Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “Remember this is a new departure for you, and that I think your stuff is great,” he added. “The novel’s damn good.”

  It was a dignified, noble letter, which showed Fitzgerald’s intense desire to see Hemingway succeed. It also revealed the depth of Fitzgerald’s devotion to the craft of writing, and how much he wanted to see Hemingway elevate that craft in a bold new way. To his mind, the status that he and Hemingway craved must not come as a result of commercial drivel masquerading as literature, à la Michael Arlen. It must come from innovation and virtuosity. Fitzgerald had no interest in watching Hemingway make an imperfect debut and then call him out afterward. Rather, he wanted to see him soar from the beginning.

  It is unclear how Hemingway felt upon receiving Fitzgerald’s advice, but in any case, he immediately adopted it. Tolerating feedback from Kitty Cannell was one thing, but heeding suggestions from F. Scott Fitzgerald was another matter. The proposed edits just happened to dovetail perfectly with Hemingway’s own omission theory. Right away he informed Perkins that he was cutting the first two chapters, although he implied that the edits had been his own idea.

  “I think it will move much faster from the start that way,” he wrote. “Scott agrees with me.”

  He explained that Fitzgerald had suggested various elements to cut out of those chapters, but that he himself felt it best just to lop off all of the initial material. He had never been that fond of it in the first place, he reported. The book would now begin with an introduction to Robert Cohn—Loeb’s character—and his background, and dive straight into the Paris part of the narrative. Fitzgerald would probably be writing to Perkins separately, he advised, to tell him of his great excitement about “the book in general.”

  Fitzgerald never took any public credit for his contributions to The Sun Also Rises that summer in Antibes. A decade later, he downplayed his role, stating that he and Hemingway used to throw all sorts of advice at each other, some that stuck and some that did not.

  “The only effect I ever had on Ernest was to get him in a receptive mood and say let’s cut out everything that goes before this,” he told writer John O’Hara. “And so he published it without that and later we agreed that it was a very wise cut.”

  With characteristic wryness, he added, “This is not literally true and I don’t want it established as part of the Hemingway legend.”

  That said, Hemingway did privately appreciate Fitzgerald’s input and told him so. Later that fall, he wrote to Fitzgerald, informing him that he had figured out an appropriate way to express his gratitude. He had instructed Scribner’s to amend the title, he joked, and add a subtitle or two to reflect Fitzgerald’s role in bringing the novel to its mature state. Henceforth, after the eighth printing, the cover of the book would read:

  THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE)

  A greater Gatsby

  (Written with the friendship of F. Scott FitzGerald

  (PROPHET OF THE JAZZ AGE)

  IT IS UNLIKELY THAT Maxwell Perkins would have appreciated the ribald joke. After all, he had been tasked with toning down the tawdrier aspects of The Sun Also Rises. Not only would the book’s casual sex and listless drinking rustle up objections from readers, booksellers, and the generally straitlaced from coast to coast, but also certain words and phrases dotting the manuscript made it inevitable that the novel would be banned in some precincts.

  Unlike Fitzgerald, however, Perkins edited the manuscript lightly and with conciliatory cheer. Toward the end of July, he sent Hemingway the proofs of the book. “I have hardly made a mark on it,” he promised, but immediately voiced wariness about the Fitzgerald-mandated cuts. He understood that axing Lady Brett’s unconventional background was in keeping with Hemingway’s “method,” but worried that it might place an unnecessary burden on readers.

  “Your way of writing will be new, and in many cases strange,” he reminded his author, adding that mainstream readers unfamiliar with his work might welcome the padding and hand-holding of those early chapters as they adjusted to the Hemingway world.

  Hemingway stood his ground. The book was much better without all of that, he thought. “After all if I’m trying to write books without any extra words I might as well stick to it,” he wrote to Perkins. He conceded in a later letter that it was a shame to lose some of that “very good dope on Brett,” but added that retaining the dope would compromise the overall artistry of the novel.

