Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Members of this unfortunate demographic could be easily identified by their lack of respect and lethal drinking habits, she added.

  This anecdote would completely change the prism through which the entire book would be seen, Hemingway reasoned. With its addition, he was about to reconceive his cast of characters as a symbolic band of lost souls. It immediately elevated their dissipation and bad behavior: it wasn’t their fault that they were drunk, aimless, and destructive; they had been ruined by an ignoble war and the flawed institutions that used to give life meaning. What was left, Hemingway wondered in the foreword, to guide them? His generation had unsuccessfully sought solace in the Catholic Church, Dadaism, royalism, and the movies. Now there was a void of guidance, spiritual or otherwise. Other writers had been grappling with these seismic issues, Hemingway conceded, but he implied that his own literary examination was about to prove far more meaningful.

  “This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us,” he wrote in the foreword, taking an obvious swipe at Fitzgerald’s subject matter.

  Once again, perfect material had presented itself to Hemingway at a crucial moment. With this new Lost Generation angle, not only could he position himself as a revolutionary stylist and documenter of sexy, saleable material; he was now speaking for an entire generation, as Fitzgerald had been doing. Granted, they were saying very different things about their contemporaries, but that was just as well. It would differentiate Hemingway nicely.

  He later claimed that he had felt immediately hostile to the idea of a “lost generation,” at least in the way that Stein had meant it. The night when she told him the story, he walked home from her rue de Fleurus studio and decided en route that all generations had been “lost” in one way or another.

  “I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?” he later wrote. Stein’s “dirty, easy labels” and talk of a lost generation could just go to hell.

  He may have reviled the label, but he co-opted it anyway. He eventually axed The Lost Generation as a title and even did away with the long, treatise-like foreword. But he held fast to the sentiment of the foreword, condensing it into a brief epigraph that packed an even more powerful punch:

  “You are all a lost generation.”

  —Gertrude Stein

  His instinct had been spot-on. In the end, it took only these six simple, borrowed words to elevate the book from a work of gossip-fueled fiction into a generation-defining event.

  There was still room for more gravitas, he decided. Even as he wrote about his generation’s rejection of the church, he was mining the Bible as a source of alternative titles. In the same Chartres notebook containing the excised foreword, he listed some candidates pulled from the Book of Ecclesiastes, including River to the Sea, Two Lie Together, The Old Leaven, and The Sun Also Rises. The Sun Also Rises option had been culled from a line in the “Vanity of Life” passage:

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh:

  but the earth abideth for ever.

  The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,

  and hasteth to his place where he arose.

  The theme of death and regeneration was as poignant as that of a devastated generation, and it fit neatly with Hemingway’s belief that each generation was just as lost as any other; the concept would resonate with him for the rest of his life. He enthused about Ecclesiastes in a letter to Ezra Pound; he implored his former mentor to read it again and not let his “just disgust with the so called Christian religion” prevent him from seeing its merits. Soon he made a decision.

  “[I] am calling it The Sun Also Rises,” he wrote to Harold Loeb a few weeks later.

  Hemingway declined, however, to describe the book’s plot and characters. Loeb would simply have to learn about a certain “Robert Cohn” on his own, many months later.

  AS HEMINGWAY WAS agonizing over a title for his incendiary novel, Boni & Liveright was preparing to debut In Our Time, which would introduce Hemingway to the wider American public. For months he had been corresponding with Horace Liveright about the proofs for the book.

  “Reading it over it is even a better book than I remember,” Hemingway wrote to his publisher, who appears to have been left out of Hemingway’s flurry of correspondence announcing the existence and progress of his new novel.

  Boni & Liveright had prepared a bullish cover for the book: nearly the entire front jacket was covered in blurbs from some of Hemingway’s most powerful supporters, as though the publisher were daring critics to utter a word against the book.

