Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Yet Loeb was not ready to surrender the guise. He sold his share of the bookshop; the proceeds “seemed to burn a hole in my pocket,” he recalled. He had also received a $50,000 inheritance while still at Princeton. After parting ways with his unhappy wife and children, Loeb departed for Europe, and with those funds launched a new literary magazine called Broom. As the name indicated, he was making a clean sweep of things.

  By the time Hemingway met Loeb at that fateful 1924 tea party, Loeb was once again at liberty. Financial difficulties had just doomed the magazine after a twenty-one-issue run, but it had been a surprisingly impressive addition to the literary landscape. Loeb had launched it as a counterpoint to the more established literary magazines of the day and aimed to feature some new voices. Even The Dial “tended to repeat the same names over and over,” he complained, adding, “No longer was there novelty in publishing T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, Mina Loy or Marianne Moore.” With Broom he had intended to bring together young American writers whose common trait was “disapproval of the generation that preceded them.” The list of contributors ended up being more varied, and included Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Gertrude Stein—and a writer who called himself “H.A.L.,” otherwise known as Harold Loeb.

  Like practically everyone else in town, Loeb was trying his hand at being modern on paper. In his contribution to the experimentalism of the times, Loeb had decided to omit most of the “a’s” and “the’s” from the manuscript of his first novel; the publisher would demand their return before agreeing to let the book roll off his presses.

  Socially, he got mixed reviews within the colony: certain Crowd members may have vied for publication in Broom, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they had to like its editor. The obviousness of his wealth seems to have been off-putting. Loeb’s relatives regularly traveled across at least two continents swathed in luxury; his mother once arrived in Paris “with a newly acquired husband, a Packard, and a present . . . so generous that it enabled me to live comfortably for quite some time,” Loeb recalled. Uncle Daniel Guggenheim would materialize and treat Loeb to dinners at the Ritz. Loeb’s younger cousin Peggy Guggenheim had also become an electric presence in the city as a young heiress in a tempestuous, gossip-generating marriage to the surrealist painter and writer Laurence Vail. Loeb and his clan were, in other words, laden with the trappings of privilege; his daughter called him a “spoiled man [who] always had everything he wanted.”

  He was not, of course, the only independently wealthy literary patron type in town: Gertrude Stein also had money to burn, but she was obviously dead serious in her commitment to modernism, and besides, she ran a semi-public bar at which all of the drinks were gratis. Yet Loeb appears to have had a reputation as a comparative lightweight, despite the intelligence and serious-mindedness of Broom. To one fellow expat, Loeb had “no more personality than a clean, expensive blanket lying folded across [a] café chair.” And unlike Hemingway, Loeb didn’t actively cultivate the Olympians. Expat writer Morrill Cody remembered Loeb as a vain person who “did stupid things,” which included being rude to James Joyce and annoying Sylvia Beach.

  Still, the literary life and literary men had great allure for Loeb, and he could tell, he later said, even during that first encounter at Ford’s tea that Hemingway was the real deal. The two men also discussed hunting and fishing, and soon there were further meetings.

  “The more I saw of Ernest the more I liked him,” Loeb wrote later. He was especially impressed that Hemingway could be so tough and sporty, yet so sensitive and devoted to the art of writing. “I had long suspected that one reason for the scarcity of good writers in the United States was the popular impression . . . that artists were not quite virile,” he added, offering up Oscar Wilde as a culpable example. “It was a good sign that men like Hemingway were taking up writing.”

  Predictably, Hemingway invited Loeb to face off in the boxing ring. Loeb had briefly boxed at Princeton but had swapped the sport for wrestling; Hemingway outweighed him by forty pounds, but Loeb pulled on the gloves anyway. The men began to spar. Luckily, Loeb quickly learned that Hemingway telegraphed his punches by “a jiggling of the pupil”—a discovery that gave Loeb a shot at survival. The two men also became tennis pals. For their first match, Hemingway invited Loeb to play on courts “near the prison where the guillotine was kept.”

