Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Yet the novel had made Hemingway’s name so ubiquitous that he was finally invited to join a certain roster of notables that had long eluded him.

  “Got a sheet to fill out from Who’s Who,” he informed Fitzgerald, adding that his life had been so “fuckingly complicated” that he had managed to answer only two of their questions and suspected that they would be used against him anyway.

  Public interest in him was now running so high that even an undignified domestic accident—in which a skylight above his toilet collapsed and gave him a wound requiring stitches—was picked up by the wire services. A flurry of concerned cables and notes arrived from two continents. It was a dubious way to earn a fresh round of headlines, but by then, Hemingway was an international celebrity. Privacy would soon be as distant and dusty a memory as that of a dark little apartment, four stories above a bal musette.

  NOW THAT The Sun Also Rises was rocking the country, those who had missed out on its publication sat glumly on the sidelines. Boni & Liveright made one last desperate plea to lure Hemingway back into its stable; its tactics were a curious combination of carrot and stick. Horace Liveright dispatched an ambassador, Boni & Liveright vice president Donald Friede, to meet with Hemingway in Paris.

  “His argument was that Boni and Liveright had published In Our Time when no one else would and that I had only been allowed to leave because he,” meaning Friede, “wasn’t there,” Hemingway reported to Maxwell Perkins. Friede offered $3,000 on any new novels, and pledged to buy the rights to both The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring—clearly a sign that Hemingway was now seen as a stronger stock than Sherwood Anderson. Hemingway turned Friede down, adding that he was “absolutely satisfied” where he was.

  After all, nowhere was Hemingway more in demand than at Charles Scribner’s Sons. The Sun Also Rises hadn’t even had time to cool down after being rolled off the Scribner’s presses before Perkins proposed the idea of chasing the novel’s release with a spring 1927 short story collection. Hemingway had ten completed short stories on hand, he reported, and he was still interested in writing a nonfiction bullfighting tome. Yet he worried that they might be cranking out Hemingway books too fast.

  “Don’t you think we might give them a rest?” he wrote to Perkins, arguing that what came out next would have to be “awfully good” to secure his new position. After all, “there will be a lot of people with the knife out very eager to see me slipping—and the best way to handle that is not to slip.”

  In the end, they decided that his next book would indeed be a collection of short stories, slated for a fall 1927 release. It would keep Hemingway’s name in the press until the next big thing, and, Perkins predicted, keep The Sun Also Rises in circulation for several more seasons as well. Hemingway suggested calling the collection Men Without Women—an ironic title, considering that the author rarely was without lavishly devoted female company. Each of the stories lacked a “softening feminine influence,” he explained to Perkins, adding that he was willing to come up with an alternative should Perkins find it a “punk title.” Perkins deemed it “splendid.”

  Men Without Women received mixed reviews, with two leading ladies of letters taking opposing sides. Virginia Woolf wrote an unflattering review for the New York Herald Tribune, calling Men Without Women “self-consciously virile” and adding that Hemingway’s talent was contracting, not expanding. Dorothy Parker sailed to his defense in The New Yorker, calling the stories “truly magnificent”; Hemingway was, in her opinion, a “genius” and “the greatest living writer of short stories.”

  Yet Hemingway and Perkins both knew that he would ultimately have to secure his powerful position with a second novel. Another “big book,” as Fitzgerald called it, was the only way to evolve from new champion into mature master.

  As usual, Hemingway was on top of it. “Once he’d finished a book, his obsession was with the next [book], not the past,” according to his son Patrick. Even before The Sun Also Rises was released, Hemingway had already been mulling his second act and even had a possible title for a new novel: The World’s Fair. A few months later, he informed Perkins that he intended to start another novel once “things get straightened out and my head gets tranquil.” It would not have any real-life people in it, as he was not especially eager to venture down that road again.

