Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  DESPITE HEMINGWAY’S angst and self-imposed social isolation, he did make room for at least one outing during that time. Poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife gave a party one evening. Donald Ogden Stewart attended with his new wife, Beatrice; Hemingway also dropped by, a bit of his latest work in tow—a poem this time—ready to be shared with his friends. Its title: “To a Tragic Poetess.” In front of this audience, he began to read aloud.

  Oh thou who with a safety razor blade

  a new one to avoid infection

  Slit both thy wrists

  the scars defy detection

  Donald Stewart was aghast. The subject was clearly Dorothy Parker, who had tried to kill herself twice in the past three years. Hemingway read on, describing a recent tour of Spain taken by the tragic poetess:

  you sneered your way around

  through Aragon, Castille and Andalucia.

  Spaniards pinched

  the Jewish cheeks of your plump ass

  The subject of this poem then promptly returns to Paris, her “ass intact,” to turn out more poetry for The New Yorker. Parker had, indeed, gone to Spain after arriving in Paris with Hemingway and Benchley. Pretty much everything about the country—from its treatment of animals to the rump-pinching habits of Spanish men—had appalled her. In Barcelona, she had walked out of a bullfight after a bull gored a horse and declared that she found matadors disgusting. Once back in Paris, Parker had imparted these impressions to Hemingway, for whom such views amounted to sacrilege. The next forty-nine lines of his poem addressed the sacred scenes Parker had overlooked while sneering her way around the country. This sort of condescension and lack of talent for observation was why, the poem implied, Parker was and would remain a second-rate writer.

  It remains unclear what prompted Hemingway to create this devastating portrait at this moment, but perhaps it should have surprised no one that he had little sympathy for the self-inflicted wounds of a caustic and comparatively pampered urbanite. Still, the poem shocked Don Stewart, who later called it “viciously unfair and unfunny.” He could not discern a motive behind the attack, given that Hemingway was one of the few living artists who hadn’t suffered from one of Parker’s poison-pen reviews. He upbraided Hemingway on the spot.

  “No one else did,” Stewart recalled. “Not Archy [MacLeish] or anybody else. I’ve always been known as the easy guy, everybody’s Uncle Don, but I did tell him off that time, and of course you didn’t do that to Ernest.” He cringed, waiting for the retort.

  To Stewart’s surprise, Hemingway took his reprimand in stride. “Without a murmur,” actually, said Stewart, “which is some kind of record I suppose.”

  Still, in Stewart’s view, the incident ended their friendship. Not that they ceased to be friendly; as Stewart later explained, “We were always technical friends, but it was a different kind of friendship after that.” The poem had rattled him by revealing a “mean streak” in Hemingway that, to Stewart, seemed like “a booby trap kind of thing.”

  To the best of Stewart’s knowledge, Parker never learned about the existence of the poem, which remained unpublished until after her death; unaware of its existence, she continued to write wildly enthusiastic reviews of Hemingway’s work in The New Yorker and called him one of her favorite writers.

  HEMINGWAY HAD ALWAYS been a splendid target of gossip at the Dôme and beyond, and his split from Hadley—coinciding with Pauline’s sudden departure from Paris—piqued the interest of his attentive followers. Now alone, Hadley passed her mornings at La Closerie des Lilas, where she was inundated with nosy acquaintances who were “just dying of curiosity” about the whole situation. But late that October, an event across the Atlantic abruptly changed the conversation.

  On October 22, 1926, Charles Scribner’s Sons released 5,090 copies of The Sun Also Rises.

  Back in New York, Maxwell Perkins and Scribner’s were determined to make the novel’s debut a major event. Whatever misgivings the editorial team may have had about Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises, the house’s publicists were crazy about the project. Both novel and author gave them almost limitless material to work with; they peddled Hemingway and his book to everyone from highbrow critics to gossip columnists. Not only were they debuting another Scribner’s “bad boy,” but also this one was a new breed entirely: a hybrid of Parisian glamour, Alpine ruggedness, boxing-ring savagery, and yet, somehow, intellectual brilliance.

