Harold Loeb
In front of me and can you see readily. There were three. Three of them were there. I found that he was there and the two others … I said that there were three of them and what interested me was that they were seated next to each other …
Since Loeb had found Greenwich Village too bohemian for his taste, he was not likely to be comfortable in the Quarter, so he decided to do his share of the running of Broom from Rome. The first issue, which came out in November 1921, was nearly a hundred pages long with nine plates on art paper. But Loeb soon realised that very little distinguished it from the other experimental magazines apart from elegance and its large size. The writers came from all schools, Malcolm Cowley and E. E. Cummings jostling with Amy Lowell and even Walter de la Mare. The magazine sold quite well but lost money, and Kreymborg soon resigned. Loeb appealed for funds to his uncle Simon, who some years later was to establish the Guggenheim Foundation, but the request was turned down. Other rescue attempts included an offer by Kay Boyle, then still in the New York office, to work without pay – this was a year before she sailed for France – and Malcolm Cowley in Paris setting up an editorial board to help run the magazine; but Broom eventually petered out during 1924 and Loeb began to write novels instead. He moved to Paris, but took an apartment well away from the Quarter, near Les Invalides. His first book, Doodab, a Babbitt-like story based on his experiences in the smelting industry, was accepted by Boni & Liveright, and Loeb was just putting the finishing touches to it when he met Hemingway.
They were introduced at one of Ford’s transatlantic review teas in Bird’s print shop. Loeb liked Hemingway’s ‘shy, disarming smile’, and thought he had never before encountered an American so unaffected by living in Paris. Kitty Cannell, Loeb’s mistress, warned him that Hemingway was putting on an act, but Loeb answered: ‘Who isn’t?’ He and Hemingway began to play tennis together and went on a walking tour. Loeb easily succumbed to the stories Hemingway was now writing; when he read ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ he was moved to take up fishing. They also boxed together; Loeb was nervous – ‘Hem was some forty pounds heavier’ – but he could usually tell from a shift in Hemingway’s eyes when a big punch was coming.
Marvellous as Loeb thought them, Hemingway’s stories were still bringing in rejection slips from the magazines, and Loeb gave him some advice: ‘What you’ve got to do is bring in women. People love to read about women and violence. You’ve got plenty of violence in your stories. Now all you need is women.’
*
One day at a cocktail party in the Quarter, Loeb was introduced to Lady Duff Twysden and her companion, a Scotsman named Pat Guthrie – the ‘two bloody British’ who had been in the Dingo the day that Scott Fitzgerald first met Hemingway. ‘I had first noticed Duff some months earlier,’ writes Loeb, ‘at the Sélect Café, where I had often gone to work on a chapter of Doodab. One afternoon I heard a laugh so gay and musical that it seemed to brighten the dingy room. I looked up.’
McAlmon was in the Sélect that day, so Loeb went over and asked him who she was. ‘Bob, who knew everybody, said that her name was Duff Twysden* and that she had picked up a title by marriage. She was British, and went around with Pat Guthrie.’ McAlmon did not like her. ‘Of all the various “ladies” who were on the loose in Paris,’ he writes, ‘she was the most imitated, the least witty or amusing, and she could switch to acting “Her Ladyship” at the most dangerous moment.’ He calls her ‘entirely a product of London and England and she had nothing to do with the spirit of Montparnasse’. On the other hand Don Stewart thought her ‘enormously attractive’, and says ‘she had a kind of style sense that allowed her to wear with dignity and chic almost anything – I mean a man’s felt hat, or a matador’s hat, maybe even a lamp shade’.
Duff Twysden had been born Mary Smurthwaite, the daughter of a Yorkshire wine merchant, and in 1925, when the Hemingway set began to take notice of her, was in her early thirties. She was sometimes heard to claim that her surname at birth had been Stirling and that she had been a débutante, also a musical prodigy who had given a piano recital in London at the age of twelve. Her first husband was a man named Byrom, and she later married a baronet, Sir Roger Twysden, a year younger than her, by whom she had a son. She left the child and his father and eventually turned up in Paris.
Harold Loeb says that the heroine of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1924) was ‘partly based on her’, and Don Stewart writes that she was ‘right out of the gay brave hell of Michael Arlen’. Stewart describes her companion Pat Guthrie as ‘another Green Hat character from the overdrafts of Mayfair … whose charming worthlessness immediately won my heart’. In fact, Nancy Cunard was Arlen’s model for Iris March in The Green Hat. Scott Fitzgerald guessed, however, that Duff had read the book and and was deliberately playing the part.
