous champions who had been fishing their entire lives. To make up for it, Hemingway offered the locals to give back their lost tournament money.

But not for free – challengers had to go in the ring with big Papa for three rounds and win. One contender was a man who the locals said could “carry a piano on his head.” Unimpressed, the 35-year-old Hemingway beat him in under a minute and a half. The other three challengers suffered a similar fate. “Develop a built-in bullshit detector.” Right: Max Eastman A megalomaniac, Hemingway did not take lightly those who tarnished his macho reputation. One notable episode involves an altercation between Hemingway and fellow writer Max Eastman in their publisher’s office one day in 1937. Hemingway was furious when he found a line in Eastman’s new essay which read “Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you.” He confronted Eastman and in his uncanny style challenged the writer to take his shirt off and see who had more chest hair. Needless to say, Hemingway had the most hair. Triumphant, Hemingway proceeded to hit Eastman in the face with his own book.

According to a 1937 NY Times article , Eastman allegedly then threw Hemingway over a desk and stood him on his head in a corner. Hemingway denied this happened and offered a new challenge: “If Mr. Eastman takes his prowess seriously — if he has not, as it seems, gone in for fiction — then let him waive all medical rights and legal claims to damages, and I’ll put up $1,000 for any charity he favors or for himself. Then we’ll go into a room and he can read his book to me–the part of his book about me. Well, the best man unlocks the door.” There was no reply from Eastman. “Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy” Hemingway’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises” turned Pamplona’s annual fiesta of San Fermin from a local event into an internationally recognized one that attracts around a million visitors each year.

The novel describes a trip made by a group of Bohemians from Paris to Pamplona in the 1920s and is inspired by characters he met in post-war France and his initial visit to the capital of Navarra with his first wife Hadley in 1923. In a NYTimes article from 1932 , a journalist writes “Mr. Hemingway knows bull-fighting at least as well as the specialized sports writer in our own country knows baseball, football, racing or fighting. He knows it so well that on occasion only the introduction of an extremely singular old lady as the author’s interlocutor, a few digressions on death, modern literature and sex life, joined with Mr. Hemingway’s extremely masculine style of writing, save the reader from drowning in a flood of technicalities.” In a piece for the Toronto Star in 1923 , Hemingway wrote bullfighting “symbolizes the struggle between man and beasts. The three acts of the drama are the entry, the planting of the banderilleros, and the death of the bull.

A Canadian at ringside.” Letter to Ezra Pound, July 19, 1924: Dear Ezra— Here, at 900 meters above the Nivel del Mare on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees is a good place to observe the ruin of my finances and literary career. Shit. I appeared in the bull ring on 5 different mornings—was cogida 3 times—accomplished 4 veronicas in good form and one natural with the muleta, the last morning, received contusions and abrasions in the pecho and other places, was drunk twice, saw Bill drunk twice…We haven’t enough pesetas now to pay our hotel Bill and dont know how we’ll get away from here. …Having been bitched financially and in a literary way by my friends I take great and unintellectual pleasure in the immediate triumphs of the bull ring with their reward in ovations, alcoholism, being pointed out on the street, general respect and the other things Literary Guys have to wait until they are 89 years old to get. Advertisement The Plaza is the only remaining place where valor and art can combine for success.

In all other arts the more meazly and shitty the guy, I.E. Joyce, the greater the success in his art… Then when a guy has a few decent human instincts like yourself what do they do to him? I wish to hell I was 16 and had art and valor. …I am going to have to quit writing because we haven’t any money. The Transatlantic killed my chances of having a book published this fall and by next Spring some son of a bitch will have copied everything I’ve written and they will simply call me another of his imitators. Now we haven’t got any money anymore I am going to have to quit writing and I never will have a book published. I feel cheerful as hell. These god damn bastards. See you about the 27th of the month. Love to Dorothy— Hem. “I drink to make other people more interesting.” It’s no secret Hemingway enjoyed a tipple or two, to say the least. He liked his Martinis dry, his Mojitos sweet, and was rumored to be drinking a quart of whiskey a day later in his life.

