“Hemingway gave Frances my conversation,” she decided. “From family wheezes, jokes and so on I had developed practically an individual language.”
Even though The Sun Also Rises shocked her, Cannell was not entirely surprised. After all, she had felt all along that Hemingway had a vicious streak. Loeb had been the guileless one when it came to Hemingway, not her. And now, thanks to his naïveté, they would both suffer for the rest of their lives. Furthermore, it was humiliating to be portrayed as such an inept gold digger—much less the mistress of such a weak, contemptible bore. And on a final note, Cannell thought the book was “awful” from an aesthetic point of view.
Nor was Donald Stewart particularly impressed by the book’s artistic merits. Back in California, he got a copy and found himself uneasily transported back to the Pamplona misadventure.
“It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skillfully done travelogue,” he later recalled. “What a reporter, I said to myself.”
He was baffled by the commotion the book was stirring up in the loftier publications and among his comrades back on the East Coast. The Sun Also Rises was, in Stewart’s opinion, journalism with just enough fiction—such as Lady Brett’s affair with Pedro Romero—to permit Hemingway to get away with calling the book a novel.
“It didn’t make too much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius,” he remembered.
Predictably, the easygoing Bill Smith seemed least perturbed about having been used by Hemingway as fiction fodder. After the Pamplona trip, he had been trying to write his own short stories, with no real success, but this did not prevent him from exulting in the accomplishment of his boyhood friend. Like Hadley, he’d had a front-row seat for Hemingway’s ambitions since the early days. If Smith had been “utilized”—to borrow the word that Hemingway had borrowed from him—to help make this breakthrough possible, so be it. Furthermore, Smith did not, like Stewart, consider The Sun Also Rises a “complete copying” of the Pamplona events. He and Loeb and the others were just springboards for carefully crafted characters, he asserted.
“Hemingway was not a diarist,” he said later. “He was an artist.”
BY THE NEW YEAR, the sales statistics for The Sun Also Rises were looking impressive. By January 1927, the book had gone into its fourth printing. Nearly 11,000 copies had been sold.
“The Sun has risen,” Perkins wrote to Hemingway, “and is rising steadily.” By April, 19,000 copies had sold.
These were not blockbuster sales—at least when compared to the performance of Fitzgerald’s debut novel: This Side of Paradise had sold 35,000 copies within the first seven months. The Sun Also Rises did not hit that mark in its entire first year of publication.
Yet it did not matter. For Perkins, the latest “bad boy” gamble had clearly paid off: the reception of The Sun Also Rises had been thunderous and portended even bigger things for his new author. Beyond the critical reception, the novel had clearly begun to capture the hearts and minds of a generation. It quickly became a “craze” among the college crowd, to whom the book had been heartily advertised. News that Sun had been “suppressed” in Boston likely helped its reputation with that demographic. Five years earlier, everyone had wanted to imitate well-bred Fitzgerald characters; Ivy League hijinks and cocktail adventures at the Plaza Hotel had been all the rage. Now everyone wanted to be Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, or even Hemingway himself.
“Young women of good families took a succession of lovers in the same heartbroken fashion as the heroine,” recalled expat writer Malcolm Cowley. Their male counterparts tried to get “as imperturbably drunk as the hero” when they weren’t shadowboxing and warding off imaginary bulls with sweaters and jackets. Both sexes soon “all talked like Hemingway characters.”
For this group, the idea of being part of a “lost generation” took hold hard and fast. The epithet was quickly moving toward capitalized status: the Lost Generation. In subsequent generations, similar umbrella identities would be ascribed to each era’s under-thirty crowd: the Beat Generation, Generation X, the Millennials, and so on. But the Lost Generation was the forerunner of modern youthful angst banners, and The Sun Also Rises was its bible. That said, no one in that demographic seemed particularly glum about being “lost.” Membership in this new club had an undeniable glamour.