  “We have three publicity men in the house and all of them were particularly wild over your book,” Perkins wrote to Hemingway. “[They] have been ravenous for any kind of advertising material, and [are] anxious to go the limit.”

  The team quickly realized that they were onto something big. The press had an enormous appetite for Hemingway. Perkins implored his author to send the house “any kind of pictures there are of you.” The publicists would use anything they could get their hands on. Three days later Perkins wrote again, begging Hemingway for additional biographical information that could be pumped out to eager news editors and columnists.

  “Papers are glad to print almost anything we send about you,” Perkins reported excitedly, “and we are very hard put to it.”

  He even admitted to culling Hemingway’s letters to him for material, extracting a couple of incidents to feed the publicity beast. Hemingway obliged, sending a couple of photographs for reproduction and distribution, including an athletic shot taken in the mountains, a snowy background shimmering behind him. But he bristled at the request for more information.

  “I would rather not have any biography and let the readers and the critics make up their own lies,” he informed Perkins.

  This reticence may have been genuine, or it may have been strategic. As a new master of a less-is-more approach to literature, perhaps Hemingway felt that a little mystery might serve to augment his allure. That approach had worked with the characters in Sun, in his opinion—and Fitzgerald’s. Or he may have seen advantages in letting the press do its own storytelling, however embellished, when it came to presenting Hemingway the man. Publicity was publicity, after all.

  If this had indeed been Hemingway’s attitude, he seems to have quickly changed his mind. As a press clipping service began to send dozens of reviews and stories his way, he was unnerved to see that the papers were indeed making up their own lies. The New York Herald Tribune informed its readers that Hemingway had earned his way through college as a boxing instructor. (“I never went to college and have never told a living person that I went to college,” he protested to Perkins.) Another paper reported enthusiastically on Hemingway’s record as a star athlete in high school. (“I was a long way from being a football star,” he demurred.) Yet another source exaggerated the number of Hemingway’s progeny.

  Most alarmingly, however, Hemingway saw far-fetched stories about his wartime experiences, and he worried that, to those in the know, he would come across “as a faker or a liar or a fool.” He wanted to clarify that he had not been in the actual military; rather, he had been attached to the Italian infantry as a “very minor sort of camp follower.” He demanded to know if the Scribner’s machine had been responsible for any of these tall tales. If so, they needed to set the record straight, he decreed.

  That said, he promised to supply any juicy anecdotes that might further pique press interest.

  “If I break a leg or have my jewels stolen or get elected to the Academie Francaise or killed in the bull ring or drink myself to death I’ll inform you officially,” he added.

  Perkins investigated the matter and wrote a not particularly apologetic letter of explanation.

  First of all, he had discerned the possible source of at least some of the more outlandish Hemingway tales: apparently one of the in-house publicity men “had Scott [Fitzgerald] on the witness stand for a while.” And everyone knew that Fitzgerald was an expert at crafting exciting backgrounds for his characters. Perkins would certainly try to rein in the publicity team, but only with reluctance.

  “Of course it is right th
at they should want to do everything they possibly can to advertise an author,” he explained to Hemingway. If he held them back from doing so, it would feel as though he were “restraining a naturally good impulse.”

  Meanwhile, the Scribner’s advertising team launched a major print campaign promoting The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s obscurity was over at last.

  “We are preparing bigger advertisements than we have ever used on it,” Perkins informed Fitzgerald, who—as ever—was being kept in the loop about Hemingway’s in-house affairs.

  Like Perkins and the publicity team, the admen had been excited by the book and readily foreseen its saleability. This was, Perkins reported privately to Hemingway, both fortunate and significant. The admen were supposed to work equally hard for all Scribner’s titles, but the fact that they genuinely adored the book would inevitably inspire them to push it even harder. “They are not supposed to take their own predilections into consideration,” Perkins said of his former department. “[But] they of course do.”

