Hemingway was now attempting a similar high-low approach in the realm of literature. People like Gertrude Stein and poet E. E. Cummings might craft fine, provocative books in experimental language, but “no one who had not read a good deal of ‘modern’ writing could read [them],” Hemingway wrote to Liveright. He would not be among that crew, and looked forward to becoming a prominent “property” for Boni & Liveright as soon as possible.
Less than a week later, Hemingway visited Sylvia Beach at her bookshop. As usual, she handed him a pile of correspondence that had arrived for him. Among the missives: two letters of inquiry from Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, the prestigious publishing house in New York City. Hemingway saw with dismay that the letters had been written over a month earlier. The first one—dated February 21—told him everything he had ever dreamed of hearing from a major American publisher. Perkins had heard through the grapevine that Hemingway was doing some remarkable writing. After tracking down a copy of his little Paris book in our time—which had apparently taken quite a bit of effort—Perkins had been impressed by its contents. He instinctively understood Hemingway’s style.
“Your method is obviously one which enables you to express what you have to say in a very small compass,” he wrote.
Would Hemingway consider publishing another one of his works with Scribner’s? Perkins hastened to add that in our time itself was too scant to be considered saleable for a commercial publisher like Scribner’s—perhaps a hint that he would be interested in seeing something of novel length.
Yet this flattering missive had gone missing because of an insufficiently specific address. Luckily a mutual acquaintance saved the day by instructing Perkins to contact Hemingway via Sylvia Beach; she practically ran a post office for the Crowd. Perkins sent off another enthusiastic letter a few days later, adding that he had since heard that Hemingway “would likely have material for a book before so very long.”
The timing could not have been more frustrating. Hemingway quickly replied to Perkins, explaining that while he had been excited by the inquiry, his hands were tied: he had just entered into an agreement with Horace Liveright for his next book—and furthermore, the terms of his contract gave Liveright the option on his next three books.
“It makes it seem almost worth while to get into Who’s Who in order to have a known address,” he wrote.
Yet Hemingway was clearly already eyeing loopholes: if Liveright did not accept his next book, he duly reported to Perkins, the firm would relinquish its option on the one that followed. So there was hope for future collaboration with Scribner’s. He described to Perkins other projects he had in mind—including more short stories and perhaps a definitive nonfiction book about bullfighting—and went on to make a bizarre and disingenuous declaration. “I don’t care about writing a novel,” he wrote. It was, he added, an “awfully artificial and worked out form.” Nevertheless, he waffled, some of his short stories were now reaching up to twelve thousand words, so perhaps he would get there yet.
“So that is how matters stand,” he reluctantly concluded.
Neither he nor Perkins appeared willing to submit to their “rotten luck,” as Perkins put it in his response. Over the next few months they kept up an affable correspondence. In these exchanges, Hemingway never asked how Perkins had heard about his work in the first place, perhaps just assuming that his name had been swirling in the ether. He may have been astonished when he learned that Perkins had first heard about him from none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the five years since publishing his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, with Scribner’s, Fitzgerald had not only become one of the house’s leading literary stars and a national celebrity; he had also been serving as an unofficial talent scout for Perkins. Popular sports columnist and author Ring Lardner—once called America’s “most humorous man” by no less an authority than Groucho Marx, and an early influence on Hemingway himself—was among Fitzgerald’s more prominent contributions to the Scribner’s stable. Donald Ogden Stewart also credited Fitzgerald with helping to launch his career by introducing him to Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair’s editor.
Furthermore, once Fitzgerald successfully ushered a writer into Scribner’s stable, he often remained closely involved in his career; Perkins even occasionally sent Fitzgerald sales statistics and reviews of his discoveries’ releases. Fitzgerald’s benevolence toward his fellow writers was almost startling, given the competitive nature of the field. Some wondered if he brokered careers to gratify his own ego, but most felt that his motives were pure. “[He] was selflessly generous about other men’s writing,” wrote John Dos Passos, who knew Fitzgerald in the early days of his career.
