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.
No comments:
Post a Comment