Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  On December 7, Hemingway shipped the Torrents manuscript off to Horace Liveright. To keep it company, he enclosed a fairly outrageous cover letter introducing the work. He opened by delivering a short lecture about the bygone golden age of satire and reported that he had heard critics bemoaning the fact that America had no decent satirist to call its own.

  “Maybe when you read this book you will think they haven’t so much bewailing to do now,” he wrote.

  Here was a “very perfect American satire” that could stand in the company of works by greats like Donald Stewart, Robert Benchley, and Ring Lardner. If Liveright didn’t want to take his word for it, Hemingway went on, F. Scott Fitzgerald would soon be dispatching a separate letter affirming its brilliance; he also reported that author Louis Bromfield agreed that Torrents was “one of the very funniest books he had ever read.”

  If Liveright wanted this book, he should be prepared to pay handsomely (here Hemingway inserted a demand for a $500 advance, even though, he added, he ought to ask for a thousand) and would have to pledge to promote the book vigorously. Hemingway reminded Liveright that he had made “no kick” about the lack of advertising surrounding In Our Time nor its ill-advised cover: all of those blurbs, Hemingway complained, had only put would-be readers on the defensive instead of luring them in. He instructed Liveright to release Torrents that upcoming spring and to hire artist Ralph Barton—whose drawings had adorned one of Donald Stewart’s books and Anita Loos’s best-selling 1925 satire Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—to illustrate the book. He predicted that Torrents was bound to sell up to twenty thousand copies—if the project was handled properly by its publisher, that is.

  There was, of course, the bothersome matter of Sherwood Anderson, and the fact that if Boni & Liveright published The Torrents of Spring, the house would basically be harpooning one of its most lucrative authors. “I do not think that anybody with any stuff can be hurt by satire,” Hemingway contended, implying that if Anderson took offense, he was being unduly thin-skinned.

  Hemingway demanded Liveright’s immediate decision. “In case you do not wish to publish it I have a number of propositions to consider,” he declared. He also made sure that Liveright knew he was revising the manuscript of a completed novel, although he neglected to mention that The Sun Also Rises skewered Harold Loeb, another author from the Liveright stable—the very one who had campaigned so diligently for Hemingway’s acceptance at the house in the first place.

  Liveright’s reply, he instructed, should be sent to the Hotel Taube in Schruns, where Hemingway and Hadley would be staying for the next three months. A few days later, the Hemingways departed for Austria for their second winter holiday in the little town, soon to be joined by Pauline Pfeiffer and eventually John Dos Passos.

  Two feet of snow greeted the family. Once they settled in at the Taube, Hemingway read, skied, played poker, and waited for the inevitable drama to unfold.

  HEMINGWAY MAY HAVE genuinely felt that The Torrents of Spring was a brilliant satire, yet it was more likely “a cold-blooded contract-breaker,” as Hemingway friend Mike Strater put it.

  “I have known all along that [Liveright] could not and would not be able to publish it as it makes a bum out of [his] present ace and best seller Anderson,” Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald from Schruns. He hastily added, “I did not, however, have that in mind in any way when I wrote it.”

  As Hemingway had ceaselessly reminded his associates over the past year, if Boni & Liveright failed to accept his next book for any reason, the house’s option on his future works lapsed. Therefore, if Horace Liveright rejected Torrents, he would relinquish any claim on The Sun Also Rises, thus allowing Hemingway to rush into the welcoming embrace of a more prestigious publisher, namely Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. On the one hand, his letter to Liveright could be seen as a wildly confident sales pitch by a hungry young author; on the other hand, it could be construed as a document impishly crafted to push a publisher over the edge.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald may have helped Hemingway strategize an exit from Liveright. The two men had reconnected in Paris that autumn, and they began, once again, drinking champagne together (presumably on Fitzgerald’s tab). They had become “very thick,” as Fitzgerald informed Perkins. He resumed his own patronage of Hemingway, penning a review of In Our Time in an effort to help the book’s chances and also “working like a beaver to get Max Perkins to take on Hemingway at Scribner’s,” as John Dos Passos put it. By that December, Fitzgerald had read Torrents and indeed sent Horace Liveright and one of his editors a letter extolling its virtues.

