WRITING

 

WRITING

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 15, 2021

 

INFLUENCE OF ERIC HOFFER & ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON MY WRITING

 

              Eric Hoffer came late to writing his epic “The True Believer” which was published when he was in his 50s.  Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, established himself as a writer publishing “The Sun Also Rises,” when he was in his twenties. 

Hoffer claimed to have “a taste for the good sentence,” whereas Hemingway referred to this as a quest “for the true sentence.”  Like Churchill, Hemingway became celebrated for his simple declarative sentences.  He believed “what you left out of a sentence was more important for what the sentence failed to contain was necessary for it to be true.” 

He constantly rewrote at his standing desk, similar to how Goethe and Thomas Jefferson wrote, saying, it saved his back and kept his butt from spreading out like a sack of groceries. 

Hoffer didn’t write as economically as Hemingway as he was too enamored of colorful epigrams and aphorisms.  He never had the luxury of a standing desk.

My first book was published in my thirties; my second book in my fifties.   Along the way, I published an occasional newspaper or magazine article but filled the void by reading everything written by these two authors or that I could find written about them.  

Hemingway wrote:

“There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

 

Hoffer would find this claim a bit melodramatic.  Moreover, he never learned to type, wrote all his missives in longhand, and sent them off to Harper & Row to be typed but not edited.  From the beginning, he didn’t like editors.   Now, with Hoffer, the writing wasn’t a chore; it was a celebration.   After publishing "The True Believer" in 1951 to modest if significant sales, everything changed for the longshoreman laborer and philosopher in 1967, sixteen years later, when Eric Sevareid had him as a guest on CBS-TV.  He proved to be quite a self-promoter and actor, as was Heminway.  Hoffer was 69 at the time. 

Hemingway glamorized war to project his macho persona.  Biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote:

“Because of Hemingway’s tendency to obscure the distinction between his fiction and his life, he was temperamentally primed for corruption by publicity and wealth.  He inflated his genuine heroism in war through newspaper interviews and public speeches while still in his teens.”

In my parlance, Hemingway was never an adult whereas Hoffer was having no choice to be otherwise.

Hemingway wrote – as he did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Sweden in 1954 having suffered two plane crashes in Africa in a matter of days and was recovering from his injuries:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.  For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.


Hemingway died of suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961 at the age of 61; Hoffer died of natural causes in 1983 at the age of 84. Hemingway was rich, celebrated throughout the world, a guest of the incredibly wealthy as well as royalty, whereas Hoffer was of modest means and suffered grave hardship in his early life. Hemingway was a world celebrity traveling widely whereas Hoffer never left the continental United States.

Hemingway left 332 manuscripts of unpublished works with his wife, Mary, at his death.  Hofer has some 75 linear feet of his papers and books at the Hover Institute of Stanford University.  Hemingway’s papers are at the John F. Kenney Presidential Library in Boston. 

MY REASON FOR SHARING

Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, I completed two manuscripts: EVERYONE IS AN AUTHOR: Confessions of an Existential Amateur and MIRROR OF THE PSYCHE: A Study of the Writing of Eric Hoffer from the perspective of The Fisher Paradigm©™.

In July 2019 on July 2, I had open-heart surgery, and have been dealing with that ever since.  To put it simply, I’ve never recovered sufficiently to write with the energy and abeyance that I once did. An essay such as this is about my limitations.

I don’t have 332 unpublished manuscripts in my repertoire,  but I do have some 1500 essays on my blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com and a few manuscripts such as THE TRIPLE FOOL and IN SEARCH OF THE REAL PARENTS OF MY SOUL. 

The first is a novel of a middle-aged man who loves the comfort of his study where he has a conversation with his books in Latin, while he reminisces about the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith while experiencing teleportation to his son who is a Catholic Priest in Rome in residence at St. Paul’s Outside the Wall in Rome, Italy.  

The second is something like a Kahlil Griban mystical journey into knowing only centered on being both inclusive and beyond all religions.

Like Hoffer, I do write in notebooks, but not systematically as my writing is of whole cloth highlighted with my empirical experience never thinking of an audience.  Hemingway, on the other hand, can think no other way.  He writes:

“Writing is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

 

This was what I have been thinking today, March 15, 2021, The Ides of March.