I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

as Hemingway noted, “[Writers] are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

La Rotonde

I have my work cut out for me withHemingway, since he used many type-writers: a gigantic Royal No. 10 desk-top with glass side panels from his earlyKey West days, an Underwood Noise-less that helped him fi nish For Whomthe Bell Tolls and fi le dispatches fromhotel rooms while he was a World WarII correspondent, and black matte Roy-als from the early 1940s—especiallythe Quiet DeLuxe and Arrow—he fa-vored while at Finca Vigía in Cuba.

Deluxe Noiseless on display at MarjorieK innan Rawlings’s screened frontporch at Cross Creek, Florida; Flan-nery O’Connor’s 1930s Royal Stan-dard; Faulkner’s famed UnderwoodUniversal; Hemingway’s 1940 RoyalArrow; and the tiny, folding CoronaNo. 3 favored by both Ernie Pyle andIsak Dinesen.

As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”

“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him,” he continued. “But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”

Ernest Hemingway’s idea of the ‘crap detector’

Novelists Ernest Hemingway and Wil-liam Faulkner, for example, went backand forth about the virtues of simplic-ity in writing. Faulkner once criticizedHemingway, who he said “had nocourage, never been known to use aword that might send the reader to thedictionary.” “Poor Faulkner,” Heming-way responded, “Does he really thinkbig emotions come from big words?He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollarwords. I know them all right. But thereare older and simpler and better words,and those are the ones I use.”15

ErnestHemingway once said that good prose is architecture,not interior decorating.

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influentialnovelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical,understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writersand led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Hemingway Bridge.” He wouldalways end a writing session only when he knew what came next inthe story. Instead of exhausting every last idea and bit of energy, hewould stop when the next plot point became clear. This meant thatthe next time he sat down to work on his story, he knew exactlywhere to start. He built himself a bridge to the next day, using today’senergy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.

“Beer.” He drew that beer and cut it off

Every one was very respectful to the peroxide blonde, who said all this in a high stagey way, but Alice was beginning to shake again. I felt it sitting by her.

“Did you know him?” one of the men asked.

The bartender didn’t answer him. He just looked over our heads and said, “What’s yours?” to a man who’d come in. “Rye,” the man said. The bartender put out the bottle and glass and a glass of water. Tom reached over and took the glass off the free-lunch bowl. It was a bowl of pickled pig’s feet and there was a wooden thing that worked like a scissors, with two wooden forks at the end to pick them up with. “No,” said the bartender and put the glass cover back on the bowl. Tom held the wooden scissors fork in his hand. “Put it back,” said the bartender.

“I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine,” Tommy said. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” the big whore shook with laughing. She had a really pretty voice. The other whores didn’t smile.

“It’s a lie,” Peroxide said proudly.

“It’s true,” said Alice in her nice voice. “And it doesn’t make any difference to me whether you believe it or not.” She wasn’t crying any more and she was calm.

“The other way from you,” Tom told him.

“You can interfere with this one,” he looked at the cook. “He likes it.”