The previous fall, Fitzgerald had decided to help to send some of that generosity in the direction of Ernest Hemingway. He had come across in our time and breathlessly informed Perkins in a letter that he should look up a Paris-based American writer named “Earnest [with the “a” crossed out] Hemmingway,” who had just published a remarkable book.
“He’s the real thing,” Fitzgerald declared.
For Fitzgerald to have billed Hemingway thus meant that he likely saw the glimmer of commercial viability in Hemingway’s writing: at last, here was an experimental writer from the milieu of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound who could actually be appreciated by the average American reader. Barely any of Stein’s book The Making of Americans, Fitzgerald complained, had been “intelligable at all.” (Perkins agreed with him: while he found Stein’s style fascinating and effective, he doubted that “the reader who had no literary interest, or not much, would have [any] patience with her method.”) Hemingway was a different matter entirely.
Hemingway had actually never met his new champion, although—like everyone else in his generation—he had for years been reading Fitzgerald’s books and stories. He often had less than glowing things to say about them.
“Ernest seemed on the fence about that early Fitzgerald work,” recalled his Toronto Star colleague Morley Callaghan. “Not grudging, . . . but he did make it clear that Fitzgerald wasn’t exciting him at all.”
He appeared to be in the minority. In the five years since Fitzgerald had made his thunderous debut, he had only become more prolific, critically applauded, and famous than ever. He had published two short story collections and two more novels; one of them, The Beautiful and Damned, had been made into a film. This Side of Paradise had also been optioned. In 1920 and 1921 alone, three movies had been conjured up out of Fitzgerald short stories.
“[He] was making more money than anybody in Paris ever dreamed of a writer’s making,” recalled expat poet Archibald MacLeish.
As if all of this success wasn’t intoxicating enough, Fitzgerald also appeared to have captured one of the most coveted literary prizes of all: as early as 1921, he had become, according to one press profile, “the recognized spokesman of the younger generation.” Scribner’s helped considerably in setting the tone for coverage of its new author, touting him in ads as “The Novelist of a Rising Generation.” On paper, he was a keen observer of the postwar atmosphere and the attitudes of his contemporaries, which were so starkly different from those of their parents.
“My point of vantage was the dividing line between the two generations, and there I sat—somewhat self-consciously,” Fitzgerald acknowledged later.
In This Side of Paradise, he wrote that his peers had grown up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Yet he was also strongly associated with postwar frivolity and giddiness: he and his wife, Zelda, were sometimes credited in the press with single-handedly creating flapper culture. They led by example, and their champagne-soaked world received liberal coverage. According to John Dos Passos, “They were celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word . . . and they loved it.”
Whatever Hemingway thought of his writing, Fitzgerald must have seemed a particularly maddening and enviable presence. By his own admission, Hemingway was still having
a hard time cranking out single paragraphs, much less three celebrated novels in five years. At least he could console himself that Fitzgerald was not deemed a stylistic innovator. “Modern” and “experimental” were words that rarely attached themselves to him. Rather, his work was often called “vivid” and “alive.” Even though his subject matter—flappers, bootleggers, jazz—was strikingly modern, his writing had far more in common with Edith Wharton than with Gertrude Stein. Yet no matter what others might think, Fitzgerald saw himself as a pioneer.
“I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned,” he wrote once to Perkins.
With his new novel The Great Gatsby—just released that April—Fitzgerald felt that he had hit his mark. Shortly after the novel’s release, he informed Perkins that he considered it “something really NEW in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that Joyce, and Stien are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.” He reported that T. S. Eliot agreed with him: “[He] wrote me he’d read Gatsby three times and thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James!”
Yet for the experimentalists, this sort of step wasn’t nearly big enough. A writer couldn’t simply write about modern life; one had to do so in a thoroughly modern and revolutionary way. Gatsby had not achieved that. For example, in the opinion of Edmund Wilson, a Fitzgerald confidant and a leading critic of that era, Fitzgerald would someday be considered “one of the first-rate figures in the American writing of his period,” but Wilson did not credit him with being a literary radical. This meant that there was still a major prize left to be claimed: authorship of a voice-of-a-generation novel that was both modern in subject and a stylistic groundbreaker.
