“Not Really Friends Since’26”
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway

1. To HORACE LIVERIGHT, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 15 May 1925

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It was seeing son-of-a-bitch in the proofs of Harold Loeb's book [Doodab] that prompted my original remark about it. Since then I have noticed it in Scott Fitzgerald's last book [The Great Gatsby] and imagine it was getting so people did not mind seeing it in print.

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2. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 9 June 1925

Dear Mr. Perkins:

I can't tell you how much I appreciated your sending me the copy of [the Paris] In Our Time. It was one of those very pleasant things that sometimes happen to one and which give a good feeling whenever they are remembered. Thank you ever so much.

Now I have finally gotten hold of another copy and am mailing it to you with this letter. Scott Fitzgerald is living here now and we see quite a lot of him. We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon through the Cote D'Or.1 I've read his Great Gatsby [1925] and think it is an absolutely first rate book. I hope it is going well.

Thanks again for sending me the little book and with very best regards,

Yours sincerely, Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. See A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), pp. 154-76.

3. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,1 From Ernest Hemingway

Burguete, Spain, 1 July 1925

Dear Scott:

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I've ever felt—havent drunk anything but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lived [along] the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway we're going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain

Or dont you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both,

Yours, Ernest

Notes:

1. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) had first met EH at the Dingo Bar in Paris in May 1925. See A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), pp. 149 ff. This and all subsequent letters to Fitzgerald are used courtesy of the Princeton University Library.

4. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked November 30, 1925

ALS, 2 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull; Life In Letters.

Dear Ernest: I was quite ashamed of the other morning. Not only in disturbing Hadly, but in foistering that “Juda Lincoln” alias George Morgenthau apon you. However it is only fair to say that the deplorable man who entered your appartment Sat. morning was not me but a man named Johnston who has often been mistaken for me.

Zelda, evidences to the contrary, was not suffering from lack of care but from a nervous hysteria which is only releived by a doctor bearing morphine. We both went to Bellau Wood next day to recuperate.

For some reason I told you a silly lie—or rather an exageration, silly because the truth itself was enough to make me sufficiently jubilant. The Sat. Eve. Post. raised me to $2750.00 and not $3000. which is a jump of $750. in one month. It was probably in my mind that I could now get $3000. from the smaller magazines. The Post merely met the Hearst offer, but that is something they seldom do.

What garbled versions of the Mcalmon episode or the English orgy we lately participated in, I told you, I don’t know. It is true that I saved Mcalmon from a beating he probably deserved and that we went on some wild parties in London with a certain Marchioness of Milford Haven whom we first met with Telulah Bankhead. She was about half royalty, I think. Anyhow she was very nice—anything else I may have added about the relations between the Fitzgeralds and the house of Windsor is pure fiction.

I’m crazy to read the comic novel. Are you going to the Mclieshe’s Tuesday? I hope Hadly is well now. Please believe that we send our

Best Wishes to
Ernest M. Hemminway

Notes:

Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Hemingway’s first wife.

Robert McAlmon, American writer and publisher in Paris. He had spread gossip that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.

The Torrents of Spring (Scribners, 1926).

5. To HORACE LIVERIGHT, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 7 December 1925

Dear Mr. Liveright:

I am sending you, with this letter, on the Mauretania tomorrow the Mss. of my new book The Torrents of Spring. Scott Fitzgerald has read the manuscript and was very excited about it and said he was going to write you about it. I don't know whether he did or not.

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6. From Ernest Hemingway

Late 1925 (?)

Inscription in typescript (CC) of The Torrents of Spring (1926). Princeton.

To Scott and Zelda with love from Ernest

7. To ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 11 December 1925

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Scott [Fitzgerald] has invented that spelling of Hemingway [with two ms and no g]. Why I don't know unless it is that there are two ts in Scott Fitzgerald. He says that he has written a review that will help In Our Time very much. I've never seen it so I imagine that the name is spelled as he gave it to you. It will probably do that Hemminway a lot of good anyway.

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8. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

PUL

Schruns, 15 December 1925

Dear Scott:

I hope you and Zelda are well again. Did Pauline [Pfeiffer] bring the books? I gave her the Ludendorff, Brig. Young and Mr. Farrar's Spot Light.1 I was pretty sick too with my damned throat and especially so after reading the whole of the Torrents of Spring book out loud to them, the Murphys, as an act of bravado after not being able to talk all day. Jesus Christ some time I'd like to grow up. I've had hell with it now for a week. Suppose it will be all right in a couple of days.

We had a good trip down here. No other foreigners in the town. I've been staying in bed, shooting pool with the natives and ski-ied twice but haven't any strength, consequently no legs, consequently no guts. Hadley and Bumby are in swell shape. I used to give Hadley a handicap of 200 in billiards. Now she beats me level.

It has snowed for two days. About 21/2 feet of snow. Cold and the air nice and tight. The mountains are damned nice to see again.

Have read Fathers and Children by Turgenieff and the 1st Vol. of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Fathers and Ch-en isnt his best stuff by a long way. Some swell stuff in it but it can never be as exciting again as when it was written and that's a hell of a criticism for a book.

You're write about the Murphy's. They're grand people. Nice people are so damned nice.

Buddenbrooks is a pretty damned good book. If he were a great writer it would be swell. When you think a book like that was published in 1902 and unknown in English until last year it makes you have even less respect, if you ever had any, for people getting stirred up over Main Street, Babbit and all the books your boy friend Menken [H. L. Mencken] has gotten excited about just because they happened to deal with the much abused Am. Scene.

Did you ever read [Knut Hamsun's] The Growth of the Soil? And then for Christ sake to read Thom Boyd.2

I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you. But what all these bastards do is learn certain concrete ideas that are only important as discoveries. Like if I were now, suddenly, to discover the law of gravitation.

Like me to write you a little essay on The Importance of Subject? Well the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get. What made 3 Soldiers a swell book was the war. What made Streets of Night a lousy book was Boston.3 One was as well written as the other, I can hear you telling me I'm all wrong. Maybe I am. Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice. Gentlemen the boy lecturer is tired. A dull subject I should say would be impotence. Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into yr. next book and sit back.

And don't for Christ sake feel bad about missing the war because I didnt see or get anything worth a damn out [of it] as a whole show, not just as touching myself, which is the cheap, romantic viewpoint, because I was too young. Dos, fortunately, went to the war twice and grew up in between. His first book was lousy.

Now dont be a lousy crut and not answer this because letters are worth millions of dollars down here.

Best love to Zelda. Yrs. always, Ernest

How did your plan of having Harold Stearns make good in two weeks— after all these years—turn out?

Notes:

1. John Farrar edited the Literary Spotlight (1924). In 1925 he was an editor at George H. Doran Co. In 1929 he became co-founder of Farrar and Rinehart.

2. Thomas Boyd (1898-1935) wrote Through the Wheat (1923) and other novels.

3. Three Soldiers (1921) and Streets of Night (1923) are novels by John Dos Passos.

9. To ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, 20 December 1925

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Why with Scott's great gout for the late war doesn't he go to see it in the movies? There are a number of wonderful films that are always showing somewhere or other. The British Zeebrugge film, German submarine film, British 2nd Ypres, 3 very good French, official Italian in 3 parts—Mountains, Plain and Piave, and Air and Sea. If he wanted to take a little trouble to hunt up the pictures he could see a hell of a lot more war than any of his contemporaries ever saw. The Zeebrugge film was right around the corner from his house on Ave. Wagram.

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10. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, c. 24 December 1925

PUL

Dear Scott:

Have sent the 400 [dollars] to your concierge. You can keep it yourself or give it to Harold Stearns.1 You write a swell letter. Glad somebody spells worse than I do.

Sure, I know Hank Wales. He was once a bartender in Goldfields, got to be a newspaper man some way, came over in 1918 when any newspaper man could work anywhere, got all smashed up, in a motorcycle accident I think, taught himself to read, write and speak French and is a hell of a good newspaper man. I used to hate him when I first knew him and now I am fonder of him than any other newspaper man except Bill Bird and Guy Hickock. Hank used to send amazing and beautiful stories during the Peace Conference and one day Col. House said to him, “Wales where do you get your facts?” Hank had just given the Yugo Slav oil fields to Japan or something else. “Col. House,” Hank says. “What the Chicago Tribune wants isnt facts. It's news.”

Why did you ask about Hank? He hasn't got a pleasant manner and he certainly looks and acts like hell. I suppose the reason I like him so much is because he likes me. Any of the dope about him being ex bartender etc. is confidential. He also managed pugs.

Your rating of I.O.T. stories very interesting. The way I like them as it seems now, without re-reading is Grade I (Big 2 Hearted. Indian Camp. 1st paragraph and last paragraph of Out of Season. Soldier's Home) Hell I cant group them. Why did you leave out My Old Man? That's a good story, always seemed to me, though not the thing I'm shooting for. It belongs to another categorie along with the bull fight story and the 50 Grand. The kind that are easy for me to write.

Cat in the Rain wasnt about Hadley. I know that you and Zelda always thought it was. When I wrote that we were at Rapallo but Hadley was 4 months pregnant with Bumby. The Inn Keeper was the one at Cortina D'Ampezzo and the man and the girl were a harvard kid and his wife that I'd met at Genoa. Hadley never made a speech in her life about wanting a baby because she had been told various things by her doctor and I'd—no use going into all that.

The only story in which Hadley figures is Out of Season which was an almost literal transcription of what happened. Your ear is always more acute when you have been upset by a row of any sort, mine I mean, and when I came in from the unproductive fishing trip I wrote that story right off on the typewriter without punctuation. I meant it to be a tragic about the drunk of a guide because I reported him to the hotel owner—the one who appears in Cat in the Rain—and he fired him and as that was the last job he had in town and he was quite drunk and very desperate, hanged himself in the stable. At that time I was writing the In Our Time chapters and I wanted to write a tragic story without violence. So I didnt put in the hanging. Maybe that sounds silly. I didn't think the story needed it.

