As for the story itself and who put it out, it was his conviction it just grew spontaneously, and knowing who was the one who put the mischievous twist in it was beyond calculation. But the story as it was now, making Ernest a boastful bully who got what was coming to him, was certainly far from the source. Then Scott said that he hadn’t even told Edmund Wilson or Perkins what had happened. As for me being the one who started the story, he had never even implied in any way to anyone, including Ernest, that I was remotely responsible. But he recognized that he had been gravely unjust to me and since he was returning in February he would be happy to offer his amends to me in person.
The dignified, half-formal tone of the apology shamed me. Poor Scott. Once again he was caught in the middle. As I said some time ago, he was always the one who managed to get caught in a bad light. His fineness of spirit, his generosity, all that was perceptive in him had prompted him to urge Ernest to be patient. The touch of comedy in the whole situation lay in this: they were both assuming I would or should do the job. Yet neither one of them could have wanted me to tell the truth, neither one imagined for a moment I would give a factual account of the events of that afternoon. However, Scott, having been insulted by Ernest that day in the American Club, was now insulted by me because he had acted to please Ernest. Having listened to him at the American Club – now after this new indignity – I knew how cynical and bitter about Ernest he would be feeling. And beyond all doubt I knew that even if they sometimes heard from each other, from now on in his heart Scott had finally walked out on Ernest.
Look what Scott’s admiration for Ernest, and his eagerness for our companionship, had led to. Why did he have to come along? Ernest, my old friend, and I now were bristling at each other – over Scott. Ernest was anxious to fight me. For the sake of his dream would he keep at it until he did? But I was nursing another humiliation. I cursed myself for not trusting my understanding of Scott. I called myself a blind man, a dolt lacking in all perception. I ought to have known that Scott, of his own accord, would never have sent that demanding cable. The irony of events kept tormenting me. I had gone to Paris, confident that I would find there a deepening friendship with Ernest, and a fine warm intimacy with Scott. I had found some strange tangled relationship between Scott and Ernest, but there had been a lot of admiration and respect, too. Out of my hopeful eager journey had come all this shameful petty rancor and wounded vanity, and suspicion – and a challenge to fight from Ernest!
Max Perkins was being as busy as a little bee, and I received another letter from Ernest who was now in Key West.
The letter, dated February 21, was typewritten, and as I look at it now it seems to me that Ernest must have taken a little time with it.
Admitting he had been really sore, he suggests that I put myself in his place. He says he knows I wasn’t to blame for putting out the story, so I should be able to look at the matter aside from the question of who was to blame. My denial of the story had been quick and gracious. As for his letter to me, he said, the facts were as he had stated them, but he hadn’t intended to post that letter. It was true, as I had written, that in return for my courtesy in quickly dis-avowing the malice of someone engaged in baiting authors he had offered to beat me up. It was simply that he had gone berserk, he wrote.
As for the letter, and how it came to be posted when he hadn’t intended to send it, he wrote that he had put it aside in his desk and had driven to Bordeaux to deliver his car to the boat. His wife, remaining behind, cleaning up things in the apartment, had come on the letter, and thinking he had overlooked it, had mailed it.
Then he went on to say that with the letter sent, he couldn’t undo it. A man can’t challenge another man to do battle in a letter, then wire him and tell him to pay no attention to the letter.
He could understand I would be sore at receiving a collect wire from Paris from Scott; perhaps this was due to the wire having been sent to New York. And, too, he was aware that I had no fear of him.
Again he admits he was good and angry about the story. And then he put it up to me in this way: a syndicated piece says you encounter someone, sneer at his work, get taken up on it, and then get knocked out. How would I like it myself? To make matters worse, this happened with a man whose work you have praised and tried to push and whose boxing has given you pleasure and aroused your admiration.
Naturally he had been really angry, he wrote. And then came the part of the letter that fascinated me. It was about his boxing. Asserting his friendly feeling again, he nevertheless wanted to say it was his conviction, quite aside from making it a matter of either one of us being afraid of the other, that with small gloves he could knock me out. He thought he would need about five two-minute rounds. Then he granted that along the way he would be taking plenty of popping from me, he was sure he would. This belief of his however, he wrote, wasn’t to be taken as the unfriendly gesture of a man who was still sore. But if I didn’t share his opinion he had no desire to go on all his life working at remaining in good condition on the possibility we might encounter each other. Therefore, if it was my wish we should lay down our arms, I should tell him so. And he sent his regards to Loretto and his good wishes for the success of my book.
At last, thank heavens, I was able to laugh. In this letter he sounded more like the boyish old Ernest, and he had admitted cheerfully that he had gone berserk. And now I was moved too, for he had reminded me how he had gone around telling people about my work, my only writing friend for so long, and how happy we had been in those Paris months, and how much I had liked him.
