Preface


EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

 

You can find more background reading — reviews of Hemingway’s works, commentaries, other papers to which I refer as well as a list of quotations about Hemingway the writer and man here.




This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(ironically a fictional character).

Why the life of this rich libertine and destroyer of wildlife should be of such great and continuing public interest a decade following his suicide, we cannot and need not say.
Judge Charles L Brieant Jr, Aug 3, 1979 in his judgment
against an appeal by Doubleday over a libel
suit brought by A E Hotchner.


I DON’T doubt that many reading what follows will react with disbelief and scorn, and some diehard Hemingway champions possibly even with horror. More than 50 years after his death, the name Ernest Hemingway is perhaps not as popularly known as once it was, but I suspect that most who hear it will still pronounce him to have been ‘a great writer’ or even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’, mainly, perhaps, because that’s what they were taught at school.

One does come across readers who think he was little more a boorish braggart and who regard his style as dull, flat and often banal. That they have probably not read much of his work is because what they had read did not encourage them to read much more of it. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote off Hemingway as ‘a writer for boys’ and added that
I read [Hemingway] for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it.
He did though concede that
Later I read his admirable The Killers and the wonderful fish story.
At the extreme was a comment by the American novelist and wit Gore Vidal, a man who loved to shock and delighted in taking a contrarian view. Talking about his home nation he asked
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
Yet these were, and perhaps still are, decidedly minority views. In 1941 the Pulitzer Prize jurors unanimously wanted to honour Hemingway for his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and that he didn’t get the award was down to the lobbying by a very influential pro-Franco and ring-wing Pulitzer board member.

The jurors responded and made their feelings known by not awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to anyone else.

Twelve years later they were able to honour Hemingway and awarded him the Fiction prize for The Old Man And The Sea. Then, in 1954, came an even greater distinction when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So who is ‘right’: the champions or the sceptics? Frankly, no one is – the excellence or otherwise of Hemingway’s writing and the greatness or otherwise of his literary status is a matter of opinion not fact.

In fairness it should be pointed out that there was – at least at first – a little more to Hemingway’s fiction. Yet in hindsight there was also less to his writing, and in time a great deal less, than his champions – and Hemingway himself – insist.

It would be a sweeping generalisation, but not untrue, to suggest that he began at the top and worked his way down. The print, broadcast and online media are often accused of working on the principle (advice given to his young journalists by a long-standing editor of the Economist, Geoffrey Crowther) of
first simplify, then exaggerate
and adopting it one might even suggest – no doubt to the outrage of many – that Hemingway’s literary success was something of a fluke.

In response, the champions might choose to repeat their mantra that ‘but Ernest Hemingway was a leading modernist and one of our/America’s/the English-speaking world’s greatest writers!’ Unfortunately, continual repetition doesn’t necessarily make it true. Yet having established their devotion, the devotees are will never, but never, allow themselves to be gainsaid: those who disagree either don’t ‘get’ Hemingway and are obviously philistine or quite possibly just being malicious. If only.

The reason this collection of essays is subtitled ‘How did a middling writing achieve such global literary fame?’ is simple: that is the enigma which has interested me ever since I came back to reading Hemingway’s work. I had previously — many years ago — read the early novels, Death In The Afternoon and many short stories, but to be frank I was not intellectually equipped to deal with any of them.

. . . 

As a young man at college, I had accepted without question — as did and do many others at that age when they first encounter ‘Hemingway’ — that he was ‘one of our greatest writers’. Thus if I did not ‘get’ him or was not as engaged and impressed by the work as I believed I should have been, it was necessarily and certainly my fault. This, too, might be true of others of that younger age.

Hemingway did have a certain gift, but it is — ironically, as many commentators and reviewers have pointed out — for descriptive writing, especially about nature. Discussing Across The River And Into The Trees which Hemingway published in 1950, the New York Times’ columnist and former books reviews editor J. Donald Adams writes
My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood — most perfectly displayed in some of the short stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is not, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of human life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to great fiction.
Other commentators and reviewers also pointed out that — fatally one might think for a writer of fiction — he was not at all good at characterisation.

It often seems that Hemingway’s main gift, one which drove his career far more than any putative excellence in writing, were his remorseless and competitive ambition fuelled by a bombastic talent for self-promotion. His one real and main achievement was, as pointed out by the scholar Matthew J Brucolli, that
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.
Over the millennia that men and women have been writing, there have been many turning points in literature — though as with many such changes they came and come in fits and starts — and as a young man publishing his first volume of short stories, Hemingway was the catalyst for one such change. The irony was that other writers took his techniques, attitude and subject matter and turned out rather more interesting work than he did.

Dare I even claim ‘better’ work? No, I dare not, but that is not because I might be strung up from the nearest lamppost by Hemingway champions. It’s because in many discussions, the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — and thus ‘better’ and ‘worse’ — are not just inappropriate but pretty damn useless. They tell us nothing.

Over the intervening years, my confidence has become more robust, and I am less inclined to accept wholesale and without question. I have also read more widely and, crucially, developed more sceptical instincts, largely, I suspect, because I once worked as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor [copy editor].

I have also come to appreciate the virtues of an ‘open mind’, and it is a quasi-theistic devotion to Hemingway and his work which has increasingly come to worry me. All too often articles about the man and his work in specialist publications and discussions in webinars strike a curious note of adulation, as though one were at a Britney Spears convention. A curious campfire cosiness permeates Hemingway far too many of the studies I have read.

These essays or monographs — call them what you will — began life as an entry intended for a blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t remember why I even thought about doing so — I had re-read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.

When I had finished it, I was baffled that the blurb on the back of my paperback edition described it as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. The novel and he, I thought, seemed to be anything but.

Certainly the novel isn’t bad, and it is entertaining enough; and, certainly, the two claims owe a great deal to publishers’ hyperbole, puffing up a product to ensure greater sales. But The Sun Also Rises is certainly no ‘masterpiece’ and struggles to justify the claims made for it as being in any way ‘profound’. 

To regard Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’ is frankly ridiculous. And when an academic — Philip Young in his 1952 book Ernest Hemingway — describes him as ‘very likely the finest writer of American prose to come along since [Henry] Thoreau himself’, you wonder what is going on.

I am, however, aware that my scepticism of Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ is definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still spoken of by many as ‘a leading modernist writer’, ‘a stylistic innovator’ and, most dangerously for an apostate such as me, ‘one of the greatest American writers’.

Is it really likely that most of the world — many biographers, academics in their hundreds and notably the Nobel Prize committee which had awarded Hemingway the prize of literature in 1954 — were wrong in their evaluation of the man and his work, and that I was right?

Intrigued and not a little concerned that I was risking making a fool of myself, I began by scouring the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view. Almost immediately I came across reviews of a book published in 2016 by the New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.

It was a serendipitous find: well-researched, extensively annotated, well-written and — not at all least — very entertaining, Ms Blume’s book gave a full account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris in the 1920s and of the week-long trip to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in 1925 upon which he based his novel. Pertinently it provided many details and more for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises.

I was incidentally amused — and rather pleased — to learn that the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is entitled Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf. The main title translates, as one might expect, as Everybody Behaves Badly; but tellingly the subtitle in English translates as How Hemingway Created His Legend, an insight by the German publisher which reflects one of the conclusions I have come to. In fact, this book is essentially about the Hemingway
legend and how he actively created it.

Although Ms Blume refers to The Sun Also Rises as ‘Hemingway’s masterpiece’, I suspect that was her publisher’s choice of words, given that Ms Blume’s account of Hemingway and the genesis of his novel is rather less adulatory.

As I read Ms Blume’s book, I realised I had a problem. She referenced the several biographies of Hemingway and other books about the man, and I increasingly felt that to do justice to both my project and the writer, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway’ a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize, I should tread carefully. So knowing far more about the man and his work — including reading more of it — seemed not just necessary but a wise course to take.

The first biography of Hemingway was published in 1967, six years after Hemingway’s death. It was by Carlos Baker who had been appointed by Hemingway himself as his ‘official biographer’. Baker thus had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow, although having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword.

As Baker discovered in his research, Hemingway could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and thoroughly dishonest, but he had to tread carefully in his descriptions of the writer. Welsh was litigious and had already taken one writer, A.E. Hotchner, to court over his planned memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost). To ensure her continued help, he did not want to alienate her.

Baker’s volume was the definitive work for 18 years until Jeffrey Meyers published his biography in 1985. Two years later, in 1987, came the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work and Kenneth Lynn’s take on Hemingway, and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography.

