The move took on the tenor of a prison escape. As the Hemingways would be illegally breaking their lease, they asked friends to shuttle their possessions secretly out of their apartment. When the transatlantic liner Antonia set sail for France from New York in mid-January 1924, the Hemingways—now numbering three—were aboard.
Hemingway was now officially a published author, a retired journalist, and a free agent. Until he began to earn income from his fiction, the family would rely entirely on Hadley’s trust fund. They would soon learn the meaning of poverty, but those material deprivations would be nothing compared to the anguish they had just lived through. It had been a turbulent year, filled with trials and upheaval. As with the Great Train Robbery and Hadley’s “surprise” pregnancy, however, the silver lining of the Canadian debacle would soon reveal itself. As Morley Callaghan later pointed out, “if it hadn’t been for Hindmarsh, Hemingway might have remained a year in Toronto,” and the events that set the stage for his first real novel—not an amateur effort or a petulant satire—might never have taken place.
4
Let the Pressure Build
THE HEMINGWAYS seem to have had a talent for finding Parisian flats above raucous ground-floor businesses. This time around, they swapped the background noise of bal musette accordion music and stamping feet for the persistent gasp and wheeze of a wood saw: their new flat at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs overlooked a lumberyard and sawmill that specialized in making doors and window frames. The mill opened at 7 a.m. each day, and the courtyard below quickly filled with workmen and dogs.
The prospect of living upstairs from this cacophony might have driven others to despair, but the Hemingways managed to wreath their circumstances in a romantic haze. There was only a “very gentle buzzing noise,” Hadley assured Hemingway’s mother, and the lovely scent of freshly cut wood wafting up from below.
However gently administered, the sound of the buzzing saw—combined with the cries of a newborn—continually drove Hemingway out of the apartment to write. He began to frequent La Closerie des Lilas on boulevard du Montparnasse and guarded the outpost with territorial ferocity. Each day he set up a de facto office at one of the café’s marble-topped tables, armed with pencils, a pencil sharpener, and French school notebooks.
“The marble-topped tables, the smell of café crèmes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed,” he contended. Those things, and a horse chestnut and worn-down rabbit’s foot as good-luck talismans. A writer could easily loiter at the Closerie for hours. “Nobody ever threw you out or said, ‘If you’re going to stay here, you’d better order another,’” recalled expat poet Archibald MacLeish. “That’s not the way the French do things.” This was a godsend arrangement for someone with semi-private office needs but limited resources.
Savvy acquaintances knew to steer clear of Hemingway as he sat on the Closerie’s terrace, his pencil skittering across the small notebook pages. He was like a “blind pig” when he was working, he later joked. It helped that the Closerie had not yet become populated with the same expat riffraff who besieged the Dôme and Rotonde at all hours. Unfortunately, however, both of those cafés were within walking distance of the Closerie on the same boulevard, and Hemingway occasionally had to contend with their spillover. To most people, such intrusions would be considered an occupational hazard of public-café-based writing, but Hemingway considered any interruption that “bitched” his work a hostile act. One had to be “ruthless” with interlopers, and anyone who interrupted the scripting of a spare, rhythmic sentence could expect a greeting along these lines: “You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?”
These were not leisurely outings. For Hemingway, the pressure was on. He had committed to being a full-time writer; his fiction needed to become a profitable venture sooner rather than later, and he still had a rather slender body of work to his credit. In Paris, as in the Toronto Star newsroom, it seems that no one felt neutral about Hemingway’s style. Some found his new writing “marvelous,” while others “held their noses,” recalled writer Malcolm Cowley. Either way, he was becoming something of a junior god on Olympus. The right people were backing him and he was clearly ambitious.
