Terry di Beirut pada September 1970. Pengalamannya berada di Timur Tengah ini menyebabkan dia diterima bekerja sebagai wartawan. Dilahirkan dengan nama Robert Terry McDonell, di U.S. Naval Air Station, Virginia pada 1 Ogos 1944. Dia bekerja sebagai jurufoto bebas dan penulis (1969-72); pemberita Associated Press (1972-73); pemberita LA (1974-75); editor bersekutu, San Francisco Magazine (1975-76); editor bersekutu, City magazine (1976-77); editor kanan, Outside magazine (1977-78); editor urusan, Outside magazine (1978-79); ketua editor, Rocky Mountain Magazine (1979-80); editor urusan, Rolling Stone (1981-83); penolong editor urusan, Newsweek (1983-85); editor penasihat, Manhattan, Inc (1986-87); ketua editor, Smart magazine (1987-89); ketua editor, Esquire (1990-93); ketua editor, publisher, Sports Afield (1993-96); editor, Men's Journal (1996-99); ketua editor, Us Weekly (1999-2002); editor urusan, Sports Illustrated (2002-5); editor, Time Inc. Sports Group (2006-12); editor kanan, Time Inc. (2012). Kini, penulis bebas berpangkalan di New York. Gambar bawah kiri, Hemingway bersama Hadley; bawah kanan, Miss Stein dan bawah sekali, Sylvia di sisi Hemingway.

DUIT ... DUIT

Bahagian A, di bawah ini, memaparkan kesusahan yang dialami Ernest Hemingway ketika dia menetap di Paris bersama isteri nombor 1, Hadley dan seorang anak lelaki kecil, digelar Mr Bumby. Kisah-kisah mencabar lain diharungi pengarang tersohor ini turut dimuat dalam bukunya, A Moveable Feast. Begitupun, pada 1920-an, 3 wanita menjadi watak utama yang secara tak langsung mendorong Hemingway terus menulis: 1. Hadley yang penyayang. 2.  Sylvia yang boleh anda fahami sifatnya melalui cerita di Bahagian A. 3. Miss Stein yang suka mengutuknya kerana Hemingway suka baca buku-buku pengarang yang sudah meninggal dunia, tapi sebenarnya wanita berketurunan Yahudi German ini, secara peribadi tidak sukakan pengarang-pengarang terbabit. Sungguhpun begitu, Miss Stein pernah beritahu Hemingway supaya singgah untuk makan-minum di rumahnya yang dijaga pembantunya semasa dia tiada, tapi pada suatu hari akibat disindir Miss Stein, Hemingway terus memutuskan persahabatan karibnya dengan Miss Stein. Ironinya, ketika zaman kemelesetan serba-serbi ini, ada seorang penyajak terkenal bernama pangkal sama dengannya, Ernest Walsh, berasal dari Ireland, dikatakan menerima 1,200 dollar untuk satu sajak disiar dalam majalah. Pencen Hemingway sebagai bekas tentera ketika itu pun sekadar dua dollar sehari! Bayaran karya penulis di Malaysia bagaimana pula? Dulu dan sekarang banyakkah bezanya???

Di bahagian B, saya tempek tiga muka surat daripada buku, The Accidental Life karya editor terkemuka, Terry McDonell yang menceritakan bayaran mewah yang diterima penulis-penulis tertentu - pastinya pada zaman yang melampaui era Hemingway - dalam rencananya, Money. Di tepi kanan tajuk, dia tulis jumlah perkataan, katanya, bagi memudahkan pembaca mengagak jumlah minit yang diperlukan untuk membaca rencana-rencana dalam bukunya ini. Prihatin betul Terry ini!

The Accidental Life, saya pinjam dari Perpustakaan Awam Seberang Jaya 9 Jan lalu bersama-sama A Moveable Feast,  The Black Painting, Neil Olson; Dari Pesantren ke Istana: Kiai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, Greg Barton dan novel terjemahan Seribu Matahari Syurga, Khaled Hosseini. Tajuk novel Seribu Matahari Syurga - sebelum ini saya pernah baca dalam versi Bahasa Inggeris berjodol A Thousand Spendid Suns - adalah berasal daripada sebuah sajak pujangga Parsi abad ke-17, Saeb -e- Tabrizi. Khaled dilahirkan di Kabul pada 1965 tapi tinggal di San Jose, California setelah keluarganya pindah ke sana. Ayahnya bekas diplomat yang bertugas di Paris sejak 1976 tapi sewaktu mereka sepatutnya pulang pada 1980, Afghanistan diduduki Kesatuan Soviet. Khaled adalah seorang doktor perubatan yang pernah menjadi "duta" Amerika Syarikat bagi program membantu pelarian anjuran UNHCR. 

