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Posted on 14 November, 2023

Room 511 at Ambos Mundos

I never hero-worshipped Hemingway, but blowhard and boorish bully though he was he had a tremendous work ethic, knocking out on this typewriter articles for Esquire and fiction during the 30s in his main kip for Havana fishing trips. I was not allowed to test my weight on the chair – no matter, he always typed standing up anyway. And he didn’t do bad at that, wrote many true sentences. I noted one of them recorded by his biographer Hotchner in my 1994 diary, since also used in Dave Daze

‘the only constructive thing I ever learned about women – that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.’