The Paris Tribune’s gossip column noted the emergence of a Hemingway “cult” on two continents, without noting that the Left Bank branch of that cult had been in the making for years.
There was, of course, blowback too—which was just as well, since controversy was, and remains, a reliable sales booster. Even Dorothy Parker conceded that members of the literary crowd either “hated [Sun] or they revered it.” Among the publications that found the book “without excuse,” as Parker put it, was the Springfield Republican. The “extreme moral sordidness” of The Sun Also Rises, contended the paper’s critic, defeated any sort of “artistic purpose” the author may have had. Furthermore, he added, the novel had no structure. Allen Tate of The Nation accused Hemingway of sentimentality despite his best efforts to appear hard-boiled. Even critics who liked the book’s style found Lady Brett and the Sun crowd repellent; all they ever did, complained one reviewer, was bathe, eat, and have sex—while drinking continuously. Another dubbed the cast of characters “spiritual bankrupts”; yet another called them “utterly degraded.”
The New Masses ran a review that must have felt like a kick in the crotch to Hemingway. John Dos Passos reduced his friend’s book to “a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.” It had been a mistake, he added, to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectations, which were not met by the story that followed. Dos Passos did concede, however, that the cock-and-bull story was well written.
Disapproving readers and organizations also noisily responded. Some protested directly to Scribner’s. A man from Sarasota called the book “coarse and uncouth as it can be,” adding that it was “a disgrace to [Scribner’s] good name.” He predicted terrible sales. A library committee in New Hampshire deemed the book “worse than worthless” and informed Scribner’s that it would be destroying its copy.
If all of this brouhaha about the immorality of The Sun Also Rises helped create an essential air of scandal around the book, the nastier reviews bothered Hemingway, who detested critics in general. Most of the reviews had been extremely laudatory, as Perkins pointed out to him; and they were saying all the right things about Hemingway’s revolutionary style. Still, the criticism stung him.
Pauline did her best to bolster his spirits from afar, echoing Perkins when she assured her lover that he was already being written about as a legendary character. She knew that she was now sharing her life with a public persona: already he had become known as Hemingway the Bull-fighter, Hemingway the Expatriate, and Hemingway the Satirist. As for Hemingway the Man and Hemingway the Artist, that Ernest was “perfect,” she assured him.
Yet he still could not get his detractors out of his mind. Though he was “his own severest critic,” as Sylvia Beach noted, he could be, she added, “hypersensitive to the criticism of others.” To Fitzgerald he compared criticism in general to “horse shit” but without manure’s pleasant smell. The fact that reviewers were making such a big deal about the unlikeability of his characters showed, to Hemingway, how useless and off-target most of them were. To Perkins he complained that such reactions seemed “very funny as criticism when you consider the attractiveness of the people in, say, Ulysses, the Old Testament, Judge [Henry] Fielding and other people some of the critics like.” (That said, he privately agreed with some of the assessments. The characters had been “smashed” by life and were “hollow and dull,” he admitted to a friend, “but that is the way they are.”)
Perhaps most frustrating to Hemingway, however, was the critics’ near-universal insistence on viewing the book through the prism of Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” quote. Review after review stated that Hemingway’s purpose had been to depict definitively his damaged generation, which was “stumbling through life like a man lost in the forest,” as one critic put it.
He quickly tried to backpedal from the “lost generation” web of his own weaving. Yes, the quote had elevated the book’s material and imbued it with profundity; Hemingway had not, after all, wanted this book to be a “jazz superficial story,” as he wrote to Perkins, in a barb likely aimed at Fitzgerald. But neither had he meant to create a tome detailing all that ailed his generation. Reviewers were misunderstanding his intentions, he complained crossly. Stein’s “lost generation” remark was merely “bombast,” and he had meant to lampoon its pomposity, not endorse it. Why weren’t critics taking their cue from the “sun also ariseth” Ecclesiastes quote? To Hemingway, the whole point of the book was that “the earth abideth for ever.” Wasn’t that obvious enough?
