Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship
by Scott Donaldson

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Chapter 7
Afternoon Of An Author

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks

Advised by his doctors to take the mountain air for his health, Fitzgerald spent much of 1935 and 1936 in the salubrious surroundings of western North Carolina, and particularly in Asheville. The weather may have been good for his lungs, but the rest of his life bottomed out in a descent that was still ongoing when he wrote the confessional “Crack-Up” essays during November 1935. He was troubled by his tuberculosis and alcoholism, by Zelda's worsening condition, and by his sense of himself as a man.

In April 1935, Fitzgerald wrote Mencken a curious letter. In the course of delivering a message of consolation for the death of his wife, Sara, Scott told Mencken—a generation older than himself—how important his support had been.

We have both lived too deeply in our own generation to have much communication except with a mutual respect, but that you accepted me as an equal… settles something that has been haunting me about my relations with men ever since my tacit break with Earnest Hemingway. I suppose like most people whose stuff is creative fiction there is a touch of the feminine in me (never in any sense tactile—I have always been woman crazy, God knows)— but there are times when it is nice to think that there are other wheelhorses pulling the whole load of human grief and despair.

Here Fitzgerald is making at least two points. First, he felt insecure in his relationships with male companions, and the “tacit break” with Hemingway— following so closely on the accusations from McAlmon and Callaghan—had made him question his own masculinity. Mencken's acceptance of him as a writer and a man had given him some reassurance along these lines. Second, he felt a still stronger connection with Mencken in their “mutual grief,” as fellow wheelhorses beset by the worst of misfortunes.

Living at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville in the summer of 1935, Fitzgerald continued his run of bad luck. The hotel itself was beyond his means, and he soon added to his expenses by hiring Laura Guthrie as his secretary-amanuensis. He also exercised his considerable charm on her, producing a “fierce” infatuation that drove her “nearly crazy” with thoughts of him. Guthrie, a divorcee whose nominal job at the Grove Park Inn was to read the palms of wealthy guests, kept a journal during the course of that eventful summer, recounting almost everything that Fitzgerald said and did. He talked about Zelda and his fear that he was to blame for her terrible condition. He drank vast quantities of beer, “almost to the exclusion of eating food, because his stomach hurts then, and he has to get the alcoholic stimulation to keep himself at his work.” He explored the borders of sexuality. “Women don't give me a kick,” he said, trying her out. “I am a fairy. What are you? Are you like that?” And he talked incessantly of Hemingway.

“Ernest Hemingway is his best friend and he admires him extravagantly— both in a literary way and as a man,” Guthrie recorded, adding a number of direct quotes she'd scribbled in her notes. “We are Damon and Pythias,” Fitzgerald said of a friendship he knew had foundered. Then he went on to implied comparisons: “Ernest is the best writer in the U.S.A. today.” “I used to want to be the best damn writer in the U.S.A. I still do.”

Hemingway had achieved the heights, and he was still climbing, a ranking Fitzgerald reiterated in a note he himself made during a visit with novelist James Boyd at Southern Pines. “Dorothy Parker once said that Ernest Hemmingway could make a six-day bicycle race interesting to a Mother Superior, or words to that effect—the present writer has no claim to such talent, but…”

One of Guthrie's duties was to accompany Fitzgerald to nightspots in and around Asheville. They whiled away the time one night by creating a “genius” chart, in which Fitzgerald classified the great men and women of the time—both those he had known and those he knew of—on a scale ranging from “16” to “29.” He may have adopted this numbering system from the game of cribbage, where29 is the highest score a player can make on any given hand. Fitzgerald awarded three women the highest ranking: writers Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Six men qualified for 29s: inventors Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, industrialist Henry Ford, and writers Hemingway, Mencken, and Theodore Dreiser. Hemingway's name he wrote at the very top.

“I've simply got to arrange something for this summer that will bring me to life again,” Fitzgerald wrote Max Perkins in mid-April 1935. What he arranged was an affair with Beatrice Dance, a young married woman from San Antonio who was also staying at the Grove Park Inn. The affair lasted seven weeks, from mid-June to early August, when her husband and doctor broke it off. “I gather [Scott's] been having some kind of what's called a love-affair.—But I guess not serious,” Perkins wrote Hemingway on August 30. He didn't like the idea, Max went on, but at least it wouldn't “hurt his writing or his health, like gin. Might even help.” Ernest agreed, with emasculating qualifications. “Imagine a love affair would help Scott if he has anything left to love with and the woman isn't so awful that he has to kid himself too much.”

The affair was no casual summer romance as Perkins and Hemingway assumed. Beatrice Dance, anything but awful, fell very much in love with Scott, and he was revived by the intensity of her passion. “You are the loveliest human being I have ever known,” he wrote her when the affair ended. “I love you—you are crystal clear, blown glass with the sun cutting always very suddenly across it… Goodbye, goodbye, you are part of me forever.” In Hollywood a few years later, he told Sheilah Graham that he'd been in love with Beatrice. She was the first woman to make him forget Zelda.

In the aftermath of the affair, Fitzgerald abandoned the beer and ale regimen he'd been following all summer and went back to gin. Sticking to malt beverages was supposed to cut down on his alcohol intake, but it did not have that effect. “Beer ran down his throat like a waterfall runs down a rock,” Guthrie noted in her journal, “but with more disastrous effects.” His mind wandered, and he couldn't finish telling stories aloud, much less get them down on paper. The switch to gin made matters worse. “Being tied to an alcoholic whether as secretary, nurse, or wife,” Guthrie concluded, was the hardest work in the world.

On Friday the 13th of September, she cleaned up the mess in Fitzgerald's room, packed his dirty clothes in a suitcase, helped him get dressed, and accompanied him to the desk in the lobby while he checked out. Debilitated as he was, appearances still counted. Then they took a taxicab to the hospital's alcoholic ward, where she deposited him and escaped. There were to be several such drying-out periods during the following year. A few months earlier, Laura Guthrie had been consumed by her feelings for Fitzgerald. On the day she turned him over to the hospital nurses, she remarked in her journal, “I never felt less in love with a man in my life.”

Later that month, after Fitzgerald returned to Baltimore, Perkins sent him the latest news of Hemingway. Ernest had come through New York, and would not return to Key West until the weather cooled down. His safari book, Green Hills of Africa, was scheduled for publication on October 25, and Max was worried about its reception. The critics, and to a lesser extent the public, seemed to have turned against Hemingway after the lukewarm reception of Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. In effect, Max was asking Scott to sympathize with Ernest's travail, much as he did when summoning Hemingway to share in his distress about Fitzgerald. “Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly,” Perkins pointed out. From that point of view it was probably just as well that the anti-Hemingway tide was running when Ernest “was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.” Green Hills of Africa belonged in that category.

Green Hills provided an account of Ernest's 1933 safari to Africa with Pauline and Key West friends Charles and Lorine Thompson under the guidance of white hunter Philip Percival. As with Death in the Afternoon, the book also offered Hemingway the opportunity to discourse on any number of unrelated subjects. One such topic was the present state of American literature. In addressing it, Ernest on three occasions made damning remarks about Scott. The first— and worst—of these, had to do with cowardice among writers. Archie MacLeish “had the most charm” and they'd had good times together. “But he was really a coward so you were never completely comfortable with him just as he was never completely comfortable with himself.” John Dos Passos, though “perhaps a little over-married,” was as brave as a buffalo. Fitzgerald, like MacLeish, “was a coward of great charm. I wondered why the cowards all had so much charm.”

The passage about cowardice was deleted from the manuscript, but two other slurs directed at Fitzgerald's reputation made it into print. He did not use Fitzgerald's (or anyone else's) name, but the context makes it clear that he had Scott in mind. Hemingway held forth on what writers need—talent, discipline, “an absolute conscience”—and on the forces that “destroy” them, especially money. “[O]ur writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop.” Ernest further cited “two good writers” who were ruined because “they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.”

On the day after publication of Green Hills, Perkins went over the immediate reaction in a letter to Fitzgerald. On balance, he thought the reviews were favorable, particularly the first-rate one in the Sunday New York Times supplement. The unfavorable ones, Max believed, were motivated by the “prevalent idea,” at the bottom of the depression, that writers should concern themselves with “troubles of the day” rather than hunting expeditions. In fact, most of the major reviewers disliked the book. “Just another safari.” “It used to be pretty exciting, sitting down to read a new book by Hemingway, but now it's damn near alarming.” “[F]ew fine and no extraordinary passages, and large parts of it are dull.” Most tellingly, Edmund Wilson observed that Hemingway was “beginning to be imposed upon by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.” Among the principal figures in his books, the pontificating Hemingway of Green Hills was “his own worst-drawn character” and “his own worst commentator. His very prose style goes to pot.”

Such responses drove Hemingway into a state of depression, and he was displeased when Fitzgerald wrote him six weeks after the appearance of the book that he too hadn't much liked it. That letter has been lost, but it probably reflected the views Scott expressed to Perkins: that he had been put off by the “calendar of slaughter” and the “sad jocosity” of Ernest's references to Pauline as “P.O.M.” or Poor Old Mama. “Was delighted from your letter to see you don't know any more about when a book is a good book or what makes a book bad than ever,” Ernest wrote in reply to the critique. Scott reminded him of “a brilliant mathematician who loves mathematics truly and always gets the wrong answers to the problems.”

