by Andrew Farah
Though three of Hemingway’s short stories were first published in the Transatlantic Review, Hemingway vilified and insulted its editor. Ernest had even worked proofreading manuscripts for him in Paris, but his latelife assessment of Ford Madox Ford is one of the cruelest in Feast. Ford is described as a habitual liar with malodorous breath, in fact, “fouler than the spout of any whale.” Ford’s stench drives Hemingway to hold his breath when near him “in a closed room.” If he has to visit with him, he prefers the open air.17 In Hemingway’s eyes, Ford Madox Ford, whose real name was Ford Hermann Hueffer,(he had changed it after World War I) is a phony, a liar, and drunkard. Legend has it there was a dispute over money that left Hemingway with enormous contempt for Ford, and once again, Hemingway proves he could get even, no matter how long it took.
And John Dos Passos is the “pilot fish,” swimming along with the rich, scouting talent for the upper class. The metaphor is clear enough, but the language conjures up two unpleasant biological images: pilot fish feed on parasites, and labeling someone as a “fish” is usually a way of mocking facial features. Similarly in Feast, he describes Wyndham Lewis as having “a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him.”18 This is probably the only assault in Feast that is justified, as Lewis had titled his 1934 essay on Hemingway “The Dumb Ox.” The review is every bit as insulting and misinformed as his title suggests. Ernest was so outraged when he saw it that he smashed a vase of tulips at his beloved Shakespeare and Company. He insisted on paying Sylvia Beach 1,500 francs for the flowers, vase, and thirty-eight soaked books.19 Though he probably went too far in describing Lewis as having the eyes of an “unsuccessful rapist,” whatever that means, Ernest should be allowed some retaliation in Feast for the “dumb ox” insult, and one can easily see how Lewis reminded him of a frog.
But Dos Passos deserved no such treatment. Dos Passos is now the forgotten man of literary modernism. He was considered at one time America’s Joyce, and his photo appeared on the cover of Time a year before the impressionistic painting of Hemingway deep-sea fishing graced it. The two men shared so much life together that Hemingway at one point even tried to fix Dos up with his sister Ursula (who found him unattractive, nervous, and “jumpy”).20 This was not a problem; Dos soon married Hemingway’s longtime friend and former romantic interest Katy Smith.
During the Spanish Civil War, Dos became disillusioned after the kidnapping and execution of his friend Jose Robles. And he soon realized the “cause” that had brought them over there was simply proxy Stalinism with all its attendant horrors. He put the question directly to Hemingway: “what’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?” Unable to face the two possible answers, that he had been duped or that he had been complicit, Hemingway regressed to attacking the messenger: “Civil liberties, shit! Are you with us or are you against us?”21
Further egged on by the unexplained dislike of his girlfriend at the time, Martha Gellhorn, of Dos, from that point forward Hemingway was solidly against his longtime friend. The couple even spread rumors of Dos’s “cowardice” in Spain, which were certainly untrue. Dos put himself at great risk trying to track down his missing friend (who, unknown to Dos, had been executed by the time he arrived there). The worst of Dos’s transgressions was the caricature of Ernest as an “Indian-like boy” with dirty fingernails in his 1951 novel, Chosen Country, but Ernest had long before assigned Dos to enemy status. And, sadly, once he broke off the friendship, he was never close to another artist in his league. Hemingway was surrounded thereafter only by sycophants and hangers-on.
And as a man nearing sixty, reflecting on his Paris days, he found that dementia accentuated both his aggression and his fears and forced his inventive recollection into the narrow, dead-end path of vengeance. But Hemingway could not savage Dos for sins he had not yet committed. So he reduced their Paris years together to the sole memory of Dos’s sycophantic hobnobbing. Dos’s evil deed from the 1920s was simply introducing Ernest to a circle of people richer than he was (that is, Pauline). Once again, Hemingway was the victim of events that eventually ruined his marriage, and Dos was the Iago.