But he wanted me to agree he could knock me out – conceding he would take a lot of punishment. Having his own peculiar view of his life, I knew he simply had to believe it. Indeed, it was at this time in Key West that he explained to Josephine Herbst, who relayed it to me, his laughable statement, “My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything.” What was I to say to him? If I agreed with him I would feel I had joined the ranks of those men who were making him unreal. I decided to tell him the truth. I wrote him a good-humored letter in which I said I had no objections at all to him thinking that he, using small gloves, could knock me out in five rounds. In fact I would want him to have this opinion. But since I had never been knocked out I was sure he would understand it was hard for me to imagine him doing it. But wasn’t it the way we both should feel? So for heaven’s sake, disarm. It was the last I heard from him.
I don’t know what Scott and Ernest said to each other after they returned to America. They seemed to have remained nominal friends, but they had become very cynical about each other.
Then I, who admired them both, and had liked and enjoyed their company so much, made a mistake. At the time it did not seem to be a mistake. Looking back on it I can see it is the kind of a mistake men make so often in their lives when a warm relationship has been disrupted. Perkins, whom I trusted, had told me to forget the whole thing, since he had talked to both Scott and Ernest. Both of them, he said, recognized it would be absurd to hold any resentment against me. He assured me they both had goodwill for me. Now Perkins had a talent for diplomacy in difficult human situations, and he had a kind of nobility of spirit and a fine sense of fairness. Well, I took his word for it. I left it to him. It was a mistake. There had been an arrangement adjustment, but what about the friendship?
Only many years later, after brooding over it, did I realize that such wounds cannot be healed by a third party, no matter how discreet and just and full of goodwill he is. Insulted and injured people, who shake hands from a distance or write apologetic letters, find themselves lying awake at night making up little speeches, some of them angry, and the one to whom these secret little speeches are addressed in the dark never has a chance to answer. No, when there has been a sudden sharp break in a relationship the two or three who are concerned have to seek each other out, face each other quickly, talk, open their hearts to each other. Men and women, of course, shy away from revealing themselves to each other, but when they withhold to
o much of themselves for too long, there is soon nothing left to give. They can no longer communicate honestly. And in Paris, I’m convinced, Ernest and Scott had never really got together even in the heyday of their relationship, and then with time passing, it had got harder.
I shouldn’t have let the whole thing drop. I should have met Scott as he had suggested. Instead, soothed by Perkins, I was glad to be told that I did not have to say to Scott, Yes, you should see me. I was glad to duck the encounter, for I was the one now who felt secretly ashamed. I had been guilty of misjudging and abusing him. And of course, as time passed, it became much easier for me to avoid thinking of him. The Depression had come. And the world in which Scott had been a golden dazzling figure had col-lapsed. All that had happened to his relationship with Ernest because of me did not seem to be important. Whenever I would think of these two men who had been my friends, I would find myself growing fascinated at the way little details, little vanities, little slights, shape all our relationships. It is these little things, not clashes over great principles, that turn people against each other.
Loretto and Pauline Hemingway standing at the window. “I won’t bother giving you the address if you don’t intend to use it,” Pauline had said, and a barrier had gone up. And the night Scott said to me, “I took your arm... I knew what you thought I was.” A man acting as timekeeper lets a round go on too long and... Louis Bromfield’s slippers.
So when Scott’s Tender Is the Night was published, I wrote to Perkins about the book – not to Scott. Whenever I thought of him I felt the old embarrassment. To put an end to it, one time when I was in New York I asked Perkins where Scott was and was told he was in Baltimore. I would go and see him, I said. To my surprise Perkins advised me not to go at that particular time. Zelda was mentally ill and giving Scott trouble, and Scott himself was drinking heavily; it wouldn’t do me any good to see him. Now I know that in spite of Perkins I should have gone to Baltimore. Suppose I had found Scott alcoholic? Suppose he had been nasty to me? Hadn’t I encountered him in scenes which would have startled Perkins?
As for Ernest, the little matter had been straightened out to his satisfaction. Unless I sought him out I knew I would never see him. Why didn’t I? Whenever I thought of doing so, I would remember how he had brought out the gloves that first day in his living room to satisfy himself he was right in his judgment of me. And if I walked in on him, and we got talking about boxing, mightn’t he feel driven, as he often seemed to be driven in other matters, to prove something to himself? I wouldn’t have been able to give in. God knows what might have happened if that old sense of frustration so intolerable to him had seized him. The thought of it was unbearable to me. Yet now I can see I may have been humoring myself, humoring my view of him. But I was secretly nursing some half-hidden grievance.
But with time passing, I was learning the grim lesson that all writers who aren’t just morning glories, and go on, have to learn. In the beginning the good opinion of Hemingway and Fitzgerald had helped me to feel I was not alone – even in my hometown. Having passed the morning-glory period, I had learned that you can’t be sustained by the praise and admiration of a few friends. You lose them along the way anyway, and since you should always be changing and becoming something else, the friends, if they stay alive, may not stay with you. I find that people who like what I did when I was twenty-five often do not like what I do now, but I have learned that this is because they would like things to be done as they were done when they, themselves, were twenty-five or thirty – the time when they were most alive themselves. And those dreams I had of Paris – as a place – the lighted place – I had learned it had to be always in my own head, wherever I was. Sometimes in strange places I have remembered that prison chaplain who insisted that no prison should be so obviously escape proof that freedom was even beyond the imagination of the inmates. They ought to be allowed at least a condition for the comfort of their fantasies. I won’t enlarge on that splendid idea.