In the rest of this December 16 letter, however, Hemingway went out of his way to make amends. He was damned fond of Scott and hoped they would soon have a chance to talk. He'd started up to see him in Asheville but family duties kept him away. The more he thought about it, the better Tender seemed. Still, Fitzgerald's comments must have stung. Writing Dos Passos the next day, Ernest complained about Scott's “very supercilious letter” about how bad Green Hills of Africa was. (Fitzgerald did not, apparently, raise the issue of why Hemingway had chosen to attack him in the book.) “Goddamn it,” Ernest told Dos, “that is a good book. I'm not a goddamned patriot about my stuff and can tell good frombad and that is a good book.” The swearing and protestation made it sound as though he were trying to convince himself.

“The Crack-Up” and the Crack in “Snows”

After a fallow few months in Baltimore, Fitzgerald returned to the mountains to take stock of a badly diminished life. It had become painfully evident that Zelda would not recover from her illness. She was kept under close supervision at Sheppard-Pratt as she alternated between a catatonic state and an “intense suicidal mania.” Scott's own health was deteriorating as well. His energy was flagging. He had trouble sleeping. His drinking forced him to the hospital. He was strapped for funds, and could no longer write the formulaic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back yarns that for so long had kept him financially afloat.

This time, Fitzgerald stayed not in the elegant Grove Park Inn but at the pedestrian Skylands hotel in Hendersonville. He brought with him a mantra suggested by Esquire's Gingrich, who was buying short pieces from him for one-tenth of what his stories had brought in a few years before. In order to escape his writer's block, Gingrich suggested, Scott was to repeat “I can't write stories of young love for The Saturday Evening Post because I can't write stories of young love for The Saturday Evening Post because…” and so on. Holed up in Hendersonville and living on the cheap, he wrote the “Crack-Up” articles that amply demonstrated why he couldn't go on writing stories of young love.

In his elegiac essay about Ring Lardner two years before, Fitzgerald regretted that his friend had not lived up to his promise as a writer. One reason was that Lardner resisted expressing his innermost thoughts and feelings in his work. Scott suggested to him once that he should write something “deeply personal,” but Ring refused out of reticence and modesty. The unfortunate consequence was that Lardner “got less percentage of himself on paper than any other American of the first flight.” It was a mistake Fitzgerald wanted to avoid. For Esquire, during the middle 1930s, he turned out a series of autobiographical essays. The best-known of these were the three “Crack-Up” pieces that ran early in 1936: “The Crack-Up” (February), “Pasting It Together” (March), and “Handle with Care” (April).

The articles set out to explore Fitzgerald's “dark night of the soul,” to come to grips with his depression. By the standards of confessional memoirs at the end of the century, the account of his breakdown seems less than candid. Much is withheld.Zelda's illness is not mentioned, and the essays bring up drinking only in order to rule it out as a cause of Fitzgerald's problems. The only character is the enervated and somewhat cynical persona of F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the end of his rope.

Fitzgerald does not use much concrete detail in these essays, nor does he supply much by way of narrative. There are a few anecdotes, but mostly he talks about his feelings—normally a sure-fire recipe for producing boredom. Yet the “Crack-Up” essays elicited an extraordinary reaction among readers at the time of publication, and continue to generate considerable power two generations later. One quality keeping the essays alive is Fitzgerald's gift for communicating how he feels through metaphor. He is like a cracked plate, Fitzgerald tells us, not to be brought out for company but good enough to “hold crackers… or go into the ice box under left-overs.” He is an emotional bankrupt who has overdrawn on his resources. He is a beggar holding “the tin cup of self-pity.” He is an ineffectual soldier “standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in [his] hands and the targets down.” He is a little boy left home alone at night.

In the last of the three essays, these comparisons become progressively more self-demeaning. Finally, Fitzgerald warns that he has hung a “Cave Canem” sign above his door. “I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.” He will no longer squander his emotions as in the past. He will adopt a serviceable if insincere smile to deal with everyday encounters. He will become “a writer only,” and so—with luck—survive the storms ahead. In good part, he has been reduced to this depleted condition because he has no real self of his own, having borrowed so much of his personality from others. His “intellectual conscience,” for example, derived from Wilson (duly identified) and his “artistic conscience” from another source who was, manifestly, Ernest Hemingway.

Fitzgerald got a lot of mail in response to the “Crack-Up” articles. Old friends counseled him to cheer up. Fans encouraged him to keep writing. His professional colleagues, however, were generally dismayed. Perkins thought the essays might be taken as signaling the end of a career. Ober feared they would compromise his attempt to secure Fitzgerald a job in Hollywood. On a wider scale, Dos Passos objected to Scott's concentration on his own troubles as the depression continued and fascism flourished in Europe. “Christ, man,” he objected, “how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?”

Ernest did not write Scott directly about his confessional essays, but let others know how he felt. After reading the first installment, he wrote Dos Passos that he'd been trying to cheer Fitzgerald up through his letters—including, presumably, the one about casting his balls in the sea, if he had any balls left—but that he hadn't been able to. “See the reason now. He's officially cracked up.” As for Fitzgerald's ills, “Max says he has many imaginary diseases along with, I imagine, some very real liver trouble.”

After the second essay appeared, Ernest wrote Max at substantial length. The Esquire pieces “seem to me to be so miserable,” and there was another one coming. He'd always known Scott couldn't think, but he did have “a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public.” Hemingway went on to generalize that “people go through that emptiness many times in life and come out and do work.”

In this letter, too, Ernest included two disparaging comments about Fitzgerald that were often repeated in his correspondence. First, his lack of courage: “If Scott had gone to that war that he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice.” Second, his failure to grow up: “It was a terrible thing for him to love youth so much that he jumped straight from youth to senility without going through manhood.” It seemed “rotten” to criticize Scott after all he'd gone through, Ernest acknowledged. “Maybe the Church would help him.” Work definitely would help, but only honest, noncommercial work. “I wish we could help him,” Ernest concluded.

Perkins noted in reply that Fitzgerald had recently appealed to him for money, and he supposed he would give it to him. The important thing was to get him back on his feet and at his desk. As always on the lookout for the bright side, Max propounded the theory that a truly hopeless man would not have written the first two Esquire articles. If he really felt that bad, he would not have been able to talk about it. Scott was only forty, he mentioned in closing [actually, still 39]. It was “absurd for him to give up.” Following the appearance of the final essay, Ernest told Max he wished Scott “would pull out of that shamelessness of defeat.” They were all bound to die. Why quit before then? Was Scott trying to make a career out of “being through”? Then he reverted to the cowardice theme. Fitzgerald, he wrote, had “something in common” with Max Baer, the heavyweight boxer who (Hemingway thought) had taken a dive against Joe Louis to avoid being beaten up.

Writing Sara Murphy in March 1936, Fitzgerald remembered the awful “suddenness” with which the Murphys' son Baoth had died from spinal meningitis the previous year. He had gone through nothing quite like that, but he was writing her as a fellow sufferer of misfortunes. It was different with Ernest, whohad “managed to escape the great thunderbolts.” This was not entirely true. Hemingway's father's suicide administered one such shock, and his father bequeathed to him the painful legacy of depression. Ernest was susceptible all his life to terrible bouts of what he called “the black ass.” With them came periods when he behaved with extraordinary cruelty to almost everyone he knew, himself included if you take into account his long list of self-inflicted injuries. The late 1930s were one such period. His work was being panned, his marriage to Pauline was falling apart, and he lost all tolerance for former friends like Archibald MacLeish and John Dos Passos and, most notably, Scott Fitzgerald.

In June 1936 Arnold Gingrich went down to Bimini to join Hemingway in another of his deep-sea fishing outings. There he met Jane Mason, the beautiful young wife of Pan Am's man in Havana and possibly, at the time, Hemingway's lover. Gingrich liked Jane a great deal—twenty years later they would get married—and started talking to her about his admiration for Fitzgerald. He “draws the finest and purest tone from the English language of any writer now alive,” Gingrich said. Mason shushed him. “We don't say things like that around here,” she said. Members in good standing of the Hemingway camp were not to praise Fitzgerald.

While Ernest had not written Scott directly about what he regarded as the deplorable “Crack-Up” essays, he let him know instead in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” his story in the August 1936 Esquire. Hemingway's cruelly insensitive comment about Fitzgerald in that story breached the boundaries of personal and professional courtesy, and effectively shattered the cracked plate of their friendship. The passage, occurring midway through the story, recorded the thoughts of the narrator about the rich.

[They] were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

This heartless passage derived from two sources. The first was Fitzgerald's “The Rich Boy,” where his narrator expounds on the situation of the very rich as a group before going on to deal with the specific case of Anson Hunter.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are… Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think they are better than we are. They are different.

The other, unattributed source was a luncheon Hemingway and Perkins had in New York with the quick-witted Irish writer Mary Colum. Ernest began talking about his contacts with the wealthy folk in Bimini who fished and partied off then-yachts. He was getting to know the rich, he said. “The only difference between the rich and other people,” Colum instantly responded, “is that the rich have more money.” The remark rather belittled Hemingway, who had been waxing expansive. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” he transferred the put-down to Fitzgerald.

