Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Hemingway clearly had a feeling for the material, but it was a spectacle he had to see for himself. As he would soon find out, it would be like having a front-row seat at a bloody battle.

  He could hardly wait.

  ON THE FIRST of June, 1923, McAlmon and Hemingway left Paris for Spain by train.

  “Beery-poppa (Hemingway) said a loving goodbye to Feather-kitty (Hadley),” recalled McAlmon, citing the latest nicknames Hemingway and Hadley had bestowed on each other. “And he and I, well lubricated with whisky, got on the train.”

  Bill Bird planned to meet them in Madrid. By the time he got there, McAlmon was on Hemingway’s blacklist. Once anyone earned a spot on this roster, it was nearly impossible to receive a pardon.

  They found themselves at odds before their train even crossed the Spanish border. At one point, while still in France, the train stopped. On the track beside their car, on top of a flatcar, lay a festering, maggot-eaten dog corpse. McAlmon blanched and looked away—a gesture that immediately earned Hemingway’s disdain. He had seen similar scenes in war, he advised McAlmon; one simply had to be detached and scientific about it.

  “He tenderly explained that we of our generation must inure ourselves to the sight of grim reality,” McAlmon remembered. “I recalled that Ezra Pound had talked once of Hemingway’s ‘self-hardening process.’” McAlmon was proving to be too soft for Hemingway’s taste.

  Once in Spain, the men prepared to see their first bullfight. After downing a few drinks to steel themselves, they took their seats in the stands, bringing along more whisky in case their nerves needed further steadying. The very first bull charged a horse, lifting the animal over its head on its horns. Later, another horse was gored and galloped “in hysteria around the ring, treading on its own entrails,” McAlmon recalled. He was repulsed—and not just by the goings-on in the ring. The crowd was also brutal and vulgar, he thought. Bill Bird was less horrified, according to McAlmon. “But neither he nor I were putting ourselves through a ‘hardening process.’” Hemingway, however, was immediately seduced. “It’s a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he wrote to a friend. Bullfighting, in his eyes, took “more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could.” It was like, he added, “having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.”

  He immediately began acting like someone newly admitted to a secret society, Bill Bird observed, and set about making himself an instant expert. (“If there’s ever anything you want to know about bull fighting ask me,” he wrote to his father a few weeks later, adding that the trip would provide material for “some very fine stories.”) At the same time, Hemingway’s patience with McAlmon was running thin, and he insulted him unsparingly, even though McAlmon was funding the entire enterprise. McAlmon’s inability to stare down brutality—whether a rotting dog or a gored horse—repelled Hemingway; plus, Hemingway felt that McAlmon considered him a poseur. Nothing could be further from the truth. His bullfighting afición was real, and he was going to prove it.

  Yet astonishingly, by the time the trio returned to Paris, Hemingway had earned not one but two new publishers: both Bird and McAlmon decided that they were going to publish his works via their respective presses. McAlmon planned to beat Bird to the punch, publicly announcing soon after they got back from Spain that he would be the first to publish a book by Ernest Hemingway. Talent was talent, after all, whether it kissed the ring or bit the hand.

  THAT FIRST BOOK would be a slim affair, as one could intuit from its eventual title: Three Stories and Ten Poems. Two of those three stories were survivors of the Great Train Robbery: “My Old Man” and “Up in Michigan.”

  The third story was one that Hemingway had written that spring after his Rapallo trip, while skiing at Cortina with Hadley. “Out of Season” was a stylistic breakthrough for him. Not only was it clipped and rhythmic, but also it showcased a new “iceberg theory” that he’d been kicking around. He was not just intent on stripping down language itself; he was now stripping down his material and prompting readers to infer events not explicitly spelled out. When it came to story lines, a gifted writer could get away with showing only the tip of the iceberg. “If the writer is writing truly enough, [the reader] will have a feeling of those [omitted] things as strongly as though the writer had stated them,” he explained later. This approach would involve the reader more deeply in the story and make him or her more of an active participant.

