Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

F. Scott Fitzgerald, by contrast, had become truly famous. Tens of thousands of people bought his books, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, one of the most prestigious major publishing houses back in New York. He and his insouciant golden-haired wife, Zelda, were already pop culture icons; Zelda was said to epitomize flapper culture. The latter category of fame was more what Hemingway had in mind. But he intended to have it all: both the snob appeal and the mass following.

  It was an unapologetically ambitious goal, but Hemingway saw the opportunity and he certainly had the will.

  BY LATE WINTER, Hemingway felt it was time to send out Sherwood Anderson’s letters of introduction. Hemingway first approached writer Lewis Galantière, an erudite, bespectacled American then working for Paris’s International Chamber of Commerce. Sherwood Anderson had written to Galantière before the Hemingways had set sail for Europe; Hemingway was delightful, Anderson assured him, and “a young fellow of extraordinary talent.”

  Galantière kindly found Hemingway and Hadley a starter apartment: a small $18-a-month fourth-floor walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine on a hilltop in the Latin Quarter. Each landing featured a smelly pissoir. Downstairs, next to the entrance, stood a noisy bal musette, or workers’ dancehall. Beggars lined the street’s rambling decline to the river. It was a tough, poor neighborhood, but the price was right and the street had a literary atmosphere: James Joyce had worked on Ulysses at number 71; French poet Paul Verlaine had lived at number 2. Hemingway returned Galantière’s favor by inviting him to box a few rounds back at the Hôtel Jacob and then punching Galantière in the face while his guard was down. Hadley thought it was a near-miracle that neither Galantière’s eyes nor his face had been cut by his shattered glasses.

  Hemingway then contacted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, both enemies of frilly, old-fashioned writing. Pound was “the acknowledged leader of the modern movement,” according to Sylvia Beach. He often sported a scarf stitched with the words MAKE IT NEW; the garment billowed out behind him as he bicycled around town. As larger-than-life characters, Stein and Pound probably intimidated meeker souls. That said, for those with strong constitutions, serious intentions, and sufficient talent, Stein and Pound were willing mentors.

  Hemingway approached Pound first. Pound was known as something of a literary midwife. He had already had a hand in bringing to fruition some of the twentieth century’s most seismic modernist literary works; he had, for example, edited T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land.” He could also get talent published, and often proved a hard-hitting advocate on behalf of his protégés. Since 1920 he had acted as an agent and material scout for The Dial, a New York–based literary magazine that called itself “the leading review in the English language.” He fought ardently to get Dial editor Scofield Thayer to publish “The Waste Land,” which ultimately ran in the magazine in November 1922. He had helped James Joyce by getting some of Joyce’s early stories and his debut novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in literary magazines. Pound also was responsible for introducing Joyce to Sylvia Beach, who was brave enough to publish his scandalous novel Ulysses in book form in Paris in 1922. In addition, Pound happened to be a foreign editor for The Little Review, an important magazine devoted to showcasing experimental writing and new international art; it had serialized Ulysses and published works by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis.

  Anderson’s endorsement earned Hemingway an invitation to tea at Pound’s studio on the winding rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where he lived with his wife, Dorothy. The Hemingways found the studio poignant: lovely light bathed Pound’s collection of Japanese paintings and those created by his wife.

  At first glance, Pound, then forty-six, was not exactly an obvious candidate to become a Hemingway confidant. Thanks to a childhood spent fishing, hunting, and camping, Hemingway reeked of the great outdoors and manly pursuits. Pound, by contrast, took dandyism to an almost operatic level. He was often heavily costumed in velveteen ensembles and romantic Byronic shirts. An untamed mop of hair billowed from the top of his head. His most emphatic accessories included a spearlike mustache, a pointed goatee, and a walking stick—all of which he used to accentuate his words.

  Their first meeting was long and resembled Hemingway’s first encounter with Sherwood Anderson back in Chicago. Dorothy fluttered around, serving tea. Hemingway listened quietly and attentively as Pound spoke at length; he must have downed at least seventeen cups of tea, Hadley thought. This would be the first of many meetings: after all, there was much to discuss. Pound had a great deal to teach Hemingway in the matter of creating spare language. He was known for his stern opinions on the subject of adjectives: namely, they were to be distrusted. He also insisted that writers should never use superfluous words, and should never be descriptive. “Don’t be viewy” was classic Pound advice.

  He also liked to compare writing and music. “Behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music,” he later wrote. “The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.” These were all tenets that Hemingway would take to heart.

  Following their first meeting, Pound gave Hemingway access to his vast book collection. He had a general reading list for up-and-coming writers. One must read the ancient authors: Homer and Confucius in particular were to be read “in full.” Dante and Voltaire must also be studied—but in the case of the latter, one could reasonably steer clear of his “attempts at fiction and drama.” And, of course, any serious aspiring writer should read and take to heart the genius of Pound’s protégés T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.

  Hemingway offered himself up as a willing pupil to Pound, yet he walked away from that first meeting filled with scorn. Shortly afterward, he showed Lewis Galantière something new that he had written: a nasty little satire about Pound, skewering his goatee, his coif, his garb—his whole bohemian demeanor.

