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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  The new title had been arrived at by accident. He had thought of calling the book The Lost Generation: A Novel – Gertrude Stein had made her celebrated remark to him only a few months earlier – but he also remembered the biblical words about ‘Vanity of vanities’ and decided to look them up in full in the Book of Ecclesiastes 1: 2–5.

  Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity … One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever … The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose …

  He told Maxwell Perkins that, in calling the book The Sun Also Rises, he meant to refer to the words that precede this phrase in the Ecclesiastes passage: ‘The point of the book to me was that the earth abideth forever.’ This seems an eccentric message to derive from the novel. The British edition was published as Fiesta, which in the end seems the best title.

  Resuming work on the book, he decided to add a whole new series of chapters at the beginning, set in Paris. The new version had the plainest of openings:

  This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story …

  There follows a description of Brett Ashley’s two marriages. It is implied that she would like to have married Jake Barnes; instead, she has taken up with Mike Campbell (Pat Guthrie):

  Brett went off with Mike Campbell to the Continent one afternoon, she having offered to at lunchtime because Mike was lonely and sick and very companionable, and, as she said, ‘obviously one of us.’ … They came to Paris on their way to the Riviera, and stayed the night in a hotel which had only one room free and that with a double bed. ‘We’d no idea of anything of that sort,’ Brett said … That was how they happened to be living together.

  This loose, chatty narrative style is a little suggestive of Fitzgerald, also of Michael Arlen. It seems a long way from in our time.

  The second chapter of the new version opens with Jake explaining that he is an American newspaperman living in Paris, the European director of the Continental Press Association – Bill Bird ran just such a bureau. He turns to the subject of Montparnasse:

  I never hung about the Quarter much in Paris until Brett and Mike showed up. I always felt about the Quarter that I could sort of take it or leave it alone. You went into it once in a while to sort of see the animals … and on hot nights in the spring when the tables were spread out on the sidewalks it was rather pleasant. But for a place to hang around it always seemed awfully dull. I have to put it in, though, because Robert Cohn, who is one of the non-Nordic heroes of this book, had spent two years there.

  Jake explains that during these two years Cohn had lived with a lady who thrived on gossip, Frances Clyne (Kitty Cannell). She had ‘a constant fear and dread’ that he was seeing other women and was about to leave her, and it is implied that she made his life hell.

  After The Sun Also Rises was published, Kitty Cannell tried to pretend that she had had only a brief and insignificant affair with Loeb, and that they had ‘occupied separate apartments in the same building near the Eiffel Tower, where we quite comfortably led double lives’. She alleged that Hemingway did not have her in mind at all for the character of Frances Clyne, who, she said, was really based on a Broom secretary who had travelled to Europe with Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg. However, Bertram D. Sarason, who has investigated the lives of the real people behind the novel, was shown Kitty’s letters to Loeb, and says that Hemingway’s account of the ‘Frances Clyne’ affair in the novel is closely based on the Kitty-Loeb affair, is indeed an astonishingly accurate record of it; he is mystified as to how Hemingway discovered so much, unless Loeb told him everything.

  The narrative goes on by explaining that, despite Frances Clyne’s constant interference in his life, Cohn has somehow managed to write a novel – Loeb’s Doodab: ‘He was the hero of it, but it was not too badly done and it was accepted by a New York publisher.’ Jake says that Cohn, at that time, ‘had only two friends, an English writer named Braddocks, and myself, with whom he played tennis’. Braddocks is Ford Madox Ford, and there follows an account of him promising to help Cohn improve his novel. Braddocks never actually gets round to reading it – a dig at Ford’s laziness – and asks Jake to look at it for him. Now comes the account of Ford at the Closerie de Lilas, making a nuisance of himself to Hemingway and the waiter and wrongly identifying Belloc, which – considerably expanded and with Ford’s real name restored – finally appeared in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway seems to feel a little guilty at having sidetracked himself into this story, for he makes Jake apologise for including it; Jake says of Braddocks:

  I should avoid as far as possible putting him into this story except that he was a great friend of Robert Cohn and Cohn is the hero.