  “Out of Season” would be a case study of sorts. It was, Hemingway later admitted, a near-literal translation of something that had happened to him and Hadley during their Cortina foray. At the story’s center is a fraught marriage between a young man and a young woman named “Tiny”—one of Hadley’s nicknames for Hemingway. The characters are on holiday; they are bickering. Amidst this discord, they allow themselves to be taken on an illegal out-of-season fishing expedition by a drunken old guide named Peduzzi. The unpleasant little voyage unravels, thanks to Peduzzi’s ineptitude, and at the story’s end, the reader is left speculating about the cause of the quarrel between the couple and what becomes of the hapless Peduzzi.

  In real life, the Hemingways had gone on a similar excursion, and afterward Hemingway had complained about the “drunk of a guide” to their hotel manager, who promptly fired the old villager. The “very desperate” old man then hanged himself in a stable. When he later recounted the incident, he expressed no remorse about his possible role in prompting the man’s suicide; he only matter-of-factly explained why the suicide did not work as a literary device in the story that stemmed from the events. He simply “didnt think the story needed it.” Clearly his self-hardening process was working.

  Also, here Hemingway’s reporting skills were coming in handy. The “Peduzzi” affair was one of many real-life events that he would treat as a fiction scoop. Over and over again, he would recognize the literary currency of an event and then practically race to the closest flat surface on which he could translate that event onto paper—usually in faintly fictionalized, highly stylized form. He had written “Out of Season” in a frantic reporter-on-deadline rush, starting as soon as he returned from his own ill-fated fishing trip. He claimed to have written it so fast that he didn’t even use punctuation.

  “Your ear is always more acute when you have been upset by a row of any sort,” he explained later.

  Hemingway also needed to come up with new material for his book project with Bill Bird. Like McAlmon’s press, Bird’s newly founded Three Mountains Press was an independent publisher dedicated to limited editions of experimental writing. Yet unlike McAlmon’s books—which one expat described as “uglyish wads of printing”—Bird’s were tactile, artisanal objets d’art, printed on an eighteenth-century handpress; the whole operation was crammed into a tiny former wine vault. He had recently teamed up with Ezra Pound to publish a six-volume series titled The Inquest into the state of contemporary English prose. Bird asked Hemingway to contribute the sixth and final book. He suggested a series of vignettes like Hemingway’s 183-word gored-matador passage. Luckily, Hemingway had already been laboring over a series of them, six of which had been published in The Little Review earlier that spring. One of them, a war story, consisted of a mere seventy-five words:

  We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.

  Hemingway agreed with Bird; they called the resulting volume of vignettes in our time. It was a declarative title, implying that readers might find the literary zeitgeist within its rough-hewn pages.

  The slenderness of the book made it appear diminutive, yet it was anything but. A mere 3,500 words long, it contained eighteen “chapters”—most of which were no longer than the “garde
n at Mons” passage. Yet those words had been painstakingly selected and arranged. Each of the in our time vignettes—many of which drew on material that Hemingway had picked up on reporting assignments around Europe—conjured up its own engrossing little world. Robert McAlmon was about to have the honor of being Hemingway’s first publisher, but Three Stories and Ten Poems was largely repurposed material from Hemingway’s largely lost “Juvenilia” era.

  Bill Bird, by contrast, got the real goods. in our time hinted at what the future would hold: not just Hemingway’s future but the future of literature. The new Hemingway formula was falling into place, saturated with Pound-inspired spareness and Steinian repetitive stream-of-consciousness elements. Yet the vignettes were unique too—as action-driven and engrossing as any Hemingway article; as literary as anything that Pound or Stein might have created yet more accessible.

  To Bird and the other early in our time readers, they felt like something new under the sun.