Fitzgerald and his wife had recently traded New York for Europe; they had eventually landed in Paris, where they rented an apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. They quickly “made a special social category of themselves and their pleasures” among the rich of the Right Bank, as New Yorker writer Janet Flanner put it. Their recklessness and profligacy became legendary.
“Poor Scott was earning so much money from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it,” recalled Sylvia Beach.
To do so, they did everything short of torching cash in the lobby of the Ritz. Beach claimed that Fitzgerald spent an entire publisher’s check on a pearl necklace for Zelda, who then gave it to “a Negress with whom she was dancing” in a nightclub. They reportedly left a heap of money on a tray in the foyer of their flat so bill collectors and deliverymen could help themselves. Yet despite the frivolity, Scott was immediately, even passionately, embraced by the Crowd. “We liked him very much, as who didn’t?” recalled Beach, remembering with affection Fitzgerald’s “blue eyes and good looks, his concern for others, . . . and his fallen-angel fascination.” Given the limited roster of cafés and bars favored by literary expats, it was probably only a matter of time before Fitzgerald ran into Hemingway.
Sure enough, one day that spring Hemingway had settled in at the Dingo bar in Montparnasse with Duff Twysden and Pat Guthrie (or “some completely worthless characters,” as he later put it). In the prewar days, the Dingo had been a grungy workers’ café, but had since been discovered by Flossie Martin, a former Ziegfeld showgirl and informal, bawdy mascot of Montparnasse. Once she began to frequent it, the Dingo became a requisite destination dive for expats, many of whom drank themselves into oblivion at its small bar and could sometimes be found passed out up in the trees or clinging to the lamppost outside.
As Hemingway, Twysden, and Guthrie were sitting at the bar, probably already drinking, two men approached them. The first was Fitzgerald, who apparently knew Hemingway on sight. He introduced himself and his friend, Dunc Chaplin, and then ordered champagne for the group.
Fitzgerald’s face unsettled Hemingway. It was too pretty, he thought, especially that delicate mouth. Fitzgerald then launched into an excited monologue, which unnerved Hemingway even more.
“It was all about my writing and how great it was,” Hemingway recalled later.
It was disgraceful, he thought, to lavish praise on another writer like that. Things only got worse when Fitzgerald started interrogating Hemingway about his sex life, demanding to know whether he and Hadley had had sex before marriage. Hemingway claimed not to recall. Fitzgerald persisted.
“Don’t talk like some limey,” he pressed. “Try to be serious and remember.”
Just then, Hemingway noticed that Fitzgerald was beginning to sweat; drops beaded his upper lip. Suddenly the color drained from his face and he blacked out right there at the bar. Hemingway was afraid that he might be dying, but Chaplin assured him that it was not a serious matter. The two men carried Fitzgerald out of the Dingo and wedged him into a taxi, instructing the driver to take him home.
At least, this was Hemingway’s version of how he first met his famous benefactor. There were other versions of the story as well—Fitzgerald, for example, told a friend that he had simply “looked up Hemminway”—but Hemingway’s tale has been taken more or less as fact over time.
Whatever the circumstances of that fateful first encounter, by June 1925 Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins that he and Hadley had been seeing “quite a lot” of Fitzgerald and that the two writers had even taken a road trip together. Fitzgerald needed to go to Lyon to retrieve a Renault that he and Zelda had abandoned there. Zelda, in the mood for a convertible, had arranged for the car’s top to be sawed off, and inclement weather had forced them to abandon temporarily the newly decapitated vehicle. Fitzgerald invited Hemingway to make the journey with him: they would take a train down and drive the Renault back.
