Dear Mr. Zieman:
In 1929, I published these words in my novel A Farewell to Arms:
"We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
Zieman, you talk too much about losing. Winners don't beg for love the way you did in your front-page letter to readers on Sunday. Your talk of business models is a coward's prayer. I was at D-Day and I mucked Marlene Dietrich. Don't talk to me about penetration. You are a boy.
In the summer you laid off some and in the fall you undid more and in the late fall your simple pattern got done. Now you speak my name and you say you cannot have done these things in vain. But you have already lost. Was it worth it, Zieman?
I liked the paper in the morning.
In the morning you don't talk and you don't need to talk. You read the paper and you drink the coffee and taste the chicory in the mug and feel the day on your face. Now you feel Mary Sanchez on your face and you taste bitter on your lips at the mention of Steve Penn. You do not read the paper so much on the whole. You wish it was like it used to be. You wish C.W. Gusewelle would hold his mud.
Zieman, I did once say the rules for writing at the Star were good. Maybe better than good. Maybe the best. I was 18 then and I used to paraphrase those early lessons. Short sentences. Short first paragraphs. Vigorous English. An 18-year-old was a man when I was at the Star and newspapering was a man's work. Now you let men and women older than that but no wiser tell the news and it takes a strong man to read it. You must be tough as leather to get through any of the editorials. You grit your teeth against the FYI section and its sissy sisters spread over tables in town. You are lashed by writing that talks down to you and spits in your face and you want to punch back.
That was a long time ago and for me the rules changed. They changed in the charnel house of Europe and the whorehouses of France and under Spanish gunfire and aboard Cuban skiffs. I changed the rules in Key West and I changed them back in Ketchum, Idaho. You are crazy to have rules and you are crazy not to have rules and that is what writers call truth. Tell the truth, Zieman. Do you make the salary you made a year ago? What is it? Tell the truth.
Anything you would say about my six months at the Star would have to be as short as a good sentence. I never won an award there but you keep honoring me anyway. I don't understand that.
Zieman, damn it, stop. Unless you find my pancreas in the drawer where I left it in 1918, I don't want to hear you say my name again.
Ernest Hemingway
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they should worry less about who once wrote for them and more about who fucking reads them....... it takes ten minutes to pick thru the star these days, how about some content?
What they never brag about over there is that William Faulkner used to write the Jumble. The answer was always "antediluvian."
Mr. Zieman, bless your heart. You have turned a newspaper of some of the people into a newspaper of none of the people.
If Ernie were still around he'd give you a high colonic with a Winchester Model 12.
The Kansas City Star -- All The News That Fits (our agenda)...
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