“Nobody knows about the generation that follows them and certainly has no right to judge,” Hemingway insisted. “I didn’t mean the book to be a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding for ever as the hero.”
Decades later, he was still protesting.
“Gertrude was a complainer,” he told a friend in the 1950s. “So she labeled that generation with her complaint. But it was bullshit . . . Nobody I knew at that time thought of himself as wearing the silks of the Lost Generation, or had even heard the label. We were a pretty solid mob.”
His protests notwithstanding, Hemingway was immediately anointed that contingent’s new spokesman. The phrase captured the popular imagination too completely. The Sun Also Rises suddenly seemed to have expertly pinpointed a certain postwar malaise that others may have keenly felt but been unable to describe—until Hemingway (and Gertrude Stein) did it for them.
Therefore, from October 22, 1926, onward, Hemingway would be cloaked in the Lost Generation’s silks in perpetuity—whether he had buyer’s remorse about the garb or not.
BEFORE HEMINGWAY REMOVED all real-life names from the manuscript, Maxwell Perkins had feared a potential lawsuit, and eventually a complaint did cross his desk. The legal representatives of a real-life Lady Ashley had found the use of her name for “the disreputable heroine” of The Sun Also Rises to be libelous. Perkins wrote to Hemingway and his British publisher about the matter, although he and Scribner’s attorney did not consider the complaint actionable, only amusing. This Lady Ashley’s lawyers had maintained that the complainant was a comely twenty-five-year-old, although Perkins had it on good authority that she was actually a fifty-something woman who lurked on the fringes of the theater world. If anything, perhaps the publishers could use the complaint to generate further publicity for the book.
“We offered to publish a statement that the Lady Ashley of the book was not the Lady Ashley of fact,” Perkins informed Hemingway, “which would make an excellent advertisement anyhow.” (Hemingway’s take on the matter: “She might as well try and sue Robinson Crusoe.”)
That particular Lady Ashley appears to have abandoned her cause; nor did the real-life inspiration behind Lady Brett protest to Hemingway’s publishers. But it did not take long for the actual prototypes—from Duff Twysden to Harold Loeb to Kitty Cannell—to learn, with red faces, of their appearance in Hemingway’s incendiary new novel. Hemingway had given them no advance warning; they simply had to read it along with everyone else in their world.
It did not matter that Scribner’s had not advertised in the Paris papers: The Sun Also Rises became an immediate scandal within the Left Bank crowd. For those who actually wanted to read the novel instead of merely gossip about it, Sylvia Beach was stocking copies at Shakespeare and Company. It became a topic of choice at many of the cafés and bars depicted in the book’s pages. Guessing the real-life identities of its characters might have made a good parlor game had Hemingway not made them so transparent. A more appropriate name for the novel, some joked, would have been “Six Characters in Search of an Author—with a Gun Apiece,” a riff on the title of the recent popular Pirandello play.
News of the Sun scandal went transatlantic as the press on two continents picked up the story. It was “the best thing that could have happened to Hemingway from the point of view of launching him into the selling brackets comparable to those of Fitzgerald,” noted writer and Montparna
sse memoirist Morrill Cody, who added that “everyone” had been talking about it from the moment of its debut. For Twysden and Loeb and the rest of the prototypes, “it was like somebody putting you on a billboard in Times Square,” as Hemingway friend A. E. Hotchner put it. Janet Flanner informed her New Yorker readers back in America that the “four leading characters” in Hemingway’s “roman à clef” were “local and easily identifiable.” She declined to give the real names of these characters but pointed out that “the titled British declassée and her Scottish friend, the American Frances and her unlucky Robert Cohn with his art magazine which, like a new broom, was to sweep aesthetics clean” could easily be found on any given day “just where Hemingway so often placed them at the Select.” Flanner did, however, state that it was safe to assume that Donald Ogden Stewart was the “stuffed-bird-loving Bill” (in reality, the character Bill Gorton harbored an affection for stuffed dogs, not birds), and that Ford Madox Ford was prancing through the book’s pages “under the flimsy disguise of Braddocks.”
