98 “a fine, charming fellow”: F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, ca. May 22, 1925, reprinted in Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, 113.
7. Eve in Eden
99 “must write”: Ernest Hemingway, Along with Youth manuscript, item 239a, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
100 “perpetual drunk”: Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound, ca. June 8–10, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:346. In the end, neither Benchley nor Fisher came on the trip. The complete entourage included Hemingway, Hadley, Harold Loeb, Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Duff Twysden, and Pat Guthrie.
100 “Hemingway and his”: Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” 148–49.
100 “damned good”: Ernest Hemingway to Harold Loeb, June 21, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:353.
101 “We made love”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 276. One of Loeb’s friends later recalled that Loeb had been suffering from a “shocking toothache” throughout the week, which may have hampered his amorous activities, but Loeb did not mention the affliction in his memoirs. Cody, “The Sun Also Rises Revisited,” 267.
101 “[He’s] a good”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 272.
101 “Should we go”: Ibid., 275.
101 “with all [her]”: Ibid., 280–81.
101 “Pat has sent”: Ernest Hemingway to Harold Loeb, June 21, 1925, paraphrased in Loeb, The Way It Was, 281, and reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:353.
101 “low feeling which”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 281.
101 “I expect I”: Lady Duff Twysden to Harold Loeb, 1925, reprinted ibid., 282.
102 a question that: Various Hemingway contemporaries have weighed in over the years on the topic of a possible sexual relationship between Hemingway and Twysden. Hadley maintained to biographers that she believed the relationship had remained platonic. Bill Smith later told a biographer that he felt Twysden was “wild about Ernest,” but he did not think they had a sexual relationship (quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 150). Donald Ogden Stewart told a different biographer that it seemed the two were having an affair, but he wasn’t certain either way (paraphrased in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 70). Twysden’s third husband, Clinton King, claimed Twysden had told him that she and Hemingway never had sex: first of all, he stated, “Hemingway was not her type,” and second, she demurred out of consideration for Hadley and Bumby (Clinton King to Bertram Sarason, quoted in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 42–43). Kitty Cannell would scoff that this was just Twysden’s polite way of holding Hemingway at bay without offending him (Cannell to Sarason, paraphrased in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 54). Hemingway’s friend A. E. Hotchner asserts that they came close to consummation but never had intercourse (interview with the author, December 11, 2013). The bottom line, as Valerie Hemingway puts it, is that “we just don’t know” (interview with the author, December 20, 2013).
102 “By all means”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 281.
103 “I did not”: Loeb, “Hemingway’s Bitterness,” 120.
103 “Oh, you’re here”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 283.
103 “Pat broke the”: Ibid., 284.
103 “cluttered and ordinary”: St. John, “Interview with Donald Ogden Stewart,” 191; “Pamplona seemed to”: Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! 144.
104 “Someone had left”: Ibid., 143–44.
104 “Evidently Duff was”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 286.
104 Hemingway, Loeb, and Smith: The memory of the broken ribs earned in the previous year’s adventure prevented Stewart from following them; Guthrie also declined. “Old Pat would have been too tight [drunk] for that kind of thing,” Stewart later said. St. John, “Interview with Donald Ogden Stewart,” 194.
104 “Perhaps he felt”: Loeb, The Way It Was 289, 294.
105 “too keen on”: Ibid., 290.
105 “Hem seems to”: Ibid., 290, 291.
106 “For an instant”: Ibid., 292.
106 Even the barber: Ibid.
106 “Why don’t you”: Ibid., 293.
106 “Obstinacy kept me”: Ibid.
107 “there was too”: Ibid., 294.
107 “He was sincerity”: Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 88–89. Hemingway adds that he had tried “to describe how [Ordóñez] looked and a couple of his fights in a book one time,” a reference to his translation of Ordóñez into the character Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. In his later book The Dangerous Summer, he further stated that he had “written a portrait” of Ordóñez and “an account of his bullfighting in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer, 50.
108 “very small and”: Barnaby Conrad, interview with the author, November 12, 2012.
108 “He did everything”: Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, July 16, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:360–61.
108 trying to cultivate Ordóñez: Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, 304.
108 “I was amazed”: Juanito Quintana, quoted in Michener, Michener’s Iberia, 2:493.
108 “[She] wrapped it”: Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, July 15, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:360.
108 “One would have”: Loeb, “Hemingway’s Bitterness,” 121.
