SOURCE: Banks, Russell, Charles Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, E. Annie Proulx, Bob Shacochis, Robert Stone, Terry Tempest Williams, and Steve Paul. “On Hemingway and His Influence: Conversations with Writers.” The Hemingway Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1999): 115-32.

[In the following article, Paul interviews several well-known and highly respected writers concerning Hemingway's influence on their own work and what they find most compelling about Hemingway.]

Is it possible for an American writer, on the eve of the 21st century, to write outside the shadow of Ernest Hemingway?

Well, yes and no. For some the shadow receded long ago; for others it was never there. But for many American writers of the generations since Hemingway, the shadow dapples the landscape. It's there in fragments, in memory. It's ephemeral. Sometimes it looms large. And just as Hemingway can suggest different meanings to different readers, he speaks differently to each writer: He can teach one to see, another to hear. He carries the weight of history or the weight of his own appetites.

In order to find out how present Hemingway was in the lives and minds of contemporary writers, we talked to a few of them, interviewing them by phone, e-mail, fax and in person. Participating were Russell Banks, Charles Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, E. Annie Proulx, Bob Shacochis, Robert Stone, and Terry Tempest Williams. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.

What emerges from these discussions is something far from a monolithic portrait. Cubism is more like it. There is no denying, as Russell Banks points out, that a generation of white-male writers carried the Hemingway torch. Yet, in the jargon of literary criticism of recent decades the cheap adjective “Hemingwayesque” was rarely applied with approval. There is a sense among several of these writers that the Hemingway centennial is not a time for nostalgia, but more an opportunity to set aside the myth and myth-making and return instead to the rich possibilities of the work.

Russell Banks tells a story of his traveling youth when he was trying to “invent myself as a writer.” Banks had made his way to Key West, where he was scratching out stories and living in a rooming house of questionable repute. He remembers looking through the locked gate of the Hemingway house, its famous occupant no longer living there but not yet a ghost either. It would be some thirty-five years later when Banks got to stand on the veranda of the house as the recipient of the Hemingway Prize at the Hemingway Days Literary Festival. Banks is the author of the celebrated novels Continental Drift, Affliction, Rule of the Bone and, most recently, Cloudsplitter, which is based on the life of the abolitionist John Brown. He recently retired from teaching at Princeton.

[Paul]: What about that Hemingway shadow?

[Banks]: An American writer beginning to write now might be free of that shadow, most especially if that writer is a woman or a non-white author. But there's really no getting away from it. Even they in turn were profoundly influenced by writers who were profoundly influenced by Hemingway. It's the trickle down theory of influence.

My generation of white-male writers had an influence on those who have taken graduate writing programs. You can see the influence of writers like Ray Carver and Richard Ford. I don't care if you're male or female, white or black, he's there still, more than Faulkner and Fitzgerald, because of his impact on the post-war generation of writers.

Part of it is the persona he created in his work and in his life—that sort of stoic existential hero; the romantic alienation that he seemed to be emblematic of and that he manifested in his style as well, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. There was a tone and a stance toward the world that is inextricably bound up with the work.

And then, too, there's the simple sheer beauty of his sentences and the relationship that he bore to American vernacular English. I remember when I first began reading him in my late teens and early twenties. He was able to make a jewel hard, a diamond hard. I had never seen that before.

You don't see it in Twain. That's American vernacular English, but it doesn't have Hemingway's kind of precision and clarity and sheen. You don't see it in Stephen Crane. You really don't see it in any other writer until you get to Hemingway. And it's exhilarating.

If you want to write in American vernacular English—and most of us do—then you have to turn to Hemingway. It was his invention. He admired in his own ambivalent way Sherwood Anderson, but you really don't see it there either. There's a certain kind of structure to the stories and certain kind of attention that he shares with Anderson, but the prose is really different. The prose in Anderson is softer, much softer.

Are there writing moments when Hemingway becomes more conscious to you, when, say, you're aiming for the true sentence?

There are certain things Hemingway mastered that I'm conscious of referring to. For instance—and this is the simple thing, but if you're a writer it's not a simple thing if you're going to do it—he said he learned how to describe scenery by studying Cézanne. I learned how to describe scenery from reading Hemingway.

