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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald that the book’s moral was ‘how people go to hell’. But Mike and Bill leave Pamplona cheerfully enough, and Jake and Brett are allowed at least a low-key happy ending: there are some pages describing Jake meeting up with Brett in Madrid, where she has persuaded the boy matador to abandon her because she knows she will do him no good; and the novel ends with Jake and Brett enjoying lunch with several bottles of rioja and cuddling in a taxi. No one has gone to hell except Cohn, the character who least deserves it.‡

  *

  Boni & Liveright duly rejected The Torrents of Spring, and Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s accepted both it and The Sun Also Rises. ‘He wrote an awfully swell contract,’ Hemingway reported, ‘and never even asked to look at The Sun.’

  Hemingway now lent Fitzgerald a carbon copy of The Sun Also Rises; Fitzgerald was markedly unenthusiastic about some of it. He told Hemingway, face to face in Paris, that he thought parts of it were ‘careless and ineffectual’, and that in particular there was a feeling of ‘condescending casualness’ about the opening chapters, a lot of ‘mere horseshit’, bad writing that ‘honestly reminds me of Michael Arlen’. He repeated all these criticisms in a letter the next day, warning Hemingway that ‘the very fact that people have committed themselves to you will make them watch you like a cat’. It was true that ‘almost everyone is a genius’ in the Quarter, or at least they thought they were, but this did not mean that a really ‘good man’ like Hemingway should take things easy. He must realise that the people who had been telling him that he was a genius were frail and unreliable, mere ‘professional enthusiasts’, and he must develop ‘a lust for anything honest’ that he could get people to say about his work. It was an odd reaction: Fitzgerald was attacking that part of the novel – the opening section – which most resembled his own writing; quite unjustifiably, for these chapters were excellently done in themselves, though in a rather different manner from the rest of the book. Maybe Fitzgerald felt Hemingway was straying threateningly into Gatsby territory and becoming a potential rival.

  He gave Hemingway some detailed notes on what he particularly disliked in the opening fifteen pages of the typescript. These included the anecdote about Ford and Belloc, which he said was ‘flat as hell without naming Ford which would be cheap’. He continued:

  Why not cut the inessentials in Cohens [sic] biography? … When so many people can write well & the competition is heavy I can’t imagine how you could have done these first 20 pps. so casually … From p. 30 I begin to like the novel but Ernest I can’t tell you the sense of disappointment that beginning with its elephantine facetiousness gave me. Please do what you can about it in proof.

  Fitzgerald explained that he had ‘decided not to pick at anything else’ in the remainder of the novel ‘because … I was much too excited’. He said the greater part of the book was ‘damn good’.

  Maxwell Perkins wrote to say he liked the novel. Replying to Perkins, Hemingway did not mention what Fitzgerald had said – all he told Perkins was that Fitzgerald was ‘very excited’ about the book –but he said he had now decided to ‘start the book at what is now page 16 in the Mss.’ There was nothing, he told Perkins, in those first sixteen pages that was essential to the rest of the narrative. ‘Scott agrees with me.’ Perkins did not agree; he wanted to retain the opening because he thought it provided necessary background to the characters. Hemingway himself did not altogether like performing such surgery. ‘I believe the book loses by eliminating the first part,’ he admitted to Perkins, ‘but it would have been pointless to include it with the Belloc eliminated – and I think that would be altogether pointless with Belloc’s name out.’

  Fitzgerald had not asked him to eliminate these pages; he had merely recommended that he rewrite them. But Hemingway was evidently not prepared to take instructions, even from Fitzgerald. Probably he was furious; no letter from him to Fitzgerald survives until September 1926, several months after he had received the criticisms. Writing then, he mentions quite casually that he has ‘cut’ the novel to ‘start with Cohn’, and offers no thanks or even acknowledgement to Fitzgerald for having initiated this.

  Though the cutting was probably done in a mood of pique and anger, it did the novel no harm. Hemingway decided to begin abruptly with the account of Robert Cohn boxing at Princeton, and this gives the novel an intriguingly low-key start that recalls ‘Indian Camp’ and ‘Big Two-Hearted River’. Just as Cohn appears without preamble, so a few pages later does Brett. The reader is plunged straight into Jake Barnes’s world, the Quarter in the spring of 1925, and is treated as a true Quarterite who knows everybody without needing to be introduced.

