Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Hadley never returned to their sawmill apartment again. She took rooms at the Hôtel Beauvoir, across the street from her husband’s home café, La Closerie des Lilas, where he had spent so much time teaching himself to write in spare, hard sentences and simmering with ambition for the moment that was finally about to arrive. Hemingway moved into Gerald Murphy’s Montparnasse studio at 69 rue Froidevaux, a few blocks from the Dingo, the Select, and the Dôme.

  As ever, work proved a tonic. He began his near-final revisions on The Sun Also Rises, which included some that Perkins had assigned and a very important one of his own. That spring, in the throes of a more buoyant mood, he had dedicated the book to Bumby and added an irreverent line describing the book as a “collection of Instructive Anecdotes.” Now in a more somber frame of mind, he changed the dedication. In a letter to Perkins, Hemingway advised his editor that he wanted the dedication to read:

  TO HADLEY RICHARDSON HEMINGWAY

  AND TO JOHN HADLEY NICANOR HEMINGWAY

  He then crossed this out and replaced it with

  THIS BOOK IS FOR HADLEY

  AND FOR JOHN HADLEY NICANOR

  The revised dedication managed to be both poignant and brutal. At first glance, the use of first names only implied a loving intimacy between a husband and a wife who had supported him from the beginning. This was appropriate: the publication of The Sun Also Rises should have been Hadley’s triumph as well. Besides Hemingway himself, no one had sacrificed more to help bring it to fruition. Hadley had been an unconditional stalwart since the earliest days of his career, when limitless ambition and a gift for cynical intuition were the chief items on his résumé. She had cheered her fiancé as he spun out idea after idea for the book that might someday put him in the same pantheon as someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald—then a golden-boy stranger staring out at the Hemingways from newspapers, magazines, and best-seller lists. Writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound had still been remote, fabled figures trying to incite a revolution in a faraway city across an ocean. Even as Hemingway began attracting those figures as mentors, Hadley had supported him when he gave up journalism to perfect the style that would surpass those mentors’.

  Now, on the eve of the Hemingways’ epic and hard-earned victory, it appeared that another woman would be taking Hadley’s place at her husband’s side. Suddenly Hadley was no longer even a Hemingway: all it had taken was a quick swipe of the hand to scratch a line through her surname, bringing an abrupt, symbolic end to that half decade of marriage and king-making. Unlike Fitzgerald’s character Jay Gatsby, Hemingway had no interest in sentimentalizing the past, at least not at that moment. The darkest hours of the night were behind him. He would not be looking back.

  A new era was dawning, and he was watching the sun rise.

  Ernest and Hadley Hemingway on their wedding day, Horton Bay, September 3, 1921. The couple originally planned to go to Italy afterward, until writer Sherwood Anderson instead convinced them that Paris was the place for ambitious young creatives.

  A popular writer in the 1920s, Anderson was immediately impressed by young Hemingway when they first met in Chicago in 1921. “I think he’s going to go someplace,” he told mutual friends.

  Hemingway’s 1923 passport photo. For the young journalist and writer, his trip to Paris was just the beginning of his travels: the Toronto Star and other news services would soon send him all over Europe on important stories.

  The newlyweds in Switzerland, 1922.

  Le Dôme café in Paris’s Montparnasse, the nerve center of the 1920s expatriate colony. Anyone who wanted to broadcast a salacious bit of gossip, show off a new mistress, or brag about selling a new novel did so at the Dôme; word then ricocheted through the crowd with satisfying speed.

  Deemed “the acknowledged leader of the modern movement” in the Paris expat colony, Ezra Pound first met Hemingway in early 1922 and became his mentor. “Make it new” was one of his mantras, and he often wore a scarf stitched with the phrase.

  Experimental writer and salon hostess Gertrude Stein also took Hemingway under her wing soon after he arrived in Paris. Her commanding physique and outsized persona earned her an array of nicknames around the Left Bank: “the Sumerian monument,” “the great god Buddha,” and perhaps most amusingly, “the Presence.”

  American expatriate Sylvia Beach, publisher and proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, a popular Left Bank bookstore, lending library, and salon. To her, Hemingway looked marked for success: “He seemed to me to have gone a great deal farther and faster than any of the young writers I knew,” she later wrote.

  Hemingway at Shakespeare and Company shortly after his arrival in Paris, in a photo taken by Sylvia Beach.

  Robert McAlmon, proprietor of the Contact Publishing Company, a boutique press and Hemingway’s first book publisher. Acid-tongued and openly bisexual, McAlmon seemed an unlikely collaborator for Hemingway; the men locked horns almost immediately but still brought their project to fruition.

  Robert McAlmon and Hemingway in Spain, 1923. Hemingway had been nursing a growing fascination with bullfighting and was eager to behold the spectacle in person. McAlmon footed the bill for the excursion.

  McAlmon and Bill Bird in Spain, 1923. Hemingway and McAlmon were joined on their trip by Bird, an expat journalist and publisher who had also just founded his own small book press in Paris. For an ambitious new writer in search of a publisher, these were most promising travel companions. By the end of the trip, both men had agreed to release books by Hemingway.