  “Mr. Hemingway is young, strong, full of laughter, and he can write,” promised Sherwood Anderson, whose blurb hovered next to the book’s title. A statement somehow cajoled out of Ford Madox Ford, despite his strained relationship with Hemingway, assured prospective readers that Hemingway was “the best writer in America at this moment . . . the most conscientious, the most master of his craft, [and] the most consummate.” In the lower left corner, Donald Ogden Stewart likened the book to eating a hearty meal after being forced to subsist on literary lettuce sandwiches.

  The book was published in New York around the time Hemingway was in Chartres. Just over 1,300 copies rolled off the Liveright presses—not a staggering first printing, but still more than four times that of any of Hemingway’s previous books.

  If his patrons had been intent on driving home the point that Hemingway was a unique new talent, reviewers were not ready to cast him as more than a talented apprentice. Several reviews linked him stylistically to Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. At least two reviews called Stein’s influence on the stories “obvious,” and The New Republic’s critic wrote that Hemingway’s “fine bare effects and values coined from simplest words” had clear overtones of Anderson while lacking Anderson’s warmth.

  One reviewer, however, saw something profoundly exciting in the book.

  “Ernest Hemingway is something new under the sun in American letters,” wrote Robert Wolf of the New York Herald Tribune. Yes, Hemingway bore the influence of Stein and Anderson, but they were prewar writers, and there had been “more discontinuity between the literary tradition of 1920 and that of 1925 than between that of 1914 and that of 1920.” Hemingway was the first representative of the postwar school of writers, who were bound to take literature in astonishing directions. Stein and Joyce may have started it all—it was “impossible to write in the old way” since they had made their mark—but Hemingway was poised to become the leader of the new guard. His style was “built after the pattern of a machine . . . reflecting our modern, stereotyped machine civilization.” He finished the review with the ultimate endorsement: “Ernest Hemingway has promise of genius.”

  The esteem was not mutual: Hemingway later described Wolf as “stupid but well meaning.” Yet the reviewer was clearly onto something: had Hemingway been published before the war, he might have been disqualified from being a postwar voice of a generation. Only a newcomer who hailed from that doomed twenty-two- to thirty-year-old category could qualify for that honor. Once again, luck had conspired to promote Hemingway’s talent.

  Sales for In Our Time proved dismal: that first season, only around five hundred copies would make their way from booksellers’ shelves into the hands of readers. Yet Hemingway’s name was becoming known in New York publishing circles. Publisher Alfred Harcourt sent a letter to author Louis Bromfield about Hemingway and In Our Time that fall; in his view, the book portended great things.

  “Hemingway is his own man and talking off his own bat,” he wrote, and prophesied, “[His] first novel might rock the country.”

  Soon enough, that property would be in play.

  HAROLD LOEB, in the meantime, had arrived back in New York City. If he’d expected fanfare and adulation over the release of his own book, he too was sorely disappointed.

  “I didn’t get a decent review in t
he city + none too many outside,” he reported to Hemingway that November. Sales were low. Despite the unraveling of their friendship, Loeb was still acting as an unofficial liaison between Hemingway and Liveright. Unfortunately, he had equally grim news to impart about In Our Time.

  “They tell me in the office . . . [that] the sale of short stories in book form is next to impossible,” he wrote. “Your book is no exception.”

  It is tempting to say that Hemingway’s relationship with Boni & Liveright ended then and there. He had never been ecstatic about the house to begin with. Horace Liveright had further vexed him that past summer by asking him to scout additional authors in Paris and send them in the house’s direction; Hemingway had declined. “Being a simple country boy from Chicago I dont know anything of the technique of grabbing off authors,” he informed his publisher.

  The firm’s apparent disinclination to market his book aggressively brought out Hemingway’s ire. He wrote back to Loeb that Liveright’s team had obviously decided in advance that it wasn’t worth their effort to sell a book of short stories. They weren’t even fulfilling actual orders, he reported: over in Paris, Sylvia Beach would order a dozen and receive half that number. Unlike Liveright, she knew how to market Hemingway’s work. She would sell out of those six copies in a single day, he claimed, and would have to cable for additional copies. By the way, he added, there had been three offers on his new novel—swell ones. He planned, at the moment, to be loyal to Liveright, but it was “up to them to keep me happy”—which meant giving In Our Time “a good ride” and rummaging up a sizable advance for the novel.

