Ernest Hemingway His Life and Works

Matthew J. Bruccoli, author and editor of a number of works on F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) bravely set out a few years ago to write a book about the relationship between Fitzgerald and his younger contemporary Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Bruccoli's 1994 book Fitzgerald and Hemingway, A Dangerous Friendship opens on a note that will set the tone for the rest of it: Bruccoli cites Hemingway's famous account in A Moveable Feast of the first time he met Fitzgerald, a meeting that according to Hemingway took place at the Dingo bar in Paris in 1925, and at which Duncan Chaplin, who had pitched for Princeton's baseball team when Fitzgerald was a student there, was present.

Then Bruccoli goes on to write that Chaplin was not, in fact, at the Dingo bar that day. In fact Chaplin was not in Paris in 1925. In fact Chaplin was not in Europe in 1925. In fact, Chaplin never met Hemingway. In fact, as Bruccoli proceeds to show his readers, most anecdotes about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and there are dozens of them, tend to evaporate under the light of investigation. Like a mariner hugging the shore, Bruccoli tries as best as he can to stick to the provable. As a result, the text of Fitzgerald and Hemingway consists largely of letters written by the two authors to or about one another.

After slugging it out with the evidence for 196 pages, Bruccoli comes very close to throwing up his hands in despair. On p. 197, writing of Hemingway's appearance in Hollywood in 1937, when Fitzgerald was there doing film work and Hemingway was in town to show and discuss The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film about the Spanish Civil War which he had worked on, Bruccoli writes:

"A researcher working on Fitzgerald and Hemingway is forced to conclude that there may not be such a thing as a reliable eyewitness for events involving them."

It should come as no surprise. Whatever else they were, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were legends, each in his own way. And legends have a curious effect on facts, somewhat analogous perhaps to the way in which physicists tell us that light itself begins to bend near a black hole in space. To put it less esoterically, both men were celebrities. Celebrities generate "buzz," and "buzz" is famously unreliable. Also, despite the obvious differences between the two, they were in some ways astonishingly alike, as we shall see. One of those ways is that they both ultimately self-destructed, although at different speeds. A Moveable Feast, famous for its chapters on Fitzgerald, was written well into Hemingway's own journey down, and those chapters cannot be taken at face value as an appraisal of Fitzgerald's character or his fate, although they do contain much truth.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway did indeed meet in Paris in 1925. At the time of their first meeting, Fitzgerald, the older of the two by three years, was an established novelist. He had already published the flawed but highly popular This Side Of Paradise (1920) and the also-uneven but acclaimed The Beautiful And Damned (1922). His third novel and first acknowledged masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published the year the two met. Hemingway, at the time of their first meeting, was almost unknown outside the literary "little mags" of Paris-his first American book, the short story collection In Our Time (not to be confused with its earlier, Parisian incarnation, in our time) was published in October of that year by the firm of Boni and Liveright in an edition of slightly more than 1,300 copies.

But meeting Fitzgerald was just another example of the flawless timing that characterized the young Hemingway's career. Meeting Sherwood Anderson in Chicago in 1921 had resulted in his being given letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound in Paris; now, Fitzgerald, having met Hemingway, was deeply impressed with his talent and wrote to his own editor, Max Perkins, suggesting that Hemingway would be a good "catch" for Scribner's, Fitzgerald's own publisher and a much bigger, higher-profile company than Boni and Liveright. If Fitzgerald didn't exactly "launch" Hemingway, at the very least he gave him a big boost. The following year Scribner's published Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and he was on his way to world fame.

The relationship between the two authors was an odd one. Although the older of the two, and the more successful as a novelist when they first met, (this was about to change) Fitzgerald accepted something of a "younger brother" role in his relationship with the more robust and overbearing Hemingway. The reasons lay in the two men's similar backgrounds and very different characters. Both came from the midwest; Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and Hemingway in the suburbs of Chicago. Each had a weak father and a strong mother. Scott had two older sisters who died while his mother was pregnant with him. Later another son was born, but lived only an hour. Hemingway grew up in a house full of sisters and throughout his childhood and youth longed for a little brother. But when his brother Leicester finally did come along, Hemingway was well into his teens and it was too late for the big-brother-little-brother relationship he had longed for. Fitzgerald grew up craving heroes just as strongly as Hemingway longed to be one. At Princeton, for example, from which he did not graduate, Fitzgerald idolized the burly, bloodied-up football players whom he couldn't match in gridiron prowess. Hemingway positively relished being burly and bloodied-up in a whole series of roles that he played during his lifetime, and he basked in attention. In this respect they were a perfect match: Fitzgerald needed a hero, and Hemingway fit the bill.

