Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “There are two versions of life: one is turn the other cheek and the other is destroy the enemy,” says Hemingway’s son Patrick, implying that Hadley was of the former camp and Pauline of the latter. Sooner rather than later, Hemingway would have to choose between the women, and Pauline apparently felt that she was in the stronger position.

  Hemingway became irate when Hadley confronted him back in Paris. Yes, he was having an affair, he admitted, but then he turned the tables on Hadley: she was the one doing irreparable damage to the marriage by bringing it up. Everything would have been just fine if she hadn’t dragged it into the open—or at least, that was Hadley’s interpretation of his position. It is unclear whether he meant that the affair would simply have run its course, or that he would have been perfectly happy to continue enjoying the attentions of both a wife and a mistress. He swept out of the apartment while Hadley cried.

  The couple decided to stay together. Yet it became clear that Hemingway had no intention of excising Pauline from his life. Soon after the confrontation, Pauline sent a message to Hadley through Hemingway, requesting a woman-to-woman chat. Hadley declined. She had had quite enough of Pauline Pfeiffer’s invitations.

  Not long after the showdown, Hemingway boarded a train to Madrid. He and Hadley had planned another Spanish summer together, but when Bumby came down with a cough, Hadley stayed with him in Paris. Hemingway made the trip alone. Once in Madrid, he checked in at the Pensión Aguilar, his usual haunt. Filled with nervous energy, he began to write at breakneck speed, as he had the summer before. In one day alone he completed three short stories.

  “I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy,” he later recalled.

  The pension’s staff got into the spirit of his writing mania, sending fortifying food and wine up to his room. When Hemingway told the waiter that he was exhausted, the waiter looked at him with disapproval.

  “You tired after three miserable little stories,” he muttered.

  Other factors may have contributed to his exhaustion: Pauline had left Paris around the same time as Hemingway, ostensibly to visit relatives in Italy. Yet it has been speculated that she may actually have joined Hemingway in Madrid to get an abortion. Whether this was true or not, Hemingway’s personal life was in a state of upheaval as he anxiously waited for Perkins’s response to his manuscript of The Sun Also Rises.

  AFTER HEMINGWAY left for Madrid, Hadley took Bumby down to the Riviera: Sara and Gerald Murphy had offered to look after the child at their Antibes villa so Hadley could join Hemingway in Spain. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were already summering nearby.

  The Murphys’ fourteen-room house, Villa America, was perched on seven acres of land overlooking the “burnished blue-steel” of the Mediterranean, as Gerald Murphy put it. Terraced gardens cut across a hill that sloped gently down to the sea; the property teemed with mimosas. The sunbaked air smelled of heliotrope, eucalyptus, and tomatoes. Palms, lemon trees, and white Arabian maples rustled in the sea breezes.

  At first glance, life at Villa America seemed an unrepentantly opulent and celebrity-filled existence. Sara casually wore an opera-length pearl necklace to the beach; Rudolph Valentino, Cole Porter, and Pablo Picasso were frequent presences at the house. The Murphys’ sleek one-hundred-foot schooner, the Weatherbird, swayed in the waters offshore.

  Yet simplicity and a lack of pretension defined the Murphys’ existence. They avoided the ostentation of the aspiring and the nouveau riche; to their admirers, they seemed superior and thoroughbred. If the Fitzgeralds trafficked in decadence, the Murphys’ life was a study in wholesome luxury. Sara’s luncheons epitomized studied effortlessness: One day she might serve perfectly boiled potatoes with butter, muscadet wine, and bread. Another menu featured poached eggs with homegrown corn and tomatoes, served outdoors in the shade of a rustling linden tree. The couple could also be irreverent—especially Gerald, who liked to prepare canapés and offer them to the family’s dogs on Italian china before serving his human guests.

  “They would never be young again and they proposed to live well,” recalled poet and Murphy friend Archibald MacLeish. “But they knew how to live without throwing money around.”

