Kitty Cannell grew anxious in advance of the meeting. She worried that Hemingway harbored anti-Semitic tendencies and might create a terrible scene in front of Fleischman and his wife, Helen. She said as much to Loeb. He brushed her off.
“I tended at that time to ignore the gossip, current in ‘The Quarter,’ about Hem’s temper,” he wrote later. “I was aware that people exaggerated.”
The evening of the meeting arrived. Perhaps out of ghoulish curiosity, Cannell came along with Loeb and Hemingway when they turned up at the Fleischmans’ flat near the Champs-Élysées. Helen Fleischman answered the door.
“It’s the maid’s day off,” she explained as she ushered them in.
Leon Fleischman then stepped forward, wearing a velvet smoking jacket. Both Cannell and Loeb could tell that Hemingway disliked Fleischman on sight.
Drinks were sipped; small talk was scrounged up. Cannell and Helen gossiped about Peggy Guggenheim and her husband. Loeb tried to liven up the atmosphere by recounting a story about “two little colored girls who had their picture taken at Coney Island.”
Eventually the men began to talk business. Fleischman kicked things off with a speech: He had been hearing about Hemingway as an up-and-coming talent, he said, but one never could tell whether a new writer would actually prove popular. The public needed to be educated about new literary trends.
For Loeb, it was an excruciating monologue. “I seemed to be hearing Leon with Hem’s ears,” he wrote later. “Everything he said sounded precious, supercilious, affected.”
Hemingway swigged impassively from a glass of scotch. When Fleischman glanced in his direction for reactions, Hemingway rewarded him with emphatic grins. Loeb grew even more alarmed.
“I want to read your stories,” Fleischman finally announced. If he deemed them sufficiently impressive, he went on, he would send them to Liveright with his recommendation. “Horace knows it pays to accept my advice [but] it must be tactfully put, of course,” he added. “Horace think he makes his own decisions.”
Mercifully, the gathering concluded shortly afterward. Loeb, Cannell, and Hemingway left together.
“In the street I made an anodyne remark about having spent a nice evening,” Cannell recalled. “Hemingway exploded into profanity: ‘Double god damned kikes!’—with a lot of picturesque explicit expletives.”
Later, Loeb and Cannell would give different versions of what occurred next. Loeb recalled that he and Cannell went out to dinner and discussed what had happened.
“See what I mean?” Cannell supposedly reprimanded him. “You never believe me. I’m glad he said what he did. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”
Loeb hadn’t cared for Hemingway’s reaction, but he still made excuses for him. “He likes to express himself violently,” he told Kitty. In another recounting of the incident, Loeb recalled telling her that Hemingway had “used the word as I might say mick or dago. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
Cannell remembered a pithier and more visceral exchange. In her version, Harold stood stunned on the sidewalk while Hemingway marched away.
“Well, Baby there’s your future friend,” she remembered saying.
“‘Oh no,” Harold reportedly replied. “If Hem thought of me as a Jew he wouldn’t have spoken that way in front of me.”
IN OUR TIME was now en route to two major American publishers—Doran and Liveright. Now Hemingway just had to sit back and sweat bullets until the responses came in.
Weeks went by. In his letters he seemed alternately nervous and confident. He implored Stewart to send updates and thanked him “ever so god damn much” for his help. A few days later he wrote to a friend that he had a book coming out in New York the following spring, although no such deal with any publisher was yet in place and he had yet to hear from either publisher.
“Doran are going to publish it I think,” he told his old friend Bill Smith. “We’re dickering now. Boni and Liveright want it if they dont come through but I’m all for keeping out of the manuals of the Semites as long as possible.”
Yet by mid-December he still had no definitive answer from Doran, the Semites at Liveright, or any other publisher. He peddled a farcical story to Vanity Fair—Donald Stewart’s turf—titled “My Life in The Bull Ring with Donald Ogden Stewart.” It was rejected. His letters took on a less boastful tenor. He and Hadley prepared for a family trip to Austria to do some therapeutic skiing and hearty eating.
