Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway (and how I learned of Marquez’s Nobel)

Garcia, 30 years ago, on seeing Hemingway 32 years before in Paris: 

For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I faced the same great inconvenience. At the time, I spoke the same rudimentary English that I still speak now, and I wasn’t very sure about his bullfighter’s Spanish. And so I didn’t do either of the things that could have spoiled that moment, but instead cupped both hands over my mouth and, like Tarzan in the jungle, yelled from one sidewalk to the other: ”Maaaeeestro!” Ernest Hemingway understood that there could be no other master amid the multitude of students, and he turned, raised his hand and shouted to me in Castillian in a very childish voice, ”Adiooos, amigo!” It was the only time I saw him.

At the time, I was a 28-year-old newspaperman with a published novel and a literary prize in Colombia, but I was adrift and without direction in Paris. My great masters were the two North American novelists who seemed to have the least in common. I had read everything they had published until then, but not as complementary reading – rather, just the opposite, as two distinct and almost mutually exclusive forms of conceiving of literature. One of them was William Faulkner, whom I had never laid eyes on and whom I could only imagine as the farmer in shirtsleeves scratching his arm beside two little white dogs in the celebrated portrait of him taken by Cartier-Bresson. The other was the ephemeral man who had just said goodbye to me from across the street, leaving me with the impression that something had happened in my life, and had happened for all time.

via nytimes.com

No words to express how much this moves me. Just Hemingway would have been enough; but to learn Marquez’s two biggest influences at that age included two of my top three (along with Woolf) — priceless. With many thanks to Paige Williams, who directed me to this 30-year-old treasure I’d have otherwise missed.

Very close to the time this was published, I was living in NYC, and learned Garcia had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was riding the elevator up to my apartment, and riding it too was the delivery guy from the neighborhood wine store, where I often bought $2 bottles of wine that had originated in Argentina or Australia or Chile — still overlooked sources back then. The wine-store guy, who was from Colombia, was young and smart and heavily accented and ridiculously handsome. That day, carrying a sack of wine up for someone on a higher floor (I got the apartment via rent control; the building was way beyond my fresh-grad paygrade, but I had snagged it at the same price my friends were paying to live in hovels), he was beaming.

“How are you?” I asked.

He said, “Wonderful. I am so happy today. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has just won the Nobel prize. I am so happy and proud.” He looked terribly happy and terribly homesick.

Somehow this completes a circle: Hemingway, Garcia commenting on Hemingway’s bullfighter Spanish, and the Colombian wine steward, beaming, bringing me the news of Garcia’s own triumph.

Article: The Danger of Cosmic Genius – Magazine – The Atlantic

The schism between Freeman and his son, George, began not with any debate about asteroids versus redwoods, but over marijuana. In his early teens, George left his father’s house in Princeton to spend his summers in Northern California, visiting his mother, the mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. He and his mother hiked the Sierra Nevada on Sierra Club trips; in those mountains, and later in Colorado, he came to know my sister, Barbara, a teenage cook for the club. He also hiked the Haight of the late ’60s, when rebellion and cannabis smoke were thickest in that neighborhood, and he made contacts among the flower children. Back home in New Jersey, he became the target of an investigation, suspected by narcotics officers of being the main weed dealer at his high school. His room was raided and some seeds were found. He was handcuffed during class and taken to jail. Freeman chose not to bail him out. In his week behind bars, George read the dictionary up to the letter M before his sister Esther helped spring him. He was shaken by the experience, and his relationship with his father was broken.

(via Instapaper)

That’s from The Danger of Cosmic Genius, in The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/

This is a near-epic tale, by the son of David Brower, the great environmentalist, of the conundrum that is Freeman Dyson — the physics genius who talks idiocy about global warming. Brower wants to answer the obvious but confounding question: How can such a smart man be so stupid about something so important. Usually its a mistake, a forced falsity, to seek the answer to such a question in a clash of an age’s great forces within a single mind and family. But Brower, whose own family has been enmeshed with Dyson’s for decades, convinces me that’s the case here.

This is a stunning, magisterial story. So much that can go wrong in a man, a family, and in science goes wrong here. Messy. Yet it holds the arcing beauty of great physics.