  Even for Hadley, who hated being apart from Bumby during her travels with Hemingway, Villa America must have seemed a guilt-free place to deposit her little son for the summer: the place was a child’s paradise as well. The world of Villa America often centered on the Murphys’ three young children; Sara and Gerald seemed determined to give them the chicest and most whimsical childhood possible. The children spent much of the summer on the villa’s private beach, running naked under the Riviera sun. Their playmates often included some of Paris’s most celebrated creative figures. Once the Murphy children staged an art show which Picasso judged; another time, the Fitzgeralds held an elaborate treasure hunt for the children, including their daughter Scottie.

  Yet Bumby’s cough had become more pronounced by the time he and Hadley turned up at Villa America. Watching him play with their children on the beach, the Murphys grew alarmed and summoned their doctor. The prognosis was grim: whooping cough.

  The Murphys immediately exiled Bumby and Hadley from paradise. Luckily, they were able to move into a small house in Juan-les-Pins that the Fitzgeralds had rented but abandoned for a more lavish villa with its own beach. Gerald wrote to Hemingway in Madrid and tried to put a cheerful face on the banishment of his wife and son. Hadley would probably be far happier not having to listen to the shrieks of so many kids, he contended, and Bumby was under the care of a superlative English doctor and was getting fresh vegetables from the garden. Hemingway was not to worry; everything was under control.

  Bumby’s nanny hustled down to the Riviera from Paris; she, Hadley, and Bumby settled into an isolated sickroom routine in the little house. The Murphys and Fitzgerald kept “a grand distance from us poisonous ones,” Hadley reported to Hemingway, although the Fitzgeralds sent them necessities such as chicken, eggs, and roses. The Murphys also dispatched their chauffeur with provisions. Loneliness and uncertainty tormented Hadley, although a walk into town and a shot of whisky sometimes helped alleviate her unhappiness and stress.

  Soon, however, company arrived that likely made Hadley long for solitude again.

  “Pfeiffer is stopping off here Wednesday,” Hadley informed Hemingway in a letter.

  Hadley later indicated that she was bemused by Pauline’s sudden appearance on the Riviera, even claiming to one biographer that Hemingway had likely implored Pauline—who’d had whooping cough as a child and was immune—to go to Juan-les-Pins and alleviate the little family’s isolation. But on May 21 Hadley had actually written to her husband and told him that she’d invited Pauline “to stop off here if she wants,” adding that it would be a “swell joke on tout le monde if you and Fife and I spent the summer [together]” on the Riviera. She appeared to be making an effort to make light of the tricky romantic situation, although she may have invited Pauline out of fear that her rival might otherwise join Hemingway in Spain during her own absence. In any case, Pauline materialized on the Riviera and moved into the small house, with the stated purpose of giving Hadley some relief from her sickbed duties.

  “She’s sorry for me,” Hadley wrote to Hemingway. But the person Pauline was “really sorry for is Mr. Hemingway all alone in Madrid,” she added somewhat bitterly. “I’m sure that she will go on and make Madrid a place of pleasure instead of the awful strain of a place its been to you alone.”

  SOON HEMINGWAY joined them in Juan-les-Pins, setting the stage for what must have been one of the odder and more claustrophobic households in literary history. The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as “a splendid place to write.”

  Their collective plan was to remain on the Riviera for three weeks or so until Bumby recovered, and then take off for their usual jaunt to Spain, incl
uding the annual fiesta in Pamplona. The Murphys and Fitzgeralds welcomed Hemingway’s Riviera arrival with a little champagne party at a nearby casino. After that, the Hemingway ménage remained in quarantine at their house, but the Antibes crew insisted on bringing the ongoing party to them. Not exactly to their doorstep, but close: in the early evenings, the couples parked their cars on the road and hung out in front of the fence lining the small front yard of the Hemingways’ house. At the end of each outing, they mounted their empty bottles upside down on the fence spikes. By the time the Hemingways and Pauline left a few weeks later, these trophies ran the entire length of the fence, resembling a long colored-glass garland glinting in the Antibes sun. At these gatherings, the Fitzgeralds and Murphys had front-row seats to the Hemingways’ unconventional arrangement—or their “domestic difficulties,” as Zelda Fitzgerald put it.