  This was most welcome news to Perkins. He had not yet begun to pressure Hemingway about beginning a new novel, but the demand was certainly there. By that spring, the International Magazine Company had approached Hemingway in a bid to serialize his next novel—whatever it might be—and offered a $30,000 option for film rights for the phantom book.

  Hemingway turned them down. It was unhealthy for a writer to undertake a commissioned book. He didn’t want to carry that “extra weight,” he explained to Perkins.

  “I can’t see it doing me any good now—and I have never seen an American writer survive it,” he stated. Perkins concurred. Anyway, the offer hadn’t been high enough, in his opinion.

  Yet by that summer, “things” had gotten straightened out. Hadley had been assigned the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises and was now in California with Bumby. Hemingway had married Pauline on May 10, 1927. Virginia was her sister’s attendant. The Pfeiffer clan blessed the union with the bestowal of checks, some of them for as much as $1,000—nearly the amount that Perkins had given Hemingway as an advance for both Torrents and The Sun Also Rises. After their almost month-long honeymoon in a walled town in France, there was the annual jaunt to Pamplona, followed by a recuperative trip to San Sebastián.

  The intensive summer travel appears to have had the usual stimulating effect on Hemingway. By October he had begun a new novel and had nearly thirty thousand words completed. He got twenty-two chapters deep into the manuscript before he shunted it aside and started working on another. At first he’d thought it would be just a story, but it was turning out to be something bigger. Now as a nascent novel, he wrote to Perkins, it was going “wonderfully.”

  The pressure was, once again, beginning to build. The only way to create a formidable follow-up to The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway concluded, was to write about what he knew. That had been his formula with Sun, after all. In the meantime, he wanted to assure Perkins that he wasn’t stalling. He knew that there were high expectations for his sophomore effort. He also knew that there was an unspoken timetable for turning works out, and that steady output was crucial to building one’s reputation. Fitzgerald, Hemingway felt, was already a year or two late in producing his follow-up to The Great Gatsby. He didn’t want to fall into that trap, but neither did he want to turn out anything mediocre.

  “This next book has to be good,” he reiterated to Perkins.

  A month later, his new novel had stretched out to fifteen thousand words. It would soon be given a title—A Farewell to Arms—a phrase he borrowed from a sixteenth-century George Peele poem he’d come across in the Oxford Book of English Verse. Once again, Hemingway had drawn his heroine from real life: Catherine Barkley bore a startling resemblance to Agnes von Kurowsky, the young American nurse who had attended to Hemingway in a Milan hospital after he had been wounded during the war. The two had fallen in love and planned to marry before von Kurowsky jilted Hemingway for an Italian officer. Perhaps she thought that she was making a clean break with Hemingway. She was wrong.

  The writing of Farewell may have brought a sense of déjà vu to Hemingway’s friends watching from the sidelines. Hemingway was again furiously working on a novel in an atmosphere of pressure and high stakes. (“I work all the time,” he informed Perkins.) And once again he frequently supplied his friends with status reports on the novel’s progress, down to the word count. There was, as before, a Hemingway wife in the background, offering funds and limitless encouragement. That wife was even now pregnant with a son.

  Yet everything had changed. Hemingway’s neophyte days were over. He had successfully stripped the English language down and bent it to his will, and was on his way to becoming one o
f the most recognizable cultural icons on the planet. All of the elements of the Hemingway persona—which would grow to outsized proportions in years to come—were in place.

  Paris, too, had been ably conquered. Hemingway would return to the city many times, but an era had ended. By 1928, he and Pauline had decided to return to America for an extensive sojourn, starting in Havana and Florida. Just as Sherwood Anderson had extolled the virtues of an exotic locale known as Montparnasse to Hemingway and Hadley seven years earlier, Hemingway had been hearing about the wonders of sultry Key West from John Dos Passos. On March 17, 1928, the Hemingways set sail across the Atlantic.