  Robert Cohn was middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn …

  Jake now gives us a picture of Cohn’s aimless life in the Quarter. He struggles to get away from Frances, and pours out his troubles to Jake as he hangs around Jake’s newspaper office. It is also mentioned that he used to edit ‘a review of the arts’ (Broom). As a portrait of Loeb it is neither kind nor very unfair, just studiedly neutral, a touch sardonic, and – judging from Loeb’s autobiography – all too accurate. Not that it was easy to convey the sheer indeterminacy of Loeb’s character and behaviour; Jake feels that he has failed to portray Cohn clearly:

  The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people … He had a funny sort of undergraduate quality about him. If he were in a crowd nothing he said stood out.

  As if to emphasise Cohn’s naïvety, Jake’s own first romantic encounter is with a poule whom he picks up on a café terrace out of sheer ennui. He takes her to dinner and runs across Braddocks, to whom he facetiously introduces her as his fiancée, ‘Mademoiselle Georgette Leblanc’ – the celebrated singer and Paris beauty. They all go on to Braddocks’s weekly gathering at the bal musette, and Brett now makes her first entry, in the company of a crowd of ‘fairies’, dancing ostentatiously with them while Robert Cohn watches from the bar: ‘Brett was damned good-looking … Her hair was brushed back like a boy’s.’

  Brett realises that Cohn has fallen in love with her, but it is Jake she chooses to go off with. It becomes clear that they are in love with each other, but have not had an affair because of Jake’s war wound. Brett asks him:

  ‘Don’t you love me?’

  ‘Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me … And there’s not a damn thing we could do,’ I said.

  The novel does not make it precisely clear what is wrong with Jake, but many years later Hemingway explained that Jake had been injured in the groin during the war, rather improbably losing his penis – or at least the use of it sexually – but not his testicles, therefore being capable of sexual desire without being able to do anything about it.

  Within the context of the story, Jake’s physical impotence offsets the character-weakness of Cohn, who gets his woman physically but is totally unable to achieve any union of minds. The sexual wounding seems a grotesque way of achieving this contrast, but it is also in the story because Hemingway badly needed to express his own private predicament. On a simple level, it is a manifestation of his desire to have an affair with Duff but his fear of extra-marital involvement; more deeply, there is something in it of the Oak Park boy adrift among the sexually liberated; and at a fundamental level, Jake’s wound is a way of portraying a confused sexual identity: Hemingway’s terror of homosexuals but his attraction to boyish women – perhaps to actual boys such as the young matador – and his worship of maleness from a viewpoint that, as ‘Indian Camp’ and the first part of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ suggest, was essentially feminine.*

  Yet one should be wary of making too
close a narrator-author identification. In the finished novel, Jake is not much like Hemingway. His role as the detached observer, ironic and hard-boiled (Jake’s own epithet for himself – ‘it is awfully easy to be hard-boiled,’ he says in chapter 4) – wary of close involvements and sexually inactive, bears a striking resemblance to Robert McAlmon.

  *

  Wandering into the Sélect after Brett has failed to meet him for a drink at the Hôtel Crillon – traditional Right Bank haunt of American journalists – Jake runs across Harvey Stone:

  He had a pile of saucers† in front of him, and he needed a shave.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Harvey, ‘I’ve been looking for you … Do you want to know something, Jake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.’

  I figured rapidly back in my mind. It was three days ago that Harvey had won two hundred francs from me shaking poker dice in the New York Bar …

  I felt in my pocket.

  ‘Would a hundred help you any, Harvey?’

  This is Harold Stearns, who in 1921 had delivered his symposium Civilization in the United States to the publisher and then made his much-publicised departure to Europe on the Fourth of July. Despite the fanfare on that occasion, Stearns says in his memoirs that he had only intended to come to Europe for a short summer trip, and his journey was motivated as much by the recent death of his wife as by any ideological dissatisfaction with the USA. He had various literary projects in mind, and was lent some money by Sinclair Lewis, off which he lived for a while in Paris. Deciding to stay a little longer, he began to write some pieces for the newspapers, including the Paris Herald – the European edition of the New York Herald. ‘The work was fun, it was easy; and at the then rate of exchange it paid well … How could one be bored or miserable?’

