"Hemingway, Ernest - Green Hills of Africa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone
and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should
work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and
not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All
angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from
their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art,
sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the
bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not
want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no
woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their
lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her
that makes the rest unimportant.'
'But what about Thoreau?'
'You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly
everything later.'
'Better have some more beer, Papa.'
'All right.'
'What about the good writers?'
'The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.
That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'
'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'
'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim
is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'
'What about the others?'
'Crane wrote two fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.
The last one is the better.'
'And what happened to him?'
'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'
'But the other two?'
'They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they
got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers
into something very strange.'
'I do not understand.'
'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It
is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make
money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase
their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up
their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is
slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there
is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.
Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say
they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and
they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write
because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote,
sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would
be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and