109 “I suppose you’d”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 294–97. This was not the only time Hemingway would bring someone to the brink of violence and then make a jarring attempt to smooth things over before the situation spiraled out of control. Morley Callaghan recalled a ghoulish Paris sparring session in which Hemingway took repeated punches on the mouth: “His mouth kept on bleeding. He loudly sucked in all the blood . . . [S]uddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face. I was so shocked I dropped my gloves . . . We stared at each other. ‘That’s what the bullfighters do when they’re wounded. It’s a way of showing contempt,’ he said solemnly . . . [S]uddenly he smiled. Apparently he felt as friendly as ever . . . but I was wondering out of what strange nocturnal depths of his mind had come this barbarous gesture.” And yet, as with Loeb, Hemingway would somehow succeed in retaining the loyalty of the other man. Callaghan recalled that later that evening, as the two sat in a bar, “I felt closer than ever to him” (That Summer in Paris, 125–27).
109 “I was terribly”: Ernest Hemingway to Harold Loeb, ca. July 12, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:359–60.
110 “But I knew”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 297.
110 “camaraderie fell to”: Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! 144.
110 “overdid the heartiness”: Loeb, The Way It Was, 297–98.
110 “it occurred to”: Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! 144.
8. The Knock Out
111 “the intensive sun-tanning”: Ibid., 145.
111 “Let the pressure”: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 71.
111 The story almost: It has been speculated that Hemingway may even have begun writing the story that would become The Sun Also Rises while still in Pamplona. Carlos Baker thought that the earliest material—the book’s first two scenes—had “possibly [been] set down in Pamplona as early as July 6–12,” but conceded that this view was “conjectural” (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 589).
112 events onto paper: The exact date on which Hemingway began the novel remains unclear. Hemingway maintained in later accounts that he had first put pen to paper on his twenty-sixth birthday—July 21—but this was most likely an embellishment meant to dramatize further the already theatrical sprint writing of the novel. He later wrote to his mother that he had been working on the novel for up to five hours a day since leaving the fiesta on July 13, “including days on the train” as he and Hadley traveled around the country to attend various bullfights and ferias. Ernest Hemingway to Grace Hemingway, September 11, 1925, r
eprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:388.
112 “Have been working”: Ernest Hemingway to William B. Smith, July 21, 1925, reprinted ibid., 364.
112 “Some of it’s”: Ernest Hemingway to William Smith, July 27, 1925, reprinted ibid., 365. In an August 5 missive to Smith, Hemingway would inflate the 1,200 words a day figure to 2,000.
112 a “story”: It is not certain that Hemingway knew he was drafting a novel when he first started working. Hemingway’s friend A. E. Hotchner says that Hemingway told him that he had originally begun the novel “as a journal of what had happened,” but then turned it into fiction (interview with the author, December 11, 2013). Or he may have originally conceived of the work as an extended short story. By midsummer, however, it had become clear that Hemingway was on his way to penning a novel at last.
112 “I’ve written six”: Ernest Hemingway to Sylvia Beach, August 3, 1925, reprinted in Defazio, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 2:368.
112 thirty-three-page draft: In different biographies, this loose-leaf preamble has variously been described as being thirty-one or thirty-two pages. The surviving manuscript in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (item 193) numbers thirty-three pages total. The first page contains an epigraph, the second a typed list of characters. The remaining thirty-one pages are the handwritten manuscript, with the title “Cayetano Ordonez, Niño de la Palma” written at the top and underlined. This page is what Hemingway called page one; he wrote the page numbers at the upper left and circled them, all the way through his page thirty-one.
112 “[Harold] was in”: Ernest Hemingway, early handwritten draft of The Sun Also Rises, item 193, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
113 “Pat stood wobbly”: Ibid.
113 everyone was badly behaved: That is, except for Hadley, whose brief appearances were innocuous filler, and Bill Smith, who at this point had little presence and functioned mostly as a silent sidekick to “Hem.”
113 “bulls have no”: Ibid.
113 “I will not”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
113 “There is a”: Ernest Hemingway, early handwritten draft of The Sun Also Rises, item 193, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
114 French school notebook: That first notebook featured grid-lined pages and a tan cover—not blue, as often reported. The entire manuscript for the novel would be written in seven notebooks like these, some of French origin, others Spanish (probably acquired in Valencia). Notebooks I, V, VI, and VII were of French origin: their covers proclaimed “L’Incroyable, 100 Pages, Cahier” and measured 8.8 inches by 6.8 inches. The back covers displayed helpful “Tables de Multiplication” and “Division du Temps” (“Siècle = 100 ans,” for example) and guides to Roman numerals. Notebooks II, III, and IV were Spanish. The following information was printed on their covers: Papeleria, E. Bort Pellicer, Libros Rayados, Zaragoza, 18—Valencia. Like the French notebooks, the Spanish notebooks featured tobacco- or caramel-colored covers and were roughly the same size as the French books: 6.5 inches by 8.6 inches. Color images of the notebook covers and information about their dimensions provided by the Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The seven notebooks together make up item 194 of the collection.
