Everybody Behaves Badly

The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

Lesley M. M. Blume

• Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780544237179
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

The New York Times bestseller. " Fiendishly readable... a deeply, almost obsessively researched biography of a book."— The Washington Post

In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. But the full story of Hemingway's legendary rise has remained untold until now.

Lesley Blume resurrects the explosive, restless landscape of 1920s Paris and Spain and reveals how Hemingway helped create his own legend. He made himself into a death-courting, bull-fighting aficionado; a hard-drinking, short-fused literary genius; and an expatriate bon vivant. Blume's vivid account reveals the inner circle of the Lost Generation as we have never seen it before and shows how it still influences what we read and how we think about youth, sex, love, and excess.

"Totally captivating, smartly written, and provocative." —Glamour

"[A] must-read... The boozy, rowdy nights in Paris, the absurdities at Pamplona's Running of the Bulls and the hungover brunches of the true Lost Generation come to life in this intimate look at the lives of the author's expatriate comrades."— Harper's Bazaar

"A fascinating recreation of one of the most mythic periods in American literature—the one set in Paris in the '20s."—Jay McInerney

1

Paris Is a Bitch

IN 1921 EVERYONE IN AMERICA was talking about a young midwestern novelist. He was everything that a thrilling new writer should be: ambitious (“I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don’t you?” he once told a friend), appallingly youthful (he was twenty-three when he published his first book), exuberant, and controversial. For his publishers, it was the happiest of arrangements: this fellow was poised to become the voice of the postwar generation, and a lucrative one at that. He alarmed his elders; his peers adored and imitated him. Already the social rhythms of the young decade were obediently following the strokes of his pen. His name was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Back in the Midwest—Chicago, to be precise—Fitzgerald had some competition brewing, although he did not know it. Another feverishly ambitious would-be novelist was watching Fitzgerald’s success and planning something of a coup d’état. Fitzgerald’s fame was encouraging, but his stories, he thought, were frivolous, dizzy with flappers, Ivy League shenanigans, and champagne bubbles. Plus, what was new about his style? Fitzgerald might have been writing about a new generation, but he was doing so in the voice of an older one. Shouldn’t the so-called voice of a generation have a genuinely fresh voice, a new way of spinning out sentences? Adjectives were so passé, so Victorian.

It was time for a revolution. At least that was the opinion of Fitzgerald’s then-anonymous rival, who would soon seize the opportunity to spearhead that revolt personally. This young man was not alone in his opinion: already he had accrued a cult-like following. Admittedly that cult was rather small: it consisted of one devotee, the writer’s fiancée. No one in the vaster world had heard of Ernest Miller Hemingway, the author. There was no reason for anyone to have heard of him. He had yet to publish a single short story.

Yet his fiancée, Hadley Richardson—a sturdy, relentlessly optimistic redhead eight years his senior—was sure he was destined to become a renowned writer, even a cultural icon. At first she hadn’t felt an overwhelming “glorious faith in his future,” but he had swiftly changed her mind. Their life together quickly became geared toward launching his career. She wrote worshipful missives to him, validating his ambitions and practically begging to be his “helper.”

No one was more assured about the magnitude of his future than Hemingway himself. Not only did he believe he was capable of creating masterly modern stories; he likely knew that he himself was a masterly modern story. He was undeniably charismatic. His handsome features were chiseled but sensual: there was that full mouth and pleasing symmetry, and an intense stare that implied a certain shrewdness. He had “the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun,” as Fitzgerald would later write of one of his own characters.

Extraordinary things happened to him. Even when those things were terrible, they made a hell of a story. Spotlights sought him out as though by magnetic attraction. Three years earlier, just short of his nineteenth birthday, he had fallen victim to shelling and enemy fire while distributing chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers on the front lines in Italy. As the first American casualty in Italy, he had garnered press attention across the country. The New York Sun reported the number and quality of shrapnel pieces that had savaged his legs: “227 marks, indicating where bits of a peculiar kind of Austrian shrapnel, about as thick as a .22 caliber bullet and an inch long, like small cuts from a length of wire, smote him.” The Chicago papers were also filled with Hemingway news. A coterie of gift-bearing admirers surrounded him as he recovered in a Milan hospital.

“Men loved him,” recalled his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky.

And he loved the attention; in fact, it was, he wrote to his parents, “the next best thing to getting killed and reading your own obituary.” But a few headlines and the adoration of a few comrades in arms was not the sort of destiny Hemingway had in mind. His ability to inspire devotion in his peers would prove an essential ingredient in his success, but he craved attention of a loftier caliber. One did not simply lurch out of nowhere, however, and become a world-renowned revolutionary author. He still actually needed to pen the work that would make him famous and establish him as the true literary voice of the modern world. It was an inconvenient but unavoidable stepping-stone.

He was working on it. By the summer of 1921, he had an idea for a novel. Hadley was beside herself with excitement.