  Galantière looked at Hemingway and asked him what he intended to do with it.

  Hemingway informed him that he planned to send it directly to The Little Review for consideration.

  This probably wasn’t such a great idea, Galantière advised him. Had Hemingway forgotten that Pound was the publication’s longtime foreign editor? The editors at home probably wouldn’t appreciate the outlandish attack. Hemingway ripped up the parody.

  Pound soon visited the Hemingways’ new home on rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Soon the men began to be seen around town together socially. They seemed an odd couple to other Left Bankers, who observed them with keen interest and amusement. “Ernest was always the champion sportsman in every café he entered and Pound, with his little beard, looked and was conscientiously aesthetic,” recalled Janet Flanner.

  Yet the relationship flourished, and Pound began to step into Hemingway’s world as well. Hemingway soon reported to Sherwood Anderson that he was teaching Pound to box. Not that he was making great headway: Pound may have been a brilliant poet, but he had all the grace of a crawfish, Hemingway wrote. That said, he added with due respect, Pound was a good sport to “risk his dignity and his critical reputation at something that he don’t know nothing about.”

  Pound had other virtues too, in Hemingway’s opinion—including his admirably bitter tongue. Apparently Pound felt similarly about him, for he immediately started marketing some of Hemingway’s poems and a story to his editors at the magazines. Hemingway had snared his first Olympian champion.

  HEMINGWAY’S NEXT Crowd conquest led him into the realm of Sappho, a seemingly unlikely destination for a man who would soon be known around the globe for his pronounced masculinity and penchant for blood sport. Sherwood Anderson had provided an especially complimentary introduction letter to Gertrude Stein. Here, Anderson assured Stein, was “an American writer instinctively in touch with everything worth-while going on here.”

  Many vied for invitations to Stein’s regal apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. The grand entranceway to the building’s courtyard stood in stark contrast to th
e Hemingways’ walk-up with its squalid pissoirs. When Hemingway and Hadley turned at Stein’s doorstep, a maid in a white cap and apron ushered them in. A small woman then stepped forward to greet them; she looked like a “little piece of electric wire,” Hadley recalled, “small and fine and very Spanish looking, very dark, with piercing dark eyes.” This was Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s longtime lover and partner. (Hadley’s description was one of the more charitable ever offered up by one of Toklas’s contemporaries; others were inspired to giddy heights of cruelty when describing her hooked nose and broom-like mustache.) In the far corner of the salon, near a fireplace, sat Gertrude Stein, who was as substantial as Toklas was stringy. After the visit, Hemingway would ponder the weight of each of her breasts.

  “I think about ten pounds, don’t you, Hadley?” he asked his wife.

  Stein’s commanding physique and outsized persona earned her an array of nicknames around the Left Bank: “the Sumerian monument,” “the great god Buddha,” and perhaps most amusingly, “the Presence.” She was usually as distinctively turned out as Ezra Pound (who, incidentally, had been banished from Stein’s apartment after he’d accidentally crushed one of her favorite chairs while delivering an especially enthusiastic monologue). Typical Steinian garb included floor-length burlap gowns; Hemingway later described her wardrobe as having a distinct “steerage” motif.

  Securing a private audience with Stein was an honor. Her admirers, wrote Sylvia Beach, “would come to me, exactly as if I were a guide from one of the tourist agencies, and beg me to take them to see Gertrude Stein.” Most guests at the salon had to share her with other gawkers; callers would often enter such gatherings and behold Stein perched in a large, high chair in the center of the studio, preparing to deliver a sermon. Soon she would begin to “monologue, and pontificate, and reiterate, and stammer,” recalled a former guest. Attendees were advised to maintain a reverential hush as she spoke.

  “Don’t frighten her or she won’t talk,” one visitor was warned. “She is shy, very unsure of herself.”

  “Shy,” however, was not the first word most people would have used to describe Gertrude Stein. “Megalomaniac” and “mythomaniac” were more accurate, according to one fellow Crowd member. “Genius” was Stein’s own preferred term when describing herself.

  “Nobody has done anything to develop the English language since Shakespeare, except myself,” she once asserted. “And Henry James perhaps a little,” she generously added.

  There were variations on a theme: she also once maintained that “the Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.” When, in her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote—speaking in Toklas’s voice—“I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius,” this time the trinity included Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

  As the Hemingways made their way into the salon during that first visit, a well-rehearsed dance was set in motion. As Stein gestured to Hemingway to sit in a chair near her, Toklas swooped in, steered Hadley to the other side of the room, and regaled her with distracting chat about current affairs. Artists’ wives were persona non grata as far as Stein was concerned, piddling intruders on her conversations with great men. Toklas’s efficient “wife-proof technique,” as Sylvia Beach put it, had become famous among veteran Paris residents.

  Hemingway gamely took a seat near Stein. Dozens of large modern paintings covered the walls around them, all the way up to the ceiling: Picassos, Braques, Cézannes. It was like being in a private museum. He and Stein began to talk shop.

