Hemingway and French Writers

Ben Stoltzfus

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010644
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authors

In a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: "The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck."

When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, he was an unknown writer from America. The City of Light was where he learned his craft and gained legitimacy. Although much has been written about Hemingway's apprentice years in Paris, little has been published about his literary convergences with French writers. In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway's major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers.

While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway's writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other's works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway's craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled "le style américain."

One

Hemingway and French Literature

The Paris Years, 1922–1928

Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast

It is therefore wholly necessary that this man, if he values being illustrious, bring to the capital his bundle of talent, that there he lay it out before the Parisian experts, that he pay for expertise, and that a reputation is then made for him that from the capital is dispatched to the provinces, where it is eagerly accepted.

—RODOLPHE TÖPFFER, unpublished notes, 1834–1836

France informs Ernest Hemingway’s life and work, from his first sight of land in 1918 to his last visit in 1960. “France,” he said in a piece in the Toronto Star in 1923, “is a broad and lovely country. The loveliest country that I know” (“Franco-German Situation”). The city of Paris and the geography of France would mean a great deal to him, and it was Paris’s artistic and cultural climate, not only the American and British writers he met there, but also the vibrancy of French literature of that period, that influenced his writing. Paris was, after all, the capital of world literary space.

Much has been written about Hemingway’s American and British connections during his apprentice years in Paris, but relatively little has been written about his French contacts and their parallel experiments in the arts—experiments that began in 1896 with Alfred Jarry’s publication of Ubu roi and André Gide’s publication of Les nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth) in 1897. My purpose is to flesh out the Gallic side of the artistic revolution that was taking place between 1896 and 1928—the year Hemingway left Paris and the year he split with his wife Hadley—and to focus on French writers who were working in new and different styles—styles that would have interested Hemingway, and some of which influenced him. Hemingway and French novelists affected each other in a kind of symbiosis. Stendhal’s panoramic battle scene at Waterloo in La chartreuse de Parme and the detached, precise irony of Flaubert’s writing, particularly Madame Bovary and Trois contes, taught Hemingway important lessons about the craft of fiction (Oliver, A to Z 103, 313).¹ Eventually, influence flowed back into French literature when Sartre, among others, praised him for his direct American style, a style that continued to influence French authors into the 1950s and 1960s, when Alain Robbe-Grillet said that the nouveau roman had much to learn from Faulkner and Hemingway.

Hemingway and Hadley Richardson were married on September 3, 1921, and with letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson (the author of Winesburg, Ohio, 1919) to Gertrude Stein; Sylvia Beach, the keeper of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company; and Lewis Galantière, who worked for the International Chamber of Commerce, Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway sailed from New York for Cherbourg on December 8, 1921, on the Leopoldina.

Shortly before Christmas, the young couple moved into a Paris apartment, 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, near the Panthéon. Two years later, after their son was born, they rented an apartment on 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in Montparnasse. It was an attractive street in a nice neighborhood, and a short walk down the avenue de l’Observatoire to the Closerie des Lilas and the Luxembourg Gardens. The apartment was on the second floor and it overlooked the courtyard of a sawmill (Sokoloff 68). For more than six years, Paris was Hemingway’s home away from home, because, as Stein said, “Paris was where the twentieth century was” (Paris France 11), and, she might have added, the nineteenth and the eighteenth centuries as well. “Paris,” said the poet Henri Michaux in a special issue of Mercure de France, “is the homeland of those free spirits who have not found a homeland” (52). Paris was a homeland not only for writers but also for translators. According to Valery Larbaud, it was Voltaire who undertook the translation of Shakespeare into French. Indeed, at that time, a great deal of British literature was being disseminated throughout Europe only in French translation (Ce vice impuni 31–32). Although Hemingway was only twenty-two when he arrived and, except for his journalism, unpublished, he profited immensely from his new contacts, particularly from Stein and Pound, both of whom adopted him and became his tutors. They taught him how to write and told him what to read, and by the time he left Paris in March 1928, Ernest had become the famous author of In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), a writer on the threshold of consecration.²

Paris was an incubator for Hemingway’s prodigious talent, and the people he met and the books he read gave him the college education he never had. As George Wickes phrases it, Hemingway “served his literary apprenticeship under the best possible mentors” (5). Pound taught him to use no superfluous words, to avoid abstractions, and to eschew adjectives that did not reveal something (Reynolds, The Paris Years 29). In 1935, when Hemingway was writing “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” one of his working titles was “The Short Life of Francis Macomber” (Oldsey, “Beginnings and Endings” 213). The addition of the adjective “happy” makes all the difference and reveals everything about Macomber’s cowardice and his twenty-four hours of manhood.