I'm sorry as hell for H[arold] S[tearns] but there's nothing anybody can do for him except give him money and be nice to him. There's nothing to be achieved. No solution. And again I'm fond of him. Probably as in the case of Hank because he likes me.

There's nothing you can do for him except give him money and you've done that and naturally can't assume the continuance of it as an obligation. He lives altogether in his imagination. The poor old bastard. I always get awfully sorry for people and especially for liars, drunks, homely whores, etc. Never get very sorry for worthy cases. After all, Panhandling is no damned fun. A gent who's drinking himself to death ought not to be constantly having to raise the funds to do it with. I do think Harold had a pretty damned good head. Also think he destroyed it or completely coated it with fuzz by drinking. You've done your part toward him. Just dont give him any more dough. But don't, for Christ sake ever let him think that I don't absolutely believe in him. Because there's nothing to be done about him and therefore it's pretty sad and I couldn't sleep if I hurt his feelings. Christ nose that when I cant sleep I have enough sons of bitching things I've done to look back on without adding any ornamental ones.

The ear that gets pushed is (Referring Battler) the stump.

McAlmon is a son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toe nail. I'm through defending that one. I still feel sorry for him but damned little. After I called him on you he went around for two nights talking on the subject of what a swine I was, how he had done everything for me, started me off etc. (i.e. sold out an edition each of that lousy little book and In Our Time at 15 francs and 40 francs a copy. I not receiving a sou. The only books he ever sold of all the books he's published) and that all I did was exploit people emotionally.

I've defended the lousy little toe nail paring for 3 years against everybody because I knew his horribly unhappy English arrangement etc. But am through now. Am going to write a Mr. and Mrs. Elliot2 on him. Might as well give his emotional exploitation story some foundation.

Seem to be in a mood of Christ like bitterness this A.M. Have swell piano in her room for Hadley and she's practicing. Played poker last night and drank too much beer. 7 bottles. Won 158,000 Kronen. Makes about $2.35.

No fairies in Vorarlberg anyway.

Will report in full on Dostoevsky.

I think MacLeishes and Murphys are swell. Also Fitzgeralds.

God I hope Zelda gets all right at the bains place.3 Pain's such an awful thing. It's such a rotten shame for her to be sick. I do think she'll get better down South and you will both be a damned sight better off on the Riviera than in Paris. You both looked so damned well when you came up last fall and Paris is poisonous for you. We'll see you there too.

God I wish I hadn't drunk so much beer. Going to buy Bumby a rocking horse for 80,000 Kronen though. The presents will go swell with it. Please thank Scotty for Bumby.

There was a Chinook yest. and day before and then it rained and now it is bright and cold and the snow ruined.

I am buying you 2 illustrated German war books. The swell illustrated ones are just beginning to come out. One on the mountain fighting Italian Front, and the other the history of the Wurtemburg Artillery. Am sending to Frankfort. Have seen the mountain book it's swell. When you get them if the pictures outweigh the German text I'll get you some more. There's going to be one on the Sturmtruppen. The Mountain pictures are swell.

We went in to Bludenz and heard Herr Kapitan Leutenant Mumm lecture on the battle of Skaggerack with movies. You'd have liked it. Hadley hated the Kapt. Leut. so that she was very thrilled. He was an awful man.

Review of In Our Type from Chicago Post says all of it obviously not fiction but simply descriptive of passages in life of new Chicago author. God what a life I must have led.

Am reading Peter Simple by Capt. Marryat. Havent read it since I was a kid. Great book. He wrote 4 great books. Frank Mildmay or the Naval Officer. Midshipman Easy. Peter Simple and Snarleyow or the Dog Fiend. He wrote a lot of kids books in later life and people get them mixed up. You ought to read Peter Simple.

If you want to read about war read any of those 1st 3.

Pauline Pfeiffer gets here tomorrow to stay for Xmas and New Years.

Know you will be glad to read in N.Y. Herald that 2 men died of cold in Chalons Sur Saone where you nearly did same. Good thing we got out in time. By the way, where the hell is your car?

Hadley, Bumby and I or me send our love and Merry Christmas to Zelda, Scotty and yourself.

This might have been a good letter if it hadnt been for the beer.

Original ending of story had dose of clapp (referring to Very Short Story) instead of gonorreaha but I didn't know whether clap had two ps or one, so changed it to gonoccoci. The hell I did. Try and get it. (This is a piece of slang I invented down here).  Hope you have a swell Christmas.

Yrs. always
Yogi Liveright.

Please write even at $400 a letter. Will raise you to $435 but dont get drunk to celebrate.

[In left margin:] You know what Austria (Osterreich) means? The Eastern Kingdom. Isnt that swell? Tell Zelda.

Notes:

1. Harold Edmund Stearns (1891-1943), former associate editor of the Dial; author of Liberalism in America (1919), America and the Young Intellectual (1921), and other books; and editor of Civilization in the United States (1922). He appears as Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises.

2. Originally called “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the story attacked Mr. and Mrs. Chard Powers Smith and appeared in the Little Review 10 (Autumn-Winter 1924-1925): 9-12. See EH to Smith, c. 21 January 1927.

3. Salies-de-Bearn, France, is in the Pyrenees not far from Bayonne. Zelda was there for her health in January 1926.

11. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, 31 December 1925-1 January 1926

Dear Scott:

Have just received following cable from Liveright—Rejecting Torrents of Spring Patiently awaiting Manuscript Sun Also Rises Writing Fully—

I asked them in the letter I sent with the Ms. to cable me their decision. I have known all along that they could not and would not be able to publish it as it makes a bum out of their present ace and best seller Anderson. Now in 10th printing. I did not, however, have that in mind in any way when I wrote it.

Still I hate to go through the hell of changing publishers etc. Also the book should come out in the late Spring at latest. That would be best. Later would not be bad but Spring would be ideal.

My contract with Liveright—only a letter1—reads that in consideration of theyre publishing my first book at their own expense etc. they are to have an option on my first three books. If they do not exercise this option to publish within 60 days of receipt of Ms. it lapses and if they do not exercise their option on the 2nd book it lapses for 3rd book. So I'm loose. No matter what Horace may think up in his letter to say.

As you know I promised Maxwell Perkins that I would give him the first chance at anything if by any chance I should be released from Liveright.

So that is that.

In the meantime I have been approached by Bradley (Wm Aspenwell) for Knopf.

In the meantime I have the following letter from Louis Bromfield.

Dear Ernest—Appropos of “Torrents of Spring” I received a letter today from Alfred Harcourt who replied at once to a line I had written / taking the liberty after talking with you / regarding the chances of your shifting publishers. He is very eager to see the Anderson piece and is thoroly familiar with your stuff—both in the magazines and In Our Time. In this connection he writes—“Hemingway is his own man and talking off his own bat. I should say, Yea Brother, and we shall try to do the young man as much credit as he'll do us, and that's considerable. I'd like to see his Anderson piece. It's a chance for good fun, if not for too much money for either of us. Hemingway's first novel might rock the country.[”]

He also stands ready to advance money in case you need it, as soon as you like, provided you are free of Liveright and want to go to Harcourt. I was pleased to have so prompt and interested an answer, though of course, it was to be expected, etc.

So that's that.

In any event I am not going to Double Cross you and Max Perkins to whom I have given a promise.

I will wire Liveright tomorrow A.M. to send Manuscript to Don Stewart care of the Yale Club, New York (only address I can think of tonight) and summarize by cable any propositions he may be making me in his letter.

It's up to you how I proceed next. Don I can wire to send Ms. to Max Perkins. You can write Max telling him how Liveright turned it down and why and your own opinion of it. I am re-writing The Sun Also Rises and it is damned good. It will be ready in 2-3 months for late fall or later if they wish.

As you see I am jeopardizing my chances with Harcourt by first sending the Ms. to Scribner and if Scribner turned it down it would be very bad as Harcourt have practically offered to take me unsight unseen. Am turning down a sure thing for delay and a chance but feel no regret because of the impression I have formed of Maxwell Perkins through his letters and what you have told me of him. Also confidence in Scribners and would like to be lined up with you.

You, however, are an important cog in the show and I hate to ask you to write even one letter when I know you are so busy getting away and all.

However there is the situation.

I dont know exactly what to write to Bromfield. Perhaps you will suggest something. In any event say nothing to Bromfield who has been damned decent, nor to anybody else in Paris till you hear from me.

I will wire Liveright in the morning (to send Ms. to Don at Yale Club). Then when I hear from you I can wire Don to send Ms to Maxwell Perkins. Write me Scribners' address.

Today is Thursday. You will get this letter on Saturday (perhaps). The mail boats leaving are the President Roosevelt on Tuesday and the Majestic and Paris on Wednesday. Mark your letter via one of the latter 2 ships and it will go fastest.

Have been on a long trip all day. Tired as hell. Chinook for ten days. Snow all gone to slush. Suppose that I will spend all my advance royalties on cables again this year. Oh yes. That reminds me that the advance I want is $500. The advance I had on the Short Stories was $200.

God it feels good to be out from Liveright with the disturbing reports I have had from Fleischman etc. Liveright supposed to have dropped $50,000 in last theatrical venture. Has sold 1/2 business, sold Modern Library etc. They ought to get someone like Ralph Barton or [John] Held or [Miguel] Covarrubias to illustrate the torrents. It has 5000 more words than Don's first parody Outline of History [1921].

Well so long. I'm certainly relying on your good nature in a lousy brutal way. Anyway so long again and best love to Zelda and to you both from Hadley and

Ernest

New Years Morning P.S.

Got to worrying last night and couldnt sleep. Do you think I ought to go to N.Y.? Then I would be on the spot and could settle things without a six week lapse between every proposition. Also could be on hand to make or argue any excisions on Torrents. If Liveright wants to hang onto me as his cable indicates could settle that. Also should get In Our Time plates if I change publishers. Etc. Meantime I have to wait at least 2 weeks more for my new passport. Old one ran out Dec. 20. Applied for new one Dec. 8 or 9—takes 5 weeks for it to come.