Here Hemingway saw an opportunity. Even though he found some of Fitzgerald’s work silly and badly written—and even openly accused Fitzgerald of being a literary whore when it came to tricking out short stories to make them more saleable to major magazines—if he went along to Lyon, he would have “the company of an older and successful writer” from whom he would “certainly learn much that it would be useful to know.”
He accepted the invitation. According to his retelling, the trip was a debacle. Fitzgerald committed a slew of offenses, which included standing Hemingway up at the train station (they eventually connected in Lyon), taking to his bed with an acute bout of hypochondria, and subjecting them both to an endless and unnecessarily opulent hotel meal. He apparently rounded out their holiday activities by delivering an unwelcome lecture about how both he and Hemingway could learn a thing or two from writer Michael Arlen and then treated Hemingway to another passing-out episode, during which “he looked like a little dead crusader,” Hemingway wrote.
Somehow their friendship survived the journey. Fitzgerald may have been a bad drunk and a literary slut in Hemingway’s eyes, but he was an influential slut, and one didn’t simply cast him aside.
Fitzgerald’s wife soon complicated the relationship considerably. Poison immediately coursed between Zelda and Hemingway; it was “hate at first sight,” as Fitzgerald’s eventual mistress put it. Their first encounter took place at the Fitzgeralds’ Paris apartment, a dark, airless place on the rue de Tilsitt. Zelda was weathering a nasty hangover that day, Hemingway recalled, and ceaselessly picked on Fitzgerald, who in turn made Hemingway and Hadley examine a ledger bearing details of his earnings in recent years. It was a tense, unpleasant gathering.
Zelda and Hemingway seemed hardwired to detest each other. Even her legendary beauty had little effect on him; rather, he likened her eyes to those of a predatory hawk and drew attention to what he called her thin lips. Whereas Hadley played a submissive support role in the Hemingways’ marriage (she followed Hemingway around “as silently as an Indian squaw,” thought one of Zelda’s friends), Zelda was indomitable and opinionated. After reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway decided that Fitzgerald had potential after all—but now that he had met Zelda, he realized that Fitzgerald needed protectors if he was going to
be able to write an even better book. Zelda, Hemingway immediately concluded, would ruin her husband. She was obviously jealous of his work, and could not be more emasculating. She became especially happy when Fitzgerald was drinking wine, Hemingway thought.
“I learned to know that smile very well,” he wrote later. “It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.”
These early assessments were damning enough, but soon Hemingway decided that Zelda was outright insane, and told Fitzgerald as much.
“Zelda is crazy,” he informed Fitzgerald one afternoon, after Fitzgerald allegedly complained that Zelda deemed him insufficiently endowed. Hemingway inspected Fitzgerald’s wares in the bathroom of Michaud’s, a Saint-Germain restaurant where James Joyce regularly dined with his family. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he concluded. “Zelda just wants to destroy you.” Nor did he keep his opinions to himself. Fitzgerald “should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago before she was diagnosed as nutty,” he wrote to Perkins later.
Zelda was equally impervious to the virile charm that had beguiled so many others; she called Hemingway a “phony he-man” and a “pansy with hair on his chest”—assessments that she would reiterate many times over the years with only slightly varying vocabulary. She knew that Hemingway was trying to undermine her marriage; the couple began to quarrel about him, just as Harold Loeb and Kitty Cannell had. Yet like Loeb, Fitzgerald apparently adored Hemingway and would not be swayed.
“Ernest . . . was an equeal and my kind of an idealist,” he later tried to explain to Zelda.
His “literary crush on Hem, the sportsman-stylist, the pugilist-storyteller,” as John Dos Passos put it, quickly became apparent to everyone in the Paris Crowd. Soon he was submitting to the requisite boxing rounds with Hemingway, who also took him to meet Gertrude Stein. Unlike Hemingway, Fitzgerald didn’t especially care about the modern paintings lining her salon walls, but he found Stein herself intriguing and the two became friendly. Alice Toklas noted that when Fitzgerald started visiting 27 rue de Fleurus alone, he was always sober, which she took as a token of his esteem for Stein.
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