114 “to understand what”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
114 “There is nothing”: Ibid.
114 “the best-known person”: Charters, This Must Be the Place, 72.
114 “Jake Barnes”: During the writing and editing of the manuscript, Hemingway went back and forth about whether to render Jake in the first or third person; in a later draft, Jake drolly informs the reader, “I did not want to tell this story in the first person but find that I must . . . so it is not going to be splendid and cool and detached after all.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, final galley, chap. 2, item 202, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
115 “the novel will”: Ibid.
115 borrowed a line: First-draft material later deleted from the manuscript reveals that Hemingway likely co-opted other biographical details from the life of Bill Bird, the publisher of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time. Jake gave the reader a formal introduction to his own background: he was a war veteran (discharged from a British hospital in 1916) and a newspaperman, and had co-founded a syndication service called the Continental Press Association, of which he was now European director. Ibid. Bill Bird had co-founded the Consolidated Press Service in 1920 and then taken over its Paris bureau.
115 “magnificent”: Sokoloff, Hadley, 82.
115 “hated newspaper work”: Jack Goodman, John Milton, Alan Graber, and Bill Tangney, “Hemingway Tells of Early Career; States That He ‘Won’t Quit Now,’” Daily Princetonian, April 14, 1955, reprinted in Bruccoli, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, 100.
115 “To damn people”: Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound, ca. November 14, 1926, reprinted in Sanderson, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 3:143.
115 “When you are”: Ernest Hemingway to Ernest Walsh, January 2, 1926, reprinted ibid., 10.
115 “Lady Brett Ashley”: When it came to conjuring up a name for his leading lady, Hemingway appears to have fretted a bit. While she largely remained “Duff” up through the very last passages of the novel’s first full draft, the book’s author knew he would eventually have to assign her an alias. “Lady Doris” was one rejected possibility. He came up with a long pearl necklace of a name: “Elizabeth Neil Brett Murray,” from which “Brett” would be extracted to replace “Duff.” The matter of her married name also seems to have caused some consternation. Her titled husband would go through various iterations as well: Lord “Durham” (crossed out), Lord “Lambert” (also rejected), Lord “Henry Marlowe” (nixed), and finally “Robert Ashley”—although he would be referred to several times in the book’s first draft as “Sir Joseph Anthony.” (Getting to “Anthony” may not have required a huge stretch of the imagination: it was the name of Twysden’s son.) Hemingway ultimately made a note to himself that the “name generally used” for Duff would be “Brett Ashley,” although she would have to wait for revisions to appear under that alias. Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, item 193, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
115 “Duff had been”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
116 “too expensive for”: Ibid.
116 “clean bred, generous”: Ibid.
116 “Brett was damned”: Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 18.
116 forty-nine words: Hemingway’s four-line description of Brett also revealed him to be an astute fashion journalist by calling attention to her jersey sweater—which had only recently been appropriated by women’s wear designers. It was one of many 1920s sartorial badges of the independent New Woman, according to Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (interview with the author, March 6, 2014).
116 “[He] had various”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
116 “Mike Campbell”: Pat Guthrie would ultimately be assigned the name “Mike Campbell” in a later version of The Sun Also Rises, although he is referred to alternately as “Patrick” or “Pat Guthrie” as well as “Michael Gordon” in the first draft.
117 “Gerald Cohn”: It has been speculated that Hemingway co-opted the name “Gerald” from Gerald Murphy,
although it would prove perhaps a bit too Irish for a Jewish New Yorker.
117 “How that kike”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
117 “Frances Clyne”: Unlike the other characters drawn from real-life prototypes, Cannell’s character was never referred to by her actual name even in the draft. Hemingway assigned her the moniker “Frances Clyne” in the very first notebook. “Clyne” may have been a derivation from “Cannell,” with their four shared letters.
117 “lived on gossip”: Ernest Hemingway, first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Notebook I, item 194, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
117 “Why did he”: Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 42.
118 “Well, it was”: Ibid., 25.
118 “I got the”: Fraser Drew, “April 8, 1955 with Hemingway: Unedited Notes on a Visit to Finca Vigia,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1970, reprinted in Bruccoli, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, 95.
118 “poor bastards”: Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, 48.
118 “capable of all”: Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction: Ernest Hemingway,” 77.
118 “Good advice, anyway”: Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 26.
119 “Impotence is a”: Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, December 7, 1926, reprinted in Sanderson, Spanier, and Trogdon, Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 3:179.
119 proceeds to snub: This last transaction would be cut from the published version and later repurposed for a vicious portrait of Ford in A Moveable Feast; John Dos Passos’s cameo would also be edited out. Before being cut entirely, however, Dos Passos would be assigned a draft alias: “Alex Muhr.”
Everybody Behaves Badly Page 37
