As Everybody Behaves Badly was an international tale that spanned two continents and many countries, I relied on several talented people for assistance in translating works, phrases, and slang from French, Spanish, and Italian: Sophie Capéran, Jean-Luc Giai Piancera, Chiara de Rege, Alex Dickerson, and Ana Herrero. Brooke Wall and Jason Cannon also helped me navigate fishing terminology. I am grateful to each of them.
I could not have undertaken this intensive research effort without the assistance of my A-team of research associates, who tracked down documents, rare and out-of-print books, magazine and newspaper articles, obituaries, unpublished poems, and other materials of that ilk. Alison Forbes—my right-hand woman from the earliest incarnation of this project, a proposed magazine feature—and Abigail Crutchfield Arzoumanov never came back empty-handed, and each always managed to track down the most elusive of contacts. I could not have asked for better bloodhounds. My Harvard-based associate Alexander Creighton made many trips to the Kennedy Library and Museum and Harvard’s Houghton Library, where he transcribed countless letters and manuscripts; no request was too daunting or too minute, nor was any handwriting too idiosyncratic for him to decipher. I am deeply in debt to all three researchers, and I am very proud of their contributions to this work. Melissa Goldstein also has my thanks for helping us to track down elusive, decades-old photos in libraries and archives.
Nor would this project have been possible without my formidable literary agent Molly Friedrich and her team, including Lucy Carson, Molly Schulman, Nichole LeFebvre, and Alix Kaye. From the earliest days of this project, they championed the idea of a young(ish) female reporter taking on the most masculine of subjects, and were unflagging sources of support, counsel, and encouragement throughout every step of the research and writing process. I would also like to thank Glynnis MacNicol, who has been my co-reporter on many assignments and first introduced me to this team; her deeply appreciated contributions to this book are myriad.
I am also extremely grateful to Rosemary McGuinness, Mary Dalton-Hoffman, Margaret Anne Miles, and Lisa Glover of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in helping me with the often tricky administrative, legal, and permissions aspects of this project. I owe many thanks also to our astute and patient copyeditor, Amanda Heller.
Everybody Behaves Badly belongs as much to my adored husband, Gregory Macek, as it does to me. No aspect of this book lacks his imprint: he has been my first-wave editor, my vigilant lawyer, and my most crucial pillar of support. Every night he dutifully listened to the latest snippet from Lost Generation Paris; after each edit to the manuscript was completed, he always had two tumblers and a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle at the ready. We essentially raised a baby daughter and this book together from scratch at the same time—not unlike the coinciding of Jack “Bumby” Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises—and I will long remember this period with fierce poignancy.
Notes
Introduction
ix “Ernest Hemingway, America’s”: “Vanity Fair’s Own Paper Dolls—No. 5,” Vanity Fair, March 1934, 29.
x “The rejection slip”: A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway (New York: Random House, 1966), 57.
x “The Sun Also Rises”: Lorin Stein, interview with the author, January 28, 2013.
xi “Fitzgerald was”: Charles Scribner III, interview with the author, March 11, 2014.
xi “primitive modern idiom”: Paul Rosenfeld, The New Republic, November 25, 1925, 22–23.
xi trains bearing magazines: Literary editor Lewis Lapham says that his father—a Yale student in the 1920s—waited at the station for trains bearing the latest editions of the Saturday Evening Post with new Fitzgerald stories. By the time he was at Yale himself a few decades later, he and his fellow students were waiting at the station for the latest J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker. Lewis Lapham, interview with the author, February 22, 2014.
xii “Scott gave the”: Zelda Fitzgerald to Sara and Gerald Murphy, 1940, quoted in Honoria Donnelly, Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After (New York: Times Books, 1984), 150.
xii “wanted very much”: Archibald MacLeish, Reflections (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 44.
xiii “[He] wanted to be”: Omitted passage from “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 132.
xiii “bitched” his writing: In “Birth of a New School,” a chapter in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway would describe his chagrin at being disturbed at work during those early years. Anyone who interfered with him at Closerie could expect to be treated to this sort of boilerplate response: “You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?” Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, restored ed. (New York: Scribner, 2009), 170.
xiii “family life [was]”: Patrick Hemingway, interview with the author, July 30, 2014.
xiii his wicked wit: Email from Valerie Hemingway to the author, May 26, 2015.
xiii “If you knew”: Joseph Dryer, interview with the author, May 16, 2014.
xiv “Limelight Kid”: Robert McAlmon, quoted in John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2007), 43–44.
xiv “He made men”: Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others (New York: Coward-McCann, 1963), 26.
xiv “When he met”: Valerie Hemingway, interview with the author, December 20, 2013.