Loeb was bowled over by her, and so was Hemingway. ‘She was not supposed to be beautiful,’ Hemingway writes, ‘but in a room with women who were supposed to be beautiful she killed their looks entirely.’ Jimmie Charters was greatly puzzled by Hemingway’s evident infatuation: ‘She was one of those horsey English girls with her hair cut short … rather masculine physically … I never could see what he saw in her.’ The few photographs and drawings of her which survive emphasise her boyishness, even mannishness. She usually wore a man’s slouch hat and a sailor’s jersey. Pat Guthrie was rumoured to be homosexual.
Loeb, who often fell in love and admired from a distance, would ‘find myself looking to see if Duff was there when I entered a café, and then watching her when I should have been working … Her features had a special appeal for me.’ According to Loeb, she talked like a member of the Drones Club in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse: ‘Would one of you gents give a chap a spot of gin?’ Pat Guthrie, invariably by her side, was tall and narrow-shouldered and, adds Loeb, ‘usually tight’. Loeb thought him a detestable parasite, one of the nastiest specimens of the British upper class, but Don Stewart calls him ‘a nice enough fellow for a drunk’.
Having worshipped Duff for weeks at a distance, Loeb was so disconcerted at finally being introduced to her at the cocktail party that he came over faint and had to leave. It distressed him to realise how obsessed he was with ‘a woman whose life exemplified what I most disliked about the Quarter’. He saw her again at one of Ford’s bal musette evenings, but she and Pat soon left for another party. A couple of evenings later, Loeb was playing bridge in the Sélect when she turned up at the bar, with friends, but for once without Pat. Loeb abandoned the game and went to sit near her. After a while her friends left, and Loeb prepared to get up and join her, ‘but before I could move she turned to me and said, “It is the only miracle.”’
From the start, Loeb’s account of his involvement with Duff – unlike the one Hemingway was to write – is in the manner of a romantic novelette: ‘Her deep gray eyes … seemed to be holding and to be held by mine … I moved three stools down to sit beside her … “How long have you known?” She smiled. I said, “Will you see me tomorrow …?”’
They arranged to meet at the Falstaff. The only person there when Loeb arrived was the barman – Jimmie Charters, who had just moved from the Dingo. When Duff came in she introduced Jimmie to Loeb. ‘I can count on Jimmie,’ she said. ‘A good chap.’ Loeb gathered that when she was in a spot, Jimmie lent her money. Jimmie says this is true, though ‘it was a strain on me’. She also borrowed money from Hemingway; on one occasion she wrote to him: ‘Ernest my dear … I am in a stinking fix but for once only temporarily and can pay you back for sure … Am living in the country on nothing – but owe the pub a packet and dare not return without it … As ever, Duff Twysden.’
She insisted on telling Loeb all about her past life, or at least her preferred version of it: ‘She came from a small village in Scotland. She told me all about her disastrous first marriage to an older man; she should have known better, but she wanted to get away. On a second wedding day she had eloped with the best man, a naval officer … She had had a ch
ild by him, but they couldn’t live together. He would get blind when on leave and stay that way until it was time to return to his post. Her mother had the child now.’
Loeb saw her three times in three days, and finally said: ‘We can’t go on this way …’ He suggested that as Kitty Cannell was about to visit friends in England, and Pat Guthrie was in Scotland trying to squeeze money out of his family, they could both go away together – there was just time before Loeb was supposed to join Hemingway and his friends in Pamplona for the bullfighting. They agreed on St-Jean-de-Luz, on the coast near Biarritz, and Loeb bought the tickets.
They were able to go to bed together before leaving Paris, for Flossie Martin went away for a weekend and lent them her room. ‘It was a small room and messy,’ says Loeb, ‘not at all the kind of place I would have chosen.’ Also, Loeb was feeling guilty about Kitty, which made him temporarily impotent. However, in the wagon-lit on the way to St-Jean-de-Luz, ‘enchantment enveloped us’. At St-Jean, ‘after unpacking our bags and making love again on the bed beneath the window, Duff and I strolled over to the beach. The sea sparkled under a blue sky …’ The next morning, says Loeb, Duff told him that her feelings for him were more serious than she had thought: ‘It is like that first time we dream of, that first time which never is.’ And so, in Loeb’s account, the idyll continued: ‘The moon rose like morning from the sea. Her hands were soft and tender …’†
After a couple of weeks Duff left Loeb at St-Jean and went back to join Pat in Paris. She wrote to Loeb, who was still at St-Jean, that she had some ‘doubtful glad tidings’: she and Pat were ‘coming on the Pamplona trip with Hem and your lot. Can you bear it?’
