TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, …/media/assets/Education and Public... · relentless desire not to make easy peace with ... "Things had gotten off to a bad start from

2013 PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARDS

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TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy

Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director

of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I

welcome you to the 2013 PEN/Hemingway and PEN New England Award ceremony.

Now, in a moment, I'm going to play a clip from one of this year's Academy Award-

winning films, and I'd like to begin with a mini-Academy night acceptance speech.

Fortunately, I've already managed to make my way on to the stage without tripping on

those stairs [laughter], and I promise there'll be no unsolicited revelations about my

personal life. [laughter]

But I do need to pause and to thank all of the individuals who played a hand in today's

festivities, especially PEN New England and its Executive Committee Karen Wulf,

Helene Atwan and Richard Hoffman, and my colleague Amy Macdonald, who also

happens now to serve as the chair of PEN New England.

We also thank the Hemingway Foundation and Society, who fund the PEN Award,

represented here today by Steve Paul and others. We also recognize the Ucross

Foundation; the University of Idaho; and the generous underwriters of the Kennedy

Library Forums.

I will be introducing Patrick Hemingway shortly, but I also want to recognize and thank

all the members of the Hemingway family who are here with us today, especially

Patrick's wife Carol, one of the guiding forces behind our work with the Hemingway

collection; and Sean Hemingway, who, along with his wife Colette, is the co-chair of the

Hemingway Council and an editor of numerous works about and by his grandfather. Let

me also recognize other members of the Hemingway Council who are here this afternoon,

including Jill Ker Conway, Rose Styron and NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon.


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Working at this Library, one cannot help but notice the ubiquitous references to John

Kennedy and Ernest Hemingway in popular culture. Watching the Super Bowl, for

example, I was confounded to see flashing across my television screen Kennedy home

movies from this Library's AV collection of a young JFK playing touch football with his

siblings. It turns out an enterprising marketing firm discovered that these iconic images

are in the public domain and cleverly attempted to expropriate them – without asking

permission, I might add – to promote the NFL and football as the nation's favorite

pastime. [laughter]

And references to Hemingway are similarly omnipresent. Such as this scene in Silver

Linings Playbook, in which the lead character, played by Bradley Cooper, having been

released from a psychiatric unit to live with his parents, attempts to win back his

estranged wife by reading the novels she teaches in her high school English class. Here

he is having just finished A Farewell to Arms.

[video clip shown] [laughter/applause]

While it does not seem fair to blame all the ills of the world on Ernest Hemingway

[laughter], we can credit him for many positive things, including our gathering here this

afternoon to celebrate great writing. And I should note that a few years ago Matthew

Quick, the author of the novel Silver Linings Playbook upon which the film is based,

participated in this very ceremony as one of our 2009 PEN/Hemingway honorees. He

reports that the certificate he received then still hangs over the computer he uses to write

each day.

The PEN/Hemingway Award honors an American writer for a first work of fiction. It's

fitting to name such an award after Ernest Hemingway based on the example he set as a

young man in his 20s, recently married, moving to Paris, writing his first stories and

novels, which revolutionized literature in his time. Not only have those works endured,


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but they've inspired countless readers to become writers themselves, including most

notably today our keynote speaker.

There is something arresting about seeing the breakthrough of any new artist. In an essay

on Hart Crane, the American modernist poet who happened to be born on exactly the

same day and year as Ernest Hemingway, Colm Tóibín writes, "There are certain single

volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, that carry with

them a special and spiritual power. They seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to

have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a

primal sense of voice, and the aura of the voice and the rhythms of the poems suggest a

relentless desire not to make easy peace with the reader. If some of these poems have the

tone of prayers, they are not prayers of comfort or of supplication as much as urgent

laments or cries from the depths where the language has been held much against its will,

or has broken free, and now demands to be heard."

Hemingway and Crane, having come of age in the first years of the 20th

century, were

both voices informed by an artistic need and restless desire to be heard and to break

language free. How fortunate we are today to celebrate writers in our own time who are

doing just the same. I want to thank you all so much for coming to this special ceremony

this afternoon.

Now, no one connects us better to Ernest Hemingway than his son Patrick. Who else

could write the following? "I remember when I was ten years old in 1938 and in the 5th

grade, being beside my father at the top of the stairs on the second floor of our home in

Key West when he opened and read a telegram informing him of the start of the last big

offensive of the Spanish Republic, which would end 16 weeks later in disaster on the

Ebro. Papa left for Spain at once. That was the year my mother, my brother and I went to

war, three whole years before Pearl Harbor. My family was, as they say, prematurely

anti-fascist."


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The anecdote is from Patrick's foreword to Hemingway on War, an anthology edited by

his nephew Sean and apropos in light of the novel and novelist we honor today. The

foreword continues with the story of how Martha Gellhorn, who was a protégée of

Eleanor Roosevelt, arranged for Hemingway to be invited to the White House when it

was clear that Spain was about to fall to Franco, a meeting that only confirmed

Hemingway's dislike of FDR.

"Things had gotten off to a bad start from my father's point of view," Patrick writes,

"when President Roosevelt somewhat gratuitously remarked that he had not read any

work of fiction since his undergraduate days at Harvard. [laughter] The rest of the

evening, the President spent telling about, not listening to, what was going on in Spain.