“Same old shit going on here,” he reported to Robert McAlmon. “Glad to be getting away.”
Just before Christmas, the little family made its way to the Hotel Taube in Schruns, a tiny mountain town in western Austria. Like Burguete that past summer, Schruns was remote and unpretentious and devoid of Montparnassians. And like France, Austria had become absurdly cheap even for struggling American writers. The entire family boarded at their pension for around two dollars a day.
Hemingway kept himself busy as he waited for word from New York. He and Hadley skied while a fetching Austrian girl took care of Bumby. The locals soon took to calling Hemingway the “Black Christ,” in honor of the black beard he grew while there. (If the Austrians were feeling particularly elaborate, they promoted Hemingway to “the Black Kirsch-drinking Christ.”) He spent evenings sampling the thirty-six different types of beer on tap at the Taube and playing illegal poker games behind shuttered windows. Hadley knitted wool sweaters.
Harold Loeb had originally planned to tag along on the Austrian adventure, but back in Paris he was still haggling with Horace Liveright over changes to his novel Doodab. He delayed his journey to Schruns—“I wanted to get the matter of my book cleared up first, for I could not really enjoy myself with that hanging fire,” he later recalled—and eventually booked a berth back to the States instead, departing just after New Year’s. He also took advantage of this absence to try to remove himself from his romantic entanglement with Cannell, writing her a “difficult and painful letter.” It simply wasn’t fair to her, he explained: “She should have a husband, and I did not want to marry anyone. For over three years we had been close friends [and] it hadn’t worked.” Cannell did not agree. They remained a couple after all.
Before learning that Loeb was going to New York instead of coming to Austria, Hemingway had written to him, imploring him to hurry up and bring along some good whisky, and adding, “Bring my book from Fleischmann will you?”—perhaps on the assumption that Doran was going to bite. A week later, however, he wrote to Loeb again, this time a profanity-laden missive full of news, ire, and strategy.
Doran had rejected In Our Time.
Hemingway had just received a letter from Donald Stewart with a check nestled inside. At first, Hemingway assumed the money was from Doran, but rather it was a personal check from Stewart, a morale-boosting Christmas present to help take the sting out of the rejection letter also enclosed from publisher George Doran.
“They were all agreed on the power of my stuff and what a great book it was,” Hemingway reported to Loeb. “Only they didnt want to publish it.”
The Doran editorial team had objected to the sexual content of some of the stories—but also, they simply didn’t want to lead a new writer out of the stable with a short story collection. That said, “he would go all the way with me in a novel,” Hemingway told Loeb.
Suddenly the Semites at Boni & Liveright looked more palatable. Hemingway didn’t know it at the time, but initial enthusiasm for his manuscript hadn’t been particularly strong at that house either. When he reached New York, Harold Loeb went to Liveright’s brownstone office and asked one of the firm’s readers, Beatrice Kaufman, about In Our Time. He was horrified to learn that it had been relegated to the slush pile. Kaufman fished it out and informed Loeb that she was just about to return it.
Loeb pleaded with her not to send it back: “You’ll live to regret it. You are missing a tremendous opportunity. He can write. One paragraph will tell you that. And his next is going to be a novel.”
His impassioned ple
a apparently did the trick: when he stopped by the office a week later, Kaufman told Loeb that Liveright had accepted In Our Time for publication. Sherwood Anderson had also buoyed the effort and attempted to convince Liveright of the book’s importance.
“Anderson [was] then at the peak of his reputation and Liveright’s star author, [and] since Liveright was anxious to hold Anderson, his best-selling literary author, in our time was accepted,” Loeb later recalled.
The publisher’s offer: $200 against royalties. Both Loeb and Stewart cabled their congratulations to Hemingway, who received the news with mixed emotions.
“Hurray for you and the news and Horace Liveright and the whole business,” he wrote to Loeb, adding that while he felt “wonderful” about the book, he also felt as if he had been “kicked in the balls.” Apparently “it had taken half the population of New York” to sell the book—and to Liveright, no less.
