Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (23 page)

There were also considerable differences in their characters and way of life. Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the
New Yorker,
found Fitzgerald’s manner “remote” and thought he was “set apart by his elegance.”
³
Fitzgerald always stayed in luxurious hotels; and his expensive apartment in Paris isolated him from ordinary life and placed him among the rich American tourists of the Right Bank. Hemingway preferred small pensions and modest flats, which in Paris put him in touch with local people on the more bohemian Left Bank. Fitzgerald had an English nanny for his daughter; Hemingway had a French peasant to look after his son. In the summers, Fitzgerald went to the Riviera to lie on the beach; Hemingway went to Spain to see the bullfights and live the experience he would write about in
The Sun Also Rises.
Fitzgerald could compete with Hemingway as a writer but not as a sportsman. Unlike the Murphys, Dos Passos, Don Stewart and Max Perkins, Fitzgerald never followed Hemingway to Spain or went fishing with him in Key West.

But Fitzgerald, who emphasized his extravagance, seemed wealthier than he actually was while Hemingway, who exaggerated his poverty, was not as poor as he claimed to be. Though his wife had a comfortable trust fund, Hemingway said he had to catch pigeons in the public park so they could have some food for dinner. When they first met, Hemingway must have envied and desired Fitzgerald’s literary fame, material success and luxurious way of life, which provided a striking contrast to his own obscurity and rather pinched existence. But he made a virtue of this difference, compared his own frugality to Fitzgerald’s wastefulness and ironically offered to send all his royalties to his friend’s villa on the Riviera.

Fitzgerald lived lavishly and squandered his talent; Hemingway (who lectured him about this, as Fitzgerald had lectured Lardner) lived in relative poverty so that he could dedicate himself to art. Hemingway was absolutely sure of himself; Fitzgerald was full of self-doubts. While Fitzgerald had unbounded admiration for Hemingway’s talent, Ernest (like Edmund Wilson) was extremely critical of Scott’s faults. Though Fitzgerald seemed to toss off stories while Hemingway struggled to perfect every word, Scott contrasted his own plodding struggle to Ernest’s natural ability. As he later wrote Perkins: “I told [Hemingway], against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility.”

Fitzgerald seemed to have a much weaker character, but he was actually more courageous than Hemingway when faced with adversity. Hemingway was ruthless with anyone who interfered with his work or his wishes. When his marriages went bad, he selfishly discarded a series of sometimes rich and always devoted wives. Ill equipped to deal with disease and depression, he finally shot himself. Fitzgerald, by contrast, endured poverty and neglect during the 1930s and remained loyal to Zelda in her madness.

II

Despite these significant differences, Fitzgerald and Hemingway initially had a good deal in common. Both writers came from a middle-class Midwestern background, had a strong mother and weak father, were close in age, were married, had one small child, lived an expatriate life in Paris and were devoted to the craft of writing. They traveled in the same social circles and, through mutual introductions, shared many of the same friends. Ezra Pound had introduced Hemingway to Scott’s Princeton classmate Henry Strater. Don Stewart ran with Hemingway and the bulls in Pamplona and went trout fishing in Burguete, was instrumental in getting
In Our Time
published in New York and was a model for Bill Gorton in
The Sun Also Rises.
After Hemingway joined Scribner’s, Max Perkins also became his close friend, and often acted as intermediary between the two writers. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald sat at the feet of Gertrude Stein and—along with Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker—enjoyed the hospitality of the Murphys. In the late 1920s both writers became friendly with the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan.

Shortly after they met, Fitzgerald persuaded Hemingway to accompany him on a trip to Lyon to recover the Renault he and Zelda had abandoned on the way to Paris. Under the heading “Most Pleasant Trips” in his
Notebooks
, Scott listed “Auto Ernest and I North.” And in June 1925 Hemingway told Perkins: “Scott Fitzgerald is living here now and we see quite a lot of him. We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon through the Côte d’Or.” Thirty years later, in
A Moveable Feast
, Hemingway, who had no tolerance for weakness or for behavior he considered unmanly, gave a radically revised and contemptuously affectionate account of that ludicrous car trip. In his posthumous time bomb he portrayed Fitzgerald as hostile to the French, childish and gauche, wasteful and irresponsible, quarrelsome and irritating, hypochondriac and insecure, dependent upon and dominated by Zelda, a complacent and self-confessed cuckold, a drunkard, an artistic whore, a destroyer of his own talent.