Furthermore, said my father, Mrs. Roosevelt -- although undoubtedly a person with deep

sympathies for humanity in general -- was a very poor housekeeper, [laughter] and he had

never eaten a worse meal than what he had been served at the White House, especially

the squab, which was tougher than rubber." [laughter]

It's always such a great pleasure and honor to have Patrick here with us each year. We

tend to describe him in our promotional materials as Hemingway's sole surviving son.

When hearing that description, he often responds, with a twinkle in his eye, "That means

I get to have the last word." [laughter] In this ceremony, we are honored to give him the

first. Ladies and gentlemen, Patrick Hemingway. [applause]

PATRICK HEMINGWAY: That is a tough act to follow. We've started this custom of

reading something from my father's work, and this year the prize-winner has written a

beautiful story about war. War is a very serious subject, so I'm going to read something

more comical, more light, so that you can really get down to the seriousness of The

Yellow Birds.

The book I'm going to read an excerpt is The Torrents of Spring. And in this early edition

from Scribner's, on the blurb it says, "First published in 1926, The Torrents of Spring is


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an amusing parody of the Chicago School of Literature to which Sherwood Anderson

subscribed. Poking fun at that great race of writers, it depicts a vogue that Hemingway

himself refused to follow. According to The New York Times, "The Torrents of Spring

revealed Mr. Hemingway's gift for high spirited nonsense. It contributes to that

thoughtful gaiety which true wit should inspire. The book sets out to amuse; this it does."

Now, I'm not sure that it will, because it's from a long time ago, almost 100 years, and it

is making a lot of references to contemporary things. It sort of resembles those things in

Shakespeare's plays that the lower class characters talk about and you have to read the

notes to know how funny it is. [laughter]

But anyway, we'll have a try. This is Chapter 15 of The Torrents of Spring:

They were alone in the beanery now. Scripps and Mandy and Diana. Only

the drummer was with them. He was an old friend now. But his nerves

were on edge tonight. He folded his paper abruptly and started for the

door.

"See you all later," he said. He went out into the night. It seemed the only

thing to do. He did it.

Only three of them in the beanery now. Scripps and Mandy and Diana.

Only those three. Mandy was talking. Leaning on the counter and talking.

Scripps with his eyes fixed on Mandy. Diana made no pretense of

listening now. She knew it was over. It was all over now. But she would

make one more attempt. One more last gallant try. Perhaps she still could

hold him. Perhaps it had all been just a dream. She steadied her voice and

then she spoke.

"Scripps, dear," she said. Her voice shook a little. She steadied it.


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"What's on your mind?" Scripps asked abruptly. Ah, there it was. That

horrid clipped speech again.

"Scripps, dear, wouldn't you like to come home?" Diana's voice quavered.

"There's a new Mercury." She had changed from the London Mercury to

The American Mercury just to please Scripps. "It just came. I wish you felt

like coming home, Scripps, there's a splendid thing in this Mercury. Do

come home, Scripps, I've never asked anything of you before. Come

home, Scripps! Oh, won't you come home?"

Scripps looked up. Diana's heart beat faster. Perhaps he was coming.

Perhaps she was holding him. Holding him. Holding him.

"Do come, Scripps, dear," Diana said softly. "There's a wonderful editorial

in it by Mencken about chiropractors."

Scripps looked away.

"Won't you come, Scripps?" Diana pleaded.

"No," Scripps said. "I don't give a damn about Mencken any more."

Diana dropped her head. "Oh, Scripps," she said. "Oh, Scripps." This was

the end. She had her answer now. She had lost him. Lost him. Lost him. It

was over. Finished. Done for. She sat crying silently. Mandy was talking

again.


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Suddenly Diana straightened up. She had one last request to make. One

thing she would ask him. Only one. He might refuse her. He might not

grant it. But she would ask him.

"Scripps," she said.

"What's the trouble?" Scripps turned in irritation. Perhaps, after all, he was

sorry for her. He wondered.

"Can I take the bird, Scripps?" Diana's voice broke.

"Sure," said Scripps. "Why not?"

Diana picked up the bird cage. The bird was asleep. Perched on one leg as

on that night when they had first met. What was it he was like? Ah, yes.

Like an old osprey. An old, old osprey from her own Lake Country. She

held the cage to her tightly.

"Thank you, Scripps," she said. "Thank you for this bird." Her voice

broke. "And now I must be going."

Quietly, silently, gathering her shawl around her, clutching the cage with

the sleeping bird and the copy of The Mercury to her breast, with only a

backward glance, a last glance at him who had been her Scripps, she

opened the door of the beanery, and went out into the night. Scripps did

not even see her go. He was intent on what Mandy was saying. Mandy

was talking again.

"That bird she just took out," Mandy was saying.


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"Oh, did she take a bird out?" Scripps asked. "Go on with the story."

"You used to wonder about what sort of bird that was," Mandy went on.

"That's right," Scripps agreed.

"Well that reminds me of a story about Gosse and the Marquis of Buque,"

Mandy went on.

"Tell it, Mandy. Tell it," Scripps urged.

"It seemed a great friend of mine, Ford, you've heard me speak of him

before, was in the marquis's castle during the war. His regiment was

billeted there and the marquis, one of the richest if not the richest man in

England, was serving in Ford's regiment as a private. Ford was sitting in

the library one evening. The library was a most extraordinary place. The

walls were made of bricks of gold set into tiles or something. I forget

exactly how it was."