  The first scenes stayed on the cutting-room floor. Perkins acquiesced but remained nervous about the decision; a few months later he circled back and gingerly suggested the insertion of a foreword or prologue reinstating some of the more sympathetic material about Lady Brett, in a bid to “make one understand her better in the end.” On the one hand, the inevitable stir that this character was bound to provoke would create valuable publicity around Sun, but on the other hand, widespread suppression of the book on moral grounds, as with James Joyce’s Ulysses, would likely hurt sales. Hemingway demurred once again. Brett’s borrowed background would filter into the novel, like clues to a riddle, and that was that. (And when it came to moral objections about Brett’s carnal activities, as Hemingway pointed out later to Pound, at least “all the fucking takes place off the stage as in Shakespeare.”)

  On other issues Perkins was more tenacious. The Sun Also Rises seemed riddled with potential lawsuits, he argued. He came back to the Henry James reference: Hemingway needed to cut it.

  “Henry James is . . . as dead as he will ever be,” Hemingway protested to Perkins, adding that James had left no descendants to offend with this bit of dialogue; therefore a libel suit was not an issue. Anyway, it was well known that James had suffered such an accident, he argued.

  Perkins would not give up. James might be dead, but he was still a living memory for many people in the literary community. “There are four right in this office who were his friends,—two his close friends,” he wrote. In the end, Perkins prevailed; Hemingway offered to change the name to “Henry or Whatsisname—whichever seems best to you.” In the published version, Bill Gorton would refer to him only as “Henry”; readers familiar with this supposedly ubiquitous story of the Henry James bicycle incident would know who he was talking about.

  The editor cited legal reasons for other cuts: Hemingway had included an anecdote about the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc in the opening passages. “An Englishman will actually sue for libel at the slightest provocation,” Perkins advised his author, adding that the British felt “a right to privacy, unknown in the U.S.A.” That said, Perkins never addressed any potential violations of the privacy of Lady Duff Twysden, who was as British as one could get. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway had alerted Perkins to the fact that Lady Brett Ashley was based on a real person. That fall, Hemingway admitted to Perkins that the biography was “not imaginary”: he had drawn a “girl” he knew “so close to life that it makes me feel very badly,” but added that his guilt was assuaged by the fact that he suspected she never actually read anything.

  Nor did Perkins and Hemingway discuss the privacy of Harold Loeb or Donald Stewart—both of whom ran in the same New York literary circles as Perkins. Rather, the quibbles between editor and author continued to center on figures at the novel’s fringes, and in the end, most were snipped away or assigned fictitious monikers. If Perkins had any concerns about the fact that the book’s major characters were blatantly based on recognizable people, he did not bring it up. The pseudonyms assigned to them presumably provided sufficient legal cover for the publisher, and that was what mattered. Hemingway certainly deemed them adequately “protected,” as he put it to Perkins.

  Finally, there was the issue of obscenity. Perkins understood Hemingway’s need to be modern and authentic, but words like “bitch” and “balls” presented a problem. Here Perkins cleverly blamed the provincial reading public.

  “It would be a pretty thing if the very significance of so original a book should be disregarded because of the howls of a lot of cheap, pru
rient, moronic yappers,” he argued.

  He added that Hemingway had lived in Europe for so long that he had likely forgotten how huffy Americans could get about such things. In response, Hemingway launched into a defense of the word “bitch” that would have impressed Plato in its persuasiveness and also pleased Chaucer, for it offered up the comparative acceptability of the word “fart” in literature. “I have never once used [the] word [bitch] ornamentally nor except when it was absolutely necessary,” Hemingway argued, “and I believe the few places where it is used must stand.” One should never use such words simply for shock value, he added; that would be distracting. For example, he pointed out, the word “fart” would overpower any page that it graced, “unless the whole matter were entirely rabelaisian.” Even though it was a “very old and classic English word for the breaking of wind,” a writer simply could not use it. Hemingway would cut any profane words that he felt were gratuitous, he promised, but “bitch” was not one of them.