By 1985 and later, 24 years after Hemingway’s suicide, his work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of Hemingway, both of the man and his work, than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.) Most recently, in 2016, James Hutchisson has published what he calls ‘A New Life’, but in truth it is simply, like Anthony Burgess’s biography, a precis of, and a general romp through, what previous biographers had written.

Despite claims made in some reviews, Hutchisson does not seem to have undertaken any new or original research. Furthermore, though nicely produced, it contains, inexplicably, several outright howlers.

Two years later, Mary Dearborn published her biography, and although she might well have undertaken additional research, it does add much to what previous biographers had written (and on one or two matters contradicts them, though who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ is impossible to establish).

I did not bother reading A. E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I gather, was distinctly hagiographic and took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ all the tall, often outrageous, stories Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is more of a coffee-table book for which he also did no original research.

Then there’s a very curious volume by Richard Bradford, The Man Who Wasn’t There, published in 2019, which is notable for its outright hostility to Hemingway and, which might warn us, was extremely badly edited.

Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied heavily on his wives, not just for emotional support, but in two cases also their money. Gioia Diliberto’s more recent work, Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, provides an interesting picture of Hadley Richardson and corrects the often accepted view that she was essentially some kind of doormat who gave into her egocentric and domineering husband at every turn. Although Hadley is the main focus of her book, Diliberto also illuminates Hemingway’s character very well.

Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband which covers much the same ground, as well as his book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway Vs Fitzgerald: The Rise And Fall Of A Literary Friendship. Then there are the comparatively short volumes on the writer and the man by Verna Kale, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Griffin and Charles A Fenton. The Second Flowering, Malcolm Cowley’s volume of essays, two of which are about Hemingway, provides useful considerations on what is referred to as ‘the lost generation’.

The more I read, I also realised that given the standing Hemingway had and for many still has in modern literature, I would have to do more than simply examine The Sun Also Rises and question why it was and still is hailed as ‘a masterpiece’. It seemed to me that the central conundrum was: just how and why did Hemingway, essentially a middling writer of some talent but no more than others, reach such extraordinary worldwide prominence?

On that question Leonard J. Leff’s — rather luridly titled — Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s and The Making Of American Celebrity Culture was especially interesting. It examines the growth of celebrity and pop culture in 1920s ‘jazz age’ America as well as developments in advertising and marketing, and how Ernest Hemingway and his literary career benefited. Also helpful in examining his rise to prominense was Fame Became Him by John Raeburn.

In the course of his career of roughly just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — in fact, compared with his contemporary writers, surprisingly little. Despite the acclamation his early work met, by the mid-1930s, first with the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) his reputation was beginning to tail off, and some critics were beginning to have their doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier.

With the exception of For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), which became a bestseller, not least because in the US it was chosen as a Book Of The Month, and 12 years later The Old Man And The Sea, another commercial success and was published in its entirety by Life magazine, Hemingway’s scant work from the 1930 on was regarded as not very good at all.

As my project took shape it’s focus changed: it was no longer to examine why The Sun Also Rises was and still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and, on the strength of it, Hemingway was and is hailed as ‘a genius’.

One essay considers, on the back of Virginia Woolf’s pithy remarks about critics (as part of her review of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories), whether objective judgment of a piece of writing is even possible. Another looks at Hemingway’s writing ‘style’, his ‘iceberg theory’ of writing and why, exactly, it is celebrated and regarded — not least by Hemingway — as an
‘innovation’. A third considers the commercial background and imperatives which helped to ensure Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel became success.

I also wonder why Hemingway is still touted as ‘a modernist’ writer Then there is why and how the myth took hold that The Sun Also Rises portrayed the despair of a ‘lost generation’. Central to it all was I considering the force of Hemingway’s personality on his rise to fame.

My project concludes with short accounts of Hemingway’s life, culled from the various biographies of the man. They mainly recount his early years in Paris and in the 1930s when his he began to play the part of the celebrated ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the hard-drinking, hard-living, action man writer.

Incidentally, Hemingway awarded himself the sobriquet ‘Papa’ and by the mid-1920s he encouraged everyone to address him with the name. No one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it.

When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following observations. Both are pertinent to how he achieved the status of ‘one of America’s greatest writers.

The first is by Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In view of what he says, it is worth noting that he and Hemingway did not fall out as Hemingway did with many of his friends, and his comment is not intended to be hostile:
No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.’
Then there is the comment by Michael Reynolds made in Hemingway: The Paris Years, the second volume of his five-volume biography:
Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
I have not undertaken any original research, and the nature of these essays that would seem to make it superfluous. In fact, I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have any of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth. In fact, it is astonishing how much they all echo each other and accept as established fact much about Hemingway and his writing which is certainly contentious. All the views expressed here are my own.

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Various commentaries, papers, interviews, dissertations and reviews on Hemingway and his work alluded to in these pages



I have quoted from and alluded to several commentaries, profiles, features, book reviews, dissertations, interviews and other papers in these pages. If any reader wants to find out more, they can follow these links:


W. J. Stuckey on The Sun Also Rises refuting Philip Young’s




Italy, 1927, New Republic account of March 1927 trip with Guy Hickock




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1921-1929 — Paris years, early success, first divorce and second marriage - Part III

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

 


95 per cent of The Sun Also Rises was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did. I made it all up.
Ernest Hemingway, letter to Maxwell Perkins, Nov 1933. 

Don Stewart was mildly amused at the caricature of himself in the figure of Bill Gorton [in The Sun Also Rises]. He recognised a few of his own quips in the talk between Bill and Jake, but the whole book struck him as a little more than a very clever reportorial tour de force.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story 

THE new friends Hemingway made in the spring of 1925 were all to prove significant — he met Pauline Pfeiffer, who was to break up his marriage to Hadley and become his second wife; Lady Duff Twysden, upon whom he based the character of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rise (who was born Dorothy, or possibly Mary, Smurthwaite, the daughter of a Yorkshire wine merchant, and had acquired her title by marriage); and, most significantly, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hemingway was introduced to Pfeiffer (below) at a party given by Kitty Cannell, Harold Loeb’s then girlfriend. The attraction was not immediate, but Pfeiffer — like Hadley several years older than
Hemingway — soon took a shine to him. She was 30 and thought by some in Paris to be ‘looking for a husband’, although Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds suggests she had moved to Paris from New York as much to escape being married off to a wealthy cousin as for the prestigious job with Vogue she had been offered.

Before meeting Hemingway, she had previously considered other men as potential partners, including Harold Loeb, and Hemingway, already married and a father, was not an obvious choice. Pfeiffer was unimpressed when she and her sister Jinny called on Hadley after meeting the couple at Cannell’s party and were ignored by an unshaven Hemingway lounging on his bed next door reading.

In his memoir A Moveable Feast Hemingway later claims that Pfeiffer had somehow wheedled her way into his affections by subterfuge, using ‘the oldest trick in the book’ by making his wife ‘a best friend’ and then stealing that friend’s husband. Reynolds refutes that: he suggests that without strong and quite definite encouragement from Hemingway (for whom marriage to Hadley seemed to be paling and who already had hopes of acquiring a mistress available for inconsequential sex) Pfeiffer would have held back.

Reynolds points out that as a strict, practising Roman Catholic whose church insisted on the ‘sanctity of the sacrament of marriage’, Pfeiffer would not have considered merely having an affair with Hemingway unless it led somewhere. That she and he were eventually able be married in an Roman Catholic ceremony after Hemingway and Hadley were divorced was simple: as Hemingway and Hadley had been wed in a Methodist ceremony, their marriage was not a ‘real’ in Roman Catholic eyes and thus Hemingway was ‘not divorced’.

Similar legerdemain was used when Hemingway was required to prove he had been received into the RC church: he claimed that soon after being blown up in July 1918 in Italy, he had been ‘baptised’ by an Italian army chaplain because he had received the sacrament of ‘extreme unction’. Not only was this claim unsound (and it was a wonder the RC church accepted it), but no baptismal certificate or proof of any kind was ever produced or has since turned up, but in the event no more questions were asked.

. . . 

Although Hemingway soon fell for Pfeiffer (and, some suggest, her trust fund income, substantially larger than Hadley’s, added to her attraction) in 1925 he first developed a crush on the twice-divorced Lady Duff Twysden. She and her supposed fiancé, her cousin Pat Guthrie — who became Mike Campbell in The Sun
Also Rises and was thought by some to be gay — were two impecunious and hard-drinking spongers and fixtures in the Montparnasse expatriate community. 