"Go on," Scripps urged. "It doesn't matter.

"Anyhow, in the middle of the wall of the library was a stuffed flamingo

in a glass case."

"They understand interior decorating, these English," Scripps said.

"Your wife was English, wasn't she?" asked Mandy.

"From the Lake Country," Scripps answered. "Go on with the story."


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"Well, anyway," Mandy went on, "Ford was sitting there in the library one

evening after mess when the butler came in and said: 'The Marquis of

Buque's compliments and might he show the library to a group of friends

with whom he has been dining?' They used to let him dine out and

sometimes they let him sleep in the castle. Ford said, 'Quite,' and in came

the marquis in his private's uniform followed by Sir Edmund Gosse and

Professor Whatsisname, I forget it for the moment, from Oxford. Gosse

stopped in front of the stuffed flamingo in the glass case and said, 'What

have we here, Buque?'

"'It's a flamingo, Sir Edmund,' the marquis answered.

"'That's not my idea of a flamingo,' Gosse remarked.

"'No, Gosse. That's God's idea of a flamingo,' Professor Whatsisname said.

I wish I could remember his name."

"Don't bother," Scripps said. His eyes were bright. He leaned forward.

Something was pounding inside of him. Something he could not control.

"I love you, Mandy," he said. "I love you. You are my woman." The thing

was pounding away inside of him. It would not stop.

"That's all right," Mandy answered. "I've known you were my man for a

long time. Would you like to hear another story? Speaking of woman."

"Go on," Scripps said. "You must never stop, Mandy. You are my woman

now."

And this may remind some people of Downton Abbey. [laughter] And the other thing it

might you remind you is what was billed as Downton Abbey for grownups, Parade's End.


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Thank you. [applause]

CRAIG NOVA: I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself. I'm Craig Nova, and I

was one of the judges for the PEN/Hemingway Award. And first, I would like to thank

Patrick for the reading and to say what a pleasure it was, and for him to please accept our

appreciation.

Next, I would like to thank the other judges for the PEN/Hemingway Award. These, of

course, were Amy Bloom and Oscar Hijuelos. It is scarcely possible to describe the

dedication and seriousness with which they approached this task, which, while

demanding, was exquisitely satisfying, just as it was a great honor. Frankly, it was

inspiring to see so many young writers doing such lovely work. So it is my great

pleasure to present the awards.

First, I would like to say that there were two honorable mentions. These were Catherine

Chung for Forgotten Country, and Peter M. Wheelwright for As It Is On Earth. Would

both of you please stand so we can applaud you? [applause]

Now it is my great pleasure to read the citations for the finalists and for the winner of the

PEN/Hemingway prize.

The first citation is for Jennifer duBois for A Partial History of Lost Causes. One of

Jennifer's duBois's characters, Irina Ellison, a young woman afraid that she has a fatal

disease, asks, through her compelling and beguiling story, those questions that are

essential to all novels that endure: What do we do with the time we have? What is right?

And how do we know the truth of the answers we find? And while these notions are

encoded in every beautiful sentence, they are unstated and profoundly moving.


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It has been years since a book so charming, so entertaining and so necessary has

appeared. Not only is A Partial History of Lost Causes literature, it is also a reason for

celebration.

Jennifer, can you come up here? [applause]

The next citation is for Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan. Vaddey Ratner

was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, and nine before

she and her mother escaped. With In the Shadow of the Banyan, she has told a gracefully

rendered story of that time, rich with history, mythology, folklore, language and emotion.

Moreover, as a testament about Cambodia in that era of forced labor and starvation,

resilience and survival, it is a novel that will surely be read and valued by future

generations.

Vaddey. [applause]

And finally, the last citation is for Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds. The Yellow Birds is a

painful, compact and distressing novel, as blunt and painful as a broken shoulder, and as

lyrical as any memorable epic poem about any of our terrible wars. There is a promise

and hope in the story of young Private Bartle and the even younger Private Murphy, two

young men sharing the wish that they might save each other and be saved, and the reality

of all the things they do not know about the wreckage of war, about friendship and its

hidden delicacy, about loss and memory, and what these things do to young men. Kevin

Powers was a machine gunner in Iraq. Now he's a writer with a poet's eye and a soldier's

determination, bringing us a first great novel. Kevin. [applause]

KEVIN POWERS: Thank you very much. I'm incredibly honored to be here with my

fellow honorees. It's been a pleasure to meet you. Thank you to the PEN Foundation and,

of course, to the Kennedy Library. When I was in Mosul, Iraq, this is not the place I ever

expected to be. Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it.


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I'm just going to read a short passage of the book. Our narrator is home. He's leaving his

childhood home for the last time, and he's reflecting on the grief he feels for a friend he's

lost and reflecting on the nature of grief in general.

I sat down there awhile until the sun was straight above me and the light

fell down in wide columns and sweat ran down between my shoulder

blades. I decided then to walk the tracks toward the city. It wasn't so much

a decision as it was a product of trying to turn off my mind. I couldn't stop

thinking about Murph. I drifted and followed the guidance of the tops of

my boots and I tried not to think and when I got back up to the porch, I

wiped the sweat from my forehead, opened the sliding door, put a few

things in my duffel bag, and left.

