Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  When he returned to America, Hemingway found work as a reporter, but magazines were not interested in his short stories. Some experts have deemed Hemingway’s earliest surviving stories dull and derivative; he was then, they say, a far cry from the grand innovator of the English language that he would become. Therefore this early spate of rejection was perfectly reasonable. Yet others have faulted magazine editors of the early 1920s for lacking vision.

  “I saw some of [Hemingway’s] work [in] 1920 and I thought it was very good,” recalled Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, who spent a good deal of time with him during this period. “The only trouble is he was sending it to the wrong magazines,” he said, adding that a publication like the Saturday Evening Post—then a hugely popular vehicle for fiction—“would never have used that experimental writing of his, . . . and it was experimental even before he went to Paris.”

  Still, everyone had shunned Fitzgerald’s first short stories too. At one point during his early career, he had artistically arranged over a hundred rejection slips on his bedroom walls. It had required the firepower of a first novel, This Side of Paradise, to help him stage a breakthrough. When crafting that all-important debut novel, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway started out by writing what they knew. Fitzgerald’s novel was a somewhat country-clubified account of life at Princeton University, which he had attended before the war. When Hemingway began his starter novel, he apparently set it in northern Michigan, where he’d spent his boyhood summers, and filled its pages with stories of fishing and hunting. It is unclear how well developed this novel might have been in 1921; he may even have had more than one in the works. He appears to have been bandying about a few ideas with Hadley, for she wrote to him that she was “all treading on air about these novels!” It was criminal, she added, that “we aren’t free yet to put your best time and tho’t [into] them.”

  Still, if Hemingway was to turn out the requisite magnum opus, he was going to need to situate himself in a more muse-friendly atmosphere. At the moment, he was camping out in the apartment of Bill Smith’s adman older brother, Y. K. Smith, then home to a passel of boarders. Hadley had also stayed there while visiting Chicago; it was here that she first met Hemingway. The attraction between them had been immediate, despite the difference in their ages. He liked her red hair and the way she played the piano; she deemed him a “hulky, bulky something masculine.” Nicknames were exchanged. Among their crowd of mutual friends, Hemingway went by “Oinbones,” “Nesto,” “Hemingstein,” and “Wemedge.” Hadley dubbed Hemingway “Erniestoic”; she was christened “Hash.” Even the apartment itself had a nickname: “the Domicile.”

  Soon afterward, Wemedge and Hash became engaged and began planning a wedding—not a grand affair, as had been portended by the St. Louis society press, but rather a small country wedding in Horton Bay, Michigan, where Hemingway had spent his childhood summers. The church where the ceremony eventually took place on September 3, 1921, stood next to the town’s general store. The nuptials were to be followed by a voyage to Italy—perhaps for as long as a year or two—starting with Naples.

  The trip would be a homecoming of sorts. Hemingway was proud of his personal history there. He’d had, for example, a bit of the shrapnel removed from his leg set into a ring; it was a wearable reminder of his dramatic brush with death and first exposure to international fame. Eager to show the country off to Hadley, he began buying Italian lire. Hadley had long assured him that she was not in the market for a conventional existence; she too began to prepare to make a “bold penniless dash for Wopland.”

  Such a dash would indeed have been bold, but not penniless: Hadley had a trust fund, bestowed upon her by a banker grandfather; she called it “my sweet little packet of seeds.” It would give the Hemingways $2,000 to $3,000 a year to play with. Hemingway retired his affiliation with The Cooperative Commonwealth, whose future he deemed unpromising. Hadley’s “filthy lucre,” as he called it, would now be the main engine powering their overseas adventure.

  “There are those who think Hadley’s name became Hash because she had a small inheritance and thus became Hem’s meal-ticket but that is untrue,” stated Bill Smith later. “Hash was simply a corruption of Hadley.”

  Whether or not “Hash” meant “cash,” Hadley was undeniably a meal ticket. It was a relatively modest meal, but nourishing enough. Her money would get them over to Europe, and for the next half decade her trust fund would be their sole consistent source of income. Hemingway was already worried that his reporting work was forcing him to relegate his other writing to “on the side” status; his frantic work schedule was making him “busy and tired and done in.” He needed to leave the tug-of-war behind. Italy—funded by St. Louis dollars—might provide the necessary respite.