  But he quickly became bored with the journalism, and gradually gave it up. By 1925, still in Paris, he was unemployed and almost destitute, a sponger who was avoided by most of his former friends in the Quarter. He ate almost nothing, drank continuously, touched strangers at the Dôme and the Sélect for loans, and sold racing tips to gullible American tourists. John Dos Passos observes that ‘even his pursuit of drink and women seemed to lack conviction’; Harold Loeb says he had become ‘a landmark’ in the Quarter.

  Kay Boyle, who met him in 1928, gives a vivid picture of Stearns when he had reached these depths:

  The stubble-covered jowls packed hard from drink … the stains of food on his jacket lapels, and the black-rimmed fingers holding his glass … The collar of Harold’s black and white striped shirt was frayed, and the side of his face was in need of a shave.

  Quarterites, recalling the grand title of his symposium, would sneer: ‘There goes American civilization – in the gutter.’

  John Glassco describes a typical encounter with him in the Dôme. Glassco had just been reciting to a Spanish girlfriend a forty-line surrealist poem he had written:

  ‘It’s awful,’ she said. ‘But it’s very beautiful too.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a grating, boozy voice at my elbow. ‘It’s good and it’s not beautiful. Send it to the Dial …’

  ‘You mustn’t pay any attention to this man,’ said Adolf. ‘He is Harold Stearns, and he knows less about poetry than any living man.’

  ‘I am not a living man,’ said Stearns.

  At the end of 1925 Stearns took over the ‘Peter Pickem’ racing column in the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune) and proved to be an erratic but sometimes inspired tipster, scorning the obvious favourites for outsiders that occasionally fulfilled his prophecies. Of the Tribune staff, he observes that half of them did not come to work because they were drunk, while the other half turned up drunk: ‘It was a sheer miracle that the paper came out at all.’ Stearns was now drinking so much that he sometimes saw racehorses flying over the grandstand.

  ‘How did your plan of having Harold Stearns make good in two weeks – after all these years – turn out?’ Hemingway asked Scott Fitzgerald in a letter in December 1925, while he was at work on The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway said he was ‘sorry as hell’ for Stearns, ‘but there’s nothing anybody can do for him except give him money and be nice to him’.

  *

  After the establishment of the Jake-Brett frustrated romance and the encounter with Harvey Stone, the new draft of the novel introduces Bill Gorton, a necessary comic antithesis to the hard-boiled Jake and the vapid Cohn. Jake takes Gorton to the Sélect, where Brett is sitting at the bar with Mike Campbell. Mike’s attitude to Brett is coarse, asexual, non-romantic – perhaps a dig at Pat’s supposed homosexuality. He treats her like a comic pet dog:

  ‘You are a lovely lady, Brett. Where did you get that hat? … It’s a dreadful hat … I say, Brett, you are a lovely piece … Don’t you think so, Jake?’

  Brett and Mike agree to join Jake, Bill, and Robert Cohn in Pamplona, after Jake has taken Bill and Cohn fishing in the Pyrenees. ‘Won’t it be splendid,’ Brett says. ‘Spain! We will have fun.’ When she learns that Cohn will be on the trip, she suggests it may be ‘a bit rough’ on him, and lets out that she has just been staying with him in San Sebastian. Jake’s reaction is terse:

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  We walked along.

  ‘What did you say that for?’

  ‘I don’t know. What would you like me to say?’

  We walked along and turned a corner.

  Brett explains that she went away with Cohn because ‘I rather thought it would be good for him’. Jake remarks: ‘You might take up social service.’

