The people that go to the Bal Musette do not need to have the artificial stimulant of the jazz band to force them to dance. They dance for the fun of it and they occasionally hold someone up for the fun of it, and because it is easy and exciting and pays well. Because they are young and tough and enjoy life, without respecting it, they sometimes hit too hard, or shoot too quick, and then life becomes a very grim matter with an upright machine that casts a thin shadow and is called a guillotine at the end of it.
On the whole, his new pieces were indeed beginning to resemble Cézanne paintings with their blunt brushstrokes. His work was leaner, simpler, and more rhythmic. Yet as far as Pound and Stein were concerned, he was still just a promising novice. Hemingway submitted work for review to Pound, who could be unsparing: often the pages came back to Hemingway covered with blue-penciled amendments and slashes through the adjectives. Yet Pound encouraged Hemingway too, even sending six Hemingway poems to Scofield Thayer at The Dial and a story to The Little Review.
“Pound thinks I’m a swell poet,” Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson. He added that it was unclear how much “drag” Pound had with Thayer, but whatever the case, Hemingway wished to hell that Pound’s influence would help get him published.
Thayer did not, however, take the poems; nor did he solicit further material. The Little Review also rejected Hemingway’s story. Yet Pound’s support did not flag.
Hemingway had Stein’s lessons to follow too, and it was difficult work.
“Isn’t writing a hard job though?” he asked her. “It used to be easy before I met you.”
Not only did Stein lecture him in her salon, but she also lent him many of her manuscripts that demonstrated her approach. He took her work with word repetition seriously; right away some of his writings began to bear signs of her influence—including the inaccrochable short story Stein had found so objectionable.
“Liz liked Jim very much,” Hemingway wrote. “She liked it about his mustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith.”
He started doing little stream-of-consciousness exercises on the pages of blue notebooks used by French schoolchildren, another habit he picked up from Stein. “Down through the ages,” went one such effort. “Why is it down through the ages? Down through the ages. Down and out through the ages. Out through the ages . . .”
During this time, Hemingway carefully observed his mentor. By Stein’s own admission, she was becoming bitter about “all her unpublished manuscripts, and no hope of publication or serious recognition.” It was becoming extremely important to her to get published. Eventually he would help her meet that goal, but in the meantime, he was seeing obvious applications for her style in work that he knew he could get published. Just because she hadn’t made a success of her writing style didn’t mean that he couldn’t. Hemingway had, since before arriving in Paris, been concerned with “rhythm and tones and lines,” as Hadley had once put it, and Stein’s ideas about cadence advanced his thinking. He openly borrowed from her, but began to Hemingway-ify her ideas, making them all subtler, more appealing, more accessible. After all, what was the point of writing something brilliant and fresh and new if no one was going to read it? With every stroke of his pencil up in that icy garret on rue Descartes, Hemingway was quietly turning Stein from his Pygmalion into a mere forerunner.
Sooner or later, Hemingway knew, he would have to channel these lessons and new exercises into a significant work. Perhaps he could rewrite his starter novel, as he had rewritten the story “Up in Michigan.” True, Stein had told him to throw the novel away and start anew, but he had no intention of obeying all of her instructions.
At that moment he had no way of knowing that soon he would be forced to take Stein’s advice and start from scratch—whether he wanted to or not.
3
Fortuitous Disasters
IN THE FALL OF 1922, Hemingway left Paris to cover the evacuation of Greek troops from eastern Thrace. After the end of the world war, Greece had attempted to expand its territorial holdings in what had been the Ottoman Empire; Turkey voiced its objection with a counterattack that expelled the would-be conquerors. The repulsion amounted to, Hemingway informed his Star readers, “the end of the great Greek military adventure.”
He was then rerouted to Lausanne, Switzerland, where a conference was being organized to settle the Greco-Turkish situation. There Hemingway ran into investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens—or, rather, Hemingway “dawned upon me one night,” Steffens remembered, adding that, among the foreign correspondents covering the conflict, Hemingway had impressed him as having “the surest future over there.”
Hemingway showed Steffens a cable he had written. He had grown fascinated with the art of “cablese”—the ultimate adjective-free expression. One couldn’t get much further away from Victorian frippery. Even while on assignment, Hemingway was finding ways to instruct himself in the art of spare communication. For example, he later explained, a cable that read “KEMAL INSWARDS UNBURNED SMYRNA GUILTY GREEKS” could be translated by his editors back home to read: “Mustapha Kemal in an exclusive interview today with the correspondent of the Monumental News Service denied vehemently that the Turkish forces had any part in the burning of Smyrna. The city, Kemal stated, was fired by incendiaries in the troops of the Greek rear guard before the first Turkish patrols entered the city.”
The cable he shared with Steffens described the exodus of Greek refugees from Turkey, a “vivid, detailed picture of what he had seen in that miserable stream of hungry, frightened, uprooted people,” recalled Steffens. “I was seeing the scene and told him so.”
“No,” Hemingway chided him. “Read the cablese, only the cablese. Isn’t it a great language?”
Steffens wanted to see more. “I asked him to read all his dispatches, for the pictures,” he wrote later.
