Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  That evening he cornered Twysden in the square and finally persuaded her to come have a drink alone with him. They walked off together to a small café, and then got swept into a private party in one of the buildings overlooking the square. Champagne flowed; a monocled man with a goatee played popular tunes on a piano. A crowd of men naturally formed around Twysden, who entertained her admirers with stories in French about the bullfights while Loeb stood next to a window and drank himself into oblivion. He tried to wrench Twysden away from the festivities but finally abandoned the effort. He woke up the next morning in his bed, with no memory of having come back to the Hotel Quintana.

  Loeb staggered out to meet the crew for lunch. Guthrie was in an ugly mood; even Hadley had lost her kindly smile, and Smith wore a grim look. Twysden turned up later, accessorized not with a beret or a fedora but rather with a black eye and a bruised forehead. Loeb demanded to know what had happened to her, but before she could respond, Hemingway interrupted, saying that she had fallen. No one else—including Twysden—offered an explanation, and Loeb made no further inquiries. Once again he considered leaving the fiesta, but once again he was afraid of looking like a coward. He stayed put.

  As usual, Loeb noted, “there was too much lunch.”

  THE ONE BRIGHT, joyous presence in Pamplona that week was Cayetano Ordóñez, a nineteen-year-old matador who had been thrilling aficionados throughout Spain.

  “He was sincerity and purity of style itself with the cape,” Hemingway wrote of him later, adding that he “looked like the messiah who had come to save bullfighting if ever any one did.”

  At that moment there were interesting parallels between Ordóñez—who went by the name Niño de la Palma—and Hemingway. Both men were considered potentially revolutionary prodigies who might revitalize their respective fields, but neither man had yet proven himself. Audiences and critics alike were willing Ordóñez to become one of the greats, but he still needed to build a convincing body of work and show that he belonged in the master category.

  In Pamplona that week he fought in the ring along with famed matador Juan Belmonte, long one of bullfighting’s heavyweights; he was now an aging champion but could still command a crowd. He and Ordóñez were a fascinating duo: Ordóñez was almost comically handsome; Belmonte was “very small and ugly,” with a jutting jaw and a stammer, recalls American matador Barnaby Conrad, who later fought on the same program with Belmonte. But he had something special. “You’d see this little guy go out, round-shouldered and his feet kind of hurting,” says Conrad, “and then suddenly he’d grow about five inches.”

  Yet it was Ordóñez, not Belmonte, who quickly became the grand attraction at Pamplona. “He did everything Belmonte did and did it better,” Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. “Everybody in Spain is crazy about him—except of course those that can’t stand him.”

  Hemingway reportedly devoted much of the week to trying to cultivate Ordóñez, perhaps having been introduced by hotel proprietor Juanito Quintana, with whom Hemingway had been becoming close. “I was amazed at how quickly this man could learn,” Quintana later said about Hemingway. “He had a fantastic identification with the drama of the ring and caught on immediately. By the time he left Spain he knew bullfighting as well as any of us.”

  The ingratiation apparently worked, for later, when Ordóñez was awarded a bull’s ear after a particularly good corrida, he gave it to Hadley. “[She] wrapped it up in a handkerchief which, thank God was Don Stewarts,” Hemingway reported to Stein. Hemingway, however, was probably less than delighted when Ordóñez applauded Loeb’s performance in the ring. “One would have thought he had done it on purpose,” he told Hemingway the night after Loeb’s bull’s head feat.

  Ordóñez fought especially well toward the end of the fiesta. On the second-to-last evening, Hemingway informed his entourage that Ordóñez had personally assured him that the following day’s bulls were going to be the best in Spain. They were sitting around a café table in the square after dinner, drinking brandy. As Loeb recalled it, Hemingway then turned to him and said, “I suppose you’d like it better if they shipped in goats.”

  Loeb was close to losing his temper. He responded that while he didn’t dislike bullfighting, he simply sympathized with the victims.

  Apparently both Hemingway and Guthrie were also spoiling for a fight after a week of pent-up tension. Guthrie snickered. “Our sensitive chum is considerate of the bull’s feelings,” he said. “But what about ours?”