  “To one rather snooty reader, at least, [Torrents] seems about the best comic book ever written by an American,” he informed them. That said, he rather hoped that Liveright wouldn’t like the book: “I am something of a ballyhoo man for Scribners and I’d some day like to see all my generation that I admire rounded up in the same coop.”

  Fitzgerald and Hemingway stayed in weekly touch while Hemingway was in Schruns. As Hemingway waited to hear back from Liveright, he was nursing an ugly cold but expended nervous energy on the slopes and playing billiards. He also began to revise The Sun Also Rises, which he later described as “the most difficult job of rewriting I have ever done.” Some of the revising at Schruns involved an attempt to wrest the story away from Jake’s first-person point of view, an effort that Hemingway would soon abandon. In any case, he was working it “over and over” and wanted it to be “darn good.”

  SOON EDITORIAL BACKUP arrived in the form of Pauline Pfeiffer, who materialized in Schruns around Christmastime. Earlier that month, Kitty Cannell had beheld the spectacle of tiny Pauline dragging a pair of skis along a Paris street while clad in a fashionable Louise Boulanger suit. When Pauline told Cannell that she was about to join the Hemingways on a skiing holiday, Cannell was taken aback. “I had not realized that they had been seeing that much of each other,” she later wrote, adding that she worried that Pauline would break her little “bird bones” on the slopes. She probably need not have been concerned: Pauline was tougher than she looked.

  Hemingway later claimed that Pauline came to Schruns not to ski but rather to “murder” his marriage. She had already begun this lengthy, insidious campaign to wrest him away from Hadley, starting with an infiltration using what he called the oldest trick in the book: “This is when an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, comes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”

  As a couple, he and Hadley were particularly vulnerable to such an invasion: at that time, his revisions to The Sun Also Rises were consuming much of his time; this meant that Hadley needed a playmate while he was working, and Pauline seemed a sensible solution. Then, at the end of each working day, there were two attractive women on hand to tempt him. “One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both,” he later wrote.

  “Then the one who is relentless wins,” he added.

  Seduction does, however, involve two willing parties. While Pauline has long been depicted as a predator and home wrecker, she had certain virtues that would have conceivably encouraged Hemingway to pursue her as well—namely that she was an heiress, while Hemingway remained decidedly broke. Her increased presence in the Hemingway households coincided with Hadley’s waning relevance: now that Hemingway was—finally—poised to make a noisy breakthrough into the realm of literary celebrity, he may have realized that he had outgrown her. Her own diminished trust fund had proved inadequate even for the world of simple pleasures they had created, and he may also have sensed that she was not suited for life on a grander stage.

  It is unclear whether Hemingway and Pauline began a physical affair at Schruns or weeks later, but by the time she left Austria, the Hemingways and Pauline were in triangle mode, at least emotionally. As with The Torrents of Spring, Pauline made herself essential to the revisions of The Sun Also Rises: each night, Hemingway read h
is revisions to her, and she gave him editorial feedback. She became increasingly emotionally invested in his professional goings-on.

  It is also unclear whether Hadley—who had long commented on her husband’s works in progress—was included in these evening manuscript sessions. At this point she appears to have been living in cheerful denial; yet that winter she may have realized that the chessboard was being rearranged around her, and that hers was not an advantageous position. When Kitty Cannell ran into Hadley back in Paris, Cannell “innocently” inquired how things had gone during Pauline’s visit. Hadley replied that she was certain Cannell knew what was happening. Cannell claimed that she did not.

  “She’s taking my husband,” Hadley told her.