However exciting and promising his little books with Robert McAlmon and Bill Bird had been to insiders, they didn’t do much to shore up the dwindling Hemingway treasury, which was strained to the limit now with the addition of the baby’s expenses. Nor did Hemingway’s Paris books create a furor among major American publishers and reviewers. When in our time debuted in March 1924, Bird had planned to publish 300 copies of the book; but somehow he botched over a third of his print run, meaning that only 170 copies were available for sale. (Bird was, to be fair, the first to admit that publishing was only a hobby for him.) This meant that Hemingway now had two artisanal books in print, with a grand combined inventory of 470 copies in circulation—a pittance by anyone’s standards, but especially for someone with grand aspirations for commercial success. Few reviewers back in the States even noted the books’ existence. A critic for the New York Herald Tribune deemed both books to be largely derivative with a few glimpses of originality, which was perhaps worse than being wholly ignored.
“Burton Rascoe said In Our Time showed the influence of who the hell do you think?—Ring Lardner and Sherwood Anderson,” Hemingway complained to Ezra Pound. It was not the first time his style had been likened to Anderson’s. The comparison annoyed Hemingway: after all, even back in his Chicago days he had been critical of Anderson’s writing.
As if the pressure to succeed wasn’t already high enough, disaster struck the Hemingways once again—this time taking aim at Hadley’s modest trust fund that spring. The couple had concluded that their trust company was too conservative, and instead handed over management of the fund to the husband of a friend of Hadley’s. This wizard not only managed to halve the fund’s capital but also even left the Hemingways without an income for several months. Hemingway squandered precious hours trying to trace the trail of the lost funds, but the couple was ultimately left bewildered and nearly destitute.
“It was my ‘complete poverty’ period,” Hemingway reportedly told a friend later. The Hemingways didn’t even have enough money to buy milk for the baby, he swore. “I hit everyone for cash. I even borrowed a thousand francs from my barber. I accosted strangers. There wasn’t a sou in Paris that hadn’t been nailed down that I didn’t solicit.”
He began to skip meals. Paris was torture for a hungry man, especially one who liked to work in cafés. He claimed later that he had even ambushed pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens and brought them home to the family cookpot.
News of their poverty got around town. A rumor circulated that Bumby slept in a dresser drawer. Hadley trudged all over the city, scouting out places to buy cheap food—a daily chore probably made more dispiriting by the holes in her shoe soles; resoling was a luxury they could not afford. The family used a public bathhouse by the river. Guilt plagued Hemingway, who could have alleviated their situation by going back to journalism, but he stuck with his game plan. Hadley never complained, which made Hemingway feel worse. “The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on,” he later wrote.
The couple refused to accept gestures of charity. Bill Bird’s wife had her dressmaker create a dress for Hadley, whose clothes were falling into tatters. Hadley burst into tears of embarrassment and would not wear the new garment. Yet she and Hemingway did not acknowledge themselves as poor or inferior; he later wrote that they actually felt superior to their wealthier counterparts, who could be stupidly oblivious to the simple pleasures in life. The Hemingways, by contrast, found luxury in necessities, savoring hearty peasant food and reveling in the warmth of their bodies at night under the covers.
Yet for Hemingway, a feeling of hunger plagued him at all hours. Even after he and Hadley had eaten dinner, the feeling lingered. It was still there after the co
uple made love in the dark. It kept Hemingway awake at night as Hadley slept quietly in bed next to him, bathed in moonlight.
His was a hunger that had little to do with food, and it would not abate until he broke through.
LIKE BOUTIQUE PUBLISHING HOUSES, literary reviews were becoming quite a fad among expats in Paris. Most of these publications were, as Sylvia Beach put it, “short-lived, alas! but always interesting.” A new one joined the roster in January 1924: the transatlantic review, administered by British novelist and literary editor Ford Madox Ford, who had come over from London.
