Writers and Corn Are All Ears
Steven G. Kellman, Ph.D.
Director (Academia), Global Listening Centre.
Professor, University of Texas, San Antonio, US.
Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story “Hills Like White Elephants” consists almost entirely of dialogue. A man and a woman waiting for a train in Spain reveal truths about themselves and their relationship through a bare minimum of verbiage. Although the word abortion appears not once in the story, an attentive reader surmises that the man is trying to convince the woman to undergo the procedure:
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”
“What makes you think so?”
“That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.”
It is unlikely that the couple will be fine afterward, nor is it likely that that pregnancy was the only bar to their happiness before. Published in 1927, “Hills Like White Elephants” is almost 100 years old, but the dialogue remains as pointed as a newly sharpened scalpel. It is not exactly the speech that—freighted with “um” and “hmm”—a tape recorder would have picked up if positioned in that train station somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid. But it is ordinary conversation pared and polished to its crystalline essence. The only way Hemingway could have produced this gem was to have mined it from the mass of human babble. He knew how to listen.
In 1934, when his fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was suffering an artistic slump, Hemingway offered him this advice: “When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think truly. And writing is only what you truly think.”
By exhorting Fitzgerald to listen, Hemingway is offering a recipe for attentiveness. He observes that, in a conversation, many of us are too intent on what we are going to say next to heed what our interlocutor is really saying. Journalists know that the way to bungle an interview is to prepare a set of questions that will be posed no matter what replies they elicit. Attentive listening is living generously and ethically. You cannot observe the Golden Rule without being attuned to the words and deeds of others. Good writers are responsive to the universe.
In an 1884 essay, 50 years before Hemingway sent his letter to Fitzgerald, Henry James offered this advice to aspiring writers: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Artistic achievement demands heightened awareness; obliviousness is an aesthetic handicap as well as a moral flaw. Nevertheless, regardless of intention, something is inevitably always lost, even by a mind as capacious as James’s. Although we might listen for everything, we only hear something, a fraction of the vast audible clutter. The human ear cannot detect infrasound (less than 20 Hz), ultrasound (more than 20 kHz), or any other sound that is too faint, too loud, or masked by other sounds. All listening, even by auditors as perceptive as Hemingway and James, is selective listening. We cannot hear all.
If poets are, according to Percy Bysshe Shelley, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” they are obliged to listen to their constituents. However, after canvassing as wide a range of the citizenry as possible, it is up to them to then narrow the range of options and make decisions. Listen generously, but also provide a focus. Public hearings are cacophonous assemblies without an agenda.
The economy of attention requires choices. On the vast playlist of human activity, what will we choose to listen to? Early in Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” the narrator declares:
“I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmm.”
By limiting his audition to what he prefers, The Boxer remains a man of narrow compass. The rest that he disregards might have enriched his meagre existence. By contrast, John Cage revolutionized music by opening up the sonic palette to encompass what is usually dismissed as noise. However, in performance, Cage could not help but be selective. His most famous composition, 4’33”, does not accommodate what is heard in the 34th second of the fourth minute. When throwing in the kitchen sink, there is not always room for dirty dishes.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, asks the philosopher, does it make a sound? We must strive to be alive to the sound of tumbling trees. “The woods,” wrote Robert Frost, “are lovely, dark, and deep.” But, failing to listen to both the forest and the trees, the macrocosm and the microcosm, we lose everything.
