Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “In fact, the book will be complete except for the text,” he added. “That I shall await with great eagerness.”

  By late April, the wait was over. Hemingway alerted Perkins by letter that “the Sun A.R. (the pig that you bought in a poke)” was en route. As he anxiously waited for a response, he wrote morosely to Fitzgerald that he felt “low as hell,” and his mood only sank from there. In another letter to Fitzgerald he confessed that he was lonesome again and signed it from “Ernest M. Shit.”

  The manuscript of The Sun Also Rises survived its ocean voyage and landed safely on Perkins’s desk. Perkins read it eagerly. Like This Side of Paradise, it was indeed bound to cause an uproar in the house. From its liberal sprinkling of four-letter words to its characters’ profligate drinking habits to the sexually emancipated, emotionally deadened female protagonist, The Sun Also Rises was a perfect storm of affronts to the sensibilities of the more conservative Scribner’s editors.

  At home, Perkins fretted about it to his wife, the writer and poet Louise Saunders. The couple hotly debated the book. Later Saunders would have no great love for Hemingway, but she came out in favor of his contentious debut novel.

  “Max, you have to stand up for this, and protect its integrity by not taking out obscene words,” Louise told him.

  Perkins agonized over the situation. “He always staunchly defended the right of the author to write his or her own book, but he was also pragmatic,” says his granddaughter Jenny Phillips. “The book was so shocking and disturbing at the time.”

  In fact, Perkins believed that The Sun Also Rises was “almost unpublishable,” as he wrote to Fitzgerald that spring. But he prepared to make his case for the book anyway. When the Scribner’s editors gathered to discuss the book’s status, Perkins marched into the meeting, determined to defend his acquisition as important literature, not mere profanity.

  “It’s a vulgar book,” Charles Scribner Sr. declared. “There are four-letter words in it that I never would permit on the page of any book that enters a gentleman’s house.”

  Perkins started by making concessions.

  “Well, Hemingway is willing to cut out some of these words,” he ventured. (Hemingway, unaware of this discussion, was certainly not willing to cut words, but at this point, it was more important just to get the book greenlighted.)

  “Which words?” Scribner demanded.

  Unable to utter the words out loud, Perkins hustled back to his office and came back with a piece of paper. He scribbled a short list and handed the sheet to Scribner, who gave a tight smile and responded, “Max, if Hemingway knew that you didn’t dare say those words in my presence, he’d disown you!”

  Scribner was amused but unconvinced. Perkins tried a different approach. He reminded the team that the house’s reputation needed continued renovation: despite the presence of Fitzgerald and Lardner on their list, younger writers still considered Scribner’s to be “ultra conservative,” and if they rejected Hemingway’s book, that reputation would be set in stone.

  This argument had persuaded the house to publish Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, but in the case of The Sun Also Rises, Scribner simply would not budge. The team reached an impasse; the atmosphere was one of “general misery,” as Perkins put it later. Junior editor John Hall Wheelock was then summoned and pressed for his opinion.

  Perkins must have squirmed as he awaited his colleague’s feedback. Wheelock was, in Perkins’s view, something of a hermit who dwelled “out of the world on that balcony of his.” Despite his comparative youth, he was fairly out of touch with “modern tendencies in writing.”

  Wheelock entered the room and gave his verdict.

  “To my amazement,” Perkins later told the younger Scribner, “he thought there was no question whatever but that we should publish.”

  Finally—painfully—the book was accepted, but with deep misgivings among its detractors. Rumors circulated first in-house and later throughout the literary community that “Old C.S.” had rejected the book and that Perkins had threatened to resign.

  Yet once The Sun Also Rises was added officially to the Scribner’s list, the house was prepared to launch Hemingway as strongly as it had backed Fitzgerald. Securing the acceptance of The Sun Also Rises was, of course, primarily Perkins’s triumph, but the book was now the house’s collective gamble. “Old C.S.” has often been described as authoritarian and resistant to change, but he had also begun to see—through Perkins’s eyes—where modern sensibilities were heading. The elder editors softened in their aversion to The Sun Also Rises as well, and even began to look at it as another experiment.

