Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  16 “drifting along in”: Ernest Hemingway, “Paris Is Full of Russians,” Toronto Daily Star, February 25, 1922.

  17 “They are nearly”: Hemingway, “American Bohemians in Paris.”

  2. Storming Olympus

  19 “He was an”: Hearst correspondent Basil Swoon to Charles Fenton, quoted in Fenton, Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, 143.

  19 “some sort of”: New York Tribune reporter Wilbur Forrest to Charles Fenton, quoted ibid., 144.

  19 an exceptional life ahead: Biographer Charles Fenton tracked down a handful of Hemingway’s former press corps colleagues, who told him that Hemingway was deemed an alien in their world and often recognized as exceptional. Ibid., 143.

  19 “I’ve been earning”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, ca. December 23, 1921, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:313.

  19 worn through his: Ernest Hemingway to Howell G. Jenkins, March 20, 1922, reprinted ibid., 334.

  19 “On the Star”: George Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction: Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958): 70.

  19 “This goddam newspaper”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, March 8, 1922, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:331.

  20 “slow, rain-soaked”: Ernest Hemingway, “A Silent, Ghastly Procession,” Toronto Daily Star, October 20, 1922; plodding along: Ernest Hemingway, “Refugees from Thrace,” Toronto Daily Star, November 14, 1922.

  20 “black-shirted, knife-carrying”: Ernest Hemingway, “Italy’s Blackshirts,” Toronto Star Weekly, June 24, 1922.

  20 “Europe’s Prize Bluffer”: Ernest Hemingway, “Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer,” Toronto Daily Star, January 27, 1923.

  20 “launching a flock”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, ca. December 23, 1921, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:313.

  21 literary gods of Olympus: Cowley, A Second Flowering, 54.

  21 “the Crowd”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 25. Beach actually borrowed the term from expat writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, but she uses the phrase throughout her memoir to describe the inner circle of expat creative figures in 1920s Paris.

  21 “sort of royalty”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited,” in Babylon Revisited and Other Short Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 213.

  21 “didn’t count”: Harold Stearns, Confessions of a Harvard Man: Paris and New York in the 1920s & 30s (Santa Barbara: Paget Press, 1984), 209.

  21 declined to introduce: Beach recalled the George Moore–James Joyce incident with sheepish amusement in her memoir Shakespeare and Company. She noted that her protectiveness of Joyce in this case had been a “mistake” and that the two writers eventually managed to meet up in London. Moore magnamiously “didn’t hold the incident in the bookshop against me,” she added. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 72–73.

  21 “Who is your”: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 13. Stein explained, “The idea was that anybody could come but for form’s sake and in Paris you have to have a formula, everybody was supposed to be able to mention the name of somebody who had told them about it.”

  21 “To be ‘done’”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 112. Hemingway would eventually be among those thus anointed: Man Ray, amusingly dubbed the Crowd’s “court photographer” by one biographer, took a formal portrait of him in August 1923.

  21 largely an American movement: For many, the Americans’ insularity went beyond the creative realm. “I am puzzled by the persistence with which these fluently French-speaking English and American artists of the quarter for the most part kept to themselves,” observed English art critic Clive Bell. “Some of them had French mistresses—kept mistresses; but very few had French friends.” Allan, Americans in Paris, 7.

  21 “America in Europe”: Kreymborg, Troubadour, 364.

  22 “I never met”: MacLeish, Reflections, 66.

  22 “There was no”: McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 336.

  22 “Fame was what”: Archibald MacLeish, “Years of the Dog” (1948), reprinted in Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems, 1917–1982 (New York: Mariner Books, 1985), 376.

  22 “In 1922 it burst”: Janet Flanner, introduction to Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939 (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1988), x.

  22 “just when Joyce”: John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, January 25, 1934.

  23 “a young fellow”: Sherwood Anderson to Lewis Galantière, November 28, 1921, in Jones, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, 82.

  23 box a few rounds: Hadley’s recollection of the boxing match is recounted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 44–45. Hemingway would soon become known for subjecting prospective friends and acquaintances to bravery-proving tests such as these, whether those rites of passage entailed impromptu boxing sessions, being shamed into staring down ornery bulls in Spanish bullrings, or even indulging in little knife rituals. Maria Cooper Janis—daughter of actor Gary Cooper, with whom Hemingway had a decades-long friendship—recalled a certain dinner-table ritual that involved putting “your hand . . . on the table and he’d take a hunting knife and throw the knife and hopefully it would hit between the fingers.” Then they upped the ante: in the next round the knife was aimed at the lap area. Luckily, blood was never drawn, she recalled. Maria Cooper Janis, interview with the author, May 20, 2014.

  23 “the acknowledged leader”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 26.

  23 willing mentors: Both Stein and Pound “encouraged younger artists to despise the old forms and the old stuff, to rebel, break away and dare,” as journalist Lincoln Steffens later put it. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2005), 833.

  23 “the leading review”: Nicolas Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial: An Illustrated History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 47. Pound served as a commissioned agent from early 1920 until April 1923, after which point he remained a contributor to the magazine. Ibid., 166.