  “Think of how in Italy there won’t be anything but love and peace to form a background for writing,” Hadley wrote to Hemingway. “Why you’ll write like a great wonderful sea breeze bringing strong whiffs from all sorts of strange interior places.”

  Even at this early stage, Hadley knew that she was being outshone by Hemingway and she did not seem to care. She was content—even ecstatic—to become the woman behind the nascent genius. All of her resources were at Hemingway’s command. He was poised to write “the best things you’ve ever done in your life,” she told him. “Honest, you’re doing marvels of stirring, potent stuff . . . Don’t let’s ever die. Let’s go on together.”

  They planned to leave for Europe that November.

  THE SUBSTANTIAL INDUSTRY now known as Hemingway’s Paris might have been Hemingway’s Naples if not for the intervention of a regular visitor to the Domicile.

  Today writer Sherwood Anderson has fallen into obscurity, but in the early 1920s he was well known. Not household-name, mega-best-seller famous, but certainly well regarded. He had come to authorship through a circuitous route. For a while he had headed a mail-order paint firm, but—according to legend—he suffered a nervous breakdown at the office in 1912, during which he stalked out and never returned. He chose literary pursuits as his cure-all, and by 1914 was publishing stories in magazines.

  When he met Hemingway in 1921, Anderson was having an Icarus ascent-to-the-sun moment; his recent collection of stories—Winesburg, Ohio—had sold well, and that year he would receive the inaugural Dial award for his contribution to American literature. Short stories were considered his forte; his novels appear to have been tolerated cheerfully by critics and the public. In the 1930s he would spiral into obscurity, but in 1921, Sherwood Anderson was a celebrity. He knew Y. K. Smith through the Chicago advertising world and lived nearby; his visits to Smith’s apartment were considered exciting events.

  There was no reason for Anderson to have heard of Hemingway when they first met, but Hemingway knew about Anderson. Like everyone else, he approved of Anderson’s short stories but found his novels “strangely poor”—an early assessment that would take on great (and from Anderson’s point of view almost sinister) significance a few years later.

  When Anderson first ambled into the apartment—probably in a state of disrepair, for he usually resembled a disheveled professor with a carefully selected wardrobe of ill-fitting jackets—Hemingway treated him with polite, quiet attentiveness. This would become his customary approach to would-be mentors with stellar connections. Hemingway claimed later that he and Anderson “never spoke of writing” at that time, but even if this was true, he still managed to make a powerful impression on the veteran writer. Like Hadley, Anderson became quickly converted to the idea that Hemingway was a man with a future.

  “Thanks for introducing me to that young fellow,” Anderson told Smith and his wife after his first meeting with Hemingway. “I think he’s going to go some place.”

  It was an expert bit of casual matchmaking by Y. K. Smith, who “knew Hem was a genius even then,” recalled his brother Bill. Did Bill think Hemingway was a genius at that time? “Of course not,” he admitted later. “Your buddy is never a genius.” Yet Y.K. was ple
ased that the connection had been made, and saw its immediate effect on Hemingway. “At this point Ernest began to take seriously his own talent as an alluring possibility,” he wrote later. “I think this was his first contact with a big-time artist and it gave him as it were a chance to measure himself.”

  In measuring himself against Anderson, Hemingway seems to have deemed himself in a position to surpass the veteran writer—or at the very least, he felt he was in a position to critique. During return visits, Anderson occasionally read his work aloud to the Domicile entourage. Hemingway evaluated every word. He may have been polite to Anderson in person, but he was said to be have been, in private, “thoroughly hostile” to Anderson’s approach.

  “You couldn’t let a sentence like that go,” he announced after Anderson left the apartment after one reading session.

  Anderson also irritated Hadley by comparing Hemingway to Victorian writer Rudyard Kipling. “That’s foolish,” she fussed in a letter to Hemingway. “Why I don’t want to compare you to anybody . . . you’re Ernest Hemingway.”