Look at “Hills Like White Elephants,” or almost anything. Look at the physical description, how he moves from background to foreground. It's the logic of the eye. It's not the logic of the paragraph. And it's not the logic of exposition. It's the logic of the eye. The eye moves from distance to middle ground to foreground. And he will describe a scene in exactly the same way. Or it moves from foreground to middle distance to background. It doesn't swirl around. Or follow any other logic. It's a very physical way of setting a scene.

And that was because the logic of a Cézanne painting is the logic of an eye. It's top to bottom and the action is in the bottom foreground. Hemingway would organize a scene that way. I'm quite conscious when I'm sitting down of that process.

One of the things I'm realizing, when I reread those stories and read those descriptions, I'm wondering, what did I pay attention to the first time around? I mean really, it's tragic. That's the way we're taught in school: When we read Hemingway we tend to look for the symbols, we tend to look for the codes. So we decode him instead of remembering he was following some rudimentary, essential, fundamental thinking in his writing.

Joseph Conrad said, before all else I want to make my readers see. He meant literally to visualize. I think Hemingway, too, wrote with that in mind. I think he visualized as he wrote, because, when I read Hemingway I visualize. I literally see what's going on. I hallucinate whatever it is he's setting up. Naturally I inject my own imaginings into it, but he orchestrates and controls how you see to an extraordinary degree.

Which work stands out for you and keeps you going back?

I keep going back to the stories. I can't resist them. Even now after I don't know how many times over the years I've read them and taught them. They still are great. They'll stand forever, I think. Or a dozen at least will stand forever. And that's a dozen more than anybody else's.

And then, of course, the early novels. The later novels seem to me more mannered and have less of an impact on me. But in some ways his later prose invited me into more complex relationships with his characters and their worlds. They were more conflicted and were acting out in sometimes melodramatic ways their pain and disillusionment, and, more explicitly, trying to work out a moral ethic for life in a world in which there appeared to be no morality. In some ways he's the ultimate secular writer. There's the ancient and ongoing spiritual need, and the essential conflict in his life and in his work is how to find the ethical and spiritual center in a world in which one is totally disillusioned.

Your newest book, Cloudsplitter, is historical fiction, in which you imagined a life from the nineteenth century. Hemingway never did that. He wrote from experience.

His own direct experience, yeah. To my knowledge he never moved outside his own immediate or recent experience. He didn't influence me in that regard. His relation to his own personal experience and his dependence on it and the need to constantly replenish it in order to continue to write was the part I never was interested in particularly.

I think we're temperamentally so different. That has something do with my sense of the significance of my own personal experience, which wasn't much worth writing a book about. Hemingway was always convinced that his was.

Perhaps if I had gone to war at eighteen or nineteen years of age, or had the kind of life-defining experiences as his, which were historical really and international. Mine were quite different.

That is a fascinating moment in a writer's life when you leave the family and enter the larger social world. That moment often can define you for the rest of your life. The Lost Generation—they were nineteen or twenty when they went off to war. They left their homes in small-town America and went to a war that threw them into the international arena and blew away any lingering illusions they had about the goodness of man and the permanence of certain social institutions. You can look at World War II writers in the same way or the writers who left home at the time of the Depression—the Chicago writers, Richard Wright. That shaped their vision for the rest of their lives.

My generation, it was really the '60s. We left the family and found ourselves in a world that was very American. It was social, it wasn't inward particularly. I suppose that's one thing that distinguishes my generation of writers from the next older one, the Updikes, writers in their sixties and seventies. They came of age as writers in the '50s and were very much domestic writers. They were much more concerned with sexuality and repression, family, relationships between men and women on the domestic front. And if they talked about class at all it was the middle class.

Whereas my generation was talking about race, class (in terms of power), justice. It was much more politically oriented, I think. You can see it in the writers who are now in their fifties, across the board, like Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, John Wideman, Joyce Carol Oates when she's not writing Gothics. Her realistic work is wonderful in that regard.

