Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Editors back home were quickly learning that there was a ravenous appetite for stories about Paris. Wealthy Americans had long been obsessed with Parisian fashion and cuisine, but the newly almighty dollar made the city’s pleasures available to vast new demographics. Debutantes, starving artists, and even the midwestern bourgeoisie were starting to take a keen interest in all things French, from the social goings-on of the growing expat colony to the manifestos of the various artistic movements sparking away in the city’s cafés and salons. Reporter Arthur Power began documenting the lives of Montparnasse painters in a Paris Herald column titled “Around the Studios.” The fledgling New Yorker magazine tapped writer Janet Flanner for a popular fortnightly “Letter from Paris” column, in which she detailed everything from political gossip to bedroom gossip. (It was always most exciting when these spheres overlapped.) Vogue covered and promoted Paris with such dedication that it practically recruited Americans and shoveled them onto boats; it even offered its readers the services of a Paris-based Vogue information bureau. “Paris is, perhaps, the most generous city in the world and the richest in sheer delights,” gushed one Vogue writer.

  Hemingway’s coverage, by contrast, was less breathless. It did not take him long to size up his contemporaries and report on their shortcomings in the pages of the Star.

  “Paris is the mecca of bluffers and fakers,” he declared in an article penned soon after his arrival. All sorts of Americans were turning up in Paris and presenting themselves as figures of greatness, from faux dancing “stars” to nonentity prizefighters. The only reason these wayward Americans were getting away with it, Hemingway declared, was because of the “extreme provinciality” of the French people. In case anyone else was thinking about turning up in Paris and posing as a luminary, he offered some instruction: “You must choose to be a champion of some very distant country and then stay away from that country.”

  He also shot a sharp, glinting arrow at the expats thronging the Montparnasse cafés. “The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde,” he announced. (The Rotonde was another major expat destination across the boulevard du Montparnasse from the Dôme.) To Hemingway, the posturing tourists and expat residents cramming themselves into the Rotonde twelve hundred at a time “have all striven so hard for a careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity.” They could hardly be turning out immortal creative work, he surmised. “Since the good old days when Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through the same old Latin Quarter, there has not been much good poetry written in cafés.”

  It was a shrewd choice of topic on Hemingway’s part, and one likely to garner attention. Since the war’s end, the cafés and bars of the Left Bank had served as backdrops for much expatriate melodrama and debauchery, and they were filled with unspoken rules. Once newcomers alighted upon Montparnasse, they picked their café affiliations carefully and were judged accordingly. The Dôme was the headquarters of the official rumor mill among American expats: anyone who wanted to broadcast a salacious bit of gossip, show off a new mistress, or brag about selling a new novel did so at the Dôme; word then ricocheted through the crowd with satisfying speed. Dôme patrons reviled Rotonde customers, and it was equally fashionable among the literary in-crowd to detest the Rotonde’s owner, who was alternately called a “sour-faced, scurvy swine” or merely a “bastard.” (His offense: he had decreed that ladies should neither smoke nor sit hatless at his café—unacceptable policies to Americans who were there to cut loose.) Luckily, the boulevard was too wide for Dôme and Rotonde customers to fling chairs at each other, but insults could still carry quite clearly across the din of traffic.

  Behavior at these establishments often rivaled the saloons of the American Wild West. “Many [expats], really highly respected and stable citizens at home, went completely berserk the minute they hit Montparnasse,” recalled one bartender of the era. Yet the drunken antics of patrons often paled in comparison to the black-hearted practices of the cafés’ owners, who regularly tried to sabotage one another. For example, one day Hilaire Hiler, proprietor of a popular bar called Le Jockey, discovered a suicidal patron taking poison in the bar’s washroom. Hiler pumped the fellow’s stomach and heard his confession.

  “Hiler, I cannot, I really cannot go on living,” the customer told him. “I’ll do it again, and right away, too.”

  “What have you got against me?” Hiler asked him. “Why do you want to hurt my business in the Jockey?”

  “I don’t, old man, really I don’t,” responded the patron.

  “Well,” Hiler instructed him, “the next time you want to commit suicide, go somewhere else.” When asked for his recommendation on an appropriate site, Hiler paused and said, “Well, the Dôme is my big rival, you know.”

  The next day, the patron was found dead in the Dôme’s bathroom.

  Any astute writer could immediately see that expat Paris was rife with insights into the less savory aspects of human nature—and Hemingway was more astute than most. The material had an immediate use for newspaper stories that were helping to pay the bills, but it held limitless promise for an even bigger and more significant work, something literary and profound—if only the right premise would come along.

  Other writers must also have sensed that Paris was a treasure trove of literary possibility, but many of them were too consumed by the frantic scene to document it with any clarity. Some expats likened their Paris experiences to an extended, drug-fueled party. Poet Hart Crane described life as a spree of “dinners, soirees, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenades, oysters, sherry, aspirins, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, editors, books, [and] sailors.” For the American writer Malcolm Cowley, Paris was like cocaine, and just as debilitating a habit when it came time to pull himself together and work. Some expats quickly learned that it was wise to distance oneself from Paris’s less wholesome charms.