  “I should think . . . we might go ahead and see what happens,” wrote one of them in an internal memo about the debate surrounding the book. After all, he added, “a single mistake would not be fatal.”

  A couple of years later, when the book had been published and was getting some of the inevitable horrified backlash the elder editors had feared, Perkins personally responded to one of the more irate readers’ letters. By then he had had time to hone and clarify the reason he and Scribner had decided to publish The Sun Also Rises in the first place. Not every work necessarily reflected the personal taste of the publisher, he stated.

  Nevertheless, “[the publisher] is under an obligation to his profession,” Perkins wrote, “which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time.”

  In other words, the publisher had a duty to advance the cause of art, and The Sun Also Rises represented art’s next frontier.

  BY MID-MAY, Hemingway had heard nothing from Perkins and stewed in anxiety; he was also feeling defensive about The Torrents of Spring, which would hit bookstores a few days later. When Perkins finally wrote to his new author on May 18, he kept him ignorant about the in-house row over his novel.

  “‘The Sun Also Rises’ seems to me a most extraordinary performance,” Perkins congratulated him. “No one could conceive of a book with more life in it.” The reader truly felt he was there, especially in the pastoral Burguete scenes. The humor and satire, especially as expressed by Jake and Bill Gorton, were top-notch. It was an astonishing work of art, one that involved “an extraordinary range of experience and emotion, all brought together in the most skillful manner—the subtle ways of which are beautifully concealed—to form a complete design.”

  He advised that edits would follow, but Perkins was light-handed in this first missive. He did have to bring up, however, the sensitive fact that Hemingway had managed to shoot a sharp arrow—as was now his habit—at one of his publishing house stablemates. This time the victim was Henry James; in the manuscript, Bill Gorton implies that James had, like Jake Barnes, been rendered impotent by an accident. In this case, the catalyst was a mishap with a bicycle—or maybe even a tricycle, Gorton jokes—rather than a war wound. According to Perkins, it would have to go.

  “I am not raising this you must believe, because we are his publishers,” he wrote to Hemingway. Even though James had been dead for ten years, Perkins simply did not see how the reference could be included: “It could not by any conception be printed while he was alive, if only for the fear of a lawsuit; and in a way it seems almost worse to print it after he is dead.” Other than that, it was time to move forward at full speed and put the manuscript into production.

  First, however, they had to get over the speed bump of publishing The Torrents of Spring, which debuted to the world on May 28 bearing the title

  The Torrents of Spring

  A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race

  No one in-house seemed particularly invested in promoting the book. Hemingway had predicted to Horace Liveright sales of at least 20,000 copies, but Scribner’s answered that bluff with a modest first printing of 1,250 copies. The publication schedule had been so rushed that the book was not included in the house’s spring catalogue, and only a limited advertising campaig
n was attempted.

  The house used the book’s launch, however, as an opportunity to tease the upcoming novel and get the drumbeat going about Hemingway himself. Scribner’s vigorously marketed him as a new leader of “modern tendencies in writing,” as Perkins had put it. In a supplement to the spring catalogue, the house announced that “Hemingway as a writer is in revolt against the soft, vague thought and expression that characterizes the work of extremists in American fiction today.” His writing was “utterly direct” and “completely fearless,” and would give readers “a shock like cold water.” The Torrents of Spring provided a hint of the “extraordinary talent of the writer, a talent which will be even more clearly revealed when his first novel, ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ is published next fall.”

  In reality, The Torrents of Spring did little to showcase Hemingway’s revolutionary style, as it was a satire of Anderson’s, but no matter. The house’s ads for Torrents echoed these sentiments, driving home the message that Hemingway was brilliant, promising, and young.

  Most of the reviewers who did bother to write up the book did not take the bait, however. At least one of them simply seemed confused by The Torrents of Spring: How had Hemingway made the leap from In Our Time, with its terse, brutal prose, to this? Another reviewer—Harry Hansen of the New York World—made short work of Hemingway’s attempt at satire.

