Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412)

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  After dinner they all took a table on the square and began drinking brandy. Hemingway described the fine bulls that were to arrive the next day, but then turned to Loeb: ‘Harold, I suppose you’d like it better if they shipped in goats.’

  Loeb said he didn’t mind the bullfighting, but ‘I just find it hard not to sympathize with the victims’.

  Pat said it was nice of him to be considerate of the bull’s feelings, ‘but how about ours?’ And now Hemingway joined in:

  ‘Harold is very considerate. You should see him with Kitty. I’ve listened to him taking it by the hour.’

  Loeb had not particularly minded Pat disliking him, but it hurt to have Hemingway taking Pat’s side. He began to fight back verbally at Pat, but Hemingway joined in again. ‘You lay off Pat,’ he told Loeb. ‘You’ve done enough to spoil this party.’ Loeb gripped the table hard.

  ‘Why don’t you get out?’ Pat asked Loeb. ‘I don’t want you here. Hem doesn’t want you here. Nobody wants you here, though some may be too decent to say so.’

  ‘I will,’ answered Loeb, ‘the instant Duff wants it.’

  ‘You lousy bastard,’ said Hemingway. ‘Running to a woman.’

  Loeb got up unsteadily. Struggling to keep his voice calm, he said to Hemingway: ‘Do you mind stepping out for a moment?’

  ‘Oh, willingly, willingly,’ Hemingway said.

  Hemingway got up and followed him. ‘The square was full of light,’ writes Loeb, ‘though most of the celebrants were now seated at tables. There was an unlit corner diagonally across from us. The streets beyond the plaza would be dark and empty.’

  They crossed the open space towards the darkness. Loeb was ‘scared – not shaken or panicky, but just plain scared. I had boxed enough with Hem to know that he could lick me easily; his forty-pound advantage was just too much … I would just have to stand up and take it.’

  They went down some steps into a side-street lit only by widely spaced lamps. ‘I took my glasses off and, considering the safest place, put them in the side pocket of my jacket. Then I stopped, faced Hem, and took my jacket off … I looked around for someplace to put my jacket.

  ‘“Shall I hold it for you?” he asked.’

  Loeb smiled, and there was just enough light for him to see that Hemingway was smiling too, ‘the boyish, contagious smile that made it so hard not to like him’.

  ‘“If I may hold yours,” I said. We stood hesitantly looking at each other. “I don’t want to hit you,” I said.

  ‘“Me neither,” said Hem. We put on our jackets and started back.’

  Hemingway once told Ernest Walsh he would never hit anybody. ‘Have never hit but 2 gents outside of boxing in my life. Then only because they wanted to hit me. I don’t brawl.’ Besides, Loeb had been middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

  Leob says that ‘everyone pretended not to notice our return. The drinking continued. I avoided Pat, Pat avoided me. Duff no longer seemed to matter.’ The next day Hemingway put a letter in Loeb’s pigeon-hole at the hotel:

  Dear Harold:

  I was terribly tight and nasty to you last night and I dont want you to go away with that nasty insulting lousiness as the last thing of the fiestas. I wish I could wipe out all the mean-ness and I suppose I cant but this is to let you know that I’m thoroly ashamed of the way I acted and the stinking, unjust uncalled for things I said.

  So long and good luck to you and I hope we’ll see you soon and well.

  Yours

  Ernest

  Loeb thought the apology almost excessive: ‘I wondered if he had said anything that I had missed. When we were alone for a moment after luncheon I told him that I was glad he felt as he did.’

  The fiesta ended. ‘Some fiesta,’ observes Loeb. Hemingway and Hadley were going on to Madrid; Hemingway ‘seemed to be in high spirits, and overdid the heartiness’. Pat and Duff did not have enough money to pay their hotel bill, so Don Stewart paid it for them. Stewart went to Antibes; he says that on the way it occurred to him ‘that the events of the past week might perhaps make interesting material for a novel’.

  * In his autobiography Loeb changes a lot of names; for example Duff Twysden is called ‘Duff Twitchell’. I have restored the real names.

  † After reading this, one might almost feel that Hemingway’s version of the Loeb–Duff romance in The Sun Also Rises is a justifiable revenge on appalling writing, were it not that Loeb’s book about the affair, The Way It Was (1959), was written more than thirty years after Hemingway’s novel.

  4

  Just a damn journalist

  Hemingway’s high spirits as they were leaving Pamplona suggest that the idea of writing something about the week had occurred to him too. A few days later he started work on a narrative set in Pamplona. He was probably still angry about what had happened during the fiesta; someone once said: ‘His temper has to go bad before he can write.’