  When they weren’t bludgeoning each other or whacking balls across a net, Hemingway and Loeb frequented cafés and bars together, drinking and trading stories. Loeb told Hemingway details about his upbringing and adult life. He had many powerful advantages that Hemingway lacked—an Ivy League education, seemingly unlimited resources—and the inequity soon created tension between the men. But from Hemingway’s point of view, Loeb had one particularly intolerable advantage: he was about to publish his first novel, Doodab, with Boni & Liveright, a major American publisher.

  The tension built and eventually boiled over. Years later, Loeb recounted the probably inevitable confrontation. One rainy evening, the two men were eating oysters and drinking Pouilly-Fuissé at L’Avenue in Montparnasse. After a couple of bottles of wine, Loeb made a serious misstep. He had been thinking lately about why Hemingway was having such a difficult time breaking through, and decided to offer some constructive criticism.

  “What you’ve got to do is bring in women,” he advised. “People like to read about women and violence. You’ve got plenty of violence in your stories. Now all you need is women.”

  “Women?” asked Hemingway, who was likely staring at Loeb with murderous intensity.

  It would probably be hard for Hemingway to understand, Loeb went on. After all, “a happily married man misses so much,” he said. “Such as misery.”

  He then noticed that Hemingway’s face had gone “stiff and dark” and that his teeth were bared.

  “So I haven’t had misery,” Hemingway began. “So that’s what you think.”

  Loeb tried to backpedal. “How about another bottle,” he suggested desperately. “To hell with misery!”

  But the damage had been done. Hemingway spent the rest of the evening punishing Loeb with details of his life’s miseries. Loeb fiddled with the wineglasses and listened obligingly, not knowing what else to do.

  “Sure,” he said, somewhat feebly. “I should have known it.”

  The incident blew over, but there was another. In October of that year, the men traveled together to the medieval town of Senlis, just north of Paris. One evening they were playing poker in their hotel. Loeb won hand after hand, yet Hemingway refused to stop. He ran out of cash and started writing IOU’s. Loeb didn’t want his money and “certainly didn’t want his IOU’s,” but the pile kept growing. Finally, Hemingway wrote out an IOU for a hundred francs, raised Loeb, and won a hand.

  The tables turned. Suddenly Loeb’s luck ran out, and eventually his money ran out as well. He stood up from the table and tried to quit, “but Hem wanted to continue, [and] even tried to shame me into going on,” Loeb recalled. The incident shifted the dynamic between them. Loeb felt that a “shadow seemed to come between us.”

  Still, the men continued to socialize, and Loeb’s early delight in Hemingway evolved into blind adoration. Despite the undercurrent of resentment and competition, Loeb “relish[ed] his spontaneity [and] his zest for living.”

  Above all, Loeb admired what he called Hemingway’s “great capacity for friendship.” The more he saw of him, the more he liked him. The relationship became so important to Loeb that when Hemingway left town for a holiday, Paris suddenly felt empty.

  AT LEAST ONE person had a sense of foreboding about Hemingway: Loeb’s girlfriend, Utica, New York–born Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who went by “Kitty.”

  In 1924 Cannell was a thirty-three-year-old expat fashion correspondent and popular girl-about-town. She was also a lady of the stage, having danced, sung, and acted professionally, sometimes as a mime. More recently, Cannell had taken up writing; it was, she felt, a good break from the rigors of t
he stage and a much less exhausting discipline than singing.

  Cannell knew everyone in Paris, especially those in the artistic set, and was therefore a great asset to any deserving arriviste to the colony. She had been helpful to Loeb during the Broom days, introducing him to Ford Madox Ford and wrangling talent and submissions for the magazine. Some suspected that she had been the brains behind the operation.

  “The mistress of the editor,” Malcolm Cowley, a former consultant to the Broom team, confided by letter to a friend, “[has taste that is] sounder than Loeb’s, and I believe much stronger.”

  The Cannell-Loeb liaison likely made for great people-watching down at the Dôme. As a flashy heir to a fortune, Loeb always drew attention, but Cannell was said to be prone to jealous rages and apparently did not wait to conduct all of them in private. At that time their relationship was in limbo: Cannell was waiting for her divorce from Imagist poet Skipwith Cannell to come through, and was therefore a member of the prominent demographic known around town as the “alimony gang.” (Paris was apparently a popular destination for the soon-to-be-divorced as well as the recently emancipated.) This state of limbo was perfectly fine with Loeb; he had since become divorced from the wife he had left behind in New York, and was in no hurry to return to the shackles of matrimony. Once Cannell’s divorce case was due to come up in French court, he started to feel anxious.