Still, a big American publisher was a big American publisher. A week after receiving the news from Loeb and Stewart, Hemingway sent a cable to Liveright:
DELIGHTED ACCEPT
= HEMINGWAY
6
The Catalysts
WHEN THE HEMINGWAYS returned from Schruns to Paris in March 1925, the city suddenly felt overcrowded.
“Now everybody seemed to be coming to Paris,” wrote Harold Loeb, who also returned from New York that month. Hordes of American tourists would have piled into Loeb’s boat and the other transatlantic liners plowing across the Atlantic to France that year. The franc was once more rising against the dollar, but this did nothing to stem the flow. All of that press about the wonders of Paris was clearly having an effect. By one estimate, in 1925 some five thousand Americans arrived in Paris every week. The city trembled with an almost volcanic excitement.
“Too much advertising had turned the spontaneity of ‘la vie bohème’ into a huge commercial success,” recalled Montparnasse bartender Jimmie Charters. For the original postwar expats, the tide had begun to turn, he felt. The Quarter was acquiring a carnival-like atmosphere, complete with an audience of gawkers eager to sample a bit of authentic bohemia.
As ever, introductions to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others of their rank were hotly sought after. Hemingway was now situated firmly among them. No longer was he humbly toting letters of introduction to luminaries; rather, that spring, people of importance, interest, or possible utility were introduced to him. Over the past year, Hemingway had become an even more powerful attraction within the Crowd and to voyeurs alike. Word went around that he now had a big American book deal in the works. According to one of his contemporaries, he had become an “overwhelming prize” at café tables and social gatherings.
“Ernest did have that gift for attracting public homage,” recalled expat writer Malcolm Cowley. “‘Charisma’ would be the later word for it.”
Some in the Crowd watched Hemingway’s ascent through narrowed eyes, including those who had once happily helped build his platform. Robert McAlmon, for instance, had decided that Hemingway was an utter phony. “He’s the original Limelight Kid, just you watch him for a few months,” he ranted one day after running into Hemingway in a Montparnasse café. “Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay . . . He’s going places, he’s got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy.”
For Hemingway, there were seemingly few literary Olympians left in Paris to conquer. But then, that spring, a different group of luminaries began to flood into his life, people who could advance his ambitions in a wholly different way.
“That year the rich came,” he wrote later.
A year before, he contended, they would have ignored him. He had been too obscure then, and this particular breed of “rich”—or “international birds of paradise,” as one of Picasso’s mistresses once put it—cultivated and collected only highly successful talents. Otherwise, it was just a waste of their time and charm. Even now, he felt, they likely were on the fence about him, because he had yet to pen the novel that would confirm his greatness.
Hemingway’s entrée to these new circles may have begun with Donald Stewart. “[He] was telling us both that we ought to see more of ‘people that mattered,’” John Dos Passos recalled. Stewart repeatedly mentioned one American couple in particular: Sara and Gerald Murphy.
“They were both rich,” Stewart later wrote. “He was handsome, she was beautiful; they had three golden children . . . They had the gift of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.”
Sara hailed from a midwestern fortune, and Gerald’s family owned the Mark Cross Company, purveyor of fine leather goods; they now stood at the apex of Paris’s creative scene. Their dinner guests on any given evening might include Picasso, Cole Porter, or Douglas Fairbanks, who would be seated alongside dancers from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Theirs was a “closed circle, it was privileged, but within those narrow limits it was immensely stimulating,” said Stewart.
Stewart did not, however, do a great job of selling them to Hemingway and Dos Passos at first. “He almost put us off the Murphys by building them up as rich socialites,” remembered Dos Passos—a frivolous category almost certain to elicit scorn from Hemingway. Yet when both men actually met the Murphys, they had to admit that they were not merely rich in a vulgar or ostentatious way. Yes, they had a beautiful apartment and entertained on a grand scale, and there was also that glorious seaside villa down on the French Riviera they had just purchased and renovated.