Just to get an idea, here’s a great find tweeted by Letters Of Note featuring Hemingway’s postscript to a letter to Ivan Kashkin, a Russian translator, and critic, in 1935. Hemingway explains his love of alcohol in a P.P.S. pic.twitter.com/FDQViJskE7 — Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) July 2, 2013 In fact, Hemingway was such a notorious enthusiast of alcohol that there’s even a myth that attributes the invention of the famous cocktail “Bloody Mary” to him. The legend has it that the drink was first served to Hemingway in Paris. As the story goes, his doctors had forbidden him from having alcohol and his wife, Mary, was holding him to it. A bartender at the Ritz mixed him the vodka-and-tomato juice drink, full of booze that could not be detected thanks to the other strong ingredients. Having got the better of his “bloody wife,” the cocktail was christened after her. A number of sources have debunked this myth. It’s true, however, that he indeed invented a drink during his stints in Havana: the Papa Doble.

Journalists and guests recorded the drink recipe for posterity, but there are small disagreements about the exact mixture. Here’s one version you might want to try at home: 2oz white rum 2 tbsp grapefruit juice ½ tbsp maraschino cherry Shake, and pour into glass FULL of shaved or crushed ice. It is a settled fact that Hemingway liked his drinks with copious amounts of ice. Hemingway enjoying in a Papa Doble in the company of a charming lady. “Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.” While he loved alcohol, Hemingway always refrained from drinking when working. When asked in an interview if rumors of him taking a pitcher of martinis to work every morning were true, he answered, “Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes – and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one. Besides, who in hell would mix more than one martini at a time?” “When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.” Hemingway with a shotgun. Circa 1950.

Hemingway vs Hemingway. Hemingway lost. “Death is like an old whore in a bar–I’ll buy her a drink but I won’t go upstairs with her.” Colour photograph of Hemingway. Despite his numerous adventures and close calls, death always seemed to escape Hemingway. Besides the shrapnel from WWI, he also bore a bullet wound after he accidentally shot himself while trying to finish off a still thrashing shark he had dragged aboard while shark hunting. Shooting yourself in the leg is always embarrassing, but Hemingway gets off since it happened while he went shark fishing. Later in life, he survived anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, skin cancer, hepatitis, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, and several major injuries. However, the greatest trick he played against death was during his second safari when he survived not, but two place crashes! In the winter 1953-1954 Hemingway set of for Africa again. A bit older and changed – drinking far too much. Now traveling with his fourth and last wife, Mary, to enjoy another safari. He also wanted to visit his son, who was living in Tanganyika.

The visit was in the middle of Kenya’s Mau-Mau rebellion ignited by president Jomo Kenyatta against the British colonialists. The rebellion was very violent and Hemingway almost lost his life on this journey, but it was not as a victim of the Mau-Mau. Over the Congo, his plane was struck an abandoned utility pole and “crash landed in heavy brush”. Hemingway’s injuries included a head wound while Mary broke two ribs. A few days later, he and his wife boarded a so-called rescue plane. In a stroke of bad luck, the plane had to perform an emergency dive to avoid a bird strike and the plane ground-looped, eventually crashing . The plane was all up in flames, but Hemingway and Mary managed to escape alive, but not unscathed. They eventually arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway’s death. Here’s a complete list filled in by Hemingway himself in a letter to Kit Figgis, who, with her husband, Larry, assisted the Hemingways in the aftermath of the accidents and contributed to an article about their safari that was published in Look magazine.

“Dear Kit: I must have been pretty punchy when I wrote you the enclosed. Sent it as a curiosity you can always sell it for the children. I’ll get you the name of a dealer. What I sorted out to, according to…doctor, very practical type, was: major concussion, rupture one kidney, damage liver, collapse of intestines, Paralysis sphincter, 3/4 lost sight in one eye (left) (never any good anyway), Burns head, Brush fire = burns on lips (light), left hand severe, right forearm ditto, abdomen (light), legs (Light). Am beating all raps OK. But you can’t beat lives many…Had cable from Bill Lowe that everything sold and 1st installment in Look April 20th on the newsstands…Kit this trip has been a little rugged. All the effects were delayed. Good thing we did the piece when we did although we could have done it the worst days ever saw…If I haven’t paid Major…(there are about 2 blank weeks) give him my permanent address 90 Guaranty Trust Co of N.Y.

