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

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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.