  Scribner’s advertised the book heavily in the New York press, knowing that the city was a trendsetter for national appetites. Thanks to a half decade’s experience in marketing its new and even flamboyant postwar authors, Scribner’s ads were modern pitches for modern books. Conversational and irreverent, they foreshadowed the unsubtle, urgent voice of television commercials decades later. Fitzgerald’s early books had been forerunners: the Scribner’s ads had unrepentantly peddled both book and author as consumer products. This Side of Paradise was “more than a best-seller,” one ad had informed readers; it was a “national tonic.” The same ad advised consumers to “Make it a Fitzgerald Christmas.”

  The Scribner’s ad team even slyly exploited bad reviews for their entertainment value. Algonquin Round Table critic Heywood Broun had claimed that This Side of Paradise had left him “not only cold but baffled”; in turn, the Scribner’s team ran an ad blaring in oversized font that “HEYWOOD BROUN scoffs and snorts—” alongside five blurbs from other reviewers who found the book “cracking good stuff.” Readers were implored to read the book for themselves and decide.

  In both ad campaigns and publicity, Scribner’s relied heavily on what would today be called “FOMO”—or fear of missing out. Anyone who didn’t read the house’s latest books would be left behind, covered with dust and cobwebs. “The book is timely, most timely,” read one press release for another Scribner’s title. “You cannot afford not to read it.”

  The house went to equally great rhetorical lengths on behalf of The Sun Also Rises. Its sales team had already alerted booksellers that this debut novel would cross a literary Rubicon: its release would permanently change literature. The book “quiver[ed] with life” and had been penned in the “spirit of literary revolt.” Hemingway was clearly “disgusted” with the sentimentality of “certain popular novels.” (Never mind that some of those authors may also have been published by Scribner’s.) His novel was a different beast entirely.

  Taking its cue from the book’s epigraphs, the team pushed it as the tome encapsulating the voice of the “war generation too strongly dosed with raw reality . . . all illusions shattered, all reticences dissipated.” The Lost Generation was being ushered down the red carpet, brought to audiences by Hemingway, sponsored by Scribner’s. With unintentional irony, the house’s fall catalogue noted that the book’s characters were “so palpable that one . . . would recognize them upon the street.” Those who knew Twysden and Loeb and the other Sun victims would soon confirm the accuracy of this claim.

  As with the PR campaign, the advertisements rolled out Hemingway himself as an exciting character. In one ad, an image of his face (his expression pensive, intense) loomed larger than the text extolling his virtues as a writer. An illustration was being used, Perkins explained to his author, instead of a photograph because it was easier for publications to reproduce, and naturally the house wanted Hemingway’s youthful, chiseled visage to be as widely reproduced as possible.

  “With [this novel’s] publication Mr. Hemingway’s sun also will rise,” the house pledged.

  The ad team even trotted out Ford Madox Ford’s endorsement from the jacket of In Our Time, assuring readers that Hemingway was “the best writer in America of the moment.” Presumably the admen did not know at that point that a thinly disguised Ford was making a buffoonish appearance in the novel’s pages—or else they just didn’t care.

  Naturally, advertisements were placed in all of the major literary publications, from the Saturday Review of Literature to American Mercury to The Atlantic, but the ad team expanded its campaign to lifestyle and niche publications as well, from Christian Century to Golden Book to Town & Country. Ads were soon placed in regional papers and magazines from Chicago to Boston to Philadelphia. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton publications were also included. No demographic was to be ignored: everyone from students to debutantes to preachers would soon know about The Sun Also Rises and its author.

  Hemingway did not approve of all of the ways the house marketed the book. For example, he disliked the book’s cover, created by an artist who went by the pen name “Cleon,” whose work was featured on other popular Scribner’s books—including ones put out by both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The cover featured an image of a beautiful but somewhat beleaguered-looking woman, clad in golden Grecian-style garb and leaning closed-eyed, head against her knees, under a tree, an apple in one hand; a black sun rises behind her. Golden apples also flank the book’s title. Her sandaled feet rest on an unfortunate typo identifying Hemingway as the author of In Our Times instead of In Our Time.

