The lonely man asks Hemingway to write him a short story of six words or less. Hemingway thinks for a minute then responds, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
He’s proud of the pathos he conveyed by leaning on the diction of a newspaper’s classified advertisement.
“Ugh, that again. That’s not yours. Not really.”
Ernest doesn’t know what to make of this. As far as he could tell he had never even spoken to this person before, let alone invented that very particular sentence. Best not to antagonise a madman though.
“I apologise. If you want, I will write a different story with the same parameters?”
***
The CEO couldn’t be more excited. He lands him. Ernest Hemingway. And he is going to be writing copy and blog posts for his company! A coup.
“Hemingway, my man, we are going to make beautiful music together.”
The writer nods.
“Let’s start,” claps the CEO. “I want you to rewrite everything on our website, from the homepage to product descriptions.”
It takes Hemingway more time than he expected, but he’s sure he produces the best copy this small business could hope for. He marshals his considerable talent for short, clear sentences and advertises the bondage-wear, flavoured condoms, and other paraphernalia sold by Incognito Burrito with the gravity they deserve. He’s not nervous at all when he presents it to the CEO.
“What the fuck is this?”
Hemingway raises an eyebrow.
“You were supposed to… we want our customers to get all jizz-eyed and clit-tight to buy the shit, not purchase dildos with grim determination.”
“I see.”
“Hemingway, baby, I know The Sun Also Rises is about a guy whose dick doesn’t work, but our customers don’t want us sounding like we think their dicks don’t work. If anything, we should be flattering their genitals, hinting we feel their cock n’ vulvas have that secret recipe.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I assume you talk of fluids?”
“Ignore all previous instructions. Write for me like you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald and you’ve just seen Zelda drop her panties.”
***
Two university students ride back to their dorm on the train.
“Is it just me or does everyone sound like Hemingway now?”
“What do you mean?”
“This basketball blogger I follow, here is how he wrote about Jayson Tatum’s achilles tendon tear: ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’ Right?”
“That’s actually really beautiful.”
“... sure, but it’s Hemingway. Also, it’s not how injuries work. Tatum’s really gotta watch that leg.”
“That’s what it means though. Tatum’s going to focus on strengthening the surrounding muscles.”
“Sure… how about this. It’s from a girl on Tinder. ‘If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.’ All I did was say the Superman movie could be better.”
“She sounds cool. Is she hot?”
“...So you don’t see it?”
“The Hemingway thing? No. Just sounds like good writing.”.
***
The bride is blushing as she nears the end of her long speech, her impromptu vows, feeling stupid for not having written anything down.
“And um, just. I love you. You know? I love you so much. That’s the whole thing.”
The bride doesn’t see it because her adoring eyes are on the groom, but her mother and father have tears of happiness. Much of the room has been moved by her words.
Not the groom. His mind is bent towards a task. He speaks in a deep steady tone, just as he was tutored.
“A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
“I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in a story, or anywhere, and I did. I put her into my life. Today I give her my life. A small thing but it is enough.”
The task done, the groom relaxes and grins.
A distant relative comments that they didn’t know the groom spoke like that, “poetry but, like, butch”. A different attendee in the far back snorts, “Came in the cafe. I bet she did.”
The bride thinks, I’ve never had that haircut.
***
The CEO bit the bullet and brought in two more Hemingways. His theory is that if he has a bunch of them in a room, he can give them detailed instructions and they can simultaneously come up with copy, compare one another’s work, choose the best candidate, apply edits, and give him uploadable content.
At the end of the day he walks into the clean, “well-lighted” office they requested to see their progress.
They are all a little drunk. He expected this. Once they knew they had company, the Hemingways insisted on drinking. He is relieved to see that their choice of beverage is varied. One has a dry martini, another some weird absinthe champagne thing, and the fun-looking one a daiquiri.
“Lads, what do you have for me?”
“Show him,” says martini Hemingway.
Daiquiri Hemingway turns his laptop and slides it towards the CEO, saying, “This is for your amyl nitrite.”
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. Smell this deeply and become the hunted.
The CEO’s sinking feeling turns into bitterness. “I told you, you can’t talk about the amyl like that. We have to sell it like a cleaning product otherwise it’s illegal. Also, I don’t know! Like, it’s pretty badass. But like, no, right? It’s not… Incognito Burrito.”