Perkins reported the Hemingway-Colum exchange in an August 1936 letter to his intimate friend Elizabeth Lemmon. To take Colum's comment and use it against Fitzgerald struck him as “contemptible,” Max said. He used no such judgmental language in correspondence with Scott or Ernest, however. In fact, he did not even let Fitzgerald know of the luncheon conversation.

Upon reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in Esquire (the issue also contained Scott's “Afternoon of an Author,” an autobiographical account of a writer unable to work because of a loss of vitality), Fitzgerald objected at once in a brief letter to Hemingway.

Dear Ernest:
Please lay off me in print. {Direct, and to the point.) If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn't mean I want friends (still friends, then?) praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly (how could that have been ?) but it cost me a night's sleep. (Only one night: I'm tougher than you think.) And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind (gently, gently) cutting my name?

It's a fine story—one of your best—(absolutely true, and under the circumstances insightful and generous) even though the “Poor Scott Fitzgerald etc.” rather (putting it mildly) spoiled it for me.
Ever Your Friend (despite all) Scott

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction. (Setting the record straight.)

Hemingway replied to this letter, but his response has been lost or destroyed. As Fitzgerald told Beatrice Dance, in his response Ernest “rather resentfully” agreed to omit Scott's name when the story was republished in a book. Hemingway also commented that since Fitzgerald had been exposing his private life so “shamelessly” in Esquire, he figured it was “open season” on him. At that point, Scott said, he wrote Ernest “a hell of a letter that would have been sudden death for somebody the next time we met” and then—in an access of self-control—decided to tear it up.

Ernest was quite “as nervously broken down” as he was, Scott added, “but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.” The megalomania he noted in Hemingway (“a psychopathological condition in which delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence predominate”) was real enough, but so was Ernest's very real melancholia (“a mental disorder characterized by severe depression, apathy, and withdrawal”).

Hemingway told Max Perkins that Fitzgerald “was sore” because he'd used his name in “Snows.” “He has only been writing those awful things about himself since Feb. in Esquire but if I took issue with his analysis of his proclaimed break-up he gets sore.” For five years, Ernest said, he hadn't written a line about anybody he knew because he was so sorry for them all—an inaccuracy, considering Green Hills of Africa—but time was running short and he “was going to cease being a gent and go back to being a novelist.” This observation, Hemingway must have realized, paraphrased Fitzgerald's resolution in the final “Crack-Up” essay to stop trying to be good or kind or thoughtful and to concentrate instead on becoming a writer only.

Hemingway was not entirely through keeping “anybody he knew” out of his fiction. In a draft of “Snows,” Hemingway's protagonist is reminiscing about his days in Paris. “And there in the cafe as he passed was Malcolm Cowley with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara.” Before publication in Esquire, however, Hemingway deleted Cowley's name and substituted “that American poet.” An element of professional calculation may have contributed to that decision. Cowley was an influential critic and literary editor of the New Republic. His name came out. “Poor Scott Fitzgerald” stayed in.

Looking back on Hemingway's insult in “Snows” two months later, Fitzgerald confessed to Perkins that somehow he loved “that man, no matter what he says or does,” though his patience had been sorely tried. But he went on to make an attack of his own against Ernest's recent work. “No one could ever hurt him in his first books but he has completely lost his head and the duller he gets about it, the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.

Did Fitzgerald think of the very rich as a “special glamorous race”? And why did Ernest determine, all of a sudden, that this was one of the things that “wrecked” Scott? Earlier he had attributed Fitzgerald's troubles as a writer to a number of causes. Zelda was jealous of his work and tried to emasculate him. Scott could not control his drinking. He wrote slop for money. He was stalled by critical over-praise and the sense that he must write masterpieces. He couldn't think. He didn't listen. He fell in love with the idea of failure. He loved youth so much he never grew up. And so on. In “Snows” for the first time Hemingway cited Fitzgerald's “romantic awe” of the rich as yet another principal cause of his crack-up.

Context helps to explain why. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” tells the story of Harry, a failed writer, and his rich wife, Helen. In marrying Helen, the writer chose security and comfort over his career, and what happened to him subsequently was very much like what happened to Fitzgerald's Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. He fell into a pattern of too much drinking and too much travel and not enough work. In Africa on safari with his wife (as Ernest and Pauline Hemingway had been in 1933), Harry contracts gangrene and dies, after thinking back on all the stories he had not written. The rotting away of his leg symbolizes the rot in his soul. As much as any story ever written, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” illustrates how the very rich are different from other people and how they can “wreck” writers. It constitutes a cautionary tale directed at Hemingway himself. Harry rather cynically reflects, as Ernest must have done after leaving Hadley for Pauline, that he had “traded on” his talent. “It was strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one?” In singling out Fitzgerald as a writer destroyed by admiration for the rich, Hemingway was transferring the guilt implicit in his own story.

In doing so, moreover, Hemingway chose to ignore what Scott had written on the subject. In the second “Crack-Up” essay, he thought back to the summer of 1919, when Zelda “closed out” their engagement on the basisof common sense. “It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money,” and though Fitzgerald wrote a novel and so made it come out all right, “it came out all right for a different person.” The man who married the girl in the spring of 1920 “would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of the peasant.” Since that time, Fitzgerald had never been able “to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of [his rich friends] my girl.” He distrusted the rich, yet worked for money “to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives.”

In his fiction as well, Fitzgerald consistently repudiated the rich for their callousness toward others (Anson Hunter in “The Rich Boy”), for leaving the dead and destroyed behind them as they took their leave (Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby), and for using up and discarding lesser mortals (Nicole and Baby Warren in Tender Is the Night). The “mobility and grace” of the very rich might merit emulation, but not their morals.

The fact is that both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were simultaneously attracted and repelled by the world of the very rich. In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a companion safari story to “Snows,” Ernest chronicled the sudden coming-of-age of a wealthy playboy and his seemingly accidental murder by his wife, who would have preferred that he remain arrested in his cowardly boy-man status. In To Have and Have Not, he sketched the rich yacht people anchored off Key West as immoral, exploitative, sexually conflicted, alcoholic, and generally to be avoided. Most notably, he excoriated the wealthy in A Moveable Feast for helping to break up his marriage to Hadley, a union he tended to idealize after the breakup. In their youthful innocence, Ernest wrote, he and Hadley did not learn soon enough “about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves ever scoured.” So much for the Murphys. And so much and more for John Dos Passos, the “pilot fish” who led them to their prey. (Actually, as Gerry Brenner discovered from the drafts of the posthumously published A Moveable Feast, Hemingway intended to moderate this attack on the rich.)

Despite such pronouncements in his fiction, Hemingway in his private life was if anything more involved with the wealthy than was Fitzgerald. Only the very rich had the time to pursue those outdoor sports that meant so much to Ernest: hunting the high country, fishing the deep seas, going to bullfights in Spain or on safari to the Serengeti. And as he grew older and more famous, Ernest became a more desirable object of their social patronage. The very rich inhabited a different world, Hemingway understood. But he maintained that he could go into their country as he would enter any foreign country, and emerge unharmed.

Getting Hemingway to remove “poor Scott Fitzgerald” from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was not as easy as Perkins assured Fitzgerald it would be. In fact Ernest contemplated compounding his attack in the months after his story appeared in Esquire and Scott asked him to lay off. In early drafts of To Have and Have Not, written at that time, Ernest engaged in some extraneous literary gossip. Harry Crosby was a terrible writer who should have killed himself sooner. The homosexual Hart Crane, another suicide, had an unfortunate proclivity for picking up the wrong sailors. About Fitzgerald he put down what he had been saying in letters to Perkins and others: he was all charm and talent with no brains, and had gone straight from youth to senility without stopping at manhood. All of these slurs, together with other passages that obviously libeled Dos Passos (another friend Hemingway had turned against), were cut out before publication.

Fitzgerald did not know about these derogatory reflections, but he was worried that Hemingway might not follow through on his promise to delete the reference to himself in book publication of “Snows.” It was hard to imagine that Ernest retained “any friendly feeling” toward him at all, Scott wrote Max Perkins in March 1937. But he reminded Perkins that Hemingway had agreed to the change in copy “if the story should come in with me still in it.” Not to worry, Max wrote back. He'd spoken to Ernest a while back, and his feelings toward Fitzgerald were “far different from what you seem to suspect.” Ernest had “some queer notion” that the reference in “Snows” would give Scott a “jolt” and be good for him. “Anyhow, he means to take it out.”

“Thanks for the word about Ernest,” Scott answered. “Methinks he does protest too much.”

A year later, Fitzgerald took up the issue once more. He sent Perkins a letter he'd received that showed “how a whole lot of people interpreted Ernest's crack” in “Snows.” The story had since appeared, without alteration, in The Best Short Stories 1937, a collection edited by Edward J. O'Brien. Scott gathered that Ernest could not help that, but then gave vent to his developing indignation. In the fall, Scribner's was planning to publish Hemingway's First Forty-nine Stories. “[D]o keep in mind that he has promised to make an elision of my name. It was adamned rotten thing to do, and with anybody but Ernest my tendency would be to crack back. Why did he think it would add to the strength of his story if I had become such a negligible figure? This is quite indefensible on any grounds.”