I hadn't known what I was doing then, but my memories of Murph were a

kind of misguided archaeology. Sifting through the remains of what I

remembered about him was a denial of the fact that a hole was really all

that was left, an absence I had attempted to reverse but found that I could

not. There was simply not enough material to account for what had been

removed. The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the

picture I was trying to re-create receded. For every memory I was able to

pull up, another seemed to fall away forever. There was some proportion

about it all, though. It was like putting a puzzle together from behind: the

shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard

backing a tease at wholeness and completion. I'd think of a time when we

sat in the evening in the guard tower, watching the war go by in streaks of

red and green and other, briefer lights, and he'd tell me of an afternoon in

the little hillside apple orchard that his mother worked, the turn and flash

of a paring knife along a wrap of gauze as they grafted uppers to

rootstocks and new branches to blossom, or the time he saw but could not


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explain his awe when his father brought a dozen caged canaries home

from the mine and let them loose in the hollow where they lived, how the

canaries only flitted and sang awhile before perching back atop their

cages, which had been arranged in rows, his father likely thinking that the

birds would not return by choice to their captivity, and that the cages

should be used for something else: a pretty bed for vegetables, perhaps a

place to string up candles between the trees, and in what strange silences

the world worked, Murph must have wondered, as the birds settled

peaceably in their formation and ceased to sing. And I'd try to recall things

until nothing came, which I quickly found was my only certainty, until

what was left of him was a sketch in shadow, a skeleton falling apart, and

my friend Murph was no more friend to me than the strangest stranger. My

missing him became a grave that could not be filled or leveled, just a

faded blemish in a field and a damn poor substitute for grief, as graves so

often are.

Thank you very much. [applause]

AMY MACDONALD: Hi, as Tom Putnam mentioned, I'm the new chair of PEN New

England, and I'm honored to be introducing our three winners in poetry, nonfiction and

fiction. PEN New England has been honoring New England writers for over 30 years,

one of whom I’d like to recognize, Jill Ker Conway, is a past winner; others have been

Jennifer Haigh, Andre Dubus, E. B. White.

I'd like to begin the Awards – and I hope I have the right glasses – with the poetry for

David Huddle.

“The title poem of David Huddle's new book of poems, Blacksnake at the Family

Reunion, first signals the generosity of his inclusions, then introduces you to some of the

poet's near and extended family, and then allows them and you to go on your way a little


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bit improved by the family's story he's gotten down on the page. Whether Huddle is

writing out of his own experience or his imagination, the poems in this book display a

non-coercive ease, a sympathetic eye for the delicate complexity of our relationships, and

an abiding gratitude for whatever is. This is a book to read again and again.”

Thank you, David. [applause]

Bernd Heinrich is our winner for nonfiction, and this will be a pleasure to read. I don't

think I'll ever read anything quite like this again.

“Bernd Heinrich's Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death offers an intriguing

window into the most intimate details of the natural world, specifically dung beetles,

vultures, wolves, ravens and other complex creatures who serve as efficient undertakers

deconstructing the dead and manufacturing the fertilizer that keeps the planet in cycle.

Heinrich is both a fearless naturalist and a natural storyteller, and his intriguing book

combines meticulous observation with compelling reflection on the need for human

beings to profoundly reconsider our burial practices and severed connection with nature.

Life Everlasting is thoughtful, challenging, yet thoroughly accessible to the lay reader,

and a book that stays alive in the reader's mind long after the final page is turned.”

Thank you, Bernd. [applause]

I should mention that our poetry and nonfiction judges, Dinty Moore and Charles Martin,

are not here with us, but Patricia Eakins is, who was our fiction judge, which goes to

Heidi Julavits. And Heidi will be reading from her book after I give this citation.

“The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits is a narrative high-wire act, astounding stunt after

astounding stunt -- performed without a net. Like Poe, Julavits traffics in horror and

mystery, but she flips and reflips these genres into the heady realm of the paranormal,

arguably to create a new genre. Her spookiness for all its whiffs of the weird antique is


PAGE 15

utterly contemporary, undermined as it is intensified by her ironic playfulness and her

stringent sense of humor. Her evocation of the paranormal is both plausible and

implausible, oscillating before us like a mirage, a dream or a parallel universe. Within

these coruscations, her portrayal of the mother/daughter relationship is fierce, tender and

uncannily accurate. Her portrait of grief is simply and deeply touching.”

Thank you, Heidi. [applause]

HEIDI JULAVITS: Thank you all for coming, and thank you so much for this award. I

moved to New York 20 years ago. I grew up in Maine and I still spend part of the year

there, and I was so nervous that I might be disqualified on a technicality that I went and

renewed my driver's license in Maine last week. [laughter] And so, it did get renewed,

and so, yeah, no disqualification.

Also, when I'm in Maine, I live about a quarter-mile, maybe even a fifth or a sixth of a

mile from where E. B. White is buried. After I learned that I had won this award and I

learned that he had also been a winner -- I actually often go to his grave and tell him how

awesome he is because I feel like writers can never hear enough how awesome they are.

[laughter]; even after they're dead, writers need to hear how awesome they are. And so I

went there two days ago, when I was up in Maine, to tell him how proud I was to have

won this award, because he had also won it. And also Jill Ker Conway, I would have

visited your grave, but you’re not dead yet, and you don’t live in walking distance – or

your grave is not in walking distance – from my house. But a great honor to be sharing

this honor with you as well.