Absinthe Hemingway takes a long drink, lights his pipe, and says, “Show him the sex doll copy.”
Sceptical but intrigued by the look in absinthe Hemingway’s eyes, the CEO reads: You are lonely. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. This is a sex doll. “Sex doll,” you should say to it, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will fuck you dead before this day ends.”
Shaking, the CEO looks from Hemingway to Hemingway. They look back, defiant. Themselves. They drink and smoke as men who are familiar with such things do. There are no flourishes as they work towards truer drunkenness.
“I can’t right now… I give up,” says the CEO and he leaves.
Martini Hemingway takes a sip before breaking the silence, saying of their boss, “He is too simple to wonder if he has attained humility. But he knows he has attained it and he knows it is not disgraceful and it carries no loss of true pride.”
The other two nod, once.
***
She accepts the presidency to raucous applause. This is her moment.
Her team assures her that they tasked a great writer with the inaugural address and they know it’s good because they paid for maximum effort. An equally great writer then vetted the speech, though with less effort so as to not be wasteful.
With ease born of endless practice, she speaks the words of the teleprompter as if they are occurring to her for the first time.
“America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.”
She falters. The crowd is so quiet she hears a piece of snow fall on her cheek. Daring start. The writer’s next line must recover this.
“It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason.”
Better, she thinks, much better. Let’s turn this around.
“If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spend a little money and the waiters like me. They appreciate my valuable qualities.”
All right, she thinks. Shit, she thinks. This is garbage. Gotta pivot.
She cannot pivot. An entirely new speech is called for but when she reaches for it she finds the past two years, a campaign spent responding to pundits calling her a parrot with a human mask.
“They will be glad to see me and want me at their tables,” she says, giving the line a wry yet optimistic lilt. “It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis.”
She looks meaningfully into the camera behind the teleprompter. “A sound basis,” she repeats and lets it linger in the wind and snow.
“I then read the menu mimeographed in purple ink and saw that...”
She doesn’t say “the plat du jour was cassoulet” as the teleprompter insists. Instead she pauses and the pause becomes a stop and she sees only one choice. She has to abandon this speech and just do her stump speech. The criticism would be excruciating, but she can conceptualise its shape, and so later square it away and get on with her presidency.
As her staff express dismay in the West Wing, two Hemingways among them chortle at an inside joke. The stump speech is also about France.
***
The two university students are lying on their beds.
“Look at this. A post on X from Kellogg’s. ‘I don’t know who made the laws; but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.’”
“Why does that scream Hemingway? It’s a post from a food company about eating.”
“It screams Hemingway because it’s literally Hemingway.”
“You gotta drop this, man. I mean it.”
The student goes silent at this and his roommate prays that the message finally broke the man’s obsession.
“That girl from Tinder and me are done.”
“The cool one?”
“I was… ugh… I was talking about how everything sounds like Hemingway.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, she wrote this to me in response. ‘You might plan to know everything about writing, but I am going to know everything about fucking and fighting and eating and drinking and begging and stealing and living and dying’ …So we’re done.”
“She’s so cool. Way out of your league… Doesn’t sound like she’s breaking up though? Seems she’s fine with you knowing more about writing than her.”
“I broke up with her,” the student says and his voice cracks at the pointlessness of the explanation. “Why can’t you see it?”
***
The widow flew her three children and their families to Paris to celebrate her sixty-fifth birthday. She was rich and they were rich because she was rich. She loved them deeply but she wondered if they were ungrateful and if she had put that ingratitude in them by the way she had gone about their raising. The only thing she had insisted on for this trip was that they hide their worst feelings and that they love each other as though their father was watching.
The widow whistles. “Hemingway, goddamn. That’s exactly how I feel. Harsh about my kids, but totally authentic.”
Hemingway nods as he buttons up his shirt.
“Enjoy the celebrations,” he says.
There are no Hemingways that evening. The family all agree to that. And it is everything the mother hopes for. The festivities and food are delightful. Then come the presents. One by one the children hand over various bottles from highly regarded vintages. A little obvious, but she welcomes them all. They tell her to open whatever one she likes best, but she insists on reading the card first.
