Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon —
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
This work is my interpretation of Hemingway’s iceberg theory—keeping my mosaics lean and true, allowing the observer to intuit what lies beneath the surface.
After two decades of critical and commercial success, Hemingway released Across the River and Into the Trees, a novel about an aging American colonel reflecting on love, war, and mortality during a melancholic weekend in post–World War II Venice with his young mistress. Despite Tennessee Williams praising it as Hemingway’s finest work, the novel was met with over 150 negative reviews. Quite a contrast.
Hemingway was deeply wounded by the criticism. His behavior became erratic, and for the first time in his life, his writing seemed passé. But he went back to work. In just two years, he produced what many consider the greatest novella of all time: The Old Man and the Sea. It tells the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who, after a long stretch of bad luck, endures an epic struggle with a giant marlin—an allegory of endurance, pride, and quiet resilience.
Two years later, Hemingway won “that Swedish thing”—the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote a beautiful speech, in which he said:
“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”
Endurance. Resilience
