Hemingway Had the Pilar, I Have Golf

Every morn­ing while liv­ing in Key West and Cuba, Ernest Hem­ing­way rose ear­ly to write, and every after­noon he went out cruis­ing and fish­ing on his yacht, Pilar. There are many arti­cles out there, includ­ing this one and this one, that detail what Hem­ing­way did dur­ing his after­noons on the Pilar, as well as how much the boat meant to him, so I won’t dis­cuss any of that here.

I only men­tion the Pilar because as much as Hem­ing­way loved writ­ing, he need­ed an activ­i­ty that took his mind off it. Spend­ing hours cruis­ing and fish­ing (and hunt­ing Ger­man subs dur­ing WWII) enabled him to for­get his writ­ing and enjoy him­self for a while, so he could return to his work the next day refreshed.

As a boy I loved to fish, but some­where along the way I devel­oped an aver­sion to han­dling slimy, squirmy things, so in the last 25 years I’ve fished maybe twice.

The promise of the 1st tee

Instead of fish­ing, for relax­ation I’ve turned to anoth­er clas­sic obses­sion: golf. While I’ve tak­en a few lessons and read sev­er­al books on the game, I’m only an aver­age play­er, typ­i­cal­ly shoot­ing between 100 and 110 (par is 72) and occasionally—if I’m on fire—in the low 90s.

But most of the time I don’t even keep score. I play for the Zen aspect of the game. For those few hours while I’m play­ing, noth­ing else exists.

All wor­ries about char­ac­ters and plot and reviews and fan mail and roy­al­ties and where in Europe I want to trav­el and whether the sec­ond book in my detec­tive series will be as good as the first and my friends’ and rel­a­tives’ health and why lit­er­ary jour­nals tell me they enjoy my sto­ries but con­tin­ue to reject them and bills and the incon­gru­ous­ly gor­geous postal work­er I chat­ted with that morn­ing and what I’ll write next and what I’ll talk about at the par­ty I was invit­ed to that week­end and whether I’ll ever amount to any­thing as a writer—all of these wor­ries fall away while I’m play­ing golf, leav­ing just me, the course, and the ball.

There’s so much I love about the game, I can’t pos­si­bly express it all here. Nor do I want to. Some­day I want to write a novel—or at least a story—about my love of golf, so I have to keep a cer­tain amount of my pas­sion to myself. If I write it all now, there won’t be any cre­ative ten­sion to write more in the future. I will share one obser­va­tion, though:

Besides the qui­et and the soli­tude when I’m able to play alone, I love the panoply of green on golf cours­es. As James Kaplan notes in his short sto­ry “The Mow­er,” con­trary to what most peo­ple think, there are about a thou­sand shades of green on a golf course: green-green, yel­low-green, blue-green, orange-green, black-green, gray-green and so on.

Walk­ing a course forces me to see—really see—the world in greater detail, which is exact­ly what a writer needs. Golf gets me out from behind a desk and actu­al­ly see­ing things, not think­ing about them, mulling them. It reminds me of why I write in the first place: to attempt to cap­ture some of the beau­ty and poignan­cy of moments in the world.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

Comments (5)