  Anderson did manage to redeem himself for these unwitting offenses in a significant way. During his visits, when he wasn’t reading aloud from his own manuscripts, he extolled the wonders of Paris to the Domicile crowd; the city was now a magnet for creative types from all over America. Earlier that year Anderson had made the transatlantic voyage to Paris and there encountered the redoubtable Gertrude Stein, an American heiress and experimental writer who had famously settled there decades earlier. He had also met the Irish writer James Joyce, who had been busy scandalizing readers with installments of his book Ulysses in the American literary magazine The Little Review. Anderson had had to wangle the introductions; after all, one didn’t just materialize in Montparnasse and receive an invitation to Stein’s legendary salon or to a Joyce family dinner.

  To gain entrée, Anderson had descended upon Shakespeare and Company, a new but already renowned English-language bookstore on the Left Bank, founded and run by American expat Sylvia Beach, who knew many important creative figures around town. One day Beach noticed an intriguing-looking man lurking outside on the store’s doorstep. Eventually he bustled inside and expressed his admiration for a book Beach had featured in her window. No other bookseller in Paris had the good sense to carry Winesburg, Ohio, he told her, and then revealed that he was the book’s author.

  Beach was immediately charmed by Anderson. “I saw him as a mixture of poet and evangelist (without the preaching), with perhaps a touch of the actor,” she later recalled. Anderson lingered and regaled her with the tale of his defiance of the mail-order paint industry; Beach was sufficiently amused to introduce him to her lover, Adrienne Monnier, who was equally taken with him. When Monnier invited Anderson to dinner, he knew that he had been officially admitted to one of the great citadels of expat literary Paris.

  This citadel was linked to another. Anderson soon pressed Beach for an introduction to Gertrude Stein, whose work had fascinated and influenced him. Beach gamely complied. They arrived at Stein’s salon, where Anderson kissed the Steinian ring with gusto.

  “Sherwood’s deference and the admiration he expressed for her writing pleased Gertrude immensely,” recalled Beach. “She was visibly touched.”

  The meeting set in place a literary friendship that would last for decades. Anderson probably could have stayed in Paris and happily enrolled in the elite expat scene, especially now that he had secured the devotion of two of its foremost doyennes. Yet he returned to America, where he would remain a devout non-expat for his entire career. It was a curiously untrendy stance, but he remained unmoved by the allure of living abroad. “You see, dear friend, I believe in this damn mixed-up country of ours,” he explained to Stein. “In an odd way I’m in love with it.”

  That said, Anderson avidly encouraged other creative types to make the leap across the Atlantic. He found a receptive audience in Hemingway and Hadley. Back in Chicago, over dinner one evening, he informed them that they should immediately swap their Italian lire for French francs. Paris was definitely the place for ambitious young writers with experimental inclinations. Plus, it was cheap. And what was more, Anderson knew gatekeepers there now and could pave the way for Hemingway too.

  He made a convincing case: by Thanksgiving, the Hemingways had shelved their Neapolitan foray and booked passage for France. Instead of visiting the sites of Hemingway’s past glories, they had chosen a different backdrop for new and inevitably greater glories. Paris was, after all, now a laboratory of innovative writing and the supposed creative center of the universe. Yet even though the city was attracting countless would-be modern novelists—Hemingway’s soon-to-be competitors—there was great opportunity there as well. No one had yet conjured up the Paris novel or a definitive postwar expat work, at least not one that the masses were reading. Fitzgerald was already laying claim to New York’s postwar discontent and decadence. In Paris there might be more oxygen, and definitely ample material.

  The night before the couple left Chicago, Hemingway stopped by Anderson’s apartment and dropped off a token of his appreciation: an oversized army knapsack filled with over a hundred pounds of canned foods from his apartment. Anderson was moved by the gesture.

  “I remember his coming up the stairs, a magnificent broad-shouldered man, shouting as he came,” he recalled. “That was a nice idea, bringing thus to a fellow scribbler the food he had to abandon.”

