Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  As Cézanne had painted his lush landscapes with broad, thick strokes, Hemingway was doing the same with words. His new novel was becoming an exposition of everything he had learned from his mentors and taught himself over the last three years.

  The new Burguete scenes also gave Bill Smith his moment in the sun. In the earlier Paris scenes, Hemingway introduces the character “Bill Gorton,” an amalgamation of Bill Smith and Donald Stewart. At first Gorton is more Stewart than Smith: the character is supposed to be a successful novelist with a string of best-selling books to his credit. Yet as the book progresses, the character takes on more of Smith’s attributes, especially his idiosyncratic wit. As showcased in one Burguete scene, in which Gorton and Jake share a picnic of icy wine and cold chicken while fishing, Gorton specializes in quirky monologues that smack of the pulpit: “Bill gestured with the drumstick in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other. ‘Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?’” He and Jake Barnes then “utilize” quite a bit of the wine they have brought with them on their trek to the river. Hemingway lifted the phrase directly from Smith, who had been playing around with the word during his trip to Burguete with Hemingway.

  “I remember it catching on somehow,” Smith recalled later. “We all have our moments I guess. You can get pretty silly when you’re tight.”

  Yet for all of the character’s comic-relief silliness, not all of his remarks are endearing. Bill Gorton also utters a handful of disconcerting anti-Semitic slurs against Cohn—referring to him as “that kike” and deriding him for acting “superior and Jewish.”

  Donald Stewart later shamefacedly took the blame for having been the probable inspiration for Bill Gorton’s anti-Semitic remarks and exclamations. “I have no doubt that I was really basically anti-Semitic in those days, as probably also was Hemingway,” he said. His was not, he clarified, a deep-rooted hatred like the variety that gave rise to Nazism, but rather “a form of social snobbishness, something that people simply took for granted” at the time. He hadn’t, he recalled, been cruel to Loeb to his face, but had been “even worse behind his back.”

  After finishing the Burguete scenes, Hemingway sent the core characters to Pamplona, to the Hotel Quintana—dubbed “Hotel Montoya” in the novel. As he began to write about the fiesta, it seemed as though the entire centuries-old spectacle had been contrived to show off his newly fashioned rhythmic prose: “The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences . . . It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.”

  As in real life, Pamplona’s fictional streets are filled with riau-riau dancers, peasants wreathed in garlic necklaces, and sky-high puppets of Moors, kings, and queens. At one point in Hemingway’s story, some dancers form a circle around the Lady Duff character, who tries to dance with them and is made to stand still: “They wanted her as an image to dance around.”

  Yet his anxiety that Pamplona, like Paris, was on the verge of being spoiled by expats also seeped into the text. Even in the pages of Hemingway’s preamble loose-leaf draft, the American ambassador and the “haute monde from Biarritz and San Sebastián” surge into Hemingway’s fictional square as they did in real life, except their presence on paper becomes almost sinister. The young purist matador Cayetano Ordóñez is particularly vulnerable to their influence. “People would wreck him to make a nymphmaniacs holiday,” wrote Hemingway. A pure, fine bullfighter like that, he added, should stay away from “this Grand Hotel business . . . until he is safely arrived.” And even then, Hemingway warns, this expat crowd is poisonous. He offers up bullfighter Juan Belmonte—who appears in both the early draft and the published version of the book under his own name—as evidence of what happens when a matador allows himself to become fashionable. Belmonte is written up as a sallow, hemorrhoidal sellout who performs merely to please clueless society people, and who is willing to face off only against little bulls better suited to teaching children at bullfighting schools.

  At the end of Hemingway’s novel, however, the most potent poison is delivered neither by the objectionable ambassador nor by any of the Biarritz crowd. Rather, it is injected by the steady hand of the fictionalized Lady Duff, whose presence—as in real life—sets the entourage’s men at one another’s throats. Loeb’s character Cohn tells Lady Duff/Lady Brett that she is a modern-day Circe. Amused, she relays the comment to Pat/Mike.