  “There is a security in having a sweetheart with a husband,” he admitted.

  Up to that point, their romance had had a certain church-and-state feel to it. Loeb and Cannell even occupied adjacent apartments, separated by a flimsy wall. Like his relationship with Hemingway, his arrangement with Cannell seemed potentially explosive.

  Loeb and Cannell began visiting Hemingway and Hadley at their home above the sawmill; the two couples saw each other several times a week, sometimes dining out, sometimes playing tennis. Unlike her boyfriend, Cannell was not susceptible to Hemingway’s charms.

  “I instantly felt that Ernest was undependable and unpredictable,” she later reported, adding that she could detect “weakness slant[ing] out of his wrists and ankles.” She was mystified by Loeb’s hero worship of Hemingway. “Doubtless Hem represented some sort of ideal to him,” she ventured.

  Yet Cannell liked and respected Hadley, even though she was appalled by the Hemingways’ living conditions. Her own insistent glamour made Hadley’s poverty stand out even more starkly.

  “Her clothes are falling off,” Cannell told Loeb. “She can’t even show herself on the street.” Hemingway may have been able to wreathe their life in the carpenter’s mill flat with a certain purist romanticism, but Cannell was having none of it. It was Hemingway’s fault that Hadley was clad in rags, she insisted, and Hadley was a “perfect fool to take it.” After all, she pointed out, they were living on Hadley’s money—or what was left of it, anyway.

  Cannell promptly made Hadley into a pet project, taking her shopping and on antiquing outings. “All the in-girls were collecting earrings,” she recalled, a trend that probably had as much relevance to Hadley as a vogue for hunting Siberian tigers. These jaunts were also a mischievous jab at Hemingway. It gave her pleasure to hold herself up as a “bad example to a submissive wife.”

  Hemingway did have one redeeming quality in Cannell’s eyes: he loved cats. She eventually gave one to the Hemingways; they named it “Feather Puss.” A little while later, Cannell ran into Hemingway at a café. He was looking depressed.

  “I have just one consolation in life,” he informed her.

  She waited, expecting him to say Hadley or Bumby. Instead he told her, “My kitty.”

  Hemingway may simply have been punning on her nickname, but Cannell apparently took the incident as evidence of what she saw as Hemingway’s selfish and inconsiderate nature. She complained about him to Loeb repeatedly over the next year, but her opinions made no difference. Unlike his feelings for Kitty, Loeb’s affection toward Hemingway seems to have been unconditional. He would soon lay his resources at his friend’s feet—including entrée to his powerful publisher in New York. This was a most welcome development. Hemingway was exhausting his publishing opportunities in Paris, and it was time to begin cultivating the big guns back home. Loeb would soon prove an invaluable asset in bridging the gap.

  5

  Bridges to New York

  NO MATTER HOW BROKE the Hemingways were, they always seemed to have enough money to go to Spain. In May 1924, Hemingway wrote to his family that he and Hadley were planning a June trip to that “wonderful and beautiful country.” They would be going trout fishing in the Pyrenees and also planned to hike from Pamplona to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port; Hemingway was keeping his fingers crossed that they wouldn’t be mistaken for smugglers and shot. He began buying pesetas in anticipation of the trip.

  In the meantime, Paris continued to offer up both frustrations and pleasures. In addition to weathering his publication blues, Hemingway was now at loggerheads with Ford Madox Ford. He had begun to suspect that Ford was praising his own work under pseudonyms in the transatlantic (he was correct); he reported this to Ezra Pound, adding that Ford was running the magazine as a “compromise.” All of the work that Ford was publishing could just as easily be found in other magazines already; why didn’t he take some risks? Hemingway wondered. After all, he had barely any subscribers or advertisers to offend.

  “The thing to do with Ford,” Hemingway wrote, “is to kill him.”