Hemingway also had with him a copy of “My Old Man,” a dramatic racetrack short story. Steffens read it and liked it; this, along with the cables, made him feel certain that Hemingway was the real deal. “He could, he would, do it some day,” he recalled thinking. Eager to play a role in launching him, Steffens sent Hemingway’s short story off to an editor at Cosmopolitan, in New York, which published fiction at the time.
Meanwhile, Hadley was back in Paris, nursing a nasty flu. Hemingway implored her by cable to join him as soon as she felt “travelly” again. She soon felt sufficiently recovered to make the trip. As she prepared to leave, she made a curious decision: in a valise she packed Hemingway’s manuscripts, including his short stories, poetry, the starter novel, and all of the carbon copies of these works. Nearly his entire literary output to date would be making the trip alongside her clothes and toiletries. Hemingway had been sending her letters “singing high praises” of Steffens, she later explained, and she had been certain that her husband would want Steffens to see more of his work. What happened next would haunt the Hemingways for the rest of their lives.
Hadley arrived at the Gare de Lyon train station, stashed her bags in a compartment of the Paris-Lausanne Express, and then got off the train to buy some water and a newspaper. She had a little time to kill, so she lingered on the platform, chatting with a few correspondents who were also heading to the conference. When Hadley finally got back to her compartment, the small bag containing Hemingway’s manuscripts had vanished.
She made the trip anyway, soaked with panic and despair. In Lausanne, Hemingway was waiting for her at the station. Lincoln Steffens stood at his side. Hadley got off the train, sobbing.
“She had cried and cried and could not tell me,” Hemingway later recalled. “I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone.”
Hemingway hired someone to cover for him at the conference and went back to Paris. At first he was in denial that Hadley had brought along everything, all of his work, but he soon got to their apartme
nt and realized that she had indeed packed nearly his entire opus. “I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true,” he wrote later. Yet he apparently never revealed what the mysterious, possibly scandalous activity had been.
“No amount of sleuthing ever brought the valise to light,” Hadley later recalled. “And so deeply had Ernest put himself into this writing that I think he never recovered from the pain of this irreparable loss.” The disappearance of his starter novel—which she described as “sacred”—had been an especially tough blow for him, she added.
If this was true, Hemingway was almost incomprehensibly nice to Hadley about what his friend Bill Smith dubbed “the Great Train Robbery”—at least on paper, as he recounted the ghastly incident in later years. Poor Hadley was, Hemingway wrote, a “lovely and loyal woman with bad luck with manuscripts.” He had never really blamed her, he claimed in another account. After all, “she had not hired on as a manuscript custodian,” he went on, adding that “what she had hired on for—wife-ing—she was damn good at.” (To be fair, these magnanimous words were uttered after he’d had more than a quarter century to cool down.)
Gallows humor helped Hemingway pull through. When Cosmopolitan rejected and returned “My Old Man,” he began to refer to the story as “Das Kapital,” claiming that it had suddenly become his total “literary capital.” This wasn’t exactly true: the inaccrochable “Up in Michigan” had also survived; for some reason it had been stuffed “in a drawer somewhere,” apart from the other manuscripts.
Hemingway also sought the sympathies of his new mentors but received little coddling. “I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia?” he wrote to Ezra Pound a few weeks after the theft. “You, naturally, would say, ‘Good’ etc. But don’t say it to me. I aint yet reached that mood. I worked 3 years on the damn stuff.” It was an “act of Gawd,” Pound replied, adding that Hemingway should perhaps try to re-create the lost writings. After all, memory was the best editor anyway, he added. Gertrude Stein hadn’t liked his novel in the first place.
Eventually Hemingway grudgingly came to believe that “it was probably good for me to lose the early work.” For him there was no question of re-creating the entire portfolio from scratch; he was having a clean slate forced upon him. Yet whatever came next would almost inevitably be an improvement on what had been lost. After all, it would be created against the backdrop of intellectual Paris, infused with all that Hemingway had learned from Pound and Stein. Now his earliest works—far from smacking of “Juvenilia”—would instead make him appear as something of an Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’s forehead. In fact, not only were these powerful influences now in place; Hemingway was already prepared to surge past them and write in a bold new voice of his own.
“I know what I’m after in prose,” he wrote to Ezra Pound. “If it is no fucking good I’ll know it.”
By the end of January 1923, he informed Pound that he was already working on new material.
Years later, Hemingway created a character in an unpublished short story titled “The Strange Country” whose wife lost all of his early works. The character, Roger, desperately misses the lost stories. Yet, he says, “I could see already, as you begin to see clearly over the water when a rainstorm lifts on the ocean as the wind carries it out to sea, that I could write a better novel.”
THAT FEBRUARY, the Hemingways traveled to Rapallo, Italy, where Ezra and Dorothy Pound had taken up residence. It seemed a promising recuperative backdrop: there would be fresh figs and good wine and warm Italian bread, and long walks and tennis matches with the Pounds.