Fitzgerald, however, at that time and later on, had nothing but admiration for Hemingway’s integrity and fiction, and adopted him as his artistic conscience. After their drive through Burgundy, he told Gertrude Stein: “He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate” and called himself (with a characteristic sense of inferiority in relation to Hemingway) “a very second-rate person compared to first-rate people.” When Booth Tarkington met the traveling companions in Paris that year, he thought they got on splendidly—though Hemingway (in his eyes) lacked the Princeton polish: “My impression was of a Kansas University football beef; but I rather liked him. Fitzgerald brought him up and was a little tight—took him away because Hemingway was to have a [boxing] fight that afternoon at three o’clock, though I gathered they’d both been up all night.”
⁴

Fitzgerald liked to tell admiring stories of Hemingway and invest his life with a special touch of glamour. The hero of his four absurd “Count of Darkness” stories was modeled on Hemingway as he might have existed in the Middle Ages. In these tales Fitzgerald portrayed Hemingway as a medieval knight; in
A Moveable Feast
Ernest portrayed the sickly Scott as “a little dead crusader.” Fitzgerald said that he “had always longed to absorb into himself some of the qualities that made Ernest attractive, and to lean on him like a sturdy crutch in times of psychological distress.” The novelist Glenway Wescott, who would soon be satirized as the homosexual Robert Prentiss in
The Sun Also Rises
, exaggerated Fitzgerald’s artistic irresponsibility and personal abasement when he claimed that Scott cared more about Hemingway’s work than about his own. But there is no doubt that Fitzgerald (like Murphy and Archibald MacLeish) hero-worshiped Hemingway. According to Wescott, Fitzgerald “honestly felt that Hemingway was inimitably, essentially superior. From the moment Hemingway began to appear in print, perhaps it did not matter what he himself produced or failed to produce. He felt free to write just for profit, and to live for fun, if possible. Hemingway could be entrusted with the graver responsibilities and higher rewards such as glory, immortality. This extreme of admiration—this excuse for a morbid belittlement and abandonment of himself—was bad for Fitzgerald.”

Fitzgerald took several practical steps to advance Hemingway’s career and introduced him to Scribner’s just as Shane Leslie had once introduced him to that firm. In October 1924, six months before he met Hemingway and while living in Saint-Raphaël, Fitzgerald (still vague about details) told Perkins about the first
in our time.
It had been published, with Pound’s help, by William Bird’s Three Mountains Press in the spring of 1924. “This is to tell you,” Fitzgerald wrote, “about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris, (an American) writes for the
transatlantic review
& has a brilliant future. Ezra Pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris, at some place like the Egoist Press. I haven’t it here now but it’s remarkable & I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.”
⁵

Fitzgerald had urged Wescott to write a laudatory essay to launch Hemingway. When Wescott (more concerned about his own career) refused, Fitzgerald wrote an enthusiastic review of
In Our Time
in the
Bookman
of March 1926. He had been tremendously impressed by the autobiographical revelations and the high art of these violent tales about bullfighting, criminals, war, politics and executions, “felt a sort of renewal of excitement at these stories” and, in a notable tribute, said he had read them “with the most breathless unwilling interest I have experienced since Conrad first bent my reluctant eyes upon the sea.”

On Fitzgerald’s early recommendation Perkins had expressed serious interest in the second
In Our Time
before he even read the book. But his letter reached Hemingway ten days after he had accepted Boni & Liveright’s offer, which gave them an option on his next three books. In late November 1925 Hemingway rapidly wrote
The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race,
whose subtitle echoed
The Passing of the Idle Rich
(1911) by Frederick Townsend Martin, the father of Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend Townsend Martin.
The Torrents of Spring
was a satire on
Dark Laughter
(1925), the latest book by Hemingway’s friend Sherwood Anderson. Then at the height of his reputation, Anderson was Boni & Liveright’s best-selling author.