Well so long anyway. Bumby's very excited about going to get his new jockey cap, whip etc. I'm going down to get them through the Customs today.

Best to you always,
Ernest

Notes:

1. The contract, dated 17 March 1925, is reproduced in facsimile in In Their Time: 1920-1940 (Bloomfield Hills, Mich., 1977), p. 42 recto. (LHC)

12. To HORACE LIVERIGHT, From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, 19 January 1926

Dear Mr. Liveright:

I have your letter of December 30 rejecting The Torrents of Spring. About two weeks ago I cabled you to deliver the manuscript of Torrents of Spring to Donald Ogden Stewart at the Yale Club. I hope you have done this.

As The Torrents of Spring is my second completed book and as I submitted it to you and as you did not exercise your option to publish it; according to my contract with you your option on my third book then lapses. This is quite clear. The contract is quite clear that if you do not exercise your option to publish the second book within sixty days of the receipt of the manuscript your option lapses and the contract further states that if your option lapses on the second book it lapses on the third book. There can be no doubt on this point.

There was nothing in the contract about what order books should be submitted in, whether the second book was to be a collection of short stories, a humorous book, or a novel. The contract said one of my next three books must be a full length novel. There was nothing in the contract which said that a full length novel must be the second book which I should submit to you. On the other hand the contract is quite explicit that your option on further books lapses if you reject my second book.

I submitted The Torrents of Spring to you in good faith. I consider it a good book and Scott Fitzgerald, Louis Bromfield, and John Dos Passos, men of widely divergent taste, are enthusiastic about it. You turned it down saying that everyone in your office was opposed to it. I can quite understand that as I remember that everyone in your office, excepting, I believe, Mrs. Kauffman, was opposed to In Our Time and it was quite formally turned down after a discussion. Your office was also quite enthusiastic about a novel by Harold Loeb called Doodab which did not, I believe, prove to be a wow even as a succes d'estime. But because it is your office that turns down my books, even though you reversed the decision on In Our Time, you can not expect to hold an option on my future books when the option has, by contract, lapsed.

I therefore regard myself as free to give The Torrents of Spring and my future books to the publisher who offers me the best terms.

As you know I expect to go on writing for some time. I know that publishers are not in business for their health but I also know that I will pay my keep to, and eventually make a great deal of money for, any publisher. You surely do not expect me to have given a right to Boni and Liveright to reject my books as they appear while sitting back and waiting to cash in on the appearance of a best seller: surely not all this for $200.

As soon as my new passport, now a week overdue, arrives I am sailing for New York. I look forward to meeting you there and meantime may have an answer to this letter. Will you please address me care of The Guaranty Trust Co. of N.Y., 1, Rue des Italiens, Paris, France.

Yours very truly, Ernest Hemingway

13. To LOUIS AND MARY BROMFIELD,1 From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, c. 8 March 1926

Dear Louis and Mary:

Well what happened in N.Y.—if I've really been to N.Y. and havent just been cockeyed and will wake up to find it's all still to be gone through—was that as soon as I was definitely clear of Mr. Liveright or Horace—because we're Horace and Ernest now—I had a couple of drinks with Horace and told him how sorry I was etc and was up all that night because I couldnt sleep worrying about the Messers. Scribners and Harcourt. I tried to kid myself that I did not have to give Scribners the first look at Torrents but I would have been just a crook if I hadnt because last March I promised Maxwell Perkins that if I was ever free I would turn to them. So there wasnt anything else to do. Max Perkins read it and thought it was grand and not at all censorable as Scott had cabled him and I agreed to let them have Torrents and The Sun Also Rises for a $1500 advance, 15% flat, no split on any outside rights except 2nd serial rights etc. He wrote an awfully swell contract and was very damned nice.

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Notes:

1. Bromfield (1896-1956) was known at this time as the author of The Green Bay Tree (1924), Possession (1925), and Early Autumn (1926). EH had met him in Paris in 1925; see his scornful comment on Bromfield, EH to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 31 March 1927.

14. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Schruns, 10 March 1926

<…> Bob Benchley and I had a grand trip on the Roosevelt. Perfect weather and a very good time. I've been working ever since. Scott and Zelda were in Paris and we had lunch and dinner before they left for Nice. They were looking well and Zelda's cure was very successful. <…>

15. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 20 April 1926

Dear Scott:

Had a letter from Curtis Browne that Jonathan Cape wants to publish In Our Time and will pay 25 pounds advance and (10% and 3 D for a copy) British Empire rights not including Canada. Liveright wouldnt sell them sheets—they are going to set it up themselves.

Curtis Browne is going to be my continental and British agents and say they are dickering with a German publisher that wants I.O.T. [In Our Time].

I've returned the proofs of Torrents to Scribners a week or so ago. It looks very good.

Sun Also Rises is all done and back from the typists 1085 francs total typing charges. So I guess I'll send it off. I've cut it to about 90,000 words. May dedicate it like this

TO MY SON
John Hadley Nicanor
This collection of Instructive Anecdotes

I'm hoping to hell you'll like it. You'll see it in August. I think may be it is pretty interesting. Later—you wont like it.

Chink [E. E. Dorman-Smith] is in town for 2 weeks. He and I are going to walk from Saragossa across the Pyrenees by way of Andorra the end of July.

I've had a rotten cold. Been being very social and am god damn tired of it. Do you know anything about the girl [Beatrice Ames] Don's marrying? We go to Spain the 12th of May. Hadley's playing the piano very well. Where are you on your book. Write to me. Rousseau asks about you at the bank. He had us to lunch. We went. Went 5 of the 6 days to the bike race. It was swell [one word illegible] went with Chink and many generals etc. to see Sandhurst play Saint Cyr. Yr. letter just to hand and [Ernest] Walsh's poem or coming in his pants or whatever you want to call it made me vomit again seen on the envelope. But unlike the dog which returns to his vomit I tore up the envelope—just as I tore out the original poem and just as threw away This Quarter after tearing out my story to keep it.

Havent seen Archie MacLeish on acct. his absense in Persia. Seen Bromfield's once. Glad to see you're feeling bitter as understand that stimulates literary production.

Glad to hear you see further than [Booth] Tarkington. Sorry to hear you see not as far as Hemingway. How far do the French women see?

Very glad if you realize criticizm to be horse shit without horse shits pleasant smell nor use as fertilizer. Have not seen Bookman.1 Nevertheless I thank you for services rendered. Havent seen the New Fiction except Gents Prefer [Blondes] which seemed 2nd rate Lardner and very dull. Perkins sent [John W.] Thomason's book which seemed very juvenile. I'd thought it would be much better. There wasnt that much hand to hand fighting in 100 years of the Crusades. Have not seen Sherwood Anderson's note book2 though I believe I should in order to get a lot of new ideas.

Fifty Grand is, I believe, in the hands of some agent. I could use the 250 I could have gotten by cutting it for Scribners [magazine]. Am thoroly disgusted with writing but as there is nothing else I care as much for will continue writing.

Paul Nelson would be a good story for you to write if you knew anything about it.

I'm glad as hell you got the money for the movie rights of Gatsby. With that and Gatsby in person at the Ambassador you sh'd be able to write a pretty good novel with the franc around 30. Maybe someday you'll get the Nobel prize. Understand it's not yet been given to an American. Am recommending to Mr. Walsh that he give you This Quarter's $2000 bucks and have just called in my attorney to make you my heir.

So Dont Worry About Money

Chink says he'll leave you Bellamont Forest3 too if you like. Pauline Pfeiffer says you can have her job on Vogue. I've written Scribner to send all my royalty checks to you.

It makes no difference your telling G[erald] Murphy about bull fighting statement except will be careful about making such statements. Was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure.4 Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers.

Your friend Ring [Lardner] is hampered by lack of intelligence, lack of any aesthetic appreciation, terrible repressions and bitterness. Any one of those is a terrible load for any writer to carry no matter how talented. He is, of course, 100 times as intelligent as most U.S. writers.

Bumby has the whooping cough. Hadley has had a rotten cough now for over 6 weeks. I expect they give it back and forth to each other.

We go to Spain May 12. If Bumby is not well then I'll go on ahead and Hadley come later. We go to U.S.A. in End of Sept. Antibes in August. I'll have a copy of Sun etc. there and w'd welcome your advising me or anything about it. Nobody's read any amount of it yet. If you are worried it is not a series of anecdotes—nor is it written very much like either [Dos Passos's] Manhattan Transfer nor [Anderson's] Dark Laughter. I have tried to follow the outline and spirit of the Great Gatsby but feel I have failed somewhat because of never having been on Long Island. The hero, like Gatsby, is a Lake Superior Salmon Fisherman. (There are no salmon in Lake Superior). The action all takes place in Newport, R.I. and the heroine is a girl named Sophie Irene Loeb who kills her mother. The scene in which Sophie gives birth to twins in the death house at Sing Sing where she is waiting to be electrocuted for the murder of the father and sister of her, as then, unborn children I got from Dreiser but practically everything else in the book is either my own or yours. I know you'll be glad to see it. The Sun Also Rises comes from Sophie's statement as she is strapped into the chair as the current mounts. Well why not write?

Regards to all yr. family
Herbert J. Messkit.

Notes:

1. Fitzgerald in “How to Waste Material,” Bookman 63 (May 1926): 262-65, goes out of his way to praise EH.

2. Sherwood Anderson's Notebook, essays and sketches (1926).

3. Dorman-Smith's ancestral seat at Cootehill, County Cavan, Eire.

4. The origin of the famous phrase, later given currency in Dorothy Parker's profile of EH, “The Artist's Reward,” New Yorker 5 (30 November 1929): 28-31.

16. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 24 April 1926

<…>

I had a long letter from Scott a few days ago saying he'd started his book, was seeing no one, not drinking and working hard. He said he'd gotten $15,000 for some movie rights and this, with other things, would probably see them through until Christmas. I felt very touched by his precarious financial situation and told him that if he was worried about money I would write you to send all my royalties direct to him at the Villa Paquita, Juan les Pins, A.M.

<…>

17. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 4 May 1926

Dear Scott:

Dont you write any more? How are you going?

I have finished a story—short—and am sending it to Scribners tomorrow. We go to Spain a week from Thursday. Maxwell Perkins writes that Torrents will be out at latest May 21st. I sent them The Sun etc. about 10 or 12 days ago. It's rained here every day for 3 weeks. I feel low as hell. Havent seen Bromflelds, Edith Wharton, Comrade Bercovinci [Konrad Bercovici] or any other of the little literary colony for some time. May be there will be a literary colony in Madrid.

Dotty Parker, Les [Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert] Seldes and Seward Collins—you remember the man who shot Lincoln—all went to Spain and of course hated it.

Murphys arrived yest. and it isn't Dos that's marrying. It's Don. If I said Dos it was a slip of the ink. I'll pour that ink out. Oh Jesus it is such foul weather and I feel too low to write. I wish to hell you had come up with Murphys—I've not had one man to talk to or bull shit with for months. In Spain of course I can't talk at all—am in for 3 mos. of listening and reading the papers.

Write to me. I dont ever get letters. How are you feeling? Are you really working on your novel? Is it true that you are swiping my big death house scene? Is it true that you have become blind through alcoholic poisoning and had to have your pancreas removed? I have just given 200,000 francs to save the franc. Harold Stearns is giving the same amount.

I am thinking of going out in a few minutes, and getting very cock eyed drunk.

Love to yr. family,
yrs.
Ernest
(Christ what a name)

18. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Madrid, c. 20 May 1926

Dear Scott:

I was glad to hear from you and glad to note that you were on the “Waggon.” Sorry my letter was snooty—I didnt mean it that way. You were saying how little you valued critical articles unless they were favourable for practical purposes and I was just agreeing. That's what all the services rendered was about. Youll be seeing Hadley today. Wish the hell I were. Madrid is fine and cold and dry with a very high sky and lots of dust blowing down your nose—or up my nose. Corrida called off for today by the veterinaries who wouldn't pass the bulls (sic) because they were too small and sick. I was out when they turned them down and it was a collection of animals Harold Stearns could have killed while drunk with a jack knife. Didnt Ford say I was the great writer of English? Tomorrow they have a lad from Seville with a dose of clapp— a local boy (who was admired by Gilbert Seldes if that means anything to you) and one of the lousiest bull fighters on Earth—named Fortuna— and I might just as easily—a damn sight easier be seeing you at Juan les Pins. I missed the big fight on the 13th—of course—todays called off—tomorrow's a lot of cruts and Monday may be a good one.

[H. L.] Mencken is noble all right. I wish to hell I had your letter to answer. Herschel Brickel is in Paris. He read Torrents and was crazy about it. If that means anything. He's a nice guy personally anyway. Seldes is certainly—nothing about Seldes. We met [Seldes] and a lot of other 2nd class passangers at Noel Murphys where we were invited by 2 pneumatiques 2 telegrams and a personal call. I hadnt seen so many 2nd class passengers since I crossed on the Mauretania [February 1926].

I dont want to look up my Spanish friends because then I'll have to be talking Spanish, if I can talk Spanish, and going around and I'd like to work. Yeah you were right about generalities about Ring. All such are the bunk. You were wrong about Paul Nelson—way way wrong. I was referring to a very special exciting and dramatic story that you don't know. No scandal. Neither, however, was it the simple minded uneducated young writer having the wool pulled over his eyes by the smooth Irish chameleon as you suggested. That isnt snooty. Why the hell should we have to pull our punches writing?

I'm glad as hell that your book is going and that it is so swell. That's not kidding. I'll be glad to hear from Max Perkins what they think of Sun etc. It is so obviously not a collection of instructive anecdotes and is such a hell of a sad story—and not one at all for a child to read—and the only instruction is how people go to hell- (Doesn't it sound terrible, I can hear you say) that I thought it was rather pleasant to dedicate it to Bumby—If you're right I wont put in the anecdote part—but I'll dedicate it to him for reasons that will be obvious when you read the book and also for another reason. I've a carbon with me and you can read it at Juan les Sapins1 if there aren't proofs before then.

The 2 bottle men drank port and the best were 3 [bottle men] but I understand the bottles were small. Did you ever read the Encyclopaedia Brit. on Lawn Tennis in America? There are a hell of a lot more salmon in Encyclopaedia Brit. than in Lake Superior. Besides it doesnt make any difference because look at Shakespere and the seacoast of Tchecoslovakia etc. Nouvelle Revue Francaise is going to publish 50 Grand as Cinquante Grosse Billetes in July or Aug.

No news here. Write me and I swear to God I'll write a good letter next time. I know this is lousy but I'm lonesome as hell.

Best to Zelda. Hadley will greet you all fully.

Always your co-worker for the Clean Books Bill.2
Ernest M. Shit.

Notes:

1. Probably a joke. Sapins = fir trees.

2. The so-called Clean Book Bill, introduced at the 1926 winter session of the New York State Legislature by Dr. W. L. Love, was killed in committee 19 March 1926.

19. To Ernest Hemingway From Fitzgerald.

June 1926

AL, 10 pp. Kennedy Library; From Correspondence.

Juan-les-Pins, France

Dear Ernest: Nowdays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for awhile, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax (in one mysterious way or another)—not realizing the transitory quality of his glory because he forgets that it rests on the frail shoulders of professional entheusiasts. This should frighten all of us into a lust for anything honest that people have to say about our work. I've taken what proved to be excellent advice (On The B. + Damned) from Bunny Wilson who never wrote a novel, (on Gatsby—change of many thousand wds) from Max Perkins who never considered writing one, and on T. S. of Paradise from Katherine Tighe (you don't know her) who had probably never read a novel before.

[This is beginning to sound like my own current work which resolves itself into laborious + sententious preliminaries].2

Anyhow I think parts of Sun Also are careless + ineffectual. As I said yestiday (and, as I recollect, in trying to get you to cut the 1st part of 50 Grand)3 I find in you the same tendency to envelope or (and as it usually turns out) to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke thats casually appealed to you, that I find in myself in trying to preserve a piece of “fine writing.” Your first chapter contains about 10 such things and it gives a feeling of condescending casuallness4

P. 1. “highly moral story”

“Brett said” (O. Henry stuff)

“much too expensive

“something or other” (if you don't want to tell, why waste 3 wds. saying it. See P. 23—“9 or 14” and “or how many years it was since 19XX” when it would take two words to say That's what youd kid in anyone else as mere “style”—mere horse-shit I can't find this latter but anyhow you've not only got to write well yourself but you've also got to scorn not-do what anyone can do and I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to p. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going. And to preserve these perverse and willfull non-essentials you've done a lot of writing that honestly reminded me of Michael Arlen.5

[You know the very fact that people have committed themselves to you will make them watch you like a cat. + if they don't like it creap away like one]6

For example.

Pps. 1 + 2. Snobbish (not in itself but because the history of English Aristocrats in the war, set down so verbosely so uncritically, so exteriorly and yet so obviously inspired from within, is shopworn.) You had the same problem that I had with my Rich Boy, previously debauched by Chambers ect. Either bring more thot to it with the realization that that ground has already raised its wheat + weeds or cut it down to seven sentences. It hasn't even your rythym and the fact that may be “true” is utterly immaterial.

That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.

P. 3. “Beautifully engraved shares” (Beautifully engraved 1886 irony) All this is O.K. but so glib when its glib + so profuse.

P. 5 Painters are no longer real in prose. They must be minimized. [This is not done by making them schlptors, backhouse wall-experts or miniature painters]7

P. 8. “highly moral urges” “because I believe its a good story” If this paragraph isn't maladroit then I'm a rewrite man for Dr. Cadman.8

P. 9. Somehow its not good. I can't quite put my hand on it—it has a ring of “This is a true story ect.”

P. 10. “Quarter being a state of mind ect.” This is in all guide books. I havn't read Basil Swoon's9 but I have fifty francs to lose. 10 [About this time I can hear you say “Jesus this guy thinks I'm lousy, + he can stick it up his ass for all I give a Gd Dm for his 'critisism.' “ But remember this is a new departure for you, and that I think your stuff is great. You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe—and the last. (This latter clause is simply to balance the sentence. It doesn't seem to make sense tho I have pawed at it for several minutes. Its like the age of the French women.11

P. 14. (+ therabout) as I said yesterday I think this anecdote is flat as hell without naming Ford12 which would be cheap.

It's flat because you end with mention of Allister Crowly.13 If he's nobody its nothing. If he's somebody its cheap. This is a novel. Also I'd cut out actual mention of H. Stearns14 earlier.

***

Why not cut the inessentials in Cohens biography?15 His first marriage is of no importance. When so many people can write well + the competition is so heavy I can't imagine how you could have done these first 20 pps. so casually. You can't play with peoples attention—a good man who has the power of arresting attention at will must be especially careful.

From here Or rather from p. 30 I began to like the novel but Ernest I can't tell you the sense of disappointment that beginning with its elephantine facetiousness gave me. Please do what you can about it in proof. Its 7500 words—you could reduce it to 5000. And my advice is not to do it by mere pareing but to take out the worst of the scenes.