Yet the Murphys were curiously unpretentious. Ten years older than Hemingway and Dos Passos, they were extremely devoted to their little family. The role they assumed in Paris’s social life was a mentoring one; their homes were chic but secure refuges amidst the riotous decadence outside. “They were the parents everybody wished they’d had,” recalls Murphy friend Calvin Tomkins.
Their artist and writer friends often sought the couple’s opinions on their latest works, yet they “wanted them to approve for different reasons,” adds Tomkins. “Not for literary excellence but because they loved you.” Gerald was himself a respected cubist painter, admired by the other cubist greats and top-tier artists in town. “He seemed to me to have a sort of butcher’s approach to painting, violent, skillful, accurate, combined with . . . a surgeon’s delicacy of touch,” said Dos Passos.
The Murphys found Hemingway wondrously talented, and he was quickly admitted to the ranks of writers permitted to descend upon them at any hour to read their latest work. He and Hadley joined in the Murphys’ grander entertainments as well. It did not matter that the Hemingways were as broke as ever. Their new companions offered them “all the amenities, [and] could take them anywhere for gorgeous meals,” recalled Hadley. Hemingway earned their keep simply by being Hemingway. Hadley was not an especially charismatic or stylish addition to the scene, but she did her best to play along, and the Murphys were kind to her. Around this time she would listen with amusement to conversations between her husband and Gertrude Stein, in which both claimed not to care about material success. Yet after these chats, she pointed out later, Hemingway would still readily accept all of the expensive and flattering hospitality anyway. He didn’t entirely want to “simply sink back and take all this,” Hadley added, but he often couldn’t resist the trappings of his popularity.
Hemingway would remain friends with the Murphys—especially Sara—for decades, and they were about to play a central role in his most intimate affairs, professional and personal. Yet even they were window dressing in comparison to the three upper-echelon expat luminaries who were about to happen to him. Each would act as a catalyst, accelerating his final transformation from embryonic Hemingway into legendary Hemingway. The first catalyst provided a conduit to desperately needed financial stability. The second would serve as the previously elusive idea trigger for the novel that would make his reputation at last. And the third—a dynamic but tragically self-destructive patron sai
nt—would help usher Hemingway onto the prestigious international stage he craved.
Like Paris itself, Hemingway’s life teetered on the verge of explosion.
AS SOON AS he returned to Paris, Harold Loeb visited Hemingway at his carpenter’s loft, filled with excitement about their respective triumphs at Boni & Liveright. At first he was irritated to learn that Hemingway’s old friend Bill Smith—whose brother Y.K. had introduced Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson in Chicago—had also just arrived in Paris and would be competing for Hemingway’s attention that spring. An amusing counterpoint to the posh company the Hemingways would be keeping that year, Smith, who was resolutely broke, moved in with the couple. The arrangement was supposed to last a few weeks but stretched into months. Hemingway tried, without success, to get Smith a job as an editorial assistant on one of the expat magazines; eventually he helped install him as a business manager at Robert McAlmon’s press.
Initially Loeb and Smith “eyed each other with suspicion,” Loeb recalled. Hemingway had to finesse relations between the men; he assured Loeb that Smith was a swell guy and briefed Smith on Loeb’s virtues, which included boxing, wrestling, and tennis skills. After their initial wariness, the men became fast friends. Loeb liked Smith’s low-key manner and discretion, but also his cynical wisecracks—an attribute that Hemingway had spent years observing and would soon advertise to much of the literate world.
By this point, Loeb’s relationship with Kitty Cannell had been strained beyond repair. When he returned from New York, she greeted him at the train station, filled with optimism and plans. Loeb, for his part, simply felt hollow about her. Not long after their reunion, she threw a jealous tantrum over another woman that “did not let up until the songbirds were tuning up outside the window,” he claimed later. The incident led at last to their breakup, and Loeb wasted no time letting it be known around town that they were finally finished.
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