In the late forties, Sam Putnam wrote a book called Paris Was Our Mistress. According to this author, after playing tennis, I challenged Ernest to a boxing bout and he knocked me out in a round. I won’t say that I waited to hear from Ernest, or that I demanded a correction. I never heard from him and I didn’t expect to. I was sure by this time that, as a storyteller, this version to him was imaginatively true. But at least I understood my own little grievance. I had known all along he would have to have it in this light. Anyway, Ernest, over the years, was getting lost to me in the legends.
Hemingway in his prime, the man I knew in Paris, the author of the early books and A Farewell to Arms, was perhaps the nicest man I had ever met. I can say the same for Fitzgerald. I liked those two men. In my heart I knew Ernest couldn’t possibly have turned into a swaggering, happy extrovert. How they ever got him into that light and how he put up with it, I don’t know. In the good days he was a reticent man, often strangely ingrown and hidden with something sweet and gentle in him. But I was glad to hear that in the last year of his life out in Sun Valley, he talked to the photographer so affectionately about those days in Paris with Scott and me, and sent me at last his warm regards.
A Literary Life
Morley Callaghan, as a young storyteller, was among the first to write about Ernest Hemingway’s fiction ( In Our Time) and the fiction of James Joyce ( Finnegans Wake). In his middle years, he commented on Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, in London’s The Spectator, and on the mythic presence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the Washington Post. Toward the end of his llfe, he wrote movingly about how it was to return with his wife, his “girl,” as he still called her, to Paris.
INTRODUCING ERNEST HEMINGWAY
So many brilliant post-war writers are discovered every day by enterprising critics that one is apt to overlook the importance of Ernest Hemingway. Reviewers discussing the American short story have grown accustomed to mentioning his volume, In Our Time and his work has been praised by Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, almost everybody of importance, excepting H.L. Mencken. It is appropriate that Hemingway should have dedicated his new book, Torrents of Spring, a satire on modern writers, to Mencken “in admiration.”
Irrespective of critical acclaim and literary fashions, I believe Hemingway is writing the best short stories coming from an American today. It is too bad his vogue is limited, for his prose has a classical quality, a direct simplicity and earthy flavour quite foreign to the King’s English and the literary language of professors, which makes it a spoken language with a feeling for the natural rhythms that are colloquial. The short stories of In Our Time show his complete mastery of his material, his fine regard for the value of a word and a disdain for mannerisms and vanities dear to the heart of many good writers. He is a fine naturalist, who, instead of piling up material and convincing by sheer weight of evidence, in the manner of Dreiser or Zola, cuts down the material to essentials and leaves it starkly authentic.
Hemingway lives in Paris, his first slender volumes were published by Contact and the Three Mountains Press, and so he is often associated with that Paris group: Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Robert McAlmon. But Hemingway, having none of Ford’s affectations of style, has more intensity and control of himself and his material than McAlmon, and unlike John Dos Passos, he has not come under the influence of James Joyce.
In Our Time consists of fifteen short stories with brief inter-posed “chapters” in italics. These fiercely concentrated moments of energy and vitality are extraordinarily vivid; a British officer in the garden at Mons, bullfights, a hanging, an evacuation, all having a permanent quality, the words used at one with the subject matter. He has refused to succumb to the temptation of the splendid word, the devices of those who wish to be mistaken for English stylists. Stories like “Cat in the Rain” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” show a temperamentally different attitude to the short story. “Cat in the Rain” catches a mood, a short feeling of opposition between husband and wife in a h
otel room. A young boy watches a quarrel between his father and a half-breed in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and the reader understands intimately the relation between the Doctor and his Christian Science wife. In “Out of Season,” a depressing, irritating mood is caught and held. “The Three-Day Blow,” two boys getting drunk and trying to remain thoroughly practical, is a happy and subtle piece of writing. Finally the story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” is as good a piece of descriptive writing as I have ever read. Nick goes fishing. Nothing stands between the reader and Nick’s movements. So accurate is Hemingway’s reporting that this movement has an exhilarating reality in these days of the psychological novel. One moves with his people, knows what they are thinking, feels the wind, sees the hills and gets the smell of burnt timber.
Hemingway’s new book, The Torrents of Spring, is a robust and lively satire on the affectations of some modern writers, done in the style of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. Hemingway hates affectations and poses, which to him are the source of the truly ridiculous. Here, he hilariously carries Anderson’s manner to a logical but ridiculous extremity, and incidentally, hits out at Dos Passos’ studies in futility and D.H. Lawrence’s affected awareness of the primitive. It is healthy and good to find a writer of Hemingway’s calibre wielding the slapstick on celebrated writers, even as one acknowledges that Anderson’s Dark Laughter remains a distinguished and beautiful piece of work.
That Summer in Paris Page 21