  Yet Hemingway could kick up only a limited fuss: Scribner’s marketing campaign was substantial by any standard, but especially compared to Boni & Liveright’s tepid efforts for In Our Time. Perkins mailed some of the ads to Paris for Hemingway to peruse. The illustration of his face used in the ads was okay, Hemingway guessed; it was sort of how he had envisioned Jake Barnes. That said, it looked “very much like a writer who had been saddened by the loss or atrophy of certain non replaceable parts,” he wrote to Perkins. “It is a pity it couldn’t have been Barnes instead of Hemingway.”

  CRITICS ACROSS AMERICA immediately weighed in on the new novel. About a week after its release, Perkins steeled Hemingway for the first batch of reviews. The notices from the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune were the most important, he felt. Both editor and author must have been excited, then, when the Times reported that there had been a great deal of anticipation surrounding the book’s release: “This is the novel for which a keen appetite was stimulated by Mr. Hemingway’s exciting volume of short stories, ‘In Our Time.’” The New Republic echoed this sentiment: “No one need be afraid any more that Hemingway’s power is going to be limited to episodes.”

  More important, even the least enthusiastic reviewers conceded that The Sun Also Rises represented a stylistic tour de force. If Fitzgerald’s work was frequently described as “alive,” Hemingway’s was “fresh.” This once-promising new writer had suddenly sprinted ahead of the crowd and established himself as a young master of modern writing. The Herald Tribune review likely would have made Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein proud, and perhaps even envious. “It is alive with the rhythms and idioms, the pauses and suspensions and the innuendos and shorthands of living speech,” wrote the reviewer, Conrad Aiken. “‘The Sun Also Rises’ makes it possible for me to say this of [Hemingway], with entire conviction, that he is in many respects the most exciting of contemporary American writers of fiction.”

  The New York Times exulted in the book’s “lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.” The Sun Also Rises was an “event,” an example of magnificent writing. “No amount of analysis can convey [its] quality,” the reviewer contended, adding that the narrative itself was “absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, [and] heartbreaking.” The Saturday Review of Literature called Hemingway’s style “terse, precise, and aggressively fresh,” and added that The
Sun Also Rises contained “some of the finest dialogue ever written in this country.” Privately, influential critic Edmund Wilson wrote to Hemingway that his book was a “knockout,” and maybe even the best fiction yet conjured up by his generation of American writers.

  Soon a review came in from the Boston Evening Transcript. Perkins deemed the publication the most conservative newspaper in the country, so the critic’s response would be a litmus test. Rather than being scandalized by the book, the Transcript’s reviewer declared it a “beautiful and searching novel.” If he had gone overboard in its praise, the critic explained, “it is only because the book called it forth.” Furthermore, the review noted the debt that Hemingway’s writing owed to his training as a reporter: “With what mastery Mr. Hemingway has used his rather bare, journalistic style.” At first the “staccato sentences” were irritating, the reviewer warned, but one soon got used to them.

  The Algonquin crowd also contributed to the fanfare. Heywood Broun might have “scoffed and snorted” over Fitzgerald’s debut novel, but in his New York World review, he called The Sun Also Rises beautiful and truthful. Dorothy Parker later bolstered the growing Hemingway legend in The New Yorker by asserting that for weeks “you could go nowhere without hearing of ‘The Sun Also Rises.’” Some in her crowd, she reported, were already declaring it the great American novel, shunting aside classics like Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter.

  “The Stars and Stripes were reverentially raised over [Hemingway],” she informed her readers. “Eight hundred and forty-seven book reviewers formed themselves into the word ‘welcome,’ and the band played ‘Hail to the Chief’ in three concurrent keys.” So much brouhaha surrounded the novel’s debut that, she added affectionately, “I was never so sick of a book in my life.” (To Hemingway, she sent a private cable, celebrating his triumph: “BABY YOUR BOOK IS KNOCKING THEM COLD HERE ISN’T IT SWELL LOVE = DOTTY.”)