Because I knew that Madame Ackermann's A-frame would be

underheated, I wore a wool jumper and wool tights and a pair of silver

riding boots purchased from the Nepalese import store, run by an aging

WASP hippie. Hers was one of seven businesses in the town of East

Warwick, New Hampshire (there was also a vegan pizza parlor, a


PAGE 16

hardware store, a purveyor of Fair Isle knitwear, a bank, a pub, and a real

estate agent), a town that existed in the minds of some to provide basic

material support to the faculty and students at the Institute of Integrated

Parapsychology – referred to locally, and by those in the field, as the

Workshop.

That I – Julia Severn, a second-year initiate and Madame Ackermann’s

stenographer – had been invited to her forty-third birthday party was an

anomaly that I failed to probe. When I let slip to my stenographic

predecessor, Miranda, that I had been asked to Madame Ackermann's for a

social occasion, Miranda tried to hide her wounded incredulity by playing

with the pearl choker she habitually wore and, in apprehensive moments

such as these, rolled into her mouth, allowing the pearls to yank on the

corners of her lips like a horse's bit.

"Madame Ackermann observed a firm boundary between her academic

and personal lives," Miranda said, removing her pearls halfway, wedging

them now into the recession above her chin. She was not the kind of

professor, Miranda cautioned, straining her necklace's string with her

lower jaw until it threatened to snap, to invite an initiate to her house for a

social occasion, not even as a volunteer passer of hors d'oeuvres.

Miranda's jealousy was understandable. Madame Ackermann's attentions

were the prize over which we initiates competed, the reason we'd come to

the Workshop – to study with her, hopefully, yes, but in more pitiable

terms to partake of her forbidding, imperial aura by walking behind her on

the many footpaths that vivisectioned the campus quad into slivers of mud

or grass or snow.


PAGE 17

Thus, I reassured Miranda (who, despite the year she'd spent as her

stenographer, clearly did not know Madame Ackermann), one of the many

admirable qualities Madame Ackermann possessed was that, even as a

relentless investigator of past lives, she could permit bygones to be

bygones. Yes, she'd selected me from a pool of thirty-five initiates to be

her stenographer, and yes we'd both immediately come to regret this

choice of hers. But after weeks of misunderstandings, deceptions, and

hostilities between us, Madame Ackermann was not above extending an

olive branch.

And so on the night of October 25, I donned my silver boots and awash in

optimism and specialness, drove to Madame Ackermann's A-frame. As I

passed the custodian-lit Workshop buildings, their windows flickering

behind the spruces, I allowed myself to view the scene from the future

perspective of an older self, wrought by nostalgia for this place I'd yet to

leave or miss. In order to prolong my anticipation of what was sure to be a

momentous evening, I took the scenic way along the Connecticut River.

In the moonlight, the water, whisked to a sharp chop by the wind,

appeared seized into a treacherous hoar of ice. I spied a hunter emerging

from an old barn whom I mistook for the shadowy half second before my

car beams illuminated him, to be wearing the decapitated head of a deer. A

bat died against my windshield.

And yet despite these dark portents I somehow failed to divine, as I turned

off the river road and began the slow ascent to Madame Ackermann's A-

frame, that I would never drive along this river again. Or that I would

drive along this river again, yes, but I would no longer be the sort of

person who wore silver boots to parties and believed that bygones could

be bygones.


PAGE 18


HELENE ATWAN: Thank you, Heidi, that was wonderful, and thank you, Kevin, for

your reading as well. I'm Helene Atwan. I'm the director of Beacon Press and also the

administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

I am very sorry to report that Amy Bloom, who did us the great favor of judging the

Hemingway Award this year, along with Oscar Hijuelos and Craig Nova, and who had

planned to be here to introduce our keynote speaker, has fallen victim to the terrible

scourge that has laid so many people low this long and endless winter. So she could not

join us today.

It's especially hard for Amy, because she had been so looking forward to this happy

moment. But she has asked me to read her introduction, which I am proud to do, since

Colm Tóibín is a writer I admire greatly and who I know has been a great supporter of

first fiction, including Kevin Powers' book, and, it is reported, spent his days on the beach

at 17 – this is true – reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still

professes to have, pages stained with seawater.

So here are Amy Bloom's words:

It is an honor to introduce this man, one of my favorite contemporary writers. Just listing

his books is a pleasure because to name them is to remember them, and they have all left

deep, lasting marks.

His first prize-winner, The South; the ones that were shortlisted for the Booker, The

Blackwater Lightship and The Master; Brooklyn, the winner of the Costa Novel of the

Year; the exceptional recent essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother; and his

most recent, compassionate, provocative, The Testament of Mary; and every other novel


PAGE 19

or collection of essays, whether on Henry James or traveling through Catholic Europe, or

any one of his short stories.

Tóibín wrote about another equally good writer, Jane Austen, that, "her Mansfield Park is

not a moral fable or an exploration of the individual's role in society. It is not our job to

like or dislike characters in fiction or to learn from them how to live. A novel is a pattern,

and it is our job to relish and see clearly its textures and tones, to note how its textures

were woven and its tones put in place."