Hemingway, ignorant of Loeb’s affair with Duff, wrote to him from Paris on 21 June 1925 with the same news:
Pat and Duff are coming too. Pat has sent off to Scotland for rods and Duff to England for funds. As far as I know Duff is not bringing any fairies with her. You might arrange to have a band of local fairies meet her at the train carrying a daisy chain so that the transition from the Quarter will not be too sudden.
This was an innuendo about Duff preferring the company of homosexuals. Hemingway added: ‘Pamplona’s going to be damned good.’
Loeb thought the letter ‘altogether Hemingway’, but for some reason ‘the exuberance seemed a little forced’. He was suspicious of Hemingway’s motives in inviting Duff and Pat to join the party; Duff had told him that she sensed that he was interested in her, but she was careful to have little to do with him ‘because of Hadley’. In fact Hemingway was beginning to fret at monogamy; he wrote to Scott Fitzgerald that his idea of heaven would be a bullring with a trout stream outside, his wife and child in one house, and ‘nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors’ in another; and to Ernest Walsh he remarked that he wished he could go to Venice for some ‘romantic fucking’.
Meanwhile McAlmon, sensing what Hemingway was up to, suddenly announced that he was coming too – and would be bringing Kitty Cannell. Hemingway ‘turned a terrifying purple’, and McAlmon had to explain that it was a joke.
*
Loeb was supposed to join Hemingway, Hadley, Don Stewart and Bill Smith for a few days’ fishing at Burguete up in the Pyrenees before they all went on to Pamplona, but he decided to skip this and stay at St-Jean-de-Luz. He arranged with Duff that she should bring Pat down there from Paris, and they could all drive on to Pamplona together. But when Duff and Pat arrived, Pat said icily to Loeb:’ Oh, you’re here, are you?’ Duff herself seemed to have lost interest in Loeb. ‘Pat broke the spell,’ she told him. ‘He worked hard at it.’
From St-Jean they set off across the Spanish border in a hired car. ‘It was a long drive and no fun at all,’ writes Loeb. ‘Most of the country was not much to look at, nor was Pat.’ They talked of people in the Quarter: ‘Of Flossie … of Cheever Dunning who had been sent to a hospital … of Ezra Pound who had actually composed an opera, of Peggy Vail who had thrown a wild party’.
Arriving at Pamplona a day before Hemingway and the others, they checked in at the Quintana Hotel, where Hemingway always stayed because the proprietor Juanito Quintana treated him flatteringly as an aficionado of the bullfight. Loeb was given what he calls ‘a small cubicle’ on the second floor; Pat and Duff had a double room on the fourth.
Hemingway and his group arrived next morning. ‘Been trout fishing,’ he wrote to Fitzgerald. ‘God it has been wonderful country.’ The trip had really been a complete failure; Hemingway admitted to Loeb that construction work on a reservoir had ‘played hell’ with the trout, and the party had not caught a single fish. But after reporting this, he ‘turned cheerful’, ordered a good lunch, and made Loeb drink his first real absinthe. Then they all hurried out to the railroad yards to see the bulls unloaded.
They all admired the bulls. ‘Hem pointed out their good points,’ says Loeb, and indicated the small spot on the shoulder through which a sword could reach the heart. The party ‘stayed and watched long after I had lost interest’. He began to be thoroughly depressed; Bill Smith was friendly enough to him, but never said much, and Pat was perpetually irritating; on the walk back into town he bought a goatskin full of wine and managed to drench his shirt while drinking it. ‘Everyone roared as if it were funny. Duff called out: “Give a chap a swig, won’t you?”’
The next morning, they watched the bulls being driven through the streets to the stadium; one spectator among the Spaniards was gored and taken to hospital. ‘Then,’ says Loeb, ‘the ring opened for the amateur frolic’ – an hour or so during which the local menfolk were allowed in the ring to try being matadors. Don Stewart had broken a rib in this event when he came to Pamplona the previous year, and had no intention of doing it again. Pat would not consider going in, but Loeb ‘went up to the fence with Hem and Bill, determined to go over. It took a bit of a will, but when Hem climbed in, Bill Smith and I climbed in too.’