  Nearly six years later, in late 1933, Hemingway returned to Paris and took a good look around. By then he was the man he had hoped to become all those years earlier. A Farewell to Arms had been published to great acclaim, securing his place as the leading voice of the postwar generation. It had topped best-seller lists and been dubbed “the very apotheosis of a kind of modernism.” In 1932 Paramount released a major film adaptation of the novel, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Hemingway had also published two more books: Winner Take Nothing, another collection of short stories, and Death in the Afternoon, the nonfiction tome about bullfighting that he had been mulling for years. His public persona had grown steadily with his literary reputation and sales numbers. Vanity Fair would soon honor him with a satirical editorial: five Ernest Hemingway paper dolls, each representing a different aspect of the Hemingway legend. Three of the five guises—Hemingway as hard-drinking Lost Generation writer, Hemingway as zealous matador, and Hemingway as wounded soldier—had been launched along with The Sun Also Rises and have remained permanent, essential components of that image.

  Since leaving for America in 1928, he had been back in Paris many times, but on this 1933 trip he was documenting the state of the city in an article for Esquire. (Journalism was about to become a big part of his life once again: he would soon cover two wars that would roil Europe for the next decade.) His subsequent “Paris Letter” for the magazine can almost be seen as a grim sequel to the giddy, decadent world he had portrayed in his debut novel.

  Paris remained as beautiful as ever, he thought, but it had been a “big mistake” to come back. The 1929 stock market crash had officially ended the party for thousands of expats, who had packed up and reluctantly gone home. Even Jimmie Charters, the popular bartender at the Dingo, had retreated to London. By the time of Hemingway’s visit, “only a few diehards who literally could not tear themselves away from the scene of past glories” remained in Montparnasse. Now, not only had The Sun Also Rises distinguished itself as the vanguard of modern literature, but it had become the book of record depicting a vanished world.

  Hemingway revisited his old haunts and, perhaps from some of those leftover diehards, learned the fates of various former cohorts. So-and-so had shot himself; another friend had died of an overdose; yet another had gone back to New York and plummeted to his death from a high window. No one had any money; dealers could not sell paintings; everyone was discouraged. The Quarter had become disconcertingly middle-class and bourgeois, but sinister elements were creeping into the neighborhood too. The terrace of the Dôme—once filled with champagne- and Pernod-drinking American and English expats—was now crowded with frightened German “refugees from the Nazi terror” and the Nazis who had been dispatched there to spy on them. Everywhere people talked of the inevitability of another war.

  “It is accepted and taken for granted,” Hemingway wrote.

  The scene depressed him, but not enough to keep him from thinking with tenderness and even nostalgia about his early years in Paris. He was seeing the city with new clarity now: it was like an ageless woman who moves from lover to lover. Paris had tired of Hemingway’s generation, he realized, and had taken on new lovers. And like the city, Hemingway too had moved on.

  “It was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man’s education,” he mused. “We all loved it once.”

  “And,” he added, “we lie if we say we didn’t.”

  Epilogue

  FOR THE PEOPLE who inspired the principal characters in The Sun Also Rises, life was divided into two categories: “B.S.”—before Sun—and “A.S.” What follows are summaries of their post-Sun existences. There is more information available about some than others; but in the end, all of them received at least some documentation, in several cases exclusively because of their role in Hemingway’s debut novel.

  Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett Ashley)

  In 1927 Duff met Clinton King, a soft-spoken American artist nearly a decade her junior. He had come to Paris to paint and study. One day he was invited on an outing by artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who were both friends of Duff’s (and also Hemingway’s models for Brett’s gay sidekicks in the opening chapters of The Sun Also Rises). Duff’s reputation had preceded her; King opted to come on the outing when he heard she would be in attendance. They fell in love and were married the following year.