Ford and Ezra Pound had been longtime acquaintances and fellow crusaders in the name of modernism, and now Pound helped ease Ford’s entry into the Paris Crowd as they prepared to launch the publication. “I had never read [Ford’s] works,” recalled Robert McAlmon, “but was prepared to believe Ezra Pound that he was ‘one of us.’” News of the publication’s imminent debut had reached Hemingway the previous fall while he was still toiling away in Toronto. He wrote to Pound and posited the idea of pitching a work titled “Oh Canada.” (The theme of the proposed piece: how Canada was “shit.”) Pound in turn implored Hemingway to come back to Paris and become the publication’s editorial director. When Hemingway returned, Pound invited him to his studio and introduced him to Ford. Hemingway made a poignant first impression on Ford by shadowboxing his way through their first encounter, Ford recalled, while Pound informed Ford that Hemingway was the finest prose stylist in the world. Duly impressed, Ford made Hemingway his second in command at the transatlantic.
It was a fraught collaboration from the start. First of all, Ford didn’t pay Hemingway, an arrangement almost guaranteed to brew resentment. Second, while Ford was a highly esteemed writer, he could also be distinctly ridiculous. He seemed almost predestined for a wicked Hemingway parody. Thanks to his rotundity and a fringe of blond hair that drooped from his upper lip, Ford was frequently likened to a walrus. Being embraced by him was like being “the toast under the poached egg,” said one writer.
None of this ridicule seems to have had an adverse effect on Ford’s self-esteem. Like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Ford saw himself both as a director of modern literature and a mentor to the new generation. “He was always generous, particularly to young writers, often too generous,” recalled Sherwood Anderson. And like Stein, Ford was quick to espouse his own genius. He had an incorrigible penchant for self-aggrandizement. “Publishers and editors would clamor for his work,” added Anderson. “When he awoke in the morning there would be a dozen of them camped on his doorstep. Indeed, in Ford’s imagination they did camp there.”
Ford’s “imagination” was the source of great debate within the Crowd. He quickly became known around town as an unremitting liar. “Ford was blessed with total unrecall: he remembered nothing as it actually happened,” recalled one expat. For the most part, Ford’s fabrications seemed whimsical and innocuous. Sherwood Anderson recalled that Ford once invited him to visit a house of his in Pennsylvania. “He described the house, the view from the terrace at the front, the garden, the apple trees that grew on a nearby hillside . . . [It] was beautifully furnished and there was a retinue of servants.” The only hitch: the house didn’t actually exist—or if it did, it did not belong to Ford. That same evening, Ford offered Anderson a stay at two more fictional homes, one in Florida and one in California.
Ford’s new deputy editor was less amused by Ford’s fibs. Hemingway later claimed that Ford lied about money matters, which, for an aspiring writer living hand to mouth, was no small consideration. That tendency, according to Hemingway, scarred their relationship, although he did concede that not all of Ford’s stories were injurious—such as one tale in which Ford tried to convince Hemingway that he had once crossed the American Southwest in the company of a puma.
The transatlantic review office occupied a cramped gallery in Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press quarters on the Quai d’Anjou. The ceiling in Ford’s area hovered only five feet above the floor; he and his secretary constantly whacked their heads. Hemingway rarely wedged himself into the workspace—not necessarily because it was so tiny, but rather because of Ford’s breath. It was “fouler . . . than the spout of any whale,” Hemingway complained; he instead edited manuscripts down on the banks of the Seine. This was apparently fine with Ford, who had grown wary of his adjunct. “He comes and sits at my feet and praises me,” he reported back to Gertrude Stein. “It makes me nervous.”
Yet he loved Hemingway’s writing. “I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything he sent me,” Ford wrote later. He duly included a new Hemingway short story—“Indian Camp”—in the April 1924 issue of the transatlantic. The volume also contained reviews of in our time and Three Stories and Ten Poems—penned by Ford’s secretary—which applauded the spareness of Hemingway’s prose.
With his new position and acquisition of yet another enthusiastic patron-publisher, Hemingway had become, as writer John Dos Passos later put it, “a figure in the top Valhalla of literary Paris.” Yet he was becoming increasingly desperate to conquer new territory. Major publications back home were still declining to publish him. “I was finally doing all the good writing I had promised myself,” he later recalled. “But every day the rejected manuscripts would come back through the slot in the door.” He admitted to crying as he read the rejection slips, and complained to Ford that it took a man years to build a reputation.