“It’ll be wonderful to have you writing a novel,” she informed her twenty-two-year-old fiancé. She was willing to do whatever she could to help bring it to fruition. “I’ll be as happy as happy to be with you thru it all or be kicked out or slid into a corner or anything you like,” she assured him. She could tell already that Hemingway’s first novel would be a wholly modern work, stripped down and lean. His approach “eliminated everything except what is necessary and strengthening,” she complimented him. It was all wonderfully simple, “but as fine as the finest chain mail.”

She and Hemingway were then living in different cities as they planned their wedding. Hadley was anticipating the event from her native St. Louis; Hemingway had set up shop in Chicago, where he was scraping together a meager living as a reporter at a magazine called The Cooperative Commonwealth and penning freelance pieces for the Toronto Star. He had been training himself to become a reporter since high school in Oak Park, Illinois, where he wrote for his school paper, The Trapeze. During those early years he had also been trying his hand at writing fiction and had already acquired a bit of literary bravado.

“Cicero is a pipe,” he wrote in 1915. “I could write better stuff with both hands tied behind me.”

Hemingway wasn’t drawing on a grand family literary tradition, although a streak of creativity did run through his clan. His mother had once been an aspiring opera singer and often took her children to concerts, plays, and art exhibits in nearby Chicago. Yet by the time he was a teenager, it was evident that his talent lay in writing, not in the visual or performing arts: his English teachers praised him, and his themes were often read aloud in class. The Tabula, his high school literary magazine, printed some of his earliest short stories—which, like some of his later work, involved subjects such as boxing, woodland living, and suicide. Back then, his work was more imitative than original; he frequently wrote in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular sports and humor writer. Yet when Hemingway graduated in 1917, he was nominated Class Prophet—a designation that could be seen as prophetic in its own right, considering that he would later help envision and usher in the era of modern literature.

The literary encouragement, however, had more or less ended after he left Oak Park High School. Hemingway’s doctor father wanted him to attend Oberlin College; but the First World War was then raging in Europe, and Hemingway, like countless other young men of his generation, was determined to see action instead. He later admitted to having viewed the entire war as something of a sporting event, and dubbed his younger self an “awful dope.” Defective vision prevented Hemingway from enlisting in the military, but in 1918 the Red Cross Ambulance Corps deemed him good enough for service and promptly dispatched him to Italy, where he was wounded within weeks of his arrival.

When he returned to America, Hemingway found work as a reporter, but magazines were not interested in his short stories. Some experts have deemed Hemingway’s earliest surviving stories dull and derivative; he was then, they say, a far cry from the grand innovator of the English language that he would become. Therefore this early spate of rejection was perfectly reasonable. Yet others have faulted magazine editors of the early 1920s for lacking vision.

“I saw some of [Hemingway’s] work [in] 1920 and I thought it was very good,” recalled Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, who spent a good deal of time with him during this period. “The only trouble is he was sending it to the wrong magazines,” he said, adding that a publication like the Saturday Evening Post—then a hugely popular vehicle for fiction—“would never have used that experimental writing of his, . . . and it was experimental even before he went to Paris.”

Still, everyone had shunned Fitzgerald’s first short stories too. At one point during his early career, he had artistically arranged over a hundred rejection slips on his bedroom walls. It had required the firepower of a first novel, This Side of Paradise, to help him stage a breakthrough. When crafting that all-important debut novel, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway started out by writing what they knew. Fitzgerald’s novel was a somewhat country-clubified account of life at Princeton University, which he had attended before the war. When Hemingway began his starter novel, he apparently set it in northern Michigan, where he’d spent his boyhood summers, and filled its pages with stories of fishing and hunting. It is unclear how well developed this novel might have been in 1921; he may even have had more than one in the works. He appears to have been bandying about a few ideas with Hadley, for she wrote to him that she was “all treading on air about these novels!” It was criminal, she added, that “we aren’t free yet to put your best time and tho’t [into] them.”

Still, if Hemingway was to turn out the requisite magnum opus, he was going to need to situate himself in a more muse-friendly atmosphere. At the moment, he was camping out in the apartment of Bill Smith’s adman older brother, Y. K. Smith, then home to a passel of boarders. Hadley had also stayed there while visiting Chicago; it was here that she first met Hemingway. The attraction between them had been immediate, despite the difference in their ages. He liked her red hair and the way she played the piano; she deemed him a “hulky, bulky something masculine.” Nicknames were exchanged. Among their crowd of mutual friends, Hemingway went by “Oinbones,” “Nesto,” “Hemingstein,” and “Wemedge.” Hadley dubbed Hemingway “Erniestoic”; she was christened “Hash.” Even the apartment itself had a nickname: “the Domicile.”

Soon afterward, Wemedge and Hash became engaged and began planning a wedding—not a grand affair, as had been portended by the St. Louis society press, but rather a small country wedding in Horton Bay, Michigan, where Hemingway had spent his childhood summers. The church where the ceremony eventually took place on September 3, 1921, stood next to the town’s general store. The nuptials were to be followed by a voyage to Italy—perhaps for as long as a year or two—starting with Naples.