I've decided not to pick at anything else, because I wasn't at all inspired to pick when reading it. I was much too excited. Besides this is probably a heavy dose. The novel's damn good. The central theme is marred somewhere but hell! unless you're writing your life history where you have an inevitable pendulum to swing you true (Harding16 metaphor), who can bring it entirely off? And what critic can trace whether the fault lies in a possible insufficient thinking out, in the biteing off of more than you eventually cared to chew in the impotent theme or in the elusiveness of the lady character herself.17 My theory always was that she dramatized herself in terms of Arlens dramatatization of somebody's dramatizatatg of Stephen McKenna's18 dramatization of Diana Manner's19 dramatization of the last girl in Well's Tono Bungay—who's original probably liked more things about Beatrix Esmond than about Jane Austin's Elizibeth (to whom we owe the manners of so many of our wives.)

Appropos of your foreward about the Latin quarter—suppose you had begun your stories with phrases like: “Spain is a peculiar place—ect” or “Michigan is interesting to two classes—the fisherman + the drummer.”

Pps 64 + 6520 with a bit of work should tell all that need be known about Brett's past.

(Small point) “Dysemtry” instead of “killed” is a cliches to avoid a cliche. It stands out. I suppose it can't be helped. I suppose all the 75,000000 Europeans who died between 1914-1918 will always be among the 10,000,000 who were killed in the war.

***

God! The bottom of p. 77 Jusque the top p. 78 are wonderful,21 I go crazy when people aren't always at their best. This isn't picked out—I just happened on it.

The heart of my critisim beats somewhere apon p. 87.22 I think you can't change it, though. I felt the lack of some crazy torturing tentative-ness or insecurity—horror, all at once, that she'd feel—and he'd feel— maybe I'm crazy. He isn't like an impotent man. He's like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt.

Oh, well. It's fine, from Chap V on, anyhow, in spite of that—which fact is merely a proof of its brilliance.

Station Z.W.X. square says good night. Good night all.

Notes:

Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both on the Riviera, where Fitzgerald read the typescript of The Sun Also Rises for the first time. See Philip Young and Charles W. Mann, “Fitzgerald's Sun Also Rises,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1970.

2 Fitzgerald's brackets.

3 Fitzgerald had persuaded Hemingway to cut an anecdote about Jack Brennan and Benny Leonard from “Fifty Grand.”

4 The first chapter included a series of comments and anecdotes about the Paris Latin Quarter; Hemingway cut these in proof.

5 Armenian-born English society novelist, best known for The Green Hat.

6 Fitzgerald's brackets.

7 Fitzgerald's brackets.

8 Samuel Parkes Cadman, inspirational preacher.

9 Basil Woon, author of The Paris That's Not in the Guidebooks.

10 Fitzgerald's bracket.

11 A reference to the epigraph for Hemingway's in our time (1924).

12 An anecdote about Ford Madox Ford, which Hemingway later used in A Moveable Feast.

13 Aleister Crowley, English diabolist; Hemingway later salvaged the anecdote about him in A Moveable Feast.

14 Harold Stearns, alcoholic American journalist in Paris; model for Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises.

15 Hemingway made this cut.

16 President Warren G. Harding, who often had trouble with his rhetoric.

17 Duff Twysden, an alcoholic and promiscuous English woman; model for Brett Ashley.

18 English society novelist.

19 English actress.

20 Ch. 5 scene in which Jake tells Cohn about Brett.

21 Ch. 6 scene in which Frances Clyne, Cohn's mistress, berates him for abandoning her.

22 Ch. 7 scene in which Brett comes to Jake's flat.

20. To HENRY STRATER,1 From Ernest Hemingway

Valencia, c. 24 July 1926

<…>We were gypped out of Ondarria by Bumby getting the whoop cough and getting himself and Hadley and eventually me, coming from Madrid, quarantined on the Riviera in a former Villa of Scott Fitzgerald's at Juan les Pins (Alpes Maritimes). <…>

Notes:

1. Henry (Mike) Strater, American painter (b. 1896, Louisville, Kentucky), Princeton, Class of 1919, first met EH in Pound's Paris studio in the fall of 1922 and saw much of him in Paris, Rapallo, and later in Key West. In 1979 he compiled “an autobiography in color,” Rocks, Nudes, and Flowers, which contains his three portraits of EH.

21. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 21 August 1926

<…> Zelda was looking very well and very lovely when I saw her last week. Scott was working hard. <…>

22. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 26 August 1926

<…> A letter from Scott today said he was working very hard with the front door barred and all the blinds down and expected to sail for N.Y. on December 10th from Genoa. <…>

23. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

September 1926

ALS, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Juan-les-Pins, France

Dear Ernest-Sorry we missed you + Hadley. No news. I’m on the wagon + working like hell. Expect to sail for N.Y Dec 10th from Genoa on the Conte Biancamo. Will be here till then. Saw Bullfight in Frejus. Bull was euneuch (sp.). House barred + dark. Front door chained. Have made no new enemies for a week. Hamilton domestic row ended in riot. Have new war books by Pierrefeu. God is love.

Signed
Ernestine
Murphy.

Did you read in the N.Y Herald about—

“… Henry Carpenter, banker, and Willie Stevens, halfwit, …“
S

Notes:

Jean de Pierrefeu, author of works about the Great War.

24. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

Fall 1926

ALS, 2 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Juan-les-Pins, France

We were in a back-house in Juan-les-Pins. Bill had lost control of his sphincter muscles. There were wet MaFins in the rack beside the door. There were wet Eclaireurs de Nice in the rack over his head. When the King of Bulgaria came in, Bill was just firing a burst that struck the old limeshit twenty feet down with a splat-tap. All the rest came just like that. The King of Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.

“The great thing in these affairs—” he said.

Soon he was whirling faster and faster. Then he was dead.

At this point in my letter my 30th birthday came and I got tight for a week in the company of such facinating gents as Mr. Theodore Rousseau + other ornaments of what is now a barren shore.

Ernest of little faith I hope the sale of The Killers will teach you to send every story either to Scribners or an agent. Can’t you get “Today is Friday” back? Your letter depressed and rather baffled me. Have you and Hadley permanently busted up, and was the nessessity of that what was on your soul this summer. Don’t answer this unless you feel like it. Anyhow I’m sorry everything’s such a mess and I do want to see you if you come to Marseitte in October.

We saw the Murphys before they left, got stewed with them (at their party)—that is we got stewed—and I believe there was some sort of mawkish reconciliation. However they’ve grown dim to me and I don’t like them much any more. Mclieshes too have grown shadowy—he’s so nice but she’s a club woman at heart and made a great lot of trouble in subtle ways this summer. We saw Marice the day she left + the huge Garoupe standing desolate, and her face, and the pathetic bales of chiclets for the Garoupe beach in her bedroom are the strongest impression I have left of a futile and petty summer. It might all have happened at Roslynn Long Island.

Swimmings almost over now. We have our tickets for America Dec. 10th on the Conte Biancamo—we’ll spend the winter in New York. Bishop was here with his unspeakably awful wife. He seems aenemic and washed out, a memory of the past so far as I’m concerned.

Im glad as hell about the story and I hope its the first of many. I feel too much at loose ends to write any more tonight. Remember—if I can give you any financial help let me know.

Always Your Friend
Scott—

I had a lot more to say but its 3.30 A.M. and Ive been working since 11 this morning and its very hazy. Have you read The Spanish Farm + Sixty-four, ninety-four! by Mottram? Wonderful war books. Much better than Ford Madox Ford. In fact the best thing I've read this summer.

Met your cousin from Princeton!

Notes:

Scribner’s Magazine (March 1927).

25. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 7 September 1926

PUL

Dear Old Fitz:

Glad to hear again from the Master. How goes the work, Fitz? Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. Keep it up old boy. I had exactly the same experience myself when I started writing. Then one day I met George Horace Lorimer in the Petit Chaumiere and from then on things simply slipped along.

How the hell are you anyway? I decided to give away all my stories when I got here so as to clear away all the stuff I was counting on selling and that would force me to write some more. So I gave Today Is Friday to some pamphlet organization that had written asking for an essay to be published with a drawing by Cocteau and sent the Alpine Idyll to the New Masses which is the most peurile and shitty house organ I've ever seen—they also having requested a contribution—and just to see what the alibi would be sent The Killers—which I'd just finished to Scribners. So right away back I get a cable from Max Perkins saying Killers grand Bridges writing offer Sun proofs received Perkins.1

So even cynical little boys like Ernest get pleasant surprises. Only now I only wait to hear of the sudden death of Bridges, the losing of his job by Perkins and the suspension of Scribner's magazine. Otherwise may get published.

Since then have completed a new story, yest. and am starting another one. Thanks a lot for the letter from [Paul] Reynolds and for your sterling attitude on the censorship question. All France is proud of you.

Don't listen to any of the subversive element of Juan les Pins, exemplified by the police or other bureaucratic classes, that may try to nullify this.

The author of Gatsby le Magnifique will be backed by at least as many people as went to bat for Dreyfuss. Don't let them jail you. Just don't let them. The real France is backing you.

Hadley and I are still living apart.2 I am thinking of riding down to Marseilles on my bike in Oct. and living in Marseilles for a month or so and working. Will ride over and see you when you get the book finished. Our life is all gone to hell which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do. Needless to say Hadley has been grand and everything has been completely my fault in every way. That's the truth, not a polite gesture. Still having been in hell now since around last Christmas with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could study the terrain I get sort of used to it and even fond of it and probably would take pleasure in showing people around. As we make our hell we certainly should like it.

I cut The Sun to start with Cohn—cut all that first part. Made a number of minor cuts and did quite a lot of re-writing and tightening up. Cut and in the proof it read like a good book. Christ knows I want to write them a hell of a lot better but it seemed to move along and to be pretty sound and solid. I hope to hell you'll like it and I think maybe you will.

Have a swell hunch for a new novel. I'm calling it the World's Fair. You'll like the title.

Give my love to Zelda and tell her how sorry we were not to see you when we came around to say goodbye. I haven't been drinking, haven't been in a bar, haven't been at the Dingo, Dome nor Select. Haven't seen anybody. Not going to see anybody. Trying unusual experiment of a writer writing. That also will probably turn out to be vanity. Starting on long semi-permanent bike trip to last as long as the good weather lasts as soon as my present piles go down. Then will get a lot of work done, all the stories I want to write, probably working in Marseilles. Then we'll see.

