Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  He got back to New York in January 1919, and was treated as a hero. A reporter recorded admiringly that there were ‘227 wounds’ on his legs, and said he had ‘defied the shrapnel of the Central Powers’ more than ‘any other man, in or out of uniform’. This journalist was also given the impression that he had spent the weeks leading up to the Armistice fighting in the vicinity of Monte Grappa. Considering that from Hemingway’s native Oak Park alone, some 2,500 young men had gone to the war, and fifty-six of them had been killed on active service, it was a feat to attract such attention.

  He returned to Oak Park and paraded his uniform: a photograph shows him on the sidewalk in his officer’s cape and boots, leaning on a cane. He told the local War Memorial Committee that he had been a first lieutenant in the Italian Army and had fought in three major battles. Later, in a 1924 short story, ‘Soldier’s Home’, he wrote candidly about his behaviour during these months. He explains that he had found that ‘to be listened to at all he had to lie’, because ‘his town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities’. His lies ‘were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers’. The truth was that he had hardly experienced the war at all.

  He had a signet ring set with a piece of shrapnel from his leg, and showed it to the kids of Oak Park. He wrote daily to his nurse, but she wrote back from Italy that she had fallen in love with a handsome Neapolitan. Hemingway claimed that when he heard this he ‘set out to cauterize her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone’. In fact at the age of nineteen he scarcely drank – Prohibition was in any case coming into force – and he seems to have had no sexual experience yet beyond ‘petting’. He had, however, developed a terror of homosexuality; he writes in A Moveable Feast of his feelings about it as a teenager:

  I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy … When you were a boy and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with … If you knew you would kill, other people sensed it very quickly and you were let alone.

  He also spoke of ‘the old man with beautiful manners and a great name’ who had visited him in hospital in Italy, ‘and then one day I would have to tell the nurse never to let that man into the room again’.

  *

  While convalescing at his parents’ home he began writing short stories, sending them to the Saturday Evening Post and the other popular papers. There was no question of trying to be a serious author; at nineteen, he simply wanted to make a name for himself and a lot of money. Also, the stories allowed him to live out his fantasies without fear of being called a liar.

  One of the pieces he wrote a little before his twentieth birthday, ‘The Mercenaries’, describes an American army officer, Perry Graves, getting involved with the wife of the Italian ace pilot, Il Lupo, of whom the narrator says: ‘Any school boy can tell the number of his victories and the story of his combat with Baron Von Hauser, the great Austrian pilot. How he brought Von Hauser back alive to the Italian lines, his gun jammed, his observer dead in the cockpit.’ It is the usual boys’ adventure stuff. Graves is found by Il Lupo having breakfast with his wife, and Il Lupo challenges him to a duel: ‘You won’t fight me. You dirty dog, I’ll cut you down!’ Graves takes over the narration:

  If he killed me at that three foot range with his gun I would take him with me. He knew it too, and he started to sweat. That was the only sign. Big drops of sweat on his forehead … ‘Una!’ said the waiter. I watched the Lupo’s hand. ‘Dua!’ and his hand shot up. He’d broken under the strain and was going to fire and try and get me before the signal. My old gat belched out and a big forty-five bullet tore his out of his hand as it went off. You see, he hadn’t never heard of shooting from the hip … I shoved my gun into the holster and got my musette bag and started for the door, but stopped at the table and drank my coffee standing. It was cold, but I like my coffee in the morning.

  The Saturday Evening Post expressed no interest, and another magazine advised Hemingway to try writing from real experience instead. But at nineteen he did not want to. He had been trying to turn his own life into the stuff of a thriller or a dime novel, so he had no wish to be truthful in his writing. Quite apart from this, he had read scarcely any good modern fiction and knew almost nothing worth imitating other than Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903).

  He was also labouring to get out from under a considerable family repression. When his mother discovered that he had been assigned Jack London’s novel in his freshman year at high school, she went before the School Board to protest that ‘no Christian gentleman should read such a book’. His father, meanwhile, was quoted in a local newspaper on the necessity of the adolescent ‘choosing active Christian associates’ and avoiding all temptations, ‘since each step in self-control lends additional strength and beauty to the character’.

  *

  After a while, Hemingway drifted to Toronto and found a sinecure as companion to the son of a wealthy family. He began to hang about the office of the weekly Toronto Star, trying to impress people with stories of his experiences as a Kansas City newsman and his war heroics. Eventually they agreed to print some pieces by him, mostly feature articles about prizefighters, bootleggers, and suchlike. A little later, during 1920, he shifted to Chicago, still wearing his Italian officer’s cape, and found a job of sorts editing a journal for the Co-operative Society of America. A friend gave him a room rent-free in an apartment while he waited for something better to come along.