  *

  The book was published during October 1926, and at once began to attract a cult following. Thornton Wilder describes undergraduates at Yale mimicking Jake, while Malcolm Cowley recalls their opposite numbers at Smith College adopting Brett as a model. ‘Bright young men from the Middle West,’ he writes, ‘were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the sides of their mouths.’ Gossip-columnists hinted at the real identities of the novel’s characters. ‘For those who know the stamping ground of the American expatriates in Paris,’ wrote Herbert Gorman in the New York World a month after the book had been published, ‘it will become speedily patent that practically all of these characters are directly based on actual people.’ Janet Flanner wrote in her ‘Letter from Paris’ in the New Yorker: ‘The titled British declassée and her Scottish friend, the American Frances and the unlucky Robert Cohn … are … to be seen just where Hemingway so often placed them at the Sélect.’

  Harold Loeb was in the South of France when the novel was published. Hemingway had not given him the slightest warning about the book, and Loeb says that it ‘hit like an upper-cut’. Not that he read it right through:

  At first I had difficulty getting into it. I confined my reading to the passages that had to do with Cohn, seeking to discover if I talked like Cohn. Evidently I didn’t act like Cohn, never having knocked anyone down or even hit anyone except with gloves on. I didn’t seem to talk like Cohn either. But it is difficult to see oneself as another sees you; so I couldn’t be sure. Then, having read the book, I tried to understand what had led my one-time friend to transform me into an insensitive, patronizing, uncontrolled drag.

  He felt that despite all that had happened at Pamplona, ‘nothing in our relationship justified the distortion of the real friend I was into the Robert Cohn of The Sun Also Rises’.

  Rumours began to circulate the Quarter that Loeb and the others wanted revenge. Someone suggested that the novel should be called Six Characters in Search of an Author – with a Gun Apiece.§ It was even said that Loeb really had a gun and was looking for Hemingway, and that Hemingway, hearing this, had sent him a telegram saying he would be in a certain bar for three nights running if Loeb wanted to get him. Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald six months after the book had come out that there was a story that he had gone to Switzerland ‘to avoid being shot by demented characters out of my books’. Loeb’s own version is that, some months after the novel was published, he was having a drink in one of the bars in the Quarter when Hemingway walked in. Hemingway saw him, smiled uneasily, and went over to the bar and drank there by himself. Loeb was ‘amazed at the colour of his neck. Red gradually suffused it – and then his ears – right to their tips.’

  The other characters did not resent the book at all; they were flattered to be in it. Hemingway told Fitzgerald that Duff had said she ‘wasn’t sore’ about the novel; she ‘said the only thing was she had never slept with the bloody bull fighter’. Nor did they object when friends in the Quarter credited them with all the exploits of their fictional selves. Kitty Cannell, though she disclaimed identity with Frances, says with pride that ‘everyone in Montparnasse’ kept asking her if she had done everything Frances did in the novel. To Don Stewart it seemed as if they had all been ‘busily playing their roles’ for the book at Pamplona. Even Loeb, writing
about The Sun Also Rises and the real events behind it in a 1967 article in the Connecticut Review, uses the names from the novel to describe himself and his friends, as if they had all merged into the Hemingway characters. Whatever his feelings about Hemingway’s maltreatment of him, he admits in his autobiography that nothing after Pamplona seemed quite so exciting: ‘All that came afterward was anticlimactic, even the high spots.’

  Though there were doubters, reviewers of The Sun Also Rises were mostly very impressed by the book. Conrad Aiken in the New York Herald Tribune said that ‘if there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it’. No critic – not even Aiken, who was Jewish – commented on the Jew-baiting of Cohn or Jake’s complicity in it, nor did they mention Jake’s impotence, the one element of the novel that still worried Fitzgerald after Hemingway had cut the opening; he told Hemingway: ‘He isn’t like an impotent man. He’s like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt.’ Robert McAlmon did not care for the novel, or what he bothered to read of it. Writing many years later, he said: ‘Beginning with The Sun Also Rises I found his work slick, affected, distorted … himself always the hero.’

