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PARTISAN REVIEW
one runs away from glare in terms of what's to be depicted. That's like say–
ing in the Arctic it's all white. But it's all ice. I don't know, it leads to a kind of
literature of indolence, a concept of lethargy, you know, of the siesta, of de–
cay, of afternoon languor that is really more theatrical than real. It's just
lit–
erary,
that idea of the tropics, really.
DM:
You mentioned different types of blue. Is it that there is not a language
for the different shades of blue, or the
particular
shades of blue, and, in a
sense, through words you are trying to identify those shades that have not
been named?
DW:
A passage I always quote when I'm teaching is the first chapter of
A
Farewell to Arms
in which the model is really a combination of Gertrude Stein
and Cezanne. Sometimes I point out to the class certain effects Hemingway
achieved by watching Cezanne. One was to let the stroke of the word "blue"
appear very late in the first few paragraphs. So that the first startling stroke
of the word "blue" comes much later, after the dust and the leaves and so on,
and the waters swiftly moving are blue in the channels. Now,
what
blue is
not described, but the point is that the stroke is put down with exactly the
same cubic area that a Cezanne stroke is put on a bleached background. Or,
say, the rocks or trees are skeletally or sparingly indicated, and then that
stroke appeared next to another hue - a blue or a lilac, and so on. Heming–
way's technique comes from a scrutiny particularly, I think, ofwatercolor.
DM:
What stereotypes do you have to break through in language to bring
out the reality of the tropics?
DW:
Well, you know, every truth becomes a cliche after awhile. I came on a
break this summer from St. Lucia to Boston. On the first or second day, I
thought my body would burst from the humidity. The acute, implacable dis–
comfort that I felt in the house was nothing compared to the kind of heat that
exists in the tropics. It can be fierce, scorching sun there, but you've got only
to step into the shade to be cool. And that contrast is - in terms of tempera–
ture - melodramatic. So when people give an image of the tropics as a place
of swelter and indolence and exasperation and languor and idleness and so on
... well, I was devastated by the humidity of a northern summer. Now
if
we
amplify that kind of cliche to say, well, in hot countries nothing is ever pro–
duced, we would have to say that for the bulk of time that summer repre–
sents in all northern countries
rwthing
can be produced. And it should not be,
if
you're going by that kind of geographic description ofwhat is expected of
certain locales. Whereas more can be produced in the summer in the
Caribbean because it's cooler. So that concept of the tropics being a place of
intense heat where nothing happens and nothing stirs makes for good fiction,
but it's not true.
But I'm going deeper than simply the climate. I'm thinking ofan attitude
that's both geographic and historical. Hot countries, until the emergence of the
Latin American novelists and poets, were not supposed to produce anything.