“Most of those who used the phrase about themselves . . . knew they were boasting,” recalled Cowley. “They were like Kipling’s gentlemen rankers out on a spree.”
Lost Generation lifestyle became a dark, sexy alternative to Fitzgerald’s fizzier vision of youth culture. Though Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s subject matter overlapped somewhat—namely, renegades from society behaving badly—Lost Generation decadence had nothing to do with dinner dances and eating clubs. Rather, it was all about purposeful dissipation. With Jake and Brett as their lodestars, self-fashioned Lost Generationers were spiritually obligated to defy convention, embrace hangovers as holy, and indulge in sexual adventures—the more ill-fated the better.
New York had been the altar at which Fitzgerald’s flock had worshipped, but Paris was clearly the Lost Generation capital. Soon disciples of The Sun Also Rises were traveling there, descending on the cafés and bars mentioned in the novel. Veteran expats began to notice a new clientele cropping up at the Dingo: “young Americans [who] were doing their best to imitate Jake and his ‘let’s have another one’ friends,” recalled expat writer Samuel Putnam.
If tourists used to gape at literary luminaries like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, now people tried to spot Hemingway’s characters in real life. Once Kitty Cannell was sitting at La Coupole when someone approached her and exclaimed: “Why you’re Kitty Cannell! I’d recognize you anywhere from [the] descriptions.” It was not the only time she was thus outed.
“If I had a dollar for each person,” she said, “who came up to me and demanded: ‘Did you really hold Harold Loeb up for such a sum, in such a place, on such a date and in such a way?’—it would have been unnecessary to hold anyone up for years.”
IN THE WEEKS that followed the book’s release, Hemingway seemed uncharacteristically subdued about the excitement surrounding his novel. Here he was, at his own coronation at last. He was already discussing future projects with Perkins. Important critics had been rhapsodic about him. The literati on two continents could not stop talking about him. A growing legion of worshipful young subjects were writing him letters; he was even becoming a bit of a heartthrob among female readers. He had, in short, achieved the success and notoriety he’d hoped for.
Yet his personal affairs kept him mired in misery—until Hadley suddenly caved in. “The three months separation is officially off,” she wrote to him in a mid-November missive, bereft of the usual nicknames.
Hemingway should start divorce proceedings right away, she informed him. His welfare was no longer her concern. Rather, it was in his own hands—and God’s. He could see Bumby as often as he liked.
“[Come] take him out sometimes if you feel like that kind of thing,” she wrote, “so that he will know you are his real papa.”
Hemingway immediately agreed. Her decision was brave, unselfish, and generous, he told her, adding that they had been like “two boxers who are groggy and floating and staggering around and yet will not put over a knock-out punch.” Now that Hadley had delivered that punch at last, all parties could start the process of healing and recovery.
All in all, it was a tender letter. In it Hemingway acknowledged that The Sun Also Rises was essentially their second child together. Accordingly, she would henceforth receive all royalties from the book.
“It is really your right and due,” he told her.
He was also creating a will. Under its terms, all income from his books, past and future, would be held in trust for Bumby, under Hadley’s supervision. He hoped that Bumby could help make up for some of the hurt he had caused Hadley, who was “the best and truest and loveliest person” he had ever known.
Hadley received a preliminary judgment of divorce on January 27, 1927, just as The Sun Also Rises was about to go into its fifth printing. She later claimed that she felt liberated.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, but I had lots of confidence in myself,” she said. “I knew that I could get along and I knew that I could still get some fun out of music.”
That April she took Bumby back to America to see her family. When she got there, she felt “like a million dollars and free as air.” Pauline, she had decided, was a better fit for Hemingway after all. She had certainly shown that she had the requisite toughness for the job. As a husband, Hemingway had proven “a very difficult horse to ride,” as his son Patrick would put it.