I would say the same thing about Colm Tóibín's work, that its textures and tones are

powerful and dynamic, but so is the storytelling. As a New York Times reviewer

described one of his superb short stories, "It unfolds to reveal a complex portrait with the

emotional density and historical depth of field of a novel." As does all his work.

There is, as Grace Paley put it about something else, no stinginess. There is pleasure and

trouble. There is a full life of the senses. There is a grief that knocks people down where

they stand. And there is love which happily, for me as a reader, opens, closes, overturns

and changes much without necessarily redeeming a damn thing.

And there is the storytelling from the inside out, full of empathy and sharp observations,

conversations overheard and created, people understood, if not necessarily admired, and

disparate worlds brought close to us, spinning on his dexterous fingers as the magician,

Colm Tóibín, helps us see and hear the textures and tones.

The reviews for Tóibín's work are, as they should be, full of praise for his subtlety; his

empathy; his wide-ranging imagination; his graceful, evocative prose with sentences that

are both achingly lovely and powerful; for his unforgettable characters; and, I would add,

what he does with them.


PAGE 20

Of Colm Tóibín's work one can say, as the Irish Times said in its Irish Times-y way, "His

work does not disappoint." [laughter] It does not. It illuminates and it lasts.

Colm Tóibín. [applause]

COLM TÓIBÍN: It's a very special honor to be here today at the John F. Kennedy

Library. When my father took me out of school in June 1963, which is almost 50 years

ago, he took me out of school so I could witness history. It was when John Fitzgerald

Kennedy came back to Wexford as President of the United States. His great-grandfather

had left County Wexford and we were from Wexford, and we still had the keys in

Wexford Town, and we watched him, and it was an amazing moment. It was a hugely

inspiring moment for all of us. It mattered enormously, and I think it changed our country

in many ways. It let us know that anything was possible. It wasn't merely inspiring in

very large and grand ways – although it was, the ways it inspired us were large and were

grand – but also in small ways.

Before he died, a few months before he died, I spoke to Arthur Schlesinger in New York.

He told me that in the crafting of the speech which President Kennedy gave to the Joint

Houses of Oireachtas, the Joint Houses of Parliament in Ireland, they very carefully

inserted something that was a sort of dynamite, a sort of wake-up call for Ireland. That

among the banished children of Ireland was James Joyce. His name was almost

unmentionable. His books were unread. He was not publicly recognized in any way. His

manuscripts were not in any holdings in Ireland. There was no statue of him, no street

called after him, and his name was anathema in Ireland. And in that speech, John

Kennedy used his name as a great son of Ireland, a son Ireland should be proud of, and he

said it in our parliament building. I think that was a very important moment in the lifting

of censorship and in the opening up of things in Ireland.

Just further to add that in many other ways the Kennedy family has been so important for

our country in the work that Senator Edward Kennedy did, often behind the scenes, to


PAGE 21

create peace in Northern Ireland. And it's wonderful that the son of Jean Kennedy Smith

is here. She was your Ambassador to our country who, as Ambassador during those

crucial years when peace was being forged and when things were very difficult and very

delicate in Ireland, held a key position and worked tirelessly for a simple thing in

Northern Ireland, and indeed on the island, called peace. Both she and Senator Kennedy,

and perhaps it will only be known in the future when the archives are fully opened, the

amount of work they did for that and their dedication for that. It's something that I think

will be acknowledged even more in the future than it is now. But even now, it's

something that we are grateful for.

As was mentioned, in 1972 when I was 17, my mother really wanted to get me out of the

house. I was sort of sitting around a lot and I seemed to be dreaming dreams that didn't

seem healthy. [laughter] So they found me a job quite a distance away just so they

wouldn't have to see me for the rest of the summer, as a barman – a 17-year-old barman, I

was a wimp – in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, which is a seaside resort in County

Waterford in the southeast of Ireland.

I suppose some part of the hotel may have really been grand or compared, say, with other

hotels in the region -- which were certainly not grand -- or it might have been grand in the

past. But it did not seem grand to me in 1972. The bar was small and dingy, and it was

not very busy in the day. But it was at night that the grandeur emerged, if grandeur is the

word. And grandeur indeed may be the word because at around 11 or so, in the ballroom

of the hotel, the vast ballroom added to the back of the hotel, the grandeur emerged in the

guise of a grand appetite for alcohol. [laughter] No one could have enough of the stuff,

and they wanted even more in the two hours when all the other bars in Tramore were shut

and the ballroom of the Grand Hotel had a special license to go on serving on a grand

scale. [laughter]

Drinkers in those two hours were five deep at the bar, calling for more. They were frantic

to have their orders heard over the loud music. Orders came like "two vodkas and tonic;


PAGE 22

one vodka and white lemonade; two pints of Guinness and a double Jameson." [laughter]

Pulling a pint of Guinness – I was a dreamer, I was interested in literature – pulling a pint

of Guinness then, as now, took skill and it took time. You pulled half of it and then left it

to settle, and by the time you'd found it again you'd forgotten the rest of the order.

[laughter] And you could not locate the customer among the crowd. [laughter]

The strange part was when you went to clean up at the end of the night, much of the last

orders, orders demanded with such urgency and carried away in triumph by a man, had

not even been touched. It was hard work, and as you can imagine, I did not last long.

[laughter] Mostly extras like me were needed at night or at the weekend. But slowly I

wasn't needed at all.

