Some authors, like John Steinbeck, have found that while a work is in progress, it is useful not only to journalize its development, but also it is advantageous to discuss the piece as it takes life. Such was the case when Steinbeck wrote East of Eden and the later published, Journal of a Novel: the East of Eden Letters. However, a common belief among some of SteinbeckÆs contemporaries is that this is something that you do not do. For example, this was the ideology of two men who also found great success in the written word: Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. Mr. Hemingway reveals his abhorrence in an uncharacteristic interview he gave George Plimpton in the 1958 Spring issue of The Paris Review:
In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writersÆ books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it(72).
His last line is crucial. Although it can probably be extended to include, as J.D. Salinger puts it: ôIf there is an amateur reader still left in the world û or anybody who just reads and runsàö(dedication). The point here is to suppress some of what has been written and said about Hemingway and Lawrence, particularly what scholars believe to be the truth of their plot evolutions, symbolism, the flatness and roundness of their characters, and more specifically the interrelationships of said characters. However, a manifestation of suppression can be the formulation of new ideas and opinions; commended for the evolution of the argument which they extend, these new calculations can be seen as hypocrisy. Nevertheless, it is this writerÆs remonstration, which progresses almost entirely on its own, that both authors, Mr. Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms and Mr. Lawrenc...