  Beneath the show of camaraderie, antipathies sparked within the group, recalling the tense dynamic within the Pamplona entourage the summer before. Hemingway adored Sara but was less simpatico with Gerald. “[My father] was unable to go along with [Hemingway’s] ‘tough-guy’ lingo, as Archie MacLeish and John Dos Passos did,” recalled the Murphys’ daughter Honoria, describing that lingo as “consisting of short, punchy sentences and single-syllable words.” Gerald was a dandy, and both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suspected he was masking a “repressed homosexual streak,” as Murphy friend Calvin Tomkins puts it. Fitzgerald would needle Gerald with little barbs, asking him things like, “Why do you have such a passion for buckles?” It created an awkward distance between the men, although Gerald’s support of Hemingway’s talent never dwindled.

  The Murphys’ patience with the Fitzgeralds had also begun to fray by that summer. As their friendship progressed, the Murphys gradually realized that they had inadvertently added two more high-maintenance children to their brood. Scott’s behavior that summer pushed that friendship to its limit. Months earlier, Fitzgerald had extolled the calm, restorative qualities of the Riviera to Hemingway; he promised that it would be a spare, wholesome, joyous routine of work, swimming, sunbathing, and just two aperitifs a day.

  Instead, when Hemingway arrived, he found that Fitzgerald was drunk day and night. He was, another friend thought, “committing suicide on [an] installment plan.” Zelda later reported that a “sense of carnival & impending disaster [had] colored [the] summer,” although she was drinking a fair amount herself that season. The couple had been terrorizing the Riviera with their inebriated hijinks, which included kidnapping a bartender. Fitzgerald threatened to saw his hostage open to ascertain his contents; they would, Zelda predicted, include a jumble of pencil stubs and saucer shards, among other less choice objets. On another evening, driving home from dinner, the Fitzgeralds steered their car onto a train track and promptly passed out. Salvation arrived in the form of a passing peasant, who woke them up just before a train was about to plow into them. Fitzgerald’s misbehavior at Hemingway’s welcome party—he took to throwing ashtrays at other restaurant patrons—earned him a temporary banishment from the Murphy home. Exile was a terrible fate for Scott, who worshipped Sara.

  “We cannot—Gerald & I—at our age—& stage of life—be bothered with sophomoric situations like last night,” she chided him in a letter.

  Fitzgerald managed to plead his way back into Eden, but matters worsened when he openly began studying the Murphys as prototypes for his own roman à clef. He had decided that Sara and Gerald would be the stars of his next novel, which needed to be an even greater sensation than The Great Gatsby to solidify his reputation as an important new literary voice. Such consolidation was, after all, as crucial a step as making a splashy debut in the novel club; it was a requisite pressure that Hemingway would also have to look forward to. Fitzgerald eventually translated the Murphys into Dick and Nicole Diver, the glamorous but doomed protagonists of his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, and his interrogation of the real-life couple lasted for years beforehand. He quizzed them unabashedly about their finances, sex life, and family backgrounds. Sara and Gerald bristled under the glare of his spotlight, but still could not bring themselves to expel him permanently.

  “What we loved about Scott was the region in him where his gift came from,” said Gerald, adding that nothing ever managed to bury that realm completely.

  In the meantime, Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald continued to antagonize each other. In a reversal of accusations, Zelda now blamed Hemingway for encouraging Fitzgerald’s drinking and sabotaging his work. Yet Hemingway could do no wrong in Fitzgerald’s eyes. Zelda’s hatred did not budge him. Nor could the fact that their mutual friends were beginning to value Hemingway’s talents over Fitzgerald’s. To the Murphys, “Scott was a successful commercial writer,” says Calvin Tomkins. “They liked Gatsby, but [his work] didn’t hit the contemporary note in the way that Hemingway’s did. Hemingway’s came like a blast out of the zeitgeist.”

  They were not the only ones who felt that way. “People watched Hemingway and watched what Hemingway was doing and cared deeply about it, as I did, and weren’t too much impressed by Scott,” recalled Archibald MacLeish, who was also on the Riviera that summer. “Scott doesn’t exist when you’re talking at the level of Picasso and Stravinsky.” But Hemingway was about to reach that stratum, and his peers sensed it.

