Shortly thereafter, Millay left Maine to take preparatory classes for passing her entrance exams at Vassar College. On the basis of “Renascence,” Millay was readily accepted into the upper echelons of New York literary society. Unfortunately, the experience overwhelmed her: in the middle of a lecture by publisher S. S. McClure, Millay fainted and fell out of her chair.
At Vassar, the timid Millay came out—in more ways than one. She was four years older than the other freshmen in her class, and, as a published poet, more famous than anyone else on campus (including her professors). Millay drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and seduced her fellow students with her crimson hair, fair skin, and naturally red lips. “Honestly, Vincent, you have a gorgeous red mouth,” one of her classmates (and lovers) told her. Before she graduated in June 1917, she had written most of the poems for her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. Aria da Capo, a play written by Millay, opened in December, the same month her poetry collection was published. Both were critical and commercial hits. The New York Times drama critic called Aria da Capo “the most beautiful and interesting play in the English language now to be seen in New York.”
Millay and Parker never crossed paths: by the time Parker was raising hell with the Round Table, Millay had already married a Dutch businessman and moved out of New York City.
Parker shuttled between Europe and the United States for several years before finally divorcing her estranged husband in 1928; Edwin died five years later of an accidental overdose of sleeping powder. Then, sometime after the stock market crashed in 1929, the Algonquin Round Table broke up. No one is quite sure when they officially disbanded, but one story has Edna Ferber walking into the Algonquin in 1932 and finding a family from Newton, Kansas, dining at their old table, the Vicious Circle nowhere to be found.
Parker believed their accomplishments paled in comparison to Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s. “Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were,” she said years later. Parker is the only member of the Round Table whose literary celebrity has stood the test of time.
To shore up her finances, Parker moved to Los Angeles to write for MGM studios. MGM sent out a press release that welcomed “the internationally known author of Too Much Rope, the popular novel” to Hollywood. In other circumstances, she might have just laughed off the mistakes in the press release. However, the line about her being a novelist cut deep. She had been contracted by Viking Press to write a novel for release in the fall of 1930. Despite working on it in Switzerland, when the time came to turn in a draft to the publisher she had nothing. (Perhaps she shouldn’t have chosen to write in the European country with the highest per capita consumption of alcohol?) Viking settled for a short story collection instead of a novel.
Following a brief stint writing for the movies, she returned to New York City. She had a short affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald while Zelda was hospitalized. When Parker first met Fitzgerald years earlier, he told her he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia. Parker, however, “never found [Zelda] very beautiful. She was very blond with a candy-box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale, and there was something petulant about her. If she didn’t like something, she sulked; I didn’t find that an attractive trait.” According to gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, Parker and Fitzgerald’s affair was an act of compassion on Parker’s part—and one of desperation on Fitzgerald’s.
Parker married actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell in 1934. They moved to Los Angeles, where they were hailed as a Hollywood power couple. While Parker was undeniably the draw for studios hiring them—she initially commanded $1,000 a week, while her husband drew $250—Campbell was no slouch: he would eventually publish nineteen of his own short stories in The New Yorker. They were a good team. Parker, who hadn’t lasted more than a few months during her previous stint on the West Coast, grudgingly settled in and made California her home.
Parker and Campbell went to a dinner party at author Nathanael West’s home on December 13, 1940. West and his bride of eight months were christening their new house in North Hollywood. The mood was upbeat. They reminisced about the long-gone Jazz Age and sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
Fitzgerald died of a heart attack eight days later on December 21; the day after his death, the Wests were killed in a car crash.
Campbell was superstitious and worried that he and Parker would be next. Bad things happen in threes, he told Parker, and holding the dinner party on Friday the thirteenth was an omen of ill fortune. His fears were unsubstantiated; the other shoe did not drop for a very long time.
Parker wrote and appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur in 1940 and adapted Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan as The Fan in 1949. Her Hollywood success, however, was overshadowed by her political associations, which leaned toward communism and other controversial stances.
She was aggressive in soliciting support for causes she believed in, and alienated many friends over the years, including her old Round Table colleagues. Editors frequently rejected her stories or requested she rewrite them because she was putting in blatant propaganda. “God damn it,” an editor told her. “Why can’t you be funny again?”
Though she was never an official member of the Communist Party, she wound up on the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. The FBI compiled a thousand-page file on her alleged communist activities, but they never called her before Congress and ultimately dismissed her as “not dangerous enough.”
Parker and Campbell never had any children together. Privately, people questioned if it was possible for Parker to have anything in common with children or anyone else who didn’t drink. Campbell engaged in an affair with a married woman in Europe while serving in World War II and divorced Parker in 1947. Three years later, Campbell and Parker reconciled—and were remarried. “What are you going to do when you love the son of a bitch?” Parker allegedly said.
