Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  In the meantime, Fitzgerald resumed his advocacy on Hemingway’s behalf. On May 22, he gave Maxwell Perkins a cheerful update, calling his new friend “a fine, charming fellow.” Perkins had made inroads with Hemingway, Fitzgerald assured him. “If Liveright doesn’t please him, he’ll come to you,” he pledged his publisher. “And he has a future.”

  7

  Eve in Eden

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, Hemingway sat down to write. He pulled out a stenographer’s notebook, otherwise used for list-making. The back contained a rundown of letters he “must write”; intended recipients included Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, and Aunt Grace. Also scribbled there: a list of stories he had recently submitted to various publications.

  On this day, he opened the notebook to a fresh page and scrawled in pencil across the top:

  Along with Youth

  A Novel

  He began writing a sea adventure, set on a troop transport ship in 1918 and featuring a recurring Hemingway short story hero named Nick Adams. The first pages included a conversation between Adams and a few Polish officers on the deck as someone strummed a mandolin in the background. Exactly two months earlier, Hemingway had informed Max Perkins that he considered the novel to be an artificial and played-out genre, yet here he was, making another bid to jump-start one. It turned out to be a false start, however: little happened in the pages that followed, and Hemingway ended the draft abruptly on page twenty-seven. Yet it was clear that he might be on the verge of getting back into the novel game at last.

  July was fast approaching, and for Hemingway, that month had become synonymous with Spain, beginning with Pamplona. He secured tickets and rooms at the Hotel Quintana, on the town’s main square, owned by the devoted bullfighting aficionado Juanito Quintana.

  Hemingway started rounding up a fiesta entourage. It was shaping up to be a good gang, he wrote to Horace Liveright. Donald Stewart was slated to make a return appearance, along with a fellow Algonquin Round Table habitué, Robert Benchley, a humor writer who had also been staying in Austria near the Hemingways the previous winter and was in Europe that summer doing some reporting for Life. Architect Paul Fisher showed interest in coming too. Scott Fitzgerald was not mentioned in the early roster as a probable participant: he was on a “perpetual drunk” that June, Hemingway reported to Ezra Pound.

  One Pamplona regular had been conspicuously left out of the plans this time around: Robert McAlmon. Not long before the group was due to leave, he dined with Kitty Cannell. Over supper they discussed “Hemingway and his sycophants,” as she called the entourage. They decided to stop by the Hemingways’ sawmill apartment after their meal to see how the travel arrangements were coming along.

  “I wanted to see my ex-kitty, so we went,” Cannell wrote.

  When they got to the flat, McAlmon decided to play a little joke on Hemingway.

  “I’m thinking of taking Kitty with me to Pamplona next week,” he informed Hemingway in a deadpan way. Suddenly, Cannell reported, Hemingway’s face turned purple and he flew into a rage.

  “He lunged toward me, seized a lighted lamp from the table at my elbow and hurled it through the window into the yard piled high with boards and kindling,” she claimed.

  The visitors quickly scurried out. In later interviews and writings, neither of them speculated about why Hemingway had such a fierce reaction to the prank, but if the lamp-flinging incident is true, his antipathy toward both Cannell and McAlmon was finally out in the open, and it clearly ran deep. Afterward, Cannell pretended nothing had happened, but McAlmon appeared satisfied with the result of the visit, having avenged his snubbing.

  Unlike Cannell and McAlmon, Harold Loeb made the Pamplona cut. Hemingway sent him a jovial note, filled with logistical guidance and promising that Pamplona would be “damned good.” By then, however, Loeb was keeping a secret from Hemingway. He and Duff Twysden had gone on their clandestine Saint-Jean-de-Luz holiday. It had been wildly romantic, Loeb later claimed; they couldn’t even wait to get there before consummating their union, and instead did so in a cramped Paris flat borrowed from a friend. Once in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, they moved into an auberge with a view of the Pyrenees and picked up where they’d left off in Paris.

  “We made love furiously,” Loeb wrote, “as if we were trying to squeeze a life of love-making into three short days.”