Fitzgerald offered his support from America, where he was attempting to make progress on his novel. He was delighted with the press response to “The Sun ect.” Also, he had reread the novel and reported to Hemingway that he “liked it in print even better than in manuscript.” (Zelda, by contrast, considered it a novel about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.”) Nevertheless, he was chagrined but unsurprised by the news of the failure of the Hemingways’ marriage. “I’m sorry for you and for Hadley + for Bumby and I hope some way you’ll all be content and things will not seem so hard and bad,” he wrote, and promised that he would continue to look out for Hemingway’s interests at Scribner’s.
“I can’t tell you how much your friendship has meant to me during this year and a half,” he added. “It is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me.”
Years later, Fitzgerald ruminated on the relationship between Hemingway’s writing and Hemingway’s wives.
“I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book,” he told Morley Callaghan over dinner in Paris. For The Sun Also Rises—his first big book—there had been Hadley. Hemingway had since then published his next novel, written in the company of Pauline.
“If there’s another big book,” Fitzgerald ventured, “I think we’ll find Ernest has another wife.”
13
Sun, Risen
SOON AFTER The Sun Also Rises was published, expat editor Samuel Putnam ran into Hemingway at Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain. Hemingway was by this time perceived as “edging away” from Montparnasse and the world that had made him famous. High-ceilinged and airy, filled with white light, the Deux Magots was an appropriately majestic backdrop for him. It had for decades been the home café of many international literary and artistic heavyweights. Now Hemingway was joining their ranks.
He and Putnam had a few drinks together.
“It did not take me long to discover that the somewhat shy and youthful reporter whom I had met in Chicago had vanished,” Putnam later recalled. “In his place was a literary celebrity.”
Hemingway spoke at length about the art of writing, even giving Putnam a tip or two.
“The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare to the bone,” he said. “And that takes work.”
Had he been influenced by Gertrude Stein in this matter? Putnam asked.
Sure, Hemingway admitted unenthusiastically, he had learned something from her, but not that much. On the subject of Pound, Hemingway was “rather pleasantly, and youthfully, patronizing,” recalled Putnam. He claimed to have been far more influenced by the Old Testament in the King James Version.
“That’s how I learned to write,” he said. “By reading the Bible.”
By then, another acquaintance noted, Hemingway had—like many of his readers—begun to talk like one of his own characters. Apparently he still visited some of the old haunts in the Quarter, for when Arthur Moss ran into him at the Select, he found that Hemingway the “shy youth had become Tarzan of [the] printed page.”
It’s hard to say whether these were sour grapes testimonials or merely the observations of other expat writers who—like Hemingway—were shrewd chroniclers of the characters in their milieu. Hemingway was not even in Paris much that winter or the subsequent spring, once he and Hadley settled the terms of their divorce. When Pauline returned to Paris, she and Hemingway departed for a lengthy skiing holiday in Gstaad, a popular winter resort destination among chic expats. Gone were the “Black Christ” days of the humble Hotel Taube in Schruns. Instead, the couple checked in to the regal Grand Hotel Alpina. They stayed in Switzerland until March; a few days after returning to Paris, he left on a tour of Italy.
Hemingway had always evacuated Paris during the dreary winters, but now this onetime shimmering Olympus must have begun to look like the backwater playing fields of his youth. He had simply outgrown the city—along with all of the mentors, publishers, and luminaries who had backed him since he first arrived there with Hadley years earlier.
The Sun Also Rises had elicited a wide array of reactions from his discarded Paris champions. Even though Hemingway had cut the Bill Bird–inspired portion of Jake Barnes’s biography, Bird still detected with amusement some of his habits in the character. Hemingway’s second publisher, Robert McAlmon, had nothing kind to say about either the book or its author.
“Beginning with the ‘Sun Also Rises’ I found his work slick, affected, distorted characterization, himself always the hero,” he later wrote. (The feeling was mutual: Hemingway had recently dismissed McAlmon as a “son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toe nail” and even considered making him the subject of a punishing little short story.)