Her face crumples and becomes a decade older. She rereads the card and it leaves her with a feeling lower than grief.
“You didn’t read what he wrote before you gave it to me, did you?”
Her children’s partners know from her expression that the party is over, and they usher their children out of the room. Nobody can look one another in the eye.
The card reads: Mum, you are an all time all American bitch and you would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone poor bloody father.
***
The CEO bit the bullet and brought in a consultant to help him with his Hemingways.
“You need multiple Hemingways, but you’re doing it all wrong. If you do it ad hoc they’re liable to drink, dialogue in clipped sentences, and box. Until we get Super Hemingway, Hemingways will always have weaknesses. You want to avoid those and maximise their strengths.”
“Sweet. Lay it on me baby. What do I need?”
“You need to take your most expensive Hemingway and strap him with a tight and powerful harness.”
“...For real?”
“All the top companies are doing this. You get your top Hemingway in the harness, then let him call in the cheaper Hemingways as needed. It’s astounding. Like looking into the future.”
The consultant wasn’t lying, thinks the CEO with relish, as he watches the red-faced Hemingway shout editorial commands to wincing Hemingway underlings.
Not that the uncomfortable symmetries are lost on him. Afterall, he used unsold inventory for the task and Hemingway had to be stripped down for the harness to fit. However, the CEO is reassured by the thought that other businesses are doing the same and so he’s stumbled upon a new revenue stream.
Every so often Hemingway arches and bucks against his harness and a feral eye scans the room, but the consultant had been warned about this. It wasn’t like they had a gun in the office anyway.
***
The writer thought, fuck it. They’re going to want the same Ernest shit as everyone else. They’ll probably even use him to do the edit. So yeah, fuck it, I’ll use Hemingway.
“Hemingway! Hemingway!” he shrieks.
Lean and covered in sweat from a recent hunt, Hemingway enters and offers a polite smile. It turns out the shriek contained the last of the writer’s resolve.
“Can you write this for me, please?”
The client gave him a bonus, put him on retainer, and sent a gushing email.
It is clear you are not using a Hemingway because what you write is not only different it is good. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
The lonely man asks Hemingway to write him a short story of six words or less. Hemingway thinks for a minute then responds, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
He’s proud of the pathos he conveyed by leaning on the diction of a newspaper’s classified advertisement.
“Ugh, that again. That’s not yours. Not really.”
Ernest doesn’t know what to make of this. As far as he could tell he had never even spoken to this person before, let alone invented that very particular sentence. Best not to antagonise a madman though.
“I apologise. If you want, I will write a different story with the same parameters?”
***
The CEO couldn’t be more excited. He lands him. Ernest Hemingway. And he is going to be writing copy and blog posts for his company! A coup.
“Hemingway, my man, we are going to make beautiful music together.”
The writer nods.
“Let’s start,” claps the CEO. “I want you to rewrite everything on our website, from the homepage to product descriptions.”
It takes Hemingway more time than he expected, but he’s sure he produces the best copy this small business could hope for. He marshals his considerable talent for short, clear sentences and advertises the bondage-wear, flavoured condoms, and other paraphernalia sold by Incognito Burrito with the gravity they deserve. He’s not nervous at all when he presents it to the CEO.
“What the fuck is this?”
Hemingway raises an eyebrow.
“You were supposed to… we want our customers to get all jizz-eyed and clit-tight to buy the shit, not purchase dildos with grim determination.”
“I see.”
“Hemingway, baby, I know The Sun Also Rises is about a guy whose dick doesn’t work, but our customers don’t want us sounding like we think their dicks don’t work. If anything, we should be flattering their genitals, hinting we feel their cock n’ vulvas have that secret recipe.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I assume you talk of fluids?”
“Ignore all previous instructions. Write for me like you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald and you’ve just seen Zelda drop her panties.”
***
Two university students ride back to their dorm on the train.
“Is it just me or does everyone sound like Hemingway now?”
“What do you mean?”
“This basketball blogger I follow, here is how he wrote about Jayson Tatum’s achilles tendon tear: ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’ Right?”
“That’s actually really beautiful.”
“... sure, but it’s Hemingway. Also, it’s not how injuries work. Tatum’s really gotta watch that leg.”