It's an interesting shift. And I have a feeling that it's shaped back in those early years when you're nineteen to twenty-five and you've left the womb and you're out there in the world looking around. That first social world that you engage is the one that shapes you. That's an elaborate explanation for why I don't have a connection to my own private life.

E. Annie Proulx achieved wide attention (and a Pulitzer Prize) with her darkly comic novel The Shipping News (1993). She has a distinctive, American voice that can also be found in a story collection, Heart Songs, and the novels Postcards and Accordion Crimes. She lives in Wyoming.

[Proulx]: I first read Hemingway when I was a child, about ten years old, one or two of the short stories, one of them probably “Up in Michigan.” Of course I did not understand them but the short, tight sentences made it seem that I could and I certainly got the sense of male anger and the smell of water, some stony ambiance. A few years later I read “The Killers,” which I loved and I thought it very funny. It never occurred to me that Hemingway was going for bleak realism through corner-of-the-mouth dialogue. Somewhere along the way I read The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, but these seemed to me to have been written for another kind of reader; both left me feeling outside the pages. In 1952, when I was seventeen, along with roughly five million other people, I read The Old Man and the Sea in the special edition of Life. I read it absorbedly but the after-feeling was one of an odd discomfort, a sense of pious bloat as I was too inexperienced in subtleties to distinguish between simplistic reductionism and complex silence. I voyaged through more Hemingway in later years but what I took in my ignorance as a reductionist chop seemed always to swamp the boat. In short, I was a poor reader of his work. I still believe it is difficult to read Hemingway well. His style promises easy understanding at the same time it annoys and baffles.

Although I never felt comfortable (in a readerly way) with Hemingway's novels I did recognize flashing power and beauty in much of the writing. In a way I think those strong, hard sentences have stayed inside me as a writerly example to trim the sentence down, though not to the irreducible minimum as Hemingway often did.

Now I do not read Hemingway much if at all—rather, Hemingway, for me, is a Literary Presence, a writer figure who seemed peculiarly American in his hungry need for constant praise and attention, his egoistic construction of himself along larger-than-life lines. The rise of the Writer as a cultural icon may not have begun with Hemingway but certainly he fixed the writer's position. He was terrific copy, handsome, frequenter of exotic places, satisfied the taste for adventure that characterized the early part of this century—Byrd in the Arctic and Antarctic, the stories of Jack London, the archaeological expeditions of Roy Chapman, the jungle trips of Martin and Osa Johnson make a frame for Hemingway's work. But the intensely personal aura of the Hemingway oeuvre, the “write about what you know” school carried to absurd lows, I think rather stilted his imagination and put him, as Byrd, in the position of having to top himself with every page written or day lived. His squalls and squabbles with other writers, his misplaced belief in his own profundity, his serial marriages and love affairs—in short, his life—seemed to get in the way of his writing. I suppose he might have had an atrophied imagination, that he might have had to substitute the lived event for the imagined.

Do the aesthetic qualities of Hemingway's work still have importance for us today?

Of course his work is important; it casts its shadow over nearly forty years of American literary history and set countless imitators a-scribbling, liberated writers from nineteenth century sentence styles as tightly packed and convoluted as the intestines in a hog. There is a great deal the writer can learn from Hemingway though of course few do as he is rather unfashionable, his work the butt of annual parody by people who have read little and understand nothing.

Charles Johnson's inventive fiction has impressed readers since his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, was published in 1974. His much-admired Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990. In 1998 he published Dreamer, a historical novel that imagines the last years of Martin Luther King Jr. Also a prolific critic and essayist, he is the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle.

[Johnson]: It is impossible not to work in Hemingway's shadow, either as an imitator of his approach to prose writing or in strong reaction against it. He is one of the few twentieth century American writers (along with Faulkner) who has given literature a unique narrative style—the stripped-down sentence, very journalistic, that is charged with meaning because of its compression. It is utilitarian, very serviceable whether one is writing the newspaper article or a short fiction. That approach is evident everywhere in fiction of the 1950s, even in science fiction. It is a major style that we inherit from Hemingway. The French have a word for literary padding in a story—le remplissage. You find, clearly, none of that in Hemingway's novels and stories.