  Like Duff’s previous marriage to a man of reputable lineage, this union became something of a low-grade scandal at first. Two days after the wedding, the New York Times reported that “the secret marriage of Lady Twysden, to Clinton Blair King, young artist and son of an American candy manufacturer, came to light today.” King’s clan owned the King Candy Company in Fort Worth (its slogan: “King’s Chocolates for American Queens”); though it was a family of commerce and not aristocracy, his relations protested Duff’s marriage to Clinton as vigorously as the Twysdens had her union with Sir Roger. When the King family’s lawyers were unable to deter Clinton from making Duff his bride, his father is said to have withdrawn financial support, leaving Duff—once more—in the arms of a penniless scion.

  Some of their contemporaries also regarded the couple with disdain. Again Duff unwittingly played muse to an artist in her circle: poet Witter Bynner penned some verses nastily immortalizing the couple. He dubbed Twysden “an Englishwoman with a worn-out title” and “a mother of liquor,” while King was reduced to “a son of candy.” Of their romance, Bynner wrote:

  She pounced on upon him, so they say, like Jove,

  Liking his cherub face and fleshy wings.

  And he liking her force. And then they clove

  Together, circling through the airy rings

  Of Paris, not an eagle and a boy

  But a hawk and a rabbit, or a dead balloon

  At first the couple remained in Paris, subsisting on handouts from Duff’s relatives in England and living briefly in an apartment of Robert McAlmon’s. He did not “entertain any false hopes” of collecting rent from them, he later acknowledged, even though it cost a pittance. When he needed to resume occupancy of the space himself, “it took more than gentle suggestions to get Lady Brett and her boy friend” out of his studio.

  Like Hemingway and Pauline, the Kings eventually abandoned Paris for North America, residing over the next decade in Mexico, Texas, New York, and Santa Fe. Their habits, however, remained distinctly Montparnassian: hangovers kept them in bed until afternoon, observed one acquaintance in Mexico. In New York they attempted to set up an art school, but the project faltered. The Kings—apparently broker than ever—were then bailed out by friends who lent them the use of a shack-like building on their property along with access to their vegetable garden; there the couple subsisted on the garden’s offerings and one drink of gin per day, administered by their landlord’s Korean servant.

  Theirs was an artistic existence, and—despite the penury—apparently a happy one. Duff posed for King’s paintings and made her own sketches and watercolors. They read and socialized; Duff still had a penchant for dramatic hats. Yet by all reports, they drank relentlessly. Bynner deemed Duff “the most capable drinker I ever met.”

  “The only trouble [was] that Clinton [tried] to keep up with her,” he observed.

  The Kings eventually moved to Santa Fe, which had become a Southwest alternative to Greenwich Village. That sai
d, as an artists’ colony it didn’t always get the respect afforded to the Village or the Quarter. Critic Edmund Wilson once called its residents “about the worst set of artists and writers to be found anywhere”—yet it remained a popular destination. The Kings elicited mixed reactions there “on account of their drinking and lewdness,” noted Bynner. (Duff was apparently virtuosic in the art of swearing and had a repertoire of indecent music hall songs.) That said, Bynner conceded that Duff was “witty and hearty on the uptake and a swell yelper over puns,” and added that she had remained “lankly handsome.” (Harold Loeb, by contrast, ran into her at a cocktail party in the mid-1930s and thought that his former paramour looked terrible.) It was known in the Santa Fe community that Hemingway had based Lady Brett Ashley on Duff; her neighbors occasionally referred to her as “Brett” or even “the Duff-Brett woman.”

  Duff would spend her final days in that city. In 1938, while in Texas, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The Kings returned to Santa Fe, where Duff was placed in a sanatorium. “She looks as frail as a dried sea horse but maintains the gallant sparkle,” Bynner reported to a friend. He predicted that the disease would keep her hospitalized for a year and might even kill her.

  She died just twenty-two days after this prediction was made, on June 27, 1938, at the age of forty-six. While Lady Brett Ashley would forever live on as the model of unconventional glamour, “Mrs. Duff Stirling King” was listed as a “housewife” on her death certificate.

  News of her death filtered back to Hemingway, who once again could not resist taking liberties with her life narrative.