Fairly typical of the Quarter, though with more to recommend him than some, was Harold Loeb. Hemingway first met Loeb at one of Ford’s Thursday teas. He was having an affair with Kitty Cannell, and the two of them took Hemingway and Hadley out to dinner. Loeb felt well disposed towards Hemingway, and said he would try to help him find a publisher for In Our Time, but Kitty was wary. Perhaps she noticed how Hemingway watched intently when she scolded Loeb, as she often did. She warned Loeb that he might prove a disloyal friend.
There was already plenty of evidence that Hemingway had a disloyal streak. He was currently contributing satirical verses about the Paris crowd to a German avant-garde periodical, Der Querschnitt. They included a dig at Pound and a parody of Gertrude Stein: ‘Short knives are thick short knives are quick short knives make a needed nick.’
He was also finding some questionable amusement in the eccentricities of an ailing American poet, Ralph Cheever Dunning, who lived like a hermit in a studio next door to Pound and wrote bad neo-Victorian verse. Dunning had been in Paris since 1905, but had only published one slim volume of poems, and that unwillingly. He occupied a bare room, smoked opium, and took his only other sustenance during occasional visits to a café, where he would sit in silence grasping a glass of hot milk. Suddenly Pound ‘discovered’ him and went around saying he was ‘one of the four of five poets of our time’, an assertion received with hilarious disbelief by Hemingway and his friends.
Pound was only trying to be kind to a sick man, and he attempted to persuade Hemingway to do the same. One day he summoned him because he was convinced that Dunning was dying. Hemingway went round to Dunning’s room and found him indeed looking like a skeleton. On the other hand, said Hemingway, he appeared to be speaking in terza rima, and ‘few people ever died while speaking in well-rounded phrases’. Ezra said it was not terza rima; it only sounded like terza rima because Hemingway had been asleep when he had sent for him.
Dunning was taken to a clinic and detoxified, all at Ezra’s – or at least his wife Dorothy’s – expense. Not long afterwards, when Ezra finally left Paris for Rapallo, he made Hemingway promise to keep an eye on Dunning, and gave him a jar of opium which he said he had bought from an Indian chief in the Avenue de l’Opéra. It was to be given to Dunning ‘only when he needs it’. It was a large and heavy jar that had once contained cold cream. Possibly it still did, and there was really no opium in it at all, which would certainly explain what happened next.
One Sunday morning, Ezra’s concierge hurried down the street and shouted up at Hemingway’s window: ‘Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre.’ Hemingway decided that this called for the opium jar, so he went with the concierge. By the time they got there, Dunning had come down from the roof and shut his door. Hemingway knocked, and Dunning opened it:
He was gaunt and seemed unusually tall.
‘Ezra asked me to bring you this,’ I said and handed him the jar. ‘He said you would know what it was.’
He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.
‘You son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘You bastard.’
‘Ezra said you might need it,’ I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.
‘You are sure you don’t need it?’ I asked.
He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.
I picked up the jar, which was only slightly cracked, and put it in my pocket.
‘He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound,’ I said to the concierge.
‘Perhaps he will be tranquil now,’ she said.
‘Perhaps he has some of his own,’ I said.
‘For a poet,’ adds Hemingway, ‘he threw a very accurate milk bottle’.
Hemingway got a similar degree of amusement from Ernest Walsh, an Irish-American whom he met one day in Pound’s studio:
He was with two girls in long mink coats and there was a long, shiny, hired car from Claridge’s outside in the street with a uniformed chauffeur … Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture. He was talking to Ezra and I talked with the girls, who asked me if I had read Mr Walsh’s poems. I had not and one of them brought out a green-covered copy of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, A Magazine of Verse and showed me poems by Walsh in it. ‘He gets twelve hundred dollars apiece,’ she said … My recollection was that I received twelve dollars a page, if that, from the same magazine … ‘It’s more than anybody gets ever,’ the first girl said.
Walsh, born in Detroit and brought up in Cuba, was a sick man. He had caught tuberculosis in his teens and had further weakened his lungs in a plane crash while training as an air cadet during the war. Harriet Monroe had published four of his poems, for the usual very modest fees, in Poetry during 1922, and Walsh had set off for Europe, intending to live on his services pension. He landed up at Claridge’s in Paris, where the girls in mink coats soon abandoned him and he became virtually a prisoner because he could not pay his bill. He was discovered in this predicament by a lady who, as Hemingway puts it, specialised in ‘young poets who were marked for death’: Ethel Moorhead, a well-off middle-aged Scotswoman who had studied painting with Whistler and had been a suffragette. She was no fool, but could switch from violent praise to violent abuse of the same person on the slenderest of grounds. Much more attracted than Hemingway by Walsh’s Byronic appearance, she paid his Claridge’s bill and became his protector.