  Jake and Bill go down south and meet up with Cohn in Pamplona. Jake takes Bill off to Burguete for the fishing – which goes splendidly, there being no mention of spoiled trout-streams – and Jake now admits his feelings about Cohn’s affair with Brett: ‘I was blind, unforgivingly jealous … I certainly did hate him.’ Bill, too, has little time for Cohn. ‘How did you ever happen to know this fellow, anyway?’ he asks Jake. ‘Haven’t you got some more Jewish friends you could bring along? … The funny thing is he’s nice, too. But he’s just so awful.’ (Don Stewart says this is a fair reflection of his feelings about Loeb: ‘I liked Harold all right, but undoubtedly I had a patronizing attitude towards him.’) Cohn’s Jewishness is harped upon several times, and Jake no longer distances himself from his friends’ behaviour, allowing himself to be drawn into the contempt for Cohn and the resentment of his presence in Pamplona. Tension begins to build up as the party, having assembled for the fiesta, watches the bulls being unloaded:

  ‘I say,’ Mike said, ‘they were fine bulls … Did you see the one that hit that steer?’ …

  ‘It’s no life being a steer,’ Robert Cohn said.

  ‘Don’t you think so?’ Mike said. ‘I would have thought you’d loved being a steer, Robert.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mike?’

  ‘They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and they’re always hanging about … Come on, Robert. Do say something … Don’t sit there like a bloody funeral. What if Brett did sleep with you? She’s slept with lots of better people than you.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Cohn said.

  Mike complains to Brett, not about her affair but about her choice of Cohn: ‘Brett’s had affairs with men before … But they weren’t ever Jews, and they didn’t come and hang about afterwards.’ Bill Gorton calls Cohn ‘That kike!’ and Mike says of Brett: ‘If she would go about with Jews and bull-fighters and such people, she must expect trouble.’ Jake begins to become uneasy at the baiting of Cohn; he admits that he ‘liked’ to see Mike hurting him, but ‘I wished he would not do it … because afterwards it made me disgusted at myself. That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterwards. No, that must be immorality.’

  Cohn is repelled by the goring of the horses in the bullring. He tells the others: ‘I wish they didn’t have the horse part.’ His own situation is much like the horses’; he is being gored by everyone as a minor dive
rsion before the big fight. ‘I’m not sorry for him,’ Jake tells Brett. And she replies: ‘I hate his damned suffering … that damned Jew.’

  The fiesta and the bullfighting now begin to dominate the narrative, and Cohn slips temporarily into the background. Despite Jake’s claim to be an aficionado, he and his party behave like any bunch of tourists, rushing about to see the sights. Strikingly, Hemingway entirely omits the ‘amateurs’ episode in which Loeb had ridden on the bull’s horns and become a local hero. Cohn, the despised, could here have been drawn into the fiesta in the way that Jake and his friends were failing to be; but evidently Hemingway was too jealous of what Loeb had done to put it in the book, even though some such compensation for the maltreatment of Cohn is badly needed.

  Instead, he went back to his original scheme and made the young matador, whom he now calls Pedro Romero, the ‘hero’ of the remainder of the novel. Brett falls in love with the lad; she tells Jake, ‘I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy,’ and goes off with him for the evening. This is based on Duff disappearing with Loeb for the evening at Pamplona and in consequence being beaten up by Pat. In the novel, however, Cohn beats up the matador because he is jealous of the boy’s affair with Brett. Jake finds Cohn weeping remorsefully on his hotel bed, and the next morning Cohn leaves abruptly in a hired car, back to Paris.

  Don Stewart comments of all this invented part of the narrative: ‘He had to make some of it up … otherwise it wouldn’t have been a novel.’ Maybe Stewart is right, and Loeb’s aborted fight with Hemingway would not have provided a sufficiently dramatic climax. Yet it is hard to convince oneself that Hemingway’s rewriting of history in the final chapters is much of an improvement, either dramatically or in any other respect, on the real events. When Loeb’s account of what actually happened is compared with the novel, the fictional version seems both melodramatic and muddled, as if Hemingway were trying to settle too many personal scores.