  “He claims she turns men into swine,” he tattles to the others at a café.

  In Hemingway’s book as in real life, the presence of Lady Duff/Lady Brett truly does bring out the pig in nearly every man in the entourage. Cohn is reduced to the most swinish state of all. As the real Twysden had done to Loeb in actuality, the fictionalized Duff rejects Cohn after their seaside holiday. After that, Cohn spends much of the fictional fiesta stalking her, even tailing her in the shadows when she takes a walk with Jake. His only relief from her siren song are trips to the local barber—for Cohn, like Loeb, is depicted as a relentless stress-groomer.

  As the story poured out of him, Hemingway’s notebooks piled up. Near the end of his fictional fiesta, he finally made significant leaps from fact to fiction. On paper, at last, he got to have his fight with Loeb: instead of chummily resolving their differences at the last minute, Jake and Cohn actually come to blows. (Or, rather, Cohn knocks Jake out cold at a café; Pat/Mike is also flung to the ground.) Instead of being satisfied by tinkering with the affections of her fellow expats like the real Duff, the fictional Duff embarks on a full-fledged affair with the Cayetano Ordóñez character. (In reality, the only physical contact between the two was said to be a handshake on the stairs of the Hotel Quintana.) In Hemingway’s notebooks, Cohn jealously beats the hell out of Ordóñez on the eve of an important bullfight; Ordóñez withstands the blows and then fights with particular elegance the following day, giving the cut-off ear of one bull to Lady Duff/Lady Brett as a trophy.

  Hemingway’s Lady Duff exits Pamplona somewhat more gracefully than the real Lady Duff did earlier that summer: instead of defaulting on her hotel bill and waiting for someone else to pay it, she simply decamps to Madrid with Ordóñez, whom Hemingway refers to as Niño de la Palma, or simply Niño, in early drafts. The real Pat Guthrie’s fiscal humiliations, by contrast, are recorded for posterity: not only does Hemingway depict Pat/Mike as wholly broke and a drunken wreck, but also, by the fictional fiesta’s conclusion, the character is forced to admit that he has even borrowed money from Quintana, the hotelier. Jake and Bill deposit him at Saint-Jean-de-Luz (after footing his portion of the bill for the car and his drinks en route), where he plans to subsist on credit until the next installment of his allowance comes in.

  At last, the fictional fiesta is over. The character Bill Gorton summarizes it best: the whole week has been “like a wonderful nightmare.”

  On September 21, 1925, Hemingway completed the manuscript, penning the final sentences in a seventh little notebook. He had written over eighty thousand words in at least five cities and towns in just over two months.

  9

  Breach Season

  AFTER FINISHING HIS DRAFT, Hemingway seemed to be suffering from the melancholy of things completed, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once put it. His head was “tired as hell inside,” he wrote to editor Ernest Walsh, and he was restless and “damned lonesome.” He swam in the Seine every day and drank heavily, but was so exhausted that even whisky couldn’t make him drunk.

  Italy beckoned him: he was dying to go on a recuperative walking tour and “let [his] head get normal again,” but Hadley wouldn’t be able to join him because Bumby had just rejoined them in Paris. It might be therapeutic, he thought, to go to Venice and “get a little romantic fucking,” but fears of spawning
a tribe of illegitimate offspring and getting stuck with support payments prevented him, he joked to Walsh, from taking along another girl.

  The real-life Pamplona entourage had dispersed all over the world. Lady Duff Twysden had been staying at a country pub on credit; she would eventually return to Montparnasse and resume her role as resident siren. In the final passages of Hemingway’s novel, his protagonist Jake Barnes goes off to Madrid to save the fictional Duff from herself: she has parted ways with the bullfighter, Niño de la Palma, having realized that he is ashamed of her. (“He wanted me to grow my hair out,” she confesses to Jake. “Me, with long hair. Can you see it? I’d look so like hell.”) They end the book the way they began it—in love and destined for misery:

  “Oh, Jake,” Duff said. “We could have had such a damned good time together.” . . .