A key element that helped determine the shape of Hemingway and Fitzgerald's friendship was the striking divergence in their respective writing careers, which in turn were shaped largely by the circumstances of their personal lives. Fitzgerald actually made very little money during his lifetime from his novels. On the other hand, he made enormous amounts of money, until the early 1930s when this source of money dried up for him, by writing short stories, chiefly for The Saturday Evening Post. He needed the money badly. In 1920 Fitzgerald had married the glamorous but unstable Zelda Sayre, and the two of them became living symbols of that age of extravagance. In Europe and in the United States they lived lavishly, and Fitzgerald, who wanted to write novels, found himself forced by his and Zelda's spendthrift lifestyle to write the more lucrative short stories, many of them second and third rate, even in his own eyes. (In fact, the more second-and-third rate they were, the easier they sold and the better they paid, to Fitzgerald's own disgust. His finest stories, such as Babylon Revisited and The Diamond As Big As The Ritz either paid less well or were in some cases rejected altogether.)

Ironically, Fitzgerald's career as a novelist ran into a brick wall in the very year he met Hemingway. For whatever reasons, (Hemingway's theory was that critical praise of The Great Gatsby paralyzed Fitzgerald into being terrified that he might not be able to equal that performance) Fitzgerald would not manage to finish another novel until Tender Is The Night some nine years later, and it was both a critical and a commercial failure. Fitzgerald's life after 1925 was a three-way struggle: he struggled with alcoholism, with his increasingly out-of-control wife (Zelda would be repeatedly hospitalized for mental illness during the 1930s) and with his attempts to get on with a novel while at the same time being forced to churn out magazine fiction to pay his bills. Later, during the Depression, with the magazine-fiction market no longer there for him, he would make a couple of disastrous sojourns to Hollywood to write film scripts that were never filmed, trying to make enough money to stay alive, to pay Zelda's hospital bills and to put his daughter Scottie through school.

Hemingway's story couldn't make a sharper contrast. As Fitzgerald's writing career flamed out, Hemingway's was about to burst into full morning splendor. After The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, Hemingway divorced his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and married his second, the wealthy Arkansas socialite Pauline Pfeiffer. (There would be more marriages in the Hemingway future, and quite early in this story Fitzgerald made the prescient remark that Hemingway needed a new wife for each book, a comment not far from the truth, as things turned out.) A Farewell To Arms, written mostly in Key West, Florida, where he and Pauline had been given a house by her rich uncle Gus back in Arkansas, cemented Hemingway's reputation and his fame. Freed from the constraints of having to write for a living both by the success of his first novel and by his second wife's wealth, Hemingway could and did look down upon Fitzgerald's magazine-writing. Later, during the '30s, Hemingway would also be able to avoid Hollywood and the necessity to try and make money by writing for the movies, a fate not even spared William Faulkner, who among other things worked on the film version of Hemingway's To Have And Have Not. (Which, Hollywood being Hollywood, in the end had little to do with To Have And Have Not.) 1940, the year in which Fitzgerald died, was the year in which Hemingway's career peaked with the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Clearly, theirs was the friendship of a writer on his way up and a writer spectacularly on his way down.

Hemingway's treatment of Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast may well be a farrago of half-truths, exaggerations and memories skewed by alcohol. One of Hemingway's biographers has even suggested that the whining, impotent, drunken hypochondriac depicted by Hemingway in his memoir was a deliberate attempt to cut his rival "down to size" after Edmund Wilson and numerous other critics had re-appraised Fitzgerald's work following his death and found it on the whole much better than many had previously thought. But although the distortions and mis-rememberings may be there, the truth is that Hemingway was far from alone in finding Fitzgerald a trial to be around. Charming and witty when sober, Fitzgerald became boorish, rude, loud and maudlin when drunk, and frequently humiliated himself in public. One of American literature's most famous drunks, Fitzgerald actually had a very low tolerance for alcohol. His inability to "hold his liquor" diminished him in Hemingway's eyes because it was a failure of one of Hemingway's key tests of manliness. Other friends of both writers, notably the wealthy Gerald and Sara Murphy, who frequented many of the same European locales, also found themselves exasperated by Fitzgerald's outrageous behavior when drunk. Hemingway even claimed that he had been kicked out of one of his Paris apartments owing to a raucous late-night visit by a drunken Fitzgerald, and for a time gave instructions that Fitzgerald was not to be given his Paris address; he would meet him only in a cafe or some other neutral place. After a particularly disastrous weekend at Fitzgerald's house near Wilmington, Delaware in 1928, Hemingway said he felt that bullfights were sedatives compared to weekends with Fitzgerald.