In some ways, Parker was still following in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s footsteps. Millay’s marriage to Eugen Jan Boissevain was plagued by infidelities on both sides (though historians have likened their arrangement to an open marriage). Millay’s political views also bled into her poetry, leading many to dismiss her work as propaganda. And, like Parker, Millay had a drinking problem.
After leaving New York City for the country, Millay continued to write and publish; she even worked on an English translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, published in 1936. In her preface to that book, Millay wrote that Baudelaire’s habits “unfortunately stand between the poem and the reader.” Little did she know that she, too, would soon fall victim to a habit similar to Baudelaire’s laudanum addiction.
In 1940, doctors prescribed Millay morphine to relieve pain stemming from a car accident four years earlier. Millay was powerless against the opium derivative. She was so hopelessly addicted at one point that she had to set an alarm to wake her every hour, on the hour, for an injection. In addition to morphine, Millay used a host of prescription and nonprescription barbiturates such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Demerol. While she struggled with substance abuse, she wrote very little besides patriotic poems in support of the war effort.
Millay entered rehab in 1944; she exited sober but depressed. One of her lovers, Arthur Ficke, was dying. She couldn’t write a line to save her life, and worried that drugs had stolen her muse. In September 1945, her depression bottomed out. “I’m through,” she wrote. “I’m not going to live just in order to be one day older tomorrow.” Ficke passed away in November, devastating Millay further and sending her back into the clutches of drugs and alcohol.
She reentered rehab in February 1946, and was discharged after treatment to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent two months—followed by yet another relapse. In 1947 she finally managed to get six months of sobriety under her belt, which allowed her to resume writing. “I am clean of drugs now and clean of alcohol,” she wrote to a friend. She let it slip t
hat she was still chain-smoking. “A person who has been as wicked as I have been, would feel a bit too naked perhaps, without at least one little vice to cover her,” she wrote.
The years had taken their toll, however, and she lost much of the vibrancy that had been her trademark in the Roaring Twenties. As her former lover Edmund Wilson recalled after seeing her in 1948, “She had so changed in the nineteen years that, if I had met her unexpectedly somewhere, I am sure I should not have known her. She had become somewhat heavy and dumpy, and her cheeks were a little florid. She was terribly nervous; her hands shook; there was a look of fright in her bright green eyes.”
Millay’s husband died suddenly of lung cancer the following year, and she was subsequently hospitalized after a nervous breakdown. Her doctors were worried she might harm herself, but she swore that she was fine. Things went downhill quickly upon her release. She snapped her sober streak and drowned her sorrows with wine, gin, and Seconal. On October 19, 1950, her housekeeper found her body at the bottom of the stairs. Millay had either fallen or thrown herself down the stairs while she was drunk, breaking her neck. She was fifty-eight.
Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, also left a question mark when he passed away. Despite remarrying, Parker and Campbell had mostly lived apart until 1963, when Campbell fatally overdosed on barbiturates. Those closest to him suspected suicide, but no note was found. Campbell was fifty-nine; his estranged wife, seventy-one.
At the funeral, one of Parker’s neighbors asked the widow if there was anything she could do for her. “Get me a new husband,” Parker said dryly.
“I think that is the most callous and disgusting remark I ever heard in my life,” the shocked neighbor said.
“So sorry,” Parker said. “Then run down to the corner and get me ham and cheese on rye and tell them to hold the mayo.”
While Parker, like Flaubert, was a notoriously slow writer, her drinking slowed her down even more. “I’m betraying my talent,” she told a friend. “I’m drinking. I’m not working. I have the most horrendous guilt.” Parker supplemented her scotch with sedatives like Veronal, which she took in a bowl with cream and sugar. Parker spent years working on Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox, her novel-in-progress, with nothing to show for the effort.
Still, she brushed off any attempt at intervention. When a doctor warned her that if she didn’t stop drinking, she was headed to an early grave, she said, “Promises, promises!” Robert Benchley, her old colleague from the Round Table, once urged her to seek help via Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to a meeting and found it “perfectly wonderful.”
“So are you going to join?” Benchley asked.
“Certainly not,” she said. “They wanted me to stop drinking.”
Parker died of heart failure on June 7, 1967, in New York; she never finished Sonnets in Suicide.
13
Bullfighting and Bullshit
“In order to write about life, first you must live it!”
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) outlived most of his hard-drinking, hard-living contemporaries. Hell, he outwrote his buddies F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, based on his sheer amount of literary output (if not literary merit).
“You have to work hard to deserve to drink it,” Hemingway was quoted as saying in a magazine ad for Ballantine ale. “When something has been taken out of you by strenuous exercise, Ballantine puts it back in.” (His “strenuous exercise” included writing, drinking, fishing, drinking, hunting, and drinking.) There’s a world of difference between the young, thoughtful Hemingway of his days in Paris in the 1920s and the macho caricature that he played up in the beer ad. It begs the question, where did his need for macho validation come from? And at what point did he let it take over both his writing and his drinking?