Hemingway never shied away from satire, and he could be goodnatured or cruel or both in one sentence. And he seemed to delight in sucker-punching acquaintances and friends. Characters in The Sun Also Rises read as a “who’s who” of Hemingway’s friends, enemies, perceived enemies, and casual acquaintances from his Paris years. Despite the fact that Harold Loeb, Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson all lobbied publisher Horace Liveright to accept In Our Time,22 Hemingway seemed to write The Sun Also Rises with one goal in mind: “to tear that bastard Loeb apart.”23
The Torrents of Spring was his right-handed lead punch at Sherwood Anderson, the notable who opened all doors to him before he had ever published a single word. Indeed, without Anderson, there might never have been a Hemingway. And agents from Scribner’s told him flatly that his original manuscript of To Have and Have Not was too libelous to publish. But what clinicians and family often observe in dementia is the exaggeration of preexisting traits—a naturally generous person when becoming demented often loses judgment and starts to give away their money and possessions; an instinctively assertive person may become violent. Exaggerated violence took the form of verbal attack and insult in Feast. The Paris sketches display the effects of disinhibition from dementia combined with Hemingway’s fondness for assault. The passages range in brutality from blatant to more than blatant.
The least vehement but most prescient is likely the tenth sketch, “With Pascin at the Dome.” It features Hemingway’s encounter with Jules Pascin, a painter who had agreed to illustrate a book of Hemingway’s “dirty poems,”24 and his models at the time, two sisters. Pascin was a representational artist who generally worked in soft colors. He painted dolllike young ladies who all shared youthful faces—some shapely, most rather plump. The sisters at the Dome were plenty attractive; one enjoyed modeling her tight sweater for Hemingway at the table while needling the drunk Pascin. Hemingway was, by his description, cool and detached, taking it all in and never seduced or even tempted by the girl’s game. Hemingway had portrayed himself as the ever loyal husband, although the “Madame Louisette” business card found among his Paris notebooks may argue otherwise.25
Pascin behaved like an abusive, sloppy drunk. Ernest ends the sketch by mentioning the painter’s death but not elaborating on the details. But Jules is connected to Hemingway’s circle of family and acquaintances who chose death at their own hands—Pascin was just forty-five, suiciding roughly five years after the encounter in Feast would have occurred. Hemingway’s reflection on Pascin led him to conclude in the text that “the seeds of what we will do are in all of us.”26 Pascin’s death outdid Hemingway’s in terms of dramatics: he hung himself in his studio after first cutting his wrists and writing a message to a past lover on the wall with his blood. His will split his estate between his wife and his mistress.
The most controversial aspect of the making of A Moveable Feast was delved into by the Hemingway scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Corbin, the foremost expert on the work; she believes that the famous Ritz Hotel trunks never existed. The story is legendary, almost magical—the long-lost trunks bring to life the Paris days for an author now ready to write his much-anticipated memoirs. But the weight of physical and psychological evidence indicates that the Ritz “discovery” was indeed a fantasy and in some sense a conspiracy.
There is first the impracticality of a trunk, which was either labeled as Hemingway’s or somehow known to the staff of the hotel as obviously his property, being simply tucked away unnoticed until he arrived decades later (one need only consider how less than eager Paris hotel bellmen are to store and retrieve luggage when you are actually a paying guest with tip in hand). Hemingway had bragged that he had entered Paris with the very first troops during World War II and liberated the Travelers Club and the Ritz the first
afternoon.27 He and Mary stayed there as well, and he wrote to Patrick Hemingway from the Hürtgen Forest in November 1944, “Papa still staying at Ritz (joint we took) when back in town.”28 If trunks were waiting then, his presence was never a secret.
When Hemingway left Paris in 1930, he was already a public figure, and as his fame grew it would have been fairly easy to track his whereabouts with a letter or call to his publisher and then to ship his belongings to him. Furthermore, was it one trunk or two? Hotchner claims he was present at the very moment in Paris when “We opened the trunk and it was a treasure trove of manuscripts.”29 Yet Mary described the Ritz Hotel trunks as “two small, fabric-covered, rectangular boxes both opening at the seams (containing) blue—and yellow-covered penciled notebooks and sheaves of typed papers, ancient newspaper cuttings.” Mary gave other details—the locks were rusted and were easily “pried open,” and the contents also included “bad watercolors done by old friends, a few cracked and faded books, some musty sweat shirts and withered sandals. Ernest had not seen the stuff since 1927, when he packed it and left it at the hotel before going to Key West.”30 But Ernest left in March of 1928 for Key West. And if they were two “small” boxes, it is unlikely they contained paintings, sweatshirts, and sandals in addition to all the manuscripts later claimed by Mary and others.