  They drifted between their bed and a terrace, where they dined and talked into the night. Hemingway came up in conversation. Twysden was frustratingly close-mouthed on the subject.

  “[He’s] a good chap,” she said tersely.

  Loeb pushed the subject. In his opinion, he said, Hemingway had exuberance and joie de vivre, but worked too hard for his taste.

  “I have nothing against work,” replied Twysden, “for those who like it.” She did not discuss him further.

  As their tryst drew to a close, Loeb says, Twysden implored him to go on another trip—this time to South America. (“Should we go there, darling? To a strange land, all new and different. To live as you want to live. Take a boat and go, just like that?”) But he turned her down: he didn’t know Spanish, it didn’t rain enough in Chile, and so on. The next day Twysden asked him to buy her a train ticket back to Paris. Guthrie would be returning from London soon and she needed to meet him at the station.

  Loeb also returned to Paris, and fretted about squandering the opportunity to be with Twysden. Three days later a letter arrived from her, scribbled on Dingo stationery. She was miserable without him, she reported, and loved him “with all [her] forces.” That said, she had some “doubtful glad tidings.”

  “I am coming on the Pamplona trip with Hem and your lot . . . With Pat of course,” she informed him. “Can you bear it?”

  If he couldn’t bear it, she promised, she would try to get out of it—but she was dying to come along. At least the trip would allow them to be near each other, albeit under the jealous gaze of Pat Guthrie.

  Then a letter from Hemingway arrived, confirming that Twysden and Guthrie would now be among the fiesta crew.

  “Pat has sent off to Scotland for rods and Duff to England for Funds,” he wrote.

  It was a chipper letter—Hemingway told Loeb three times what a “swell time” he had been having lately—but it gave Loeb a “low feeling which I could not shake off.” This feeling was replaced with one of genuine foreboding when he received another missive from Twysden.

  “I expect I shall have a bit of [a] time managing the situation,” she wrote, adding, “Hem has promised to be good and we ought to have really a marvellous time.”

  Loeb was dumbfounded. Why on earth had Hemingway pledged good behavior? Was he sleeping with Duff now as well? It seemed so, he grimly concluded.

  It is unclear how Twysden and Guthrie had scored an invitation to Pamplona in the first place. She and Hemingway may have met up in Paris after she returned from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, at which point he could have asked her to join the entourage; or she may simply have invited herself.

  Hemingway had, in any case, learned about her liaison with Loeb. Their Saint-Jean-de-Luz secret had apparently been working its way through the Left Bank gossip mill. Bill Smith had been with Hemingway when a mutual friend told him the news. Hemingway had been furious, Smith recalled. Like Loeb, everyone around the Quarter began to wonder if Hemingway was sleeping with Lady Duff—a question that has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

  The upcoming Pamplona trip was starting to look like a powder keg. Yet no one backed out. Hemingway, Loeb, and Twysden all put on their best poker faces.

  “By all means come,” Loeb replied to Twysden with affected breeziness.

  He even pledged to meet her and Guthrie in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and escort them to Pamplona. In the meantime, Hemingway and Hadley dispatched Bumby to Brittany with his nanny, packed their bags, and left Paris, heading for Burguete to kick off the holiday with a week of trout fishing.

  The fiesta was about to begin.

  FOR WEEKS, Hemingway and the others had
been looking forward to Burguete. It had proved such an untainted paradise the year before, with its rolling hills, thick forests, and silver streams and rivers. Nothing provided a better antidote to the cynical urban artifice of the Left Bank. Donald Stewart and Bill Smith met the Hemingways there; Smith had toted along a colorful array of flies to help tempt the trout out of the Irati.

  The Irati trout, however, were in no position to oblige them that season: the fish had all been killed over the last year. A logging company working in the area had destroyed the local pools, broken down dams, and run logs down the river. The loggers’ trash was everywhere. Hemingway was in despair over the sight. It was not an auspicious start to their excursion.

  Meanwhile, Loeb skipped Burguete altogether and went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz to meet Twysden and Guthrie. He grew upset the moment Lady Duff stepped off the train onto the platform. Instead of her usual man’s fedora, she was wearing a beret.