“That attitude is nonsense,” Ford reassured him. “You will have a great name in no time at all.”
“No time at all” was still too long a prospect for Hemingway. He knew that he had something to say, and he believed he was saying it differently and better and more accessibly than everyone else. Now he just needed to reach a vast audience. So far his vignettes and short stories—as brilliant as they were—had not been opening the right doors. It was time to step up his game.
“I knew I must write a novel,” he later recalled.
He had known it for a long time. After all, he had planned to help kick off his career with a novel, but after Hadley lost his starter novel at the Gare de Lyon, he had apparently made little effort to re-create it or start a new one. In the meantime, everyone else his age had written one, Hemingway told himself—and here he was, practically over-the-hill at twenty-four, still without a major work to his name.
Yet the prospect of starting a full-length book was daunting. Just a few years earlier, Hemingway had regaled Hadley with ideas for novels; now, suddenly, the form seemed excruciating. Writing had become so much more complicated since he had come to Paris. He could no longer rely on naïve giddiness to propel him; his approach had become deeply considered and laborious. It was difficult enough laying down paragraphs each day, much less stringing together hundreds of them into a major work of modernist fiction.
“I would put it off,” he decided, “until I could not help doing it. When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.”
In other words, he simply planned to “let the pressure build.”
LIKE GERTRUDE STEIN, Ford Madox Ford quickly became one of the Crowd’s great hosts, although his parties were decidedly more raucous than hers. Sylvia Beach turned up at one party thrown by Ford and his wife at a big studio; a feast of beer and cheese had been laid out and an accordionist played noisy tunes. Ford bounded over to her barefoot; he made Beach take off her shoes and swept her up in a dance—although with Ford, she said, “it was more bouncing and prancing than dancing.” He also hosted evenings at bals musette, including the one housed beneath the Hemingways’ raffish first Paris apartment on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine.
On Thursdays, Ford hosted teas at the transatlantic’s little office. These gatherings had a more literary tenor than his dances, and were well attended by the starving artist contingent. “Famished beginners were sustained by the lavish crumpets and sandwiches, nut bread and plum cake, possibly their only meal that day,” recalled one for
mer attendee. Ford dispensed literary advice along with the delectables: “Observe, listen, cut, polish, place,” he instructed.
Hemingway rarely attended the teas, even though Hadley liked Ford and got a kick out of his painter wife, Stella Bowen, who once created an amusing portrait of Ford passed out upright in a chair, his mouth hanging open. That spring, however, Hemingway made a tea party appearance, at which he first encountered expat editor and writer Harold Loeb. This meeting would alter the course of both men’s lives.
Hemingway “had a shy, disarming smile and did not seem interested in the other guests,” Loeb remembered years later. To him, Hemingway looked cool and unpretentious. “I thought never before had I encountered an American so unaffected by living in Paris,” he added.
Loeb had every intention of becoming affected by living in Paris. Now thirty-two, he had come to France in an ongoing yet half-hearted bid to reinvent himself. The descendant of two of New York City’s richest and most prominent Jewish families, the Loebs and the Guggenheims, he had for several years been playing at being a “poverty-stricken Bohemian,” as he put it. Years earlier, as a child, he had had a conversation with his father, a Wall Street broker, which haunted him. One evening after work, his father marched into Loeb’s nursery and gathered the boy up. He had some serious advice to impart.
“Harold,” he said, “keep off Wall Street . . . Make something. Create something. Don’t be a broker. We’re nothing but parasites.’”
Loeb could not forget these words. Instead of marching straight into New York’s Jewish society circles after finishing at Princeton, he worked as a day laborer in a Canadian construction camp. After abandoning this adventure, Loeb joined the army during the war and became a first sergeant, although he never made it overseas; after that, he backed a New York City–based avant-garde bookstore called the Sunwise Turn. By this time he had also acquired a wife, a wellborn woman from his New York social circle, who became increasingly dismayed by her husband’s vie bohème fantasy once there were two new little Loebs to consider.
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