  HEMINGWAY’S BEST Christmas present arrived five days after the actual holiday. On December 30, a cable arrived from Horace Liveright:

  REJECTING TORRENTS OF SPRING

  PATIENTLY AWAITING MANUSCRIPT SUN ALSO RISES

  WRITING FULLY

  In the letter that followed, Liveright was measured yet merciless. The submission of The Torrents of Spring had thrown Boni & Liveright into an uproar over the past few weeks; nearly everyone at the office had been called upon to read it. The team had even conscripted several “entirely unprejudiced” outside readers to opine on the work. The collective impression had not been positive, to say the least.

  “Who on earth do you think would buy it?” Liveright asked. “We disagree with you and Scott Fitzgerald and Louis Bromfield and Dos Passos, that it is a fine and humorous American satire.”

  The Torrents of Spring was, he continued, “horribly cruel,” “vicious,” “in extremely rotten taste,” and, perhaps worst of all, “entirely cerebral.” Hemingway had predicted easy sales of twenty thousand copies, but Liveright couldn’t imagine that more than seven or eight hundred readers would be willing to shell out money for the book. Furthermore, he added, practically the only reason booksellers had placed any orders for In Our Time was thanks to the blurbs on the cover which Hemingway had criticized—a stinging reminder to Hemingway that, at least in the eyes of this publisher, his most saleable asset at this point was still the support of his better-known champions. And what was more, the lack of advertising had not killed sales of In Our Time. Rather, the reading public had rejected it.

  “In Our Time will sell some day,” Liveright predicted. “After your first successful novel.”

  As ever, it all came down to a novel. Liveright made it clear that he still expected Hemingway to submit The Sun Also Rises to Boni & Liveright. After all, the house had invested in him “for the long future”: it had published In Our Time to get to the goose that laid the golden egg.

  Hemingway, however, had no intention of handing over the novel.

  “I’m loose,” he wrote immediately to Fitzgerald, adding that it already felt great to be emancipated from the Liveright shackles. “It’s up to you how I proceed next,” he added.

  He informed Fitzgerald that other publishers were now also interested, including Alfred Harcourt, who had been so keenly anticipating a potentially country-rocking novel; he had also, he said, been approached by an editor from rival publishing house Knopf. Hemingway thought that Harcourt in particular was a “sure thing,” as Alfred Harcourt had essentially offered to take his works sight unseen. That said, Hemingway felt that he already had an understanding with Scribner’s.

  “I am not going to Double Cross you and Max Perkins to whom I have given a promise,” he wrote.

  He suggested that Fitzgerald write to Perkins about the situation and endorse The Torrents of Spring again, as he had to Horace Liveright. Perkins should also be informed that Hemingway was perfecting The Sun Also Rises and it was “damned good.” The rewrites would be completed in just a couple of months, and it could be published in the fall.

  “I’m certainly relying on your good nature in a lousy brutal way,” he said apologetically.

  Fitzgerald excitedly reported back to Perkins. Here was the moment they had been waiting for: Hemingway—now endowed with a mighty novel—was in play at last. There was, however, a small sting to impart.

  “He’s dead set on having the satire published first,” Fitzgerald advised Perkins.

  It would probably sell only a thousand copies, he speculated, but it would be worth it, for the novel promised to be “something extraordinary.” There was now competition from other publishers, but Fitzgerald felt confident that Scribner’s could bring Hemingway into the coop.

  A week after Liveright’s rejection came through, Fitzgerald contacted Perkins again, urging him to make his bid. It was now or never, for Harcourt had made a definite offer:

  YOU CAN GET HEMINGWAYS FINISHED NOVEL

  PROVIDED YOU PUBLISH UNPROMISING SATIRE . . .

  WIRE IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS

  Perkins sprang into action. He wired Fitzgerald back:

  PUBLISH NOVEL AT FIFTEEN PERCENT AND ADVANCE IF DESIRED

  ALSO SATIRE UNLESS OBJECTIONABLE OTHER THAN FINANCIALLY

  HEMINGWAY’S STORIES SPLENDID

  Perkins chased the cable with a letter; in it, he fretted that he might have missed his big chance to reel in Hemingway. There had been some in-house worry about commissioning the satire sight unseen, as “it is not the policy obviously of Scribners to publish books of certain types,” but apparently he now felt it worth the risk. He would have wired immediately otherwise, and he feared now that the lag had been “fatal.”