  “I did not like her in a beret,” Loeb grumbled. “Hem usually wore a beret.”

  The hat may have been an incendiary gesture on Twysden’s part; it implied that she was enjoying the discord she was creating among her paramours. Like Hemingway, Guthrie had now been apprised of the Loeb-Twysden interlude. Unlike Hemingway, he had no intention of pretending not to know.

  “Oh, you’re here, are you?” he said, greeting Loeb on the platform.

  The party immediately repaired to the train station’s bar, which Loeb and Twysden had graced together just a few weeks earlier. Three martinis later, Guthrie adjourned to the pissoir. Loeb began to interrogate Twysden. Her behavior toward him had changed, he said. What had happened?

  “Pat broke the spell,” she reportedly told him. “He worked hard at it.”

  “I see,” Loeb responded quietly, and that was the end of the chat.

  The trio hired a car for the fifty-mile journey to Pamplona. It was a long, tense drive. When they reached the Hotel Quintana, Twysden and Guthrie went to one room and Loeb to another. The Burguete group arrived the next morning in similarly petulant spirits. Hemingway was in a black mood over the fishing disaster.

  A round of absinthe, a large Spanish lunch, and a walk through the town helped alleviate the atmosphere, but already it was clear that the jubilance of the previous year was probably not going to be repeated. First of all, Pamplona itself had changed. Just as Paris had become overrun with tourists, Pamplona now also included the appalling presence of some of the group’s compatriots.

  “We were no longer the exclusive foreign participants in the show,” Stewart later observed. “By the second trip, the establishment had caught up with the frontier.”

  Rolls-Royces that had carted luminaries from Madrid and France now idled outside their hotel. The American ambassador himself had materialized in a limousine; to Hemingway, his presence at the festival seemed particularly intrusive and symbolic of the shift. The town suddenly felt “cluttered and ordinary,” Stewart recalled. “Pamplona seemed to be getting ready for the hand of Elsa Maxwell”—one of that era’s most prominent gossip columnists.

  Yet Lady Duff would prove the most disruptive intruder of all. “Someone had left the door open and Eve had walked into my male Garden of Eden,” wrote Stewart. Suddenly, in her presence, “Ernest had changed,” he noted. “Hadley wasn’t the same . . . [T]he fun was going out of everybody.”

  The enmity clearly suited Twysden: that first morning, she looked especially beautiful and aloof in a broad-brimmed Spanish hat. The group hustled to the town’s railroad yards to watch the unloading of the bulls. Soon wine was flowing. Guthrie procured a goatskin wine bag at a nearby tavern; he squirted the wine from his mouth, staining his face and shirt a deep blood red. Everyone laughed. Twysden demanded a swig.

  “Evidently Duff was not going to be a drag on the party,” Loeb observed.

  The next morning, everyone in the Hemingway entourage scraped themselves out of bed in time to see the bulls driven from their corral to the stadium, with the usual crowd of men scrambling ahead of the herd. As ever, it was a thunderous, God-is-coming display, with men leaping over the barriers when the bulls got too close. One man was gored by a razor-sharp horn. No one from the Hemingway group joined the race, but when the bullring was opened for the amateur hour, Hemingway, Loeb, and Smith leaped in. The press corps was on hand, including photographers.

  Hemingway, sporting a beret and white pants, got right down to the business of baiting the bulls. One bull knocked Smith down; it then turned and faced Loeb, who took off his sweater and waved it at the animal. The bull charged; its horn caught the sweater, which dangled from the bull’s head as it then galloped around the arena. Loeb chased after it, hoping to salvage the garment, but it had been slashed up the middle, making it quite a souvenir of this first bullring adventure.

  That afternoon the real bullfights began. In front of the Hemingway crew, a bull gored a horse, which took a death-throes run through the arena, trailing its intestines. At another point, a bull tried to escape by jumping over the wall surrounding the ring. “Perhaps he felt that it wasn’t his party,” Loeb grimly joked. He became increasingly dismayed by the spectacle; he even “considered oléing the bulls that refused to charge,” he recalled. “It seemed, in some obscure way, shameful,” he added.