4 Place de la Concorde, Paris, France and tell him to bill me there…Please kiss my godson…Love Papa. (March 17, 1954)” Once he reached his sixties, Hemingway found that he could no longer write. In the spring of 1961, he was asked to contribute something brief to a presentation volume for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Just a single sentence. He couldn’t do it. “It just won’t come anymore,” he told a close friend, and he was weeping as he said it. At the end of his life, Hemingway was fraught with paranoid delusions. He thought his friends were trying to murder him. He thought two men working late in a bank were “Feds” auditing his bank accounts. A paper published in 2006 , examined his life through a review and discussion of biographies, psychiatric literature, personal correspondence, photographs, and medical records. The psychiatrists conclude ” evidence [..] support[s] the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probably borderline and narcissistic personality traits.

Late in life, Hemingway also developed symptoms of psychosis likely related to his underlying affective illness and superimposed alcoholism and traumatic brain injury. Hemingway utilized a variety of defense mechanisms, including self-medication with alcohol, a lifestyle of aggressive, risk-taking sportsmanship, and writing, in order to cope with the suffering caused by the complex comorbidity of his interrelated psychiatric disorders.” He was eventually admitted to a mental health hospital. His last days were miserable and painful being subjected to electric shock therapy, as was the practice of the time. Beginning in 1960, “they gave him 36 shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and shock treatments back then were very severe,” Nagel says. “They caused serious memory loss in Hemingway. If there’s anything a writer can’t stand, it’s the loss of memory. After some of those shock treatments, he didn’t even know his name. Then he would be sent back home to recover, given that drug for high blood pressure, and it was only a matter of weeks before he was depressed again.” Hemingway late in his life.

Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, a day after his 36th shock treatment. He had earlier convinced doctors that he could return home. Oddly enough, suicide runs in the Hemingway family. His father shot himself at the age of 57, using a Civil War pistol. His brother and sister and a granddaughter killed themselves, too. The New York Times described the family tree as “blood-soaked as any from Greek tragedy,” and the term ”Hemingway curse” has become shorthand for the cycle of mental illness, addiction and suicide can afflict multiple generations Earnest Hemingway: author of 27 astounding books and 50+ short stories, winner of both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, Bronze Star recipient, world class sports fisherman, big game hunter, boxer, bullfighting aficionado, war correspondent. There’s a dark side, of course: he wasn’t much of a father, he drank too much, he wasn’t very gentlemanly most of the time. But by golly, he sure had one heck of a life. Say what you will about the man, but I don’t think anyone can say he wasn’t an interesting figure.

With good and bad, Hemingway lived the life he wished. If anything: remember always to have fun. I’ll drink to that. Descriptive Writing in the Novel | Tim Weed Descriptive Writing in the Novel Descriptive Writing in the Novel For years I’ve been trying to figure out what makes certain novels so irresistible. What gives them the power to colonize the imagination so completely that putting them down is like parting with a beloved friend? The ingredients aren’t so hard to isolate: complex, coherent, sympathetic characters; robust narrative energy instilled by way of dramatic tension and conflict; a compelling voice; deeply resonant thematic unities, often conveyed through imagery; and a well-rendered setting that creates the effect of an entire, vibrant world. It’s become apparent to me that the last two elements are essential, and too often neglected by many contemporary authors. There seems to be a theory going around in some literary circles that so-called imagistic prose can accomplish little but slow a story down, like extra weight strapped under the saddle of a racehorse. That may be true in extreme cases, and it’s certainly true in cases of clumsy writing.

But in my opinion description — setting, landscape, imagery, a sense of place, whatever you want to call it — is an absolutely critical feature of a profoundly gripping narrative. It is an aspect of craft that novelists ignore to our own detriment. In part it is a matter of taste, of course. I once heard the poet David Baker say that all poetry can be divided into two camps: the ironic and the ecstatic. The Greek root of the word ecstasy is “Ek-stasis,” meaning to place, or situate, out of. Ecstasy is transcendental, mystical, drawing one away from the body and into a state of trance, vision, or dream. Irony, on the other hand, is social, worldly, involving a dissimulating doubleness of voice or imagination. Now, let’s be clear: irony is essential in fiction as an antidote to sentimentality and melodrama. But in my view the best novels — the ones that stick with you long after you’ve put them down — contain a generous dash of ecstasy as well. For me, good descriptive writing is what puts the vivid in John Gardner’s “vivid, continuous dream” of fiction.