The Pamplona men pranced about the ring, waving their jackets as if they were capes and making a pretence of challenging the bulls, but always running away when the animals started to charge. One bull made for Bill Smith, who tried to stand up to him, but then changed his mind and was butted in the rear as he ran off. ‘Then,’ writes Loeb, ‘the bull turned to me.’ Not having a jacket, Loeb had taken off his Fair Isle sweater for a cape, and as the bull charged him he swung it around like a matador: ‘He pierced the sweater with one of his horns and carried it off.’ More concerned about his sweater than his safety, Loeb chased the animal around the arena. ‘When he finally shook it off, it had a large hole through the middle.’ After this excitement, the first formal bull-fight turned out to be a shoddy business. ‘The comic-opera costumes looked worn,’ writes Loeb, ‘and the horses would have shamed a Philadelphia cab driver.’ The star matador was a nineteen-year-old named Cayetano Ordóñez, who was making his Pamplona début under the professional name of Niño de la Palma. Hadley was greatly taken with the lad, and so was Hemingway.
At apéritifs that evening, Loeb remarked sotto voce to Bill Smith that Hemingway had not exactly plunged into the affray in the ring. He had simply stood watching. ‘Why do you think Hem kept so far from les animaux?’ asked Loeb. Smith answered: ‘He’s not milked many cows.’
Loeb sensed that Hemingway was resentful towards him, and wondered why. ‘It’s that wagon-lit!’ said Bill. ‘You should have seen his face when Jo Bennett told him you and Duff had gone off in a wagon-lit.’ Bill thought it was because Hemingway had a mean streak, and regarded a sleeping-car as an extravagance, but Loeb began to wonder if he really fancied Duff himself. Smith admitted that he could sense a frisson between them.
The next morning there was another ‘amateurs’ at the bull ring. Hemingway, Smith, and Loeb went along, but the rest of the party stayed at the hotel. Again, there were photographers present. To spare his sweater, Loeb had brought a hotel towel. ‘The towel didn’t work so well either. The bull started coming. It wasn’t a big bull, but it was black and coming fast. I held the towel u
p in front of me, waving it slightly, and looked over it at the charging animal. Suddenly I realized that the bull’s mean little eyes were not looking at the towel; they were looking at me. I had no time to think. When the bull lowered his head I dropped the towel, twisted around so that my back was facing him, and sat down hard on his head, grasping the horns for support. The bull lifted me up, carried me across the arena in three long, rolling lopes, and then tossed his head. I went up into the air and landed on my feet, upright.’
The photograph of this in Loeb’s memoirs shows him in his Fair Isle sweater, white trousers, sneakers, and horn-rimmed glasses, riding aloft on the bull’s horns. He looks like his namesake Harold Lloyd in some ridiculous film predicament. The picture, says Loeb, was printed in the New York Times, ‘much to the excitement of my family’.
Hemingway decided he himself was not to be outdone: no sooner had Loeb’s bull tossed him than Hemingway ‘caught one of the animals from the rear, seized his horns, twisted his neck, and threw him to the ground’. But it was too late; Loeb was the hero of the day. When he went into town to smarten himself up after his adventure, neither the barber nor the shoeblack boys would take money for their services. ‘They recognized me, and apparently no one had ever ridden a bull’s head before.’ One of the local aficionados said to Hemingway: ‘You would have thought he had done it on purpose.’
Despite this sudden celebrity, Loeb felt half inclined to go back to Paris. He did not much like the bullfights, and clearly his presence was an irritation to Pat, perhaps also to Hemingway since his success in the ring. He asked Bill Smith what he ought to do. ‘Why don’t you do what you want to do?’ suggested Bill. ‘That’s obscure,’ Loeb answered. That evening, he managed to lure Duff away for a drink, and they were both seized on by convivial Spaniards and kept up very late. Next morning Loeb woke with a hangover, and at lunch ‘Duff appeared with a bruised forehead and black eye. When I asked her about it, Hem interrupted, saying that she had fallen against the railing … Pat was sour, ugly. Hadley had lost her smile … Bill looked grim.’ At the bullfight that afternoon, Loeb deliberately sat in a different row from Duff, Pat and Hemingway. The tension and silence persisted into the evening.
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 24