  “Parody is a gift of the gods,” he wrote. “Few are blessed with it. It missed Hemingway.”

  He also called the book out as a blatant betrayal of Anderson: “When Hemingway published ‘In Our Time’ it was Sherwood Anderson who turned the handsprings and welcomed this newcomer to the ranks of America’s great men . . . and now Hemingway pays him back.”

  Yet as far as Scribner’s was concerned, there was positive news too: Hemingway’s apparent attack on Anderson was proving good, gossipy copy—and so was Hemingway himself. The Kansas City Star included some colorful albeit inaccurate background about his war years: the author of this “audacious little volume” had “volunteered in the Italian army and got himself gloriously shot up.” A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune commented, “Mr. Hemingway’s name, which one hears everywhere now, [may be] more famous than his prose.” This all portended well for a major publicity push when it came time to release The Sun Also Rises.

  Some of Hemingway’s acquaintances were stunned by The Torrents of Spring, which had suddenly revealed his capacity for public betrayal. It was shocking even to those on the outer rings of the Paris Crowd: Hemingway had been among the privileged few admitted into the den, and now he was eating his own. Backstabbing friends and mentors on the terrace of the Dôme café was acceptable, if not de rigueur, but doing so with the backup of a major American publisher and an attentive, headline-hungry press corps was quite another affair.

  The book especially displeased Gertrude Stein. Hemingway had remained in close touch with her until around 1925, but had since grown to resent her—as he would anyone with any claim on his own genesis as a stylist or public figure. She had apparently declined to review In Our Time, which incensed him. (Clearly she expected him to fail with his first novel, he told Pound, and didn’t want to risk the public association with him.) Plus, she was “cockeyed lazy,” Hemingway had decided, and her image as the creative den mother of the Left Bank irritated him now. None of the expat writers in Paris, including himself, he later reportedly stated, had been looking for a “Mommy” to lead them out of the creative wilderness. She was even too self-obsessed to be angry about The Torrents of Spring as an attack on Anderson, Hemingway claimed. Rather her indignation stemmed from the fact that he had “attacked someone that was a part of her apparatus.” The Torrents affair foreshadowed a nasty public rift that would soon play out between the former teacher and student.

  Of course, no one was more shocked and chagrined by The Torrents of Spring than Sherwood Anderson himself. A week before the book’s publication, Hemingway sent Max Perkins a sealed letter for Anderson and asked him to mail it along with a copy of the book. Perkins was surprised but complied. “What did he say [in it], I wonder?” he wrote to Fitzgerald, but he duly sent it along.

  Anderson deemed Hemingway’s missive “the most self-conscious and probably the most completely patronizing letter ever written.” Hemingway had informed Anderson that Dark Laughter was evidence that Anderson had been “slopping,” and Hemingway was therefore honor-bound to save Anderson from himself: “When a man like yourself who can write very great things writes something that seems to me . . . rotten, I ought to tell you so,” he wrote.

  He felt that he was qualified to do so because he was a “fellow craftsman.” He knew that Anderson’s feelings would likely be hurt, but it was nothing personal. And anyway, who could be hurt by a little satire? Hemingway then trailed off into small talk about the weather in Paris and offered his best regards to Anderson’s wife.

  Anderson read the book. His conclusion: The Torrents of Spring was a failed attempt at humor. Maybe it would have worked if a more gifted satirist, like Max Beerbohm, had written it and whittled it down to, say, twelve pages. Yet Hemingway’s missive had cut him more deeply than his satire did.

  “There was something in the letter that was gigantic,” Anderson later recalled. “It was a kind of funeral oration delivered over my grave. It was so raw, so pretentious, so patronizing that in a repellant way it was amusing.”

  He penned a response to Hemingway, in which he shakily tried to reestablish the old dynamic between them.

  “You . . . speak to me like a master to a pupil,” he wrote. “Come out of it, man. I pack a little wallop myself. I’ve been a middle weight champion. You seem to forget that.”

