Gertrude Stein talked a lot of rot, but she was nice, and Hemingway vowed to help her as much as he could.

She was a fat lesbian with enough money to buy Picassos and not work, or worry about money, and she only liked writers who helped her, or said nice things about her work.

Maybe that's why Hemingway helped her and said nice things about her work. So she'd help him and say nice things about his work.

When, later, she said Hemingway was yellow--well, that was after he'd said something unkind about her, I expect.

She said the generation that fought in World War I were a lost generation.

Hemingway used that as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises, one will remember. Along with the quote from Ecclesiastes.

Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, Robert Cohn. They were lost. Drinking and sleeping around.

Whether the generation were lost or not they took Hemingway's characters to heart, and made them models, and him a spokeman for them. He was made.

Hemingway says he read after work so as not to think about what he was working on, and to let the spring replenish the well. He read Simenon.

I read mysteries after work when I was starting out. I walked, and thought about problems I was trying to solve on my walks.

I didn't have anyone to talk to about writing. I didn't talk to Brenda about writing. I didn't want to talk about what I was doing to anyone. I didn't talk to Larry and Hazel about writing.

This isolated me.

Writing can be a lonely occupation.

At least, it has been for me.

You can get out of touch when you don't talk to anyone.

When he got home and talked to his wife about what Miss Stein had said, his wife said Miss Stein did not talk to her, her friend did.

I wanted to do something I could do by myself.

The better I did it by myself the more I cut myself off from colleagues in the field, fellow writers. Later on, when I was fairly experienced, as a writer, other writers weren't sure what to make of my observations.

Who was I? What had I done?

I was America's greatest writer. I had revolutionized the novel.

You can't say that.

That's balmy. That's daft.