If Hemingway had any bearing on my own writing it was negative. He is surely responsible for the brand of fiction known as “minimalism” in the 1970s and early '80s. But I prefer to write “maximalist” fiction, prose that is highly imagistic, tight and poetic, but rich in language and ideas.

Still you recognize how Hemingway can influence. Can you describe that?

For twenty-three years I've taught creative writing at the University of Washington. During those two decades I always include a Hemingway quote, one very meaningful to me, as an epigraph on the handout materials I distribute. The quote is: “What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.” That, I daresay, succinctly defines how we should see our goal as writers, and during any era. I also tell my students to seriously consider his basic principles for writing. These are:

• Study the best literary models.
• Master your subject through experience and reading.
• Work in disciplined isolation.
• Begin early in the morning and concentrate for several hours each day.
• Begin by reading everything you have written from the start or, if engaged on a long book, from the last chapter.
• Write slowly and deliberately.
• Stop writing when things are going well and you know what will happen next so that you have sufficient momentum to continue the next day.
• Do not discuss the material while writing about it.
• Do not think about writing when you are finished for the day but allow your subconscious mind to ponder on it.
• Work continuously on a project once you start it.
• Keep a record of your daily progress.
• Make a list of titles after you have completed the work.

I've told my students again and yet again that a short story or a novel is a gift to a reader, that it should be a generous gift. If they can just remember this statement, “Specificity is Generosity,” then they will have caught the gist of Hemingway's advice that detail in writing is crucial if that prose is to be convincing and compelling.

Regarding political and social hot buttons, is it safe to read Hemingway today? How should we read him? How should we interpret his character's attitudes on racial matters, for instance?

As a black author, I don't trust Hemingway's observations on race. Not at all. And I get a bit nervous when he thumps his chest to show his masculinity. Having said all that, I must confess that I appreciate his attempts, flawed as they may be, to deliver the culture of men in literature—specifically the culture of the sportsman, and I'm sure I felt confident about publishing three stories that explore the world of the Asian martial-arts (“China,” “Kwoon,” and “The Green Belt”) precisely because Hemingway made it okay for a male writer to address, without apology, those time-honored male activities that give men a “rite of passage.” Still, I must qualify this praise by adding that sometimes I feel there is an adolescent understanding of the world in Hemingway's works.

Bob Shacochis won the 1985 National Book Award for first fiction (then it was called the American Book Award) for his story collection, Easy in the Islands. Much of his fiction in that book and since has been concerned with Caribbean island life and politics, especially as shaped by the presence of Americans in other cultures. His novel Swimming in the Volcano (1993) is the first volume of a projected Caribbean trilogy. Also a journalist (contributing editor to Harper's and Outside magazines), Shacochis this year published The Immaculate Invasion, an account of the American invasion of Haiti in 1994. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and northern New Mexico.

[Shacochis]: It's impossible to get away from the moral choices Hemingway focused on and the larger issues that the seemingly straight realism of his work delivered—all that honing in on the spirit of man in the twentieth century, a man's dignity, the violence of the twentieth century. The next century is just going to have to become entirely unrecognizable from this one for writing, or fiction writing, somehow to be relieved of those concerns. Hemingway seems to have been not just the master of those issues, but the most eloquent visionary.

More than any other American writer of the twentieth century? Did anyone else have his kind of influence?

Well. If you talk about sensibilities it would be T. S. Eliot, who for me had the full sense of the scope of human experience. Then it starts getting parceled out into areas of expertise. Like the aristocracy or the upper classes of Fitzgerald, or things like that.

Is there somebody else? No. Somebody like Robert Stone is just updating that tradition and I think all of us working in that tradition or on the periphery of that tradition understand that, just like Hemingway himself was updating other traditions. But Hemingway's sensibilities seem to represent it most as we package up the century.

Those themes—violence, human dignity—also run through your work. Do you think about Hemingway when you write? Is his influence on you a conscious one or subconscious?