Other press reports from the Quarter were somewhat less gleeful.
“Several well-known habitués of the Carrefour Vavin are mercilessly dragged through the pages” of the novel, noted the Paris Herald in its “Around the Town” column. The Sun Also Rises was “not very pretty reading,” but its contents were probably fairly accurate: Hemingway was “noted for being an observant journalist and for not respecting the feelings of friends.” The Saturday Review of Literature informed readers that not a single one of Hemingway’s characters could be credited with being the product of the author’s imagination (ditto for the events that inspired the plot), implying that the book was more an example of incisive reportage than fictional accomplishment.
There must have been a bit of schadenfreude within the colony over Hemingway’s character send-ups. At least one person found the Robert Cohn portrait to be shrewdly accurate.
“Like Cohn, [Loeb] was inclined to be tense, over-serious and humorless,” recalled Morrill Cody, who added that most Montparnassians thought Loeb took on “unjustified airs of superiority.” Yet Hemingway’s willingness to sacrifice him so publicly rattled others. “What a savage portrait!” exclaimed the Herald of Robert Cohn.
The Sun Also Rises stunned Harold Loeb. After the disappointing reception of his novel Doodab, he eventually left New York City and returned to Europe. By the time Hemingway’s novel came out, Loeb had made his way to the south of France in the company of a new paramour whom he later described as a waifish Dutch runaway. The couple was living in a farmhouse surrounded by artichoke fields as Loeb worked on another novel, to be titled Tumbling Mustard.
One day a package arrived; a friend had sent him a copy of The Sun Also Rises.
“The book hit me like an upper-cut,” he recalled later.
He scoured the book for passages about Robert Cohn. The “unnecessary nastiness” shocked him, as did the extensive co-opting of his personal background. It would have been just as easy, he reasoned, for Hemingway to have made changes to all of the characters’ biographies so he and the others weren’t so instantly recognizable. Why did Hemingway make the portraits so literal? Ritual humiliation? Yet for all the blatant similarities, Loeb found Cohn to be a gross distortion of himself, an “offensive characterization.” He simply could not understand, he said, “what had led my one-time friend to transform me into an insensitive, patronizing, uncontrolled drag.”
He was equally appalled that Hemingway had “travestied” the others—especially Duff Twysden, who came across as a “repugnant tramp,” in Loeb’s opinion. It was said that the book gave him an ulcer and also earned him nearly a decade on a shrink’s couch, although he later denied both allegations.
Rumors zinged throughout the Quarter that Loeb had returned to Paris looking for Hemingway, gun in hand. The news apparently delighted Hemingway.
“I sent word around that I would be found unarmed sitting in front of Lipp’s brasserie from two to four on saturday and Sunday afternoon,” he wrote to Fitzgerald. Anyone who felt like shooting him could do it then and there. “No bullets whistled,” he reported.
Later, Hemingway would improve on that story. In a new version of the tale, he claimed to have sent a telegram imploring Loeb to come find him at the Hole in the Wall, a notorious hangout for dope peddlers with a rear exit that supposedly led into the Paris sewers. Hemingway said that he’d selected the bar because mirrors covered its walls. “You can see whoever comes in the door and all their moves,” he explained. He claimed that he hunkered down there for three days, but the cowardly Loeb never showed up.
Loeb once again found it necessary to defend his honor against a probably embellished Hemingway Version of Events. “I never threatened to kill anyone,” he contended. “Nor did I get a telegram to meet him at the ‘Hole in the Wall’ or elsewhere.”
The two men did, however, encounter each other months later. According to the Loeb Version of Events, he had been sipping a Pernod at Brasserie Lipp when Hemingway strode in. He saw Loeb but didn’t approach him. Rather, he sat down at the bar with his back to Loeb and ordered a drink.
“I distinctly remember being amazed at the color of his neck,” Loeb recalled. “Red gradually suffused it—and then his ears, right up to their tips.” Eventually Hemingway paid for the drink and left; the men had not spoken. Loeb had been tempted to approach him but held back.