  “Harold is very considerate,” Hemingway responded. “You should see him with [Kitty]. I’ve listened to him taking it by the hour.”

  Loeb still kept his cool, but the situation quickly deteriorated. Hemingway accused him of ruining their party. Encouraged by Hemingway’s backing, Guthrie blurted: “Why don’t you get out? I don’t want you here. Hem doesn’t want you here. Nobody wants you here, though some may be too decent to say so.”

  “I will,” Loeb replied, “the instant Duff wants it.”

  Twysden quietly turned to him. “You know that I do not want you to go,” she said.

  This was all too much for Hemingway. “You lousy bastard,” he exclaimed to Loeb. “Running to a woman.”

  Loeb stood and asked Hemingway to step outside. Hemingway followed him. Loeb was scared to fight Hemingway in the dark; he wouldn’t be able to see Hemingway’s eyes, and therefore couldn’t detect when his punches were coming. But perhaps more disorienting was Loeb’s realization that Hemingway had gone so quickly from being a close friend and colleague to a “bitter, lashing enemy.”

  The two men marched on, now side by side, through the square toward a dark side street; they reached the edge of the plaza and walked down a few steps onto an ill-lit street. Loeb took off his jacket and slipped his glasses in the side pocket. He squinted around, looking for a safe place to put the garment.

  “My glasses,” he nervously explained to Hemingway. “If they’re broken I couldn’t get them fixed here.”

  To his surprise, he looked up and saw Hemingway smiling at him. It was a boyish, contagious smile—and even in that moment, that grin made it hard for Loeb to dislike him. He even offered to hold Loeb’s jacket. Loeb then offered to hold his. Their mutual rage had suddenly seeped away. The men unclenched their fists, put their jackets on, and walked back through the square.

  When they returned to the café, the rest of the entourage acted as though nothing had happened. Everyone kept drinking. Loeb and Guthrie ignored each other. As for Twysden, Loeb realized that maybe she wasn’t worth all of this antagonism after all. A line had been crossed; he felt suddenly numb about her.

  “Duff,” he decided, “no longer seemed to matter.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Loeb received a note from Hemingway.

  “I was terribly tight and nasty to you last night,” he wrote. He wished that he could wipe out what had happened, he went on, adding that he was ashamed of his behavior and of the “stinking, unjust uncalled for things I said.”

  Loeb turned up at lunch and afterward accepted Hemingway’s apology in person. He hoped they could be friends as before, he told him.

  “But I knew we wouldn’t be,” he wrote later.

  Nothing—not even a sincere apology—could undo what had been done and said. Perhaps, at that time, Loeb thought that he and Hemingway would simply go their separate ways. He couldn’t have guessed that Hemingway would soon do something that would link them for the rest of their lives and beyond.

  Mercifully, it was time to depart. As everyone was checking out of the Hotel Quintana, it transpired that Twysden and Guthrie couldn’t pay for their room. Guthrie may have failed to procure the necessary funds during his recent jaunt to England, or else the couple just expected someone else to pick up the tab. Hemingway was enraged about the situation, according to Donald Stewart. Twysden and Guthrie were mortifying him in front of his friend Juanito Quintana, who already regarded them as drunks and a sacrilegious presence in his reverential taurmachine
establishment. Stewart ended up paying the bill. Following this final fracas, he noted, any remaining “camaraderie fell to pieces.”

  Loeb, Smith, Twysden, and Guthrie hired a car to take them up to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Hemingway and Hadley prepared to leave for Madrid. Hemingway had been in suspiciously high spirits and “overdid the heartiness,” Loeb observed before they all left. On that note, the fiesta ended.

  “Some fiesta,” Loeb recalled glumly.

  Donald Stewart departed for Antibes, where he would recuperate at Sara and Gerald Murphy’s villa. On the way there, he later wrote, “it occurred to me that the events of the past week might make interesting material for a novel.”

  He was not the only one to think so.

  8

  The Knock Out

  IF DONALD STEWART HAD ANY serious designs on translating the Pamplona fiasco into literature, he seems to have forgotten about them quickly. Instead, he devoted the next two weeks to, as he put it, “the intensive sun-tanning of my body” on the beaches of the Riviera and mulled a follow-up to his recently released satire.