Well, I first read Hemingway in high school, in junior high school, before I could ever have the luxury of thinking of myself as a writer. And then he disappeared off the screen and was replaced by more contemporary influences for me, like J. P. Donleavy. People who were much more stylistically pyrotechnic than Hemingway was or wanted to be. And then Thomas Pynchon. There was the sense that realism wasn't adequate enough to hold the full human experience. There was something a bit more as life became stranger, less traditional.

That brings me up to 1989 and living in Rome and working on my novel Swimming in the Volcano and for whatever reason deciding I'd better go back and look at Hemingway. So I bought the whole canon, and I reread Hemingway for basically the first time since I was a child. I think it had a conscious influence on the center section of my book, which is sort of a novella about a young black kid who grows up and the tragedy of his life. That novella itself becomes sort of a symbolic narrative of the middle passage for blacks from Africa to the New World. It's probably some of the best writing I've ever done. Certainly critics have thought so. There has to be some sort of cause and effect there: I'm completely immersed in Hemingway and I'm doing some of my best writing. Consciously there's just that on the surface. Subconsciously I don't know exactly what went on. But I can tip my hat to the old man, I guess.

You write both fiction and non-fiction, and in each case there is a sense of realism founded in close observation and detail. Is that the Hemingway influence at work?

It would be nice to say I got it from Hemingway. But I don't know. Maybe there's some osmotic dynamic at work there. Influences are not often apparent to the person who's being influenced. And there is a parallel issue: sometimes when you are most wanting to be influenced or most trying to be influenced you're in danger of simply losing your own originality.

But things like graphic descriptions or the sense of place. Whether Hemingway influenced me on that or not, or whether it's just a common goal we were both born with, I don't know. But what I'm most influenced by are Hemingway's sensibilities to these larger things and deeper things. And once you share those sensibilities, you want to share in as accurate a detail as you can bring to the page the marvelous or hideous or cruel or beautiful things you've seen with your own eyes.

I guess only God can tell if it was Hemingway who was the father of those sensibilities in me. Certainly he was one of the sponsors or co-sponsors.

You've traveled in his tracks in the Caribbean and in Europe.

It's just coincidence, but I guess we share the same sort of restlessness. After his youth, when he hit the road, just as I hit the road after my education, it was very hard to come back to America. He always lived on the periphery of it, whether he was living around the world or living in Key West or down in Cuba or boating around. Or he'd simply bail out altogether to the wilds of Idaho.

I really have the restlessness in me that he seems to have had. I guess that marks me as one type of man and not the other. I can't stay too long in America before too many bad things start happening. One is I start disliking the country that I know I love. And I start feeling complacent about things that I know I can't afford to—spiritually. Those two forces pushed him around as they seem to be pushing me around, which is a disease common to guys who can't sit still.

He certainly had something like that in him and he plugged it into the larger world and into the forces he found sweeping randomly across the world. And I certainly recognize that behavior in myself.

Would you ever write anything in homage to Hemingway?

Well, I've got nothing against it, but I have my own projects, and they seem to me to be rather big ones. It's going to take at least ten years to get done what I want to get done. I'd have to have more time and more carefree time to do something as calculated as to write something in homage to Hemingway. On the other hand, and I don't want it too sound pretentious or too inauthentic either, but a life like the one I'm leading isn't too far away from a salute to the life like Hemingway led. Although I've got to get out of the fucking suburbs.

Michael Ondaatje grew up in Ceylon and moved to Canada in 1962. He long taught at York University in Toronto. He is a poet, essayist and writer of such inspired fictions as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (a novel composed largely of poetry), Coming Through Slaughter and The English Patient, which found a wide audience not only as a novel but in its movie adaptation. Many people compared The English Patient with A Farewell to Arms, which they pointed to as an obvious influence. Ondaatje, speaking from his home in Toronto, said he hadn't yet read it. “That's the one in the hospital, right?”

Your experience and writing sensibilities seem far different from Hemingway's, so I am interested to know how he showed up on your radar screen, if at all?

[Ondaatje]: At university I read some of him, but I wasn't a great fan. The one I loved was Faulkner, who seemed at the other end of the spectrum. Faulkner for me was the writer who allowed me to feel like one could write a different kind of prose that was more intimate and that was closer to poetry in some ways.

