Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  Just as in Paris, clique mentality ran rampant in New York’s literary crowd. The Algonquin Round Tablers—including critics Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun, and playwright George Kaufman—were feral wolves, but ones that couldn’t stand to be apart from the pack for too long. Whether at the Algonquin, one of their favored speakeasies, or the studio of artist Neysa McMein—one of the clique’s few female members—the Algonquin crowd dined, drank, and caroused together “until they dropped from exhaustion,” recalled Nathaniel Benchley, son of Robert Benchley.

  “There was never any need to worry or feel lonely, because the group was always there and ready to keep on going. The lonely ones were the ones who fell behind,” he added.

  This cabal may have stuck together out of insecurity, or perhaps disdain for the company of lesser mortals. Perhaps they just luxuriated in their ensemble wit and couldn’t bear to sacrifice a minute of banter to sleep or solitude. Whatever the case, it was a tightly knit crowd, nearly impossible to penetrate.

  That is, unless you were Ernest Hemingway. He gave no sign that he was intimidated by the verbal butchery demanded of its members, and during that fortnight in New York, he immediately beguiled their queen bee. Dorothy Parker may have hated half of what she saw on Broadway—producers, directors, and actors cowered in anticipation of her deliciously nasty reviews—but she adored Hemingway right away. This had been far from a predictable outcome. Among Parker and her cohorts, there was much eye-rolling about the pretension of the intellectual salons and lifestyle of the Left Bank, for which Hemingway was seen as an ambassador.

  “There is something a little—well, a little you-know—in all of those things,” Parker later wrote.

  The Stein crowd simply wasn’t irreverent enough for the Algonquin Round Tablers, for whom humor trumped all. According to Parker, when “Gertrude Stein . . . said, ‘You’re all a lost generation,’ . . . we all said, Whee! We’re lost.”

  Nor had Hemingway’s inaugural American publication made a thunderous impression. In Parker’s words, In Our Time had “caused about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” American booksellers, critics, and readers were rarely in the mood to tolerate such fare. They wanted novels.

  “They feel cheated,” she explained. “Literature, it appears, is here measured by a yard-stick.”

  Yet news spread about Hemingway’s new book deal and the stir that he had shrewdly caused among New York’s premier publishers. His persona fascinated Parker; all of that blunt masculinity must have stood out in stark relief among her usual cohorts, such as the plump, dandified Alexander Woollcott, with his penchant for bow ties, long cigarette holders, and reclining poses in publicity photos. Parker grilled Hemingway about his writing process and was astonished to find that they both usually found the task excruciatingly slow. Even if he boasted to her about the speed with which he had written The Sun Also Rises, she still felt that she had found in him a kindred spirit. Parker and the Algonquinites may have poked fun at the Paris Crowd, but some of them harbored serious literary ambitions of their own—including Parker. She had yet to publish a book of her own, and she certainly would have commiserated with Hemingway about the pressure to turn out a novel.

  “Write novels, write novels, write novels—that’s all they can say,” she complained later to Robert Benchley. “Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.”

  During Hemingway’s visit, she became so engrossed in his tales of the Left Bank that she shunted aside her skepticism and decided on the spot to move abroad.

  It seems unlikely that Hemingway drew any inspiration from Parker in kind, although he seems to have written an amusing little homage to a now famous Dorothy Parker couplet, published in 1925:

  Men seldom make passes

  At girls who wear glasses

  Later that year, when he went back to Paris, Hemingway penned his own Parker-like ditty:

  Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses

  Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses—

  For Hemingway, Parker would prove a strong ally. He was smart to cultivate her: she was powerful and well connected in the entertainment world, and soon it would be time to consider theatrical possibilities for The Sun Also Rises. In years to come, she would also pen several adoring Hemingway profiles and book reviews. By the end of his New York adventure, he was calling her “Dotty.”

  Other powerful critics also got a dose of Hemingway charm that week, including Herbert Gorman and Edmund Wilson. (They had even asked him for tips on other up-and-coming talent, he reported to Morley Callaghan.) He descended one evening upon the Coffee House, a club founded by Vanity Fair’s Frank Crowninshield. It would have been networking heaven for him, despite its no-introduction policy. (This was a pretentious anti-pretension measure: no introductions were necessary because practically all of its members were so famous or influential that they were recognizable on sight, and presumed to inhabit the same stratum anyway.) The club’s membership included giants from the worlds of publishing and entertainment, among them Cole Porter, P. G. Wodehouse, Charles Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, Douglas Fairbanks, and Condé Nast. In other words, it was another major platform for Ernest Hemingway to make his presence and plans known.

  He attempted some cultural outings as well, including a viewing of the Gatsby play on Broadway; he told a friend that he would gladly have paid to get out at several points during the performance. He also took stock of the literary landscape. Probably to his displeasure, he learned that Ford Madox Ford was quite popular among the New York literati. He grew equally indignant over the success of Anita Loos’s just released blockbuster satire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Hemingway sullenly called it “one of the dullest books I’ve ever read” and likened its ubiquity to an epidemic of the flu.