The world is so full of a number of things I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. How happy are kings? Stevenson.

Yrs always,
Ernest

Walsh, author of the Soldier drugfiend bullbaiter poem is attacking me to the extent of several columns in the next This Quarter charging Hemingway has sold out to the vested interests. I wrote him a postcard saying his poem made me vomit when This Q. came out. Now it seems from a flawless knight of LITERATURE I have become a hack writer in the pay of SCRIBNERS earning these vast sums. I saw a copy of this which he is circulating largely in carbons before publication. Gentlemen I give you the Irish.

[Upside down at bottom of letter:] Write if you feel like it. I get lonesome.

Notes:

1. “Today Is Friday” was published by As Stable Pamphlets (Englewood, N.J., 1926). Refused by the New Masses, “Alpine Idyll” appeared in American Caravan, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1927), pp. 46-51. “The Killers” was the first of EH's stories to appear in Scribners Magazine 81 (March 1927): 227-33.

2. EH and Hadley had separated after their return from the Riviera in August. The event is handled fictionally in “A Canary for One,” Scribner's Magazine 81 (April 1927): 357-60.

26. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 26 November 1926

<…> Next week I am planning to ride down to the Riviera with a friend who has to take a car down there and I'll see Scott. He's sailing the 12th of December, I believe. <…>

27. To HADLEY HEMINGWAY, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 18 November 1926

<…> There is no question of my suffering from any lack of money as I know that I could borrow money from Scott, Archie [MacLeish], or the Murphies—all of whom are wealthy people—or that I could accept money from Pauline whose Uncle Gus seems always wanting to give it to her. I need in the meantime the financial pressure of starting clean—and the income from those books belongs to you by every right—you supported me while they were being written and helped me write them. I would never have written any of them In Our Time, Torrents or The Sun if I had not married you and had your loyal and self-sacrificing and always stimulating and loving—and actual cash support backing. <…>

28. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 24 November 1926

PUL

Dear Scott:

Ive been trying every week to get down to see you before you leave -Mike Ward was getting a car to drive down but first he was sick—then the cars were always full; then the guy who was to take his place in the bank was sick and that brings us to this Wednesday which was today and the last time we were to start.

How are you and how have you been—? Have you worked and how is the novel. I'll bet it will be a damned good novel once you settled down to writing it—and you must have had plenty of time at Juan les Pins for writing lately.

I've had a grand spell of working; sold another story to Scribners -making two—and have sent them another that I am sure they will buy -a hell of a good story about Milan during the war—and just finished a better one that I should be typing now. Have two other stories that I know can't sell so am not sending them out—but that will go well in a book.

This is a bloody borrowed typewriter—my own busted. I see by an ad in the World that The Sun etc. is in 2nd printing and Heywood Broun in the same paper Nov. 19 a full col. on it etc. Reviews have been good although the boys seem divided as to who or whom I copied the most from you or Michael Arlen so I am very grateful to both of you—and especially you, Scott, because I like you and I don't know Arland and have besides heard that he is an Armenian and it would seem a little premature to be grateful to any Armenian. But I am certainly grateful to you and I am asking Scribners to insert as a subtitle in everything after the eighth printing

THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE)

A greater Gatsby

(Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Prophet of THE JAZZ AGE)

God I wish I could see you. You are the only guy in or out of Europe I can say as much for (or against) but I certainly would like to see you. I haven't enough money to come down on the train and so have been at the mercy of these non leaving free motors. The bad weather has made biking impossible. I started once that way but had a hell of a spill and luxe-ed my epaule. How the hell are you anyway.

What does 2nd printing mean in numbers? Book was published Oct. 22 that was in the ad of Nov. 19. Max Perkins wrote the first of Nov. that the advance orders hadn't been much but that re-orders were coming in. He didn't mention any figures. Has he written to you?

College Humor has written asking me to write them essays, pieces, shit or long fiction and I turned the letter over to Max to give to Reynolds. Sometimes I have funny stuff and I think Reynolds might be willing to sell it as somebody told me Cowedge Humour paid large prices. They said they were reviewing Sun Also etc, in January issue. Hope it goes better at Princeton than the Lampoon.

As for personal life of the noted, noted by who, author, Hadley is divorcing me. Have turned over to her all existing finances and all received and future royalties from Sun. Cape and Heinemann have both made offers for British rights. Do you think Reynolds might sell it to the Movies or some such place. I'm going to take a cut on those if there are any. Have been eating one meal a day and if I get tired enough sleeping -working like hell lately—find starting life poorer than any time since I was 14 with an earning capacity of what stories I sell to Scribners very interesting. I suppose everybody's life goes to hell and anyway have been very healthy and, lately, able to use the head again. If anybody in N.Y. asks about me don't tell them a god damned thing. I would tell you all about things but don't seem able to write about them and am not very good at talking about them. Anyway so many people seem to talk so well about one's affairs that there doesn't seem ever any necessity to speak about them oneself.

Anyway I'm now all through with the general bumping off phase and will only bump off now under certain special circumstances which I don't think will arise. Have refrained from any half turnings on of the gas or slitting of the wrists with sterilized safety razor blades. Am continuing my life in original role of son of a bitch sans peur et sans rapproche. The only thing in life I've ever had any luck being decent about is money so am very splendid and punctilious about that. Also I have been sucked in by ambition to do some very good work now no matter how everything comes out. I think some of the stuff now is good. Have learned a lot.

It is now time to cut this off and mail it.

Write to me and tell me all the dirt. What do you hear from N.Y.? Where are you going to live? How are Zelda? and Scotty? Bumby and Hadley are damned well. I had Bumby for ten days while Hadley was on a trip and one morning I took him to a cafe and got him a glace and a new harmonica and holding the harmonica and eating the glace he said, “La vie est beau avec papa.”1 He is very fond of me and when I ask him what does Papa do, hoping to hear him say Papa is a great writer like the clippings. He says Papa does nothing. So then I taught him to say, “Bumby will support Papa,” so he says that all the time. What will Bumby do? Bumby will support papa en espagne avec les taureaux.

Love to you all
Ernest.

Notes:

1. “We agree with Bumby,” wrote Fitzgerald in his reply, postmarked 23 December 1926. See The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York, 1963), pp. 298-99. He also said: “I can't tell you how much your friendship has meant to me during this year and a half—it is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe.”

29. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

Villa St. Louis Juan-les-Pins

[December, 1926]

From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Dear Ernest:

We leave this house Tuesday for Genoa and New York. I hope everything's going better for you. If there is anything you need done here as in America—anything about your work, or money, or human help under any head—remember you can always call on

Your devoted friend,
Scott

30. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

December 1926

ALS, 2 pp. John F. Kennedy Library

SS Conte Biancamano stationery—

mailed from Washington, D.C.

Dear Ernest =

Your letter depressed me—illogicly because I knew more or less what was coming *. I wish I could have seen you + heard you, if you wished, give some sort of version of what happened to you. Anyhow I’m sorry for you and for Hadley + for Bumby and I hope some way you’ll all be content and things will not seem so hard and bad.

I can’t tell you how much your friendship has meant to me during this year and a half—it is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me. I will try to look out for your interests with Scribner in America, but I gather that the need of that is past now and that soon you’ll be financially more than on your feet.

I’m sorry you didn’t come to Marseille. I go back with my novel still unfinished and with less health + not much more money than when I came, but somehow content, for the moment, with motion and New York ahead and Zelda’s entire recovery—and happy about the amount of my book that I’ve already written.

I’m delighted with what press I’ve already seen of The Sun ect. Did not realize you had stolen it all from me but am prepared to believe that its true + shall tell everyone. By the way I liked it in print even better than in manuscript.

1st Printing was probably 5000. 2nd Printing may mean that they’ve sold 4,500 so have ordered up 3000 more. It may mean any sale from 2500 to 5000, tho.

College Humor pays fine. No movie in Sun Also unless book is big success of scandal. That’s just a guess.

We all enjoyed “la vie est beau avec Papa”. We agree with Bumby.

Always Yours Affectionately,
Scott

Write me care of Scribners.

Notes:

The Hemingways’ son, John Hadley Nicanor.

* Hemingway's divorce.

31. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 6 December 1926

<…> I had a note from Scott that he was leaving for Genoa—so I imagine you may see him before you get this letter. <…>

32. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 7 December 1926

<…> What you say about The Green Hat is quite true. My contact with Arlen was through Scott's talking about him and his stuff when we once drove Scott's car from Lyons to Paris.1 I remember telling Scott who the people were that had taken Arlen up—and even getting quite irritated about Arlen—Don Stewart talked about him too; I took it for granted that the Green Hat must be a cheap book when I heard that the heroine killed herself—because the one very essential fact about all those people that Arlen knew was that none of them had the guts to kill themselves. So I guess it was really protesting about that sort of twaddle that I made Brett so damned accurate that practically nobody seemed to believe in her. Maybe they do now though. Anyway it was very funny.

<…>

Notes:

1. On Fitzgerald and Michael Arlen see A Moveable Feast  (New York,  1964), pp. 174-75.

33. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 21 December 1926

<…> I suppose by now you have seen Scott. Please give him my best greetings. <…>

34. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Gstaad, 14 February 1927

<…> Is Scott still Hollywooding? <…>

35. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Gstaad, 19 February 1927

<…> Hope Scott gets back safely from the [west] coast. They seem to have absorbed Don Stewart pretty well out there. <…>

36. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

Hotel Roosevelt Washington, D.C.

[March, 1927]

From Turnbull.

Dear Ernest:

A line in terrible haste. Lunched with Mencken in Baltimore yesterday. He is just starting reading The Sun, etc.—has no recollection of having seen “Big Two-Hearted River” and admits confusion about two In Our Times. Got him to say he'd pay you $250.00 for anything of yours he could use. So there's another market.