Good description has the power to strike an almost musical chord of emotions, resulting, in the best of cases, in a kind of narrative trance in which the reader’s consciousness is buoyed up and swept along in the current of the story. This kind of transportation effect is achieved by way of concrete sensory detail. You don’t get it with non-imagistic writing. You may get irony, pathos, angst, even sadness or anger, but you don’t get transportation. I should point out that what I’m discussing here applies more readily to novels than to stories. A great short story is possible without much description, or without any at all, although my personal favorites do manage to evoke a strong sense of place, despite the inherent austerity of the form. But the novel is really the best venue for descriptive writing of the kind I’m referring to. All of this is by way of an introduction to the central literary concept of this essay, the domaine perdu. The concept finds an archetypal embodiment in a novel called Le Grand Meaulnes, by a Frenchman named Alain-Fournier.

Fournier wrote the book at the ripe old age of nineteen, and it was in fact his only published novel; he was killed in action in World War I. In the book, a boy wandering the French countryside stumbles upon a mysterious, decaying manor house, or domaine. He senses something magical about the place. He is overcome by “an extraordinary sense of well-being, an almost intoxicating serenity.” He hears “strains of lost music” that evoke memories both sweet and sad. The residents of the domaine end up taking him in; he stays for the weekend. There is a party attended by charming and eccentric people. He befriends a young man, and becomes infatuated with his new friend’s beautiful sister. To make a long story short, the protagonist goes home filled with longing. He spends the rest of the novel trying unsuccessfully to get back to the lost domaine.

The domaine perdu, therefore, is a deep myth having to do with a compulsion to return to a lost world of sensory completeness, beauty, and perfection; to recreate, in the words of the late novelist John Fowles, the “magical-sensual world of extreme infancy.” It’s the Eden myth; it has a tremendous resonance in every culture. It’s one of the main engines that drives us as writers to describe, and, as readers, to be transfixed by fine descriptive prose. * In the early years of the current decade I had multiple opportunities to visit Hemingway’s house in San Francisco de Paula, about twenty minutes outside Havana. It’s an atmospheric, one might even say a haunted, place. Through the open windows Hemingway’s well-stocked bookshelves are exactly as he left them, for the last time, in the spring of 1960. His spectacles lie open on a side table; several enormous pairs of shoes hang toe-down in a closet rack.

The Finca Vigía was the author’s principal home for more than two decades; it is where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, and the unfinished manuscript that was published posthumously as Islands in the Stream. It was the departure point and refueling station for his beloved marlin-fishing trips; the base of operations for his grandiose, romantic, and wholly fruitless U-boat hunting patrols during WWII. On the walls of the house his big game trophies molder, their hides looking a little thin these days, like the hides of the small mongrel-dogs at rest on the cracked sidewalks of Havana Centro, with their swollen nipples and flies buzzing all around. Downhill through shaded gardens a walkway leads to the author’s expansive pool. Drained now, it’s a dangerous-looking pit with a steeply slanting bottom leading into the leaf-littered shadows of the deep end. Examining another author’s domaine perdu is a little like that empty pool: there’s something about it that’s both melancholy and hazardous.

Put another way, delving too deeply into this particular aspect of the writing craft is almost like asking the muse to disrobe and then subjecting her to a gynecological exam followed by Freudian analysis. Is it really a good idea to try to plumb the basic motivations of a great and extremely troubled writer like Hemingway? I’ll just leave that question hanging in the air. Hemingway was many things, some of them admirable, many not, but above all he was a great observer of nature. Those who love his work are generally passionate about it, while those who hate it may be equally so. Whatever your view it is important to consider that the domaine perdu is what makes Hemingway Hemingway. Without it he is merely a craftsman, a skilled and notably economical stylist with a gift for narrative. For a look at what Hemingway is like without the domaine perdu, forget about the novels for a moment and turn to a selection of his short fiction.

Stories like “The Hills are White Elephants” and “The Killers” are very, very good — maybe among the best in the language — but there’s little of the bittersweet atmosphere of nostalgia that infuses The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or A Moveable Feast. The longing for a lost world defines and shapes these latter works. Consider the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. The domaine perdu is closest to the surface when wistfulness bleeds through into description.