  Hemingway also indulged in a flirtation with the literary scene’s preeminent ice queen poet, Elinor Wylie. He reported to a friend that when they met, it had been “great love at first sight on both sides.” To literary men, Wylie served as a formidable muse; she was also a much-emulated thinking girl’s style icon, with her dark curls parted in the middle and arranged in dramatic waves around her face. John Hall Wheelock deemed her “the strikingly good-looking, disdainful type.” Like Hemingway, Wylie was charismatic and had accrued an intensely devoted following, dubbed her “cultists” by writer Thomas Wolfe, who was not among them. Hemingway did not join the Wylie cult, although he apparently saw its appeal; it remains unclear whether he became her lover, although she would later accompany him to his ship back to France, stopping at several bootleggers’ establishments along the way.

  Before leaving New York, Hemingway signed his contract with Scribner’s. The house was already creating mock-ups for The Torrents of Spring. He then boarded the Roosevelt, heading back to Europe at last, flanked by Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. Parker was following through on her impulsive decision to move to France; ironically, she funded the odyssey that Hemingway inspired by selling a book of poetry to Horace Liveright—so the publisher got something, at least, out of Hemingway’s New York visit.

  Another snowstorm engulfed the city as the group prepared to leave; ice glistened on the ship’s decks. A raucous bon voyage party, fueled by bootleg champagne, included Wylie and Algonquinite Marc Connelly; one of the revelers absconded with Parker’s scotch, an affront not discovered by the travelers until they were out at sea. The hilarity continued on the trip. Benchley hadn’t been able to get a proper stateroom and had instead been relegated to a maid’s cabin.

  “[On] the 4th day out he said it was funny but he felt just like the time he had crabs,” Hemingway wrote to Louis Bromfield. “And on the 6th day out he had crabs.”

  After the trip, Parker let it be known that Hemingway had taken saltpeter—supposedly an anti-aphrodisiac—during the group’s meals together, notifying those present that it was necessary to keep his sexual appetite under control.

  For Hemingway, it was an appropriately triumphant journ
ey back, made in the company of one of America’s most adored literary celebrities and one of its most feared critics. Both were now resolutely part of his arsenal. Benchley and Hemingway would remain friends for years, and Parker’s devotion to him bordered on idolatry. This adoration would prove useful, although far from mutual.

  11

  Kill or Be Killed

  BACK IN SCHRUNS, Hadley waited in vain for word from Hemingway: he never once contacted her from New York. She hiked and practiced the piano during her husband’s absence, but grew lonely and anxious. His trip had stretched to nearly a month.

  When the Roosevelt group arrived in Paris, Hemingway did not rush back to his family. Rather, he lingered in the city, dining and drinking with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and the Fitzgeralds.

  There were also other reasons to linger. Hemingway’s affair with Pauline Pfeiffer was now officially under way. She had even offered to accompany him to New York; when he made the trip solo, she waited patiently in Paris to welcome him back with open arms. For Hemingway, remorse would eventually settle in; but at that moment, their liaison gave him “unbelievable wrenching, kicking happiness” that was at once dreadful and “un-killable.” Pauline now “owned half” of him. She was also still cultivating Hadley, writing to her regularly in Schruns so she could maintain her easy entrée to the Hemingways’ life, he later wrote.

  After a few days, Hemingway forced himself to travel back to Schruns. Hadley met him at the train station, her face golden with a winter tan and her red hair gleaming in the sun. Bumby stood with her, looking chubby and blond and somewhat Germanic. Hemingway saw them waiting there and “wished [he] had died” before having betrayed them; yet he said nothing of the affair.

  The liaison with Pauline would resume when the Hemingways returned to Paris, but for now, they settled back into their family routine at the Hotel Taube. Soon John Dos Passos and the Murphys joined them there. Everyone was in the mood to celebrate. Gerald Murphy was especially thrilled by Hemingway’s news about Scribner’s and The Sun Also Rises.

  “It certainly broke prettily for him,” Murphy wrote to Hadley before coming to Schruns. “My God this world of success!”

  Their Austrian days were filled with roaring fires, feather beds, and cross-country skiing expeditions; the kirsch flowed so freely that “they gave it to us to rub off with when we came in from skiing,” recalled Dos Passos. “Mealtimes we could hardly eat for laughing.”

  At Schruns, Hemingway settled down to revise The Sun Also Rises. He wrote to Max Perkins and promised him that the novel would be ready for fall publication. He had to rework five more chapters, but Perkins could expect to see the manuscript in May. Perkins replied that he was impatient to read it and begged Hemingway not to get himself killed “with all of this flying and bullfighting” in the meantime.

  Now working on a typewriter, Hemingway began to reshape the final chapters of the book. In this draft, the Pamplona crew would finally be translated into their fictional guises: Duff Twysden now masqueraded full-time as “Brett Ashley,” Pat Guthrie officially became “Mike Campbell,” and so on.