  The Sun Also Rises has a strong claim to be regarded as Hemingway’s best novel. When Duff Twysden’s brother-in-law, Sir William Twysden, was questioned in the 1960s about Hemingway’s portrayal of Duff, he snorted that Hemingway was ‘just a damn journalist’. This is really a compliment, for the novel is a supreme piece of journalism. In a passage rejected from ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, Nick Adams asserts that ‘the only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined … Everything good he’d ever written he’d made up. None of it had ever happened.’ The Sun Also Rises proves that this is nonsense. As Don Stewart remarks, the novel is ‘so absolutely accurate … What a reporter, I said to myself. That’s the way it really was.’

  * The sexual act described in one of his first short stories to deal explicitly with sex may be sodomy; see The Nick Adams Stories, Scribner, 1972, p. 227; ‘He … moved Kate over … She pressed tight in against the curve of his abdomen … Nick kissed hard against her back … “Isn’t it good this way?” he said.’ Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary gave a heavy hint, in a mock-interview that she wrote in 1953, about his preferred form of sex: ‘Reporter: Mr Hemingway, is it true that your wife is a lesbian? Papa [Hemingway]: Of course not. Mrs Hemingway is a boy. Reporter: What are your favourite sports, sir? Papa: Shooting, fishing, reading and sodomy. Reporter: Does Mrs Hemingway participate in these sports: Papa: She participates in all of them.’ (Quoted in Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: a biography, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 436–7.) In the posthumously published Hemingway novel The Garden of Eden, written during his later years, a writer and his wife pretend to interchange sexual identities: ‘“You are changing,” she said. “… You’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”’ … He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said, “Now you can’t tell who is who can you?”’ (The Garden of Eden, Scribner, 1986, p. 17.) The wife cuts her hair short and dresses like a boy.

  † In Parisian cafés a waiter bringing each order of drinks places before the customer a saucer containing the bill.

  ‡ Early in the novel Cohn seems to be an alter ego for Jake-Hemingway. He is described as a passive, almost female figure: ‘He had been taken in hand by a lady … She was very forceful … Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand.’ Jake says that Cohn ‘was married by the first girl who was nice to him’ – note the passive – and describes Frances as ‘the lady who had him’. At this stage Jake is patient, even affectionate towards Cohn; he plays tennis with him, plans a walk with him, and says he ‘rather liked him’ – which for Jake is a strong statement of feeling. One might almost suspect that Jake–Hemingway has a sexual interest in Cohn-Loeb, which might add to his resentment when Cohn pairs off with Brett. Certainly the baiting of Cohn in the final chapters seems almost orgiastic and beyond reason, with anti-Semitism as a conventional excuse for it rather than the real cause.

  § Pirandello had been a contributor to Broom.

  5

  These rocky days

  While Hemingway was revising The Sun Also Rises in February 1926, Kay Boyle arrived at Grasse in the South of France to join Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead, in the hope of recovering from tuberculosis. They met her on the station platform. Walsh proved to be ‘tall and slender and ivory-skinned, with bold, dark, long-lashed eyes, and his black eyebrows met savagely above his nose’. Moorhead was middle-aged and severe-looking; ‘the pince-nez she wore gave her an air of authority’. They were living in a hillside villa rented from a shoe manufacturer. ‘If I was going to die of tuberculosis,’ writes Kay, ‘it would be easy to die in the white blaze of the plaster and stone of the walls … with drifting curtains of wisteria.’

  Walsh did not like to be called Ernest; the name he preferred was Michael. Kay describes how ‘that first night Michael read for a long time to us …’ He read two of his mock early-English sonnets:

  How coulde I call thee wife no thou art notte

  For the quicke violent steps of a husbande

  In thy chamber nor the lawful claiminge

  Hands of a husbande atte thy brests nor marriage

  Speeches or the vulgar nameplate mistress

  Thou ladye thou dame thou girlbrested thou art

  Thighplumed sweeteyed thou loitering assent …

  He also read aloud from his editorial for the forthcoming issue of This Quarter: ‘Outside of This Quarter, the Three Mountains Press of William Bird in Paris, and the Contact Publishing Company of Robert McAlmon, there is at present no place in the English-speaking world to which an artist may bring his work …’ Walsh approved of McAlmon. He read some of McAlmon’s poetry aloud to Kay as well as his own, and when Pauline Pfeiffer, an old friend of Hadley Hemingway, came to stay and told Walsh that McAlmon was spreading outrageous stories about Hemingway, and that Hemingway was fed up with him, Walsh was furious: ‘You’re talking through your hat! Ernest is as close to me as a brother, and he’s never had anything but good to say of McAlmon and his work! … Christ! McAlmon was the first to publish Hemingway.’