Hemingway had a slightly unconventional childhood in Oak Park (a quiet Chicago suburb), at least as far as gender roles go. His mother dressed Hemingway and his sister Marceline as girls one week and as boys the next for their first two years. Additionally, Hemingway’s mother gave her son a girl’s haircut and called him “Ernestine.”
Still, he seemed like a well-adjusted, middle-class boy who spent his summers hunting, fishing, and camping at the family’s summer home in northern Michigan. Perhaps his biggest problem was with his own name, which he associated with The Importance of Being Earnest, the classic play by the effeminate Oscar Wilde.
Following high school, he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star after showing an aptitude for editing his high school newspaper and yearbook. His career was put on hold in 1918 when he responded to a Red Cross recruitment drive and enlisted as an ambulance driver in the First World War. Hemingway had been too young at the start of the war to be drafted, and he saw this as his chance to get close to the action. He was sent to Italy—“a silly front”—where he was wounded by enemy mortar fire while driving an ambulance.
According to Hemingway’s recollection, he somehow found the strength to carry other wounded men to safety some 150 yards away “with both knees shot thru” and “over two hundred flesh wounds.” In actuality, he collapsed from his shrapnel wounds before saving anyone and was carried off on a stretcher. He spent six months in recovery before returning to the United States, where he joined the Toronto Star Weekly as a U.S. correspondent and married his first of four wives.
Hemingway corresponded with Sherwood Anderson, who convinced him to move to Paris. The exchange rate was favorable for Americans, and many interesting literary and artistic characters were beginning to congregate there, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso. Hemingway was introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in 1924, and the two went on to have a long, tortured relationship with many ups and downs. It was also during these early years in Paris that Hemingway went to Spain to see his first bullfight, a spectacle that became associated with his name over the years thanks to his treatise on the sport, Death in the Afternoon. Bullfighting, he believed, was “of great tragic interest, being literally a matter of life and death.” After being blown away by The Great Gatsby, Hemingway decided that he had to write a novel of his own. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926 to critical acclaim. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway joked that he would subtitle his book A Greater Gatsby, as a nod to his friend for inspiring him.
It was also around this time that his personal life began to unravel. In January of the next year, he divorced his wife. He had been seeing another woman and married her that May. It was a sequence of events he would repeat several times, as if he were caught in a time loop and forced to relive his doomed relationships over and over. As Sir James Goldsmith once quipped, “When a man marries his mistress, it creates a vacancy.”
Hemingway left Paris in 1928 for Key West, Florida. It was a bittersweet homecoming: later that year, his father committed suicide. “I’ll probably go the same way,” Hemingway told his sister.
In the 1930s, Hemingway “began to drink more compulsively than ever, especially those double frozen daiquiris at the Florida bar in Havana,” his friend Tom Dardis wrote. “He set the house record for the number of these consumed in a single drinking session.” Hemingway even imported absinthe from Cuba. In a 1931 letter to a friend, he wrote, “Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.” The drinking didn’t interfere with his writing, though: “I have spent all my life drinking, but since writing is my true love I never get the two things mixed up,” he confided to his friend A. E. Hotchner.
The drinking still took a toll, as Hemingway’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He seethed with anger when a critic, Max Eastman, gave a less than enthusiastic review to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon in 1932. When Hemingway ran into Eastman some years later in the offices of editor Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway ripped open his own shirt to show Eastman that he was a real man (because real men have hair on their chests, obviously). He stuffed a copy of the offending review in Eastman’s face and
wrestled him to the ground.
Hemingway bragged in the press about his hunting expeditions—he once killed four hundred rabbits in one day, allegedly—and Vanity Fair even printed a collection of Hemingway paper dolls in 1934, featuring interchangeable matador, caveman, bon vivant, fisherman, and soldier outfits. Zelda Fitzgerald was not a fan. He’s “all bullfighting and bullshit,” she said.
Somewhere beneath Hemingway’s impenetrable machismo was a well-hidden sadness. In his short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” one of his characters asks, “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing and a man was nothing too. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many just have it.” Hemingway tried to use common sense and intelligence to battle the darkness, but was it enough? “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” Hemingway once admitted.
Perhaps nothing frightened Hemingway more than the opposite sex. Still, he had the time and inclination to marry four different women. “Only one marriage I regret,” Hemingway told Dardis. “I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ‘What will you have, sir?’ And I said, ‘A glass of hemlock.’ ”
Of course, he couldn’t stay away from women for very long. “When I was young I never wanted to get married, but after I did, I could never be without a wife again. Same about kids. I never wanted any, but after I had one, I never wanted to be without them.”
In 1940, he published his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. After a decade during which he had published only one novel (To Have and Have Not), his new book was the big fish that his publishers—and the public—had been waiting for. It sold more than half a million copies within a matter of months.
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