  Nor did Hemingway appreciate edits that Ford had made to a short humor piece he had whipped up. He complained to Pound, but also implored him not to mention anything to Ford, as he didn’t want to start a kerfuffle—at least not yet.

  Around this time, Hemingway connected with humor writer Donald Ogden Stewart, who had alighted in Paris that spring. Stewart was one of the era’s premier satirists, then an extremely popular genre. His first book, which bore a thirty-word title—A Parody Outline of History Wherein May Be Found a Curiously Irreverent Treatment of American Historical Events Imagining Them As They Would Be Narrated By America’s Most Characteristic Contemporary Authors—had become a best-seller and made him famous. A year or two earlier, when Stewart was about to make a trip to Europe, an editor friend advised him to look up Hemingway in Paris, even though Stewart was an established heavyweight and Hemingway still just an aspirant. By chance, Stewart had run into Hemingway at Madame Lecomte’s, a restaurant on the Île Saint-Louis.

  “I didn’t know anything about him as a writer, but he seemed to be my kind of guy,” Stewart recalled. This meant, he explained, that they both liked to eat and drink heavily, and that Hemingway proved an appreciative audience who “understood my kind of humor.”

  They became fast friends. Hemingway even lent his apartment to Stewart after that first meeting; as he was about to go to Switzerland for a few weeks with Hadley and Bumby, Hemingway “insisted, with characteristic enthusiasm, that I occupy his rooms until he brought them back,” Stewart wrote later. “I woke up the next morning in his room, very happy, with a note from him telling me where I could get eggs and milk.”

  For Hemingway, it was another serendipitous acquaintance. Stewart was even richer in New York literary contacts than Loeb. Not only did he know influential editors and publishers across town, but also he was an insider at that city’s own literary Olympus, the Algonquin Round Table, an informal yet exclusive lunchtime club attended by two dozen or so of the town’s sharpest wits. Food was beside the point; rather, martinis were the essential fuel as the Algonquinites gathered to dazzle and decimate one another with banter.

  “Conversation in the early twenties had to be one wise-crack after another,” recalled John Dos Passos. “Cracks had to fly back and forth continually like the birds in badminton.” Stewart was, he added, “one of the most skilled at this exhilarating sport.” In his memoir, By a Stroke of Luck! Stewart professed that this “dog-eat-dog” world always made him feel ill at ease—“most of my ripostes occur to me three or four hours after I have been attac
ked,” he claimed—yet he was still a welcome presence at the table.

  In the year since his first encounter with Hemingway, Stewart had taken some blows. Both he and booksellers nationwide had harbored high hopes for his sophomore effort, a satirical time-travel manifesto titled Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind—but much to the chagrin of all, the book had flopped. In the wake of this disappointment, in April 1924 Stewart absconded to Paris, where he and Hemingway crossed paths once again.

  The dynamic between them had shifted somewhat. Stewart’s Aunt Polly failure had temporarily put him on his back foot. Hemingway was by now a respected literary figure in Paris, and Stewart shared with him the manuscript of a new novel he was working on. He was delighted when Hemingway asked to publish some of it in the transatlantic. (Some of that delight seeped away when Stewart learned that contributors to the transatlantic were uncompensated.) Regardless, he was happy to accept Hemingway’s invitation to join him in Spain that summer, along with a group of other writers and editors.

  “Bring plenty of pesetas,” Hemingway advised, adding that Stewart could expect both the plage (beach) and the poules (prostitutes) to be of the highest caliber.

  Stewart accepted Hemingway’s hospitality and encouragement without reserve.

  “I was to learn later that when Ernest was enthusiastic about something it was extremely dangerous to resist anything, especially friendliness,” he wrote years later.

  THE HEMINGWAYS’ FIRST FORAY to the San Fermín fiesta in Pamplona had been an adventure for two. But in July 1924, leaving Bumby in the care of his nanny, they brought along a large entourage, which included both of Hemingway’s Paris book publishers, Bill Bird and Robert McAlmon; Bird’s wife, Sally; Hemingway’s wartime friend Eric Edward “Chink” Dorman-Smith; and John Dos Passos, whom Hemingway had first met during the war. A fever pitch of excitement was a prerequisite for attending guests.