  “Balls,” however, proved negotiable. Regarding the scene in which Mike Campbell yells repeatedly at Pedro Romero, “Bulls have no balls”—retained from Hemingway’s earliest draft of the novel—Hemingway made a chaste amendment: the Pamplona bulls remained virile but now had “no horns.” But that was as far as Hemingway was willing to go.

  “Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred,” he wrote to Perkins.

  Perkins accepted these concessions and made his peace with “bitch.” It was, after all, a clinical mammalian noun, despite its undeniably slangy application in the novel. He showered Hemingway with deferential apologies.

  “I know you would not use a syllable except for the right purpose,” he wrote, adding that he was sorry he had even brought it up. He had known Hemingway only briefly, but already he was sure of his author’s writerly character.

  “You would not,” he stated, “stoop to sensationalism.”

  A CERTAIN FORMALITY prevailed between Perkins and Hemingway, who still addressed their letters to “Mr. Perkins” and “Mr. Hemingway.” It is unsurprising, then, that in their summer missives about The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway declined to mention that his personal life had taken on the character of a tornado.

  Back in Antibes, the Hemingway-Pauline ménage moved out of the Fitzgeralds’ house into a hotel. Bumby and his nanny were stashed away in a little house on the grounds, while the Hemingways and Pauline took rooms in the hotel itself. The trio had settled into an odd, forced idyll, filled with group activities: bridge games (which Hadley loathed), bike rides à trois, and daily beach visits (during which Pauline gave Hadley diving lessons that nearly killed her reluctant student). Pauline’s ubiquity infuriated Hadley, but she felt helplessly at a disadvantage and submitted to all sorts of intrusions. Once, when the nanny brought the Hemingways a breakfast tray in their bedroom, Pauline reportedly followed her in and crawled into bed with the couple, ready to dine as well.

  Not only was she overwhelmed by Pauline’s brazenness; Hadley began to feel that her enemies now extended to the Murphys, who she suspected were rooting for Pauline to prevail in the contest for her husband. Her intuition was correct. During the first part of that summer, the Murphys treated Hadley kindly and even praised the marriage.

  “As for you two children: you grace the earth,” Gerald informed Hemingway. “You’re so right: because you’re close to what’s elemental. Your values are hitched up to the universe.”

  But weeks later, the Murphys revealed to Hemingway that they had felt all along that Hadley was “miscast” as Hemingway’s wife. They liked her personally but sensed that she and Hemingway had been destined for different things.

  As she observed her circumstances that summer, it must have dawned on Hadley that Hemingway had already made the choice between her and Pauline, and that the decision carried a weighty symbolism. There on the Riviera, surrounded by their new friends’ beautiful villas, with her husband’s fashionable mistress perpetually on hand, it must have become painfully clear that Hemingway had moved on. They were already in the physical world of his future—a glaringly bright, illustrious realm far away from the naïve, hungry aspirations of their carpenter’s loft in Paris. Hemingway and Hadley were no longer allies defying the idle, ignorant rich while taking refuge in the joys of a warm bed, simple food, and uncomplicated love. Her shabbiness used to exude a certain nobility; now it just appeared unseemly and inappropriate. Suddenly she was a problematic character in the fast-paced narrative of her husband’s life, one that would have to be fixed—or omitted. And Hemingway had already made other ruthless editorial cuts that summer.

  Neither personal nor professional entanglements could keep Hemingway from the San Fermín fiesta. A new entourage in tow—this year consisting of the Murphys, Pauline, and Hadley—he descended upon Pamplona in early July with his usual vigor. By this time, the Hemingway-led tours of the fiesta were becoming well known in certain circles. They were now well-scripted events: the entourage stayed at the Hotel Quintana, where Hemingway communed with the bullfighters. General giddiness was mandatory, as were shenanigans involving wineskins.

  Seeing the fiesta with fresh eyes, the Murphys were floored by the spectacle. Hadley, however, had seen it all before, except this year she was being eclipsed by Pauline instead of Duff Twysden. This time around, Hemingway goaded Gerald Murphy into the bullring during the morning amateur sessions. Just as Harold Loeb had taunted a bull with his ill-fated sweater the summer before, Gerald used his raincoat as a cape and narrowly evaded a charging bull.