Told him about how you were going to beat him up. He's a “peach of a fellow” (no irony; just a slip of the pen). He's thoroughly interested and utterly incapable of malice. Whole thing was simply rather sloppy, as he's one of the busiest men in America.

“The Killers” was fine.

Your devoted friend,
Scott

37. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 31 March 1927

Dear Scott:

And you are my devoted friend too. You do more and work harder and oh shit I'd get maudlin about how damned swell you are. My god I'd like to see you. I got the two letters from the Roosevelt hotel and the cable about Vanity Fair this week. In principle I'd decided to not write any articles stories to order serials etc. because I don't work very easily and can't throw it off but only throw it out and then it's used up and gone. But you thought up a swell subject that wouldn't be any form of jacking off for me to write on at all. You're a hell of a good guy. Wrote something for them yest. morning in bed. Will look at it tomorrow and then fix it up and send it on. Some crap about bull fights. I think it's interesting maybe.

How the hell have you been? How nearly done is the book really? How do you feel?

Hadley and Bumby are sailing for N.Y. April 16. Bumby was down in Switzerland with me for a while and was grand. I'm to have him vacations according french law and whenever I want him according to Hadley. She is in grand shape, very happy and very much in love. None of this to tell anybody. I told Scribners to turn all the Sun royalties over to her directly. Did the same with Cape. It comes out in England this month. I went over the proofs so they didn't re-write and garble it like In Our Time. Have a couple of stories you'll see in April Scribners. Have written four since. Max Perkins will have told you the Atlantic took fifty grand. Don't know whether they plan to print it on special easily inflammable paper with punctures along the edge so it will detach so that subscribers can detach it and hurl it into the fire without marring their files of the Atlantic.

[Written upside down at bottom of page:] They were too gentlemanly to mention money. As yet I've heard nothing about money for it. Do the Atlantic pay?

Isn't it fine about Mencken. Well well well pitcher that. That last is the Sinclair Lewis influence. That's the way his characters talk. You can write this book you're working on at random without even keeping track or remembering which characters are whom and still not be in danger of any competition from the other boys. Don [Stewart] has taken to automatic writing and his wife assures him it is better and finer than ever. Bloomfield's [Bromfield's] next book is about a preacher. (Unlike Somerset Maugham or S. Lewis) Bloomfield will probably make him a decayed old new england preacher named Cabot Cabot Cabot and naturally he talks only with God—to rhyme with Cod. But sooner or later I can see that the decayed French aristocracy will come into the book and they will all be named the Marquis Deidre de Chanel and will be people whom Louis Bromfield the most brilliant and utterly master of his craft of all the younger generation of decayed french aristocracy novelists will have studied first hand himself at the Ritz and Ciros—doubtless at great expense to his friends. I went out there to dinner one night and they had a lot of vin ordinaire and cats kept jumping on the table and running off with what little fish there was and then shitting on the floor. Bloomfield, in the effort to make me feel at home did everything but put his feet on the table. I thought to show I felt at home perhaps I had better piss in the finger bowls. We talked about what fine books we each wrote and how we did it. Personally I do mine on a Corona Number 4. And when I wash it my dear I simply can't do a thing with it.

Have been broke now for a couple of months. Happily at present it coincides with Lent. I will have piled up so much credit above that will be able to get you, Zelda and Scotty all out of purgatory with no more strain than a bad cold. Pat [Guthrie] has left Duff [Twysden] and taken to living with Lorna Lindsay or Linslay. A guy named [Harold] Loeb was in town and was going to shoot me so I sent word around that I would be found unarmed sitting in front of Lipp's brasserie from two to four on Saturday and Sunday afternoon and everybody who wished to shoot me was to come and do it then or else for christ sake to stop talking about it. No bullets whistled. There was a story around that I had gone to switserland to avoid being shot by demented characters out of my books.

Pauline is fine and back from America. I've been in love with her for so damned long that it certainly is fine to see a little something of her.

Haven't been in the [Latin] quarter nor seen anyone—Murphie's came through enroute to Central Europe with the MacLeish's. Had a card from Gerald from Berlin giving me conge on his studio where I've been living for May 1st. Someone else is going to use it for something else. It was swell of them to let me use it and a hell of a lot better than under, say, the bridges. They have been swell. Also MacLeishes.

If you don't mind, though, you are the best damn friend I have. And not just-oh hell—I can't write this but I feel very strongly on the subject.

Give my love to Zelda and remember Mr. Hemingway to Scotty.

Yours always, Ernest

38. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

April 18, 1927

ALS, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Litters.

“Ellerslie,” Edgemoor, Delaware

God! Those terrible Bromfields! I recognized the parsimonious dinner

Dear Ernest:

Your stories were great (in April Scribner). But like me you must beware Conrad rythyms in direct quotation from characters especially if you’re pointing a single phrase + making a man live by it.

“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more” is one of the most beautiful prose sentences I’ve ever read.

So much has happened to me lately that I despair of ever assimilating it—or for forgetting it which is the same thing.

I hate to think of your being hard up. Please use this if it would help. The Atlantic will pay about $200, I suppose. I’ll get in touch with Perkins about it when he returns from vacation (1 wk.). Won’t they advance you all you need on the bk of stories? Your title is fine by the way. What chance of yr. crossing this summer?

My novel to be finished July 1st.

With eager and anxious good wishes,
Scott

Address for a year—Ellerslie Mansion, Edgemoor, Delaware. Huge old house on Delaware River.

Pillars, etc. I am called “Colonel.” Zelda “de old Missus.”

Notes:

First line of “In Another Country,” one of the two Hemingway stories published in the April 1927 Scribner’s Magazine.

One hundred dollars loan.

39. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Hendaye, c. 15 September 1927

Dear Scott:

I got your check cashed it like a son of a bitch without writing and never wrote. All of which if you study your bank account I don't have to tell you. But don't think of me as having become a [Ben] Hecht or a [Maxwell] Bodenheim or one of those literary gents that thinks writing books give a gent licence to larceny etc. because I am now writing and I will pay you the one hundred bucks as soon as the new monumental work entitled Men Without Women comes out. Not later than October let us both hope.

How the hell are you? What do you think of Men Without Women as a title? I could get no title, Fitz, run through Ecclesiastics though I did. Perkins, perhaps you've met him, wanted a title for the book. Perkins's an odd chap, I thought, what a quaint conceit! He wants a title for the book. Oddly enough he did. So, I being up in Gstaad at the time went around to all the book stores trying to buy a bible in order to get a title. But all the sons of bitches had to sell were little carved brown wood bears. So for a time I thought of dubbing the book The Little Carved Wood Bear and then listening to the critics explanations. Fortunately there happened to be a church of England clergyman in town who was leaving the next day and Pauline borrowed a bible off him after promising to return it that night because it was the bible he was ordained with. Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it—although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.

If you think that paragraph is dull, revert to the first paragraph where I promised to pay you back the hundred dollars. There's gold in that paragraph, Fitz.

How is your novel? Have you finished it? When is [it] coming out? I know you will be glad to hear that I am calling my new novel The World's Fair. So is Brommy as I call dear Louis [Bromfield]. Did you see how Fanny Butcher the woman with the Veal Brains called Brommy the American Fielding. Jesus Christ. It was this that moved me to write again. Due to climate, temperature, up-bringing, lack of experience, education, and tripas [guts] there isn't and won't be any American Fielding but I am resolved that son of a bitch—oh hell. It is funny though for a guy to set out to be the American Galsworthy and be dubbed the American Fielding.

I myself, Fitz, have had the splendid experience of being regarded as the tightest man in the world on acct. of never loosening up and spending any of my Sun Also Rises takings while having lived for five months on yr. 100 and $750 I got from Maxwell Perkins in the meantime having turned down large sums of dough from Hearsts including sending back a check for $1000 bucks sent as an advance on a contract for 10 stories at 1000 the first five 1250 the second five—15,000 for the serial etc. Doubtless it would seem more practical to an impartial observer for me to have taken a thousand off Hearst rather than a hundred off of Fitzgerald and I darsesay it would. The only trouble is that I cant absolutely cant write a damned thing on contract.

However am now going to write a swell novel—will not talk about it on acct. the greater ease of talking about it than writing it and consequent danger of doing same.

Got a sheet to fill out from Who's Who and my life has been so fuckingly complicated that I was only able to answer two of the questions and did not know but what they might be used against me.

Hadley and Bumby are fine and have been out on the Pacific slopes where you were too so you know what the hell they are like. Hadley plans to sail from N.Y. on the Lancastria Oct. 22 will be in N.Y. for three or four days beforehand—her address is care of the Guaranty Trust N.Y. If you were around town and could see her I know she would be cockeyed pleased and I would appreciate it.

Pauline is fine. We were going to come over to the states this fall but as I am starting working well I better keep on and get the stuff done and then come over in the Spring. Where will you be. Please Scott forgive me for being such a turd about not writing or acknowledging the check. I had a note from Northrup in Santiago enclosing a card of yours—it came just as he was sailing. So I w[rote] him in Chicago.

Love to Zelda and Scotty—write me all the dirt. The Murphies have been in Antibes all summer I think. Have heard nothing from Don Stewart since he left last fall. Nothing from [Bob] Benchley. Lett[ers] from Dos pretty often. MacLeishes are in America. Pat Guthrie after Duff [Twysden] got her divorce wouldn't marry her because she had lost her looks and now lives with Lorna Lindsley who saved him from jail on a bad check and who can let him go to jail at any time. Duff is on the town. She kidnapped her kid from England and has no money to keep him—all her small amt. of income goes to keep the kid and nurse in south of france in reduced style of titled youngsters. I ran into her one night—she wasn't sore about the Sun—said the only thing was she never had slept with the bloody bull fighter. That was [the] only night I was in the quarter for a year. Been in Spain since first of July—just bumming, went all over Galicia.