  Yet no one sensed this more keenly than Fitzgerald, who continued to champion his friend through every phase of his nascent career. Not even the alcoholism that was siphoning off Scott’s precious store of vitality could change that. That summer, his skin had taken on a faintly greenish hue, despite the best efforts of the Riviera sun; dark circles ringed his eyes and nicotine stained his fingers. He had developed a paunch and a few nervous tics, and was sinking into a morass of non-productivity. While adversity seemed to spur Hemingway’s creativity, Fitzgerald’s was essentially grinding to a halt.

  “Scott is writing an amazingly good novel which goes so slow it ought to be serialized in the Encyclopedia Britannica,” Zelda complained to a friend.

  When Hemingway arrived in Antibes, Fitzgerald put aside his own work and turned his attention to Hemingway’s. Even Hemingway—not known for rewarding his early investors—would later remember with gratitude that Fitzgerald had, by this point, become “truly more interested in my career than his own.”

  By early June, Hemingway proudly reported to Perkins that Fitzgerald had read The Sun Also Rises and had claimed to like it, although Fitzgerald wrote privately to Perkins that his affection for the book came with “certain qualifications.” He disliked the character Brett Ashley, he reported, but that was probably because he didn’t “like the original”—meaning the real-life Duff Twysden. Furthermore, he felt that Hemingway had “bit off more than can yet be chewn” with Jake’s impotence; he had “lost his nerve a little” with the theme. Yet Scott implored Perkins to treat Hemingway gently.

  “Do ask him for the absolute minimum of necessary changes, Max,” he wrote. “He’s so discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors.”

  Fitzgerald, however, had also handed Hemingway his own critique of The Sun Also Rises, and it was anything but gentle. If Hemingway had chided Sherwood Anderson for “slopping,” he was about to get some of his own medicine back in kind. After reading the manuscript, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Hemingway, urging him to excise what he saw as mediocre flourishes and push himself to the next level. Parts of the book were “careless” and “ineffectual”; Fitzgerald reported that he couldn’t even abide the novel until he was some thirty pages deep.

  “Ernest I can’t tell you the sense of disappointment that beginning with its elephantine facetiousness gave me,” he wrote.

  All of that preamble material skewering the Quarter was the stuff of guidebooks, not literature, he scolded. It amounted to a petulant squall. Few readers would be curious or dedicated enough to stick with a novel that limped through its introduction; Hemingway needed to sharpen the hook. As it stood, the beginning of The
Sun Also Rises seemed an amateur effort riddled with “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings-at-nothing.” It might have been cranked out by celebrity writer Michael Arlen—an accusation practically guaranteed to motivate Hemingway to scissor up those early chapters.

  “I go crazy when people aren’t always at their best,” Fitzgerald added somewhat apologetically.

  It was essentially a more benevolent echo of the quality-control explanation Hemingway had offered Anderson. Yet unlike The Torrents of Spring—an after-the-fact, disdainful public rebuke—Fitzgerald’s critique lacked malice. Rather, it may have been the only tough-love missive an editor or another writer ever dared to send Hemingway, and it could not have been a more crucial element in cementing the success of Hemingway’s launch as a major author. Fitzgerald offered a detailed list of suggested edits. The instructions took on an athletic tenor, as though Fitzgerald were coaching a promising young pitcher before his major-league debut. Hemingway was not the only talented player vying for that opportunity, Fitzgerald reminded him.

  “When so many people can write well + the competition is so heavy I can’t imagine how you could have done these first 20 [pages] so casually,” he said.

  The usurped, lengthy background about Lady Brett needed to be axed. Hemingway provided everything a reader needed to know about the character later in the manuscript, Fitzgerald argued; ditto for Hemingway’s “shopworn” ruminations about the postwar English aristocracy. Fitzgerald also noted that a few real-life characters still lingered in the book’s pages under their real names. This was a “cheap” device, he admonished, especially if those personages were “somebod[ies].” Anything that gave the novel a feeling of “This is a true story ect.” needed to disappear right away. Lest all the edits demoralize or anger Hemingway, Fitzgerald offered encouragements throughout the letter. These elements had to be shaved away, he advised, to showcase the book’s inherent brilliance.