Ford Madox Ford reacted elegantly to his bumbling cameo as Braddocks. Despite Hemingway’s send-up, Ford would eventually write a preface to Hemingway’s next novel, in which he would note that he hadn’t particularly cared for The Torrents of Spring or The Sun Also Rises but still had the highest regard for Hemingway’s artistic abilities.
Gertrude Stein was another matter entirely. According to Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises made her despise him because it officially turned the tables on their relationship: now he was the teacher and she was the student. The novel had, he claimed, schooled her in the art of dialogue, and she could not abide having been surpassed by her former protégé.
“It never occurred to me until many years later that anyone could hate anyone because they had learned to write conversation from that novel that started off with the quotation from the garage keeper,” Hemingway wrote, although he conceded that the breakdown in their friendship was in reality “more complicated than that.”
Soon after the novel came out, he made light of his supposed debt to her in a satirical piece for The New Yorker titled “The True Story of My Break with Gertrude Stein”—another public announcement that he’d severed ties with a former mentor, as The Torrents of Spring had broadcast his repudiation of Sherwood Anderson. Even if Stein never responded to Hemingway’s declarations against her, she was indignant that he had claimed the mantle of bullfighting expert for himself.
“He heard about bull-fighting from me,” she later informed the public in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She had long loved Spanish bullfights and dancing and had been there first; what was more, she had the photos to prove it. Also, Stein claimed, Hemingway had recounted to her conversations that he later put into The Sun Also Rises, and that she and Hemingway had “talked endlessly about the character of Harold Loeb,” possibly implying that she had influenced Hemingway’s portrayal of him in the novel. It was the beginning of an ugly feud that played out in dueling books and other publications for more than a decade.
If Stein’s indignation toward her former pupil was justified, Hemingway also had a right to suspect that she was jealous. Unlike her, he didn’t have to anoint himself a genius; others were bestowing that crown upon him. He was the one negotiating new projects with a major American publisher, while she had resorted to publishing her work herself.
In fact, Hemingway was now utterly in demand. Emissaries from other industries were suddenly approaching him, seeking to tap the potential earning power of Ernest Hemingway, influencer and voice of the L
ost Generation. Inquiries and entreaties poured in. In February 1927 Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins from Gstaad to say that he needed help fielding all of the demands. From the magazine world alone, he had received requests from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair (which had rejected his satirical bullfight story two years earlier), Harper’s Bazaar, and many others. Even College Humor was tugging on his sleeve. He began using Scott Fitzgerald’s agent, but the job would prove too big for one man. The growing Hemingway team grew confusing even to Hemingway.
“I now have two British, one each of Danish, Swedish, French and German publishers, apparently two agents in England, another agent in Germany (all volunteers, all unsolicited and all collecting a percentage) [and] at least two agents in France (both volunteers),” he reported later that year to Perkins. “All these splendid people engaged in sending cables which have to be answered at great [crossed out] some cost and the utter disruption of a morning’s work.”
Broadway and Hollywood also pursued him. Within a few weeks of the book’s publication, Perkins advised Hemingway that two “movie people” had contacted him about The Sun Also Rises, although he warned that the adaptation would likely entail extensive rewriting. He was equally wary about the outreaches made by a well-known Broadway producer.
“These people are the most eccentric and vacillating in the world next to the movie people,” he warned Hemingway.
Hemingway decided that he could tolerate eccentric vacillators if the price was right.
“[I] would not care what changes they made,” he informed Perkins, and directed him to investigate further. “For the movie rights I think you should ask a good sized sum,” he advised. Around $30,000—at a minimum—sounded about right to him. “Take whatever you can get in cash,” he added.
Fitzgerald predicted that nothing would come of the film inquiries. “No movie in Sun Also unless [the] book is [a] big success of scandal,” he prophesied to Hemingway. He was right. Even though The Sun Also Rises had indeed scandalized elite crowds in Paris, London, and New York, it would still take more than thirty years for it to reach the silver screen.
Everybody Behaves Badly Page 28