But I love the Nick Adams stories. I think in some ways Hemingway suffered from the public image of him, which is the jerk out there shooting everything in sight. I find that at his best he's a wonderfully sensitive prose writer, who can suggest remarkable things with very few words. The Nick Adams stories and something like Death in the Afternoon—these are remarkable books.

Even a really bad book like To Have and Have Not has got some remarkable pieces of writing. And he didn't lock himself into one kind of novel. He was trying various points of view and voices. They don't all work. But I like that aspect of Hemingway. He's very ambitious in trying out different forms. Some don't work.

Emotionally, I'm pretty much closer to Faulkner or Fitzgerald anyway. But there is something about Hemingway we have forgotten how to respect. He is too easily marked and parodied, I suppose.

Not being a U.S. citizen, do you think there are issues about Hemingway that are problematic or need to be explained?

In a book like For Whom the Bell Tolls, you get the American who goes abroad and seems to understand everything a bit too quickly. There is that kind of desire to be a part of that foreign place. It's understandable that he wants to be a part of it, whether it's Cuba or Spain. There is an assumption that he can articulate that place that doesn't work for me, that comes a bit too easily perhaps.

Terry Tempest Williams writes about loss, longing, and discovery in the American West. Her books include Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (1984) and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). She lives in southern Utah, where she's working on projects related to her travels in Spain, including one about the Hieronymous Bosch painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which she references here. She also references research she conducted in the Hemingway archives in preparation for a paper she delivered at the International Hemingway Conference in 1996. She teaches once a year at the University of Utah.

You were not the first person I thought of in making these connections to Hemingway and his influence. How did you arrive at your deep interest in him? And did you trip over Hemingway in Spain?

[Williams]: That assignment [the research and lecture], alongside traveling in Spain, where you do bump into Hemingway everywhere you go, created a strange confluence of perception and person to the point I felt I was walking alongside Hemingway. This became further complicated by my obsession with Bosch.

As I started getting into his letters, it became clear to me that Hemingway was absolutely in love with the Prado. And with a book like The Garden of Eden, which has to do with the ambiguous nature of gender, I thought surely he must have fallen in love with El Bosco, too.

In going back to the Garden of Eden manuscript, I found that Bosch was referenced all throughout that novel. References to El Bosco and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” had been edited out by Tom Jenks and Scribner's, and that in my mind was the heart of the whole story.

A second confluence really was serendipitous. I became really intrigued with bullfights. Because of the experiences that I had gone through with my own family, with death and dying, there was some truth that I could feel inside the bullfight that I had no language for. So I had to keep going back to the bullfights. It was a tug of conscience, because, as a staunch conservationist, the cruelty is obvious. But to me that was the politically correct stance. There was something much deeper to be found in the texture of that ritual.

There was also an echo or some semblance of correspondence between the bullfights and what I was feeling about the ravaged landscape of the American West. And again I couldn't put my finger on it. I didn't have the language. But those were the yearnings, the longings that I was attracted to in this ritual. And so I read Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. And that feeling of longing in the West for what once was, or the intense feeling of loss in this landscape, came out even stronger in my reading of that book.

When I was reading Death in the Afternoon, I wrote in my notebook at one point that there's something missing. There's something Hemingway's not telling us. Again, intuitively, I felt it was tied to the land. And, sure enough, in going back over the manuscript, there was a chapter that had been pulled from that book, which was all about Hemingway's longing for the West and the demise of what he knew in Michigan. It was at that point, I think, that I felt this kinship with Hemingway.

So whatever earlier perceptions you had of Hemingway fell away?

It was a myth. Just like the myth of the bullfight, which is so easily read as cruelty and brutality and part of the Spanish black myth as they say. I saw Hemingway strapped to the same mythology, the rugged hunter machismo. I thought, no, there is something much deeper and more tender, if you will, and human about Hemingway that has been lost in the caricature.

Did that feeling stay with you as you went back into the fiction?

Absolutely. I started looking at his ethic of place, his sense of place, in his short stories. And it's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. I mean how is it we have misread him so thoroughly?

Blame it on the media?

