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
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
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
In his biography of Carlos Baker notes that Hemingway’s
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.