But while I was there, it meant you were free during the day. And one day when the

weather was fine, I went on my own to the Long Beach in Tramore. The word ‘tramore’

comes from the Gaelic trá, meaning beach, and mhór, meaning big. And I brought a

book. And I have no idea why I had this book rather than any other book. I'd taken it

from home, it was a Penguin paperback and it was called The Essential Hemingway. And

yes, I still have it.

It had that photograph of that bearded man who looked wise and skeptical and handsome

in a weathered sort of way on the jacket. It included short stories and extracts from some

novels. But it also included the entire text of The Sun Also Rises. And this was what I

read on that beach, on that afternoon, and the afternoon that followed.

“Literature,” Ezra Pound said, “is news that stays news.” But I wonder if literature is also

something that hits the nervous system before it can be filtered by the intelligence. It

moves like energy. I had nothing in common with any of the people in that novel. I had

never been in Paris or in Spain. I'd never seen a bullfight. I'd never been fishing. I'd never

been outside Ireland. I did not know any Americans, nor any English people. I'd never


PAGE 23

been drunk. I knew nothing, or nothing I wish to repeat here with a mixed audience,

about sex. [laughter]

And, yet, the book overwhelmed me. It opened a world for me. Before anything else, the

world it opened was the world of the book itself, its characters, what they did and said.

That world seemed more real and true, and indeed more fascinating than the one I

inhabited. I felt for Jake, and indeed I became him. I, too, wanted Lady Brett Ashley, but

I could not have her. I, too, wanted the bulls to be good. I, too, wanted my friends to

behave. I, too, knew the manager of the hotel, although I should say the manager of the

hotel was looking at me by this time in a very glaring sort of way in Tramore. I, too, was

stoical. And I, too, liked being alone. And I, too, knew that things would never be the

same again.

As soon as I could, and it took me three years to organize this, I went to Spain and I

stayed there for three years. It was hard to explain at home why I wanted to go there in

the first place. Even later, I found it easier to say that I went to Spain in search of drugs

and sex and rock and roll. Since my friends knew that I didn't like drugs, and I had no

interest whatsoever in rock and roll [laughter], it would have been harder to explain that I

went to Spain because of a book I'd read on a beach in Tramore when I was 17, a book I

have never tired of.

Later, I came to analyze the style, the great Hemingway invention. I saw how the emotion

lived between the lines, within the cadences and the rhythms of the sentences.

Hemingway as a writer felt the emotion and then saw no reason to parade what he felt, or

wear it on his sleeve, or cheaply name it, thus to reduce the grandeur of its ambiguous

and mysterious power.

Instead, he found a way of enticing it from the depths, as a fisherman might, or luring it

towards him, as a matador might. And then allowing it to evade easy capture, giving it

strength and subtlety, allowing it to dart in the light, flex its muscles, create excitement.


PAGE 24

Sometimes he wrote like a painter, each brushstroke filled with a mixture of things. He

was ready to suggest, ready to leave some of the emotion out so that oddly it would be all

the more present because of his tact and the delicacy of his touch. Sometimes he wrote

like Cézanne painted, and this idea fascinated me and gave me as much as I got from

reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time.

There's a deleted passage in Hemingway's story Big Two-Hearted River, where

Hemingway wrote of an alter-ego. He wanted to write like Cézanne painted. Cézanne

started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It

was hell to do. He wanted to write about the country so that it would be there like

Cézanne had done it in painting. He felt almost holy about it.

In his memoir of his early years in Paris, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway also wrote

about the power the French painter had over him as he learned his trade. "I was learning

something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple, true sentences far

from enough to make the stories have the dimensions I was trying to put into them. I was

not articulate enough to explain it to anybody. Besides, it was a secret."

The secret lay in the brushstrokes of Cézanne, each one open and obvious in its textures,

with repetitions and subtle variations, each one containing something close to emotion,

but emotion deeply controlled. Each stroke sought to pull the eye in and hold it, and yet

also build to a larger design in which there was a richness and density, but also much that

was mysterious and hidden.

This is what Hemingway sought to do with his sentences. By looking at the work of

Cézanne, first in Chicago as he did, then in the museums of Paris, and then in the home

of his friend Gertrude Stein, he sought to follow Stein's example and make the sentences

and paragraphs he wrote ostensibly simple, filled with repetitions and odd variations,

charged with a sort of hidden electricity, filled with an emotion which the reader could


PAGE 25

not easily find in the words themselves, emotion which seemed to live in the space

between the words, or in the sudden endings of certain paragraphs.

Thus, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway could write, "But Paris was a very old city and

we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor

the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in

the moonlight."

In that sentence, he managed to declare very little, but to suggest a great deal. In the 41

words, 27 words have only one syllable. This makes the reader feel comfortable, as

though something easy were being said. But it is clear from the way the punctuation

works and the variation within the phrasing that nothing is in fact simple, and much is

ambiguous and almost painful. Instead of saying so, Hemingway manages to give the

impression of this, to comfort the reader with the diction, but then jolt the reader with the

shifting levels of tone and meaning within the clauses.