We always opt for the symbolic, the romantic, the superficial. That's not to say that Hemingway didn't have a large part in creating the mythology that circled him. Maybe that was part of the conflict that resonated in him.

But what I have found in reading and rereading his fiction and non-fiction is a man deeply tied to the land. He was desperate to find a sense of wildness, not only in the environment he chose to inhabit but in himself. There was a passage, I believe it's in the removed chapter from Death in the Afternoon, that he says, when one chooses to live in young country, one's heart will be continually broken. When one lived in old country the damage has been rendered. That's a paraphrase. But why was he attracted to Spain? Why was he attracted to Paris? He didn't have to see the losses that he was seeing in Wyoming, in Idaho, in Michigan, in the places that really were wild when he knew them.

There's no question that each reader comes to Hemingway out of his own bias. But when you read his correspondence, when you see the choices he made as to where he traveled and where he chose to live, you can't avoid reflecting on his exploration of wildness.

I also think his view of women and gender is much more complicated than we are led to believe in the popular culture. Again, when you go back to the original manuscript of The Garden of Eden, when you look at “Hills Like White Elephants,” those are really powerful perspective changes. This is a male writer: How could Hemingway know the outrage that a woman feels when a man dictates the actions she would choose on behalf of her body? And the kind of gender confusion that's played between the characters in Garden of Eden? Again, to me, this walks parallel to his views of landscape, the conflicts as well as the conciliations with his relationship with women, his relationship to his own sexuality, his relationship to the land.

Because you are not a fiction writer, I wonder how you also deal with Hemingway's technique? Does that mean as much to you as the vision, the content that you are finding?

I don't think you can separate it, because that's his voice. In “A Natural History of the Dead,” there's a quote I love: “Can any branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life?” Would you ever expect that from Ernest Hemingway?

The stereotype is curt sentences, less is more. Yet, there are times when he just lets loose in terms of his questions. And that's what I love so much about Hemingway. You look at “The Big Two-Hearted River,” yes, but what about this big-hearted man, who was so sensitive and, dare I even say, embodied the wild feminine. He had to continually keep that hidden under this guise of machismo. What price did he pay? I think we know the answer.

Williams searches for a paragraph that she had found in the deleted last chapter of Death in the Afternoon. When she retrieves it she reads it to me over the phone. “If you care about an old country, that is one where the physical changes have mostly been made, you do it for security, but that is the second illusion that an intelligent man should lose. There is no security in any life that death is the end of, nor has economic security ever existed, nor is it possible. There can only be an intelligent acceptance or refusal of chances.”

I just love that. There you find that beautiful paradox of Hemingway's soul and Hemingway's writing. Is life an intelligent acceptance or is it a refusal? It's that tension. And my relationship, if we can be so presumptuous, with Hemingway probably began in that paragraph. A piece that was never published. The unknown Hemingway. The Hemingway that has been silent, because it asks us to consider him from a much deeper place.

Robert Stone is one of the leading voices of contemporary American fiction. In his short stories (collected in Bear and His Daughter) and novels such as Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach, and, most recently, Damascus Gate, Stone reaches outward to explore the dangers of the world and inward to plumb the depths of late-century American anxieties. He divides his time between Connecticut, where he teaches at Yale University, and Key West.

You have written novels of civil war in a Spanish-speaking country, of a man against the sea, of beautiful people in beautiful places with danger in their lives, and I can think of a short story of yours about abortion. One could conclude that Hemingway has had some influence in your writing life.

[Stone]: I don't think any of those things really have their origin in Hemingway. That isn't the way that Hemingway influences. And, in a way, that is gratuitous.

How is it, then, that Hemingway influences?

Hemingway's influence was broadcast. It didn't affect everyone the same way. One of the ways in which he was influential was in creating out of a style a kind of morality, a kind of ethos. It was the one that prevailed during the second world war. A good example of that would be just about every heroic role that Humphrey Bogart ever played. You can't have “Casablanca” without Hemingway.

But that's Hemingway's influence on the popular culture. That's not his influence as a writer. That I write something about abortion has a whole lot more to do with living in the '90s than it has do with Hemingway. That's true about Central America. That's true about the ocean. None of those things would I ascribe to Hemingway. I consider myself having been influenced by Hemingway, but certainly not in terms of choice of subject.