  When the Hemingways returned from their ill-fated fall 1923 foray to Toronto, they moved into a flat at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The apartment overlooked a lumberyard and sawmill, but anything was tolerable after the misery they had experienced in Canada. Here Hemingway stands outside the building in 1924.

  British novelist and editor Ford Madox Ford, who had just joined the Paris colony when Hemingway returned from Canada. Ezra Pound arranged for Hemingway to become deputy editor of Ford’s new literary magazine, the transatlantic review. Ford was so taken by Hemingway’s writing that he pledged to “publish everything [Hemingway] sent me,” although Hemingway would prove less enthusiastic about his new colleague.

  Hemingway and his son Jack “Bumby” Hemingway, likely in late 1924 or early 1925.

  Café patrons at La Closerie des Lilas, which became Hemingway’s de facto office. He found it sufficiently removed from the raucous, posturing crowds up the street at the Dome. At the Closerie, “no one was on exhibition,” he later wrote with approval.

  Harold Loeb in a portrait by Man Ray—a court photographer of the Paris expat creative elite. A descendant of two of New York City’s richest and most prominent Jewish families, Loeb met Hemingway at a party in 1924 and grew to hero-worship him. “I relish[ed] his spontaneity, his zest for living,” he later recalled.

  Kathleen “Kitty” Cannell: American expat fashion correspondent, popular girl-about-town, and Harold Loeb’s lover. She and Hemingway disliked each other upon first sight; she deemed him volatile and weak with anti-Semitic tendencies, and later claimed that she had repeatedly told Loeb about her misgivings to no avail. Hemingway would register his displeasure with her in a far more permanent way.

  A best-selling author and one of the quickwitted members of New York’s notorious Algonquin Round Table, Donald Ogden Stewart met Hemingway in Paris and immediately concluded that “he seemed to be my kind of guy.” He soon revised his opinion. “When Ernest was enthusiastic about something it was extremely dangerous to resist anything, especially friendliness,” he learned.

  Horace Liveright was not exactly a conventional publisher; his fellow publishers deemed him a glamour-seeking charlatan, a reckless upstart, and an outrageous interloper. In the year this portrait was taken—1925—Liveright would become Hemingway’s first commercial American publisher.

  In 1925, Hemingway met Vogue writer and heiress Pauline Pfeiffer. Unlike Hadley, Pfeiffer worshipped at the altar of fashion. At first, she and Hemingway
made poor impressions on each other: he would rather have taken her sister Virginia “out in Pauline’s coat,” he declared, while she found him repellent and slovenly. Soon enough, however, they discovered each other’s more charming qualities.

  Wealthy and attractive hosts Sara and Gerald Murphy stood at the apex of Paris’s creative scene. Their dinner guests on any given evening might include Picasso, Cole Porter, or Douglas Fairbanks. They quickly detected Hemingway’s nascent genius and became enthusiastic supporters of his career. They are pictured here on the beach of their villa in Cap d’Antibes.

  Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith turned up empty-pocketed in Paris just in time to tag along with Hemingway and his illustrious expat friends to the fateful 1925 Pamplona fiesta. He had a gift for cynical wisecracks—an attribute that Hemingway had spent years observing and would soon advertise to much of the literate world.

  Maxwell Perkins, an editor at the prestigious publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins may have been a Harvard-educated blueblood, but he was also shrewd when it came to discerning modern publishing trends and wrangling vanguard talent. “Perkins would have been great at Vanity Fair,” said Charles Scribner III. “He had a commercial streak to him.”

  When Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, in 1925, Fitzgerald was at the zenith of his fame. “Poor Scott was earning so much money from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it,” recalled Sylvia Beach. He had already become Hemingway’s champion behind the scenes and would soon put more effort into boosting Hemingway’s career than nurturing his own.

  Hemingway and his entourage at a café, taken during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, July 1925. Nearly everyone at the table would soon be translated into thinly veiled characters in Hemingway’s breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises. From left to right, the individuals along with their Sun pseudonyms: Hemingway (“Jake Barnes”), Harold Loeb (“Robert Cohn”), Lady Duff Twysden (“Lady Brett Ashley”), Hadley Hemingway, Donald Ogden Stewart (“Bill Gorton”), and Patrick Guthrie (“Mike Campbell”). Hadley was mentioned briefly in some preamble material, but did not make the leap to the actual manuscript. Not pictured: Bill Smith.

  Harold Loeb’s moment of glory during the amateur fights at the 1925 Pamplona fiesta. At least one New York City newspaper ran this image, much to the amusement of Loeb’s family.

  Not to be outdone, Hemingway managed to catch hold of the bull’s horns and wrestle it to the ground. Yet despite this Herculean feat, Loeb was the king of the ring that day: the locals were in awe of the first man (or the first foreigner, anyway) in living memory who had ridden a bull’s head, and they treated Loeb like a hero.

  Cayetano Ordonez, the 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. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway translated Ordonez into “Pedro Romero” and ultimately made him the book’s hero.