When Hemingway's amended copy for the book came in, late in August, it included some minor changes in the passage but otherwise simply reduced “poor Scott Fitzgerald” to “poor Scott.” In mild protest Perkins elaborated on why it would be better if “his name could come out altogether.” If people did not recognize “Scott” as Fitzgerald (though he was identified as a writer in the following sentence), “it might as well be some other name.” And if they did so identify him, it might take them out of the story for a moment and into thinking about Fitzgerald instead. He'd shown the passage to two people who thought Scott might still feel bad about it, “being very sensitive.” It would be good if his name could come out. But they could talk about it when Ernest came to see him during the week ahead.

At that meeting, apparently, Hemingway agreed to take “Scott” out and replace him with “Julian” (the name, by the way, of the suicidal and alcoholic protagonist of John O'Hara's 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra). Nor did Perkins tell Fitzgerald of Ernest's halfway measure of changing “Scott Fitzgerald” to “Scott.” In a September 1 letter to Scott, Max discoursed on the omnibus Hemingway volume coming out. Titled The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, it was to include Ernest's new play about the Spanish Civil War, all of his previously collected stories, and four new stories. “One of the new stories is 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' and you are not in it,” Max reported, as if to suggest it had been no trouble at all to get rid of his name. The O'Brien Best Stories collection, he added, had nothing to do with Scribner's (it was published by Houghton Mifflin) and he hadn't known it contained “Snows” until after it came out. Max did not say that Ernest surely did know the Best Short Stories 1937 would contain “Snows.” Or that, since the volume was not published until May 1937, Hemingway had time enough to delete the reference to Fitzgerald, if he wished.

In February 1939, Fitzgerald wrote Max commiserating about Thomas Wolfe's unflattering portrait of him in The Web and the Rock. Wolfe's making a villain out of his former editor and friend was “astonishing.” By way of softening the blow, Scott mentioned Ernest's “sharp turn” against him, a turn that seemed to have a “pointless childish quality—so much so that I really never felt any resentment about it.” Looking back on the episode in 1951, Hemingway exhibited no regret whatever. “Poor Scott,” he wrote Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener, “and didn't he know that the man in The Snows of Kilimanjaro would have spoken of him, or thought of him, exactly as he, Scott, would have mentioned actual things, cars and places?” Except, of course, that he, Scott, was not an inanimate object like a Ford or a Chevrolet.

“Poor Scott Fitzgerald” was corrected to “poor Julian” in the fall of 1938. Over the years, a legend about an exchange of views on the very rich between Fitzgerald and Hemingway has grown up and become an apocryphal part of literary history. In his notebooks, Fitzgerald wrote, “They have more money. (Ernest's wisecrack.)” When editing The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson included a number of entries from Fitzgerald's notebooks, including that one. In a footnote, Wilson incorrectly explained that “Fitzgerald had said, 'The rich are different from us.' Hemingway had replied, 'Yes, they have more money.'” Lionel Trilling repeated “the famous exchange” in one influential essay, and Harry Levin did in another. So the story has come down to us that the discussion about the very rich—as told in “Snows”—really took place between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and that Hemingway got the better of it by making the “more money” wisecrack.

There was such a discussion, and in it Mary Colum one-upped Hemingway, not Hemingway Fitzgerald. And even in “Snows,” Ernest did not claim credit for the “Yes, they have more money” line, assigning it to an unspecified “someone.” (In an early draft of “Snows,” Hemingway gave the retort to his protagonist Harry, a fictionalized version of himself.) In the construction of legends, truth cannot compete with fiction.

Last Encounters

In the “Crack-Up” essays, Fitzgerald purported to tell about “a self-immolation” that left him purified and able to face the future, albeit with less energy and enthusiasm than in the past. He had touched bottom, the articles seemed to promise, and was on his way up. This prognosis was premature. Fitzgerald's summer of 1935 in Asheville was disastrous. The summer and fall he spent there in 1936 were worse.

For one thing, Zelda's condition had deteriorated, and Scott had given up hope for her full recovery. In April 1936 he transferred her from Sheppard-Pratt hospital in Baltimore to Highland hospital in Asheville. She weighed only eighty-nine pounds at the time. During the previous three months of “intensesuicidal mania,” she had tried to strangle herself and to throw herself in front of a passing train. At Highland she came under the care of Dr. Robert Carroll, a forceful director who believed in a regimen of rigidly controlled diet and lots of exercise. To some degree, Zelda responded. She seemed happier, and made no further attempts to kill herself. Instead she began an extended period of religious delusion, believing herself in direct contact with God and almost everyone else headed for an afterlife in hell. Zelda's entire appearance had changed from that of the flirtatious strawberry blond Scott had fallen in love with. Her facial planes had thickened and her skin coarsened in the six years since her breakdown. She rarely smiled, and in photographs looked dour and dull-eyed. When Scott went to see her, the meetings often ended in anger and coldness. “I am sorry,” she poignantly wrote him after one such failure of a visit, “that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell… I love you anyway—even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life.”

Financially and professionally, Fitzgerald continued to slide downhill. In 1935 he made about $17,000 from his writing. In 1936 the figure dropped to $10,000, less than in any year since he started his career in 1920. He could no longer produce stories that would draw several thousand dollars from high-circulation magazines. Liquor was part of the problem, but so was his “emotional bankruptcy.” As he commented in a March 1933 essay, he could find plots anywhere—a thousand of them in any criminal law library—but they wouldn't work for him. He had to “start out with an emotion—one that's close to me and that I can understand.” By the middle 1930s, he no longer possessed the emotional power to generate short fiction. There seemed less weather than in his youth, he wryly observed in his notebooks, and “practically no men and women at all.”

The “Count of Darkness” stories represented an attempt at finding salable subject matter, but they were too remote from his own experience to succeed. The “Gwen” stories about father-and-daughter conflicts originated closer to home, but lacked the punch of his earlier fiction. The Saturday Evening Post bought a few of them, and then cut Fitzgerald off as a contributor, for good.

Broke though he was, Fitzgerald stayed at the Grove Park Inn from July to December 1936. He was desperate, and he was drinking heavily. A minor disaster occurred in July when he broke his shoulder diving into the resort's pool; the bone fractured, he insisted, before he hit the water. Worse troubles lay ahead. Fitzgerald had a revolver, and fired it off in an apparent suicide attempt. Thereafter the Inn refused to allow him to remain as a guest unless he was in the care of a trained nurse. Dorothy Richardson was hired to take on this task, which mostly involved trying to control Scott's drinking. The two of them were in his room when an enterprising New York Post reporter named Michel Mok came to interview Fitzgerald on September 24, 1936, his fortieth birthday. It turned out to be one of the most devastating interviews in the history of journalism.

Mok's story appeared the following day in the Post, under the headline “The Other Side of Paradise: Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair.” It was the “Crack-Up” articles, of course, that led Mok to pursue Fitzgerald, and during the interview Scott continued to exhibit the same kind of obsession with his own decline that characterized the Esquire pieces. “The poet-prophet of the post-war neurotics observed his fortieth birthday yesterday,” Mok wrote. He was trying to come back from “the hell of despondency” but there was “obviously little hope in his heart.” Mok let description unveil Fitzgerald's condition: “his jittery jumping off and onto his bed, his restless pacing, his trembling hands, his twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child.” He made frequent trips to the highboy which contained a bottle. Each time he poured a drink, he would look appealingly at his nurse and ask, “Just one ounce?” As he grew more expansive, he poured a drink with a cavalier “Much against your better judgment, my dear” for the nurse's disapproving look.

“A series of things happened to papa,” Fitzgerald said, commandeering Hemingway's Papa nickname for himself. “So papa got depressed and started drinking a little.” It was a case of “[o]ne blow after another, and finally something snapped.” In the course of a long and disjointed conversation, Fitzgerald rambled on about his father, about his Army service, about his brief stint in advertising, about his early years as a writer. The “jazz-mad, gin-mad generation” he helped to invent had ended in calamity. “Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves… And a few became successful authors.” Fitzgerald's face twitched. “Successful authors!” he cried. “Oh, my God, successful authors!” He stumbled to the highboy for another drink.

Fitzgerald also compared himself to two such successful authors. “A writer like me,” he said, “must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling.” Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway had that kind of confidence, Scott said. He'd once had that feeling too, before losing it “through a series of blows, many of them my own fault.” He also praised Hemingway for scolding him about the “Crack-Up” essays. “My best friend, a great American writer—he's the man I call my artistic conscience in one of the Esquire articles— wrote me a furious letter. He said I was stupid to write all that gloomy personal stuff.”

Fitzgerald did not, however, mention Hemingway's egregious insult in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” And when he read Mok's ruinous interview, he wired Ernest for his assistance, if you ever wanted to help me your chance is now, he telegraphed, going on to say that Mok's interview put him “in an absurd position” and “cut” on him “directly and indirectly.” After some delay, the message reached Hemingway in Cooke City, Montana. He telegraphed Fitzgerald immediately, DEAR SCOTT PLEASE WIRE ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO STOP HAVEN'T SEEN INTERVIEW STOP… WILL DO ANYTHING I CAN AS ALWAYS ERNEST. By the time this telegram reached Scott, his rancor had abated. WIRED UNDER IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE IN NEW YORK NOTHING CAN BE DONE AT LONG RANGE AND ON COOLER CONSIDERATION SEEMS NOTHING TO BE DONE ANYHOW THANKS BEST ALWAYS SCOTT. Just what Scott thought that Ernest, had he been in New York, might have done is unclear—perhaps look up Mok and punch him out. The cry for help, in his humiliation, was clear enough.