  “[At first] I was always in a fever of excitement,” wrote expat editor Robert McAlmon, whose path was about to cross Hemingway’s. “But I knew all too well that Paris is a bitch, and that one shouldn’t become infatuated with bitches, particularly when they have wit, imagination, experience, and tradition behind their ruthlessness.”

  Hemingway was among the wise: he never wholly succumbed to the bitch—not even during his days as a Paris novice. Later, as dissipation gradually brought less resilient writers to their knees, he instead blithely described Paris as “the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is.” In holding back, Hemingway gave himself a distinct advantage as a clearheaded, removed observer. Later, many of his fictional protagonists would share this attribute.

  Until he could make serious literary use of the Quarter’s atmosphere and characters, Hemingway chronicled them in at least a dozen life-in-Paris articles. Some of those Toronto Star stories had the feel of literary test runs and even included dialogue. One story detailed an amusing overheard conversation between two Frenchmen whose wives had insisted on administering their haircuts:

  “Your hair, Henri!” said one.

  “My wife, old one, she cuts it. But your hair, also? It is not too chic!”

  “My wife too. She cuts it also. She says barbers are dirty pigs, but at the finish I must give her the same tip as I would give the barber.”

  Through his dispatches, readers were introduced to jewel-pawning Russian aristocrats exiled by their country’s revolution, who now occupied themselves by “drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right.” They met failing European politicians, incurably dishonest Arab rug merchants, French hatmakers who festooned their wares with sparrows, and a career executioner with two guillotines—one large model, and a small one for traveling jobs.

  But over and over again, Hemingway returned to tales of the American in Paris. He simply could no
t empty that well. He made it clear that he was adept at detecting phonies and hypocrites among his self-exiled compatriots—which apparently included pretty much everyone besides himself. Among his targets: the ugly American tourist who demanded that “Paris be a super-Sodom and a grander Gomorrah” and was “willing to pay for his ideal”; a dumpy woman with fake blond hair slumped in a chair at the Rotonde, her teeth clamped around a two-foot-long cigarette holder; and a Connecticut housewife footing a café bill for an assortment of young male gigolo types. They were a repellent, worthless bunch, Hemingway reported, especially those who insisted on posing as artists.

  “They are nearly all loafers,” he wrote in one Star story. “The trouble is that people who go on a tour of the Latin Quarter look in at the Rotonde and think they are seeing an assembly of the great artists of Paris. I want to correct that in a very public manner, for the artists of Paris who are turning out creditable work resent and loathe the Rotonde crowd.”

  Hemingway was clearly allying himself with the real artists who scorned the fakers. He wasn’t publicly among the band of recognized true artists yet, but there was an implicit promise in those early stories that he would be joining their ranks soon.

  2

  Storming Olympus

  HE WAS AN ERRATIC and obviously brilliant young man,” recalled one of Hemingway’s fellow Paris-based journalists years later. Another American reporter thought of him as “some sort of genius in a garret,” although he noted with faint contempt that Hemingway ran with the same café crowd that he skewered in his stories. No one in the Paris press corps had neutral feelings about Hemingway—throughout his career he would inspire either adoration or revulsion—but everyone seems to have sensed that he had an exceptional life ahead of him.

  Though he was making a big impression on his colleagues, by spring 1922 Hemingway had already wearied of the foreign correspondent lifestyle. While it was more glamorous than his reporting work at The Cooperative Commonwealth, it was no less exhausting.

  “I’ve been earning our daily bread on this write machine,” he informed Sherwood Anderson, not mentioning the fact that they were largely sustained by his wife’s trust fund. He complained to another friend that he’d been working so hard that he had nearly worn through his typewriter ribbon.

  Not only was he worried that journalism left him little time to create revolutionary fiction; he had even begun to fret that all of the reporting was impairing his ability to write decent prose. His travels were giving him great potential material, and journalism was teaching him a thing or two about communicating ideas effectively on paper: “On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence,” he conceded. But otherwise, all of the reporting work was just destructive interference.

  “This goddam newspaper stuff is gradually ruining me,” he wrote to Anderson. “But I’m going to cut it all loose pretty soon and work for about three months.”

  Unfortunately, his editors at the Toronto Star were also now impressed by Hemingway and started assigning him increasingly prestigious and time-consuming stories. They sent him all over Europe, which was then still roiling from the aftereffects of the last world war and busily setting the stage for the next one. Shortly after making his pledge to “cut it all loose,” Hemingway departed on a nearly month-long reporting trip to Genoa, thus launching a year of intensive, lengthy assignments that ping-ponged him from Milan to Geneva to Frankfurt; the Star ran at least twenty-three stories and items by him from the Genoa excursion alone. In Constantinople he profiled a refugee procession of 250,000 “slow, rain-soaked, shambling, trudging” Thracian peasants, “plodding along in the rain, leaving their homes behind . . . just keeping their feet moving, their eyes on the road and their heads sunken,” all scraping their way toward Macedonia. In Milan he interviewed Mussolini and warned his readers about the rise of fascism there, calling Il Duce’s followers “black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old potshot patriots.” He bestowed upon Mussolini himself the title “Europe’s Prize Bluffer,” adding that the dictator had a weak mouth, noting his capacity for “clothing small ideas in big words,” and asserting, “There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.” Hemingway’s confidence seems astonishing given his youth (he was now twenty-three years old) and relative inexperience, but no one seems to have dismissed him as a rookie.