“I wanted nothing more to do with him,” he recalled.
The publication of The Sun Also Rises caught Duff at a particularly difficult moment. Her divorce from Sir Roger Twysden had finally come through, but her ex-husband retained custody of their young son. Plus, she and Pat Guthrie were on the rocks. By the winter following the novel’s release, Guthrie was living with an older woman, Margaret “Lorna” Lindsley, an American writer and journalist. Hemingway was still keeping tabs on the “demented characters out of my books,” as he called them, for he reported on the breakup to Fitzgerald. Duff was free at last, but Guthrie wouldn’t marry her because she had lost her looks, Hemingway claimed. Guthrie’s new relationship had a somewhat compulsory tenor to it, Hemingway went on. Lindsley had spared him a bit of jail time resulting from a bad check. As a result, she now had Guthrie by the balls, as she could “let him go to jail at any time.” So Guthrie was in a jail of a different variety.
By the way, Hemingway added, he had run into Duff the other night.
“She wasn’t sore about the Sun,” he claimed. In fact, her only objection had been that “she never had slept with the bloody bull fighter.”
This was likely another bit of Hemingway revisionism: Duff was actually said to have been furious about the book and deeply hurt by his portrayal of her. In the years that followed, she reportedly called the novel “cruel” and insisted that Hemingway had played a nasty trick on her and the others. In her opinion, the book was nothing more than an example of “cheap reporting.” The story Hemingway told Fitzgerald may have been accurate in one regard, however: Duff was appalled at having been romantically linked to a matador; she later told a friend that keeping company with bullfighters “would have been like being up to the arse in midgets.” Yet she apparently did find some grim humor in the situation: a year later, when an acquaintance stumbled upon Duff and Guthrie at the Dôme, she was calling Guthrie “Mike”—the name Hemingway had given him in The Sun Also Rises.
Though Duff managed to make light of the controversy in public, the intrusion of Lady Brett Ashley into her life seems to have created real fallout in her private affairs. Hemingway had been horribly indiscreet about airing her dirty laundry before her former in-laws, she felt. The British aristocracy can tolerate all sorts of misbehavior among its own, but indiscretion is not among the forgivable sins. It was alleged that the Twysden clan attempted to buy the plates from the publisher to prevent further printings, and, when unsuccessful in its bid, tried instead to buy as many copies as possible to keep the book from wide circulation. A member of the clan later denied these allegation
s, but Duff became, more than ever, persona non grata within the family, and she felt certain that Hemingway’s book had complicated her visitation rights. She was even said to be hatching plans to kidnap her child just to be able to see him again.
By the following summer, Duff had found new romantic company, and word went around the Quarter that her boyfriend—a slight artist named Clinton King, heir to a Texas candy fortune—had knocked Hemingway out over the Lady Brett portrait. Like the Loeb-with-a-gun story, the tale made for great retelling at the Dôme and the Dingo, but it didn’t carry a lot of credibility for those who knew the parties in question.
“I would have been one of the first to learn about it,” claimed Dingo barman Jimmie Charters, who joked that “Mr. Clinton King, bless his heart, [would have had] to use a hammer, or a similar weapon for that purpose,” for Hemingway was so much bigger than King.
Yet another rumor went around that Kitty Cannell had procured a steely six-foot-three boyfriend to pummel Hemingway over her portrayal as Frances Clyne. She later denied this, claiming that she already had a crew of Montparnasse bartenders ready to defend her honor if Hemingway insulted her—again—in their presence. (In any case, she claimed, Hemingway went out of his way to avoid her after the book came out.) Just a year earlier, he had assured her that she would not appear in the novel that was “tearing those [other] bastards apart,” but there she was, in its pages alongside those bastards. And although her appearance in The Sun Also Rises was briefer than most of the others’, the portrait made for painful reading. For three days after perusing the book, Cannell could not scrape herself up out of bed. Like Loeb, she scrutinized Hemingway’s version of her: Frances had none of her manners or looks, she concluded, but it was obvious that she was the primary inspiration behind the character.
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