Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  As he introduced the other main characters, Hemingway revealed how much information he had squirreled away about their prototypes. He later reportedly remarked in an interview that he had “hated newspaper work” because he “was shy and didn’t like to ask people questions about their private lives”; yet for someone with this professed aversion, he had a deep cache of intelligence on his various victims. “To damn people properly you must have the dope on them,” he confided to Ezra Pound. All of that accrued dope—especially on Loeb and Twysden—was now pressed into service. No real-life detail was too gory to be barred from the pages of Hemingway’s notebook.

  “When you are writing stories about actual people,” Hemingway later told an editor friend, “you should make them those people in everything except telephone addresses.”

  He kicked off the book with a lengthy introduction to his leading lady. Eventually Hemingway began to call the character “Lady Brett Ashley,” but for the entire first draft of his novel, Duff would appear under her own name. She fared badly, especially in the earliest passages.

  “Duff had been somebody once,” Hemingway began, and then crossed out the line. He started again: “Duff had something once.” But now she is a “typical Montparnasse drunk, doing absolutely nothing else except occasionally posing for people who flattered her by begging to paint her.” Lest this imply that she is still in demand, Hemingway clarified that these painters are nobodies: first-rate artists no longer knock at her door now that she has reached the advanced age of thirty-four.

  In describing the character’s past, Hemingway gave a near-literal version of the real Lady Duff’s turbulent romantic résumé. Already divorced from a starter husband who found her “too expensive for what he got,” Hemingway’s Duff has left England and is currently idling in Paris, waiting for a divorce from her second husband—eventually revealed to be a ninth baronet, a slight amendment from the real Sir Roger Twysden’s actual designation as tenth baronet—from whom she has leveraged her title. As in real life, the couple have a son, whom the Duff character has abandoned before sashaying off to the Continent with a man named Pat.

  Still, the character does have some redeeming qualities: Hemingway’s early version of Duff is “clean bred, generous and her lines were always as sharp”—probably a reference to both her prototype’s witticisms and her lithe build. Hemingway would later improve on this description: “Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.”

  If anything, the real Duff Twysden got a bit of an upgrade here: while Hemingway’s Lady Duff/Lady Brett certainly has a wardrobe in common with her prototype, the actual Duff Twysden’s jersey look and cropped hair were in fashion at the time, not pioneering, and she was not particularly voluptuous. Yet in a mere forty-nine words, Hemingway would sculpt the real Duff into a trailblazing, Amazonian fictional version of herself, someone who inspires imitation in women and desire in men.

  Pat Guthrie was up next. In the pages of Hemingway’s notebook, he is a weak bankrupt and an embarrassing drunk. In addition to these offenses, he is also gay: “[He] had various habits that Duff felt sorry for and did not think a man should have and cured him by constant watchfulness and the exercise of her then very strong will.”

  Like the real Pat Guthrie, Hemingway’s Pat subsists on an allowance that trickles in from across the Channel. On paper, he and Duff languish in bed most of the day and drink all night at cafés and parties, at which the fictional Duff regularly gets so soused that she loses her powers of sight, speech, and hearing, one after the other. Pat is, Hemingway wrote, prone to abominable behavior on these outings. That said, he is “a charming companion . . . one of the very most charming.” Eventually Hemingway would give Guthrie the name “Mike Campbell.”

  Unlike the others, Harold Loeb was given a pseudonym in this early pass: “Gerald Cohn.” It would eventually be changed to “Robert Cohn.” As with Twysden, Hemingway went deep into Loeb’s background and put it all on paper. “Gerald Cohn was a member through his father of one of the richest Jewish families in the east and through his mother of one of the oldest,” he wrote. Cohn also happens to be a graduate of Princeton; there, Hemingway wrote, Cohn’s classmates had treated him to an advanced course in anti-Semitism, and he had taken up boxing to give himself some sort of defense against his detractors.

  “How that kike hated to fight and what a sweet scrapper he was,” says Cohn’s fictional boxing coach Spider Kelly in Hemingway’s first draft. The line would be cut later.

  In reality, Loeb had wrestled at Princeton, not boxed, but Hemingway’s version was only a slight digression from fact. Like Loeb, Cohn has also been left $50,000 by his father and has abandoned his wife and family to start a literary magazine. Hemingway’s fictionalized version of Broom, however, reflects none of the actual publication’s sophistication, nor does it allude to the real journal’s high-profile contributors. Cohn is painted as a lightweight interloper with slender credentials for running a literary magazine. Like the real Broom, Cohn’s magazine has folded.

  Loeb’s fraught relationship with Kitty Cannell was also too juicy to be left out of the novel. Cannell was given a shrewish literary makeover as “Frances Clyne,” a woman who “lived on gossip” and inflicts on Cohn, her noncommittal lover, “an atmosphere of abortions, doubts, . . . dirty rumors, dirtier reporters, still dirtier suspicions.” Like Duff, Frances Clyne is a lady of a certain age—meaning, of course, that she is teetering on the edge of desperation. And like her prototype Kitty, Clyne has been lingering in Paris, awaiting a divorce, and angling to snare Cohn as a husband. Yet she subjects him to humiliating, emasculating jealous tirades and interrogations—once in the presence of Jake. (“Why did he sit there?” Jake wonders. “Why did he keep on taking it like that?”) The portrait was guaranteed to set the Montparnasse gossip mill on fire.