Perkins and Ober, who had vested interests in Fitzgerald's career, were horrified by the interview in the Post. In sending along Scott's first telegram, Max wrote Ernest that it “seemed as if Scott were bent upon destroying himself.” When a man put himself in the care of a trained nurse, it was time to despair of him. And Scott had been foolish to trust a reporter. As printed, his story “gave you the impression of a completely licked and very drunk person, bereft of hope, acquiescing in his ruin.” Fortunately, he added, “hardly anybody reads the New York Post.” That consolation went by the boards when Time magazine reprinted Mok's interview on October 5.

On that same day, Fitzgerald wrote Ober rationalizing his behavior. He had a fever of 102 and the reporter appealed to his better instincts by claiming to have a relative afflicted with mental trouble, so Scott talked more freely than he should have done. (Later he was to claim, incorrectly, that Mok pieced together fragments from the “Crack-Up” articles instead of reporting what he said and did.) When he read the story in the Post, he told Ober, “it seemed about the end” and so he swallowed “four grains” of morphine, “enough to kill a horse. It happened to be an overdose and almost before I could get to the bed I vomited the whole thing and the nurse came in and saw the empty phial and there was hell to pay for a while and afterwards I felt like a fool.”

Fitzgerald was in better shape when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, another Scribner's author, came to visit him at the suggestion of Max Perkins. Scott seemed exhilarated and sure of his future, she recalled years later. He had “gone astray with his writing, but was ready to go back to it in full force.” Rawlings was impressed by two other things about Fitzgerald. Although not interested in her or her writing, he “turned on his charm as deliberately as a water-tap” for her benefit. And he spoke of Hemingway with affection and with another quality that puzzled her. “It was not envy of the work or the man, it was not malice.” She decided it was irony, and akin to the irony with which he set out to charm her. In this exercise, Fitzgerald resembled Dick Diver at the end of Tender, knowingly pretending affection for Mary North Minghetti, a woman he despised.

Fitzgerald suffered another blow to the ego in print within months. This was administered by his old friend John Peale Bishop in “The Missing All,” an article in the Winter 1937 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Bishop organized his essay around the contrasts between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as prime examples of the “Younger Generation” in American literature. In this comparison, Hemingway emerges as an admirable figure—both as a man and a writer—and Fitzgerald as something of a lightweight.

Bishop begins, logically enough, with first meetings. Ezra Pound took him around to see Hemingway in Paris in 1922, when Ernest and Hadley—still childless—were living in a fifth-floor walkup on the rue Cardinal Lemoine. Hemingway was then still sending dispatches to the Toronto Star Weekly, but Pound, always quick to jump, had read and admired some of his first unpublished stories and thought that Bishop, as a poet and aspiring fiction writer himself, should meet the young correspondent. Hemingway opened the door: “a stalwart, smiling, good-looking young man” with a pronounced limp. When they left, Pound told Bishop that the limping young man been wounded fighting with the Italians during the war and “left four days for dead.” This gross exaggeration provided early evidence of Hemingway's capacity to inspire legends.

Fitzgerald and Bishop met in the fall of their freshman year at Princeton, 1913, and started a conversation about their literary interests. Scott “was pert and fresh and blond, and looked, as some one said, like a jonquil.” Not much of a student, he “left Princeton without a degree and without much of an education.” He and Bishop talked books: “those I had read, which were not many, those Fitzgerald had read, which were even less, those he said he had read, which were many, many more.” At times Bishop sounds affectionate toward his Princeton friend, but the tone throughout is one of casual superiority.

It was in their attitudes toward writing that Bishop drew his sharpest distinction between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. According to Bishop, Hemingway “developed a perfect consciousness of his craft” in Paris because of his innate honesty and incorruptible subjugation to his art. In his disciplineand dedication, he was a direct descendant of Flaubert. His accomplishment promised to earn him a place in American literature. His work had both historical and literary importance.

By way of contrast Bishop stressed Fitzgerald's role as social historian. During the 1920s he made himself into “the embodiment of youth's protest against the inhibitions and conventions of an outworn morality.” But his implicit program of freedom vs. repression degenerated like the Jazz Age itself into license rather than liberty, and the long hangover that followed. “One can scarcely say that he thinks,” Bishop observed of Fitzgerald. Like Rosemary in Tender Is the Night, he was “Irish and romantic and illogical.” His great subject was first love, and its interconnection with money.

Bishop began the transformation of the “poor Scott Fitzgerald” passage in “Snows” into a celebrated literary anecdote. Here is his version of what Ernest had written, six months before:

“The rich are not as we are.” So began one of  [Fitzgerald's] early stories. “No,” Hemingway once said to him, “they have more money.”

In this form, the anecdote was only halfway complete. It was not a direct conversation between Scott and Ernest yet, for “The rich are not as we are” still emanates from a story of Fitzgerald's. But the “some one” of “Snows” who responds with the wisecrack had already undergone a metamorphosis into Hemingway himself.

Bowdlerized as it was, the reference was important to Bishop's argument. What he did, in effect, was to provide a rational explanation for Hemingway's remark that Fitzgerald was wrecked by his “romantic awe” of the very rich. According to Bishop, Scott was a victim of his belief that the rich were a race apart. Inasmuch as he shared this misperception with the country at large, it made him an ideal “historian of the period.” But it also led to personal disillusionment. Like Gatsby, Bishop maintains, Fitzgerald “remained an intruder in the moneyed world; he admired it and would have liked to be a part of it; and yet with every passing year it becomes more difficult to face it. He has learned the price of everything, and is not a cynic, but a moody sentimentalist who gives himself a very bad time.” For Bishop, who had of course read the “Crack-Up” essays, Fitzgerald represented a sad case. He accordingly felt sorry for Scott. And perhaps because he had known him when he was young and foolish and looked “like a jonquil,” he could not envision that his Princeton classmate was, like Hemingway, a writer for the ages.

Fitzgerald was hurt by Bishop's essay, the more so because it came from a longtime friend whose career he had vigorously promoted. It was a rotten return, he thought, “for ten years or trying to set him up in a literary way.” In the May 1940 letter to Perkins where he wrote those words, Scott linked John Bishop's disloyalty with “Ernest's crack in 'Snows'” (and Harold Ober's decision to stop advancing him money) as a betrayal of friendship. He followed with a curious and revealing passage.

Once I believed in friendship, believed I could (if I didn't always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian's cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.

To earn friends, Fitzgerald manifestly believed, you had to make them happy, and for a long time it “was more fun than anything” when he could do so. In the last year of his life he came to see how demeaning it was to play the clown for the entertainment of others.

Scott and Ernest met twice in two months in the summer of 1937. These were brief encounters, not extended reunions. What was over was over. Fitzgerald continued to speak of the friendship as if were still flourishing, as a way of purchasing respect through association. To a lesser degree, so did Hemingway. He came through New York on one trip associated with his activities on behalf of the Loyalists in Spain, and stopped off to visit Perkins at his home. Ernest demanded a telephone at once, announcing that he had “to talk to Scott. He's the only person in America worth talking to.”

During the late 1930s, Ernest devoted much of his time and energy to fighting fascism, which was threatening to take over Spain as it had Germany and Italy. He raised money for the cause, and twice traveled to the front during the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and propagandist. In Madrid, he lived openly with Martha Gellhorn, the writer who was soon to supplant Pauline and become his third wife. With Joris Ivens, he helped to film The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film designed to arouse Americans in the battle against fascism as the war escalated and spread.

On June 4, 1937, Hemingway spoke at the second American Writers' Congress in Carnegie Hall. The evening was sponsored by the League of American Writers, a group made up of well-intentioned liberals and doctrinaire Communists. MacLeish was moderator, and the three featured speakers wereHemingway, Ivens, and Earl Browder, secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

The hall was jammed and hot as Hemingway nervously began his talk about why writers needed to join the cause. Fascism was the only system that would not allow them to tell the truth; unless they spoke now, they would be silenced. It was the speech of the meeting. The audience came to see Hemingway, and though he sweated and stammered at first, he pleased most of them. The novelist Dawn Powell was something of an exception. Ernest's message, as she construed it, was that “war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn't they were a big sissy.”

Whether Fitzgerald actually attended the writers' congress is unknown. But he and Hemingway did get together sometime during that New York visit. Probably Scott took the train from Baltimore to see Ernest. This meeting produced no fireworks. On the day after the Carnegie Hall gathering, he wrote Hemingway from the train going south. “It was fine to see you so well & full of life, Ernest… All best wishes to your Spanish trip—I wish we could meet more often. I don't feel I know you at all.”

