◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Under the Water I am Ernest Hemingway. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. You know the picture. The rifles. The bullfights. The lions. The four wives. The beard, the boat, the drinking. I built that picture on purpose, and it is the thing I most need to take back. Let me tell you what I actually did, because it was not the hunting. I changed how Americans write. Before me the sentences were long and dressed up and sure of themselves. I cut them down. I took out the adjectives, the flourishes, the author standing over your shoulder telling you how to feel. I learned it as a young reporter, and then in the war, where I saw that the big words — honor, glory, sacrifice — had gone hollow, and only the names of places still meant anything. So I made a rule. Say a tenth. Leave nine-tenths under the water. I called it the iceberg. If you know a true thing and leave it out, the reader feels it anyway, feels it harder, because it is under the surface holding everything up. A story is strong not because of what it says, but because of everything it knows and does not say. Let me show you, in my own words, the way a book about the war begins. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. Look at what is in that, and what is not. Pebbles. Boulders. Dust on the leaves. Soldiers marching, and the road afterward bare and white. Not one feeling named. Not one. And underneath it, the whole weight of a war that is going to take everything from the man saying those words — the dust already on the leaves, the leaves already falling, early, too early. It is all in there, pressing up from below, holding the sentence up. That is the iceberg. That is the strength that is made of what you leave out. I could feel everything, and carry all of it, and let it show precisely by refusing to say it. That was real. That was mine. Remember that I could do that — because in the second of these I am going to tell you what I did with the same gift when I got out of the chair, and it is the opposite, and it is the thing I came back to warn you about. PART TWO The Thing I Came Back to Warn You About I am Ernest Hemingway again. In the first of these I told you the true thing: that I taught America a strength made of restraint — of everything felt and carried and left under the water. Now the lie, which I also built, and sold, and could not survive. Because I made the other thing too. The man who feels nothing. The man who is hard, who conquers the animal and the woman and the marlin and the bottle, who is never afraid, never tender, never in need. I sold that man to America. And he was a lie, because I felt everything, all of it, always — that was the whole engine of the writing. But I performed a man who felt nothing, and the country bought the performance and threw away the books. Look at what you made of it. Look at the man on your stage — the swagger, the contempt for weakness, the strength that is all surface and no water underneath. That is my counterfeit. He is the iceberg turned upside down, the whole thing shoved up into the air where it can be seen, and nothing underneath holding it up. He performs the manhood I sold and never had. Now I have to tell you the end, and I am going to tell it straight, because I owe you that. The code I built had no room in it for a man who needed help. That was the flaw I welded into it, and then had to live inside for the rest of my life. And when my mind began to go — the memory, the words, the work, the one thing I had — I could not do the one thing that might have saved me. I could not turn to another person and say, out loud: I am drowning. I am afraid. I cannot carry this alone. The man I had built could not say those words. My father could not say them before me. And you know how it ended, in the house in Idaho, and I will not make it beautiful, because there was nothing beautiful in it. The worst lie I could tell you — the last and worst counterfeit — would be to let that silence look like strength. So hear me, from the far side of it. The strength was never in the silence about pain. It was in the silence about everything else, so that the pain could be said. Feel everything. That was always the secret, the real one — the one I put in the books and kept out of my life. Carry what you can carry. And the one thing you must never leave under the water, the one true sentence you must say out loud to another living person, is this: I need help. I cannot do this alone. Say it. Say it to someone. I could not, and it cost me every page I had left. Do not perform the man who feels nothing. Be the one who feels everything, and says the hard thing, and stays.