  Among the crowd that hung about in the apartment was Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, aged twenty-nine, eight years Hemingway’s senior. Her father had shot himself when she was a child, and she had inherited a substantial sum of money, invested in a trust fund from which she drew an income. Hadley, as she called herself, was good-looking in a rather masculine way; a friend describes her as ‘rather on the square side, vigorously muscular … a natural-born “hiker”’. (This is the type to which Hemingway was attracted throughout his life; for example, Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the most passionately described of all his heroines, has cropped hair and looks like a boy.)

  By 1921, Chicago was nearing the end of its much-vaunted literary renaissance. Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg were still producing new work there, but other Chicago successes, Ring Lardner among them, had gone East. The Little Review had moved to New York, as had another more heavyweight Chicago literary journal, the Dial, and Poetry had gone into a decline. However, Sherwood Anderson was still there, at the height of his fame, and Hemingway was befriended by him.

  Anderson’s Gertrude-Stein-influenced style and his facility for writing about tough but credible people certainly impressed Hemingway when he read Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio – a set of stories about small town life. He was more affected, though, by Anderson’s paternalistic advice about how to succeed in the literary life. After getting to know Anderson he began to realise that there were other ways of being a writer besides churning out sensational stuff for the magazines. Anderson introduced him to the work of Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe and made him leaf through Poetry and the Dial. He met Carl Sandburg and began to write his own Chicago-style free verse. It was unremarkable – ‘Cover my eyes with your pinions / Dark bird of night …’ – and both Poetry and the Dial rejected it, but it was a step forward from Il Lupo.

  Hemingway had also discovered the novels of Joseph Conrad, which showed him that high adventure and fine writing could be combined. In the few weeks in which he and Sherwood Anderson saw each other early in 1921, Anderson reinforced this and persuaded him that slick popular fiction was bound to be junk, because the characters had to do and say things that no human being had ever really done or said. Anderson believed that the modernist movement in
literature – especially Gertrude Stein – was not just high art, but really did hold opportunities for fame and commercial success.

  But though the prospect of being a serious writer appealed to Hemingway, there seemed to be no material on which he could work, and the short stones he wrote in Chicago were almost as juvenile as his earlier attempts. One of them, ‘The Current’, written in June 1921 just before his twenty-second birthday, is narrated by Stuyvesant Byng, a man at whom women invariably look ‘with more than approbation’. Byng proposes to Dorothy Hadley, whose hair is ‘the raw gold color of old country burnished copper kettles, and it held all the firelight and occasionally flashed a little of it back’ (Hadley Richardson was a redhead). She laughs ‘tinklingly, like the chiming of one of those Chinese wind bells’, and tells Stuyvesant

  ‘You’re inconstant … You play a good game of polo. But you never would stick to it. One year you were runner-up at the National Open. The next year you didn’t enter. You play lots better polo than at least two internationalists that I know … But you’re not a sticker, Stuy.’ … She stroked his arm again.

  She goes on: ‘Pick something out and make an absolute, unqualified success of it … And then you can come and ask me again.’ He answers: ‘By Gad … I’ll do it.’ Following the advice of his ‘best pal’, he becomes a professional boxer, under the name of ‘Slam Byng, the Hoboken Horror’. In the ring he learns ‘what it was to take punishment and to be hit hard and often’, and eventually comes up against the notorious Ape McGibbons – ‘either of his hands carried the deadly knockout poison’. Dorothy takes a ringside seat for their fight; Byng is nearly beaten by the Ape, but feels that ‘there was a current somewhere. He must go with the current. That was all that mattered, the steady current. The current that made things move.’ (The Gertrude-Stein influence, filtered through Anderson, is evident, though Hemingway is already imposing his own cadences on it.) At the last moment Byng ‘crashed on the Ape’s jaw with the force of a pile driver’, and after the knockout Dorothy rushes up to him: ‘“Oh Stuy!” she sobbed. “You’re so homely and beautiful with your smashed bloody face.”’

  Hadley Richardson thought the story ‘the most wonderfully keen and superbly done thing’. Underneath the crass writing there is certainly a good idea for a plot, but one more suited to P. G. Wodehouse than an apprentice Conrad.

  *

  Hemingway and Hadley were married in September 1921. Shortly afterwards, Sherwood Anderson came back from the Paris trip on which Sylvia Beach had introduced him to Gertrude Stein, and told Hemingway that Paris was the place for serious writers. The financial exchange rate was amazingly favourable, and there was a good cheap hotel in the rue Jacob, right in the middle of everything. Hemingway, who had wanted to get back to Europe ever since the war, needed no further persuasion.

  He decided that Hadley had enough money to keep them both above poverty level, and he persuaded the Toronto Star to agree to take some European reports from him. They sailed for France soon before Christmas 1921, armed with several letters of introduction from Anderson. Arriving in Paris, they followed his advice and took a room in the Hôtel Jacob. ‘Well here we are,’ Hemingway wrote to Anderson. ‘And we sit outside the Dôme Café, opposite the Rotonde that’s being redecorated, warmed up against one of those charcoal braziers … Anyway we’re terrible glad we’re here.’