For all of this, and for the fact that Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald loathed each other, (Zelda called Hemingway "as phony as a rubber check" and Hemingway accused Zelda of encouraging Scott's drinking because she was jealous of his writing) the affection between the two men was strong if their relationship was at times a rocky one. They kept up a regular correspondence, for the most part very friendly in tone, and Fitzgerald, a keen critic and, as John Dos Passos once observed, a thorough professional when it came to writing despite his shortcomings, contributed some critical observations that helped shape Hemingway's conclusion of A Farewell To Arms. Later things between the two weren't so rosy, as when Fitzgerald published his famous series of essays about his own failure and how it came about, published later in book form as The Crack-Up. Hemingway was horrified by such a public de profundis; his own credo was that one should do the manly thing, deal with one's problems in private and not parade them around for public view. Subsequently he made a cruel direct reference in Snows of Kilimanjaro to Fitzgerald's supposed "romantic awe for the rich" and how it was one of the things that "wrecked" him. Deeply stung, Fitzgerald complained about this, both to Hemingway directly and to their mutual editor Max Perkins. In later editions of the story Fitzgerald's name is changed to "Julian." Actually, though, as biographer of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald Jeffrey Meyers pointed out, Snows of Kilimanjaro isn't so very much different in theme from The Crack-Up. Both are about failed writers confronting their respective failures, one in a fictionalized context, the other in something more like what you might see nowadays on a daytime cable television talk show. Fitzgerald was also hurt when he finally did publish Tender Is The Night in 1934 and Hemingway's comments-which Fitzgerald had begged for-were generally negative. A few years later, however, Hemingway read the book again, saw its merits and changed his opinion.

When reading about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, one is tempted to think of Shem and Shaun, the two archetypal brothers in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. In Shem we have the man of contemplation and in Shaun the man of action, and the relationship is a destructive one. Fitzgerald in fact made a kind of "Shaun" character out of Hemingway in a lamentable series of stories about "Phillipe, the Count of Darkness," in which he attempted to envision Hemingway as an armor-wearing, horseback-riding character out of the Middle Ages. But the contrast is really an illusion. What we have here are not Shem and Shaun, but Shem and Shem. The chief difference between them was that Hemingway had a much better sense of public relations; he saw to it that, as the public perceived it anyway, everything he did was related to his work. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, became identified in the public eye with dissipation and failure. But Hemingway, too, had his weaknesses, and Fitzgerald didn't fail to notice them. For example there was Fitzgerald's prediction about the women in Hemingway's life. Hemingway tended to solve marital problems by running away from them, and he was married four times. Despite Zelda's mental illness and several affairs of his own, Fitzgerald remained married to her right down to the end. Also, Fitzgerald noticed that Hemingway, just like himself, had a psychological vulnerability. "He's quite as nervously broken down as I am," Fitzgerald wrote, "but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy." True, when Fitzgerald said it. But in December, 1940, when Fitzgerald died obscure and nearly-forgotten and Hemingway was at the pinnacle of world fame, neither of them could have known that Hemingway was on a track-albeit a slower one-to an ending not so much different from Fitzgerald's. True, Hemingway never had to watch himself sinking into obscurity the way Fitzgerald did-in 1937, when Fitzgerald came to Hollywood to write for the movies, he found that many people thought he was already dead-but Hemingway's final years were haunted by some of the same ghosts that haunted Fitzgerald: alcoholism, mental illness (in this case his own) and a creeping sense of diminished self-worth, a growing suspicion that maybe he wasn't any good anymore.

Hemingway prefaced his chapters on Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with these words:

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

It was 1957 by the time Hemingway wrote this passage, and he might well have been talking about himself.

April, 2001

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

General enquiries to ernest@hemingway.com

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