Ernest Hemingway's letters often compare writing to fighting (boxing). He saw that there is no place to hide in the ring. It is all there for us to see. It is the naked, often bloody truth. The following passage comes from my award winning story Speaking of Champions, first published November last in my anthology of short fiction called Twenty Bites ... The viewpoint character is a lady lying paralysed and incommunicado, the victim of her illness but with mind intact and still in possession of her wonderful gift of total recall ... once upon a time she had been a schoolteacher and wannabe writer, herself ...
She scans the hard drive, stops it at that sixth form, remembers the special one with Janine Stone. She looks along the seven rows of faces. All different, all lovely with their looked after young lady hair stylings, some of them very pretty, some not, but each of them beautiful. And each one of them intent. Looking, watching, waiting for her, expecting the daily demonstration of their teacher’s famous total recall.Truth is beauty. Beauty is truth.
“All right, ladies, this is Virginia Woolf being Clarissa, that's Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa is here thinking of her home city of London. Are you ready?” Without reference to any printed page she begins the lengthy quotation about the hush then Big Ben striking the hour, irrevocable, and about leaden circles dissolving in the air, about what was there in people’s eyes, the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle…She takes another breath, hears a small cough, ‘Miss?’
Janine, the little red head in the front row. ‘Yes, Janine, you’d like to comment?’
‘Well, Mrs Morajani, I think that was beautiful, but I think your writing’s just as good.’ The sudden pale-skin blush.
You smile for the girl. ‘Oh, I don’t think you should compare my efforts with those of Virginia Woolf, Janine.’ Giggles in the classroom. Vision of Miss Woolf walking into the river, pockets of her drape-styled coat weighed down with rocks, the darkening of the day as the waters of the Ouse close over her head. ‘Girls. The wonderful thing is this: that we, all of us, we know what’s wonderful! And do remember this, Janine, creative art is not some kind of a competition.’
But Janine again, challenging, questioning, impressing herself as usual on her teacher and the rest of her class; “Yes, But when we did Hemingway, he wrote in one of his letters to William Faulkner that writing’s like fighting, didn’t he? He said there are losers and winners. He said, ‘Dr Tolstoi and Mr Dostoevsky were both better than both of us’. He said that, ‘Shakespeare was the all time champion,’ didn’t he?’
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