Moorhead and Walsh decided to start a Montparnasse literary magazine, This Quarter, and Hemingway says that a ‘very substantial sum’ was promised as a prize for the best work to be printed in the first four issues. Hemingway was taken for lunch by Walsh to an expensive restaurant in the Boulevard Saint Michel, fed best quality oysters and Pouilly Fuissé, and told confidently by Walsh – who on this occasion ‘did not bother to look marked for death’ – that he would get the award. Some time later, Hemingway was talking to Joyce at the Deux Magots, and Joyce asked if he had been promised the award. ‘Yes,’ said Hemingway. Joyce said he had been promised it too: ‘Do you think he promised it to Pound?’
This, at least, is the story Hemingway tells in A Moveable Feast, but at the time he was obsequious to the editors of This Quarter, for motives which were obvious. ‘Dear Ernest and Dear Miss Moorhead,’ he wrote to them both from a skiing holiday in the Alps in January 1925. ‘Hurray for the new Review … If there is anything I can do from here about helping you, let me know … I see from your prospectus that you are paying for MS on acceptance and think that is the absolute secret of getting the first rate stuff.’ This Quarter not only paid promptly; it paid very well. Hemingway received the splendid sum of 1,000 francs for ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, which appeared in its first number in May 1925. On receiving the cheque he wrote to Walsh and Moor head that they were ‘a couple of white men’. He needed the money very badly, for he and Hadley were trying to get by on $100 (1,200 francs) a month, so he was very willing to help see this first number through the press, in order to help Walsh and Moorhead who had gone down to the South of France for Walsh’s health. When the Dial turned down a new story, ‘The Undefeated’, Hemingway sent it to Walsh, and another big cheque duly turned up.
However, Hemingway soon had enough of sub-editing This Quarter, and asked to be relieved of his duties, suggesting a friend as successor. Walsh wrote back angrily saying that they had paid him lavishly because they had assumed he was going to do editorial work too, and he had been taking money on false pretences. Hemingway did not break off relations with them – he could not afford to – but thereafter things were strained.
At around the same time he heard that Boni & Liveright in New York, publishers of The Waste Land, were going to take In Our Time for an advance of $200; and things seemed to be looking up even more when, in April 1925, he had a letter
from Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner’s. Perkins had been told by one of his most successful young authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that he must take notice of Hemingway.
‘This is to tell you,’ Fitzgerald had written to Perkins in October 1924, from the South of France,
about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway who lives in Paris (an American) writes for the transatlantic Review & has a brilliant future. Ezra Pount published a collection of his short pieces in Paris, at some place like the Egotist Press. I havn’t it hear now but its remarkable & I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.
Hemingway remarked on the ‘feeling of reading an illiterate’ that Fitzgerald’s letters gave him. ‘I knew him for two years before he could spell my name.’
Maxwell Perkins got hold of in our time, and wrote to Hemingway asking whether he had anything he could send Scribner’s. Hemingway answered that he would love to submit a book to them one day, but at present Boni & Liveright had the option on his next three manuscripts. He was thinking about writing ‘a very big book’ on bullfighting, and this might be his next project, but so far he had not felt like attempting a novel: ‘The novel seems to me to be an awfully artificial and worked out form but as some of the short stories now are stretching out to 8,000 to 12,000 words maybe I’ll get there yet.’
He laboured on at the stories, getting by on such cheques as he could pick up from Walsh and Moorhead, and from the satirical pieces he was sending to the German magazine. He describes Sylvia Beach’s concern for him when he wandered into Shakespeare and Company:
‘You’re too thin, Hemingway,’ Sylvia would say. ‘Are you eating enough?’
‘Sure.’
‘What did you eat for lunch?’
My stomach would turn over and I would say, ‘I’m going home for lunch now.’
‘At three o’clock?’
‘I didn’t know it was that late … Did I have any mail?’
‘I don’t think so. But let me look.’
She looked and found a note and looked up happily and then opened and closed a door in her desk.
‘This came while I was out,’ she said. It was a letter that felt as though it had money in it …
‘It must be from Der Querschnitt … It’s six hundred francs. He says there will be more … It’s damned funny that Germany is the only place I can sell anything …’
‘You can sell stories to Ford,’ she teased me … ‘Get home now and have lunch.’
With the money in his pocket, he hurried round the corner to Lipp’s, the brasserie opposite the Deux Magots. ‘The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l’huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious
*
One day Hemingway was sitting in the Dingo, talking to a couple of Harold Loeb’s friends, when he was greeted by a stranger who identified himself as Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway was pleased to be able to thank Fitzgerald for the introduction to Max Perkins at Scribner’s, but privately he was ‘on the fence’ about Fitzgerald’s runaway success with This Side of Paradise. Writing to a friend, he said that Fitzgerald’s prose ‘wasn’t exciting’.
Fitzgerald had come into the bar with a celebrated baseball player, Dune Chaplin, who had played for Princeton.‡ Hemingway immediately took to Chaplin, who was an amiable, relaxed character, but Fitzgerald aroused more complex feelings. In A Moveable Feast he gives a disturbing description of how Fitzgerald struck him:
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the colouring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.
He was twenty-nine, three years older than Hemingway, and had made his name with This Side of Paradise at the age of twenty-four.