  Hadley Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer during the winter of 1925—26, when Pfeiffer had joined the Hemingways for a skiing holiday at Schruns, an Austrian mountain town. Hemingway became torn between the two women: “One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both,” he later wrote.

  Dorothy Parker: influential critic, author, poet, and barb-tongued queen bee of the Algonquin Round Table. Hemingway met her in February 1926 when he traveled to New York City to break ties with Boni & Liveright and sign with Charles Scribner’s Sons. Parker was captivated by Hemingway; she even impulsively decided to join him on his ocean voyage back to Europe, and would long remain a vocal supporter of his work.

  The 1926 Pamplona entourage. Seated at table, left to right: Gerald Murphy, Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway, and Hadley Hemingway. Soon after the fiesta, Hemingway and Hadley decided to separate. He would be married to Pfeiffer by the following year’s fiesta.

  An advertisement for The Sun Also Rises featuring an illustration of its author, whom Charles Scribner’s Sons wished to promote as heavily as the book itself. A drawing was being used instead of a photograph, Maxwell Perkins explained to Hemingway, because it was easier for publications to reproduce, and the publishing house wanted Hemingway’s youthful, chiseled visage to be as widely reproduced as possible.

  12

  How Happy Are Kings

  ONCE THE HEMINGWAYS returned to Paris, Hadley apparently got a second wind. Perhaps she wasn’t ready to surrender her husband to Pauline after all. He was susceptible to flattery, she felt; perhaps if he spent some time away from his adoring mistress, he might come to his senses. In one last flailing effort to salvage her marriage, Hadley delivered an edict to Hemingway and Pauline: if they could stay apart for three months, and they still found themselves in love after the separation, Hadley would allow Hemingway to move forward with a divorce.

  Hemingway and Pauline agreed to her terms. They decided that the best way to weather the period was for the two of them to spend those months on different continents. At the end of September, Pauline boarded an ocean liner, the Pennland, for New York. She was miserable, she reported back to Hemingway, but felt defiant and was determined to keep her eyes on the prize. She would even go three more months, if Hadley so decreed.

  As the days passed, however, Pauline’s patience thinned and despair began to sink in. While she felt bad for Hadley, she wrote to Hemingway, she was anxious to resolve the situation. The three-month separation must result in divorce. She instructed Hemingway to offer Hadley whatever she demanded in terms of a financial settlement.

  Back in Paris, Hemingway went underground. The pressure of the unresolved triangle and upcoming release of The Sun Also Rises was clearly taking its toll. He felt as if he had fallen to pieces, he wrote to Pauline, adding, “All I want is you Pfife and oh dear god I want you so.” He drank nothing, saw no one, and avoided his usual haunts in the Quarter.

  “Trying unusual experiment of a writer writing,” he wrote to Fitzgerald.

  He added that he was in hell and had been since the previous Christmas. It was a hell of his own making, he acknowledged, but hell nevertheless. Now he was trying to break out of it.

  “I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” he wrote, quoting a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. But then again, he wondered, “How happy are kings?”

  Six weeks into the separation from Pauline, he too plunged into despair. He suspected that Hadley would stall and extend the mandated period of separation. Maybe she wouldn’t give him a divorce at all. Maybe he should just commit suicide, he wrote to Pauline, to absolve her of the sin of breaking up a marriage and to spare Hadley the humiliation of a divorce.

  “I’d rather die now while there is still something left of the world than to go on and have every part of it flattened out and destroyed and made hollow before I die,” he told her.

  Meanwhile, oblivious to his author’s plummeting mood, Maxwell Perkins had begun prepping Hemingway for the big debut of The Sun Also Rises. He reported that sales for The Torrents of Spring had been modest, but added that Hemingway should not be discouraged. Anticipation about the novel was running high in New York.

  “You may not realize how highly you are regarded, how seriously, by those whose opinion as a rule prevails in the end,” he wrote.

  By September, The Sun Also Rises was ready to go into print. All in all, Perkins had edited it very lightly. He was satisfied that his minor tweaks had budged the novel into the realm of acceptability without sacrificing its titillating rawness.

  Hemingway instructed Perkins to place Gertrude Stein’s “You are all a lost generation” quote on the title page along with the “sun also ariseth” passage from Ecclesiastes. Perkins tried to oblige him, but the title page looked cluttered and awkward with so much text. He moved the epigraphs to their own page, on the back of the newly reworked dedication page. From there, the reader dove directly into the book’s text. The new
arrangement nicely highlighted the quotes, Perkins thought.

  “They gain an emphasis from standing alone,” he told Hemingway.

  Unlike Hemingway’s frazzled personal relationships at the moment, the one between him and Perkins seemed mercifully uncomplicated. As The Sun Also Rises was being readied for the Scribner’s presses, the men grew increasingly affectionate toward each other. By the middle of September, Perkins addressed a letter to “My dear Mr. Hemingway.” Jocularity and excitement abounded. Nothing in their communications betrayed the state of deep depression and anxiety into which Hemingway was sinking.