Hemingway in Paris: Parisian Walks for the Literary
by Noel
Riley Fitch
Paris
Carlos
Baker, Hemingway's first biographer, believes that while Anderson suggested
Paris because "the monetary exchange rate" made it an inexpensive
place to live, more importantly it was where "the most interesting people
in the world" lived. In Paris, Hemingway met American writer and art
collector Gertrude Stein, Irish novelist James Joyce, American poet Ezra Pound
(who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career" and other
writers.
The
Hemingway of the early Paris years was a "tall, handsome, muscular,
broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young
man." He and Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine
in the Latin Quarter, and he worked in a rented room in a nearby building.
Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris,[30] became Hemingway's mentor
and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and
writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the "Lost
Generation"—a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The Sun
Also Rises. A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such
as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. He eventually withdrew from Stein's
influence, and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that
spanned decades.While living in Paris in 1922, Hemingway befriended artist
Henry Strater who painted two portraits of him.
Ezra Pound
met Hemingway by chance at Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company in
1922. The two toured Italy in 1923 and lived on the same street in 1924.They
forged a strong friendship, and in Hemingway, Pound recognized and fostered a
young talent. Pound introduced Hemingway to James Joyce, with whom Hemingway
frequently embarked on "alcoholic sprees".
During his
first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star
newspaper. He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of
Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and
"Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany".
Hemingway
was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his
manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in
December 1922. In the following September the couple returned to Toronto, where
their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their
absence, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published.
Two of the stories it contained were all that remained after the loss of the
suitcase, and the third had been written early the previous year in Italy.
Within months a second volume, in our time (without capitals), was published.
The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Hemingway had
written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he
discovered the thrill of the corrida. He missed Paris, considered Toronto
boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life
of a journalist.
Hemingway,
Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and
moved into a new apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs.[40] Hemingway
helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published works by
Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as
well as some of Hemingway's own early stories such as "Indian Camp".
When In Our Time was published in 1925, the dust jacket bore comments from
Ford. "Indian Camp" received considerable praise; Ford saw it as an
important early story by a young writer, and critics in the United States
praised Hemingway for reinvigorating the short story genre with his crisp style
and use of declarative sentences] Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and
hostility".Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year:
Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.
With his
wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona,
Spain, in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting. It is at this time
that he began to be referred to as "Papa", even by much older
friends. Hadley would much later recall that Hemingway had his own nicknames
for everyone and that he often did things for his friends; she suggested that
he liked to be looked up to. She did not remember precisely how the nickname
came into being; however, it certainly stuck. The Hemingways returned to
Pamplona in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with
them a group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood
friend Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced),
her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.[ A few days after the fiesta ended, on
his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become The
Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later. A few months later, in December
1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where
Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined
them in January and against Hadley's advice, urged Hemingway to sign a contract
with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the
publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with
Pfeiffer, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March. The
manuscript arrived in New York in April; he corrected the final proof in Paris
in August 1926, and Scribner's published the novel in October.
The Sun
Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation,[58] received good
reviews and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".[59]
Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of
the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that
"the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun
Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Hemingway's
marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on The Sun Also Rises.[57] In
early 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pfeiffer, who came to
Pamplona with them that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a
separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their
possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The
Sun Also Rises.The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married
Pfeiffer in May.
Pfeiffer,
who was from a wealthy Catholic Arkansas family, had moved to Paris to work for
Vogue magazine. Before their marriage, Hemingway converted to Catholicism.They
honeymooned in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, and he planned his
next collection of short stories,Men Without Women, which was published in
October 1927, and included his boxing story "Fifty Grand".
Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand",
calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands ...
the best prize-fight story I ever read ... a remarkable piece of realism."
By the end
of the year Pauline, who was pregnant, wanted to move back to America. John Dos
Passos recommended Key West, and they left Paris in March 1928. Hemingway
suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down
on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a
prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When
Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer. After his
departure from Paris, Hemingway "never again lived in a big city".
1 comment:
I agree that Stein, Joyce, Picasso, Gris, Pound, Fitzgerald and Beach etc were amongst some of the most interesting people in the world and it was not a coincidence that they loved meeting up in Paris. But this Lost Generation consisted of not always very nice people where alcohol, drugs, anti Semitism, mental ill health and misogyny were prevalent.
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