When the normally laconic Hemingway dwells lovingly on a landscape, that’s the domaine perdu. In A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises — even in the grittier, grimmer For Whom the Bell Tolls — most of the chapters begin with vivid poetic descriptions like the one we just read. The domaine perdu is often found in beginnings: in the opening pages of a novel, or in the opening paragraphs of a chapter or a story. This is no accident. Description provides an embarkation point, a bridge, or a kind of touchstone that affords both the author and the reader access to the created world. Description also has more practical effects, such as anchoring the reader in the narrative — letting her know in a concrete way exactly where the characters are and what they are seeing –; arresting the reader’s attention with the compelling beauty of the novelistic world; and preparing the emotional ground for the scene to come. In addition to providing embarkation points, the landscapes in Hemingway’s work are a recurring narrative mode used to tie together scenes of dialogue and action.

Description is also the main vehicle for the explicit communication of the bittersweet magic, like lingering perfume or canned time, of the world that has been left behind. Here’s an anecdote of a conversation with F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast: On this night though he wanted me to know and understand and appreciate what it was that had happened at St.-Raphael and I saw it so clearly that I could see the single-seater seaplane buzzing the diving raft and the color of the sea and the shape of the pontoons and the shadow they cast and Zelda’s tan and Scott’s tan and the dark blonde and the light blond of their hair and the darkly tanned face of the boy that was in love with Zelda. Note that here the domaine perdu is a secondhand one, having originally belonged to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is also emphatically a domaine perdu writer; that is, the domaine perdu is a primary source of emotional power in his books. It is also worth noting that the lost world is not always remembered as a happy place; according to its Greek conception ecstasy is just as likely to come through misery as it is through joy.

The above passage describes an exquisitely painful memory for Fitzgerald, of the first big breach with Zelda when she had an affair with a young Frenchman. There’s no need to dwell further on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, other than to point out two doomed writers whose novels radiate the unmistakable essence of the domaine perdu. If a good writer feels strongly about something, it’s infectious. In Hemingway and Fitzgerald, that intensity of feeling speaks for itself. We can all name other domaine perdu authors; the most obvious is Proust. In terms of more contemporary novelists I personally would throw in Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain), Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell), and all of Andrea Barrett’s work, including her short stories. There’s no question that any worthy historical fiction owes its very existence to the impulse to recreate lost worlds, as do the best works of literary fantasy, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and Ursula K. Leguin’s The Wizard of Earthsea.

Indeed, if we believe John Fowles, the primal urge to return to the domaine perdu by the only means available, by creating it, lurks behind all art, which is precisely why it’s important to recognize and think about. * One of the reason’s Hemingway’s life was so glamorized, and one of the reasons it ultimately became unbearable to him, was that he strove to live his novels before he wrote them. His books are about as autobiographical as well-plotted fiction can get; for example A Farewell to Arms is based on his experience as an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI, For Whom the Bell Tolls is based on his stint as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, and Islands in the Stream draws heavily from the years he spent in his fishing yacht, the Pilar, cruising the waters north of Cuba for marlin and Nazi U-boats. For Hemingway, the lost world was a real place, or a series of places, but for the next author we’re going to consider, J.R.R. Tolkien, it was almost entirely made up.

This is not to say that some or even most of the superb descriptive passages in The Lord of the Rings didn’t flow from the author’s boyhood wanderings through the bucolic meadows and riverside glades around Oxford, or the denuded wastelands of the World War I killing fields, or trips he might have taken to the spectacular landscapes of the Alps. There’s no doubt that Tolkien too was a great observer and writer of nature. But in his case there were additional elements as well. As a young man Tolkien, like Hemingway, witnessed firsthand the awful slaughter of WWI. Like Hemingway he survived, but by 1918, according to the preface of The Lord of the Rings, all but one of his closest friends were dead. He wrote the trilogy in the period from 1936 – 1949, which may also help to explain the work’s dark, often apocalyptic tone — as well as its “good versus evil” subject matter. The truth is that unlike his other famous book, The Hobbit (first published in 1936), The Lord of the Rings is not really meant for children.