Stein’s experimental writing was an eye-opener, and she taught Hemingway the usefulness of repetition and the fact that words such as “tender buttons,” whatever their prosaic denotations, could also have connotations, sexual or otherwise. From reading Stein’s Three Lives, Hemingway learned that the continuous present tense and the repetition of key phrases could create meanings that were larger than the words themselves. He had already used this technique in his Chicago journalism for the Star, but at the time it was purely intuitive. In Paris, under Pound’s tutelage, he developed a critical self-awareness, and he learned how to repeat what he had gleaned from his mentors (Reynolds, The Paris Years 37).³

Stein told Hemingway that she wrote Three Lives while sitting in front of the portrait of Madame Cézanne, and that her sentences flowed from the red and blue-gray planes of color. Hemingway decided to study the Cézannes at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre—landscapes and bathers, card players, the courtyard at Anvers, and the house of the hanged man. In 1922, while reading Stein’s first-draft manuscripts, Hemingway also learned about automatic writing, free association, puns, verbal connections, alliteration, and resonance (Reynolds, The Paris Years 38, 40). In the Stein studio at 27 rue de Fleurus, Hemingway also studied the Matisses, Braques, Gris, and Picassos, but it was the Cézannes that would give him essential information about the architecture of art and of writing. In 1932, in Death in the Afternoon, he would write that “prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” (191).⁴ Hemingway once told Valerie Danby-Smith that he always tried “to write as good as the best picture that was ever painted” (qtd. by Danby-Smith 31). Henri Rousseau’s primitivism must also have caught his eye, because in a 1945 letter to Mary Welsh, he says that the foliage around Puerto Escondido, Cuba, was as beautiful as a Rousseau jungle piece (Selected Letters 598). As he perfected his style, Hemingway was able to see with language, and the visual elements of painting were essential to his craft. As he matured, he mastered the perception of an event that had occurred, and he was able to control the emotion elicited by the event. Whenever he and a particular experience became one, he was able to convey its intensity in words. As an artist he generated the language that would capture the simultaneity and immediacy of description and emotion.

Hemingway’s spoken French, if somewhat slangy, was getting better (Llona 165), while his knowledge of written French was excellent. He read all the French and English publications at Shakespeare and Company (Beach 79). He was also reading extensively in nineteenth-century fiction, particularly the Russians: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. In her book Shakespeare and Company (named after her bookstore), Sylvia Beach has a chapter entitled “My Best Customer,” referring to Hemingway’s frequent visits and borrowings. At the time, 1922, she was publishing Ulysses, and Hemingway was reading James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry James (Reynolds, The Paris Years 6, 8, 11, 14)—the Henry James that Sartre would later reject, saying that he had nothing new to teach the French about inner monologue and psychological analysis. Compared to Hemingway, wrote Sartre, James was passé (“American Novelists” 117). James’s change in citizenship had done little to consecrate him in Paris.

It was at Shakespeare and Company, 12 rue de l’Odéon, that Hemingway met Joyce, after Pound persuaded him to move from Zurich to Paris. Switzerland, like America, was a literary backwater. Another important acquaintance was Ford Madox Ford, the author of Parade’s End (1925), who had just moved from England to the city of light. Many Brits were fleeing the Anglo-Saxon conventions of a restrictive English society whose censors would ban Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ford soon launched the transatlantic review, a review that would publish Stein, Pound, Joyce, Ford, and eventually Hemingway’s first three Nick Adams stories (Wickes 6–7). Hemingway and Stein were then good friends, and he typed long sections of The Making of Americans for the printer, sections that he helped publish in the transatlantic. Ford had already made him assistant editor (Cowley 50). Across the street from Beach’s bookstore was Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, at 7 rue de l’Odéon, and it catered to French authors and buyers. After meeting Hemingway and getting to know him, Monnier predicted that he would be the best-known American expatriate because he cared more for his craft than any of the others (Bryer 212–14).

One of Beach’s first patrons was André Gide, and she remembers him as a generous man who was always ready to support the cause of freedom of expression, as was Hemingway, who also filled out several subscription blanks in order to help the publication of Ulysses (Beach 51). Sylvia’s sister, Cyprian, was a woman of great beauty and a movie star who played the role of Belle-Mirette in the film Judex. Louis Aragon, the surrealist poet, was much taken by Cyprian, and he too frequented Shakespeare and Company (Monnier 88). In 1944, when Hemingway “liberated” Paris, his first stop was Beach’s bookstore, then Monnier’s, where he and his company “took care” of Nazi snipers on the roof. Then he and his men rode off in their Jeeps to “liberate the cellar at the Ritz” (Beach 219–20). Shortly thereafter André Malraux joined Hemingway at the Ritz, where they discussed their respective military roles and their importance in liberating Paris (Baker, A Life Story 531–33).