But most damning is the evidence that when he did leave Paris, his possessions were scattered among four apartments, When he and Hadley separated, Ernest moved into Gerald Murphy’s studio apartment in the rue Froidevaux, but he still kept the apartment he and Hadley had shared in the rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs (until June 1927) and kept some of his belongings there. He and Pauline moved to their own apartment at 6 rue Férou, while Hadley moved to her new one at 35 rue de Fleurus. She wrote to him in 1926 about coming to get his “suitcases, etc. They are all piled up in the dining room.”31 It is clear that Hemingway had belongings in all four apartments, so why the need for a fifth place for storage?
Just like many others who have searched through the biographies and the many documents and letters at the Hemingway Library, I can find no evidence that Ernest and Pauline actually stayed at the Ritz, even after they had given up their apartment in the rue Férou. It seems highly unlikely he would store trunks at a hotel where he was not staying, no matter how many times he may have frequented the bar. When Tavernier-Courbin wrote to the Ritz management in 1980, she learned that the “books indicating items left for storage for the years 1926 and 1928 have been destroyed.” The management also stated that “Old employees of the Ritz recall that Mr. Hemingway often left things at the hotel between trips but, no one remembers that he left anything for thirty years.”32
Hemingway never used the word “trunk” as far as is documented and wrote only that “I found stuff here that has been in storage for 30 years. Good stuff for you and Mss. of The Undefeated, Fifty Grand, most of In Our Time and Men Without Women all holograph and Big Two Hearted River in the copybooks I used to write it in the café. Plenty stuff to make the trip worthwhile. Bough[t] some good Vuitton bags packed the stuff all day yest.… Some is pretty exciting to see again.”33
The letter was to Lee Samuels, a figure in Hemingway’s business dealings on a variety of levels. One was arranging for the sale of original Hemingway manuscripts. Thus, the letter Ernest sent was essentially a business proposal with an exciting context. The columnist Leonard Lyons reported in 1957 that the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms was among the famous Ritz finds; however, it was well known that Hemingway gave this manuscript to Pauline’s uncle Gus Pfeiffer in 1930. It seems undeniable that the famous “Ritz Hotel trunks” were evocative rather than material.34
Mary was primarily responsible for crafting the legend of the Paris trunks after Ernest’s death, as she understood the historical and financial aspects of her husband’s memoirs. In her 1964 account, the Paris staff was threatening to send the trunks to the incinerator, but by the time she wrote her memoir, How It Was, in 1976, she “recalled” that the Ritz staff “made a speech to Ernest, its tone so formal they had obviously rehearsed it. It was now thirty years or more since monsieur had left with them two pieces of luggage, one rather small, one large, enjoining them to care for them well since they contained important papers. In their opinion it was now time to relieve them of the responsibility.”35 Ernest never mentioned such a dramatic speech. Clearly her recollection was more than inventive.
Ernest’s psychological need for creating the myth of a “Paris trunk” is also clear. At the time he was writing A Moveable Feast, a time that Hemingway understood to be close to that of his death, he was seeking forgiveness from Hadley. Because of his fatalistic thinking, he believed he was moving ever more quickly toward his demise. We know also from his manuscript that Pauline was on his mind, but he chose to delete her section, as this was Hadley’s book. Pauline had died in 1951, soon after Ernest argued with her by the phone over the arrest of their son Gregory, usually reported as involving a “drug incident” (in reality it was an arrest for cross-dressing).36 She had flown from San Francisco to Los Angeles to check on her son and to get the full story. The next night, Ernest received her call from her sister’s house in Los Angeles; it was midnight in Cuba. According to Pauline’s sister, Jinny, the conversation started out calmly enough, but soon Pauline was “shouting into the phone and sobbing uncontrollably.”37
Pauline had suffered from headaches and hypertensive episodes so severe that her systolic pressure reached 300. She did get some sleep after the heated call but woke at 1 A.M. with severe abdominal pain. She was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital and died on the operating table three hours later.