  In the previous fiestas, Hemingway had exulted in going native, melding with the masses of Basque peasants and conferring confidentially with Juanito Quintana about the merits of the latest crop of bullfighters, while disdaining other American interlopers who dared to join the festivities. This year he courted the spotlight more aggressively. He finally succeeded in becoming the star of amateur hour. One morning, when he and Gerald were in the ring, Hemingway provoked a bull into charging him.

  “He had absolutely nothing in his hands,” Gerald recalled. “Just as the bull reached him, he threw himself over the horns and landed on the animal’s back, and stayed there, facing the tail.”

  The bull wobbled along and then collapsed, squashed beneath Hemingway’s weight.

  On another occasion, the Murphys found themselves surrounded by a crowd of Spaniards, who began chanting, “Dansa Charles-ton! Dansa Charles-ton!” Bewildered at first, the Murphys then demonstrated the new dance right there in the middle of the main square, accompanied by a brass band and a raucous crowd. They later discovered that Hemingway had put the Spaniards up to it.

  Amidst the festivities, both of Hemingway’s women grew increasingly unhappy. Across the table at the Café Iruña, Hadley noticed that her rival had begun to look distinctly forlorn. When the festival was over, Pauline decamped back to Paris and the world of Vogue; the Hemingways left for San Sebastián, where Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, went to lick his wounds after his own dizzy nightmare of a fiesta. If Hadley had been hoping to do the same, she was given no such respite. Pauline made sure that her presence was felt from afar. Her letters trailed the Hemingways as they moved on to Valencia.

  “I am going to get everything I want,” she wrote in one particularly audacious missive. “Please write to me. This means YOU, Hadley.”

  That letter may have struck a definitive blow. Somewhere on their post-Pamplona tour through the country, Hemingway and Hadley decided to separate. “[It is] an awfully hopeless business to lose someone you’ve been in love and made your life with,” he wrote woefully to a friend. “It’s one of the swell things especially reserved for all of us.” The Hemingways planned to return to Paris and scout out separate homes.

  On their way back, they stopped at the Villa America in Antibes to tell the Murphys the news. Their Riviera group had expanded: Donald Ogden Stewart had come back to Europe, a new bride at his side a
nd flush with the successes of the past year. He was a big shot back in Los Angeles now; his bachelor party had been attended by Hollywood royalty like Charlie Chaplin and King Vidor. Yet Stewart divined an equally potent air of imminent celebrity gathering around Hemingway, foreseeing that The Sun Also Rises was about to make “his name known in twenty-five countries.”

  Everyone professed dismay about the Hemingways’ breakup, although the Murphys were quick to help Hemingway jump-start the next phase of his life. Gerald offered up money and his painting studio as possible living quarters; he threw in an opinion that differed starkly from the homage to the Hemingway union he’d given earlier that summer. “Hadley’s tempo is a slower and less initiative one than yours,” he wrote to Hemingway. Sticking with her and Bumby would have been “a dangerous betrayal of your nature.” In a later missive, he assured his friend that both he and Sara “believe in what you’re doing, in the way you’re doing it.” Sara added at the bottom of the note how much she admired Hemingway’s refusal “to accept any second-rate things places ideas or human natures.”

  Decades later, Hemingway would rebuke the Murphys for having abetted his “evil” decision to leave Hadley (“I had hated these rich because they had backed me and encouraged me when I was doing wrong,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast), but at that moment, he accepted Gerald’s hospitality. He and Hadley took a train back up to Paris. Afterward Hemingway would almost immediately write a story titled “Canary for One,” in which a soon-to-separate couple makes a similar journey, witnessing all sorts of scenes of destruction along the way, including a telltale three-car wreck. Apparently no experience was off-limits when it came to his art. It seems symbolic that the Hemingways’ last journey together as husband and wife ended at the Gare de Lyon, where Hadley had lost Hemingway’s starter novel three and a half years earlier.