CANON
Books & Ideas / SpeechErnest Hemingway, 1954
Ernest Hemingway — Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
ABOUT THE WORK
Hemingway’s Nobel speech is only a few paragraphs long, but it contains one of the clearest descriptions of what it feels like to make something seriously.
He rejects the idea that accomplishment makes the work easier.
The opposite happens.
The existence of great work before you raises the standard. The artist has to go farther, attempt something that has not already been done, and eventually reach the point where nobody else can tell them what to do.
Hemingway describes the writer being driven “out to where no one can help him.” (Nobel Prize)
Creation eventually becomes solitary. Teachers, references, criticism, technique and precedent can bring you a long way. But, at some point, the work asks a question for which there is no established answer.
And Hemingway connects that solitude to an almost impossible standard: trying to make something better than you have made before while knowing perfection remains out of reach.
It is perfection as direction.
The work may never become flawless. The obligation is to keep pushing toward the farthest edge of what you can currently do, finish the thing, learn from where it failed, and go farther the next time.
For all of Hemingway’s reputation for certainty, this speech is strikingly humble.
The writer is not presented as a genius dispensing answers.
He is someone alone with the work, attempting something difficult enough that success is uncertain.
That may be one of the best definitions of making art we have.
He rejects the idea that accomplishment makes the work easier.
The opposite happens.
The existence of great work before you raises the standard. The artist has to go farther, attempt something that has not already been done, and eventually reach the point where nobody else can tell them what to do.
Hemingway describes the writer being driven “out to where no one can help him.” (Nobel Prize)
Creation eventually becomes solitary. Teachers, references, criticism, technique and precedent can bring you a long way. But, at some point, the work asks a question for which there is no established answer.
And Hemingway connects that solitude to an almost impossible standard: trying to make something better than you have made before while knowing perfection remains out of reach.
It is perfection as direction.
The work may never become flawless. The obligation is to keep pushing toward the farthest edge of what you can currently do, finish the thing, learn from where it failed, and go farther the next time.
For all of Hemingway’s reputation for certainty, this speech is strikingly humble.
The writer is not presented as a genius dispensing answers.
He is someone alone with the work, attempting something difficult enough that success is uncertain.
That may be one of the best definitions of making art we have.