A month later Fitzgerald took the long transcontinental train trip to California, where Harold Ober had negotiated a contract for Scott to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had barely arrived when Hemingway and Ivens blew into town to raise funds for Loyalist war relief. According to a letter Robert Benchley wrote his wife, he and Fitzgerald and Hemingway had “a warm and good-humored” lunch together on July 11. The following day, Ernest screened The Spanish Earth (with his own voice doing the narration) for some of Hollywood's elite. Fitzgerald was invited to the showing, but there is no firm record that he and Hemingway even talked that evening. (Lillian Hellman, in her unreliable memoir An Unfinished Woman, spun a yarn about Scott driving her to a party that Dorothy Parker gave afterwards and being afraid to go in to confront Ernest directly.)

The following day, Scott telegraphed Ernest, THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE. He went into greater detail in a letter to Perkins. “Ernest came like a whirlwind, put Ernst Lubitsch the great director in his place by refusing to have his picture prettied up and remade for him a la Hollywood at various cocktail parties.” In his notebooks, Fitzgerald wrote, somewhat mysteriously, “Ernest Hemingway and Ernst Lubitsch—Dotty 'We're all shits.'” This suggests that it may have been at Dorothy Parker's party that Hemingway put Lubitsch down, eliciting a cynical remark from the often cynical Parker. Ernest's mission was wildly successful, Scott told Max. “He raised $1000 bills won by Miriam Hopkins fresh from the gaming table, the rumor is $14,000 in one night.” But there was also a noticeable change in Hemingway's demeanor. “I felt he was in a state of nervous tensity, that there was something almost religious about it.” Scott and Ernest never saw each other again.

Ambivalent to the End

A month later, in the confines of Perkins's office at Scribner's, Hemingway's temper boiled over. During the interim, Max had written Ernest approvingly about Scott's fresh start in Hollywood. Everyone there seemed impressed by the change in him, and Max's pockets were full of money from the weekly check Fitzgerald sent as payment on his debt. To conclude, Perkins dug a sidelong elbow at Fitzgerald's lamentations in the “Crack-Up.” Everything might turn out for the best, he wrote, if Scott “will only begin to dramatize himself as the man who came back….” This time, however, the dramatics came from Ernest and not from Scott.

Hemingway had long been simmering with anger for Max Eastman, a left-wing litterateur he initially met—and liked—while covering the international economic conference in Genoa in 1922. In a June 1933 New Republic review of Hemingway's book on bullfighting, Eastman directed a few ad hominem thrusts at Ernest. Titled “Bull in the Afternoon,” the belated review speculated that Hemingway must lack the “serene confidence” that he was “a full-sized man.” Why else would he continue to proclaim his red-blooded masculinity? “Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest,” he advised. Some heated correspondence ensued, involving MacLeish and Perkins as well as Hemingway and Eastman. As usual Perkins poured oil on the troubled waters, assuring Ernest that the article didn't amount to anything. As Hemingway saw it, Eastman had accused him of impotence, and he was determined to exact revenge.

More than four years later, on the afternoon of August 11,1937, he had his opportunity. When Ernest entered Perkins's office, there was Eastman talking to Max about a new edition of his Enjoyment of Poetry anthology. Hemingway and Eastman shook hands amicably enough, but the trouble soon began. A smiling Hemingway ripped open his shirt to expose a chest “hairy enough for anybody.” All three men laughed. Then he reached over and opened Eastman's shirt, revealing a chest “as bare as a bald man's head.” Further laughter, now a bit tense. Perkins was contemplating unbuttoning his own shirt—at least he could come in second, he figured—when Ernest stopped smiling and suddenly demanded of Eastman, “What do you mean by accusing me of impotence?” He hadn't done that at all, Eastman insisted, and by way of proof picked up a collection of his work lying on Perkins's desk and showed Ernest the reprinted “Bull in the Afternoon” piece. Hemingway was less than delighted to see this attack on him preserved between book covers. After some debate over who should read the piece aloud, Ernest snatched the book from Perkins's hands and slapped Eastman across the face with it. Eastman rushed at Hemingway and the two large men tumbled to the floor, upsetting books and papers from Perkins's desk as they fell. The editor, who was fearful that Hemingway might “kill” Eastman, grabbed the man on top only to discover that the one on the bottom, grinning up at him in absolute equanimity, was Ernest.

There the fracas might have ended had not Eastman written an account of what he regarded as his victory and read it out to friends at a dinner party. The word spread at once, and the story appeared in the evening papers on Friday, August 13. As a full-fledged celebrity, anything about Hemingway qualified as news, particularly if it served to undermine his public image. This was not man bites dog, but close: the older, hardly athletic Eastman had apparently bested the rugged outdoor man of action in a wrestling match. The following day, as he was embarking for Europe aboard the Champlain, Ernest presented his own version of the encounter to the New York Times. Eastman's claim that he had thrown him to the floor was nonsense. In fact, Eastman jumped at him “like a woman, clawing… with his open hand” and Ernest held him off, not wanting to hurt him. Now, however, he was ready to issue a challenge. He was eager to fix Eastman so he wouldn't give any statements to the press for a while. If Eastman took his fighting prowess seriously, Ernest told the Times, let him waive “all legal claims to damages,” and he would put up $1,000 for any charity Eastman favored. “Then we'll go into a room and he can read his book to me… The best man unlocks the door.”

With that, he sailed off to Spain, and the war, and Martha Gellhorn at the Hotel Florida in Madrid.

Reading about this dustup in the papers, Fitzgerald first wrote Perkins asking what really happened. Was Ernest “on a bat”? Had Eastman run off to Shanghai with Pauline? In any case, he felt “damn sorry” for Hemingway after his own recent “taste of newspaper bastards.” Once Perkins provided the details, Scott commiserated with him about Ernest's decline—assuming the role usually occupied by Hemingway feeling sorry for him. He was amused by Perkins's account, but the fact remained that “Ernest did exactly the same asinine thing that I knew he had it in him to do when he was out here” in Hollywood. His discretion “must have been at a low ebb” or he would never have trusted the reporters at the boat. Scott laid the blame on what he thought of as Ernest's somewhat deranged psychological condition. “He is living at the present in a world so entirely his own that it is impossible to help him, even if I felt close to him at the moment, which I don't.” Still he liked Ernest so much that it made him wince when imbeciles could “dig at him and hurt him. After all, you would think that a man who has arrived at the position of being practically his country's most eminent writer, could be spared that yelping.”

Fitzgerald's feelings about Hemingway grew increasingly ambivalent during his last years in Hollywood. When Scott came through New York in the winter of 1938, sober and solid, he told Max Perkins that he thought of Hemingway as “the most dynamic personality” in the world, or anyhow in the country. Max relayed this news to Ernest, who responded that he never wanted to be dynamic, only a writer, and that at that particular moment he was “in such an unchristly gigantic jam of every bloody kind… that it's practically comic.” His marriage to Pauline was on the rocks, for one thing. And the reception of To Have and Have Not, published in October 1937, had been anything but favorable.

Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had gone a long time between novels, eight years having elapsed since A Farewell to Arms appeared in 1929. He had hardly been fallow in the interim, but neither his nonfiction books, on bullfighting and Africa, nor the story collection Winner Take Nothing did much to advance his reputation. To Have and Have Not did still less.

The book cobbled together several long stories about Harry Morgan, a poor working stiff trying to make a living off his boat in Key West. As a “have-not,” Morgan is driven into dangerous and illegal activities to support his family. His desperate struggle is pointedly contrasted with the immoral behavior of the “haves” who idle away their time on yachts in the harbor. Dying at the end of the novel, Morgan reflects that “One man alone… ain't got no bloody fucking chance.” It was as close to an overt political statement as anything in Hemingway's work, and his novel was greeted by Communist critics as the work of “a great artist and a brave one, brave enough to risk not writing a masterpiece once in a while, big enough to see the thing through.” Sinclair Lewis, on the other hand, took a jaundiced view of Hemingway's message “that all excellently educated men and women are boresome and cowardly degenerates, while un-lettered men engaged in rum running and the importation of Chinese coolies are wise and good and attractive.” Edmund Wilson called it Hemingway's “Popeye the Sailor” novel.

What made Ernest seem particularly “dynamic” in the late 1930s was his adventuring as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. Fitzgerald was of two minds about this—at once admiring and suspicious of Hemingway's motives. In April 1938, Perkins wrote Scott that Ernest had gone back to Spain yet again, for the good reason that he “couldn't reconcile himself to seeing it all go wrong over there—all the people he knew in trouble—while he was sitting around in Key West.” From the ship, Hemingway sent Perkins a letter that sounded as if he might not survive this trip to the wars. In this farewell communication, Max said, Ernest “especially mentioned” Scott. Fitzgerald replied that he was touched by Hemingway's “premonitory last word, and fascinated, as always, by the man's Byronic intensity”—Byron having been another writer who thought that he could change the course of history through his actions. He had been reading Ernest's dispatches from Spain in the Los Angeles Times, Scott added, but there had been none the last three days. He kept hoping “a stray Krupp shell hasn't knocked off our currently most valuable citizen.”

In a fragmentary play script among his papers, Fitzgerald placed Hemingway in the same category with movie actor Errol Flynn as flamboyant participants in the Spanish Civil War. The last time Flynn was in Spain, one character remarks, “he got wounded with some window plaster and Hemingway says that country isn't big enough to hold them both.” In pursuing the Loyalist cause, Fitzgerald implied, Hemingway was also pursuing celebrity. In conversation, he told his secretary Frances Kroll that Ernest went to the war in order to prove himself to himself. It occurred to her that Scott, confined to his desk in Hollywood, might have envied Ernest in the field with a beautiful companion at his side in Martha Gellhorn.