The trip would be a homecoming of sorts. Hemingway was proud of his personal history there. He’d had, for example, a bit of the shrapnel removed from his leg set into a ring; it was a wearable reminder of his dramatic brush with death and first exposure to international fame. Eager to show the country off to Hadley, he began buying Italian lire. Hadley had long assured him that she was not in the market for a conventional existence; she too began to prepare to make a “bold penniless dash for Wopland.”

Such a dash would indeed have been bold, but not penniless: Hadley had a trust fund, bestowed upon her by a banker grandfather; she called it “my sweet little packet of seeds.” It would give the Hemingways $2,000 to $3,000 a year to play with. Hemingway retired his affiliation with The Cooperative Commonwealth, whose future he deemed unpromising. Hadley’s “filthy lucre,” as he called it, would now be the main engine powering their overseas adventure.

“There are those who think Hadley’s name became Hash because she had a small inheritance and thus became Hem’s meal-ticket but that is untrue,” stated Bill Smith later. “Hash was simply a corruption of Hadley.”

Whether or not “Hash” meant “cash,” Hadley was undeniably a meal ticket. It was a relatively modest meal, but nourishing enough. Her money would get them over to Europe, and for the next half decade her trust fund would be their sole consistent source of income. Hemingway was already worried that his reporting work was forcing him to relegate his other writing to “on the side” status; his frantic work schedule was making him “busy and tired and done in.” He needed to leave the tug-of-war behind. Italy—funded by St. Louis dollars—might provide the necessary respite.

“Think of how in Italy there won’t be anything but love and peace to form a background for writing,” Hadley wrote to Hemingway. “Why you’ll write like a great wonderful sea breeze bringing strong whiffs from all sorts of strange interior places.”

Even at this early stage, Hadley knew that she was being outshone by Hemingway and she did not seem to care. She was content—even ecstatic—to become the woman behind the nascent genius. All of her resources were at Hemingway’s command. He was poised to write “the best things you’ve ever done in your life,” she told him. “Honest, you’re doing marvels of stirring, potent stuff . . . Don’t let’s ever die. Let’s go on together.”

They planned to leave for Europe that November.

THE SUBSTANTIAL INDUSTRY now known as Hemingway’s Paris might have been Hemingway’s Naples if not for the intervention of a regular visitor to the Domicile.

Today writer Sherwood Anderson has fallen into obscurity, but in the early 1920s he was well known. Not household-name, mega-best-seller famous, but certainly well regarded. He had come to authorship through a circuitous route. For a while he had headed a mail-order paint firm, but—according to legend—he suffered a nervous breakdown at the office in 1912, during which he stalked out and never returned. He chose literary pursuits as his cure-all, and by 1914 was publishing stories in magazines.

When he met Hemingway in 1921, Anderson was having an Icarus ascent-to-the-sun moment; his recent collection of stories—Winesburg, Ohio—had sold well, and that year he would receive the inaugural Dial award for his contribution to American literature. Short stories were considered his forte; his novels appear to have been tolerated cheerfully by critics and the public. In the 1930s he would spiral into obscurity, but in 1921, Sherwood Anderson was a celebrity. He knew Y. K. Smith through the Chicago advertising world and lived nearby; his visits to Smith’s apartment were considered exciting events.

There was no reason for Anderson to have heard of Hemingway when they first met, but Hemingway knew about Anderson. Like everyone else, he approved of Anderson’s short stories but found his novels “strangely poor”—an early assessment that would take on great (and from Anderson’s point of view almost sinister) significance a few years later.

When Anderson first ambled into the apartment—probably in a state of disrepair, for he usually resembled a disheveled professor with a carefully selected wardrobe of ill-fitting jackets—Hemingway treated him with polite, quiet attentiveness. This would become his customary approach to would-be mentors with stellar connections. Hemingway claimed later that he and Anderson “never spoke of writing” at that time, but even if this was true, he still managed to make a powerful impression on the veteran writer. Like Hadley, Anderson became quickly converted to the idea that Hemingway was a man with a future.

“Thanks for introducing me to that young fellow,” Anderson told Smith and his wife after his first meeting with Hemingway. “I think he’s going to go some place.”

It was an expert bit of casual matchmaking by Y. K. Smith, who “knew Hem was a genius even then,” recalled his brother Bill. Did Bill think Hemingway was a genius at that time? “Of course not,” he admitted later. “Your buddy is never a genius.” Yet Y.K. was pleased that the connection had been made, and saw its immediate effect on Hemingway. “At this point Ernest began to take seriously his own talent as an alluring possibility,” he wrote later. “I think this was his first contact with a big-time artist and it gave him as it were a chance to measure himself.”

In measuring himself against Anderson, Hemingway seems to have deemed himself in a position to surpass the veteran writer—or at the very least, he felt he was in a position to critique. During return visits, Anderson occasionally read his work aloud to the Domicile entourage. Hemingway evaluated every word. He may have been polite to Anderson in person, but he was said to be have been, in private, “thoroughly hostile” to Anderson’s approach.

“You couldn’t let a sentence like that go,” he announced after Anderson left the apartment after one reading sess...