xv “Hemingway’s first novel”: Alfred Harcourt to Louis Bromfield, fall 1925, quoted in Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 31, 1925–January 1, 1926, reprinted in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 2, 1923–1925, ed. Albert Defazio III, Sandra Spanier, and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 459. Bromfield apparently transcribed the contents of the Harcourt letter in a missive to Hemingway.
xv “I knew I”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 71.
xv “I would put”: Ibid.
xvi “the country that”: Ernest Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1997), 43.
xvii “It is a”: Ernest Hemingway to Jane Heap, ca. August 23, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:383.
xvii “When I first”: Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! An Autobiography (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 156.
xvii “I’m writing a”: Kathleen Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” reprinted in Hemingway and the Sun Set, ed. Bertram D. Sarason (Washington, D.C.: NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972), 149.
xvii “that kike Loeb”: Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 154, citing an interview with Kathleen Cannell, October 13, 1963.
xvii “But, of course”: Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” 150.
xviii “alcoholic nymphomaniac”: Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 383.
xviii “He had a”: Patrick Hemingway, interview with the author, July 30, 2014.
xviii “a lot of”: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, early handwritten draft, item 193, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
xix “later [became] known”: Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” 145.
xix eighteen translation markets: Email from Scribners representative to the author, April 25, 2014; shocked: Charles Scribner III, interview with the author, April 23, 2014.
xix “Everybody behaves badly”: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway Library ed. (New York: Scribner, 2014), 145.
1. Paris Is a Bitch
3 “I want to”: F. Scott Fitzgerald to Edmund Wilson, quoted in Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 110.
4 “glorious faith in”: Alice Hunt Sokoloff, Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973), 19.
4 to be his “helper”: For example, in one missive to Hemingway, Hadley writes: �
�I really value your ambition so much . . . I want to be your helper—not your hinderer—wouldn’t for anything have your ambitions any different.” Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, January, 13, 1921, quoted ibid., 21–22.
4 “the kind of”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 23.
4 fallen victim to shelling: In a droll commentary on the unglamorous incurring of his wounds, Hemingway depicts the hero of his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, getting shelled while eating a piece of cheese.
4 “227 marks”: “Had 227 Wounds, but Is Looking for Job,” New York Sun, January 22, 1919, reprinted in Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 1.
4 “Men loved him”: Agnes von Kurowsky, quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 49.
4 “the next best”: Ernest Hemingway to his family, August 18, 1918, reprinted in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 1, 1907–1922, ed. Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 130.
5 “It’ll be wonderful”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, August 18, 1921, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 27–28.
5 “eliminated everything”: Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, date unspecified but said to be in response to an April 1921 missive from Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Raymond Carver, “Coming of Age; Going to Pieces,” New York Times, November 17, 1985.
5 a meager living: According to Carlos Baker (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 76), Hemingway was paid $40 a month, or around $530 today.
5 “Cicero is a”: Ernest Hemingway, quoted ibid., 21.
6 “awful dope”: Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, May 30, 1942, quoted ibid., 38.
6 “I saw some”: Donald St. John, “Interview with Hemingway’s ‘Bill Gorton,’” Connecticut Review 1, no. 2 (1968), and 3, no. 1 (1969), reprinted in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 174–75.
6 hundred rejection slips: Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 22.
6 stories of fishing and hunting: Hadley Richardson Hemingway Mowrer to Carlos Baker, quoted in Gioia Diliberto, Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), 133. Hemingway’s starter novel may have been fairly romantic, at least according to its author: decades later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway cast a gauzy glow around the ill-fated work, stating that he had written it when he had the “lyric facility of boyhood” (A Moveable Feast, 71). A maddeningly vague clue about the book’s possible plot resides in a 1921 letter in which Hemingway informed Hadley that the novel contained “real people, talking and saying what they think.” Quoted in Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 169.
6 “all treading on”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, undated but estimated late August 1921, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. There is no way of ascertaining the exact content of Hemingway’s letters to Hadley from this period. She is said to have burned them following the collapse of their marriage. Diliberto, Paris Without End, xix. The volume of letters between the two would likely have been sizable: Hadley alone wrote nearly two hundred letters to Hemingway between November 1920 and early September 1921, which Hemingway kept. Sandra Spanier, “General Editor’s Introduction to the Edition,” in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:xxiii–xxiv.
7 “hulky, bulky something”: Hadley Hemingway Mowrer, quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 75.
7 “bold penniless dash”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, January 13, 1921, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 21.
7 “my sweet little”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, April 1, 1921, quoted ibid., 25.
7 $2,000 to $3,000: In 1921 dollars, $3,000 would have amounted to roughly $40,000 today.