The theory of this is to let the writer do the feeling and to register this in the prose, bury it

in the white spaces; thus, the reader will come to feel it all the more intensely, because it

will not come as mere information, but as something much more powerful, will come as

rhythm. And it will come so subtly that the reader's imagination will be deeply engaged

in capturing it in all its uncertainty and strangeness. Thus, it will be closer to music in its

impact, but the words will still hold their meaning. It will play the stability of meaning

against the mystery of silent sound. This idea that what you leave out in prose writing is

more important than what you put in made its way into the very core of Hemingway's

method as a novelist and short story writer. At its best, it could work miracles.

A few years ago, when I was working– actually, I was once more dawdling or making

myself useless. This time I was in the library of the University of Virginia at

Charlottesville, and it was that same frisson as I had earlier today at looking at

Hemingway's handwriting, looking at those wonderful sentences from that novel that I


PAGE 26

love so much, some of the sentences that were deleted that seemed to be perfect in their

way; I would not have taken them out. And it may be interesting to see this new edition.

But sentences that remained in and that are so important, the frisson of just looking at

that, looking at that handwriting, realizing there was a time when these weren't written,

when this sentence was not there, and that it came into being in a wonderful, miraculous

way.

I found a film script of The Sun Also Rises. It was written by a professional scriptwriter,

which Hemingway hated. He seemed to hate the script, and then he grew to hate the

scriptwriter. [laughter] And he made this pretty clear as he read the script. It was

obviously a good day because he wrote abuse in the margins and it was so exciting seeing

his handwriting and feeling his rage. [laughter]

He became especially enraged when the screenwriter tried to suggest that Jake, the

protagonist of the novel, was impotent for psychological reasons. Hemingway

emphatically declared -- and it's written in the margins -- that Jake had his testicles shot

off in the war, something Hemingway had seen happen a number of times, he wrote. But

he did not make this clear or fully clear in the text of the novel itself, however. Although

it is implied, we're also allowed to belief that there is something in Jake's psychosexual

makeup which renders him impotent. It may have happened in the war, it is suggested,

but it could have been psychological.

In any case, as Lady Brett Ashley felt, and as I felt, and as Jake himself felt, it was hard

luck on a guy, tough luck. There was nothing more to be said.

The novel takes place in the present. We're given tantalizing hints and clues about events

in the past about who Jake is and where he comes from. But most of the past is left out,

thus, offering a depth to the actions of the present. Jake is not described physically, and

this also means that the act of reading the book is an intense act of imagining, filling in

the gaps which is mirrored in the prose itself.


PAGE 27

The writing is ostensibly simple with short, declarative sentences. In this work,

Hemingway tried to achieve what Cézanne had achieved in his paintings, something

dense which pulls the eye and the imagination in toward itself, using a technique which

seems open and simple, but the result finally can contain not only an impression, but an

infinite amount of emotion.

Hemingway stands, for me, with the poet Wallace Stevens as the greatest American

writer of his age. Although Stevens took a dim view of the novel form itself, he remained

alert to what Hemingway was doing in prose and this might have been greatly helped by

a fistfight between the two men in Key West in 1936, in which Stevens, ever the dandy–

poor Stevens, he broke his fist while attempting to break Hemingway's jaw. [laughter] In

a letter written in 1942, Wallace Stevens saw Hemingway as a poet, and the most

significant of living poets, he said. So far as what he called extraordinary actuality is

concerned, in 1945 he wrote, "Someone told me the other day that Ernest Hemingway

was writing poetry. I think it is likely that he will write a kind of poetry in which the

consciousness of reality would produce an extraordinary effect. I have no doubt that

supreme poetry can be produced only on the highest possible level of the cognitive."

I did not know those nights in 1972, as I pulled bad pints of Guinness in Tramore and

forgot everyone's order, that what I was doing, what I was really doing was looking

forward to going back to the beach and the book, that I was being pulled towards the

highest possible level of the cognitive. I'm sure I would not have even known the highest

possible level of the cognitive, even had it come up from the sea and bit me [laughter], or

been served for tea. And I'm still not sure, which must in its own way be a good thing.

All I know is that we must strive towards it in all the sentences we write, and all our

paragraph endings and all our lines of dialogue. It is our job to make the cognitive more

precise than it has ever been, more rich in color and more mysterious.


PAGE 28

And on an occasion like this, with Hemingway watching over us, and the ghost of

Wallace Stevens, and indeed John Kennedy, we can also follow the man and his

companion in that poem by Wallace Stevens with the wonderful title, "How to Live.

What to Do," which ends with these words – that the men were "joyous and jubilant and

sure."


TOM PUTNAM: I can't think of any other words than to say that was thoroughly grand.

I invite you all in a few moments to join in a reception in the Library's magnificent

Pavilion after one final comment.

I'm genuinely moved by the almost sacred ritual of this annual ceremony and your notion

of Hemingway, the words are almost holy as we celebrate new writers on the cusp of

spring, renewing our spirits as perhaps only art can do. So let's allow the benediction to

be offered by President Kennedy in a speech celebrating the role of the artist delivered 50

years ago this October while dedicating the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. His

first sentence clipped in the original recording begins, "Our national strength matters."

Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls

our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of

Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the

platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified

him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote,

"one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as

well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the

triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to

overcome despair. [applause]


PAGE 29

I thank you all for coming this afternoon to celebrate the writers among us who give our

own age strength with which to overcome despair. Happy spring. Thank you for coming.

[applause]

THE END

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TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, …/media/assets/Education and Public... · relentless desire not to make easy peace with ... "Things had gotten off to a bad start from