At Shakespeare and Company and La Maison des Amis des Livres, Hemingway met Gide, Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud, and Jules Romains, as well as surrealists and innovators of all stripes, among them Francis Picabia, a painter whom Hemingway disliked initially, perhaps because he had joined forces with the Dada group in 1918 and was associated with Tristan Tzara, whom Hemingway disliked even more. In his editorial column for Ford’s May issue of the 1924 transatlantic he wrote: “Dada is dead although Tzara still cuddles its emaciated little corpse to his breast and croons a Rumanian folk-song … while he tried to get the dead little lips to take sustenance from his monocle” (qtd. by Reynolds, The Paris Years 183). Picabia participated in sensational performances that scandalized the Parisian public and he loved to astonish in ways that Hemingway would have been attracted to: by way of his ironic sense of humor and the droll means he used to challenge dogma and all manner of received ideas.

Hemingway’s early readings in Kipling and O. Henry had not prepared him for the artistic ferment of Paris, but this was about to change (Reynolds, The Paris Years 15).⁵ Paris was a place of manifestos, extravagant exhibitions, and surrealist outrages that often stopped traffic with questions such as “Do you want to slap a corpse?” The versatile and flamboyant Jean Cocteau said later that France between 1914 and 1924 presented the spectacle of an incredible literary revolution. Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Erik Satie, and Picasso invented the ballet Parade (1917), soon to be followed by Darius Milhaud’s masked spectacle-concert Le boeuf sur le toit (1920). Milhaud then wrote a jazz opera, La création du monde (1923), which featured a black Adam and Eve. The Ballets russes had a new curtain by Picasso; Man Ray was photographing combs, sieves, and shoe trees; Fernand Léger was beginning his cubist cinema Ballet mécanique with music by George Antheil, whose studio was above Shakespeare and Company; and Pound made Villon’s poetry into an opera that was performed at the Salle Pleyel (Bradbury 304–5). Hemingway was part of this cultural revolution, the Americanization of Paris, and the reciprocal influence of French cafés, galleries, museums, and bookshops on Americans. In addition to Stein as a salon hostess, there was also the influential and wealthy “Amazon,” Natalie Barney, whose “Temple of Love” and formidable lesbian culture were housed at 20 rue Jacob (Bradbury 310).⁶

Most Americans gravitated to the Left Bank and the cafés around Montparnasse, such as the Sélect, the Rotonde, and the Dôme, where they made contacts with other writers, editors, and publishers—kindred souls who could provide support and opportunity (Reynolds, The Paris Years 163). The patrons of the Sélect liked racing, gambling, tennis, and boxing. The revolutionaries preferred the Rotonde, while the hardworking painters and writers favored the Dôme (Ross 255). Hemingway scorned the expatriates who frequented these cafés because, he said, no good poetry could be written in places patronized by dilettantes, and Charles Baudelaire, when writing Les fleurs du mal, must surely, he said, have been working alone (Baker, A Life Story 113). Nonetheless, when Hemingway needed racing or boxing tips he could be found at the Sélect.

In 1922, in addition to Ford, Hemingway met the editors of the Little Review and Ernest Walsh, editor of This Quarter. These reviews published Hemingway’s work when magazines in the United States would not. It was also in Paris, soon after the publication of The Great Gatsby, in 1925, that Hemingway says he met F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar, on the rue Delambre (A Moveable Feast 147). Fitzgerald’s friendship was to prove invaluable because he suggested cuts to the beginning of The Sun Also Rises and was helpful in getting it published by Scribner, in 1926.

As the capital of literary space, Paris was an international city with many foreign energies folding into the more radical trends in French culture. But the Paris of the 1920s was no longer the Paris of the belle époque that Stein and Edith Wharton had discovered at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, in 1922, Sydney Schiff hosted a party for Diaghilev and friends from the Ballets russes, and he also invited Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce, and Proust, the four geniuses they most admired. Joyce and Proust had never met. The former complained of his eyes, and the latter of his stomach, and by the end of the year Proust was dead. He was buried with full military honors and big crowds witnessed the event (Bradbury 314). The “banquet years” that Roger Shattuck chronicles—the years of upper-class leisure and social power—were fading as Paris, after World War I, experienced additional internationalization and an Americanization, processes that Hemingway was to absorb and write about in his fiction as well as in dispatches for the Toronto Star. In March 1922, he covered the Economic Conference in Genoa; in September, the Greco-Turkish war; and in November, the Lausanne peace conference (Cowley 50). The franc was falling and Americans were discovering the intellectual, gastronomic, and sexual attractions of Paris—attractions that were beyond the disapproval and censorship of American puritanism. Paris was not only a free-wheeling capital; it was also the mind and heart of France’s intelligentsia and the arts. Hemingway thrived in the city that welcomed Josephine Baker in 1925 as the lead dancer in La revue nègre, where she was wowing audiences with her performances (Baker and Chase 3–7). When Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927 and landed at Le Bourget airport, he was given a hero’s welcome.

Archibald MacLeish describes dragging Hemingway to a gathering of writers where Gide, Jules Romains, and others were talking. Romains was a Unanimist poet and Unanimism was...