  “They are certainly putting Sherwood over big,” Hemingway added resentfully, referring to the promotional campaign surrounding Anderson’s newly released best-selling novel, Dark Laughter. He imagined that Anderson stood to make a lot of money, and he was right. It was Anderson’s first book to be published by Liveright, and the house made an enormous effort to showcase its new star. Dark Laughter was released around the same time as Hemingway’s book; yet while In Our Time sold only about a third of its modest first printing, Dark Laughter sold over 22,000 copies by December.

  “The sales climbed up and up,” recalled Anderson, who seemed almost bewildered by his newfound success. “I went on a visit to New York and saw my own face staring at me from the advertising pages of newspapers, on the walls of busses and subways.”

  If The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s postwar commentary novel, Dark Laughter was Anderson’s. Like The Sun Also Rises, it had been dashed off in a sprint. “This whole novel was written in a heat last fall,” Anderson had told Liveright earlier that spring. “I went through the whole thing in about two months and have never been so absorbed in a job before. It is the story of the present day, of postwar life in America now and in particular of postwar life in the Middle West.” It was, he added, going to be his best novel yet.

  “It walks and sings,” he advised Liveright. “Bet on this book, Horace, it is going to be there with a bang.”

  Anderson apparently had no idea that Hemingway was stewing about his success or that he loathed the unremitting critical comparisons between their respective styles. “I dare say, more than one critic . . . intimated that I was a strong influence,” Anderson wrote later. “I myself never said so. I thought . . . that he had his own gift, which had nothing particularly to do with me.”

  Hemingway, by contrast, was hardly in a mood to laud Anderson’s creative gift. Dark Laughter was pretentious and fake, he wrote to his mother; the book had only a few instances of passable writing in it, he added. Others agreed with him. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins that “Anderson’s last two books have let everybody down who believed in him,” and called the tomes “cheap,” “faked,” and “awful.” That said, Fitzgerald did not feel the need to translate this disdain into a public rebuke.

  Hemingway did. Dark Laughter was “so terribly bad, silly and affected that I could not keep from criticizing it in a parody,” he later wrote, and that November, he began to draft a nasty little satire of Anderson’s novel. It took him only about a week to complete the nearly thirty-thousand-word novella, which he would call The Torrents of Spring.

  In defending his decision to write the book, Hemingway would claim that it had been the noble thing to do. It enraged him that Anderson was squandering his talents: the older writer needed to be set straight, and it was up to other writers to call him out via the time-honored form of satire. Years later, Hemingway would call parody “the last refuge of the frustrated writer” and add that “the step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal,” but at that moment in 1925, when it came to rectifying Sherwood Anderson’s wayward course, it was apparently a respectable weapon.

  The Torrents of Spring took dead aim at Anderson’s stylistic affectations. In Dark Laughter, the action had centered on a wheel company; Hemingway’s satirical setting was a pump factory. He lampooned Anderson’s fragmented language and tendency to use repetitive questions—“Could she hold him? Could she hold him?”—and peppered the book with blasé yet boastful end-of-chapter notes directly addressing the reader. In one note, the narrator informs his audience that he wrote the previous chapter in a mere two hours, then carried it to a lunch with John Dos Passos, who read it and declared, “Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece.” Another note, insinuating that Anderson suffered from misguided impulses toward grandiosity, announced, “It is at this point, reader, that I am going to try and get that sweep and movement into the book that shows that the book is really a great book.”