On the other hand, Hemingway made what are almost technical discoveries about the beauty of the simple sentence and the way in which dialogue can be made to play on the page, the way in which dialogue can be made to carry the essence of spoken language. These are almost musical things. This is Hemingway as a stylist in influencing other writers in the way that musicians influence other musicians.

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” there aren't any adverbs; there isn't any identification for the most part as to the speakers, other than their dialogue. It's dialogue as a vehicle of characterization entirely. There is no physical description of the characters and yet they're extremely vivid, why? They're extremely vivid, because of the dialogue. And it's also extremely stripped. There're no adverbs in the description, and yet description accompanies and complements the dialogue in the most exact way. This is technique that amounts to technical innovation. Once you see how that is done, it's very hard to go back beyond it.

And his ability to use the white space, to hold a pedal down, to really make the rhythm of a juxtaposition of words echo in the space that follows it immediately; his paragraphing, his arrangement of sentences; it all creates sound. Sound in turn creates a kind of morality, a kind of stoic endurance, an ethos.

This discussion of technique brings to mind Wallace Stevens's suggestion that Hemingway was a great poet. Do you agree?

I think there's very little difference between poetry and prose. Prose is sound. Punctuation is the sonic key. The length of sentences, the sound of words, word choices, it's all sound. It all happens in the mind's ear. And Hemingway was a master controller of the mind's ear. He could make in the mind's ear a kind of solemn incantation that had a moral valence to it. In the way that Gregorian chant or chanted Tibetan mantras have their sound, Hemingway has a kind of moral resonance.

Is that something that you as a writer aspire to? To have a sound that has a moral resonance?

Yes, because in a novel of any seriousness, your characters have interior lives and consequently they have a moral dimension and you make their interior lives out of the way they sound. It's a question of leitmotif. Characters in novels or stories have a leitmotif, just like characters in operas. It's really done with sound.

That's something that Hemingway knew very well. He probably used it more immediately and more dramatically than any writer before him.

Hemingway was still alive when you began writing. What kind of presence do you remember of him at that time?

It's hard to remember the degree to which he bestrode the world. Hemingway was famous in a way writers are no longer famous. First of all, in the first half of the century writers enjoyed an esteem that they don't in the second half of the century. There's no equivalent today for Gide and Mann and Hemingway. The novelist was a more important figure culturally years ago, for whatever reason. This not to say that the best novelists then were better than the best novelists now. They were just more important.

I don't know if Hemingway was an avid self-promoter or not, perhaps he was, but he certainly was good copy and everybody was interested in him. Everybody, including people who didn't know much about writing, knew who Ernest Hemingway was. He was famous for being famous, an international celebrity.

About the time I was beginning to write, Hemingway was becoming a fairly ridiculous figure. Of course he didn't have long to live and what wasn't understood was that he was going to pieces. But as would happen to anybody that famous, that prominent, he was being parodied. He was being laughed at by younger people, as institutions inevitably are.

Stone and I digressed a few moments to talk about other influences of his. He named, for instance, Conrad, Hardy and Dos Passos.

I love USA [the Dos Passos trilogy]. He's a very underrated writer. USA: that will last. It doesn't have the beautiful style of Hemingway, but it's a great panoramic vision of America at that time.

One thing that's extraordinary is how Hemingway holds up. You pick up A Farewell to Arms and it's just as vibrant as it must have been to its first readers.

Do you think Hemingway will still be read 100 years from now?

I think so. I would put my money on Hemingway.

Would you put your money on anybody else?

I don't know about Faulkner. Faulkner seems strangely forgotten here for the moment, which always amazes the Europeans. So it's kind of hard to tell. But I feel strongly that Hemingway's work will last.

Anybody else in the twentieth century is up for grabs. But you know who else? I just did an introduction to Day of the Locust. I think Nathanael West has survived really well. Of course, there isn't a lot of work. But I think Day of the Locust is quite present.

And, as one always does, I'm probably leaving somebody out. There's work that will be rediscovered, you know, bones that will rattle again.