  He predicted that The Torrents of Spring would only help him and hurt Hemingway. Yet underneath this bravado, there were hints at real pain and surprise.

  “You didn’t sound like [this] when I knew you,” he wrote. “It must be Paris—the literary life.”

  The publication of The Torrents of Spring ended their friendship. A few months later, the two men met again briefly when Anderson was visiting Paris. According to Anderson, he was in his hotel room on his last night in town when he heard a knock on his door. He opened it, and there in the hallway stood Hemingway.

  “How about a drink?” he said.

  The men went to a small bar across the street. Each of them ordered a beer. Hemingway raised his glass.

  “Well, here’s how.”

  “Here’s how,” Anderson responded.

  And then Hemingway drank his beer and strode away. “He had, I dare say, proved his sportsmanship to himself,” mused Anderson.

  Hemingway painted a rosier picture of the reunion for Perkins. “We had two fine afternoons together,” he wrote. “He was not at all sore about Torrents and we had a fine time.”

  Anderson was actually quite sore about Torrents and would be for years. He and Gertrude Stein would talk at length about their ungrateful protégé.

  “Hemingway had been formed by the two of [us],” Stein later recalled, adding that they were both “a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of [our] minds.” Hemingway was, they concluded, a bit of a coward and also a sham; they simply didn’t buy his ultramasculine image.

  “What a book, [we] both agreed, would be the real story of Hemingway,” wrote Stein. “Not those he writes but the confessions of the real Ernest Hemingway.”

  And, finally, they didn’t think that he had understood what they were up to stylistically anyway. He tried hard to seem modern, but to Stein, he “smelled of the museums.”

  More than a decade later, Hemingway’s betrayal still weighed on Anderson. “In the case of Hemmy,” he wrote to his mother in 1937, “there is the desire always to kill.” This was because Hemingway couldn’t “bear the thought of any other men as artists,” and because of his need to dominate the whole field. But Anderson did not lose his respect for Hemingway’s skill with a pen. After reading one of Hemingway’s new short stories in a literary magazine calle
d the Quarter, he wrote to Stein of his admiration. “It was a beautiful story,” he enthused. “Beautifully done.”

  “Lordy,” he added, “but that man can write.”

  THAT APRIL, when the Hemingways had returned from Schruns, Hadley received an invitation: Pauline and Virginia Pfeiffer—now back from the United States—asked her to join them on a road trip down to château country in the Loire Valley. It would be a ladies-only lark: they could stop at Versailles and swing by Chartres; there would be delicious restaurants and overnight stays at the best hotels. Wouldn’t it be lovely for Hadley to have a break from her family obligations? Pauline even offered to bankroll the whole excursion.

  Hadley mulled it over. It would be nice, for once, to go on a trip that didn’t center on fishing or skiing. She accepted the Pfeiffers’ invitation.

  She quickly regretted the decision. Pauline was in a horrid mood as the three of them sped along in Virginia’s car. If Hadley asked a question or made a remark, Pauline shot back a hostile, terse reply. Hadley avoided confronting the situation directly, but she must have had some sense of the root of Pauline’s anger. One evening, with her customary gentleness, she approached Virginia.

  “Do you think Pauline and Ernest get along awfully well?” she asked.

  “Well,” replied Virginia, “I think they’re very fond of each other.”

  Virginia’s tone told Hadley everything she needed to know. The atmosphere among the little group turned even blacker, and the return journey was made in tense silence. Hadley wondered if the Pfeiffer sisters had planned the whole trip as a way to break the news of the affair to her. It has been suggested that Pauline’s hostility toward Hadley may have been compounded by an unwanted and soon-to-be-terminated pregnancy, courtesy of Hadley’s husband, although evidence on that score is circumstantial. Whatever the case, the “fond of each other” remark made it impossible for Hadley to continue in “innocent” silence any longer. Whether or not she genuinely had been unaware of the affair before then, Pauline and Virginia had now forced the issue.