  At first he did not write about his friends. He began a piece of prose about the young matador:

  Cayetano Ordonez

  ‘Nino de la Palma’

  I saw him for the first time in the Hotel Quintana in Pamplona. We met Quintana on the stairs as Bill and I were coming up to the room to get the wine bag to take to the bull fight. ‘Come on,’ said Quintana. ‘Would you like to meet Nino de la Palma?’ He was in room number eight, I knew what it was like inside, a gloomy room with the two beds separated by monastic partitions. Bill had lived in there and gotten out to take a single room when the fiesta started. Quintana knocked and opened the door. The boy stood very straight and unsmiling in his white shirt …

  The other members of the party soon appeared in the story, and their reactions to the fiesta and Pat’s resentment of Loeb’s presence were described, but they were all given their real names – Hem, Pat, Duff, Don, Harold, Bill, Hadley – and the young bullfighter remained the centre of attention. After a description of Pat and Duff, Hemingway wrote: ‘I do not know why I have put all this down. It may mix up the story but I wanted to show you what a fine crowd we were; what a good crowd for a nineteen year old kid [the matador] to get in with.’

  However, two things soon happened. First, he realised that the narrative was going to be long, stopped using loose sheets of paper, and began the first of a series of notebooks. Also he developed a different personality for the narrator. Not very far into the first notebook, the storyteller stops being ‘Hem’ and becomes Jake Barnes. It appears that Jake is in love with Duff, but that he has a mysterious war wound, apparently some sort of sexual injury, which inhibits him from having an affair with her. Meanwhile, other characters have their names changed. Loeb becomes Gerald Cohn, later Robert Cohn. Pat is renamed Mike Campbell, and Bill Smith and Don Stewart are fused into one person – Bill Gorton, a cheerful boozy man-of-the-world. Duff retains her own name for a while, then becomes Brett Ashley. Hadley disappears altogether.

  Hemingway also realised that, if he was to explain everything that had happened in Pamplona, he must say a good deal about his characters’ life in Paris. After all, the events during the fiesta in Spain had simply been a dramatic climax to the continual fiesta of life in the Quarter. He began to see that the novel – if it was to be a novel – would show the expatriates’ fundamental inability, despite their superficial joie de vivre, to cope with the fiesta spirit. In this first draft he wrote: ‘I do not think English and Americans have ever had any seven day fiestas. A prolonged fiesta does strange things to them.’ He started to realise ‘how much of what happened can be laid … to the natural progress of events starting in Paris’, to feel that ‘if it had not been the Fiesta’ that had prompted the crisis, ‘it would have been something else’.

  *

  He now tried to explain to himself that he intended to write a novel that was not a novel, just as he had been writing short stories that were not short stories – at least not in the conventional sense. A little way into the first notebook, in the middle of the narrative, he observes:

  In li
fe people are not conscious of these special moments that novelists build their whole structures on. That is most people are not. That surely has nothing to do with the story but you cannot tell until you finish it because none of the significant things are going to have any literary signs marking them out. You have to figure them out by yourself.

  He had already practised this in some of his short stories, and in the ‘chapters’ of in our time, anti-narratives deliberately deprived of ‘signs’ to the reader of an event’s dramatic importance or its significance. But though he had perfected this technique for the small-scale narrative, at first it proved hard to eliminate ‘literary signs’ from a full-length novel. The early drafts include a number of passages where the narrator analyses and considers his characters in a literary manner. For example, lying awake in the Pamplona hotel, Jake contemplates Brett and the consequences of her trip to San Sebastian (St-Jean-de-Luz) with Cohn, and decides that since the trip

  she seemed to have lost that quality in her that had never been touched before. All this talking now about former lovers to make this seem quite ordinary. She was ashamed. Really ashamed. She had never been ashamed before. It made her vulgar where before she had been simply going by her own rules.

  Jake also reflects on his own feelings for her:

  There had been a time when I had loved her so much that it seemed there was nothing else in the world. That there could never be anything else. The world was all one dimensional and flat and there was nothing but Brett and wanting Brett. I killed that with my head.

  There was also some difficulty in getting away from the novelist’s convention of having a hero. Even the Nick Adams stories had had a hero of sorts, but this did not seem appropriate to the events that had occurred in Pamplona, nor to Hemingway’s intention of eliminating ‘literary signs’. In the persona of Jake, he now wrote:

  I looked as though I were trying to get to be the hero of this story. But that was all wrong. Gerald Cohn is the hero. When I bring myself in it is only to clear up something. Or maybe Duff [sic] is the hero. Or Nino de la Palma. He never really had a chance to be the hero. Or maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better without any hero.

  One option was to cut himself out altogether. ‘I did not want to tell this story in this first person,’ says Jake. ‘I wanted to stay well outside … and handle all the people in it with that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing.’ But ‘I made the unfortunate mistake, for a writer, of first having been Mr Jake Barnes’ – that is, Hemingway had been a protagonist in the events he described, and could not cut himself out. At one stage he tried third-person narration, but the result was lifeless. The Great Gatsby had demonstrated that authorial detachment was possible even with an involved first-person narrator; Fitzgerald had shown Hemingway a review of his book by Gilbert Seldes in the Dial, which described the novel as ‘regarding a tiny section of life and reporting it with irony and pity’, and Bill Gorton echoes these words in the Pamplona novel:

  ‘Work for the good of all.’ Bill stepped into his underclothes. ‘Show irony and pity … Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?’ … As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, ‘Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling —, Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. When they’re feeling —, Just a little Irony. Just a little Pity …’ He kept on singing until he was downstairs. The tune was: ‘The Bells are Ringing for Me and my Gal.’

