Unfinished Projects

An unfinished project is a taunt to danger.

Paris 2017

Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.

We are in Paris. We are in the 1920s, the city revived, pregnant with possibility, and we are, for once, ready to meet the moment. We’re postwar, and roaring to unleash what we’ve been holding back—we feel invigorated by the nighttime music, challenged by the novels, motivated by the grand canvases. We even begin to notice a poignancy to the dreary rains and gray skies. We have a fistful of American dollars in our back pocket, but we’re buying drinks in French francs, so, essentially, the days are pristine.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with the pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

We have a new wife, a young child, enough ambition to make this grand city feel cramped, and our name is Ernest Hemingway.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all of Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James.

This is a passage from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his 1964 book about his life during the 1920s in Paris, a chronicle of the period that, well, doesn’t let the facts ruin a good hero story.

A Moveable Feast is perhaps the most peculiar book on the Hemingway shelf. What we have is Hemingway reaching far into the past and ensuring that his story reenforces the Hemingway mystique. Of course nearly every writer fiddles a bit with history. What’s curious, however, is how much this book is shaped by what an older Hemingway wanted to tell about a younger Hemingway. There’s no question that the book changed with the passage of time. And consider if he had written the book thirty years earlier: a reasonable but unanswerable question focuses on how it would be different.

Because the Hemingway of thirty years earlier was a different person—however slight or incidental or irrelevant that difference. And those subtle changes accumulate over the decades. Anybody who has ever labored over a long artistic project—a novel, a canvas, a film—knows that large projects shift over time. This partly results from a symbiotic relationship: the project begins to change you, and those changes redound back onto the project. You are also, however, changing as a person. Perhaps you’re becoming calmer with age, less competitive, or perhaps you’re more vindictive, caustic, and the years have put you on a downward slope, dismissive and cruel and easily provoked—however you change, the results will land on the page.

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Thus one danger for all artists is the unfinished project. This is the sporadic project, the one filled with starts and stops, the project that is a taunt to danger. Beyond the mere distaste and dismay of incomplete work, the artist who leaves a project isn’t the same artist who returns at a later date. Weeks pass, the seasons change, and the artist is a new person working on an old idea. Yes, there’s a benefit to fresh eyes, in taking a break, in stepping back, in going for a walk, in the countless other clichés that we have for the necessity of reassessing tricky problems. But the danger still remains, and haphazard, intermittent work can result in projects that are punctured with gaps: little holes between the old artist and the new artist. Occasionally, for instance, you can almost spot a vacation or divorce or family death in the unexplained chasm between some novel chapters; these are the points where a writer reinvents themselves mid-novel, switching styles, changing masks, leaving all those readers who picked up a romance novel to finish a horror story.

A novel should change over time, and a writer should—of course—change over time, but those changes need to coalesce within the work. Otherwise, the novel is disjointed, imbalanced, filled with cracks. When the writer fails to reveal how they’ve changed on the page, and they, instead, leave those changes outside the novel, they’ve hidden the journey from the reader.

Notice, however, Hemingway’s focus in the quotes above. This is the persona he wants at the forefront. It’s how he avoids inconsistent work. Or a disjointed novel. Through concentration. With propulsion. In how his immersion darkens the room. As an artist, he’s absorbed, fully present, and his pencil trails behind his instincts with a speed that he can’t comprehend. Paris has vanished, the moment isn’t even clear, all that’s left is the page and his urgency, as he inhabits the trajectory of his pencil: looking into the past, knowing that every reader is always in the future.