  AMIDST ALL of this building momentum, Hadley’s belly began to grow moon-big: the baby was due sometime in October 1923. The couple was due to depart for Canada soon—just as Hemingway was putting literary Paris on notice. He was not happy about it. Other expat hopefuls were coming to Paris in droves to pursue the very goal he was poised to achieve, and now he was exiling himself from the literary center of the universe. He complained bitterly about the situation to friends, even though the Canada move was voluntary.

  Despite his initial jitters, Hemingway did find ways to get into the spirit of his wife’s pregnancy. The couple went to Spain together in July for the weeklong San Fermín festival in Pamplona: it was an annual pilgrimage site for bullfighting aficionados. Hemingway felt the experience would be a good prenatal influence on his child. The fiesta proved to be more than that. For Hemingway, it was a life-changing, intoxicating revelation. He was giddy when describing it to others: “5 days of bull fighting dancing all day and all night,” he wrote to one friend. “Wonderful music—drums, reed pipes, fifes—faces of Velasquez’s drinkers, Goya and Greco faces, all the men in blue shirts and red handkerchiefs circling lifting floating dance.”

  What was more, from a reporter’s point of view, it was a hell of a scoop. Here was essentially an untapped trove of material, a world filled with decadence, high art, ceremony, frivolity, and profundity all at once—and he and Hadley had been, he claimed, the only foreigners there. (The spectacle had a less profound effect on Hadley, who cheerfully sat at Hemingway’s side during the bullfights, stitching clothes for their baby and “embroidering in the presence of all that brutality,” as she later put it.)

  This first fiesta immediately inspired him: nearly a quarter of in our time’s chapters would feature bullfighting scenes. He worked passionately on the material all summer, consulting with Ezra Pound on the edits. Yet now the student had also begun instructing the mentor: Hemingway gave stern, detailed guidance on how the material should appear in the final version of the book. He gave equally strict guidance to Robert McAlmon about the proofs for Three Stories and Ten Poems, enlisting firepower from Gertrude Stein about aesthetic matters along the way. He even submitted a cover he had designed himself with input from Bill Bird. “I like the look of it. Maybe you don’t,” he wrote to McAlmon. “You are the publisher,” he added magnanimously, but it was clear whose opinion Hemingway valued most.

  McAlmon released Three Stories and Ten Poems on August 13, 1923. Ernest Hemingway had officially become a published author.

  Two weeks later, he and Hadley left for Canada. Within days of their arrival, Hemingway’s darkest fears had been confirmed.

  “It couldn’t be any worse,” he wrote to Pound. “You can’t imagine it.”

  BY THE END of the summer, excitement had begun to build in the Toronto Star’s newsroom amidst rumors of Hemingway’s imminent arrival. When he materialized in September, he immediately commanded the spotlight. He spoke almost casually of his friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound—who must have seemed like mythical creatures to many of the staffers—and was candid about his intention to join them in the literary pantheon.

  Hemingway became a hot topic around the newsroom; rumors often circulated about him. According to Morley Callaghan, then a young Star reporter: “He couldn’t walk down the street and stub his toe without having a newspaperman who happened to be walking with him magnify the little accident into a near fatality. How he was able to get these legends going I still don’t know.”

  Hemingway may have filled some young staffers with a sense of awe, but the older men were less than impressed, for example, when Hemingway—clutching proofs of in our time, came to work one day and announced, “I’ve discovered a new form.” To Callaghan he added, “Ezra Pound says it is the best prose he has read in forty years.”

  Staffers quietly began passing around a copy of Three Stories and Ten Poems among themselves. Callaghan—who worshipped Hemingway and his writing—asked two colleagues for their thoughts on the tome. “I can still remember the patient smile of the older one as he said, ‘Remember this, my boy. Three swallows never made a summer,’” said Callaghan.