They existed on irregular maintenance cheques which arrived from Guthrie’s rich mother. Although Twysden (right) was said not to have been particularly beautiful, many found her attractive, and Hemingway was only one of many men who fell for her. His friend Harold Loeb was another, and he was more successful in his pursuit.

Hadley was well aware of Hemingway’s feelings for Twysden, which he made no attempt to hide, and many years later she admitted she had ‘suffered’ during the summer of 1925; but she did so in silence, believing her husband’s infatuation would blow over (as she later persuaded herself Hemingway’s affair with Pfeiffer would blow over).

She later told biographer Michael Reynolds she did not think Hemingway and Twysden had a physical affair, and Twysden apparently drew the line at sleeping with married men. Loeb, in the other hand, was no longer married and she did sleep with him: while Guthrie was in London, Loeb took Twysden off for a week-long tryst in St-Jean-de-Luiz, south-west of Biarritz. Hemingway didn’t find out until later, but when he did, he was furious and his jealousy led to the bad blood in Pamplona that July that became the basis for the story of The Sun Also Rises. .

. . . 

In April Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald. According A Moveable Feast, he was out drinking with Twysden and Guthrie in the Dingo Bar, a favourite ex-pat haunt, when Fitzgerald either introduced himself or Hemingway introduced himself to Fitzgerald — accounts differ. Elsewhere he is said to have met Fitzgerald in other Montparnasse bars.

In his memoir, Hemingway writes that Fitzgerald was in the company of a Dunc Chaplin, a baseball player, but Chaplin later said he wasn’t even in France at the time. Like much about Hemingway’s life
and its ‘facts’, it all gets a little confusing. (left) was just three years older than Hemingway; yet where Hemingway had been struggling for recognition as a writer, let alone to make a living from his work, Fitzgerald was earning very good money indeed selling ‘jazz age’ and ‘flapper’ stories to magazines and had just published The Great Gatsby, his third novel. (His earnings in 1925 were $18,333 — around $271,272 in 2020 — and $25,686 — $380,074 — the following year.)

He and his wife Zelda had been living in the South of France and had recently moved to Paris, and he began to spend a lot of time with Hemingway, taking the budding author under his wing and giving him advice on getting published and even writing. Notably he alerted his editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, to Hemingway and his new style. Fitzgerald’s advice and connections paid off, but ironically as Hemingway’s star began to wax, his began to wane, and in just a few years Hemingway, in the role of the ‘established professional writer’ he had by then assigned to himself, was handing out advice to Fitzgerald.

Biographers of the two writers have commented that Fitzgerald spent more time promoting Hemingway’s career than his own and that his attitude his new best friend was akin to hero worship. Zelda did not share his admiration: she and Hemingway disliked each other on sight. She later told Hadley she’d noticed that the Hemingway family always did what Ernest wanted. The remark irritated Hemingway, but according to Reynolds, Hadley later agreed on just how perceptive Zelda had been. But Zelda’s suggestion that Hemingway and Scott had a gay affair is most certainly nothing but pure malice.

. . . 

Hemingway had been told — and himself knew — that he needed to produce a novel if he wanted to make his name as a writer: publishers made very little money from short story collections and would usually only consider publishing one by an already established author because it was only likely to sell on the back of successful published novels.

Hemingway’s problem was that he had very little confidence in his ability to produce a long piece of work. His longest piece so far, the story Big Two-Hearted River, at around 12,000 words was considerably longer than any of his other stories none of which were very long. Nor did he have any ideas for a novel. He had recently attempted to write one, but the project petered out after just over two dozen pages.

That summer Hemingway got up another party to visit the bullfights in Pamplona during the St Fermin festival in July, and it was at the festival that he was finally presented with material for the novel he had to write. That year’s party consisted of himself and Hadley, Duff Twysden and Pat Guthrie, Donald Ogden Stewart, his childhood friend Bill Smith and Harold Loeb.

Hemingway, in the depths of his crush on Twysden, did not find out about Loeb’s tryst with Twysden until everyone had congregated in Pamplona, and despite the presence of both his wife, Hadley, and Guthrie, Hemingway is reported to have behaved as though Twysden were ‘his woman’ and was furious. Pat Guthrie was also less than pleased and continually sniped at Loeb, and the atmosphere in Pamplona was awful. At one point it almost led to a fist fight between Hemingway and Loeb (who was quite a bit shorter and lighter than Hemingway).

The Sun Also Rises, the novel Hemingway knew he had to write to build a career for himself, utilised the drama of that Pamplona trip, and it made Hemingway’s name. When it was published in October the following year, Ogden Stewart, who with Bill Smith was amalgamated into the character Bill Gorton, was unimpressed with it, declared it had no artistic merit and described it as close to a bald account of what had happened in Pamplona as dammit.

Loeb was mortified by, and angry about, the portrayal of him as the ineffectual Robert Cohn. On the other hand, Duff Twysden, who comes across as a loose woman, seemed to shrug off the notoriety it brought her, although later in life did admit the novel had upset her. (She died young, in 1938). But theirs were minority opinions. Others, not least Scribner’s, insisted the novel was an extraordinary work, and that is certainly the line its publishers — unsurprisingly — and many in the literary world have taken to this day.

Hemingway began writing the first draft in mid-July as soon as he and Hadley had left Pamplona for Madrid for a month-long tour of Spain. His routine was to write in the late mornings and early afternoons, then spend the rest of the day watching bullfighting. After four weeks he and Hadley moved to Hendaye, a small French town on the Atlantic coast south of Biarritz. A day later, Hadley left for Paris and Hemingway spent a week alone carrying on with his novel before also returning to Paris. He completed his first draft by mid-September.

. . . 

Hemingway’s joy at the beginning of the year at finally finding a commercial publisher was a little muted by the fact that Horace Liveright (below), who owned and ran Boni & Liveright, was Jewish and the house
was staffed almost entirely by Jews — in letters to friends Hemingway more than once alluded to not wanting to work with a Jewish publisher. But his goodwill towards the firm faded entirely when he found out that Scribner’s had been interested in publishing his work.

Hemingway’s antagonism grew stronger when Harold Loeb told him about the changes Boni & Liveright were making to his, Loeb’s, first novel: in an attempt to appear ‘modern’, Loeb had removed all definite and indefinite articles — ‘the’ and ‘a’ — and Boni & Liveright had simply reinstated them without consulting him. Hemingway sternly informed the house no changes could be made to his stories without his explicit approval.

He was also irritated that Boni & Liveright initially rejected the manuscript In Our Time and had only changed its mind after Loeb and Sherwood Anderson had lobbied on his behalf. He professed to despise authors who succeeded because of ‘who they knew’ and not because of the quality of their work, and he did not want to be classed as one.

He was also angry that Boni & Liveright refused to include his story Up In Michigan in the collection; and after In Our Time was published in the first week of October, 1925, he blamed subsequent low sales on poor marketing. Yet at what point he finally decided to sever his link with Boni & Liveright and jump ship is not clear.

It was plain, at least to Michael Reynolds, that Hemingway became determined to leave Boni & Liveright after he discovered that not only were Scribner’s interested in him and his work, but so, too, were other publishers, and that the decision get out of his contract was made some time before In Our Time was published.

At some point in August, Jane Heap, editor of the literary magazine The Little Review, asked Hemingway how happy he was with Boni & Liveright and told she had heard from a publisher who would consider taking him on. Writing back, Hemingway again noted — as he had previously told Perkins — that although under his contract the house had agreed to publish his next two books (after In Our Time), should Horace Liveright refuse to publish either, its options on his future work would lapse. He added that although he could not yet talk business with another publisher, he would like to meet them because ‘you can’t ever tell what might happen’.

Michael Reynolds suspects that despite Hemingway’s later insistent denials, he had by then already made up his mind to break his contract and notes
What might happen was perfectly obvious . . . In Our Time was only six weeks from being released and Hemingway was thinking seriously of ways to break his contract. . . Horace Liveright’s letters were full of business but no stroking of his fragile ego. He wanted to get letters from someone like Max Perkins who knew how to make a writer feel secure. Perkins offered him a contract on the basis of his work, not the people he knew. Sure, Scott [Fitzgerald had] got his name in the door, but Max liked his stuff.
Reynolds points out an significant oddity of Hemingway’s letter to Heap: he had torn off the bottom half of a page just after informing her exactly how Liveright’s option might lapse: he suspects Hemingway had already come up with a strategy to force Boni & Liveright to end his contract, but decided not yet to reveal it and so had removed any reference to it from the letter.

. . . 

In Our Time first edition

In Our Time generally met with acclaim from the US critics, but the reading public’s response was muted and sales were very slow. Although in the New Yorker a year later and after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Dorothy Parker observed that In Our Time

caused about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive

contemporary reviews of In Our Time will at least have encouraged Hemingway. The review in Time magazine (which had been founded only two years earlier) set the tone:
[Hemingway] is that rare bird, an intelligent man who is not introspective on paper . . . Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-‘literary’ transcriber of life — a writer
and the New York Herald Tribune Books joined in the praise:
I know no American writer with a more startling ear for colloquial conversation, or a more poetic sensitiveness for the woods and hills. In Our Time has perhaps not enough energy to be a great book, but Ernest Hemingway has promises of genius.
For the New York Times
[Hemingway’s] language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean . . . his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own
and the New York City Sun declared that:
The flat even banal declarations in the paragraphs alternating with Mr Hemingway’s longer sketches are a criticism of the conventional dishonesty of literature. Here is neither literary inflation nor elevation, but a passionately bare telling of what happened.
One does wonder what ‘the conventional dishonesty of literature’ might be and one is tempted to conclude it is just a critic getting a tad carried away.

In Britain, the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer took a more balanced view:
The general atmosphere might be described as one of American adolescence — a hard, sterile, restlessness of mood conveyed in a hard, staccato sometimes brutal prose. Mr Hemingway uses his method very skilfully; we feel he is both sincere and successful in carrying out his purpose, but his purpose seems to us narrow and unfruitful — withered at the root
and it concluded on the encouraging, though, sober note that
[Hemingway] is a natural writer who has not yet found an environment worthy of him.’

The Times Literary Supplement (reviewing the volume over a year later) notes that
‘Mr Ernest Hemingway, a young American writer living in Paris, is definitely of the moderns. It is not merely a deliberate taste for writing ungrammatically now and again which points the way to Mr Hemingway’s literary camp; it is rather his own concern for the conventional features of good writing. The short stories in the volume entitled In Our Time . . . achieve their affect by normal and rather puzzling means . . . Only one story in the book — Indian camp, the first — as anything like a straightforward appeal, and even here the actual method is as elusive as in the rest of the tales.’
Hemingway was already subscribing to a cuttings service, but it is unlikely that at this very early point in his career that he would have come across the British reviews quoted. And although the US review were sure to have pleased him, he had already developed his life-long distaste ‘literary critics’. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson — five months before In Our Time was published — he described them as
camp-following eunuchs of literature [who wouldn’t] even whore.
It got far worse several years later when he was no longer the golden boy and the critics stopped singing his praises and began taking him to task. Writing in The Green Hills Of Africa a year after the paper’s reviewers had been distinctly underwhelmed by Death In The Afternoon, published three years earlier, he described them as

lice who crawl on literature.

. . . 

In early 1926, Hemingway was to spend a few months re-drafting and re-writing the manuscript for The Sun Also Rises, but late 1925 he set about freeing himself from his contract with Boni & Liveright. Beginning in the fourth week of November and completing it in just ten days, he wrote a 30,000-word long novella sending up his friend and benefactor Sherwood Anderson’s latest novel, Dark Laughter.

He always pleaded innocence and claimed, rather pretentiously, that his send-up, which he called The Torrents Of Spring, was merely a call to order to Anderson whose latest work, he insisted, was sub-standard. All the circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise, and Michael Reynolds spells out quite clearly that

The point was to write a short book that Liveright could not possibly accept and simultaneously make it clear to critics that Sherwood Anderson was no longer his literary role model. With Anderson so recently signed to a contract and selling well, Liveright could not afford to offend him with Hemingway’s slapstick, Ernest was counting on their choosing Sherwood and setting himself free to find another publisher.

Both his wife Hadley and friend John Dos Passos were shocked that he should send up Anderson in such a manner and urged him not to submit it for publication. But Scott Fitzgerald, for whom getting Hemingway to join him at Scribner’s had become a serious project, and his soon-to-be mistress Pauline Pfeiffer egged him on. His scheme worked: the manuscript for The Torrents Of Spring was typed up and mailed off to Boni & Liveright in New York by the beginning of the second week of December.

Three weeks later, by now in Schruns, Austria, where he was spending Christmas with his family, Hemingway received a telegram from Horace Liveright rejecting manuscript and telling him he was looking forward to receiving the manuscript for his other novel. Hemingway immediately wrote an odd and ambiguous letter to Scott Fitzgerald that both confirmed and denied that submitting The Torrents Of Spring manuscript was just a ploy to get out of his contract. He told Fitzgerald

I have known all along that they could and would not be able to publish it. I did not, however, have that in mind in any way when I wrote it . . . So I am loose.

Three weeks later he replied to Liveright with an ultimatum he knew would be rejected: either publish the manuscript he had submitted — in good faith, he insisted — or he would consider himself free to go to another publisher. The fact that he knew other publishers, especially Scribner’s, were interested in signing him will have boosted his bravado.

But he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded, and rather than let the matter drag on for weeks or even months as letters made their way to and fro across the Atlantic, he decided to resolve the matter face toface. He left Europe for New York on February 3 (after five-day stopover in Paris to visit and go to bed with Pauline Pfeiffer), and the day after he arrived on February 9, he met Horace Liveright, who simply threw in the towel and Hemingway was free. He then made his way to the Scribner’s office where despite not having seen a word of the new novel Perkins offered him a contract. Max Perkins (above left) also agreed to publishing The Torrents Of Spring (his agreement to do so was crucial from a legal point of view) and asked Hemingway to return the following Tuesday to sign his contract and view the dustjacket for The Torrents. The Hemingway legend was about to be launched.
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1921-1929 — Paris years, early success, first divorce and second marriage - Part II

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

 



ONCE Hemingway was back in Paris in January 1924 after more or less walking out of his staff job in Toronto, there was no more freelance work from the Star to help pay the bills, and he and Hadley had to rely solely on her trust fund income to pay their way. Furthermore, the cheques from the fund were often late, which sometimes caused problems; the amount the fund paid was further diminished after the family friend managing it on Hadley’s behalf either made a poor investment or — and this was certainly Hemingway’s view and more recent biographers subscribe to it — had embezzled some of her money.

Yet Hemingway still did not look for paid work. At Ezra Pound’s suggestion the British novelist, poet and critic Ford Madox Ford, who had just launched the literary journal the transatlantic review [sic] in January 1924, took on Hemingway as his deputy, but the work was unpaid. Yet Hemingway’s later oft-repeated claims that he spent the next two years living in penury are typically wide of the mark. He and Hadley sometimes had to borrow money from friends to see them through until the next trust fund cheque arrived, but they were not on their uppers. Certainly, they watched their spending and when they went off on vacation, they covered their costs by subletting their apartment.

In fact, when they spent a full three months in a hotel in Schruns, Austria, from December 1924 to early March 1925, the cheap Austrian schilling allowed them to spend less than when they lived in Paris. Hemingway had a cavalier attitude to boot: he never stinted himself, but didn’t at all mind that Hadley’s clothes were almost falling off her. In fact, the wives and girlfriends in the couple’s social circle often took pity on her and passed on their clothes, wondering why Hadley acquiesced so meekly to what looked like Hemingway’s selfishness — it was after all her money that sustained them.

. . .

In his ambition to earn his living, let alone make his name for himself as a writer, by early 1924 Hemingway was still barely off the starting block. He had so far only two slim volumes to his name: 300 copies of Three Stories And Ten Poems produced by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Company and 170 copies (part of the intended 300 edition hand-printed run was damaged) of in our time [sic], published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountain Press.

As both McAlmon and Bird might best be regarded as gentlemen publishing for love rather than money and as no commercial imperative underpinned either undertaking, Hemingway was paid nothing for his work. The bisexual McAlmon funded his publishing house with his lesbian wife’s money, and Bird co-owned a press agency and worked publishing as a labour of love which he undertook in his spare time. Both men had standing in the Paris expatriate literary community, but their enterprises were very small-scale indeed, and Hemingway, understandably, craved the recognition publication by a bona-fide commercial house would give his writing.

His November 11, 1923, letter to Edmund Wilson from Toronto was one of his first moves to attract wider attention to his work. Wilson had given him some encouragement: he told Hemingway that in his view some of Three Stories and Ten Poems was very good, but then he qualified his praise. He did not much like Up In Michigan, and My Old Man, he said, reminded him of Sherwood Anderson’s work; and, he added, he thought the stories were better than the poems (everyone thought the stories were better than the poems — Hemingway’s poetry has never been acclaimed). All in all, one might sum up Wilson’s reaction to Three Stories And Ten Poems as ‘promising, but curate’s egg’. But this did not disillusion Hemingway, who thanked Wilson for his interest, though he objected to the comparison by Wilson with Anderson’s work.

The calculating side of Hemingway’s character might be gauged from part of his letter in which he disingenuously and blatantly flattered the critic: ‘Yours is the only critical opinion in the States I have any respect for’ he told Wilson. In the second volume of his biography, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds points out that
As Hemingway was obviously learning, writing well was only half the game; making sure that influential people knew you were writing well was the other half. Before another year was out his game would be impeccable, the two complementing each other perfectly.
. . .

Ford Madox Ford (below) had a solid existence and reputation in the literary world, and had long championed young writers. He had been impressed with Hemingway’s work as soon as he read it. Hemingway took an immediate and irrational dislike to the novelist as soon as they met: Ford
was corpulent, wheezed (as the result of being gassed in World War I), was much given to bragging about his literary connections, was apt to tells fibs and had a high opinion of himself, and he became increasingly and publicly insulting. But the older, more experienced writer never wavered in his admiration. Reynolds observes that
Ford never understood Hemingway’s animosity, and Ernest never understood the walrus-like Ford of the wheezing voice. The man could never tell the truth, Ernest said. Perhaps he saw something of himself in Ford, something he did not like but could not control any more than could Ford.
In addition, Hemingway disagreed with Ford’s editorial policy for the transatlantic review; he felt the choice of content was not avant garde enough and that Ford was still beholden to the pre-war world of literature.

Yet despite that animosity, which became embarrassing later in the summer of 1924 when Ford left Hemingway in charge of the magazine and, putting together the July issue, Hemingway more or less sabotaged what Ford was trying to do, Ford gave Three Stories And Ten Poems a good review in the transatlantic review and published the early short story Indian Camp.

Although he was barely off the starting block, Hemingway was, though, making some progress: his name was well-known in the small coterie of Left Bank expatriates as that of a promising writer, but bit by bit, word now also got back to literary folk in the US — well, literary folk in New York — that a young man in Paris was producing interesting work.

One man who began to pass on the word was F. Scott Fitzgerald (below left), the bright new thing of American letters who had found fame in 1919 with his debut novel This Side Of Paradise and its follow-up The Beautiful And The Damned. He alerted Max Perkins, his editor at his publisher Scribner’s  
and Perkins got hold of a copy of in our time and liked what he read. Yet none of the magazines in the US to whom Hemingway submitted his stories were as enthusiastic and none choose to publish them. The commercial magazines didn’t think his stories were what their readers wanted, and the literary magazines simply weren’t impressed.

Undaunted, the ambitious networker in Hemingway hit his stride as 1924 wore on. In the spring he had got to know John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart, both published writers, and Harold Loeb, and he enlisted the help of all three in finding a commercial publisher. Ogden Stewart was signed up to the New York house Boni & Liveright (who had recently acquired Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway’s first benefactor) and which was due to publish Loeb’s first novel. When Dos Passos and Ogden Stewart returned to New York later that year, Hemingway gave Dos Passos a copy of his manuscript for him and Ogden Stewart to hawk around the publishers. It finally made its way to Boni & Liveright.

At the time Boni & Liveright had asked Leon Fleischman to take over (from the writer Harold Stearns who was becoming something of an unreliable drunk) as its representative and scout in Europe, and for his part Loeb suggested to Fleischman that he consider recommending Hemingway’s work. One evening in early autumn, Loeb and his girlfriend Kitty Cannell took Hemingway to see Fleischman at his apartment for an initial meeting.

According to Loeb, writing in his memoir The Way It Was 35 years later, Fleischman immediately agreed to forward Hemingway’s name to Boni & Liveright — Loeb suggests Fleischman was already familiar with Hemingway’s work from the two previously privately published volumes — but the meeting at Fleischman’s apartment sparked another example of very odd behaviour from Hemingway.

During the evening he reportedly became more and more subdued and said very little, but once the evening ended and he, Loeb and Cannell left and were out in the street, he launched into an obscene anti-Semitic rant about Fleischman which shocked Cannell. Loeb, himself Jewish, later brushed off the outburst as merely the kind of ‘locker room talk’ in which men indulged. In his memoir he speculates that Hemingway was angry because he felt Fleischman had been patronising him, but whatever the reason for his nasty outburst, he nevertheless, a few days later, dropped off a copy of his In Our Time manuscript at Fleischman’s apartment.

In mid-December, Hemingway and Hadley went off to spend Christmas in Schruns and had invited Loeb to join them and others, but Loeb decided to return to New York to oversee how publication of his novel. This was a stroke of luck for Hemingway: when Loeb dropped in at the Boni & Liveright office after Christmas, the head of the firm’s editorial department explained that none of Liveright’s readers had liked Hemingway’s stories and the In Our Time manuscript was about to be returned. Loeb insisted Hemingway was a talented writer and urged her to reconsider the decision. Then, by chance, Sherwood Anderson rang Liveright and also urged the firm to publish the work. Boni & Liveright changed their minds and cabled Hemingway that they were accepting his collection of stories (with one exception — Up In Michigan was thought too coarse, and later the house also insisted the story Mr And Mrs Smith, which became Mrs And Mrs Elliot, be re-written).

This was perhaps the moment when Hemingway’s career finally sparked into life. He immediately cabled his agreement to the three-book deal Boni & Liveright offered, and signed and returned the contract at the end of March: he was finally about to become a bona-fide published writer. But as it turned out, matters would not be straightforward.

On the strength of what he had read in in our time, the slim volume brought to his attention by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Max Perkins at Scribner’s had already written to Hemingway in Paris early in February asking whether he had any more work he might like to submit. However, his letter was mis-addressed and became lost in the post. Once alerted to the error and given the correct address, he wrote again, but by the time Hemingway received that second letter, he had signed up with Boni & Liveright and informed Perkins he would gladly have submitted his work to Scribner’s but was now contracted to Boni & Liveright. Oddly — and quite notably in view of how he managed to switch to Scribner’s a year later — he made a point of stressing that under his arrangement with Liveright his contract would lapse if the house did not accept within 60 days a manuscript submitted for publication. And, he promised Perkins, if his contract with Boni & Liveright did end, Scribner’s would have first refusal on his work.

. . .

Signing with Boni & Liveright in March 1925 was a turning point for Hemingway in more than one way: by the end of the following year he had discarded one set of friends and acquired a new set, separated from his first wife and was about to marry his second, and — most notably — his ‘debut’ novel was published to wide acclaim and Hemingway the personality came into being.

During 1925 his growing prospects began to bring out aspects of his personality which were already known to his friends and acquaintances, but which now became ever more pronounced. For one thing he felt qualified to pontificate. Soon he would pontificate on what constituted ‘good writing’, a habit he kept for the rest of his life. What constituted ‘good writing’ was, though, just one of many topics on which Hemingway came to regard himself as an expert, and over the years he became something of an all-round know-all.

More immediately he now thought he knew all about publishing, and writing to Boni & Liveright conveying his strict instructions that no changes should be made to his work without his explicit approval, he also informed the house how many copies his volume of short stories would sell. Boni & Liveright did not share his confidence.

It is now obvious that very soon after signing his contract with Boni & Liveright Hemingway gradually be became disillusioned with the house, though on the face of it, quite why is not so obvious. In Hemingway: The Paris Years Michael Reynolds suggest Hemingway could simply have cancelled the contract, but the well brought-up, middle-class Oak Part boy felt he had given his word.

Compared with Scribner’s — established in 1846 — Boni & Liveright — established in 1917 — was by far the livelier and more avant garde house. Its roster of authors included Eugene O’Neill, Sigmund Freud, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes. Scribner’s on the other hand was seen as ultra-conservative, fusty and old-fashioned and counted established authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton among its writers. And its royalties were generally thought to be decidedly stingy.

The novelist Edith Stern, who as a young woman worked as a reader and later office manager at Boni & Liveright office, described the house as
the jazz age in microcosm, with all its extremes of hysteria and cynicism, of carpe diem, of decadent thriftlessness . . . To recapture its atmosphere one would not, like Proust, dip a madeleine into a cup of tea, but a canapé into bathtub gin
so one might assume being contracted to Boni & Liveright would be welcomed by a literary young Turk keen to make his name as a modernist writer. But there were other crucial distinctions between the two houses. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers suggests Hemingway reasoned that if he jumped ship and signed up with Scribner’s, he

would then obtain the benefits of a more commercially successful firm, an influential editor in Max Perkins, and a profitable outlet for his stories in Scribner’s Magazine. 