  The fictional relationship mirrored what had actually happened between Loeb and Cannell: Cohn rejects Clyne and falls in love with the Duff Twysden character. And in Hemingway’s pages, Cohn eventually has an affair with Duff/Brett, albeit in San Sebastián instead of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. This drives a wedge between Cohn and Jake, for Jake is also in love with Duff. For Jake and Duff, however, there will never be a holiday of ardent lovemaking in a seaside village. Not because Duff doesn’t desire him—in Hemingway’s reimagined version of events she does, almost desperately so—but because Jake is impotent, the result of a war wound.

  It was a fascinating decision to make about a male protagonist—especially one created by a writer known for goading friends and acquaintances into bullrings and boxing face-offs. Yet Hemingway didn’t actually use the word “impotent” until deep into the book, and then it comes up only twice, in quick succession—and still isn’t directly attributed to Jake. For the most part, Jake’s condition has to be inferred through allusions in dialogue and private ruminations.

  “Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded,” Jake broods in one passage. He finds solace in gallows humor, recalling with grim wit a speech made to him in the hospital by a sympathetic liaison colonel: “You, a foreigner . . . have given more than your life.”

  The scene perfectly showcased Hemingway’s tip-of-the-iceberg omission approach. Years later he discussed the exact nature of Jake’s wound. “I got the idea when I was in the hospital in Italy after I had been wounded,” he told an interviewer in the mid-1950s. “I too had been wounded in the groin [and] I was swollen up like footballs . . . but I was not made impotent like Jake Barnes, obviously. I was put into a so-called genito-urinary ward where there were many guys with groin wounds, and it was pretty bad.” Hemingway told another friend that he had just been nicked in the scrotum by shrapnel, but some of the other “poor bastards” in the ward had had everything blown off.

  It was important for readers to realize, he explained
in another interview, that Jake’s testicles are intact and undamaged, and that Jake is “capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them.” Hemingway depicted Jake’s torturous desire for Lady Duff/Lady Brett in spare, repetitive stream-of-consciousness ponderings that would have made Gertrude Stein proud: “Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry.”

  Some scholars and Hemingway friends have speculated that Hemingway may have been channeling his frustration over the real Duff Twysden’s possible refusal to sleep with him into this other form of on-page frustration. In any case, Jake’s war wound relegates him—and elevates him—to the role of the perfect observer. He is the only one in the group who is incapable of behaving badly—carnally speaking, at least.

  Hemingway eventually downplayed the gravitas of his choice. “Impotence is a pretty dull subject compared with war or love or the old lucha por la vida [life struggle],” he would write to Maxwell Perkins a year later.

  But Jake’s impotence made it clear that Hemingway was willing to take wild risks—even ones that might compromise his personal dignity, for there would certainly be assumptions that he had based Jake’s condition on his own well-publicized wartime injuries. Though he had been enjoying an almost aggressively masculine image—one that was about to prove immensely bankable—he would not hesitate to challenge that image if doing so would serve his art.

  Before moving the action in his novel from Paris to Spain, Hemingway gave a few other Crowd luminaries some cameos. Ford Madox Ford bumbles into the novel’s pages under the name “Braddocks” (amended from the initial pseudonym “Bradox,” perhaps Hemingway’s skimpiest attempt at an alias), his wheezing and gloating, bad teeth, red face, walrus mustache, and buffoonery on display for all to behold. In that first draft, Braddocks patronizes a café waiter and, while sitting with Jake and a “fellow named Dos Passos,” proceeds to snub a man who has no idea that he’s being snubbed. Braddocks resurfaces later in the manuscript alongside his amiable but asinine wife, who grows so excited when speaking French that she is “liable to have no idea what she was saying.” Like the real Fords, the Braddockses host evenings at bals musette, to which expats flock. The published portrait would end up being relatively innocuous, with much of the damning physical description of Ford edited out; but the omitted material portended what Hemingway would have in store for Ford in later years and subsequent books.

  In that first draft, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach are spared appearances; Gertrude Stein is mentioned only in passing. Robert McAlmon is ignored altogether, although his exclusion may have been a greater insult than even an unflattering cameo. F. Scott Fitzgerald is name-dropped by Jake Barnes but does not materialize as a character. It appears, however, that Hemingway intended to include one of Fitzgerald’s characters from The Great Gatsby—the polo-playing, philandering Tom Buchanan—as one of Lady Duff/Lady Brett’s past lovers. In Hemingway’s manuscript, when Lady Duff/Lady Brett and Pat/Mike casually discuss Duff’s past conquests, they mention a fellow who seems to fit the bill:

  “Duff’s gone off with men. But they weren’t ever jews and they didn’t come and hang about afterwards,” [said Mike.]

  “Damned good chaps,” Duff said. “You remember Tom?”

  “He was an American,” Mike said. “Maybe you know him. Chap who plays polo.”