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s nice as hell to think so.”

  Though the fictional Duff would be bound to Jake in perpetuity, it appears that the real Duff Twysden fell out of Hemingway’s life once he completed his book. Around this time he received from her a missive, addressed to “Ernest Hemingway Esq.” in her languorous handwriting, imploring him to give her some cash.

  “I want 3000 francs—but for Gods sake lend me as much as you can,” she wrote.

  It was a brazen request, considering that Hemingway was still living off his wife’s trust fund. (Perhaps with this in mind, Twysden had sagely entrusted the letter to a bartender at the Dingo rather than sending it to the Hemingways’ apartment.) The money matter was, Twysden added, an emergency: she owed the country pub a considerable sum and did not dare abscond without paying her bill.

  “I am in a stinking fix but for once only temporary and can pay you back for sure,” she promised him.

  It is unclear whether he sent her the money, but in any case, their once-intense friendship seems to have more or less ended that autumn. The rift may have been an organic one, in which two people discover they have less in common than they’d originally thought—or else Hemingway may have lost interest in Twysden now that her utility had dwindled. Perhaps for Hemingway, as for Harold Loeb, she simply no longer seemed to matter. Unlike Loeb, Hemingway may never have been able to steer Twysden into bed, but she had ended up giving him something far more significant. And now that he had created a superior version of her on paper, her far more obedient fictional counterpart would be commanding his attention instead in the year to come.

  Meanwhile, Donald Stewart was summoned to Los Angeles: when he got back to Paris from the Riviera, a cable from his publisher informed him that one of his books had been optioned by MGM; the studio wanted him on-site to write the script. Stewart accepted the offer warily.

  “I knew that Hollywood was regarded with contempt by most of my writer friends,” he recalled later, “but I argued myself into believing that it would offer me a new and much wider audience.”

  Any hesitation seems to have melted away once he got back to New York and saw his photo on the front page of the Mirror. “It was exciting to be treated as an important ‘catch,’” he wrote. It was equally thrilling to inform people on the train to California that he was going to Hollywood to write a movie.

  Harold Loeb and Bill Smith had also decided to return to America. Theirs was the one friendship that emerged stronger from the ruins of the Pamplona odyssey. After the fiesta, while Hemingway was busily recording its events for posterity and Stewart was sunbathing on the Riviera, Loeb and Smith had gone on a three-week bike tour to explore the Rhine and Worms, the German ancestral seat of Loeb’s father’s family. They had then returned to Paris and gone together on a prolonged fiesta of a different variety, this time in the company of two club hostesses.

  For Loeb, the spree was a coda. Paris was over for him. Broom had folded; his friendship with Hemingway had been a bust; his affair with Lady Duff had ended on a most unsatisfying note.

  “It was now or never,” Loeb wrote of his decision to return to New York. “My book [Doodab] was coming out. I was going back to a land transformed by distance into a place of shining towers and green hills.” His time in Paris had taught him many lessons, including “what to expect of a friend and what not to expect.”

  Loeb would also soon learn that there was no such thing as a clean break. He and Hemingway played tennis once after Hemingway returned from Spain; even though the friendship had clearly run its course, Loeb claimed that he made one last effort at appeasement by allowing Hemingway to beat him. Even this concession may have provided additional material for Hemingway’s new novel: in its pages, Robert Cohn’s tennis game would go to hell after he falls in love with Lady Brett. Vain about his own game, Loeb took issue with Hemingway’s depiction.

  “The things one imagines!” he fumed decades later.

  He and Smith booked passage on the same liner back to New York. As their departure date drew closer, arrangements for a small bon voyage restaurant dinner were made. The guests were to include Hemingway and Hadley, Loeb and Smith, and Kitty Cannell. Although it is unclear who organized the outing, the ostensible purpose was to bury hatchets. The animosities that had peaked during the fiesta seemed to have simmered down to their pre-festival levels; the Pamplona combatants had apparently reached some sort of wary détente.