  Separated from the actual events and real-life characters by a gulf of eight months, seven notebooks, and hundreds of pages, Hemingway was now in full command of their on-paper behavior and destinies. They all obeyed his pen and his imagination. Cayetano Ordóñez had been receiving an elegant makeover. By March he was “Pedro Romero,” and had become the book’s hero. While the real Ordóñez overindulged in flamenco parties, racy women, and Spanish sherry, his more solemn fictional counterpart was steeped in inner nobility and traditional ethics, making Lady Brett Ashley’s seduction of him all the more disgraceful. Like the author who created him, however, the character was capable of brutal pragmatism. Romero says:

  “The bulls are my best friends.”

  I translated to Brett.

  “You kill your friends?” she asked.

  “Always,” he said in English, and laughed. “So they don’t kill me.”

  The name “Pedro Romero” would have special meaning for aficionados. Here Hemingway borrowed once more from real life, this time from bullfighting history. The real Pedro Romero was an eighteenth-century Spanish hero—painted by Goya, beloved by thousands. He and his family were said to have founded the modern art of toreo. Co-opting his name was the perfect way to endow Hemingway’s own new hero with an air of consequence, just as designating Brett, Jake, and the others as mascots of a “lost generation” had elevated their characters.

  In Schruns, the relationship between Jake and Brett also got a going-over. In the first draft, in the scene in which Jake is summoned to Madrid to rescue the fictional Lady Duff from her failed affair with Ordóñez, he bitterly frets and tortures himself for pages about the injustice of his situation and the general failings of the British aristocracy before letting the matter rest. In the Schruns revision, Hemingway chiseled Jake’s tormented ponderings down to a controlled shrug. When Jake receives Brett’s telegraphed plea for help, he sends her a reply informing her that he is en route. Afterward, he exudes nonchalance: “That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”

  There was also the matter of the very final scene, in which Jake and Brett drive through Madrid in the back of a taxi; Brett fantasizes about what might have been. In the first draft, Hemingway had written:

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

  Ahead was a mounted policeman in Khaki . . . directing traffic. The car slowed suddenly pressing Duff closer against me.

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

  Hemingway had not been entirely satisfied with that final line. Now he felt that he had the answer:

  “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  It transformed a bitter, resigned statement into a cynical yet sad rhetorical question, and would leave readers with a sense of poignancy.

  The revisions were minute and grueling but tightened the screws of the entire novel. In the evenings, Hemingway read the new work aloud to Dos Passos and the Murphys, as he had read to Pauline earlier that winter. If Gerald Murphy had been less than enthusiastic about The Torrents of Spring, he was “blown out of the water” by The Sun Also Rises.

  Hemingway loved the praise, although he would later chide himself for reveling in the adoration. He should have thought to himself, “If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?” he later wrote. He cringed at the memory of the readings, which he came to regard as grossly unprofessional—and even dangerous to the writer. At the time, however, he was grateful for the encouragement and his friends were glad to give it, although they would be punished later for doing so.

  “We were all brothers and sisters when we parted company,” recalled Dos Passos. It was the “last unalloyed good time” he would remember having with Hemingway and Hadley during this European chapter of their lives.

  BY THE END of the month, Hemingway was back in Paris and had good news for Perkins.

  “I finished re-writing The Sun Also Rises,” he informed him on April 1. He complained later that it had been an intensely difficult revision, but all things considered, it had not taken him very long to make the leap from frantically scribbled draft to chiseled masterpiece. The completed manuscript, which was being sent off for a professional retyping, ran nearly ninety thousand words—a far cry from War and Peace, but a respectable length by anyone’s standards. It would reach Perkins in a couple of weeks.

  Hemingway had also been deliberating the dedication, and had, for the moment, alighted upon the following:

  TO MY SON

  John Hadley Nicanor

  This collection of Instructive Anecdotes

  Even though his editor had not even seen the manuscript yet, Hemingway felt that it was time to get down to the matter of publicit
y. He not only furnished Perkins with pictures of himself for the Scribner’s publicity team, but also included a shot of Bumby, perhaps in case there was any press potential in his family life.

  A week later he sent Perkins a list of powerful reviewers and writers who should get advance copies of The Torrents of Spring, and even supplied their addresses and press affiliations. The roster included influencers from the Paris Crowd and some of the Algonquin Round Tablers with whom he had just rubbed elbows.

  Around this time, he also engaged agent Curtis Brown to sell his works in England and Europe, and had already set up an arrangement with the British publisher Jonathan Cape to publish In Our Time. (“I don’t think Jonathan Cape is the best publishing house in England but they’re not the worst,” Hemingway wrote to Perkins.) Cape would also have the right of first refusal on both The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, although, somewhat tellingly, Hemingway was not making the publication of Torrents a prerequisite for acquiring The Sun Also Rises. In fact, Cape didn’t want Torrents anyway. Like Liveright and Scribner’s, all the publisher really wanted was the novel.

  Meanwhile, Perkins was ravenous to read The Sun Also Rises. He hastily sent Torrents off to the presses for a late May publication; all of his attention could now be turned to the novel. A mere two weeks after Hemingway had completed his revisions, Perkins informed his new author that the Scribner’s team had already mocked up a cover for the book they had yet even to read. His salesmen would be ready to take out dummies on May 1.