At the same time, Fitzgerald continued to rank Hemingway among the greatest of modern writers. In dispensing advice to young people who aspired to the craft, he consistently singled out Hemingway as a model for them to emulate. Frances Turnbull of Baltimore sent him a story, and Scott returned it with the comment that she hadn't dug deep enough into her emotional life. Look at Dickens, he recommended, who recycled his childhood abuse and starvation into Oliver Twist. Or at Hemingway's first stories in In Our Time that “went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt or known.” Willingness to invade one's most private feelings was the price of admission to the profession.

In his regular letters of instruction to daughter Scottie at Vassar, Fitzgerald posed questions she was to answer about various books and poems, A Farewell to Arms notably among them. It was not surprising that she decided to write a paper about Hemingway. In December 1938, Scott wrote her that he didn't have time to “dig you up stuff about Ernest” and advised her that she could learn a lot about him from reading In Our Time. Writing Morton Kroll, secretary Frances's younger brother, Fitzgerald listed a number of “great English classics” he should read, including only two by living writers: Hemingway's Farewell and Joyce's Dubliners. Thomas Wolfe was not really in the same league, he told Scottie. Wolfe beautifully recapitulated what Walt Whitman said, but unlike Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway, he had “nothing really new to add.”

In effect, Fitzgerald accepted the judgment of Bishop—and many others at the time—that Hemingway was bound for the favorable judgment of posterity, despite his unsuccessful works of the 1930s. Scott could not help comparing his own career to Ernest's, and speculating on what the future might bring. In December 1938, for instance, he asked Perkins if what “was left” of his reputation wasn't being allowed to slip away. “Since the going-out-of-print of [This Side of Paradise] and the success (or is it one?) of the [Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories],” he felt “somewhat neglected.” Perkins raised the prospect of an omnibus volume including Paradise, Gatsby, and Tender, but made it clear that would have to wait until Fitzgerald wrote a new “major book.” Meanwhile, the Modern Library was resisting proposals to bring out an edition of Tender.

Fitzgerald's prospects looked dim, particularly as contrasted to Hemingway's. It was discouraging. “I don't write any more,” he told Thornton Wilder in 1937. “Ernest has made all my writing unnecessary.” And in what may be the most often-quoted phrase on the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship, Scott put his particular spin on the issue of comparative standing. “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” The observation said a great deal about both writers, and about the current of competition in American culture dictating that there could be no winners without losers.

The Protestant ethic, derived from the Puritans, held that to succeed was to prove one's virtue. The good would prosper, the bad go to ruin. This doctrine maintained a firm grip on the muscular Christianity of Oak Park, where Ernest Hemingway grew up. His boyhood pastor was the father of Bruce Barton, pioneer advertising man and author of the best-selling The Man Nobody Knows, in which Jesus returns to life as a champion capitalist. Without entirely acceptingthe gospel of wealth in such an extreme form, Hemingway absorbed the basic creed and drove himself for the success—measured both in money and in fame—that would validate his existence.

With Fitzgerald, the situation was skewed by a number of factors. He was brought up Catholic, for one thing. And his father, a failure in business, was a romantic Southerner, who taught his only son to embrace the lost cause of the South. Young Scott was also on the side of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Mary Queen of Scots. Invariably he cheered for the underdog, for the small animals in their losing war against the larger ones. His fiction reflected that way of thinking. As he wrote in “Early Success” (October 1937), from the beginning “[a]ll the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants.”

These disastrous endings did carry a certain authority, for in depicting (and even in cultivating) failure, Fitzgerald was very much in the American grain. Flowing counter to the idea of success and with its own substantial power was the idea of failure as fulfillment. The Christian paradox of the defeated as victor resonates powerfully in our collective consciousness. As Emily Dickinson suggested in her poem beginning “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed,” only those who failed could properly understand or appreciate success. Fitzgerald was constitutionally drawn to the notion, as one critic put it, that nothing succeeds like failure. Swimming in the same waters, the two writers were carried along on competing currents.

Other Fitzgerald notes of the late 1930s dealt with the collapse of his friendship with Hemingway. “Ernest—until we began trying to walk over each other with cleats,” he wrote, probably taking more blame than he should have for rough treatment. A more cynical comment evoked with bitterness the days when he devoted so much time and energy to promoting Hemingway: “Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.” A three-word cryptic note read “Bald Hemingway characters”—probably a comment on the lack of description Ernest provided in introducing major figures in his fiction. In a much longer note, Scott set down a semi-hilarious account of Hemingway as celebrity:

Ernest Hemingway, while careful to avoid cliches in his work, fairly revels in them in his private life, his favorite being “Parbleu!” (“So what?”—French), and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Contrary to popular opinion, he is not as tall as Thomas Wolfe, standing only six feet five in his health belt. He is naturally clumsy with his body, but shooting from a blind or from adequate cover, makes a fine figure of a man. We are happy to announce that his work will appear in future exclusively on United States postage stamps.

A well-meaning British writer, turning out a script for television about the lost generation of the 1920s, took this satire seriously and had Hemingway spouting “Parbleu” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” all over Paris and the Riviera. (Fortunately, the film was not made.) It is the only instance where Fitzgerald, albeit privately and rather subtly, called Hemingway's bravery into question, in the comment about “shooting… from adequate cover.”

Fitzgerald worked hard to learn the movie business, in order to clear his debts and support Zelda's care and Scottie's schooling. As his young colleague Budd Schulberg commented, “he didn't just take his $1,500 a week and run.” But the lyricism that freshened his fiction on the page did not translate well to motion pictures. He became increasingly frustrated as very little that he wrote made it onto the screen, and he began to go on binges. M-G-M let his contract lapse at the end of 1938. He was back on his own, trying to make his living with stories for the magazines, but his knack for writing popular fiction had vanished. To make ends meet, he resumed his old policy of asking Harold Ober for advances. At first Ober complied, but early in July he said no. He knew about Fitzgerald's benders, and he could not sell the stories Fitzgerald was writing. It was a business decision. On a personal level, the Ober family continued to provide a home away from home for Scottie, while her father was in California and her mother institutionalized in North Carolina.

In a March 1939 letter to Perkins, Ernest confessed that he “always had a very stupid little boy feeling of superiority about Scott like a tough durable little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.” He asked Max to convey his “great affection” to Scott and wondered if it were “really all over” with him as a writer. He hoped not, after seeing in retrospect how “excellent” most of Tender was. When Ober withdrew his support, it must have seemed very nearly over for Fitzgerald. The one good thing about the financial crisis was that it inspired Fitzgerald to undertake another novel. He had learned a good deal about the movies and the people who made them. He had formed a long-term relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham as lover and companion, and as an insider she too had much to teach him. In midsummer he started work on The LastTycoon, his unfinished novel about Hollywood, and on his own entered into negotiations with Collier's to publish the book as a serial. Even though this deal fell through, Fitzgerald kept going. Perkins reported to Hemingway that Scott was indeed at work on a new novel, though he would not reveal the subject matter. Fitzgerald was cranking hard on Tycoon when he died.

As Fitzgerald's fortunes declined, Hemingway's prospered. He shaped his experiences in Spain into For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in October 1940. The book was a whopping financial success. Max Perkins wrote Scott that the Book-of-the-Month Club had selected Ernest's novel, assuring a substantial sale. It was “[t]he stamp of bourgeois approval,” though Ernest would hate to think of it that way. He was about to be divorced and to marry Martha Gellhorn, Perkins added. Scott wrote back that it would be odd to think of Ernest “married to a really attractive woman” and predicted, correctly, that the pattern of this marriage was liable to be different “than with his Pygmalion-like creations” Hadley and Pauline. To Zelda, he relayed the news about the Book-of-the-Month. “Do you remember how superior [Ernest] used to be about mere sales?” he asked her.

Hemingway sent Fitzgerald a copy of Bell, inscribed “To Scott with affection and esteem.” As he was reading it, Scott reported to Zelda that the book had been sold to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and that Ernest would earn $50,000 from the Book-of-the-Month Club in addition. “Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.” Zelda heard the indignation in Scott's voice, but did not entirely share it. “Though I am vaguely resentful of Ernest's success (his work being neither as meritorious nor as compelling as your own), I am also glad.” His success represented “at least a casual passing acknowledgement” of the “writer's faith.” She hadn't read the book herself. All five copies at the lending library were out.

Directly to Hemingway, Fitzgerald offered only praise of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It's a fine novel,” he began, “better than anybody else writing could do.” He accurately isolated a number of the book's high points. “The massacre [of the Fascists in Pilar's village] was magnificent and also [El Sordo's] fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene.” While he was at it, Fitzgerald told his old friend how much he liked To Have and Have Not. “[P]aragraphs and pages” in that book ranked “right up with Dostoevsky in their undeflected intensity.” Scott, who had learned not to criticize anything in Ernest's writing, was not entirely candid in these statements. But he ended his letter on a note of absolute sincerity. In congratulating Hemingway on the commercial success of Bell, he wrote that he envied him “the time it will give you to do what you want.”As he wrote those words, Fitzgerald had only seven weeks left to live.