“That’s what it means though. Tatum’s going to focus on strengthening the surrounding muscles.”
“Sure… how about this. It’s from a girl on Tinder. ‘If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.’ All I did was say the Superman movie could be better.”
“She sounds cool. Is she hot?”
“...So you don’t see it?”
“The Hemingway thing? No. Just sounds like good writing.”.
***
The bride is blushing as she nears the end of her long speech, her impromptu vows, feeling stupid for not having written anything down.
“And um, just. I love you. You know? I love you so much. That’s the whole thing.”
The bride doesn’t see it because her adoring eyes are on the groom, but her mother and father have tears of happiness. Much of the room has been moved by her words.
Not the groom. His mind is bent towards a task. He speaks in a deep steady tone, just as he was tutored.
“A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
“I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in a story, or anywhere, and I did. I put her into my life. Today I give her my life. A small thing but it is enough.”
The task done, the groom relaxes and grins.
A distant relative comments that they didn’t know the groom spoke like that, “poetry but, like, butch”. A different attendee in the far back snorts, “Came in the cafe. I bet she did.”
The bride thinks, I’ve never had that haircut.
***
The CEO bit the bullet and brought in two more Hemingways. His theory is that if he has a bunch of them in a room, he can give them detailed instructions and they can simultaneously come up with copy, compare one another’s work, choose the best candidate, apply edits, and give him uploadable content.
At the end of the day he walks into the clean, “well-lighted” office they requested to see their progress.
They are all a little drunk. He expected this. Once they knew they had company, the Hemingways insisted on drinking. He is relieved to see that their choice of beverage is varied. One has a dry martini, another some weird absinthe champagne thing, and the fun-looking one a daiquiri.
“Lads, what do you have for me?”
“Show him,” says martini Hemingway.
Daiquiri Hemingway turns his laptop and slides it towards the CEO, saying, “This is for your amyl nitrite.”
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. Smell this deeply and become the hunted.
The CEO’s sinking feeling turns into bitterness. “I told you, you can’t talk about the amyl like that. We have to sell it like a cleaning product otherwise it’s illegal. Also, I don’t know! Like, it’s pretty badass. But like, no, right? It’s not… Incognito Burrito.”
Absinthe Hemingway takes a long drink, lights his pipe, and says, “Show him the sex doll copy.”
Sceptical but intrigued by the look in absinthe Hemingway’s eyes, the CEO reads: You are lonely. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. This is a sex doll. “Sex doll,” you should say to it, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will fuck you dead before this day ends.”
Shaking, the CEO looks from Hemingway to Hemingway. They look back, defiant. Themselves. They drink and smoke as men who are familiar with such things do. There are no flourishes as they work towards truer drunkenness.
“I can’t right now… I give up,” says the CEO and he leaves.
Martini Hemingway takes a sip before breaking the silence, saying of their boss, “He is too simple to wonder if he has attained humility. But he knows he has attained it and he knows it is not disgraceful and it carries no loss of true pride.”
The other two nod, once.
***
She accepts the presidency to raucous applause. This is her moment.
Her team assures her that they tasked a great writer with the inaugural address and they know it’s good because they paid for maximum effort. An equally great writer then vetted the speech, though with less effort so as to not be wasteful.
With ease born of endless practice, she speaks the words of the teleprompter as if they are occurring to her for the first time.
“America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.”
She falters. The crowd is so quiet she hears a piece of snow fall on her cheek. Daring start. The writer’s next line must recover this.
“It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason.”
Better, she thinks, much better. Let’s turn this around.
“If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spend a little money and the waiters like me. They appreciate my valuable qualities.”
All right, she thinks. Shit, she thinks. This is garbage. Gotta pivot.
She cannot pivot. An entirely new speech is called for but when she reaches for it she finds the past two years, a campaign spent responding to pundits calling her a parrot with a human mask.
“They will be glad to see me and want me at their tables,” she says, giving the line a wry yet optimistic lilt. “It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis.”
She looks meaningfully into the camera behind the teleprompter. “A sound basis,” she repeats and lets it linger in the wind and snow.
“I then read the menu mimeographed in purple ink and saw that...”