  “The success of The Haddocks Abroad seemed to call for a sequel to be known as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Haddock in Paris France,’” he recalled, and that was apparently the end of his would-be Pamplona novel.

  For Hemingway, however, the events of the previous week had become practically priceless. Here was the heaven-sent trigger he had been waiting for.

  “Let the pressure build,” he had told himself. “When I had to write [a novel], then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.”

  He had now reached that point. Just as the pressure surrounding him had built to an almost intolerable level—all of those financial woes, the fears of obscurity and of being surpassed, the excruciating writer’s block—Duff Twysden had saved the day. The moment she arrived at the Hotel Quintana, everything essentially came together for Hemingway at last. Back in Paris, people had suspected that she might someday make great fodder for a novel. Yet when Hemingway saw her there at the fiesta—a Jezebel in Arcadia, manipulating all of her suitors like marionettes—he knew that he had figured out the puzzle at last. A story began to shape itself in Hemingway’s mind—an intense, poignant story. Suddenly every fiesta confrontation, insult, hangover, and bit of frazzled sexual tension took on a real literary currency. The story almost began to write itself.

  After the fiesta, Hemingway and Hadley boarded a train to Madrid, where they would watch Cayetano Ordóñez perform in the ring again. En route, they drank with a couple of priests and a handful of civil guards, but Hemingway may also have been busy translating the fiesta’s events onto paper as the train sped south. Once he started working on the Pamplona story, he could not stop. The couple moved into the Pensión Aguilar in Madrid, where Hemingway wrote furiously in the mornings. During the afternoons, he went with Hadley to the bullfights. The next morning he would begin again. No longer would it take him half a day to scratch a single paragraph onto a page. Not even a bout of fever and suspected dysentery quashed his momentum.

  “Have been working like hell,” he reported to Bill Smith a week after the fiesta entourage had broken up. He soon wrote again, informing Smith that he had been turning out around 1,200 words a day since leaving Pamplona.

  “Some of it’s maybe bludy good,” he added.

  He was still referring to his new project as a “story” at this time and revealed little to Smith about its content, although he did give some hints that the tale was rooted in actual events and might feature some characters drawn from real life. He had “gotten some swell stuff on this trip,” he told Smith.

  By early August, however, he let it be known that he was officially about to join the novel club. Sylvia Beach was the first to get the news.

  “I’ve written six chapters on a novel and am going great,” he wrote to her.

  By that time, he and Hadley had moved on to Valencia; they had seen seventeen bullfights, and he had completed fifteen thousand words of the manuscript. He had kicked it off with a thirty-three-page draft penned on loose-leaf paper. His handwriting—smooth, even, and upright—belied the urgency with which the story poured out of him. At this point, Hemingway’s tale was basically a précis of dialogue and events that had just gone down in Pamplona—from his conversations with Quintana and Ordóñez, to his aversion to the American ambassador, to the affair between Twysden and Loeb: “[Harold] was in love with Duff and she had slept with him while Pat was away in Scotland and told Pat about it and it had not seemed to make any difference but now whenever he got drunk he kept coming back to it. She had slept with other men before but they had not been of Harold’s race and had not come on parties afterwards.”

  Also included was the showdown between Loeb and Guthrie:

  Pat stood wobbly. “. . . Why don’t you see you’re not wanted, Loeb. Go away . . . Go away for God’s sake. Take that sad Jewish face away. Don’t you think I’m right?”

  Loeb just sat there . . . looking through his spectacles, taking it all seriously. His affair with a lady of title.

  “But I won’t go Pat,” said Loeb.

  In Hemingway’s on-paper version of the fight, as in real life, fisticuffs are averted at the last minute.

  All of the Pamplona entourage members appeared as themselves in this draft. Nearly everyone was badly behaved. Pat was depicted as drunk and belligerent, and repeatedly informed Cayetano Ordóñez that “bulls have no balls.” Don was the resident jester who ordered ceaseless shoe shines for Pat from local bootblacks. Duff smoldered and quipped and undressed the handsome Ordóñez with her eyes; her probable corruption of the young bullfighter—and her corrupting potential in general—promised almost unlimited dramatic potential.