Sebenarnya juga, 3 buku: A Moveable Feast, The Accidental Life dan Dari Pesantren ke Istana: Kiai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid saya ulang pinjam kerana saya tidak sempat baca sepanjang tempoh pinjaman dua minggu sebelumnya. Pada 26 Disember lalu, saya pinjam buku-buku ini buat kali pertama bersama-sama dua buku lain iaitu: 1. Sebuah novel berkisar era reformasi karya seorang pensyarah Bahasa Inggeris di sebuah pusat pengajian tinggi tempatan, Once We Were There yang penuh caci-maki ala penulis-penulis novel kontemporari Amerika Syarikat. 2. Sebuah buku penuh pelbagai tulisan beberapa penulis dan editor perempuan Amerika Syarikat mengenai pengalaman mereka berada di Paris, A Paris all your own. Buku-buku pensyarah berketurunan Sikh campur Cina dan sejumlah ahli bahasa dari negara Uncle Sam itu amat ketara berbeza dengan gaya penulisan Hemingway! Sewaktu saya hendak beredar dari kaunter pulang/pinjam buku serta bayar beli makanan di kantin bersebelahan, "abang lembut" yang bertugas di situ berkata: "Ambillah buku-buku 'kat rak 'tu. Percuma!" Saya tengok banyak buku remaja dalam Bahasa Inggeris serta majalah lama selain beberapa novel yang kebanyakannya milik perpustakaan ini atau dihadiahkan orang perseorangan, kedutaan asing, pihak kerajaan negeri atau syarikat swasta. Saya pilih 3 buku: 77 Shadow Street, karya Dean Koontz yang tiada sebarang tandatangan seseorang, nama individu tertentu atau cap syarikat; Library of Souls, tulisan Ransom Riggs dengan tertulis Noor Aira Aleesya bt. Marwizan di kulit keras depannya dan Tatabahasa Dewan edisi baharu karya bersama Nik Safiah Karim, Farid M Onn, Hashim Haji Musa dan Abdul Hamid Mahmood, jelas dulunya milik Chai Soo Hong yang turut dicatat dia beli pada 1997 pada helaian pertama selepas kulit keras depan dibuka.

Bahagian A

Shakespeare and Company

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Odeon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Syvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal's and as gay as a young girl's, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and streching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.

I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman's Sketches and early book of D. H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.

"You won't be back very soon if you read all that," Sylvia said.

"I'll be back to pay," I said. "I have some money in the flat."

"I didn't mean that," she said. "You pay whenever it's convenient."

"When does Joyce come in?" I asked.

"If he comes in, it's usually very late in the afternoon," she said. "Haven't you ever seen him?"

"We've seen him at Michaud's eating with his family," I said. "But it's not polite to look at people when they are eating, and Michaud's is expensive."

"Do you eat at home?"

"Mostly now," I said. "We have a good cook."

"There aren't any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?"

"No. How did you know?"

"Larbaud lived there," she said. "He liked it very much except for that."

"The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Pantheon."

"I don't know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime."

"Wait until you see if I pay you," I said. "But thank you very much."

"Don't read too fast," she said.

Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except and antiseptic container, not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.

"But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay," she said.

"Sure I will," I said. "We'll both go. And then we'll walk down by the river and along the quais."

"Let's walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops."

"Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new cafe where we don't know anyone and nobody knows us  and have a drink."

"We can have two drinks."

"The we can eat somewhere."

"No. Don't forget we have to pay the library."

"We'll come home and eat here and we'll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we'll read and then go to bed and make love."

"And we'll never love anyone else but each other."

"No. Never."

"What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we'd better have lunch."

"I'm very hungry," I said. "I worked at the cafe on the cafe creme."

"How did it go, Tatie?"

"I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?"

"Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart."

"And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them."

"Would that be honest?"

"Sure."

"Does she have Henry James too?"

"Sure."

"My," she said. "We're lucky that you found the place."

"We're always lucky," I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career with The Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but invalided home, having seriously wounded while serving with the Red Cross. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923 and was followed by the short story collection In Our Time,  which marked his American debut in 1925. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the "lost generation" but the  preeminent writer of his time.  This was followed by Men Without Women in 1927, when Hemingway returned to United States, and his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely - to Spain, Italy, and Africa - and wrote about his experience in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his classic treatise on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting in Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and covered the European front during the Second World War. Hemingway's most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea  (1952), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration." One of the most important influences on the development of the short story and novel in American fiction. Hemingway has seized the imagination of the American public like no other  twentieth-century author. He died, by suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His other works include The Torrents of Spring (1926), Winner Take Nothing (1933), To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938), Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and posthumously, A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands inthe Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986).

Bahagian B