  The passage would be cut later. Still, even though this reference was omitted, Fitzgerald would soon leave his imprint on the novel in a far more significant way.

  SINCE LEAVING PAMPLONA, the Hemingways had ricocheted from Madrid to Valencia, back to Madrid, then on to San Sebastián. They finally landed in Hendaye, a small port town in French Basque country, just southwest of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. By the time they arrived, he had completed over ten chapters of his new book.

  “How long is a novel anyway?” he wrote to a friend, adding that the only book he had with him—War and Peace—was a daunting 1,563 pages. By comparison, Hemingway had cobbled together two hundred pages over the past few weeks—but it was going to be a “Wham,” he reported.

  Several days later, he wrote to Ezra Pound about the novel but implored him, “Don’t for Chrise sake say anything to anybody.” This probably meant “Tell everyone in sight”—which is essentially what Hemingway himself had been doing. The literati on two continents had now been alerted about the imminent arrival of Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel.

  By August, the characters’ prototypes themselves may have known that he was cooking something up: in one of his earliest post-Pamplona outreaches to Bill Smith, Hemingway asked him to greet Harold Loeb and Don Stewart on his behalf; that greeting was almost certain to accompany the news that since they all parted ways, Hemingway had been working like mad on a mysterious new tome. He soon informed Smith that the story was “going like wild fire,” despite the fact that he had been weathering some inconvenient intestinal issues.

  He told his former Toronto Star colleague Morley Callaghan about the novel in mid-August, and assured him that it “ought to be damned good.” By then it was more than halfway finished—over forty thousand words had been inscribed in those little notebooks—but Hemingway showed no signs of slowing. To editor Ernest Walsh, he excitedly opined that the book was so scandalous it would be “suppressed the day they publish it.” Soon Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were looped in: he had never worked so hard, Hemingway informed the ladies, sometimes staying up until nearly dawn. Despite his exhaustion, he often still couldn’t sleep and would rise again to write.

  Perhaps the most cocksure missive of all was dispatched to Jane Heap, co-editor of The Little Review. “It is a hell of a fine novel,” he asserted, adding that it was simply written and action-packed. “I think it will be a knock out and will let these bastards who say yes he can write very beautiful little paragraphs know where they get off at.”

  He audaciously declared that he had avoided the pitfall that usually tripped up first-time novelists: relying on autobiographical information. Furthermore, when this book came out, no critic was going to compare him to another writer ever again. And by the way, the book also happened to be funny. How frequently did American writers happen to be funny anymore? Take Sherwood Anderson, for example: he was funny in person, but his humor dried up once it hit paper.

  “Well wait for this one,” he wrote.

  Hemingway knew that he had a hot property on his hands, and he was not going to let it go cheap. Too long had he worked “for love,” he informed Heap, adding that he was not yet in a position to talk business. He then proceeded to talk business anyway. No publisher was going to get his hands on this novel without paying a $1,000 advance: “Now when I’ve got something I know is valuable I’m not going to give it away.” The more a publisher paid for a book, the more incentive the house would have to promote it, he reasoned.

  A few weeks later, Hemingway wrote to his mother and informed her that the novel had a new name—Fiesta—although he was on the fence about it. He added that he had indeed been offered a $1,000 advance for the new novel—not by Boni & Liveright but rather by another publisher, he contended. “Of course [I] will stick with my contract,” he told her.

  None of Hemingway’s other surviving correspondence from this period indicates that he actually got such an offer, but in his mind’s eye, his still incomplete and unedited manuscript had already propelled him into an auction-like realm filled with hungry bidders.

  HEMINGWAY originally intended to stay in Hendaye until he finished the book, but he came back to Paris on August 18, 1925. Even in that bustling city, nothing distracted him from his novel. He had been working on it for a mere month but was already nearing the endgame.

  “I wa
nt to get it finished now and then put it away and come back and work it over,” he informed Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.

  Physically Hemingway was in France, but mentally he was back in Spain with Duff Twysden and the rest of the Pamplona entourage. The novel’s backbone was in place and would remain essentially intact up through the published version. The book now documented the lives of a group of expats as they first coincide in Paris and then venture as an uneasy entourage to the San Fermín fiesta in Pamplona. Against a backdrop of ceaseless drinking, bullfights, and sexual jealousy over Lady Duff/Lady Brett, civility among the group members quickly spirals into a morass of insults, jealousy, and fistfights.

  Along the way, some of the book’s characters stop off at Burguete and the Irati River, which had proved such a disappointment to Hemingway earlier that summer. The real Irati may have been a casualty of the logging company’s invasion, but Hemingway transformed its fictional counterpart back into the bucolic fantasyland of his 1924 pilgrimage with Donald Stewart, Bill Bird, and Robert McAlmon. Hemingway’s portrait of Burguete was a love letter to the region, which served as the unpolluted, idyllic counterpoint to the artifice of the Quarter and its inhabitants. It could also be seen as a love letter to Cézanne, whose paintings Hemingway had admired so ardently in Stein’s salon and in Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg: “We walked on the road between the thick trunks of the old beeches and the sunlight came through the trees in light patches on the grass. The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park.”