Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “[Hemingway] had an evangelistic streak that made him work to convert his friends to whatever mania he was encouraging at the time,” recalled Dos Passos.

  Pamplona still felt as pure and insular as it had the summer before, untainted by influxes of Americans and other tourists.

  “[The town] was ours,” Stewart wrote later. “No one else had discovered it . . . It was vintage Hemingway. It was a happy time . . . it was a masculine time.”

  Spaniards in blue berets danced in the town’s squares as small bands of natives streamed through the city, playing drums and blowing whistles. Hundreds of peasants from the nearby mountains crowded the streets, wearing garlic necklaces and spurting wine into their mouths from goatskin wine bags. Fifteen-foot papier-mâché giants were paraded through the town. At night, fireworks exploded in the sky, and revelers danced in the streets until dawn.

  “From every alley [came] the rhythms of Basque fife and drum or the bleating of Galician bagpipes or the rattle of castanets,” wrote Dos Passos. “As a show the San Firmímes are terrific. Bands. Processions. Cohetes [rockets].”

  The heat was almost savage; it “sweated through one’s flesh and bones,” McAlmon recalled. Once the fiesta took off, it was a surreal, sleepless, adrenaline-and-alcohol-fueled marathon. The Hemingway entourage started each day by slugging black coffee; they then moved on quickly to Pernod. They lost each other in the bacchanal and found each other again—sometimes not until the following day. One might be engulfed by a roving crowd of musicians or dancers or peasants at any moment. Every night, the drinking continued until the sun came up or one passed out, whichever came first. The expats couldn’t even keep up with themselves: Hemingway later claimed that Donald Stewart had thrown up all over Pamplona.

  When he wasn’t vomiting, Stewart got deep into the fiesta spirit. One night he danced in the main plaza with around two hundred riau-riau dancers swirling around him; they then carried him off on their shoulders. For the rest of the fiesta he was an adored mascot among the peasants.

  The festival truly began on July 7 with the running of the bulls, or the encierro, a dramatic ritual in which the bulls for that day’s fights were driven from their corrals at the town’s edge through barricaded streets into the bullring at Pamplona’s center. At dawn, small bands began circling through the town, playing ancient reedy oboes and beating drums. The sound woke up the hundreds of people sleeping in the streets: bodies carpeted the town’s squares, benches, and sidewalks. By six o’clock in the morning, thousands of people lined the bull run and crowded onto balconies to see the spectacle.

  Suddenly, at seven o’clock, a rocket shot into the sky, announcing that the bulls were being released. Then a second rocket was launched into the air: the bulls were coming. Down the corridor, a crowd of men scrambled ahead of the animals. The bulls thundered after them in a cloud of dust. If no one tripped and fell, the half-mile dash took only a few minutes—but tramplings were common occurrences. When the bulls reached the ring, more rockets were fired. Amateur hour had begun: anyone with enough cojones could leap into the ring with the animals and play toreador.

  Hemingway was ready to join them. If he had been undergoing a “self-hardening” process during his Spanish voyage a year earlier, this year there was a new variation on the theme.

  “[He] had been talking a great deal about courage, and how a man needs to test himself to prove to himself that he can take it,” recalled McAlmon.

  Naturally, this now meant goading a two-thousand-pound animal into charging him in front of thousands of people. That week in Pamplona, he jumped into the ring many times. During one of his forays, he tried to get the attention of a steer by waving his coat; when the distracted animal ignored him, Hemingway caught the steer’s horns and tried to throw it. The crowd cheered. The steer “ran away bellowing a bewildered moo,” McAlmon remembered.

  McAlmon had no intention of following Hemingway into the ring, but Donald Stewart did. He later stated that although he was usually a “practicing coward,” he had been compelled into the ring because “Hemingway shamed me into it.” He didn’t want to lose Hemingway’s regard, which had become precious to him.

  “Ernest was somebody you went along with, or else,” he noted.

  Stewart drank some wine and dropped into the bullring. In due course a bull charged him full force and knocked him “ass over teakettle.” He went after the bull again; this time it promptly tossed him into the air. When he got up off the ground, Hemingway came over and clapped him on the back.

  “I felt as though I had scored a winning touchdown,” Stewart wrote later.

  He had, instead, scored a few broken ribs. Once again he was hoisted up on the shoulders of enthusiastic Spaniards, who carried him out of the ring.

  The bullring antics of the Hemingway entourage were captured by local photographers and immortalized in souvenir postcards. News of the Hemingway-Stewart heroics quickly spread back to Paris and even to the States. Hemingway was again proving himself to be great copy. The Chicago Tribune ran an item proclaiming BULL GORES 2 YANKS ACTING AS TOREADORES.

  The story cited the afflicted parties as one “MacDonald Ogden Stewart” and Ernest Hemingway, a “Hero of World War.” According to the Tribune’s account, a bull gored Stewart, who had pledged to “leap on the bull’s back, blow smoke in his eyes, and then beat him down.” When Hemingway attempted a rescue, the bull gored him as well. He was spared a grisly demise, the article announced, only because the bull’s horns were bandaged.

  Stewart denied that either he or Hemingway had been the source of the original reports (“They must have come from Bird or McAlmon or Dos Passos”), although Hemingway wrote a letter to the Toronto Star, clarifying facts the paper had gotten wrong in its own separate account. He also boasted to his former colleagues that he and Stewart had accrued a following that materialized daily to watch them. He clearly had a strong sense of how he wanted to be showcased in the press. It had also become clear that the exotic, dangerous world of bullfighting—and accounts of expat antics within that world (the Tribune article noted that all members of the Hemingway entourage were American writers living in Paris)—were of keen editorial interest back home, just as stories about the Paris colony had enthralled readers.

  A week after it started, on July 14, the festival ended with an effusion of fireworks and rockets in the main plaza. The Hemingway crew was hungover and spent. John Dos Passos’s enthusiasm had completely waned by the end of the fête. Everyone had been too exhibitionistic to suit him, and the “sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves,” he wrote later. The occasional bullfight was fine for him, but every day for a week was simply too much. For Hemingway, however, it had been a different story entirely.

  “He stuck like a leech till he had every phase of the business in his blood,” Dos Passos recalled, “and saturated himself to the bursting point.” Donald Stewart had been the crowd’s favorite clown; McAlmon had been the cynical but amused observer. But Hemingway had been the “cynosure of all eyes.”

  THE HUNGOVER ENTOURAGE repaired to a quiet, remote Basque village in the Pyrenees called Burguete. It was the perfect place to recover from the debaucheries of Pamplona. The whole party moved into the little village inn, where they dined on peasant fare: goat cheese, tortillas, black bread, and coffee with goat’s milk. Sheep and goats dotted the hillsides, and the trout-filled Irati River flowed a few miles away. The crew took picnic lunches and hiked to the river.

  Robert McAlmon watched his author during the outings. As they fished in the falls, Hemingway was mentally working on a short story that would be titled “Big Two-Hearted River.”

  “He was so intent thinking about what it was that a man who was fishing would be thinking about . . . that he didn’t catch many trout, but he jotted down notes for the story,” he recalled. His cynicism about Hemingway was growing. He deemed the resulting short story “a stunt and very artificial,” and he would soon conclude that Hemingwa
y was “a very good businessman, a publicity seeker, who looks ahead and calculates, and uses rather than wonders about people.”

  Hemingway apparently did not improve McAlmon’s opinion with the tantrum he threw on one of the group’s country walks. He suspected that Hadley was pregnant again (she was not), and complained so vigorously about the prospect of once more becoming a father that Bill Bird’s wife, Sally, dressed him down in front of the others.

  “Stop acting like a damn fool and a crybaby,” she berated him. “You’re responsible too. Either you do something about not having it, or you have it.”

  Even after the matter of Hadley’s pregnancy had been resolved, Hemingway found other things to be glum about. He reported to Ezra Pound that the bullring was the only place left where valor and art still coincided. He envied the acclaim that was showered upon matadors but denied to young authors. Matadors got pointed out in the street and won ovations and respect. Writers had to wait until they were eighty-nine years old to get such accolades. Also, in the literary world, the more “meazly and shitty the guy,” the more success he could wrangle, Hemingway contended, and offered up James Joyce as an example.

  Money woes were back in full force, adding to his dark mindset: he told Pound that his dwindling resources meant that he was going to have to quit writing.

  “I never will have a book published,” he lamented.

  What was bound to happen next, he feared, was that some inferior competitor would rip him off and stage the massive stylistic coup that Hemingway badly wanted to spearhead. By the following spring, he grimly joked, “some son of a bitch will have copied everything I’ve written and they will simply call me another of his imitators.”

  It was time to go back to Paris, and to the business of breaking through.

  PROBABLY TO NO one’s surprise, Hemingway’s rupture with Ford Madox Ford and the transatlantic review was not far off. Like many ambitious but shakily financed lit mags before it, the transatlantic was soon on the ropes. While Hemingway had been planning his trip to Spain, Ford had gone back to the States to try to secure more backing, leaving Hemingway to close the magazine’s July issue and pull together the August one. Hemingway took the opportunity to add to the July issue an unsigned editorial skewering several prominent surrealists, and then devoted the August issue almost entirely to his various American friends, even though the magazine was supposed to feature international content. By the time Ford came back to Paris, it was too late to make changes in the August issue. Instead, he inserted an editorial, making sure his readers knew that the issue was Hemingway’s sole handiwork, and that with the next number, the review would “re-assume its international aspect.” Then, in the October issue, Hemingway published an attack on T. S. Eliot, for which Ford in turn ran another apologetic editorial in November. By then the men were no longer on speaking terms. Hemingway informed Gertrude Stein that Ford was “an absolute liar” and a “crook.” The partnership dissolved; the magazine folded a few months later.

  In the wake of the fallout, Hemingway turned to satire. For him, writing “could be an arrow of revenge in [his] quiver,” as his future daughter-in-law put it years later. He had not only been working on new short stories but also scribbling down satirical pieces about his Left Bank compatriots, including an unpublished sketch featuring Ford and his wife bickering at the Nègre de Toulouse restaurant. Another story—eventually published as “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”—depicted the travails of a couple trying to have a baby (“They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it,” ran the second line), based on the real-life conception struggles of writer Chard Powers Smith and his wife. He also wrote a story about an overweight virgin who comes to Paris yearning for romance, inspired by the woes of one of Hadley’s friends. Hemingway had a little bit of poison for everyone during this time, and he was becoming quite adept at co-opting the lives and vulnerabilities of others as grist for his literary mill.

  That said, this gossip-lit bender coincided with nobler writings and motives as well. Late that past summer he had finished “Big Two-Hearted River,” the story he had been mulling over while fishing in Burguete. The finished product, which he eventually divided into two stories, not only showcased his formidable new style, but also contained a later-deleted passage illuminating what is widely considered to be a window into Hemingway’s own thinking about his writing at the time: “[Nick] wanted to be a great writer. He was pretty sure he would be . . . He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting . . . He felt almost holy about it. It was deadly serious.”

  “Big Two-Hearted River” was the ninth completed story he had written since the Toronto debacle. Together with the three stories that had appeared in Three Stories and Ten Poems, this material seemed enough for a full-length book. Hemingway cobbled together a manuscript, lacing the in our time vignettes in among the short stories. Soon he was calling the book In Our Time—with each word capitalized to differentiate it from his slender Paris book. It wasn’t the all-important novel he knew that he still had to write, but it was enough to court major American publishers and get his name known in New York at last.

  Both old and new friends were standing by to advance Hemingway’s cause. By October, Donald Stewart had gone back to New York City, where he was staying at the Yale Club. Hemingway charged John Dos Passos with bringing the In Our Time manuscript across the Atlantic and hand-delivering it to Stewart, who had pledged to show it to his own publisher, the George H. Doran Company.

  Dos Passos would also act as an ambassador. He later recalled that he had, upon reading the vignettes from the original in our time, “right away put [Hemingway] down as a man with obvious talent for handling the English language.” He began “trumpeting it abroad” and came up with his own way of pitching Hemingway and his material. “My story was that basing his wiry short sentences on cablese and the King James Bible, Hem would become the first great American stylist,” he later explained.

  In addition, Harold Loeb hastened to be of assistance. If he had been fretting before about “why Hem was getting nowhere,” as he put it, here was his opportunity to help his friend at last. He immediately began strategizing the presentation of Hemingway to his publishing house, Boni & Liveright—and to Mr. Liveright himself.

  It would prove a most memorable introduction.

  HORACE LIVERIGHT was not exactly a conventional publisher. A decade earlier, he had gate-crashed the clubbish publishing world and had been scandalizing his colleagues ever since.

  Nothing in his early background had portended that he would become a man of letters. While many of his colleagues at other houses boasted Ivy League educations, Liveright had exempted himself from the rigors of formal education after grammar school. To earn his living as a teenager, he worked in a Pennsylvania stockbrokerage house. Yet he clearly had a more grandiose vision for his future. He eventually moved to New York and set up shop in a colonnade at the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he paid a bellboy to page him as “Lord Roseberry.” He composed an opera; it got as far as rehearsals but was never officially performed. Then, in his mid-twenties, Liveright founded Pick-Quick Paper, a toilet paper concern backed by his father-in-law, a vice president at the International Paper Company. Liveright had proudly named the product himself. Only when the venture ended disastrously did he turn his attention to more cerebral paper products.

  He was casting about for a new enterprise when he met Albert Boni. The latter had used his Harvard tuition money to open a bookshop in Greenwich Village, but his dream was to found a publishing house. Liveright proposed himself as Boni’s partner, and in 1917 the men announced the foundation of Boni & Liveright. Boni would swiftly exit the enterprise over creative differences, but the house retained his name. The firm was often described as a “madhouse” and its proprietor alternately deemed by his fellow publishers a glamour-seeking charlatan, a reckless upstart, or an outrageous interloper. Liveright kept his checkbook on his desk next to a bottle of whisky;
his waiting room boasted a highly unusual atmosphere.

  “When you went to see him in his publishing house often enough the whole outer office was filled with chorus girls,” Sherwood Anderson recalled. “It wouldn’t have surprised me when I went there to have had one of the women jump up and, with a practice swing, kick my hat off.”

  It probably would have surprised no one if Liveright had commissioned the chorus girls as ornamentation, but they were usually there to audition, as the ever multi-venture-minded Liveright had also taken up theatrical producing. In the house’s waiting room, dancers and authors alike could expect to keep company with Liveright’s army of bootleggers as well. It was not exactly the most reverential environment.

  Boni & Liveright quickly became known as the unofficial publishers of the bohemian Greenwich Village crowd, and almost as immediately became “the most noisome stench in the nostrils of the established [houses],” as Hemingway’s first friend in Paris, Lewis Galantière, would put it. Boni & Liveright had posed an immediate threat to the older houses: the firm had managed to snare major talent right away; for example, it signed literary giant Theodore Dreiser in its first year. Liveright would also soon poach Sherwood Anderson from B. W. Huebsch with the lure of a substantial five-year contract and a $100 weekly allowance. These acquisitions showed that the scrappy house meant business. The established publishers could revile Liveright as much as they pleased, but they could not dismiss him.

  Like other publishers, Horace Liveright had begun to scout talent among the expats in Montparnasse. One of the house’s former vice presidents, Leon Fleischman, had moved to Paris and was charged with finding manuscripts suitable for the American market. Harold Loeb and Fleischman knew each other from New York, and now, as Hemingway was preparing his In Our Time manuscript, Loeb arranged to bring him over to Fleischman’s apartment.