Reynolds believes Hemingway slowly became convinced Boni & Liveright was not sufficiently interested in him and his work — the initial print run for Sherwood Anderson’s latest novel was 20,000, but only 1,335 copies were printed in the first run of In Our Time (which then took two years to sell out). He also complained that once it had published In Our Time, the house had not bothered to market it. Gradually, with Perkins’s established interest in him and his work, the siren voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald urging him to jump ship — and, Reynolds suggests, Hemingway’s innate conservatism — ditching Scribner’s became more and more attractive.

In Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s, And The Making Of American Celebrity Culture, academic and film writer Leonard Leff agrees that the writer’s intrinsically conservative nature played a part his eventually ditching Liveright for Scribner’s, but he suggests Hemingway’s anti-Semitism was also a factor. In a letter to his childhood friend Bill Smith discussing possible New York publishers he might approach and three months before receiving Liveright’s offer to publish In Our Time, Hemingway had announced he was

all for keeping out of the manuals of the Semites as long as possible.

He noted that at Boni & Liveright Leon Fleischman (who had been employed in New York before moving to Paris), the house’s public relations manager Isodore Schneider, Edith Stern, Richard Simon (who went on to found Simon & Schuster) who worked in its sales department, and the house’s owner Horace Liveright were all Jewish.

When the Boni & Liveright offer was made and still unaware of Scribner’s interest, pragmatism had prevailed, but once Hemingway realized that signing up with Scribner’s was possible, Leff observes that the god-fearing, cautious — and anti-Semitic — Oak Park which had raised Hemingway held sway. Hemingway, he adds, was less modern than what he wrote. Scribner’s was respected, sober, financially sound and had a good name. Boni & Liveright, whose owner Horace Liveright flew by the seat of his pants (and, for example, used profits from publishing to subsidise a string of unsuccessful theatrical productions) was not and did not. By 1927, two years after In Our Time was published, Liveright, an alcoholic, lost control of the house he had helped found. By 1933, a few months short of his 5oth birthday he was dead.

. . .

Another aspect of Hemingway’s personality which began to became apparent in 1925 was his unsavoury practice of turning on the friends who had helped him and discarding them in favour of those who might prove to be more useful. Fitzgerald summed it up neatly several years later when he observed that

Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up. 

In his biography of Carlos Baker notes that Hemingway’s
capacity for contempt, already shown in dozens of other ways, was also apparent in his habit of accepting favours from people whom he then maligned behind their backs. He re-paid a dinner invitation from Louis and Mary Bromfield by surreptitiously speaking of his host as ‘Bloomfield’, impugning his gifts as a writer, criticising the quality of the wine he served and commenting satirically on Mary's pet cats, which he said swarmed over the dining table stealing “what little fish there was” and then defecating in odd corners of the room.
Michael Reynolds writes
At 26, he had become the writer he set out to be, but the seven-year apprenticeship had changed him. Old friends saw it clearly. He was harder now, less simple, his moods deeper, their shifts more sudden.
Then there was is shabby treatment of Sherwood Anderson.

Anderson (right), who he had persuaded the ambitious young man he met in Chicago to move to Paris not Naples, had provided him with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach and Lewis Galantière, and who had championed him at Boni & Liveright, was to become such victim. Harold Loeb — Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises — who had come to regard himself as one of Hemingway’s closest friends became another. One might even suggest, contentiously, that Hadley was yet another.

Hadley had supported him completely, not the least financially, in his years as an unknown. She had put up with his emotional volatility (now thought as the manifestation of a bi-polar condition) and his self-centred demands (there must be no talk at breakfast, he had told her, if he would be spending the day writing). She had not complained when he developed his crush on Duff Twysden — Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises — and later began his affair with Pfeiffer. But Hadley’s loyalty counted for nothing. Hemingway even blamed her for ending their marriage by eventually daring to confront him on whether anything was going on between him and Pauline.

Michael Reynolds has noted that after Hemingway returned from Toronto, by now the father of a young child, and buckled down to write the stories which appeared in In Our Time, the underlying theme of many of them was the — as Hemingway saw it — corrosive effect of marriage on a man and a man’s freedom. Some stories, for example Cross Country Run, portray a man who feels he is being entrapped by his impending marriage. Others — The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife, Cat In The Rain and Mr And Mrs Elliot — present a rather sour view of marriage. Reynolds suggests this reflected the state of Hemingway’s feelings about marriage to Hadley. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson in May thanking him for helping getting Boni & Liveright interested, he rather unenthusiastically remarks that he and Hadley were

as fond of each other as ever and get along well.

The marriage was at that point still just three and a half years old and for a union that young Hemingway’s comment might be thought to be rather odd.

After giving birth to their son in October 1923, Hadley had not lost the weight she had gained during pregnancy and, never close to having the thin and boyish physique of young women fashionable in the 1920s, she was, at almost 33, said to have looked ‘matronly’. She had come to see another side to Hemingway in July 1924 when she, Hemingway and several friends — the party included John Dos Passos and a girlfriend, Ogden Stewart, McAlmon and Bill Bird and his wife — decamped to Burguete for a week after a second visit to Pamplona.

There, according to Hemingway’s calculations (he kept an almost German account of these matters), her period should have begun; but she was late, and for several days Hemingway, already feeling fatherhood encroaching on his freedom and fearing she was pregnant again, sank into a foul mood and treated her very badly, so badly that eventually Bill Bird’s wife, Sally, lost patience with him. When her period did finally come, Hemingway was contrite, but the episode shook Hadley. As Michael Reynolds puts it

No longer feeling guilty [that she might be pregnant again], she looked at Ernest in a new light. He had made her feel like a worthless drag on his life. It was not a nice revelation, nor did the space between them immediately close.

It was another step towards the disintegration of their marriage.

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1921-1929 — Paris years, early success, first divorce and second marriage - Part I

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.


WHEN Hemingway arrived in Paris he was just another literary wannabe, one of many who washed up in Montparnasse, though by then its heyday as a bohemian hotspot was drawing to a close. Just under five years later he was a commercially published author, but it would not be for several more years before he achieved his other ambition of earning his living solely from his writing. But luck had been on his side: until his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, divorced him in November 1940, Hemingway was largely sustained by the money of his first two wives, both of whom had independent means. In addition Pauline had a very wealthy uncle who doted on her and indulged her and her eventual husband Ernest.

Because of his subsequent fame and high profile, it is often assumed that when Hemingway began working in Paris as ‘a foreign correspondent’ at just 22, it was because he was such a talented journalist. That overeggs the pudding badly. He was never on staff in Paris, and the claim on a Toronto Star website dedicated to the writer that he was ‘the paper’s European correspondent’, is this, though strictly true, ambiguous (and perhaps, given Hemingway’s later global prominence, intentionally so).

In fact, by the time he and Hadley arrived in Paris in late December 1921, his journalistic experience was not at all extensive: it consisted of six months working as a trainee reporter on the Kansas City Star, his five months in Toronto when he sold short pieces to the Toronto Star and his months helping to produce the Cooperative Commonwealth in Chicago.

He had a lively and entertaining style, though one more suited to writing colour pieces than news stories. He was also adept, a skill not unusual among reporters, at giving the impression he knew what he was talking about. He was a good and attentive listener and, for example, while later covering conferences in Genoa and Lausanne, he picked up a lot from his more experienced journalist colleagues, political and economic insights he then passed on to Toronto Star’s readers as his own in an authoritative manner.

The deal he reached with the Toronto Star before he moved to Paris was straightforward: he would write short pieces for the weekly Star and it would pay him for those it chose to print. If the paper sent him anywhere on assignment, he would be paid expenses in addition.

Yet had Hemingway not tried to be a little too smart, he might have landed himself a far better deal, according to William Burrill, a former Toronto Star writer, columnist and editor. In his book Hemingway, The Toronto Years, he says John Bone, the Star’s managing editor had his eye on Hemingway, but for a very specific reason.

It seems, says Burrill, that Bone was engaged in a little skulduggery to make some money on the side. He would sell on the copy of some of his writers to other publications under his own byline. His dilemma was that if he sold on the copy of his better-known writers, his double-dealing would be discovered, so he restricted himself to selling the copy the less known staff.

Bone was impressed with Hemingway’s work and reasoned that if he landed Hemingway in Paris as the paper’s staff correspondent, he might prove to be a source of very good copy and stories he could sell on. In the spring of 1921, Hemingway was living in Chicago and helping produce the Cooperative Commonwealth, a monthly magazine.