Certain children do devour it though, as I did when I was eight or ten. It had a major impact, opening my eyes to the power of literature as no other book had. The Shire and Mordor, Fangorn Forest, Moria, Rivendell and Lothlórien; I regret that the movies have begun to blur the vivid landscapes of Middle Earth in my mind, replacing them with the crisp silver-screen versions filmed on location in New Zealand. New Zealand is highly photogenic and fairly well-suited to Tolkien, but screen images are incapable of evoking the same magic or carrying the same emotional charge as fictional landscapes, especially those you read as a child. The fact is — and this is a powerful counter-argument to the lament that the novel is dead or dying — film simply can’t accomplish the things with landscape that literature can. Well-drawn literary landscapes become rooted in your soul, instead of washing over in blasts of music and awe-inspiring, computer-enhanced cinematography.

I picked up the books again several years back, partly because I had the time (at over a thousand densely-printed pages it’s not the kind of thing you can read in single afternoon), and partly because I wanted to revisit it before Hollywood stole my primeval memories of hobbits, wizards, and the detours and byways of Middle Earth. I was not disappointed. It really is a terrific story, in some ways even better than I had remembered. I was tempted to go on a mission to revive the books’ standing among the MFA set, but then it’s not as if the Tolkien estate really needs my help. Those who love the trilogy will always love it despite the commercial hype, and it will continue to be difficult to explain to those who have avoided it or haven’t been able to get through the first hundred pages (and there are many) what it is that’s so wonderful about it. The uninitiated reader will have to simply take it on faith that The Lord of the Rings provides an unparalleled example of how the domaine perdu can be used in a novel to express an extremely compelling vision of human existence.

I won’t bother to summarize the plot too extensively; it’s a straightforward quest story, with the twist that the quest is not to retrieve the grail but rather to destroy it. Over the course of the book Frodo Baggins and his fellowship make their way ever eastward, from the bucolic backwater of the hobbits’ Shire to the seething darkness of Mordor. On the way the party experiences many setbacks, as the reader gradually becomes aware of a miasma of apocalyptic evil that is settling over the novel’s world. They stop over in some very nice places on the way, however, Eden-like way-stations populated primarily by elves, in which the travelers long to remain but cannot. These way-stations are what concern us, because they stand out in the story like islands of light in a rising sea of darkness. They are, in other words, manifestations of Tolkien’s domaine perdu: outposts of a detailed, magical world that has already been lost.

Rather than quote at length from these chapters I’ve selected a few nearly random passages to give you something of the flavor: Slowly the hall filled, and Frodo looked with delight upon the many fair faces that were gathered together; the golden firelight played upon them and shimmered in their hair. The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. Tolkien was an Oxford professor, deeply absorbed in his studies. His main areas of focus were early Nordic and Anglo-Saxon literature, and during the course of his writing life he made up an entire world that was inspired by and in many ways based upon, these bodies of myth. There’s a great deal of verse scattered throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, much of it in Elvish, a complex language that Tolkien, a gifted linguist, ambitiously invented out of whole cloth.

I have a feeling that most people simply skip over the verse to get on with the story, but that’s a mistake, because the verse is important to the underlying mood of the books — the tip of the iceberg, if you will, exposing the vast and emotionally charged domaine perdu dwelling beneath the story, scaffolding it, and bestowing its unique inner power. Now you may well be asking at this point: if this world is entirely made up, how can you call it a domaine perdu? Doesn’t a lost world imply a place and time that exists in actual memory, as with Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The answer, I believe, is not necessarily. The main emotion associated with the domaine perdu is not merely nostalgia but longing, and it’s eminently possible, even likely, that all writers long for a place and time that never existed. In a sense, Hemingway’s Paris is every bit as made up as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But let’s get back to the story. As Frodo’s party makes its way steadily eastward, between and sometimes even during their sojourns in way-stations of light and Bardic poetry, the evil in the world begins to assert itself with ever greater force.

Terrifying ringwraiths assail the party and wound Frodo with a clammy blade; flocks of crows and other flying creatures careen menacingly through the sky above their heads; orcs pursue them through the abandoned mines of Moria, and a powerful monster drags the wizard Gandalf down into the abyss. Meanwhile the dreadful penumbra encroaches upon every quarter of the sky, and it is apparent that even fortresses of light such as Rivendell and Lothlórien must eventually succumb to the rising tide of Evil. This image of a world gradually drowning in darkness buttresses the dramatic tensions inherent in the quest story; it is at bottom an extremely dark tale. Frodo’s journey is from one pole to another — from the pole of light to the pole of darkness — and it hinges absolutely upon the existence of a domaine perdu. Early in the quest, soon after they’ve left the last outpost of the known hobbit world, Frodo tries to sleep: He lay tossing and turning and listening fearfully to the stealthy night noises: wind in chinks of rock, water dripping, a crack, the sudden rattling fall of a loosened stone.