  Hemingway would not be sorry to see Loeb leave; nor was he sad about losing Bill Smith to America. Smith was, Hemingway privately complained to another friend, prone to bouts of despondency so intense that they had been a factor in Hemingway’s prolonged furlough from Paris that summer. He had feared that Smith’s moods might derail his writing. “I’d rather he would have bumped himself off when he first began to get that way,” he wrote, adding that Smith had been “a wonderful guy” once.

  Ironically, at the farewell dinner, Bill Smith was the most spirited presence, Loeb recalled. Everyone automatically assumed their usual roles. Hemingway was “full of Madrid and bullfighting,” but was apparently close-mouthed about the contents of his new book. Hadley and Cannell chatted with each other. Loeb held himself back from the banter and watched. Everything went smoothly until the waiter served Hemingway a plate containing a duck’s “lower anatomy” while allotting the breasts to Loeb and Cannell. Hemingway apparently glowered over this but did not create a scene. The evening limped on and eventually farewells were exchanged.

  Before they parted ways, however, Cannell received a jolt of unwelcome news from Hemingway. The two had been walking together and discussing the trip-wired topic of Hemingway’s writing. Cannell liked his style but found his work lacking somehow. Like Loeb, she had given the matter some consideration and felt that she had a solution for him.

  “If only you’d write about life instead of moods, you’d have a sure fire best seller,” she implored him.

  Hemingway replied that he was taking her advice.

  “I’m writing a book with a plot and everything,” he told her. “Everybody’s in it. And I’m going to tear these two bastards apart,” he added, gesturing toward Loeb and Smith, who were walking separately.

  Then he pointed at Loeb: “And that kike Loeb is the villain.”

  If “everybody” was in it, that surely meant Cannell as well. Hemingway may have detected a look of panic on her face.

  “But not you, Kitty . . . I’m not going to put you in,” he told her. “I’ve always said you were a wonderful girl!” Hemingway then gave her a grin—the same wide, boyish smile he had given Loeb back in Pamplona as the two prepared to square off in a dark side street.

  That smile, Cannell wrote later, made “you feel like giving him an apple—or your heart.” Still, it did little to reassure her.

  On September 5, Loeb and Smith left for New York. The group would never sit at a table together again. Yet they would soon be permanently linked to Hemingway and one another, whether they liked it or not.

  AT THE END of September, Hemingway managed to get out of town after all—not to Italy, as he had hoped, but rather to Chartres, an ancient town southwest of Paris. He
had wanted to bring along a woman; instead, he towed along his manuscript and went back to work.

  The novel’s title needed attention. Its working title, Fiesta, was out: Hemingway had decided that he didn’t want to use a foreign word after all. Besides, there was the risk that Fiesta might misrepresent the material as frivolous. In case anyone mistook the book for a Spanish and Parisian version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bon ton antics, a weightier title would help create an atmosphere of gravitas around the work.

  In an eighth notebook Hemingway scribbled his name and “Chartres, Sept. 27, 1925.” Inside he wrote the header:

  The Lost Generation

  A Novel.

  Foreword.

  Gertrude Stein was about to become a significant presence in the book after all. In the foreword that followed, Hemingway recounted an incident that Stein had just related to him. She had recently stopped by a garage to have some work done on her ancient Ford. Four young mechanics were assisting the garage owner; one of them impressed Stein with his skill, and she quizzed the owner about how he had managed to find such good help.

  “I thought you couldn’t get boys to work any more,” she said.

  The owner replied that one simply could not hire anyone between the ages of twenty-two and thirty.

  “C’est un generation perdu,” he informed her. “No one wants them. They are no good. They were spoiled.”

  That said, he went on, men younger than twenty-two were still a harvestable crop. Stein asked what would become of the no-good age group.

  “Nothing,” the owner replied. “They know they are no good.”

  The anecdote reminded her of Hemingway’s whole circle of contemporaries.

  “That’s what you are,” she declared. “That’s what you all are. All of you young people who served in the war, you are a lost generation.”