For descriptions of vigorous outdoor pursuits I prefer Arthur Ransome.

it would be nice to give Lord B something positive for his Book Club.

X
That's another reason why I work on the piano. It slows me down. If you don't work at the piano then it's what Hemingway referred to as the difference between writing and typing. If you don't write at the piano you are typing. Do you know the way Hemingway wrote? It's very interesting because of the fact that he wrote about Michigan and his doctor father and the ducks, he wrote very much from something he picked up from Gertrude Stein, who observed it in Cézanne. And yet the subject has nothing to do with the Cézanne. He also picked it up from Gertrude Stein's idea about what went in English literature. Essentially he tried to get back to Chaucer. Gertrude Stein, she said, "In the beginning was the word. Then they put two words together, then they made a sentence, then they made a paragraph and they forgot the word." "Sumer is icumen in" - it's great, "Sumer is icumen in" - the phonetic feeling of the word. So he would sit in a café and in black, in block letters he would write "BACK HOME IN MICHIGAN" - this is only a parody, right - and he would look from one word, to another word and to another word and then he would form the sentence, rather than just saying, writing some boring version of back home in, you know. Very very important and the sound of the word in relation to another word just sitting there like an idiot and writing these things and then waking up one day and your name is Hemingway.

The point that I'm trying to make is, how do we know what to take out? I don't like to make a distinction between Europe and America, but there is a distinction and I feel that one of the big ditinctions, for example in literature, is say someone like Hemingway, he was a taker-outer. My friend, whom I like very much, Günter Grass, is not a taker-outer, he is a putter-inner, one tragedy after another, you see. Günter Grass learned nothing from Hemingway, you see. So the point is, it's the same thing. We know what to take out. We have an instinct to take things out, maybe it's a commercial instinct, really. Maybe it's like writing a Madison Avenue ad.