  “If only,” he wrote, “we could get the novel!”

  Perkins’s position seemed a peculiar one: he was vying aggressively for works that he had never read, created by a little-known writer whose only American-published book had fizzled commercially, exclusively on the strength of Fitzgerald’s confidence and what Perkins had glimpsed in those In Our Time stories and vignettes. That said, he had found the stories “astonishingly fine” and “invigorating as a cold, fresh wind.” Others felt the same way. In New York as well as Paris, Hemingway was indeed starting to look like something new under the sun, as Robert Wolf had put it.

  “People are beginning to talk about his writing,” Perkins informed Fitzgerald, “those who find things for themselves and appreciate aside from technical literary qualities, a true eye for reality.”

  News of that unfinished draft of The Sun Also Rises—currently being reworked in Schruns against the backdrop of a brewing love triangle—had ejected him out of man-to-watch territory into the category of major catch.

  Hemingway decided to go to New York to field all offers in person. With agent-like shrewdness, he knew better than to let things cool off. If he waited in Schruns, weeks could lapse in between propositions. He was in demand now; better to materialize in the center of action and continue to stoke the fire he had lit. The news of his imminent arrival would likely create an even greater sense of drama and urgency around him and his novel. Plus, he wrote to Fitzgerald, he got the sense that Liveright intended to hold on to him (in this assumption he was correct), and preferred to settle the matter with Horace face-to-face.

  The preparations for his trip to New York took on the tenor of a military team mapping out a high-stakes invasion. Hemingway wrote a stern letter to Liveright, advising him that his option on any subsequent Hemingway works had clearly lapsed. He offered up some cutting words regarding the collective sensibilities of the Liveright team.

  “Your office was also quite enthusiastic about a novel by Harold Loeb called Doodab which did not, I believe, prove to be a wow even as a succes d’estime.” To make Liveright fully aware of the grave shortsightedness of his decision to reject Torrents, he added: “As you know I expect to go on writing for some time . . . I will pay my keep to, and eventually make a great deal of money for, any publisher.”

  But in the meantime, he had no intention of letting Liveright sit back and reject his manuscripts while Liveright waited for him to crank out an eventual best-seller. It was all or nothing. On that note, he informed Liveright that he would be saili
ng for New York imminently and looked forward to meeting him there.

  That same day, Fitzgerald prepped Max Perkins for Hemingway’s arrival. Liveright was likely going to fight to keep Hemingway, he informed the editor, on the grounds that The Torrents of Spring was not really a book. It was a shaky claim, but Liveright was also apparently “crazy” to get Hemingway’s novel, Fitzgerald added. That said, Hemingway was just as crazy to be rid of Liveright.

  “To hear him talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions,” Fitzgerald added.

  By the way, he went on, Perkins should probably know about Hemingway’s somewhat volatile nature.

  “He’s very excitable,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and I can’t promise he’ll know his own mind next month.” In a separate missive, he warned Perkins that Hemingway could be “tempermental in business” and strongly urged him to “get a signed contract” for The Sun Also Rises.

  Other than that, they were bound to get along famously.

  “You won’t be able to help liking him,” Fitzgerald assured Perkins. “He’s one of the nicest fellows I know.”

  10

  Dorothy Parker’s Scotch

  AS MAX PERKINS waited for Hemingway to cross the icy Atlantic, he must have been filled with unease. Not necessarily apprehension about Hemingway’s temper—in the years to come, Perkins would prove to be especially adept at handling volatile authors—but about the inevitable fistfight that would arise in-house over bringing such a terribly modern author into Charles Scribner’s Sons.