TOM PUTNAM: Good Afternoon

PEN/HEMINGWAY CEREMONY

3/30/08

PAGE 25

TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of all of the sponsors listed in your program, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the annual Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award ceremony. For those of you who have attended this event before and recall our past practice of organizing the literary equivalent of a police line-up here on stage, I want to assure you that Patrick Hemingway and I have not hijacked this ceremony. There are many important writers in our midst who will speak soon. Our hope for this new choreography is to give each honoree and speaker their individual moment in the spotlight and allow them to enjoy the portions of the program they are not directly involved in, out of the glare of these lights and from their seats in the audience with you.

The last time Patrick Hemingway spoke from this stage, he described his father’s work in this way: “Writing or literature is a very different art from all the others in that its basic material is everyday speech and everyday speech is a like a public place, full of dirt, litter, bad smells. A writer has to take that language which everybody uses and polish it up and push it out again so that it really makes an impression. Ernest Hemingway was very good at this. He could take those very shop-worn, dirty words, and put them together in a new way.”

Today we present the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, America’s best known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction, and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards, honoring a book of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry with a New England topic or setting, or written by a New England author. In doing so, we celebrate writers who have put words together in new ways. For those of you who have read this year’s PEN/Hemingway award-winning book, Then We Came to the End, the phrase ‘zero grams of lasted acid’ comes to mind.

We do this annually at the Kennedy Presidential Library, home of the Ernest Hemingway collection, the world’s most comprehensive archive of Hemingway’s work. Upstairs in the Hemingway Room that overlooks that sea that he so cherished, scholars, researchers, young writers and students, come to read the words written by, arguably, America’s greatest 20th-century author. We are indebted to the Hemingway family who chose this Library as the repository for Hemingway’s manuscripts, letters, photos and ephemera, and to Patrick and his wife, Carol, who are here with us today and whose dedication and contribution to this endeavor are invaluable, for their ongoing support and loving care of the Hemingway Room and collection.

I want to thank the many people and organizations who make today’s awards and ceremony possible: Leah Bailey and The Boston Globe; the Hemingway Foundation and Society, which funds the PEN award, and its President, James Meredith, and James, please stand; the Ucross Foundation; the University of Idaho; and, PEN New England, including Helene Atwan, who chairs the PEN New England Hemingway Committee, Richard Hoffman, who chairs the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards Committee, and Karen Wulf, the Executive Director of PEN New England, all of whom did so much to coordinate the judging of today’s awards; The Friends of the Hemingway Collection, our membership organization, dedicated to commemorating the life and work of Ernest Hemingway which supports the purchase and preservation of materials for our archives. There is a brochure on all of your chairs and I encourage you, if you have not already done so, to join. At the Kennedy Presidential Library, Susan Wrynn, our wonderfully talented Hemingway curator; Nancy McCoy, our Director of Education; and, Amy Macdonald, our Forum Producer, who does all the behind the scenes work to get the speakers and all of you here today. Lastly, I thank my colleague, John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, our partner in a recent National Endowment for the Humanities Save America’s Treasures grant, and the leader in the current effort to build a Hemingway Endowment.

Before we begin the presentation of the 2008 awards, Patrick Hemingway has agreed to read a passage of his father’s writing. He will be followed by Jennifer Haigh, a former PEN/Hemingway award winner herself for her novel Mrs. Kimble, and a PEN/Winship award winner for the novel Baker Towers, and one of this year’s judges who will announce the finalists of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. This will be followed by the presentation to and reading by the 2008 winner. Richard Hoffman and John Crawford, who is here with his mother Joanna Crawford, daughter of Lawrence Winship, to represent the Winship family, will then make presentations to the three winners of the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. And this year we will hear from the Winship winner in poetry. Finally, Lois Lowry will introduce our keynote speaker, Alice Hoffman.

Ernest Hemingway was affectionately known by many as Papa, yet we are honored to open today’s ceremony with someone who can truly call him by that name. Hemingway acknowledged a degree of alchemy went into his writing. One element, I imagine, being the influence of his family. As a young boy Patrick had only a vague understanding of what his father did in his study, but he knew it somehow related to the family income. So for his father’s birthday he would give him yellow pads and pencils with hopes that Papa would write more so their family could live better. Patrick has a knack for words himself. His introduction to his father’s collected stories and his forward to True at First Light capture his own ability to weave masterfully together family lore, historical and scientific insight, and wordplay in English and other languages. In the 1990s, Patrick edited True at First Light, a previously unpublished fictional memoir that his father wrote, based on a safari they took together in 1954. Patrick lived most of his adult life in East Africa, working as a professional hunter, safari guide, and instructor in wildlife management. His interest in the natural world and game was encouraged by his father, who taught him to hunt in Idaho and to fish on Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar. Allow me one family secret, had Patrick been born a girl, his parents planned to name him, not their boat, Pilar.