  Anderson returned the favor with interest. When Hemingway boarded a transatlantic liner days later, he had in his possession a rare form of currency obtainable at no bank: personal letters of introduction provided by Anderson to the most influential literary figures in Paris.

  THE HEMINGWAYS arrived in Paris just before Christmas—not the most auspicious time to make the city’s acquaintance. It was akin to meeting a legendary and glamorous woman of the stage when she’s hungover and sans makeup. Even the poorest expats made efforts to flee the damp, dreary Paris winters; the Hemingways would soon follow suit. But when they first got off the boat train, they made their way to the Hôtel Jacob et d’Angleterre in Saint-Germain and settled in. Sherwood Anderson had lodged there during his recent Paris visit and recommended it to the couple; he even sent ahead a welcome letter to greet them when they arrived. The hotel was wonderfully cheap—twelve francs a day, or just under a dollar—and notorious in expat circles. “Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel couldn’t touch the drama and intrigue which occurred in that hotel,” recalled one former Paris-based editor. A roster of colorful, creative celebrities in residence counterbalanced the drab decor.

  Like all recent American arrivals, the Hemingways dropped off their luggage and dutifully beelined for the café Le Dôme, the gossip-and-Pernod-fueled nerve center of the Left Bank’s expatriate colony. The Dôme was a good antidote to loneliness: everyone flocked there; its revelers seemed to promise that most newcomers eventually got their Paris land legs and joined the party. Hemingway would soon heap ire on such cafés and their expat “inmates,” as he dubbed their clientele, but in those early days, the Hemingways headquartered at the Dôme as they staved off the woozy disorientation that comes with first setting foot on alien terrain. There he and Hadley sipped hot rum punches and described their earliest impressions in letters to family and friends.

  “We’ve been walking the streets, day and night, arm through arm,” he reported to Anderson. It was freezing, he complained, and added that they had been in low spirits. “I do not know what I thought Paris would be like but it was not that way,” he recalled later.

  The Dôme provided a temporary warm respite, but outside, the leafless trees and buses appeared slimy in the gray rain. As Hemingway and Hadley walked through the streets, they peered into the city’s cold stone courtyards and store windows and watched steam rising from horses’ bodies. Paris was filled with jarring sights. Expats staggering home at dawn after an all-night bender might encounter a pipe-blowing goatherd pulling a herd of black goats down the street, or even hitch a ride i
n a horse-drawn cart full of carrots. Both the city and many of its inhabitants bore disturbing war scars. “I watched to notice how well [veterans] were overcoming the handicap of the loss of limbs, or at the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces had been reconstructed,” Hemingway later wrote. To Hadley, Paris was a “marvelous strange city, marvelous and awful.”

  The couple clung to modest luxuries and diversions to comfort them. The Quarter, as Montparnasse was called, was reassuringly small: its social life centered on a handful of cafés and bars that stood within a couple of blocks of one another. The newlyweds took long walks, but there was always that reassuring ground zero to welcome them back. Hadley devoured French pastries; Hemingway threw himself into scripting ecstatic, detailed reports on the low cost of food, wine, liters of various liquors, and hotel rooms. The city was almost unfathomably affordable for Americans, thanks to inflation. The American dollar was king, worth twelve and a half francs; the Canadian dollar was a mere prince at eleven francs. Even comparative paupers were courted by French business owners, from hoteliers to restaurateurs to poules—prostitutes. Almost every American expat might expect to be “treated like a millionaire and disliked accordingly,” wrote Alfred Kreymborg, another American who arrived there in the early twenties.

  Paris may have been blissfully affordable to the Hemingways, yet the city’s more decadent and complex pleasures eluded them at first. They were outsiders, dazed and isolated. At that moment it would have been difficult for them to imagine that someday they would come to epitomize all that was romantic and exciting about 1920s Paris.

  DESPITE HIS COMPLAINTS that his work as a reporter distracted him from serious literary pursuits, Hemingway had scored a position as a Paris-based correspondent for the Toronto Star. It was a freelance arrangement; atmosphere stories were prioritized, meaning that he would be paid for savvy observations of his new milieu.