He felt that black shapes were advancing to smother him . . . He lay down again and passed into an uneasy dream, in which he walked on the grass in his garden in the Shire, but it seemed faint and dim, less clear than the tall black shadows that stood looking over the hedge. And much later, as he and his faithful servant Sam slog along through the swamps on the outskirts of Mordor: Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers. As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapors of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no color and no warmth. The Lord of the Rings is full of such bleak, frightening images; the prevailing mood is one of fear and dread. What saves it from being merely horrifying or depressing, however, is the potential for redemption inherent in the hidden domaine perdu. It’s always there in the background.

Sometimes it bleeds through, like rays of sunlight appearing through a break in a low overcast. You can’t have true darkness without light to offset it; you need one to comprehend the other. Fear and dread open the possibility for uncomplicated joy; just as the presence of light gives extra power to the encroaching darkness. To put it in more mundane terms, the “reason” for the elegiac passages — the “islands” of festivity and light — is to make the encroaching evil more real and more threatening, and the overwhelmingly dark tone of the story as a whole causes the “islands” to burn that much more brightly. It is a well-known fact that fiction about happiness is untenable; less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that fiction that dwells solely in realms of darkness also comes too easily, and is by nature incomplete. Evil is indisputably a part of life (although perhaps not in the simple-minded terms put forth by neoconservatives and certain heads of state), but so is love. This is the wisdom underlying Tolkien’s work; his novels enact this truth compellingly and on an epic scale. * For a final angle on the domaine perdu, consider the Native American writer James Welch.

For those who don’t know his novels you should go out and get them without delay: they are original, beautiful, and vastly under-appreciated. Particularly germane to this discussion is his magnificent book, The Heartsong of Charging Elk. The novel is told from the perspective of a young Lakota Sioux in the 1880’s who travels to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The prologue shows Charging Elk as a small boy, less than a year after Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn. In just a few pages it draws a remarkably vibrant portrait of the novel’s domaine perdu: the quickly vanishing prairie Eden from which Charging Elk’s people have been expelled, and to which he spends most of the novel trying to return. I hope this sounds familiar. The story itself begins a decade or so later. Charging Elk lies in a Marseilles hospital, after having become separated from the Wild West Show and fallen deathly ill. In this passage he has just regained consciousness after days in a near-coma: He thought of sunrise in another place. A place of long views, of pale dust and short grass, of few people and no buildings.

He had seen that sunrise over the rolling simple plains, he had been a part of it and it had been a part of him . . . He remembered the villages, the encampments, one place, then another. Women picking berries, men coming back with meat, the dogs and horses, the sudden laughter or tears of children, the quiet ease of lying in a sunny lodge with the skins rolled up to catch the breeze. Note the elegiac flavor of the prose: the sun-dappled imagery doled out in brief comma-separated clauses, like gently breaking waves of memory. Such emotionally charged description is possible this early in the novel because it emanates from a clearly understandable place within the protagonist, the place described so vividly in the prologue. Even if the reader doesn’t share Charging Elk’s yearning for the lost purity of the Plains Indian lifestyle — though it’s probably fair to assume that most of Welch’s readership does share it — he can relate to that yearning because he’s seen where it comes from. If we accept John Fowles’ earlier-stated premise that we all carry around our own domaines perdus, the emotion behind the description is not only earned, but universally resonant.

Charging Elk wanders the perilous streets of the late 19th century French seaport, lost, cold, and hungry. His memories of the Dakota territory are a continual presence, always in the background and periodically coming into the foreground — a pattern utterly reminiscent of the way Tolkien uses the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. The lost domain is most vivid when the present-time narrative is darkest, as when Charging Elk is sentenced to a life sentence for murder in La Tombe, a grim French high-security prison: But quite often, at the very moment Charging Elk’s despair was at its apex, the snow would fall. And he would lift his head and feel the downy flakes settle on his face and melt and he would be transported, as if by magic . . . back to the Stronghold and the winters he had spent with Kills Plenty. The domain perdu provides contrast between memory and current reality, and it provides the only cause for hope in the face of overwhelming evidence for despair. Notice the element of transportation in this passage; the memory of his domaine perdu does for Charging Elk what good fiction can do for a reader, and it’s no accident that the transportation is accomplished by way of vivid sensory description.