Besides being disturbed by Fitzgerald’s girlish looks, Hemingway quickly became embarrassed by what he was saying: ‘It was all about my writing and how great it was.’ The enthusiasm was quite unfeigned; Fitzgerald had never regarded himself as a stylist – he had modelled This Side of Paradise, stylistically as well as thematically, on Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913–14) – and he was very impressed by Hemingway’s experiments in prose. What he said when they met in the Dingo may be guessed at from a review he wrote of In Our Time, printed in the Bookman a few months later:
When I try to think of any contemporary American short stories as good … only Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha’, Anderson’s ‘The Egg’, and Lardner’s ‘Golden Honeymoon’ come to mind … I read [In Our Time] with the most breathless unwilling interest since Conrad first bent my reluctant eyes upon the sea … You are immediately aware of something temperamentally new … the awakening of that vast unrest that descends upon the emotional type at about eighteen … And many of us, who have grown wary of admonitions to ‘watch this man or that’ have felt a sort of renewal of excitement at these stories wherein Ernest Hemingway turns a corner into the street.
Hemingway had picked up the ethic of the Quarter that ‘praise to the face was open disgrace’, and was embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s effusive congratulations. Also, he was disturbed that Fitzgerald ‘did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy’, and was wearing a Guards tie. ‘I thought I ought to tell him about the tie, maybe, because they did have British in Paris.’ Fitzgerald said he had bought it in Rome.
Fitzgerald ordered champagne, first one bottle, then another. When his speech about Hemingway’s writing ran out, the questions started. Fitzgerald believed a novelist could find out what he needed to know by asking questions, and according to Hemingway the interrogation began like this:
‘Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before you were married?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘But how can you not remember something of such importance?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It is odd, isn’t it?’
‘It’s worse than odd,’ Scott said. ‘You must be able to remember.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s a pity, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t talk like some limey,’ he said. ‘Try to be serious and remember.’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘It’s hopeless.’
It sounds like one of Hemingway’s taller stories, except that John Dos Passos had a similar experience with Fitzgerald and his wife: ‘Scott and Zelda both started plying me with questions. Their gambit was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex. These things might perfectly well have been true but my attitude was that they were nobody’s goddamn business.’
Hemingway noticed that Fitzgerald was sweating in a peculiar way: drops were coming out on ‘his long, perfect Irish upper lip’. An alarming change suddenly came over him: ‘The skin seemed to tighten over his face … The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the colour left the face.’ Hemingway asked if he was all right, and received no reply. He suggested that maybe Fitzgerald should go to a first-aid station, but Chaplin – or whoever the companion was – said ‘That’s the way it takes him’ and put Fitzgerald into a taxi, adding that he would be all right by the time he reached home.
Hemingway ran into Fitzgerald again a few days later at the Closerie de Lilas, and said he hoped he was all right, and that maybe they had drunk too much while they were talking. Fitzgerald said there had been nothing whatever wrong with him: ‘I simply got tired of those absolutely bloody British you were with and went home.’ Hemingway got nowhere when he tried to pursue the matter, so they talked about writers instead, and Fitzgerald was ‘cynical and funny and very jolly and charming an
d endearing’. He was lightly dismissive of his own work, though he said he wanted Hemingway to read his new book, The Great Gatsby: ‘He had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine.’
Like Hemingway, Fitzgerald came from the Mid-West. He was the son of a failed Procter & Gamble salesman from St Paul, Minnesota, but some family money on his mother’s side – from an Irish immigrant great-grandfather who had made a fortune in wholesale groceries – had sent him to private school, and to Princeton, where he was a considerable social success. He entered the army too late to see the First World War, then after demobilisation drifted to New York, where he frequented the smarter circles in the Village and wrote This Side of Paradise. Shortly afterwards he married Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama judge. He and Zelda delighted to behave like characters from his own novel, seeking publicity by doing handstands in the Biltmore lobby because Fitzgerald had not been in the news for a week, and riding to parties on the roof of a taxi. Zelda’s behaviour as a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara charmed some people but alarmed many. A Princeton friend of Fitzgerald’s wrote in 1920 that she was just a ‘temperamental small town Southern Belle’ who ‘chews gum – shows knees’. He did not think the marriage would succeed, for both were drinking heavily, and he guessed that Fitzgerald would write ‘something big’, then ‘die in a garret at 32’.
The ‘something big’ emerged faster than might have been expected, considering that Zelda prevented her husband from working most of the time. His second book, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), took its story too closely from their own marriage to be a success – it describes a young artist and his wife wrecking themselves in dissipation – but The Great Gatsby, published in April 1925 just before Fitzgerald met Hemingway, brought off the trick.
Fitzgerald explained to Hemingway that he always wrote his first drafts to the best standard he could achieve, but before submitting stories to magazines would often deliberately make them more commercial. Hemingway was shocked; he did not believe it was necessary to go in for prostitution of this sort. He was sure that, as Sherwood Anderson had told him four years earlier, he could write really well and still make his name and fortune. He realised that he could not prove this to Fitzgerald simply by producing more short stories; he now felt he needed ‘a novel to back up my faith and to show him and convince him, and I had not yet written any such novel’.
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 22