What was unknown to Ernest and even to the doctors who treated her was that Pauline had a rare abdominal tumor, a pheochromocytoma. This tumor is known to secrete adrenaline and to elevate blood pressure to dangerous levels. This was the cause of her intermittent headaches and hypertension over some months, and when the tumor released adrenaline in the night her blood pressure spiked. Pauline was under anesthesia when her tumor stopped pumping out adrenaline. Her pressure dropped precipitously, and, because of the effect of the anesthesia, it was impossible for her blood pressure to recover to normal levels. She died of shock while the surgeons searched for a bleeding vessel in her abdomen, which they presumed was the cause of her pain.
Jinny and Gregory both believed that Ernest’s rant had elevated her blood pressure even further and killed Pauline. During their last visit, Gregory (with his wife, Jane, and infant daughter) minimized his arrest, stating it was “not really so bad.” Ernest angrily shared that it was more than bad, asserting that it had killed his mother.38 While departing, Gregory flatly told his father, “You killed my mother.” They remained mutually repelled like two electrons for the rest of their lives. Ernest, in turn, blamed Gregory and his arrest for the death. In Ernest’s depressed and ruminative mind of the late 1950s, he was no doubt a murderer.
But Ernest deleted the chapter in A Moveable Feast that included Pauline. The Paris book was about Hadley, and the central event that he came to mythologize from his years with her with was her loss of his first stories.
In early December 1922, Hadley had packed all of the manuscripts that she could find strewn about their Paris apartment, including the carbons, in a small valise and headed for the station to board an overnight train to meet her husband in Switzerland. At the Gare de Lyon, she handed the luggage to a porter, only to find the valise missing when she got to her compartment. She frantically searched all the other compartments with the conductor, but it was soon obvious the case had been stolen. When she met Ernest at Lausanne, she was sobbing so uncontrollably that she was unable to even tell him what was wrong.
Some biographies report that he left that very night and headed back to Paris to look for any left-behind manuscripts or carbons in the apartment, taking their lead from the text of Feast itself: “I was making good money then at journalism, and took the train to Paris. It was true alright and I remember what
I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true.” What exactly he recalls he did “in the night” was either a hint at scandal to add spice to his fictionalized memoir or his own confused recollection. All biographical evidence suggests he stayed in Lausanne with his wife. Two friends, Lincoln Steffens and Guy Hickok, were returning to Paris on the next train and asked about the lost case on his behalf when they reached the Gare de Lyon.39 For Ernest and Hadley it was an enjoyable and eventful trip, with plenty of skiing on the slopes above Chamby, and the couple returned to Paris almost a month later, in mid-January, 1923. It appears that Ernest showed great sensitivity toward his wife at the time of the loss, and whatever anguish they shared was short lived. Perhaps he took Ezra Pound’s advice that if a lost story’s form was correct or right at first, he should be able to reconstruct it from memory. If that failed, the story lacked proper construction and would never be right.40 Hadley had done him a favor, and later on he admitted as much: “was probably good for me to lose early work.”41
Whether good for honing his craft or not, the subject of a writer’s work being lost or destroyed would reappear in future manuscripts. David, the protagonist in Garden of Eden, would see his stories burned, and a deleted passage from Islands in the Stream equates lost manuscripts with the author’s metaphorical castration; he sleeps with a pillow between his legs to ease the “recovery.” His reflection on the lost case made the event seem more traumatic as the years advanced.
Finally, he was ready to offer his peace to Hadley, and creating the Paris trunk was the key. In a crossed-out passage from Feast, he wrote: “We had been armored together by two things. The first was the loss of everything I had written over a period of four years except for two stories and a few poems” (emphasis added).42 He could never expect the Ritz “find” to be accepted as the same valise she had managed to lose in Paris train station years ago, but at the basest level the return of lost manuscripts from the same period was more than his olive branch to Hadley: this time it was profitable. In 1922, she lost a pile of unedited stories no one would publish. The book that would become A Moveable Feast was listed on Scribner’s forthcoming book list in 1960 and 1961—and was much anticipated.