  As he had done with Anderson and Pound, Hemingway gazed at Stein intently and listened closely as she spoke. He struck Stein as “rather foreign looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes.” While Ezra Pound was instructing Hemingway to strip language down, Stein would illuminate the value of the intentional stammer. Her style was predicated on free association and word repetition, as depicted by her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily”:

  Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

  Loveliness extreme.

  Extra gaiters.

  Loveliness extreme.

  Sweetest ice-cream.

  Pages ages page ages page ages.

  No one felt neutral about Stein’s experiments with the English language, just as few people felt neutral about Miss Stein herself. Her writing style had been drawing attention on two continents since before the war, yet neither publishers nor readers were in a hurry to get their hands on her books. Back in 1908, Stein had had to self-published her first book, Three Lives; it is said to have sold fewer than seventy-five copies during its first year and a half on the market. She was, as one chronicler of the Paris scene put it, “nobody’s idea of a popular author.”

  Hemingway, however, saw a distinct opportunity in aspects of her style. He must have sufficiently impressed her during their first meeting, for soon there was a return visit from Stein and Toklas to the Hemingways’ cramped flat on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Stein dutifully climbed up the four flights of stairs to the apartment and, once there, heaved herself up onto the Hemingways’ bed, where she patiently thumbed through all of Hemingway’s early writing. She read and considered, and then delivered her verdict: there was a lot of work to be done.

  First of all, he would have to give up journalism, Stein told him. It was a necessary sacrifice if he was going to get anywhere as a real writer. Here she was preaching to the choir.

  Second, some of his subject matter was too dirty. “You mustn’t write anything that is inaccrochable,” Stein admonished him—meaning anything too salacious. She took particular offense at his short story “Up in Michigan,” which concluded with a drunken, fumbling date rape. Hemingway cheerfully tolerated the advice but would in due course reject it.

  They moved on to the subject of his starter novel—more Michigan fare. Stein had nothing good to say about it.

  “There is a great deal of description in this,” she informed him, “and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate.”

  If Hemingway was discouraged, he didn’t lash out at Stein—not yet, anyway. There was too much to be learned from her. He made more visits to her salon, during which they sipped tea and fruit liqueurs. While they sipped, he stared at her Cézanne paintings. There was something to be gleaned from Cézanne’s thick, methodical brushstrokes, he thought, something in their repetition that would help his writing—something profound. Stein herself had been deeply influenced by the painter while writing her book Three Lives. She saw his influence on Picasso’s work too, in certain landscape paintings—especially the “cutting up the sky not in cubes but in spaces.” Picasso once called Cézanne “my one and only master,” and added that “Cézanne came closer than anybody else when he said, ‘Painting is something you do with your balls.’” Soon Hemingway was visiting the Musée du Luxembourg daily to examine the Cézannes on display there as well. “I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone,” he wrote later. “Besides,” he added, “it was secret.” That said, it pertained to the crafting of “simple true sentences.”

  During his early visits to Stein’s salon, Hemingway’s hostess talked ceaselessly. They often discussed other writers, and Stein’s opinions were soaked in competitiveness. She refused, Hemingway later claimed, to speak well about any writer who hadn’t publicly supported her work. Sylvia Beach echoed this sentiment: “She took little interest, of course, in any but her own books.”

  Yet Stein became interested in Hemingway; she even admitted to developing a “weakness” for him. He was just so attentive when she talked about the general principles of her writing, she later explained. It was flattering to have such a good pupil, someone who took training so eagerly. Champion number two had been added to his arsenal.

  “Gertrude Stein and me,” he reported back to Sherwood Anderson, “are just like brothers.”

  THAT WINTER Hemingway
rented a garret on the top floor of a hotel at 39 rue Descartes. Like rue du Cardinal Lemoine, the building had its own literary history: poet Paul Verlaine had died there. Reaching the icy room required a climb up many flights of stairs; Hemingway usually carted with him bundles of twigs to heat the space. If the chimney wasn’t in the mood to draw properly, smoke filled the room; he would then have to stomp down all of those flights of stairs again and seek refuge in a nearby café.

  Yet the room had its redeeming qualities: there was a modest view over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, with smoke from other chimneys unfurling up into the gray Paris sky. Maybe more important, it was Hemingway’s own private room at last: a place to put the lessons of Pound and Stein into practice on paper, a backdrop for him to push and jab at the English language and, perhaps, even create a modernist magnum opus.

  When he wasn’t marching all over Europe for the Star, Hemingway devoted himself almost wholly to his fiction. When he wasn’t actually writing, he was thinking about writing, recovering from writing, or preparing to write. He dictated that breakfasts were to be silent—“please, without speaking,” he told Hadley—so he could clear his head for the day of work before him. And even when he wasn’t involved in his own writing, he was dutifully reading someone else’s. Sometimes when Hadley was snuggling with her husband, she would hear a rustling sound and look up to find that he was reading something behind her back.

  His nascent novel was on his mind, but instead of diving back into it, Hemingway worked on short pieces. He was trying to find his voice and craft the style that he had started to conceive even before arriving in Paris. Some of this early work—both fiction and articles—contained the seeds of what would later become quintessential Hemingway, such as a paragraph he wrote about roughneck bal musette culture for the Star: