Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  That said, he and Cannell still overlapped socially, including at one teatime gathering that would have profound ramifications for the Hemingway-Hadley union. One day Cannell invited Hadley to come over to her apartment to meet two American sisters who were relatively new to Paris, Pauline and Virginia “Jinny” Pfeiffer. Later that afternoon, Hemingway and Loeb bounded in, sweaty from their latest boxing round. There Hemingway beheld his wife sitting and making small talk with two birdlike, aggressively stylish strangers, both of whom resembled Japanese dolls with their black bobbed hair and heavy bangs.

  The impulse to connect Hadley with the Pfeiffers—especially Pauline—was an odd one. Apparently they and Hadley had lived near each other in St. Louis but never met; this seemed a sufficient reason to Cannell for making the introduction. Yet beyond their geographical backgrounds, the ladies had little in common. In the first place, Pauline and Virginia were rich; their purses were thick with dollars regularly supplied by their doting wealthy father and an equally doting uncle. Plus, Pauline worshipped at the altar of fashion, while Hadley could not have cared less about couture. That season Pauline sported a luxe chipmunk fur coat conjured up by a top Paris designer; long emerald earrings occasionally dangled from her earlobes. According to Morley Callaghan, she considered hanging out at cafés “beneath her,” and opted for the Ritz over the Dôme and the Rotonde. Even her vocabulary was trendy and luxurious: she described people and things that pleased her as “ambrosial,” the chic woman’s superlative du jour.

  Yet, perhaps the starkest discrepancy, Pauline had a career. A year earlier, in 1924, she had come to France to assist Main Bocher, the elegant new Paris editor for Vogue, America’s preeminent fashion magazine. Paris fashion and “the Paris look” were then big business for fashion houses and publications alike, and the Paris-based Vogue editors worked hard. Pauline’s life as a fashion journalist centered on interviews, fashion shows, typewriters, and deadlines, while Hadley’s was dedicated to caring for Bumby and scouting food bargains. Pauline reported on the Paris collections and trends tirelessly; her byline appeared regularly in the magazine. She was a clever writer; even her shortest items about fads demonstrated a brisk, coquettish wit.

  “Handkerchiefs and reputations are exceedingly easy to lose,” read one of her opening paragraphs. “Both are lost in about equal numbers daily. All reputations lost are very good ones—and the more irretrievably lost they are, the better they were. The handkerchiefs lost should be better.”

  Yet despite her sleek bob and her reporter’s notebooks, Pauline was apparently traditional in at least one significant way: she was believed by some to be husband hunting. “Pauline, nearing thirty, was a virgin and a good Roman Catholic,” Cannell later wrote. The ticking clock, she insinuated, was making Pauline more aggressive on the romantic front than she might have been a few years earlier—and also open to less than predictable matches.

  Hemingway fell into that category. In fact, he repulsed Pauline that first afternoon at Cannell’s apartment. (Her sister Virginia, by contrast, found him interesting as he regaled the group with stories about skiing and Austria.) Hemingway was as dismissive of Pauline as she was of him.

  “I’d like to take Virginia out in Pauline’s coat,” he declared after the Pfeiffers had left.

  Yet the Pfeiffers and the Hemingways must have found some common ground, for soon Pauline and Virginia visited Hadley and Hemingway in their sawmill apartment. Pauline—who lived in a posh Right Bank flat—saw no charm in the Hemingways’ dingy loft. Their living conditions appalled her, and she couldn’t believe that Hadley would tolerate such squalor—even in the name of art. Hemingway spent the visit cloistered away in the bedroom; Pauline caught a glimpse of him writing in bed, looking slovenly. She inwardly blanched.

  Cannell ran into the ladies shortly after this visit. “They remarked with delicate shudders that they found Ernest so coarse they couldn’t see how a lovely girl like Hadley could stand him,” she reported.

  Despite the discrepancy between her setup and the Pfeiffers’, Hadley claimed that she remained unashamed; nor did her comparative personal shabbiness seem to bother her—yet. If she felt any insecurity about her husband’s increasing proximity to glamorous women of means, she did not admit to feeling at a disadvantage romantically. She later claimed that Hemingway made her feel as though he was proud of her and that he was always, in one way or another, saying “See, here is this beautiful, smart, talented, charming wife of mine.”

  There must have been moments during this period, however, when both of the Hemingways began to see themselves through the eyes of their rich new friends. It is difficult to imagine that the veneer of bohemian romanticism never once dissolved and revealed instead a scene of cramped, dreary struggle.

  If Virginia Pfeiffer was actually as repelled by Hemingway as Cannell reported, she seems to have gotten over her aversion fairly quickly. The two reportedly struck up a flirtation and possibly even an affair. Gradually the Pfeiffers went from being a novel and occasional presence in the Hemingways’ lives to a constant one, and Hemingway became absorbed in stories of the Pfeiffers’ privileged upbringing and lives. It appeared that a changing of the guard might be in the offing.

  NEW ROMANCE SEEMED to be in the offing for Harold Loeb as well. One afternoon he had stationed himself at the Select, a Montparnasse café near the Dôme and the Rotonde, working on revisions to his Doodab manuscript.

  “I heard a laugh so gay and musical that it seemed to brighten the dingy room,” he remembered later. “Low-pitched, it had the liquid quality of the lilt of a mockingbird singing to the moon.”

  He glanced up and spotted a long, lean woman perched on a bar stool, surrounded by men. Her light hair had been shorn into a boyish cut; though she sometimes favored rakishly angled men’s fedoras, on this day she wore a slouch hat. A simple jersey sweater and tweed skirt completed the ensemble. Her strong, spare features were devoid of makeup. All in all, it seemed a fairly chaste presentation, almost masculine, yet she was arresting and sexy. This woman had, Loeb thought, a “certain aloof splendor.”

  Mesmerized, he ogled her for a while and eventually ambled over to a nearby table where Robert McAlmon was holding court. As usual, McAlmon had the dirt. The mockingbird was a Brit named Lady Duff Twysden; she was in her mid-thirties. She had acquired the title by marriage, but was soon to lose it: like Kitty Cannell and others in the Montparnasse alimony gang, Twysden had come to Paris to weather a nasty divorce. Her aristocratic husband had remained back in the U.K. Though a notoriously hard drinker, she handled her liquor admirably for such a fashionably gaunt creature.

  “I wondered how long she could keep it up without losing her looks,” Loeb wrote.

  He was merely the latest man intrigued by the charms of Lady Duff: she had been captivating men throughout the Quarter. “We were all in love with her,” recalled Donald Ogden Stewart. “It was hard not to be. She played her cards so well.”

  Twysden was an idiosyncratic temptress. Despite the upright English title, there was said to be something feral about her; some maintained that she didn’t bother to bathe regularly. Yet everything about her self-presentation worked. The tweediness of her ensembles—which might have looked dumpy on another women—seemed a symbol of good breeding. Even though she co-opted men’s accessories and drank like a man, Twysden somehow managed to translate all of that appropriated masculinity into feminine seductiveness. Even her tipped fedora implied that she was taking all sorts of other masculine liberties, like the pursuit of pleasure. She was gregarious but also exuded an air of unattainability—a necessary attribute for any successful siren.

  That aloofness worked like catnip: everywhere Lady Duff went, a flock of men invariably sat at her feet, “listening to her every word, loving her looks and her wit and her artistic sensitivity,” as one former expat put it. She treated her many admirers with a democratic flippancy, calling each of them “darling”—possibly unable to remember any of their names. Also, in a community
forever scavenging for inspiration and material, Twysden had the makings of a possible muse—a role that could be flattering and dangerous in equal parts. Many in the Quarter and beyond believed that the commercial fiction writer Michael Arlen had based the femme fatale character Iris Storm in his 1924 novel The Green Hat on Lady Duff, although Nancy Cunard—another long-limbed, lithe, aristocratic British expat—was more likely the inspiration. Modernist author Mary Butts also mulled a book partly inspired by Twysden, but found that “it won’t shape.” It seemed only a matter of time before some other enterprising writer would figure out how to translate her onto paper in a big way. Creatively speaking, Lady Duff was low-hanging fruit.

  Though other men readily flocked to her side at bars, Harold Loeb couldn’t muster the courage to approach her. But he did become obsessed with her. Whenever he walked into a café or bar, he immediately scanned the room to see if she was there. When he did spot her, she was usually attended by her customary retinue of males, and Loeb would hover in the background, observing her from afar.

  “She was not strikingly beautiful, but her features had a special appeal for me,” he remembered. Her face made an indelible impression. “I tried halfheartedly to banish her image but was unsuccessful,” Loeb wrote. “It seemed to be etched on the lens of my mind.”

  To his annoyance, he quickly discovered that Twysden was not completely at liberty, romantically speaking. While she had left her baronet ex-husband back across the Channel, she had imported with her from Britain another man, with whom she lived and caroused. Pat Guthrie was, like Twysden, a dissipated thirty-something Briton with a rumored aristocratic lineage: his mother was said to possess a fortune and a castle in Scotland. Guthrie came to epitomize genteel, debauched poverty within the colony. Like Lady Duff, he was a relentless drinker, although unlike her, he couldn’t hold his alcohol. As expat Morrill Cody put it, “Poor Pat was maudlin at the end of the second glass.” He also occasionally became belligerent, and would often have to be led away while the night was still young. On these occasions, Twysden usually “went on to other places, and other drinks with other people.”

  Despite the fact that he was sharing Twysden’s bed, some thought Guthrie was bisexual or gay, although others were less certain. “[Duff] was really quite a dish for a fairy to have, and yet it happens all the time,” ruminated Donald Stewart later. He vaguely remembered once visiting a brothel in Spain with Guthrie but conceded that it might have been someone else. Others maintained that the Twysden-Guthrie union was romantic, perhaps even one of the greatest love affairs in Montparnasse.

  Loeb hated his would-be rival on sight. He supposed that Guthrie was “handsome in a disagreeable Irish way,” but beyond that, there was little to redeem him. “He was typical . . . of that fraction of the British upper class which chooses parasitism for a vocation,” he concluded.

  It was an uncharitable summary of Guthrie’s position, but not an isolated one. Donald Stewart called him “a kind of bump on the log of Lady Duff Twysden,” even though Twysden essentially relied on him financially. He was known around town as a remittance man, surviving on family allowance checks that sporadically made their way across the Channel. According to legend—one eventually propagated by Loeb himself—whenever money came in, Twysden and Guthrie would move into the Ritz and rummage up their finery (white gloves and gowns for Twysden; a pressed dinner jacket for Guthrie). They would dine on caviar and champagne until their pile of francs grew discouragingly low; then it was back to Montparnasse and pauperdom. After their Ritz benders, Twysden and Guthrie often didn’t have enough money left over for food and relied on local bartenders for charity, whether in the form of credit, cash, or libations.

  The couple frequented the same Left Bank bars and boîtes as Loeb, and their social circles began to overlap. One evening, when Loeb turned up at a friend’s cocktail party, Twysden and Guthrie were there. Loeb nervously downed drink after drink. Rather than imbuing him with courage, the alcohol gave him the spins; he suddenly became fixated on the fact that he hadn’t shaved that morning. He left the party and staggered out to a local barber. “I made my way gingerly until I came to a striped pole,” he remembered later. Once there, he sprawled drunkenly in the barber’s chair and berated himself as the barber lathered and shaved his face. This impulse to groom under duress was apparently a tic of Loeb’s—one that Hemingway had noticed and would soon commemorate on paper.

  Not long afterward, Loeb was back at the bar of the Select, drinking a scotch and soda. Twysden was also there, chatting with a couple of admirers. He stared at her in the mirror behind the bar until her attendants left. She was—for once—alone.

  “Before I could move,” Loeb recalled, “she turned to me and said, ‘It is the only miracle.’”

  It took Loeb a moment to realize that she was addressing him. Even if he had no idea what she was talking about, he collected himself quickly and tried to muster a suave response.

  “That always makes it incredible,” he replied. (“It was as if I was speaking a part,” he later remembered.)

  He got up and sat down on the stool next to her. They stared at each other in the mirror. Soon their hands were touching. Then plans were being made to meet up the next day at an obscure bar. Loeb left when Pat Guthrie turned up.

  The next day, Lady Duff and Loeb met at Restaurant Foyot. The paneled oak walls covered with English hunting scenes seemed an appropriate backdrop for Twysden to brief Loeb on her past. This was a topic of intense speculation around Paris. Stories of her Buckingham Palace debut were making the rounds; some believed she was descended from the Stuart kings of England; Twysden did nothing to discourage this impression.

  “Her early memories were of mist and heather and horses, of cliffs on the hills and the neighbors in to tea,” wrote Loeb.

  Yet ignoble whisperings about her past countered these regal images: that her father was a lowly proprietor of a wine store somewhere in the north of England; that her family had been broke but socially ambitious; that she was a promiscuous man-eater. She didn’t seem to be mourning the imminent loss of her title. It had been a perk of her 1917 marriage to Sir Roger Twysden, tenth baronet, and from the start, it had not been a successful union. Lady Duff told Loeb that she had run away with the best man on her wedding day but ended up marrying Sir Roger anyway. They had one child together, but Sir Roger turned out to be a drunk, she said; they simply couldn’t live with each other. Her aristocratic in-laws were thrilled to be rid of her and currently had custody of her young son.

  “I made a mess of it,” Twysden told Loeb, “but I’m not sorry.”

  They met again the next day, and this time they made plans to go away together. Conveniently, Guthrie was about to leave for England to try to wangle more funds out of his mother. Twysden suggested a liaison in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing port just south of Biarritz.

  “I’ll get the tickets,” Loeb told her.

  In the meantime, another American expat had also been wheedling his way into Lady Duff’s affections. It’s unclear how Hemingway, with a wife at home and a supposed affair with Virginia Pfeiffer on the side, might have had any spare time to devote to cultivating Twysden, but that spring they were increasingly seen in each other’s company.

  “I [introduced] Hemingway to Lady Duff and the title seemed to electrify him,” claimed Robert McAlmon years later. After that, Hemingway was seen for weeks on end in Montmartre, somehow buying drinks for both her and Guthrie despite his own limited resources. Sometimes Hadley joined his excursions with Lady Duff, although they were not happy outings for her. She often burst into tears, and Hemingway would prevail upon McAlmon or their friend Josephine Brooks to take her home while he stayed out drinking with Twysden.

  “[It] looked like love or infatuation at least,” McAlmon observed. “Of course neither Jo Brooks or I DID take Hadley home, thinking if he was going to break with her that was his job, and we saw no reason [for] leaving our own drinks and companions.”

  Hadley’s
tears did little to sway Hemingway, either, who began bringing Twysden to their sawmill apartment. Now that he was gaining a modest celebrity, women of high rank were starting to lavish attention on him. As with the favors of his new rich friends, he apparently basked in the more flirtatious luxuries coming his way. Hadley may have insisted that Hemingway was still proud of her and attracted to her, but late that spring of 1925, he described the state of their union somewhat more coolly.

  “We are fond of each other as ever,” he wrote to Sherwood Anderson, “and get along well.”

  It was hardly a passionate avowal. Like the Pfeiffer sisters, Lady Duff was becoming a fixture in the Hemingways’ personal life.

  THAT SPRING, Hemingway sent off his signed contract for In Our Time to Horace Liveright. In an accompanying letter, he demanded final approval over any suggested alterations, arguing that each story in the collection was “written so tight and so hard” that tampering with a single word would render the whole work off-key. It was going to sell well, he predicted. Unlike the work of his other experimental contemporaries, his writing would have wide appeal. “My book will be praised by highbrows and can be read by lowbrows,” he assured Liveright. “There is no writing in it that anybody with a high-school education cannot read.”

  It was a savvy but tricky approach that few experimentalists could actually master. Yet there were encouraging forerunners in the community. One of Paris’s most visible artists, Pablo Picasso, was pulling it off.

  “I’ve always felt that painting must awaken something even in the man who doesn’t ordinarily look at pictures,” he later told his mistress Françoise Gilot. “Just as in Molière there is always something to make the very intelligent person laugh and also the person who understands nothing. In Shakespeare too. And in my work, just as in Shakespeare, there are often burlesque things and relatively vulgar things. In that way I reach everybody. It’s not that I want to prostrate myself in front of the public, but I want to provide something for every level of thinking.”