There would, however, also be the daunting prospect of creating an entirely new body of work. It was painful going at first, and Hemingway pressed Pound and Stein for encouragement. He was working hard, he informed Stein, and had a couple of new pieces finished. He had been bearing her lessons in mind while writing, but added that if she had any additional advice, he wished she would put it in a letter to him. In the meantime, at least he had reached a détente with Hadley: at the moment, he was happiest in bed with her, he wrote privately.
That is, until Hadley informed Hemingway that she was pregnant. She had arrived in Lausanne not only sans manuscripts but also sans contraception; she’d duly warned Hemingway, but they had taken their chances anyway. The development still apparently shocked Hemingway. Once back in Paris, he sought refuge at Stein’s salon.
“He came to the house about ten o’clock in the morning and he stayed,” recalled Stein. “He stayed for lunch, he stayed all afternoon, he stayed for dinner and he stayed until about ten o’clock at night and then all of a sudden he announced that his wife was enceinte.”
“I am too young to be a father,” he told them—with great bitterness, according to Stein.
Stein and Toklas consoled him “as best we could and sent him on his way.” Yet Stein’s sympathies ran only so deep: she found the incident entertaining and relayed her amusement to Hadley, who presumably found it less comical.
In any case, it was the second time in about as many months that Hadley had served up some deeply unwelcome news. Plans were soon made for a late-summer return to Canada, where Hemingway would take up a position as a home-based reporter for the Toronto Star to give the new family some additional security during the baby’s first year. He seemed to view fatherhood and a return to full-time journalism as a dual prison sentence. Nor was he particularly thrilled at the prospect of swapping Europe for Toronto. At least the Star offered him a prestige weekly salary of $125.
Yet no amount of adversity could entirely sidetrack his literary ambition. He worked relentlessly that winter and spring of 1923, drafting vignettes and short stories in his new spare, intense, and rhythmic style.
“I want, like hell, to get published,” he wrote to one editor.
And as luck would have it, a publisher came along who soon wanted, like hell, to publish him: Robert McAlmon, an acid-tongued expat writer and editor based in Paris. McAlmon had founded the Contact Publishing Company, an elite boutique press dedicated to publishing, in very limited editions, the work of experimental writers “who seem not likely to be published by other publishers, for commercial or legislative reasons.” His list eventually boasted works by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, and Mina Loy, among many other of that generation’s literary luminaries.
McAlmon materialized in Rapallo during the Hemingways’ winter stay. He had never heard of Hemingway before, and his early impressions of the young writer were less than favorable. He had a “small-boy, tough-guy swagger,” McAlmon recalled later. “And before strangers of whom he was uncertain a potential snarl of scorn played on his large-lipped, rather loose mouth.”
Like Pound, McAlmon, then twenty-seven, was an unlikely champion for Hemingway. A former model who sometimes wore a turquoise earring, McAlmon was openly bisexual—and thought to be more than a little bit self-obsessed. “When Bob McAlmon had had a drink or two he seemed to believe every good-looking citizen, man or woman, postman or countess, wanted to make a pass at him,” recalled a writer who ran in the same circles.
McAlmon had married a British heiress who most in the expat colony believed was a lesbian, and they served as each other’s beards. As a result of the union, he was relatively flush; his nickname around town became “Robert McAlimony.”
Even though McAlmon and Hemingway seemed socially mismatched, they got together in Rapallo and drank in the evenings. For Hemingway, a potential publisher was still a publisher, no matter what his tendencies. He showed McAlmon the remains of his earlier work and his new efforts. McAlmon didn’t love the style; he deemed it the self-conscious approach of “an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child.” Also, “My Old Man”—one of the older short stories that had survived the Great Train Robbery—sounded too much like Sherwood Anderson’s style to him. But the newer work seemed fresh and un-derivative. McAlmon decided that Hemingway might jus
t make a good addition to Contact’s list.
Meanwhile, Hemingway told Pound that he found McAlmon’s company enjoyable, and in addition the publisher had “given us the dirt on everybody.” So happy was the initial union that a few months later, in June 1923, the two men decided to take a trip to Spain together. McAlmon pledged to foot the bill. They would be accompanied by expat journalist and publisher Bill Bird, co-founder of the wire service the Consolidated Press, whom Hemingway knew from the press corps. Unlike McAlmon, who sometimes inspired “sneers and open hostility,” the amiable Bird was universally liked in the Paris colony—no small feat given the tempestuous nature of the Crowd. And Bird also happened to own a new little book press in Paris. For an ambitious new writer in search of publishers, these were most promising travel companions.
Thanks in part to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway had been nursing a growing fascination with bullfighting and was eager to behold the spectacle in person. Stein had seen her first Spanish bullfight two decades earlier with her brother Leo; she had gone back to Spain again a decade later with Alice Toklas, who wore a demure bullfight-attendance costume that involved a black feathered hat, black satin coat, black fan, and gloves. (“I called [it] my Spanish disguise,” Toklas recalled in the autobiography she actually did write.)
The ladies of 27 rue de Fleurus imparted tales of their experiences to Hemingway, who was engrossed in the subject. As part of his recovery effort from the valise theft, he penned a stylized vignette about a bullfight gone horribly wrong, drawing on secondhand accounts:
The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted.
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