7 “filthy lucre”: Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 78.
7 “There are those”: St. John, “Interview with Hemingway’s ‘Bill Gorton,’” 160.
8 “on the side”: Ernest Hemingway to Grace Quinlan, July 21, 1921, quoted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:290.
8 “Think of how”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, undated, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 27–28.
8 “the best things”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, April 1921, quoted in Carver, “Coming of Age.”
9 “strangely poor”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 60.
9 polite, quiet attentiveness: According to Charles Fenton, who interviewed former Chicago friends and colleagues of Hemingway’s for his 1954 landmark biography of Hemingway. See Charles Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Viking, 1965), 103–4.
9 “never spoke of”: Robert Emmett Ginna, “Life in the Afternoon,” Esquire, February 1962, reprinted in Bruccoli, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, 155.
9 “Thanks for introducing”: Fenton, Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, 104.
9 “knew Hem was”: St. John, “Interview with Hemingway’s ‘Bill Gorton,’” 179.
9 “At this point”: Y. K. Smith to Donald St. John, excerpted ibid., 179.
9 “thoroughly hostile”: Fenton, Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, 104.
9 “You couldn’t let”: Ibid.
9 “That’s foolish”: Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, date unidentified, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 41.
10 “I saw him”: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 30.
10 “Sherwood’s deference”: Ibid., 31.
11 “You see, dear friend”: Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein, spring 1923, reprinted in Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones (New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), 95.
11 “I remember his”: Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 473.
12 twelve francs a day: Ernest Hemingway, “Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris,” Toronto Star Weekly, February 4, 1922, reprinted in Ernest Hemingway: Dateline: Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–1924, ed. William White (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 88.
12 “Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel”: Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, rev. with supplementary chapters and an afterword by Kay Boyle (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 31.
12 expat “inmates”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 83.
12 “We’ve been walking”: Ernest Hemingway to Sherwood Anderson, ca. December 23, 1921, reprinted in Spanier and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1:313.
12 “I do not”: Ernest Hemingway, “Notes and Fragments,” version two of A Moveable Feast, item 186, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
13 “I watched to”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 74.
13 “marvelous strange city”: Hadley Hemingway, interview with Alice Sokoloff, November 27, 1971, quoted in Sokoloff, Hadley, 43.
13 unfathomably affordable: On the affordability of Paris life during this period, lawyer turned expatriate poet and Hemingway friend Archibald MacLeish would later memorably describe the situation: “We were beneficiaries of the inflation that was murdering the French.” He added, “You could practically count on the franc to drop two points against the dollar every month,” leaving Americans with dollars “two points better off” every thirty days. MacLeish, Reflections, 26.
13 poules: The literal translation of poule is “hen.” A particularly expensive prostitute was amusingly called une poule deluxe.
13 “treated like a”: Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour: An Autobiography (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), 372.
13 Editors back home: Press services with Paris bureaus during the 1920s included Reuters, the United Press, and the Associated Press; local papers also established offices, including the Philadelphia Ledger, the Chicago Tribune, and the Brookl
yn Eagle. The Paris Herald was especially prone to hiring journalists who were also aspiring novelists.
13 “Around the Studios”: William Wiser, The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 24.
14 “Paris is, perhaps”: “All Paris for the Asking: When to Come, What to See, Where to Conquer,” Vogue, January 1, 1925, 68. Vogue’s information bureau was located in the magazine’s Paris office at 2 rue Édouard VII; readers were invited to stop by if “there is anything they want in Paris or out of Paris that they are unable to find.” Ibid., 100
14 “Paris is the”: Ernest Hemingway, “The Mecca of Fakers,” Toronto Daily Star, March 25, 1922.
14 “The scum of”: Ernest Hemingway, “American Bohemians in Paris,” Toronto Star Weekly, March 25, 1922.
15 “sour-faced, scurvy swine”: McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 38.
15 “Many [expats]”: Jimmie Charters, This Must Be the Place: Memoirs of Montparnasse, ed. Hugh Ford (New York: Collier, 1989), 102.
15 suicidal patron: Ibid., 119.
16 “dinners, soirees, poets”: Hart Crane, postcard to a friend, quoted in Tony Allan, Americans in Paris (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1977), 95.
16 Paris was like cocaine: Malcolm Cowley to Harold Loeb, July 14, 1922, Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, Princeton University Library.
16 “[At first] I”: McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 114.
16 “the town best”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 156.
16 “Your hair, Henri!”: Ernest Hemingway, “Wives Buy Clothes for French Husbands,” Toronto Star Weekly, March 11, 1922.
Everybody Behaves Badly Page 32