Bone contacted him and offered to hire him to go to Paris. Hemingway countered that he liked his job in Chicago where he was being paid $75 a week (he was in fact, being paid just $40) and he would not accept the job for less than $85. That was too much for Bone and the offer was withdrawn and Hemingway arrived in Paris as just another freelance.

At first Hemingway submitted general colour pieces about whatever caught his fancy. But the weekly Star’s editor, a J. Herbert Cranston (who had got to know Hemingway two years earlier while he was living at the Connable’s Toronto mansion and had begun submitting pieces) liked his work, and eventually the Star’s managing editor, John Bone began asking him to cover particular events.

That the arrangement was, though, still on a freelance basis and that Hemingway was merely paid for what he produced is clear from a piece he wrote describing how he preferred getting out-of-town assignments because they paid better — lineage and expense rates were higher. It is also pertinent to his freelance status that he was able to refuse assignments with no comeback, as he did when the Star has asked him to go to Russia but his pregnant wife did not want to be left alone in Paris. No staff correspondent would or could do that if they wanted to keep their job.

. . .

Hemingway and Hadley were just two of an increasing number of Americans and British who moved to Paris throughout the 1920s, partly because the dollar’s exchange rate with the French franc was so attractive and they were able to live comfortably in the city on what at home would have been a pittance. Biographer Michael Reynolds reports that by January 1924 when the Hemingway’s returned from Toronto and arrived in Paris for the second time, there were ‘32,000 permanent American residents and twice as many British’ in the city.

The income from Hadley’s trust fund, very respectable in the US, was more than enough to sustain the newly married couple — the rent on the apartment they moved into in January 1922 was just $18 a month. The trust fund had been set up after Hadley’s mother died in late 1920 (her father had died, by his own hand, in 1903). In early 1922 it paid around $3,600 a year or about $300 a month/$70 a week. Taking inflation into account those sums, in 2020, are the equivalent of $56,000 a year and $4,660 a month/$1,076 a week — almost $8,000 a year/$549 a month/$140 a week higher than the 2020 US median income.

Hemingway’s later claims in his memoir A Moveable Feast that he and Hadley existed in penury are just another example of his habitual myth-making, though after they returned from Toronto in January 1924 and his association with the Toronto Star had ended and Hemingway was earning next to nothing, they relyied solely Hadley’s trust fund, and money could get tight if her quarterly cheque from the fund was late.

. . .

They had left the US in late November 1921, arrived in Paris, via Spain, a few days before Christmas and moved into a hotel where Sherwood Anderson had previously stayed and where he had booked them a room. It was there that their first contact in France, Lewis Galantière, looked them up two days after Christmas. It was to be the occasion of an instance of very odd, but typical, Hemingway behaviour which is almost inexplicable. 

Galantière, a acquaintance of Anderson’s who was just five years older than Hemingway and despite his surname originally from Chicago, had been asked by Anderson to take Hemingway and Hadley under his wing. When he received the letter of introduction written by Anderson, he called on the young couple and took them out to dinner. Afterwards he was invited back to the their hotel room for a glass of cognac. There Hemingway handed him a pair of boxing gloves (and one must wonder why he had with him two pairs of boxing gloves) and invited him to spar.

Though slightly built, short-sighted and at least a foot shorter than Hemingway — and probably a little bemused by the challenge — Galantière gamely agreed and was astonished when, thinking the sparring was over and was already taking off his boxing gloves, Hemingway punched him hard and knocked him to the floor. No explanation was offered, though one biographer has suggested that Hemingway was irritated and jealous because he felt Galantière had been paying Hadley too much attention at dinner. Yet despite being floored (and his glasses being smashed), Galantière spent the following days showing the couple the sights of Paris and helping them find an apartment. In fact, Hemingway’s friendship with Galantière continued for several years, but eventually was cooled by Galantière after Hemingway, in another inexplicable incidet, insulted his fiancé.

The dynamics of Hemingway and Hadley’s relationship meant he took all the decisions and he finally settled on renting a dismal two-room apartment four floors up in the rue de Cardinal Lemoine. It had no bathroom, a tiny annexe with a two-ring gas burner for a kitchen and the lavatory was the old-fashioned ‘hole-in-the-ground’ kind on the landing, shared by everyone else living on the same floor. Quite why Hemingway chose it was a mystery to friends who visited them there and who knew Hadley’s trust fund income would have allowed them to rent somewhere far nicer.

Some biographers suggest that Hemingway, who kept a detailed record of his income and expenditure all his life, was concerned that he and Hadley should live within their means and he erred on the side of caution. Yet money was certainly not tight: the day after they moved into their new flat, Hemingway and Hadley left Paris for a three-week skiing trip to Chambry in Switzerland, their first vacation in 1922.

. . .

In February and March, Hemingway followed up his other letters of introduction from Anderson and called on Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, who ran the well-known bookshop Shakespeare And Co and first published James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hemingway and Hadley first called on Pound (though other accounts have Hemingway meeting Pound by chance in Beach’s bookshop) and over the following months he showed Pound the stories and poems he had so far written.

Pound (right), who had a solid background discovering and fostering talent, liked what he read, but considered Hemingway to be raw material that needed to be worked on. The pieces he was shown consisted of the very conventional and derivative short fiction Hemingway had been unsuccessfully submitting to magazines for the past three years.

Pound began his instruction by telling Hemingway to avoid adjectives and such decorations in his writing, and gave him a long list of texts and books to read. According to Michael Reynolds in his book Hemingway’s Reading the list included ‘Homer, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Dante, Villon, Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Corbiere and Rimbaud’. Whether or not Hemingway did read his way through that — rather daunting — list is uncertain, but still the modest and eager pupil and not yet in the role of the wise, experienced writer he had chosen for himself by the end of the decade, he diligently practised what Pound preached. Next he and Hadley called on Stein.

Stein had a very high opinion of herself and her talent: she sincerely regarded herself as a genius and once stated that the Jews had produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza and herself. She also once declared
‘Nobody has done anything to develop the English language since Shakespeare, except myself and Henry James perhaps a little.’
Stein indulged in what has been described as ‘ “cubist writing” which was based on rhythm, rhyme and repetition rather than on a sense-making plot’, and she urged Hemingway to do the same. She also encouraged him to practise ‘automatic writing’, a technique of simply writing down what comes into your head without consciously thinking about it. But as Stein was, oddly for a genius, averse to editing and re-writing her work, the product of her ‘automatic writing’ was and is considered by many to be unreadable, and perhaps some editing and re-writing would not have gone amiss. She does have her few champions among academics, but sales of her work that has been commercially published have been slow to non-existent.

. . .

Hemingway had been submitting short, colour pieces of his impressions of Paris to the Toronto Star almost from the day he arrived, but towards the end of March, he was asked to cover the upcoming economic conference in Genoa. As luck would have it, travelling there at the beginning of April, he fell in with a group of far more experienced journalists on the train to Italy. They proved to be very helpful, filling him in on background and remained friendly colleagues for the following few years.

Once the conference had ended, he and Hadley were off again to ski in Switzerland, and from there they embarked a sentimental trip to north-east Italy so Hemingway could show Hadley the sights of his — it has to be said very short — ‘war’. That trip down memory lane was not a success. Since the end of the war just three and half years earlier in 1918, the countryside had already healed itself of its battle scars and Hemingway couldn’t even work out where the trench was in which he had almost been killed.

That summer, Bill Bird, one of the journalists who had befriended him on the train, acquired an ancient hand printing press and founded the Three Mountains Press. He decided to produce a series of limited editions, a project which evolved into ‘an inquest into the state of contemporary English prose’ with Ezra Pound as editor, and Hemingway was asked to contribute. In August he and Hadley it were off on vacation again — the third of that year — a hiking trip in Germany’s Black Forest with Bird and his wife and Galantière and his fiancé (to whom Hemingway took one of his instant dislike, a dislike which eventually led to him insulting her).

In September the Star finally agreed — some accounts have it that it was Hemingway’s suggestion — to send him off to Constantinople to cover what was left of the war between Greece and Turkey. Hadley did not want him to go — she spoke little French — though more than Hemingway who was never fluent in either French or Spanish, despite the impression he liked to give — and did not like being left alone in Paris where she still knew few people. They rowed, the first serious disagreement of their marriage and did not speak to each other for three days before Hemingway departed. 