To Zelda, to his notebooks, to Budd Schulberg, Scott confided less complimentary views of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was not as good as Farewell, he wrote Zelda. The novel would please the average reader, he supposed, but it didn't “seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments” of Farewell. In his weekly letters to Zelda at this time, Scott repeatedly mentioned his struggles over the composition of The Last Tycoon. He was “living in” the book, he wrote her. His room was “covered with charts” just as it had been for Tender. But he was having trouble with the “character-planting phase,” because he “felt people… less intently” than he once had. At his age, it was difficult to “remember emotionally.” In his final word to Zelda about Ernest and Bell, Scott was speaking for himself as well: “I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat.”

In his notebooks, he took an even harsher view of Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War. It was “a thoroughly superficial book,” he observed, with “all the profundity of [Daphne Du Maurier's best-selling] Rebecca.” On the phone one night with Schulberg, Fitzgerald talked “for anyway forty minutes” about the “dreadful” depiction of Maria and the love interest in Bell.

In his last months, Fitzgerald had a hard time entertaining positive thoughts about Hemingway. Ernest was among those he had in mind when, in a mid-October letter to Perkins, he alluded to “dear friends” who had been referring to him as “poor old Scott” for almost a decade. One night that fall, he took Frances and Morton Kroll to dinner and over the wine spoke disparagingly of Hemingway. Ernest owed a lot to Stein and Pound for their early criticism, Scott said. There was nothing admirable about his trips to Spain and Africa, either. He sought out adventure because he needed to demonstrate his manliness. Besides, he was running out of material.

On the day he was struck down by a fatal heart attack—Saturday, December 21 —Scott and Sheilah were talking about the war raging in Europe. Sooner or later, he predicted, the United States was going to have to get involved. If The Last Tycoon turned out to be a success, he told Sheilah, he'd like to go to Europe to write about the war. “Ernest won't have that field all to himself, then.”

On the same day, Bill Warren—the young theatrical genius Scott had introduced to Hollywood—wrote Scott a letter from back east. In his financial extremity, Scott had asked Warren to repay a loan. Warren responded apologetically that he couldn't do so right away, but would send the money soon. “And I hope with everything I've got,” he added, “that the novel you are working on isIt. I hope it does for you what his did for that Hemmingway. That obscenity.” The letter Fitzgerald wrote Warren has not surfaced, but it must have contained besides a request for reimbursement some remarks 1) on Tycoon in progress, 2) on the success of Bell, and 3) on Scott's disillusionment with “Hemmingway” (Warren reproduced Fitzgerald's spelling), the man who had transmuted himself from closest friend to most hurtful former friend.

Ernest did not go to Scott's funeral. “I thought of telegraphing you [in Key West] about Scott,” Max Perkins wrote him a week later, “but it didn't seem as if there were any use in it, and I shrank from doing it.” Max went on at some length about Scott's will. The estate would not be cleared up for some time, and meanwhile Perkins and others were going to make sure Scottie had the funds to finish college. “There is no use talking about Scott now.”

For fifteen years Max had been writing Ernest about Scott—and, to a lesser degree, Scott about Ernest. He had discharged that duty as best he could. No longer would he use Hemingway as a sounding board for his ideas about reforming Fitzgerald's drinking or spending habits, or enlist him as an ally in coaxing Fitzgerald back from despondency into full-scale production. There was no use talking about Scott now.

Sources

Hobson, Mencken, 389. Laura Guthrie journal, PUL. FSF, note on bicycle racing, PUL. FSF, genius chart, PUL. SD, Fool, 133. MP to EH, August 30, 1935, and EH to MP, September 7, 1935, Only Thing, 224, 227. MP to FSF, September 28, 1935, Scott/Max, 225. Lounsberry, “Holograph,” 38-39. EH, Green Hills, 23-24. MP to FSF, October 26, 1935, Scott/Max, 226. Lynn, Hemingway, 414. Mellow, Hemingway, 459. EH to FSF, December 16, 1935, SL, 424-425. EH to Dos Passos, December 17, 1935, SL, 427.

“The Crack-Up” and the Crack in “Snows”

SD, “Fitzgerald's Nonfiction,” in press. FSF, “Ring,” Crack-Up, 38-40. EH to John and Katharine Dos Passos, January 13, 1936, SL, 433. EH to MP, February 7, 1936, SL, 437-438. MP to EH, February 27, 1936, Only Thing, 238. EH to MP, April 9, 1936, SL, 444. FSF to Sara Murphy, March 30 ,1936, Life in Letters, 298. Gingrich, “Scott, Ernest and Whoever,” 186. EH, “Snows,” Short Stories, 72. FSF, “Rich Boy,” Short Stories, 318. Lynn, Hemingway, 426. Bruccoli, Scott and Ernest, 131. FSF to EH, July 16, 1936, Life in Letters, 302. FSF to Beatrice Dance, September 15, 1936, Letters, 542-543. EH to MP, July 23, 1936, Only Thing, 245-246. Mellow, Hemingway, 470-471. FSF to MP, September 19, 1936, Letters, 267. FSF, Crack-Up, 77. EH, Feast, 208. Brenner, “Are We Going,” 539-541. SD, By Force of Will, 55. Reynolds, 1930s, 238. FSF to MP, before March 19, 1937, Letters, 272. MP to FSF, March 19, 1937, and FSF to MP, ca. May 10, 1937, Scott/Max, 236-237. FSF to MP, March 4, 1938, Utters, 276. MP to EH, August 23, 1938, Only Thing, 268-269. MP to FSF, September 1, 1938, Scott/Max, 248. FSF to MP, February 25, 1939, Scott/Max, 255. EH to Mizener, January 4, 1951, SL, 716. Eddy Dow, “The Rich Are Different,” New York Times Book Review (November 13, 1998), 70.

Last Encounters

SD, Fool, 98. FSF, Ledger. FSF, “One Hundred False Starts,” Afternoon, 131-132. FSF, Notebooks, #447. Bruccoli, Grandeur, 414. Mellow, Invented, 452-453. Mok, “The Other Side of Paradise,” F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time, ed. Bruccoli and Bryer, 294-299. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, 194-195. EH to FSF, October 1936, telegram, JFK. MP to EH, October 1, 1936, Only Thing, 246-247. Meyers, Fitzgerald, 278-280. Mizener, Far Side, 266-267. Bishop, “Missing All,” 106-121. FSF to MP, May 20, 1940, Life in Letters, 445. Lynn, Hemingway, 443. Reynolds, 1930s, 270-271. Bruccoli, Scott and Ernest, 136. FSF to EH, June 5, 1937, Life in Letters, 324. Dardis, Thirsty, 151, FSF to EH, July 13, 1937, telegram, JFK. FSF to MP, ca. July 15, 1937, Scott/Max, 238.

Ambivalent to the End

MP to EH, August 5, 1937, Only Thing, 252. Baker, Life Story, 241-242, 317-318. FSF to MP, ca. August 20,1937, MP to FSF, August 24,1937, and FSF to MP, September 3,1927, Scott/Max, 238, 239-240, 240-241. MP to EH, February 3, 1938, and EH to MP, mid-February 1938, Only Thing, 255, 256-257. SD, By Force of Will, 106-108. MP to FSF, April 8, 1938, and FSF to MP, April 23, 1938, Scott/Max, 243, 244. FSF, “Dame Rumor” playscript, PUL. Ring, Current, 66-67. FSF to Frances Turnbull, November 9,1938, Letters, 578. FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, November 15, 1938, November 25, 1938, and December 1938, Letters, 41,45,46. FSF to Morton Kroll, August 9,1939, Letters, 593. FSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, November 29, 1940, Life in Letters, 472. FSF to MP, December 24, 1938, and MP to FSF, March 9, 1938, Scott/Max, 250, 243. Meyers, Fitzgerald, 269. FSF, Notebooks, #1915. FSF, “Early Success,” Crack-Up, 87. FSF, Notebooks, #612, #1819, #1868, #1177. Bruccoli, Grandeur, 456-459. EH to MP, 25 March 1939, Only Thing, 275. MP to FSF, September 19,1940, Scott/Max, 266. FSF to ZF, September 28,1940 and October 26,1940, Letters, 125,128-129. EH to FSF, after October 24,1940, inscription, Correspondence, 611. ZF to FSF, October 1940, PUL. FSF to EH, November 8, 1940, Letters, 312. FSF to ZF, October 19, 1940, October 23, 1940, and October 26, 1940, Letters, 127, 128, 129. FSF, Notebooks, #2066. Schulberg, conversation with Mizener, August 7, 1947, Mizener collection, Cornell. FSF to MP, October 14, 1940, PUL. Ring, Current, 96. Warren to FSF, December 21,1940, PUL. MP to EH, December 28,1940, Only Thing, 301.

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Next Chapter 8 Alcoholic Cases

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Published as Hemingway Vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise And Fall Of A Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson (Woodstock, Ny: Overlook P, 1999).

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Перевод: И. Проценко (Скотт Дональдсон. Хемингуэй vs Фицджеральд. Дружба и соперничество. Екатеринбург: Гонзо. 2018)

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