  This snatch of Gorton-Jake dialogue shows that, despite the application of certain of Gertrude Stein’s principles to the novel, Hemingway had decided to loosen up his narrative technique, at least to the extent of representing his friends as they really were. In the first draft, Jake addresses himself on this topic: ‘Gertrude Stein once told me that remarks are not literature. All right, let it go at that. Only this time the remarks are going in and if it is not literature who claimed it was anyway.’

  *

  Hemingway wrote to his father from Paris on 20 August 1925, six weeks after the end of the Pamplona trip: ‘Been working day and night and done about 60,000 words on a novel. About 15,000 more to do.’ By mid-September he was able to tell Ernest Walsh: ‘I’ve finished my novel – have to go over it all this winter and type it out.’

  The draft he had completed was entitled Fiesta, and it occupied seven notebooks and some loose sheets. As soon as it was finished, he put it aside and hurriedly wrote a satirical novella, The Torrents of Spring. The plan was to offer this to Boni & Liveright, to whom he was under contract; he knew they would turn it down, because it was chiefly a parody of one of their most successful authors – none other than Sherwood Anderson – and when they rejected it he would be free to take Fiesta to Maxwell Perkins, Scott Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s.

  Sherwood Anderson himself appears in The Torrents of Spring in the guise of ‘Scripps O’Neill, a tall, lean man with a tall, lean face … tall and lean and resilient with his own tenuous hardness’. Scripps walks into a small town in Michigan with a bird under his shirt (he is giving it shelter), and explains: ‘My wife left me … I write stories. I had a story in The Post and two in The Dial. Mencken is trying to get ahold of me … Scofield Thayer was my best man.’ Scripps gets a job in a pump factory – with the bird still under his shirt – and marries an ancient waitress. At this point Hemingway parodies Ford Madox Ford:

  The story will move a little faster from now on, in case any of the readers are tiring. We will also try to work in a number of good anecdotes … If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon …

  Another section is entitled ‘The Passing of a Great Race, and the Making and Marring of Americans’.

  The three of them striding along the frozen streets … Going somewhere now. En route. Huysmans wrote that. It would be interesting to read French. He must try it sometime. There was a street in Paris named after Huysmans. Right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived. Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leaving her? What was at the bottom of it? All that in Paris. Ah, Paris. How far it was to Paris. Paris in the morning. Paris in the evening. Paris at night. Paris in the morning again. Paris at noon, perhaps.

  There are passing swipes at other writers; the narrator explains that one chapter was written after an extensive and bibulous lunch with ‘John Dos Passos, whom I consider a very forceful writer’ – Hemingway thought very poorly of Dos Passos’s books – and another was allegedly interrupted when ‘Mr F. Scott Fitzgerald … suddenly sat down in the fireplace and would not (was it could not, reader?) get up and let the fire burn something else.’ There is a passing parody of The Great Gatsby, and the book concludes: ‘Well, reader, how did you like it? It took me ten days to write it. Has it been worth it?’

  Some while later, after The Torrents of Spring had been published, Hemingway wrote a semi-apologetic letter to Sherwood Anderson: ‘Dear Sherwood … It is a joke and it isn’t meant to be mean …’ The joke was not only against Anderson and the other writers parodied, for The Torrents of Spring was a necessary exercise by Hemingway in laughing at a whole side of his own writing personality, that which was indebted to Anderson. The exorcising of Anderson’s ghost from his own writing, at least temporarily, was a necessary accompaniment to developing in the Pamplona novel a much more Fitzgerald-like, knowing, even urbane style.

  Indeed it seems doubtful how much he really wanted to leave Boni & Liveright, who had done him no harm. When they published In Our Time in October 1925 – just after he had finished the first draft of the Pamplona novel – they gave it a decent send-off, soliciting compliments on the book, to be printed on the dust-jacket, from Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and other successful writers. It attracted plenty of critical attention; H. L. Mencken in the American Mercury sneeringly described it as ‘written in the bold bad manner of the Café Dôme’, but most reviews were laudatory. The New York Sun critic, Herbert J. Seligman, wrote:

&n
bsp; Ernest Hemingway is abrupt, at times, as only an American can be. He wants his moments direct. The fewer words the better. What words there are must yield explicitness. It is like people talking. His vocabulary is close to the happening. It fits the mood of young men who had to face war, were killed and mutilated.

  The review shows that the Hemingway style was already infecting his readers. D. H. Lawrence, reviewing In Our Time in an English journal, pretended to have caught it badly:

  Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held, break it, and get away. Don’t get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away.

  *

  Over Christmas 1925, at a hotel in the Alps with Hadley and Bumby, Hemingway resumed work on the Pamplona novel. To Horace Liveright he wrote of ‘the long novel which, so far, I am calling THE SUN ALSO RISES and which I am now re-writing and will be working on all this winter’; and to Scott Fitzgerald on New Year’s Eve: ‘I am rewriting The Sun Also Rises and it is damned good. It will be ready in 2–3 months for late fall.’