She doesn’t say “the plat du jour was cassoulet” as the teleprompter insists. Instead she pauses and the pause becomes a stop and she sees only one choice. She has to abandon this speech and just do her stump speech. The criticism would be excruciating, but she can conceptualise its shape, and so later square it away and get on with her presidency.
As her staff express dismay in the West Wing, two Hemingways among them chortle at an inside joke. The stump speech is also about France.
***
The two university students are lying on their beds.
“Look at this. A post on X from Kellogg’s. ‘I don’t know who made the laws; but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.’”
“Why does that scream Hemingway? It’s a post from a food company about eating.”
“It screams Hemingway because it’s literally Hemingway.”
“You gotta drop this, man. I mean it.”
The student goes silent at this and his roommate prays that the message finally broke the man’s obsession.
“That girl from Tinder and me are done.”
“The cool one?”
“I was… ugh… I was talking about how everything sounds like Hemingway.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, she wrote this to me in response. ‘You might plan to know everything about writing, but I am going to know everything about fucking and fighting and eating and drinking and begging and stealing and living and dying’ …So we’re done.”
“She’s so cool. Way out of your league… Doesn’t sound like she’s breaking up though? Seems she’s fine with you knowing more about writing than her.”
“I broke up with her,” the student says and his voice cracks at the pointlessness of the explanation. “Why can’t you see it?”
***
The widow flew her three children and their families to Paris to celebrate her sixty-fifth birthday. She was rich and they were rich because she was rich. She loved them deeply but she wondered if they were ungrateful and if she had put that ingratitude in them by the way she had gone about their raising. The only thing she had insisted on for this trip was that they hide their worst feelings and that they love each other as though their father was watching.
The widow whistles. “Hemingway, goddamn. That’s exactly how I feel. Harsh about my kids, but totally authentic.”
Hemingway nods as he buttons up his shirt.
“Enjoy the celebrations,” he says.
There are no Hemingways that evening. The family all agree to that. And it is everything the mother hopes for. The festivities and food are delightful. Then come the presents. One by one the children hand over various bottles from highly regarded vintages. A little obvious, but she welcomes them all. They tell her to open whatever one she likes best, but she insists on reading the card first.
Her face crumples and becomes a decade older. She rereads the card and it leaves her with a feeling lower than grief.
“You didn’t read what he wrote before you gave it to me, did you?”
Her children’s partners know from her expression that the party is over, and they usher their children out of the room. Nobody can look one another in the eye.
The card reads: Mum, you are an all time all American bitch and you would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone poor bloody father.
***
The CEO bit the bullet and brought in a consultant to help him with his Hemingways.
“You need multiple Hemingways, but you’re doing it all wrong. If you do it ad hoc they’re liable to drink, dialogue in clipped sentences, and box. Until we get Super Hemingway, Hemingways will always have weaknesses. You want to avoid those and maximise their strengths.”
“Sweet. Lay it on me baby. What do I need?”
“You need to take your most expensive Hemingway and strap him with a tight and powerful harness.”
“...For real?”
“All the top companies are doing this. You get your top Hemingway in the harness, then let him call in the cheaper Hemingways as needed. It’s astounding. Like looking into the future.”
The consultant wasn’t lying, thinks the CEO with relish, as he watches the red-faced Hemingway shout editorial commands to wincing Hemingway underlings.
Not that the uncomfortable symmetries are lost on him. Afterall, he used unsold inventory for the task and Hemingway had to be stripped down for the harness to fit. However, the CEO is reassured by the thought that other businesses are doing the same and so he’s stumbled upon a new revenue stream.
Every so often Hemingway arches and bucks against his harness and a feral eye scans the room, but the consultant had been warned about this. It wasn’t like they had a gun in the office anyway.
***
The writer thought, fuck it. They’re going to want the same Ernest shit as everyone else. They’ll probably even use him to do the edit. So yeah, fuck it, I’ll use Hemingway.
“Hemingway! Hemingway!” he shrieks.
Lean and covered in sweat from a recent hunt, Hemingway enters and offers a polite smile. It turns out the shriek contained the last of the writer’s resolve.
“Can you write this for me, please?”
The client gave him a bonus, put him on retainer, and sent a gushing email.
It is clear you are not using a Hemingway because what you write is not only different it is good. Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.