  But Hemingway really had turned against McAlmon. He wrote to Scott Fitzgerald in December 1925:

  McAlmon is a son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toe nail. I’m through defending that one … He went around for two nights talking on the subject of what a swine I was, how he had done everything for me, started me off etc. (i.e. sold out an edition each of that lousy little book and In Our Time … the only books he ever sold of all the books he’s published) and that all I did was exploit people emotionally … Am going to write a Mr and Mrs Eliot* on him. Might as well give his emotional exploitation story some foundation.

  John Glassco describes an encounter between Hemingway and McAlmon at the Coupole bar. McAlmon opened the batting:

  ‘If it isn’t Ernest, the fabulous phony! How are the bulls?’

  ‘And how is North America McAlmon, the Unfinished Poem?’† He leaned over and pummelled McAlmon in the ribs, grinning and blowing beery breath over the table. ‘Room for me here, boys?’

  ‘It’s only Hemingway,’ said Bob loudly to both of us. ‘Pay no attention and he may go away.’

  Hemingway gave a lopsided grin and moved into a seat at the next table … ‘Seen anything of Sylvia these days?’ he asked diffidently.

  ‘The Beach? Rats, no! We had a row last year. I don’t like old women anyway.’

  ‘No one could accuse you of that, Bob.’

  ‘Leave my friends out of this.’

  ‘Me? You brought them in. Anyway, go to hell.’ Hemingway got up and moved heavily to the bar.

  ‘Watch,’ said Bob. ‘Pretty soon he’ll be twisting wrists with some guy at the bar …’

  *

/>   Soon after Kay’s arrival at Grasse, Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead quarrelled, and Walsh and Kay set off together, journeying through the villages of the Alpes-Maritimes, looking for somewhere they could settle for a while. Walsh’s own tuberculosis was far more advanced than Kay’s illness, and ‘once a hotel-keeper had heard Michael clear his throat or cough there would be no room available’. During their wandering, the two talked a great deal of McAlmon, whom Walsh had never set eyes on, and whom Kay had only seen once. ‘We wanted to know what the man was like …’

  Walsh wrote to Ezra Pound that he was in love with Kay. Ezra replied from Rapallo in his usual Pound-language: ‘Corresponse suspended herwith until without’er of ((pssbl.?)) yu cummup for air.’ It seemed to mean he disapproved. Ethel Moorhead was in a white rage about it; she told Walsh she was removing his name from the masthead of This Quarter. He responded by refusing to hand over the material for the next number, and when they met again he threw a carafe of water at her.

  Kay’s health was improving, but under these strains Walsh’s got rapidly worse. During October 1926 – the month in which The Sun Also Rises was published – he died, aged thirty-one. ‘And what will you do now, you poor forlorn girl?’ Moorhead asked Kay, with more than a touch of malice. But when Kay said she would go back to the USA, Moorhead broke down and told her: ‘Stay here. I had only him, and now I have only you and the baby that’s coming.’ Kay was expecting his child.

  She moved into Moorhead’s Monte Carlo flat, and Moorhead perjured herself that Kay had been Walsh’s legal wife, so that the baby, Sharon, born in March 1927, could be registered as his legitimate offspring. Moorhead’s temper could be terrible. On the day of Walsh’s funeral she shouted with rage because a man named Eugene Jolas had sent a telegram to Kay from Paris saying he was ‘going to go on with what Ernest Walsh had not been able to finish’. He was going to start a magazine called transition, and would Kay send him her stories and poems ‘as quickly as possible for the first number’. Moorhead cried out that the telegram should have been sent to her. Another time she implied to McAlmon that Sharon was really Kay’s husband’s baby, and not Walsh’s.