  “I will not judge the gang who were at Pamplona,” wrote Hem-as-protagonist in the manuscript, but Hem-as-author was setting everyone down on paper to be judged by readers for generations to come.

  He soon put this loose-leaf draft aside—but a good deal of material from these first pages would eventually be transplanted into the official manuscript. His vision was startlingly clear from the beginning. His “highbrow-lowbrow” formula was also already in place—and it was a potent version of what he had described to Liveright earlier that spring. Like his In Our Time stories, this new Pamplona story already contained something for everyone. Its terse, innovative prose would titillate the literary crowd, and the simplicity of the style would make it accessible to mainstream readers. And if that deceptive simplicity didn’t do the trick, the story promised to stand alone as a scandalous roman à clef featuring dissolute representatives from the worlds of wealth and ambition.

  “There is a lot of dope about high society in it,” Hemingway wryly noted in a later discarded passage of the manuscript. “And that is always interesting.”

  IN VALENCIA, Hemingway ditched the loose-leaf paper and began writing the rest of the story in a small sand-colored French school notebook, the first of seven. On its cover, Hemingway inscribed his name and his Paris address, perhaps in a return-to-sender plea inspired by the Great Train Robbery. He would not be sacrificing another nascent novel.

  In that first notebook, he moved the setting of his new novel to Paris. The action would eventually wind back to everything that had just happened at the fiesta, but “to understand what happened in Pamplona you must understand the Quarter in Paris,” he wrote, and proceeded to pen an unsparing portrait of the scene that recalled his early spiteful Toronto Star stories about Montparnasse.

  “There is nothing romantic about the Quarter and very little that is beautiful,” he wrote. Everyone there detested everyone else, from the writers to the critics to the painters. It was a grim, unwholesome world, filled with “fairies” and women who casually racked up abortions. The only happy inhabitants of the Quarter were the drunks, and even they all inevitably succumbed to gloom. He offered up specific examples of the expat reprobates who populated the Left Bank. Anyone who had ever rankled Hemingway at the Dôme or Dingo was
about to get sent up. The draft was littered with unflattering descriptions of the local color: a popular former showgirl who serves as a patron saint of the colony’s cafés (this was, of course, Flossie Martin); a scampering little Greek painter and self-proclaimed duke named “Zizi” (the real-life version went by “Mitzi”; he was, as barman Jimmie Charters put it, “the best-known person in Montparnasse in its heyday”); an unwashed, alcoholic former intellectual who moons around drunkenly at the Quarter’s popular cafés, accepting handouts (a character any Quarterite could easily identify as expat writer Harold Stearns). Hemingway’s debut novel appeared poised to become a who’s who of the colony.

  Against this backdrop, he introduced the major characters who had been given their practice run in his loose-leaf preamble: Duff, Pat, and Loeb. Donald Stewart and Bill Smith would be condensed into a single character, “Bill Gorton.” In the loose-leaf Pamplona story, Hemingway called the narrator “Hem”; in this notebook, he became “Jake Barnes.”

  At first glance, Jake has a lot in common with Hemingway: he is a young, well-connected Paris-based American foreign correspondent with bullfighting afición. The character wryly notes that, like all newspaper reporters, he has long aspired to write a novel, and now that he is doing it, “the novel will have that awful taking-the-pen-in-hand quality that afflicts newspaper men when they start to write their own book.”

  Yet there would be departures from Hemingway’s personal biography in creating the character. He borrowed a line from the résumé of his in our time publisher Bill Bird when he made Jake the co-founder of a wire service. Also, unlike Hemingway, Jake is burdened with neither wife nor child. Hadley had appeared briefly in the loose-leaf draft but did not make the leap to his beige notebooks. (The real Hadley seems to have been unrattled by her omission; she later claimed that she had found the finished book “magnificent” and that it made her “happy.”) Jake was to be a free agent, tethered only by his longing for a certain titled lady.