  In fact, the Star’s editors often devoted considerable front-page real estate to his dispatches and—realizing that the reporter himself was becoming a point of interest—began creating an exciting public persona around him. At one point that year, the paper printed a lengthy column titled “Something About Ernest M. Hemingway, Who Is Taking the Lid Off Europe,” a profile of the man who’d been turning out all of those “intensely interesting articles” lately. Not that these biographies were always accurate—one informed readers that Hemingway had “fought with the Italian army in the great war”—but that was beside the point. The reporter was now becoming a part of the story.

  WHEN HEMINGWAY AND HADLEY first arrived in Paris, he wrote to Sherwood Anderson and told him that he planned to send out those golden-ticket letters of introduction to the literati as soon as the couple was properly settled in. It would be like “launching a flock of ships,” he added. Yet at first, he kept the letters to the most important figures under wraps.

  Most aspiring writers would have given anything for such introductions to the expat literary gods of Olympus, as writer Malcolm Cowley dubbed the creative inner circle of 1920s Paris. Sylvia Beach referred to this hallowed collective as “the Crowd.” They were “sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around [them],” as one F. Scott Fitzgerald character would later summarize their position.

  Many Americans were streaming into town and vying for introductions, but in the eyes of the Paris Olympians, most of them “didn’t count, except for incidental amusement,” decreed pioneering expat journalist and in-crowd editor Harold Stearns. The Crowd communed largely in private homes and salons, not on public café terraces. Many would-be creatives and patron types who wanted desperately to “count” were snubbed, diligently used, or merely ignored. Sherwood Anderson had gained access to the inner sanctum via Sylvia Beach, but she was not always so generous with her connections: she once even declined to introduce novelist George Moore to James Joyce when the two were standing only feet from each other in her store. Intrepid visitors approaching Gertrude Stein’s apartment, hoping to be admitted to her salon, were greeted at the door with the curt salutation “De la part de qui venez-vous?” or “Who is your introducer?”

  The Crowd knew they were gods, or at least comported themselves as such, even though some of their leaders were not exactly on intimate terms with commercial success. Yet the press on two continents often cast them as vanguards of modernity. If you wanted to see what the future was going to look like, you would watch what Miss Stein, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and others of their ilk were up to. Clearly aware of their place in history, Crowd members incessantly documented their shared world and one another during this time. Picasso famously painted Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein interpreted her peers in “word portraits,” a form she claimed to have pioneered. Man Ray and Berenice Abbott photographed all of the major players. “To be ‘done’ by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott meant you were rated as somebody,” recalled Sylvia Beach, whose bookstore doubled as an informal yet intimidating gallery of these photographs.

  Curiously, even though the Crowd had chosen Paris as the backdrop for their various revolutions, theirs was largely an American movement. The community was essentially “America in Europe,” as one expat writer put it. They published their own Paris-based English-language magazines and books, usually backed with American financing, often to make impressions on American publishers who might then give them a major American platform. “I never met an American who wasn’t, in Paris, busy with American plans and purposes and material,” recall
ed Archibald MacLeish.

  Like many other American writers, Hemingway had landed at the heart of the rebellion against stuffy Victorian prose. “There was no grandly experimental, furiously disrespectful school of writing in America, and we were going to create it,” recalled writer and editor Kay Boyle, who first arrived in France in 1923. “‘Down with Henry James! Down with Edith Wharton!’ . . . the self-exiled revolutionaries cried out.” Of course, part of the plan in deposing long-reigning monarchs like James and Wharton involved claiming their thrones. Ambition and sharp-elbowed competition coursed through the community. “Fame was what they wanted in that town,” wrote MacLeish in a poem documenting the feverish atmosphere in Paris back then.

  Of course, there was fame, and then there was fame. Gertrude Stein was famous; James Joyce was famous. Joyce’s radical novel Ulysses, for example, had rocked the world of many postwar writers. “In 1922 it burst over us, young in Paris, like an explosion in print those words and phrases fell upon us like a gift of tongues,” recalled expat New Yorker writer Janet Flanner.

  But the novel—with its racy sexual content, ranging from masturbation to adultery—was considered so scandalous that it was banned in book form in the United States until 1934. (It was ironic, mused the New York Times upon the book’s release, that the ban was lifted “just when Joyce [was] losing his influence on young writers.”) Experimentalist Gertrude Stein had her admirers, but no American commercial publisher would touch her gargantuan manuscripts.