To summarize: The domaine perdu in The Heartsong of Charging Elk fulfills a number of key narrative functions. It gives shape to the protagonist’s journey by providing a chronological and emotional starting point from which he gets further and further away. It helps round out the protagonist’s character, defining his principal “dramatic need” (to return to Dakota Territory), while at the same time offering a font of illuminating backstory. In one sense it’s a narrative of the destruction of an entire way of life, the tapering tail-end of more than three centuries of genocide on the North American continent. In another sense it’s a narrative of a stranger trying and repeatedly failing to navigate a strange land, who is exploited, commits murder, spends more than a decade in jail, and does not live to see his people again. This may sound like bleak material, but The Heartsong of Charging Elk is rescued by the domaine perdu, which infuses the story with light. Welch succeeds in blending the joyous with the tragic in a way that rings entirely true. What more can a novelist hope for, or a reader? * There’s a hike I used to take a few times a year as a child.

It begins in a tall hardwood forest, which gives way gradually to a mixed forest and then to a dense boreal forest of conifers. Glades of gnarled dwarf-spruce open out onto little mossy lawns of heather spackled with the bright scarlet brushstrokes of summer berries or autumn leaves. Climbing on you come to the edge of a vast cone of broken granite sloping up to the summit: fins and hillocks and thrones of mottled gray stone softened by a patina of multicolored lichen. This is what Tolkien might have called a “fell-field”; his goblins would have been drawn to it because of the fissures, large and small, that shoot through the ancient rock. Most of these are tightly joined, like the unmortared blocks of a Roman aqueduct; others take the form of gaping black abysses that appear to give lightning-bolt access to a hollow mountain underworld. Like the landscapes I once explored in Tolkien’s books, this place is rooted in my dreams. Just by thinking about it I can awaken its magic, like summoning ghosts. I’ve heard it said that the only proper subject for fiction is humanity.

I’ve also heard it stated that the novel is an inherently bourgeois art form, limited in scope to portraying the foibles and intricacies of human society. But this sort of conventional wisdom ignores the fact that humanity is inseparable from nature. To write narratives focused solely upon ourselves, without reference to the greater world that embraces and sustains us, is to reflect the lack of vision, the illusory and damaging presumption of separation that has brought us to the current point of crisis. It is also to ignore the challenge of portraying humankind with reference to our surroundings, as denizens of a larger universe. According to the Irish poet John O’Donohue, “To recognize and celebrate beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience.” By describing the landscapes through which our characters move, we engage in a ritual of gratitude and healing. Such rituals are few and far between these days, and we ought to embrace them. Writers in the so-called literary fiction genre too often hear about the options that are foreclosed to us. Yet there are no hard and fast rules to writing, only conventions.

One of the great pleasures of being a writer is that it is our job to constantly challenge these conventions — to stretch them, break them, or simply to ignore them. It is worthwhile to give some thought to where you yourself come down on the question of whether literature exists more to delight or to instruct. Description roots us in a narrative and keeps us there; its capacity to take us back to our species’ primal attachment to the land is powerful medicine that we as writers would be foolish to ignore. Despite what you may be told in certain writing workshops and how-to books, my advice is not to shy away from well-rendered naturalistic description, even when it’s not doing anything explicit to advance character or plot. Let your work breathe, especially in the early drafts. Tap into the landscapes buried within yourself. Consider the duality of opposites wherein the true nature of existence resides, and remember that transportation is triggered by the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch. The literature of the domaine perdu, which is a literature of loss, is more essential than ever now, when so many actual landscapes have been destroyed and so many others are severely threatened.

Whether your own lost worlds are real or imagined, the fact that you’re drawn back to them is a clear sign that you’re heading in the right direction. ____ This essay originally appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle as “Accessing Eden: Novelistic Landscapes and the Domaine Perdu.” Share this: Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive occasional news. Join 2,069 other followers

Question: Which US author (1889-1961) had a brief stint as an ambulance driver in WWI?
Answer: Ernest HEMINGWAY