  24 seventeen cups of tea: Sokoloff, Hadley, 49.

  24 “Don’t be viewy”: For these and other tenets of Pound’s doctrine, see Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” March 1913, Poetry magazine, reprinted on the website of the Poetry Foundation, October 30, 2005, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/335.

  25 “in full”: Ezra Pound, How to Read/The Serious Artist, reprinted in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1968), 38.

  25 Pound parody: The anecdote was relayed by Lewis Galantière to Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker in a March 1963 interview and described in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 86.

  25 “Ernest was always”: Flanner, introduction to Paris Was Yesterday, xviii.

  25 “risk his dignity”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:331.

  26 “an American writer”: Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein, December 3, 1921, reprinted in Jones, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, 85.

  26 “little piece of”: Sokoloff, Hadley, 50.

  26 “I think about”: Ibid.

  26 “Sumerian monument”: The nickname came courtesty of editor Robert McAlmon. Hemingway dubbed Stein “the great god Buddha” (according to Hadley Hemingway, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 50), and Harold Stearns, onetime editor of The Dial and eventual fodder for a character in The Sun Also Rises, amusingly referred to Stein as “the Presence.” Stearns, Confessions of a Harvard Man, 151.

  26 one of her favorite chairs: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 202. Speaking of herself in the third person, Stein added that she first met Pound at a dinner party and “liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” Ibid., 200.

  26 “steerage” motif: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 26. Poet John Glassco described Stein as a “rhomboidal woma
n dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap.” Quoted in Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 96. That said, the gown apparently hadn’t been carelessly stitched together. Journalist Lincoln Steffens claimed that at least one of Stein’s rough-hewn ensembles had actually been carefully, thoughtfully constructed by a great designer: “Yvonne Davidson, one of the most creative of the famous French couturières of the day, made for Gertrude Stein, at her behest, a great flowing fat gown to wear” (Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 834).

  26 “would come to”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 29.

  26 “monologue, and pontificate”: McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 205.

  26 “Don’t frighten her”: Ibid., 228–29.

  26 “Megalomaniac”: Ibid., 206.

  27 “Nobody has done”: Ibid., 228.

  27 “the Jews have”: Ibid.

  27 “I may say”: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 5.

  27 “wife-proof technique”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 31. Beach claimed that women who were not wives were welcome at Stein’s chats, although other testimony counters this assertion. Admission to these chats was apparently administered on a case-by-case basis. Writer Kay Boyle recalled being relegated to the wife stash during a visit to Stein’s salon later in the 1920s. Brought along by a male friend, she was usurped by Alice Toklas, who “immediately started to talk of cooking, and to exchange recipes.” Apparently Boyle had not favorably impressed either Toklas or Stein; her escort, she reported, later informed her that Stein had banned her from returning, having decided that Boyle was “as incurably middle-class as Ernest Hemingway.” McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 295–96. Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend Françoise Gilot, by contrast, claimed that on her first visit, not only was she granted an audience with Stein, but also Picasso sat apart from the two women while they talked. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 68–71.

  27 a private museum: The apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus where Stein lived with Toklas was a lavish shrine to modern art. Janet Flanner, once instructed by Stein in the 1930s to tally the collection, estimated that it then included “one hundred and thirty-one canvases, including five Picassos . . . hung in the china closet.” The “salon alone contain[ed] four major masterpieces,” including a Cézanne and Picasso’s portrait of Stein, “and nineteen smaller Picassos.” Janet Flanner, “Letter from Paris” (1938), reprinted in Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 187. Picasso and Matisse themselves, among countless other artists of many nationalities, had been frequent Stein guests—although after the war more writers than artists turned up on her doorstep.

  27 “rather foreign looking”: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 212.

  27 “Rose is”: Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (1913), reprinted in Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 187.

  27 few people felt neutral: “Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues of numbers,” opined Edmund Wilson, then a highly influential critic, about Stein’s writing style. Fellow salon hostess and writer Natalie Barney wanted to believe that “Stein’s brain is an innovation mill,” but instead Barney suspected that Stein had merely imposed on herself “the infirmity of the stutterer.” Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: University Press, 1992). To newspaper editors, her writing style sometimes made great fodder for caricature. One newspaper—reporting the news of Stein’s arrival for an American tour—ran the headline: GERTY GERTY STEIN STEIN IS BACK HOME BACK HOME. Allan, Americans in Paris, 66. Stein, of course, had her staunch admirers as well. Lincoln Steffens thought of her “not only as a genius, but as a wise woman” and a prophetess who “gave you glimpses of what a Buddha can see by sitting still and quietly looking” (Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 834). Janet Flanner reported back to her New Yorker readers that “no American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists” (Paris Was Yesterday, 9).

  28 fewer than seventy-five: According to Tony Allan, Stein’s first book sold a mere seventy-three copies during the first eighteen months (Americans in Paris, 64). Her only best-seller—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—wasn’t published until 1933 and was written in traditional prose.

