When asked in his 1958 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton about choosing titles, Hemingway said, “I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book — sometimes as many as one hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.” Three years later he struggled with the list you see below—possible titles for a book about his early Paris days, a book which he said probably should not be published because of potential libel suits. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

For reasons that escape me, I simply could not make myself go back and read the journals I kept during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Then, twenty-four years later, my resistance suddenly crumbled, though I had trouble deciphering my own handwriting, which I had miniaturized at the time to microscopic size. These texts are not reports on the actual filming—of which little is said.

I like cats as far as creatures go. I like almost any animal that does not have horns or scales on it for that matter, but I especially like cats. Any sort and denomination: spotted or solid, fat or thin, with and without fleas. I like them and admire them and almost anything they do is a pleasure to me.

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

A little house. Abandoned. Rank with grasses. We must have passed it by a dozen times before we knew it was the place, so undistinguished it was, looking for all the world like any peasant cottage, squatting on its haunches behind a wooden gate closed up to stay with ivy and trumpet vine, mixed impartially in the business of regaining possession. 

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings, said Auden.

A neighbor of mine shoots beavers because they cut “his” trees. Another guy shoots a nesting loon because it eats “his” fish. Another shoots a coyote because it eats “his” deer.

January 5

Tangier is a lax place. Too much dope and too many servants. Food is fresh, booze is cheap, and rents are low. In other words, paradise!

Mr. Beckett is dead. So, then, is Paris, too. I’m told that he died last Friday night. So, then, all of my heroes are dead, since last Friday night.