  Anderson may have been the primary target of Torrents, but Hemingway also took aim at a few other writers as well. In the book’s pages, he accuses novelist Willa Cather of having lifted war-related material from the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. F. Scott Fitzgerald staggers blind drunk into the action at one point, plunking himself down in a fireplace. Later in that passage, Hemingway addresses the reader again: “And you’re not angry or upset about what I said about Scott Fitzgerald either, are you? I hope not . . . Need I add, reader, that I have the utmost respect for Mr. Fitzgerald, and let anybody else attack him and I would be the first to spring to his defense!” There was also a little poke at Gertrude Stein. Part Four of Torrents was called “The Passing of a Great Race and the Making and Marring of Americans,” a riff on the title of Stein’s book The Making of Americans. In one passage, a character ponders Stein’s significance; the rumination was rendered in a spoof of Stein’s now famous style: “Gertrude Stein . . . Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leading her? What was at the bottom of it? All that in Paris. Ah, Paris. How far it was to Paris now. Paris in the morning. Paris in the evening. Paris at night. Paris in the morning sun. Paris at noon, perhaps. Why not?”

  By December 2, The Torrents of Spring was complete.

  Hemingway began to share the work with select members of his crowd. Literary parodies were fairly commonplace at that time: Donald Stewart’s Parody Outline of History ribbed the styles of ten famous writers, including Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, and Ring Lardner. Robert McAlmon wrote poems parodying Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. (Pound had reportedly not been amused.) It was a live-by-the-pen, die-by-the-pen world, and all stylists were vulnerable to ridicule.

  Yet some early readers of Torrents found its humor unnecessarily cruel. Hadley thought it “detestable” to send up the man who had supported her and Hemingway so selflessly and made all of their Paris introductions; she urged Hemingway not to publish it. John Dos Passos—far from deeming the book a masterpiece—told Hemingway that it “wasn’t quite good enough to stand on its own feet as a parody,” and argued that “In Our Time had been so damn good he ought to wait until he had something really smashing to follow it with.” He agreed with Hemingway and Fitzgerald that Dark Laughter had been overly sentimental and that “somebody ought to call [Anderson] on it”; he just didn’t think that Hemingway was the right person to do so, given Anderson’s kindnesses
to him in the past.

  “I suppose it wasn’t any of my goddamn business, but friends were friends in those days,” he wrote later.

  Hemingway may have been inspired by Donald Ogden Stewart’s success with satire and would soon use Stewart’s example as a selling point for the Torrents manuscript, but Stewart was just as appalled by the book as Hadley and Dos Passos: he loathed Torrents “both for its bitterness and for its inept attempts at humor.” He believed that parody should be amusing, but not brutal—something that he felt Hemingway did not understand.

  Hemingway continued to troll for praise. He descended upon the apartment of Gerald and Sara Murphy one evening as they were getting ready for bed. Instead, they spent the night listening to Hemingway read aloud; he went through the entire manuscript. Gerald found Torrents “in questionable taste.” Sara was in less of a position to judge the material’s virtues: she slept through much of the reading, albeit “sitting bolt-upright on the sofa.” Hemingway apparently didn’t notice, reading until he gave himself a sore throat.

  He finally found an enthusiastic backer in Pauline Pfeiffer. He and Hadley had been seeing a good deal of her that fall. Her sister Virginia had returned to the United States after her extended Parisian holiday, leaving Pauline at loose ends—and presumably ending any sort of flirtation or affair between Virginia and Hemingway. Lonely now, Pauline had begun stopping off at the Hemingways’ apartment after work; they gradually became a surrogate family to her, despite her initial horror at their living conditions and revulsion over Hemingway himself. Ostensibly Pauline’s entrée to the couple was through Hadley; the two had become close albeit unlikely friends.

  Yet Pauline had clearly become a creative confidante of Hemingway’s as well. He inducted her into the circle of Torrents of Spring readers, and she found it “one of the funniest things she had ever read.” Pauline urged Hemingway to push for publication—precisely the course he followed. Hadley resented the encouragement: if not for Pauline’s persuasion, she felt, he might have shelved the manuscript. The episode suggested that Hadley’s influence on her husband was waning and Pauline’s was on the rise.