  28 “nobody’s idea of”: Ibid.

  28 “You musn’t write”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 25. The story was indeed so overtly sexual—for its time, anyway—that Hemingway’s friend Bill Smith recalled “kidding him about it and saying your next story should be called ‘Even Further up in Michigan.’” St. John, “Interview with Hemingway’s ‘Bill Gorton,’” 175.

  28 “There is a”: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 213.

  28 “cutting up the”: Ibid., 90.

  28 “Cézanne came closer”: Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 284.

  29 “I was learning”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 23.

  29 “She took little”: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 28.

  29 “weakness” for him: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 216.

  29 “Gertrude Stein and”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:330.

  29 “please, without speaking”: Sokoloff, Hadley, 48.

  29 reading something behind: Ibid., 51.

  30 “The people that go”: Ernest Hemingway, “Wild Night Music of Paris,” Toronto Star Weekly, March 25, 1922.

  30 “Pound thinks I’m”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:331.

  30 Thayer did not: Joost, Scofield Thayer and The Dial, 248.

  30 “Isn’t writing”: Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, August 15, 1924, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:141.

  30 many of her manuscripts: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 26.

  31 “Liz liked Jim”: Ernest Hemingway, “Up in Michigan,” reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 2003), 59.

  31 “Down through the”: Ernest Hemingway, unpublished fragment (1923), reprinted in Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 38.

  31 “all her unpublished”: Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 197.

  31 knew he could get: As Hemingway scholar H. R. Stoneback put it: “Hemingway knew that he wanted commercial success. Stein wanted it, but you’re not going to get it with her stuff. She was a crucial part of modernism, but do you pick up [her books] for pleasure? And Pound—well, he’s a poet. He knows he’s not going to sell twenty thousand copies of a Canto.” H. R. Stoneback, interview with the author, June 2, 2014.

  31 “rhythm and tones”: Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, 1921, quoted in Carver, “Coming of Age.”

  3. Fortuitous Disasters

  33 “the end of”: Ernest Hemingway, “The Greek Revolt,” Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1922, reprinted in White, Ernest Hemingway: Dateline: Toronto, 244.

  33 “dawned upon me”: Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 834.

  33 “KEMAL INSWARDS UNBURNED”: Fenton, Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, 187.

  34 “vivid, detailed picture”: Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 834.

  34 “I asked him”: Ibid.

  34 “He could”: Ibid.

  34 “travelly”: Cable from Ernest Hemingway to Hadley Hemingway, November 25, 1922, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:369.

  34 “singing high praises”: This was what Hadley Hemingway later told biographer Charles Fenton. Fenton, Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, 196. Yet the exact motive has long been a source of debate. Some accounts state that Hemingway had instructed her to send all his work down so he could share it with Steffens, and not trusting the mails, she decided to deliver
it personally. But in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway laid the blame at Hadley’s feet, claiming that she had lugged the manuscripts to Lausanne “as a surprise . . . so I could work on them on our holidays in the mountains” (A Moveable Feast, 69); he mentions no letters praising Steffens or asking her to bring the material. Steffens may have asked Hadley himself: on November 28, 1922, Hemingway informed Hadley, “Steffens wrote you a letter.” If so, that letter may have contained such a request—but Steffens makes no mention of it in his autobiography, and the Steffens-to-Hadley letter itself is believed to have gone missing. Hadley biographer Gioia Diliberto states that “Steffens’s letter to Hadley hasn’t survived” (Paris Without End, 129). What has especially baffled biographers is Hadley’s decision to bring the carbon copies as well, although Diliberto points out that such reasoning “made some sense”: if Hemingway was to make changes to the various works, he would want to make those changes in the copies as well (Paris Without End, 130).

  34 “She had cried”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 70.

  35 “I remember what”: Ibid. The timing of this trip to Paris is unclear. It has been widely assumed that it took place immediately after Hadley’s pitiful arrival in Lausanne, although a January 23, 1923, letter from Hemingway to Ezra Pound indicates that the trip took place several weeks later: “I went up to Paris last week to see what was left.” Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:6. The mysterious activity to which Hemingway alludes may have been nothing terribly tawdry. If Hemingway’s fictionalized account of the theft and his return trip to Paris to confirm the total loss in his posthumously published short story “The Strange Country” can be trusted as an accurate representation of what actually happened, then Hemingway merely crawled into his bed and lay there cradling two pillows in despair. After that, the bereaved writer character relates what happened with the apartment building’s unwashed concierge, who sobs on his chest in commiseration and then sends him out to dinner at a local café. Ernest Hemingway, “The Strange Country,” in Complete Short Stories, 648–49. An editor’s note explains that “‘The Strange Country’ comprises four chapters of an uncompleted novel that Hemingway worked on at intervals in 1946–1947 and 1950–1951. These scenes represent preliminary material for an early version of [Hemingway’s novel] Islands in the Stream, which was published posthumously in 1970” (Complete Short Stories, 605). An editor’s endnote in The Sun Also Rises identifies “The Strange Country” as a “posthumously published short story.” Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 287.