The row with Hadley also centred on a second reporting deal he had made: apart from providing the Star with features and reports, he also quietly agreed to provide two Hearst news agencies with copy through their Paris office. Yet his agreement with the Star was exclusive and Hadley had strongly disapproved. His double-dealing might have remained undetected had Hemingway not eventually resorted simply to sending the agencies duplicates of his Star copy he and the paper’s managing editor, John Bone, was angry when reports identical to the ones it was getting, though under the by-line ‘John Hadley’, appeared in US papers. Hemingway tried to blame the Hearst agency point man in Paris who had hired him, claiming he had stolen his Star copy and passed it off as his own.

By the time Hemingway arrived in Turkey the actual fighting was over and there was not much to report. To add to that disappointment, life was not comfortable: his hotel bed was full of bugs, he became covered in lice and he developed a fever, possibly malaria and eventually sought treatment at a British hospital. When the Turks had taken Smyrna, agreed an armistice and gave the Greeks in Thrace 15 days to evacuate the city, Hemingway and his fellow hacks took off to Thrace to cover the evacuation, and he wrote and filed a report about the long line of refugees fleeing the city.

This account was later reworked into one of the short ‘chapters’ or ‘vignettes’ which appeared in our time — that first volume’s title was all in lower case — and later in In Our Time, his first commercially published volume of short stories. His later claim that he had spent the night before leaving for Thrace with a voluptuous Turkish whore is, in view of his lice-riddled, feverish condition almost certainly just another Hemingway tall tale.

. . .

In December he was off again, this time to cover the 1922 Lausanne peace conference. Possibly to keep Hadley sweet and agree to his attending, she was due join him in Lausanne for a few days before they made their way to Chamby for Christmas. But a bad bout of the ’flu delayed her departure, and when she did finally leave Paris, a small valise into which she had packed almost all the work Hemingway had so far completed — including his carbon copies — went missing from her train compartment in the Gare de Lyon. When she arrived in Lausanne and informed Hemingway, he was said to have been devastated. One biographer suggests it might have caused the first fissure in their marriage and eventually lead to his split from Hadley several years later.

Hemingway’s reaction to the loss of his early work is, like much else in his life, a little obscure. For many years the accepted story, for which Hemingway’ memoir A Moveable Feast written almost 40 later is the only source, has him organising cover for his Lausanne duties and catching an overnight train to Paris to check that his manuscripts hadn’t after all been left in the flat. Such a swift reaction would be in keeping with the image of ‘the artist dedicated to his work’ he was keen to establish in the memoir. Eventually — like many facts of Hemingway’s life — that account came under scrutiny.

One biographer, Michael Reynolds (in Hemingway: The Paris Years published in 1989) accepts that Hemingway did chase off to Paris, but points out that he could not, as he claimed, have had lunch with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas the following day to be consoled because Stein and Toklas weren’t in Paris. By checking dates in letters and diary, Reynolds established that the couple had already taken off to their Provencal retreat for Christmas and were not back in Paris until the beginning of February.

Three years later, biographer James R. Mellow (in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequence) goes further with his scepticism. He writes that Hemingway’s account in A Moveable Feast is simply invented. He did not chase off to Paris as he claimed, but once the Lausanne conference was over, he and Hadley carried on to Chamby in Switzerland as planned and did not get back to Paris until mid-January. Only then was Hemingway able to confirm that Hadley had also lost his carbon copies. Mellow deduces this from what Hemingway wrote in a letter to Ezra Pound dated January 23, a week after he had returned from Chamby.


. . .

Hemingway’s ambitions to establish himself as a writer were certainly not hampered by the grubby necessity of earning a living. Within weeks of returning from Chamby in mid-January, he and Hadley were off yet again, this time to Rapallo where Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy now lived. While there, he met Edward O’Brien, who edited an annual volume of short stories and after reading My Old Man (one of only three stories that had survived the Gare de Lyon loss) asked Hemingway to contribute to the next issue.

He met another friend of Pound’s, Henry ‘Mike’ Strater, who completed two portraits of him and told him all about bullfighting. He also met Robert McAlmon (right), another habitué of Montparnasse, a writer who, courtesy of his wife’s family’s money, was rather well off and had decided to start a small house in Paris to publish his own and others’ fiction. He, too, asked Hemingway to submit work. 

At the beginning of April after almost a month in Rapallo and a short walking tour with Pound, he and Hadley were off for more skiing, this time in Cortina in the Italian Dolomites. Halfway through their stay, Hemingway broke off to undertake a Star assignment to the industrial German Ruhrgebiet. He had first suggested to the Star that he should make the trip in mid-February while still in Rapallo after the French occupation forces moved invaded the Ruhr a few weeks earlier, but the Star’s John Bone had not agreed until the end of March.

Bone wanted him to spend a month in Germany, but Hemingway gave him just ten days and then rejoined Hadley in Cortina. While in Cortina and enthused by O’Brien’s request, he also got down to some serious writing, and though the work he produced was slim — just six brief paragraphs, written at the request of a Paris literary magazine which later became part of in our time — their new style boosted his confidence.

Hemingway and Hadley were back in Paris by the beginning of May, and Hemingway turned his attention to producing more short work for Bird’s project to add to the six ‘vignettes’ he had completed. In June he, Bill Bird and Robert McAlmon did a tour of bullfights in Spain, a visit which confirmed Hemingway’s interest and sparked his lifelong obsession with bullfighting. Through Stein and Toklas he heard about the San Fermin festival in Pamplona and in July he made his first trip there, with Hadley. But now Hadley’s pregnancy, first discovered in March 1923 in Rapallo, was very evident. In August McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Company produced Three Stories and Ten Poems.

. . .

Hadley’s pregnancy had not been planned and certainly cast a shadow over Hemingway’s carefree existence — there are even suggestions that he had urged Hadley to abort her unborn child. Their son John’s birth, in October 1923, certainly put the couple’s relationship under some strain and changed its dynamic, and it might have marked the second step towards their eventual separation and divorce. Most biographers report that Hemingway’s moved to Toronto in September 1923 came about because Hadley didn’t trust French doctors and wanted her child do be born on American soil.

Yet that begs the question of why they moved to Canada and not America. On the other hand, biographer Michael Reynolds believes he found evidence in letters that Hemingway had, in fact, been offered a staff job in Toronto a year earlier by John Bone. Hemingway, still intent on becoming a full-time writer — though, admittedly, he had still not produced much work — had turned down the offer and only decided to accept it when he realized that as a family man he would need a more regular income.

When they did move to Toronto, Hemingway’s brief career on the Star staff was miserable. Though Bone had been impressed by his work, his deputy, Harry Hindmarsh, the Star’s city editor who was Hemingway’s immediate boss (and who just happened to be the proprietor’s son-in-law) regarded Hemingway as a cocky upstart. Accounts by Toronto Star contemporaries do confirm that a swaggering Hemingway did play up the experienced newsman who had been reporting on important events in Europe, and Hindmarsh (who didn’t get on with Bone and disliked what he regarded as Bone’s protégés) decided to take him down a peg or two.

So Hemingway was assigned what he regarded as puff piece and was dispatched to various parts of the country to cover stories he believed were trivial. Given that one story he was asked to investigate — a possible million-dollar mining fraud by a dodgy company — was anything but a ‘puff piece’ and suggests his objections were more petulant than justified. He was on his way home from assignment in New York (where he had covered the arrival in New York of the former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, not perhaps the most important of news stories) when Hadley gave birth to their first child.

Alerted to the birth by friends, Hemingway went straight to the hospital when he arrived in Toronto and earned a rebuke from Hindmarsh for not first checking in at the office. After that relations with Hindmarsh went from bad to worse, and Hemingway was finally reassigned to work on the Weekly Toronto Star, a demotion in all but name.

It is clear from a letter dated November 11, 1923, that he (and presumably Hadley) had by then already decided to cut short their time in Toronto and move back to Paris. Writing to the literary critic Edmund Wilson with a copy of Three Stories And Ten Poems for which he candidly solicited reviews, he concluded

I hope you like the book. If you are interested could you send me the names of four or five people to send it to get it reviewed? It would be terribly good of you. This address [in Toronto] will be good until January when we will be going back to Paris.’

The account of how Hemingway resigned from his Star job has also been transmuted into an heroic myth: it is said he typed pages and pages of vitriol attacking Hindmarsh in a furious outburst and posted them on the newsroom wall. In fact, after returning from a brief one-day visit home to Oak Park he wrote a brief letter to John Bone tending his resignation which, he said, would take effect from January 1, 1924. He and Hadley left Toronto by train for New York on January 12, and set sail a week later. They were in Paris by the end of the month.



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