  No one appeared less impressed by Hemingway than his managing editor, Harry Hindmarsh—also the son-in-law of the paper’s publisher. Hindmarsh had a reputation as a ruthless newsman, a general who was “driven to break [the spirit of] any proud man” who challenged him, according to Callaghan. He took a passionate dislike to Hemingway and immediately went to great lengths to humble his new reporter, sending him on far-flung yet menial assignments. Soon Hemingway was “busy galloping around the country in the Hindmarsh harness.” Gone were the prestige days of interviewing Mussolini and covering international conflicts; the new stories Hindmarsh gave Hemingway were “piddling, just junk assignments,” recalled Callaghan, who gaped at Hemingway’s story lineups in the newsroom assignment book with disbelief. Hadley was equally appalled, and reported to Hemingway’s mother that he was “greatly overworked” and rarely slept.

  Hemingway made no effort to disguise his misery to his friends back in Paris. His missives to France grew increasingly desperate. He begged Pound to write to him. “You may save a human life,” he pleaded. (Pound, who allegedly “hated all things American,” was apparently gently scornful about Hemingway’s Canadian adventure; his letters from Paris were mockingly addressed to “Tomato, Can.”) Furthermore, he was tormented over his suddenly halted creative trajectory; he told one colleague that his stint in Toronto had already killed off ten years of his literary life.

  The tension between Hemingway and Hindmarsh neared explosion when the editor sent his reporter on assignment to New York just before Hadley was due to give birth. Sure enough, on October 10—while Hemingway was away—their son was born. Hemingway returned at once and went straight to Hadley’s bedside; Hindmarsh in turn reprimanded Hemingway for failing to bring his material to the newsroom first. Hadley commiserated wholly with her husband: she feared that the new job would “kill my Tiny if we stay too long,” she wrote to a friend. Hemingway was furious that Hadley had had to “go through the show alone” and pledged to Ezra Pound that all future work delivered to Hindmarsh would be done with “utter contempt and hatred.”

  Hemingway and Hadley named their seven-pound baby John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. In more than one letter, Hemingway jokingly noted the child’s resemblance to the king of Spain. Hadley explained to her mother-in-law that “John Hadley” was one of Hemingway’s reporting pen names. “As it includes me,” she added, “he is really named for us both.” “Nicanor” honored the Spanish matador Nicanor Villalta, whom the couple had seen in Pamplona that summer. The baby would soon acquire some nicknames as well. To his parents, he was “Bumby”—a Hadley invention which reflected his roly-polyness; two of his new godparents, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, called him “Goddy.”

  To their friends, both Hemingway and Hadley described Bumby’s progress with typical new-parent giddiness and pride, but Hadley reported that they had heavy hearts “just w
hen we ought to be so happy.” Hemingway complained of a shot stomach, nervous fatigue, and insomnia. Their existence in Canada was a waking nightmare, he wrote to Stein and Toklas. For the first time, he added, he understood how a man could be driven to suicide.

  There were, however, indications that his fighting spirit had not been extinguished, just pummeled temporarily into submission. “I’ll get on your shelves yet,” he pledged to Sylvia Beach. He wrote a few spirited articles about bullfighting and also found time to dash off several nasty little sketches of his co-workers, whom he described as “all merde” to Beach. One colleague, he wrote, was “dry inside his head like the vagina of an old whore.”

  He even thought about developing a revenge novel skewering Hindmarsh; it would be titled The Son-in-Law. It is unclear how much progress he ever made on this book; he apparently gave the project up quickly, telling a colleague that a writer shouldn’t premise a novel on someone he despised because hatred distorted one’s perspective.

  Yet nothing could distract him enough from the daily agonies of his routine. Soon a decision was made to give it all up: not just his position at the Star but journalism in its entirety. There would be no more freelancing, no more deadlines, and no accepting tempting faraway assignments. There would be only the writing—real writing. Hemingway and Hadley began making plans to flee back to France, which, they realized, had become their true home over the past two years. They implored various Left Bank friends to help them find an apartment there and regain their foothold in the city. They would not be “too fussy” about their lodgings, Hadley promised Sylvia Beach; they were simply pining for “the light of day in Paris.”