“It’s swell, and straight, and beautifully finished. Also just enough out of water. I can’t find any fault with it at all.”
The iceberg theory associated with Hemingway’s writing may have originated with first wife Hadley: “a magnificent grip on the form back of the material no matter how strange it is, like the icebergs.” It was further developed alongside second wife Pauline who is regarded for her sharp editorial eye, lavish praise, and gift for tact. She encouraged him to perfect his “iceberg” style of writing. [Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, by Ruth Hawkins, 2012, The University of Arkansas Press]
“I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.”
In retrospect I ought to have narrowed my focus when I moved to this literary town 24 summers ago. The study was too broad. My primary concern was simply—then and still—typography. But I remained and tapped in recreationally with program descendants of the fiction fame founded in 1936 while Hemingway was writing To Have and Have Not.
“Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them ‘spooks’ him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate.”
My first next-door neighbor—an MFA graduate of nonfiction, advocate of the craft, and now longtime faculty at a program located elsewhere—had lingered too long. I was new; she was ready to go. Neighbors for three years, we both left the same July. Our birthdays fall two years and one day apart. She celebrated her move with a visit to a regional “fortune teller.” A novel concept to me, I felt game and followed suit.
“He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. ”
Several years later she chided me for following through with “fortune telling,” for taking it seriously, something she considered—and grabbed for a word—“Disney.” She is not alone. While not bold enough to chide, several other connections with MFA alum have trailed off, not knowing I am “into that.”
“We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days.”
Through collaboration with 60+ scientists, 40 institutions, and 15 countries, a remarkable USO, unspecified seismic object, was eventually located to Dickson Fjord in Greenland. One year ago September, a “staggering” volume of rock and ice plunged into the fjord and produced a mega-tsunami. The wave sloshed back and forth “some 10,000 times.”
They call the phenomenon a | sā(t)SH | seiche.
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