Fitzgerald knew that if Boni & Liveright rejected the book, Hemingway would be free to follow him to Scribner’s. He could then publish his nearly completed
The Sun Also Rises
with a more commercially successful firm, acquire a first-rate editor and have an outlet for his stories in
Scribner’s Magazine.
But Fitzgerald, whose loyalty to Hemingway was even greater than to Scribner’s, thought
The Torrents of Spring
was a funny and a salutary book. On December 30 he urged Horace Liveright to publish it: “It seems about the best comic book ever written by an American. It is simply devastating to about seven-eighths of the work of imitation Andersons, to facile and ‘correct’ culture.” On the same day, in a letter to Perkins (who was equally eager to capture Hemingway) Fitzgerald expressed his belief that Anderson’s feeble fiction provoked and deserved Hemingway’s witty and well-executed condemnation: “I agree with Ernest that Anderson’s last two books have let everybody down who believed in him—I think they’re cheap, faked, obscurantic and awful.” Two weeks later, when Liveright (as expected) had rejected the attack on his star author, Fitzgerald emphasized Hemingway’s inexperience with publishers and urged Perkins to take the satire in order to get the new novel: “To hear him talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions—but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cuckoo magazines, and is very young and feels helpless so far away [in Paris]. You won’t be able to help liking him—he’s one of the nicest fellows I ever knew.”
⁶

Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm about the humor in
The Torrents of Spring
was rather surprising because Hemingway (remembering Scott’s drunken visits to his Paris flat) had also satirized
him
as an alcoholic clown: “Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald came to our home one afternoon, and after remaining for quite a while suddenly sat down in the fireplace and would not (or was it could not, reader?) get up and let the fire burn something else. . . . I have the utmost respect for Mr. Fitzgerald and let anybody else attack him and I would be the first to spring to his defense!” In an interview published in April 1927 Fitzgerald alluded to Hemingway’s subtitle and his Indian themes, and despondently declared: “There is now no mind of the race, there is now no great old man of the tribe, there are no longer any feet to sit at.”
⁷

Fitzgerald later recalled that his devotion to Hemingway had—like Anderson’s—been repaid with hostility. Scott sadly observed that he, and especially Ernest, had hardened their carapaces and turned against their friends: “People like Ernest and me were very sensitive once and saw so much that it agonized us to give pain. People like Ernest and me love to make people very happy, caring desperately about their happiness. And then people like Ernest and me had reactions and punished people for being stupid.” Scott and Zelda had not yet begun their fatal decline when Hemingway first met them, but he was able to perceive the warning signs. Unusually vindictive to benefactors, Hemingway felt superior to Fitzgerald (in Oak Park the Irish were usually servants) and tended to bully him, “like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.” In his retrospective recollection of Fitzgerald, the tough Hemingway uses the words “pretty,” “delicate,” “girl,” “beauty” and “beautiful” to emphasize Scott’s effeminate, even decadent good looks: “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful unmarked nose. . . . The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”
⁸

As this passage suggests, Hemingway was drawn to Fitzgerald’s attractiveness and charm. But, unerringly perceptive about human weakness, he also despised Fitzgerald’s worship of youth, his sexual naïveté, attraction to money, alcoholism, self-pity and lack of dedication to his art. Paraphrasing Georges Clemenceau and Henry Adams on American society, Hemingway felt Fitzgerald put so much value on youth that he confused growing up with growing old, never achieved maturity and “jumped straight from youth to senility” without going through manhood.
⁹
Fitzgerald also irritated Hemingway (who misunderstood Scott’s motives) by asking if he had slept with his wife, Hadley, before they were married. By posing this awkward question, Fitzgerald was not prying into Hemingway’s sex life, but trying to understand his own. He really wanted to know if Zelda, who had recently had an affair with Jozan, had been unusual—and immoral—by sleeping with him (and others) before
they
were married.