  * Astonishingly, the carrying-a-man story has been accepted without question by most of Hemingway’s biographers, though Michael Reynolds exposes it in The Young Hemingway (1986).

  3

  No fat, no adjectives, no adverbs

  Hemingway told Sylvia Beach he had a job as ‘sports correspondent’ for the Toronto Star, and he took her and Adrienne Monnier to a boxing match in Montmartre, commentating on the boxers’ tactics with professional expertise. But he had no such job; the Star had merely agreed to take anything he sent them. His time was entirely his own, and with Hadley paying the bills he wanted to concentrate on learning to write really well. In A Moveable Feast he recalls how he would tell himself: ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ Sherwood Anderson and the rejection slips from the Saturday Evening Post had finally persuaded him to get away from sensationalism.

  Anderson’s French translator Lewis Galantière found the Hemingways an apartment on the Left Bank, at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, and they moved in at the beginning of January 1922. It was in the district where Rodolphe lives in Scènes de la Bohème. Hemingway called it the ‘best part’ of the Latin Quarter, but it was about ten blocks from the St Germain–St Michel area and on the extreme eastern edge of the Quartier. Rue du Cardinal Lemoine was a dark, windswept, narrow street running steeply down from the slightly sinister Place de la Contrescarpe towards the river, which could not be seen from it. There was an unpleasantly smelly workmen’s café in the square, and a cheap bal musette (dance hall) stood just below the apartment. Hemingway was irritated by the noise of the accordion.

  He called the apartment ‘a high grade place’, but it was very Spartan. There was no hot water, and he and Hadley had to use a communal ‘squatter’ toilet on the stairs, which emptied into a downstairs cesspool that could be smelt all through the building. Hemingway remembered that Sherwood Anderson in Chicago had rented a hotel room for his writing, away from domestic life, so he followed suit and took a garret in a shabby hotel in the rue Mouffetard, just beyond the Place de la Contrescarpe. (He alleged, on inaccurate evidence, that it was ‘the hotel where Verlaine had died’.) On days when the garret proved too cold to be endured – it was a particularly bone-chilling January – he migrated to the bustling centre of the Latin Quarter, to ‘a good café that I knew on the Place St-Michel’.

  Here, ‘I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait’. (This is the old Hemingway writing in the 1950s about the young Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast.) ‘The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan …’

  He had begun a short story called ‘Up in Michigan’ a few months earlier. It was about a young waitress’s feelings for a blacksmith, and its style was derived from Sherwood Anderson, hence from Gertrude Stein:

  Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it and the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his moustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. She liked it how much D. J. Smith and Mrs Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny.

  Gertrude Stein had used the ‘insistence’ technique non-naturalistically, choosing for repetition words that seemed irrelevant or unimportant, but Hemingway was identifying the element of ‘insistence’ in real speech, the fact that people repeat the same word rather than search for a synonym. This substantiates his claim that he was trying to achieve ‘one true sentence’ – but only this, for in every other respect ‘Up in Michigan’ is thoroughly artificial and non-naturalistic. An incantatory manner has replaced the wham-bam narrative style of the Stuyvesant Byng and Il Lupo stories, and a carefully contrived syntax is being developed, on the principle of ‘unpacking’ the sentence’s meaning piece by piece rather than compressing its ideas or fitting them together.* Meanwhile the subject matter remains the same as in the juvenilia – the worship of he-man masculinity:

  The boards were hard. Jim had her dress up and was trying to do something to her. She was frightened but she wanted it. She had to have it but it frightened her.

  ‘You mustn’t do it, Jim. You mustn’t.’

  ‘I got to. I’m going to. You know we got to.’

  ‘No we haven’t, Jim. Oh, i
t’s so big and it hurts so. You can’t. Oh, Jim. Jim. Oh.’

  In the café on the Place St Michel, with the students and tourists of the Latin Quarter wandering around him, Hemingway ‘was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story … In the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing …’ Later, after he had drunk more rum, ‘the story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it’. (It required far more effort than this suggests; his notebooks from this period are full of false starts and deletions.) Some days, rather than go out to the café, he would light a fire in the hotel room. ‘I had a bottle of kirsch … and I took a drink of kirsch when I would get towards the end of a story or towards the end of the day’s work.’ Alcohol was very cheap, thanks to the exchange rate. ‘I get rum for 14 francs a bottle,’ he wrote to friends in Prohibition-ridden America. ‘I’m drinking Rum St James now with rare success.’ He also tried out ‘an Absinthe, they call it by another name, but it is the Genuwind’.†

  *

  One of Sherwood Anderson’s letters of introduction was to Gertrude Stein. It took Hemingway two months to pluck up courage to deliver it to 27 rue de Fleurus, but eventually he managed it, and an invitation came for him and Hadley to call.

  Gertrude Stein writes: ‘I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man … rather foreign-looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes.’ For his part, Hemingway found Gertrude and Alice ‘very cordial and friendly’, and he and Hadley ‘loved the big studio with the great paintings … and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries’.