Leave it to Ernest Hemingway to have penned one of the most apt descriptions of Patrick. In the novel Islands in the Stream, Hemingway describes the protagonist’s second son -- fashioned, many believe, on Patrick -- as an otter, the sort of animal that has a sound and humorous life by itself. “The middle boy,” he writes, “had a lovely, small, animal quality, and he had a good mind and a life of his own. He was affectionate and had a good sense of justice and was good company.” Patrick tells a more personal story in which his father, invoking his nickname, said to him, “Mouse” -- it’s a little hard for me to picture you as a mouse, Patrick; an otter, maybe, but not so much a mouse – “Mouse,” his father told him, “I am the wolf, and you are the coyote.” As a boy, Patrick thought this meant that he wasn’t as physically imposing as his father. Later, it occurred to him that his father may have been referring to the legendary symbolism of the wolf, an animal often portrayed as more powerful than the clever coyote. But now, he concludes, with his characteristic twinkle in his eye, the message may have been more simple than that. Coyotes, you see, outnumber wolves, and as a species have quietly done quite well for themselves over time.

Please join me in welcoming, from the wilds of Montana, the coyote among us and a man who is always good company, Patrick Hemingway.

PATRICK HEMINGWAY: Well, with that introduction from Tom, I can’t say anything. I’m just going to read this passage:

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 afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that move slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motorcars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cape and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going and things went very badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

That’s the opening, of course, to A Farewell to Arms, and a splendid example of Hemingway’s short, declarative sentences. Thank you. [Applause]

JENNIFER HAIGH: I’m Jennifer Haigh and on behalf of my fellow judges this year, Ernie Hebert and also Ana Castillo, who could not be here today, I’d like to announce the winners of the 2008 Hemingway Awards.

I have a clear memory of standing on this stage four years ago, accepting the Hemingway for my novel Mrs. Kimble, and it’s truly one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. We’re living in an age that can be profoundly discouraging to writers, especially new writers, whose work is too often greeted with deafening silence from the publishing world. For the winner, and for the finalists, the PEN/Hemingway fulfills a vital function. It brings attention to our work.

This award was created by Mary Hemingway 32 years ago to honor the memory of Ernest Hemingway and to bring attention to distinguished first books of fiction. The winner of the PEN/Hemingway, the two finalists, and two honorable mentions, will all receive month-long residencies at the Ucross foundation in Wyoming, which is a little slice of heaven for any writer looking for the time and space to work. The winner of the Hemingway award will also be awarded a residency at the distinguished Visiting Writer’s Series at the University of Idaho MFA program in creative writing.

Our first finalist for the 2008 Hemingway award is Like Trees Walking, a novel by Ravi Howard. About this remarkable first novel, our judge Ernie Hebert writes: “Ravi Howard’s novel Like Trees Walking, a story of middle-class African-American brothers in the South and their reaction to a lynching in the 1980s, is full of care, love, anger, confusion, craft, perseverance, and talent. It is a beautiful work of art, the crystallization of a moment in our history. A book for the ages.” Ravi Howard. Like Trees Walking. [Applause]

Our second finalist for the Hemingway award is Twenty Grand, a story collection by Rebecca Curtis. About Twenty Grand, our judge Ana Castillo has this to say: “In Rebecca Curtis’ short story collection, the reader is invited to live inside marvelously crafted contemporary characters -- young women who always seem to be running away from one situation while simultaneously risking running towards something new, strange, even hard, but maybe wonderful. Her talents come through from story to story with provocative endings that are the sign of the truly gifted writer.” Rebecca Curtis. Twenty Grand. [Applause]

And now I’d like to present the winner of the 2008 Hemingway Award, Then We Came to the End, a novel by Joshua Ferris. This book is that rare phenomenon in contemporary fiction, a novel that conjures astutely and vividly the world of work. In this accomplished and very funny debut novel, Joshua Ferris recreates the daily life of a Chicago ad agency on the skids. Its peculiar rituals, inside jokes, and shared language, the surreal intimacy of its employees, who spend most of their waking hours in the company of near strangers they did not choose. As the staff succumbs one by one to layoffs and the office hums with anxiety, this sharp, witty novel reveals its compassionate heart. Keenly observed, formally adventurous, Then We Came to the End is at every turn original and relevant. A truly remarkable first novel. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. [Applause]