  After the fight, the Hemingway entourage reconvened on a café terrace. The fiesta was in full swing around them. Hundreds of people filled the main square, along with the relentless thump of drums and shrill piping of fifes. Several small parades did their best to march through the crowd. Guthrie had moved on from wine to absinthe and was now exploring the merits of Fundador, a Spanish brandy. Hemingway asked Loeb what he thought of his first bullfight. When Loeb replied that he was not “too keen on the theme,” Hemingway was predictably unsympathetic. “We all have to die,” Loeb told him, “but I don’t like to be reminded of it more than twice a day.”

  “Balls,” Hemingway said, and then turned his back on him. Loeb seemed to be adding to his list of offenses daily; being less than reverential about bullfighting was one of the surest ways to antagonize Hemingway. The only worse offense might be stealing the limelight from him.

  Later, when Hemingway, Guthrie, and Stewart had been swept up in a parade streaming in an endless circuit around the square, Loeb began to quiz Bill Smith.

  “Hem seems to be bitter about something,” he ventured.

  Smith cut to the chase. Hemingway was angry about Loeb’s fling with Twysden. “You should have seen his face,” he told Loeb, “when Jo Bennett told him you and Duff had gone off in a wagon-lit”—a reference to a train’s sleeping car.

  When Loeb pressed him about whether Hemingway was also in love with Twysden, Smith refused to give a straight answer. The conversation abruptly ended when Loeb realized that Twysden and Hadley—sitting together at the far end of the table—had gone silent. Loeb quickly changed the subject.

  If Hadley had indeed overheard the chat and entertained her own suspicions about a possible affair between her husband and Lady Duff, she appears to have kept them to herself.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Hemingway, Loeb, and Smith headed back to the bullring for amateur hour. To spare his wardrobe any further indignities, Loeb came armed with a hotel towel.

  This time when a bull charged him, there was no chance to get out of the way. Loeb dropped the towel, and as the bull lowered its head to butt him, Loeb turned around, grasped its horns, and sat on the bull’s head. The bull loped across the arena and eventually tossed Loeb into the air. Miraculously, he landed on his feet, as though the entire episode had been a choreographed stunt. The crowd went mad; photographers caught his moment of glory.

  Hemingway then emerged from the sidelines and approached a bull from behind. He grabbed the animal and then managed to catch hold of its horns and wrestle it to the ground. The other amateur bullfighters closed in on the downed bull.

  “For an instant it looked as if they would tear the animal’s limbs off,” Loeb reported in horror, but ring attendants
came to the rescue.

  Yet despite Hemingway’s Herculean feat, Loeb was the king of the ring. After that, he was treated like a hero around town. Even the barber whose shop Loeb had been frequenting wouldn’t take money from him. Apparently the locals were in awe of the first man (or the first foreigner, anyway) in living memory who had ridden a bull’s head. His newfound fame even carried across the Atlantic: pictures of Loeb perched atop the bull, legs scissoring in the air, eventually appeared in New York publications. Hemingway had been outshone—and by a man who scoffed at the whole sport.

  None of these heroics, however, was enough to lure Twysden back into his bed. She visited him in his room before lunch that day and told him that she was sorry he was having such a tough time on her account. She was worth it, Loeb replied and tried to embrace her, only to be rejected yet again. Later that afternoon, over absinthe, he asked Bill Smith if he should leave Pamplona.

  “Why don’t you do what you want to do?” Smith responded unhelpfully.

  For years afterward, those familiar with the story wondered why Loeb did indeed stay on when Hemingway was so clearly souring against him, Twysden had proved an unreliable ally, and Guthrie likely wished that Loeb had never been born.

  “Obstinacy kept me there,” Loeb explained later. Guthrie’s hatred only made him more determined to stay, and he still wanted to get the bottom of the Hemingway-Twysden mystery. He also reasoned that if he left now, it would look like he was running away.