What the hell. Please write. I would like to hear all about Literary Affairs—wish 1 could see you and talk.

Yours Ernest

40. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

October 1927

ALS, 3 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

“Ellerslie”stationery. Edgemoor, Delaware

Dear Ernest:

Thousands will send you this clipping *. I should think it would make you quite conscious of your public existence. Its well meant—he praised your book a few days before.

The book is fine. I like it quite as well as The Sun, which doesn’t begin to express my entheusiasm. In spite of all its geographical + emotional rambling its a unit, as much as Conrad’s books of Contes were. Zelda read it with facination, liking it better than anything you’ve written. Her favorite was Hills like White Elephants, mine, barring The Killers was Now I Lay Me. The one about the Indians was the only one that left me cold and I’m glad you left out Up in Michigan. They probably belong to an earlier + almost exhaused vein.

“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it anymore.” God, what a beautiful line. And the waking dreams in Now I Lay me and the whole mood of Hills Like.

Did you see the pre-review by that cocksucker Rascoe who obviously had read only three stories but wanted to be up to the minute?

Max says its almost exhausted 7500—however that was five days ago. I like your title—All the Sad Young Men Without Women—and I feel my influence is beginning to tell. Manuel Garcia is obviously Gatsby. What you havn’t learned from me you’ll get from Good Woman Bromfield and soon you’ll be Marching in the Van of the Younger Generation.

No work this summer but lots this fall. Hope to finish the novel by 1st December. Have got nervous as hell lately—purely physical but scared me somewhat—to the point of putting me on the wagon and smoking denicotinized cigarettes. Zelda is ballet dancing three times a week with the Phila symphony—painting also. I think you were wise not jumping at Hearsts offer. I had a contract with them that, as it turned out, did me unspeakable damage in one way or another. Long is a sentimental scavenger with no ghost of taste or individuality, not nearly so much as Lorimer for example. However, why not send your stories to Paul Reynolds? He’ll be glad to handle them + will get you good prices. The Post now pays me $3500.—this detail so you’ll be sure who’s writing this letter.

I can’t tell you how I miss you. May cross for 6 wks in March or April. The Grandmothers ** was respectable but undistinguished, and are you coming home. Best to Pauline *** . With good wishes + Affection
Scott

Notes:

* Parody of Hemingway by F.P.A. column, “The Conning Tower.”

** 1927 novel by Glenway Wescott.

*** Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, Hemingway’s second wife.

41. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

December 1927

ALS, 4 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Ellerslie
Edgemoor
Delaware

Dear Ernest:

Perkins send me the check for 800 bits (as we westerners say), indicating I hope, that you are now comfortably off in your own ascetic way. I am almost through my novel, got short and had to do three Post stories but as I am now their pet exhibit and go down on them to the tune of 32,000 bits per felony it didn’t take long to come to the surface.

(This tough talk is not really characteristic of me—its the influence of All the Sad Young Men Without Women in Love.) Louis Golding stepped off the boat + said you and I were the hope of American Letters (if you can find them) but aside from that things look black, “old pard”—Brommy is sweeping the west, Edna Ferber is sweeping the east and Paul Rosenfeld is sweeping what’s left into a large ornate wastebasket, a gift which any Real Man would like, to be published in November under the title: The Real Liesure Class, containing the work of one-story Balzacs and poets so thin-skinned as to be moved by everything to exactly the same degree of mild remarking.

Lately I’ve enjoyed Some People, Bismark (Ludwig’s), Him (in parts) and the Memoirs of Ludendorff. I have a new German war book, Die Krieg against Krieg, which shows men who mislaid their faces in Picardy and the Caucasus—you can imagine how I thumb it over, my mouth fairly slithering with facination.

If you write anything in the line of an “athletic” story please try the Post or let me try them for you, or Reynolds. You were wise not to tie up with Hearsts. They are absolute bitches who feed on contracts like vultures, if I may coin a neat simile.

I’ve tasted no alcohol for a month but Xmas is coming.

Please write me at length about your adventures—I hear you were seen running through Portugal in used B.V.Ds, chewing ground glass and collecting material for a story about Boule players; that you were publicity man for Lindberg; that you have finished a novel a hundred thousand words long consisting entirely of the word “balls” used in new groupings; that you have been naturalized a Spaniard, dress always in a wine-skin with “zipper” vent and are engaged in bootlegging Spanish Fly between St. Sebastian and Biaritz where your agents sprinkle it on the floor of the Casino. I hope I have been misformed but, alas! it all has too true a ring. For your own good I should be back there, with both of us trying to be good fellows at a terrible rate. Just before you pass out next time think of me.

This is a wowsy country but France is swehw and I hope to spend March and April, or April and May, there and elsewhere on the continent.

How are you, physically and mentally? Do you sleep? Now I Lay Me was a fine story—you ought to write a companion piece, Now I Lay Her. Excuse my bawdiness but I’m oversexed and am having saltpetre put in my Pate de Foie Gras au Truffles Provencal.

Please write news. My best to Pauline—Zelda’s also to you both. God will forgive everybody—even Robert McAlmon and Burton Rascoe.

Always afftly
Scott

Notes:

Louis Bromfield.

Volume of biographical essays by Harold Nicolson (1927).

Play by e. e. cummings (1927).

42. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Gstaad, c. 15 December 1927

Dear Scott:

Always glad to hear from a brother pederast. You ask for the news. Well I have quit the writing game and gone into the pimping game. They have been purifying Paris and running all the former and well known pimps out and it has left a big lack and a fine opportunity both of which I am trying to fill. I have lined up a fine lot of “girls les girls” a french word and when you and the Mrs. come over in the Spring I will be able to offer you some very interesting reductions.

Old Brommy [Bromfield] has certainly swept the women's clubs. It was a sure thing that he would encounter my mother “Mother of Four Takes Up Painting at 52” and he did. He told her he was certain he had recognized her although he couldn't place her because Ernest was his best friend and how wouldn't he know Ernest's mother. Now my mother has a new cause to weep because I don't write [like] Brommy.

Are you keeping little Scotty off of the hop any better? We hear many happy anecdotes  over here about  how  she  jammed  H.  L.  Menken [Mencken] with her own little needle the last time he visited at the Mansions and that that was how the American Mercury came to be written.

Teddy Chandler the boy whom if I am not mistaken once killed your mother is over here. Also Bill Bullitt or Bull Billet a big Jew from Yale and fellow novel writer. Pat Guthrie who once lived with Duff Twizden is now being kept by Lorna Lindsley who is looking even fresher and lovlier. None of these people I ever see but will be glad to look them up for you.

My son Bumby is following in his father's footsteps and makes up stories. Hearsts have offered him 182,000 bits for a serial about Lesbians who were wounded in the war and it was so hard to have children that they all took to drink and running all over Europe and Asia, just a wanton crew of wastrels. I have introduced him to a lot of them and he is writing hard and I am helping him a little now and then with the spelling and Pauline reads aloud to him your stories out of the Post so he will get an idea of the style which is going to be the same as that of the latest poems by MacLeish only trimmed with Persian Lamb. Bumby is calling the thing

lesbos Lesbos LESBOS

I see few people except Mike Ward the ex Banker who had an amazing adventure the other night in the Club Daunau where he hit a man standing at the bar because he said something about me that he, Mike, did not hear but didn't like the sound of. He asked the man if he was a friend of mine and when the man said no Mike hit him. Later it turned out that the man had not mentioned me at all but Mike said that the man was no friend of mine he could tell.

You ought to have loyal friends like that Fitz.

There was no money in Spanish fly so I gave up the Spanish Fly game. My eye is all right now and we are hoping it will snow. Jinny has been here since the 1st of December hoping it will snow too. We have only been hoping since the 14th of December. I have a sore throat and am in bed. I guess you will agree we got [Charles A.] Lindberg[h] a nice lot of publicity. Would you like me to be publicity man for either Scotty or Zelda. You are right about the Spanish wine skin and I find it very comfortable but it has nothing so unhemanish as a zipper. I have to watch myself that way and deny myself of many of the little comforts like toilet paper, semi-colons, and soles to my shoes. Any time I use any of those people begin to shout that old Hem is just a fairy after all and no He man ha ha.

On acct. being so laid up so long started a fine beard which is now almost rabbinical. May keep it until come to the states but doubt it.

Write me all the news and views. Love to Zelda and little Scotty if you can keep her off of the stuff long enough for her to understand the message. You shouldn't let that child have Heroin Scott. I've thought it over from every angle and it can't be good for her. I know that you have to keep up appearances and I know the way things are nowadays but nobody can convince me that it really does a child of that age any good. Write again. Now I don't owe you anything besides undying gratitude and say 180 bottles of champagne I can write free-er.

yrs. always, Ernest.

43. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Gstaad, 15 January 1928

<…>

A gentleman named Burton Emmett sent me a check for $500 to buy some manuscripts of stories The Killers, Fifty G. etc. Have had various other offers. But have given most of these Mss. away during the great tissue towel famine. Don't however tell anyone this as if my eye started to go bad it might be a good provision against the future to start making manuscripts. At present there would seem to be more money in manuscripts than in stories. I should think Scott's original Mss. would bring thousands for the spelling alone. I wonder if Mr. Emmett prefers Mss. of mine before or after I put in the grammar? But I am afraid to joke with these Mss. buyers for fear they won't want them. Think I'll write back and say they are all in the British Museum except The Sun Also Rises which is in the Prado. <…>

44. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 12 February 1928

<…> Scott sent me an announcement of a debate between the Messrs. [Louis] Bromfield and [Glenway] Wescott—did you hear it? What did they debate? <…>

45. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 17 March 1928

<…> I know very well that Scott for his own good should have had his novel out a year or two years ago. I don't want you to think that I am falling into that thing or alibi-ing to myself. <…>

46. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 21 April 1928

Dear Mr. Perkins:

I'm terribly sorry to hear about Scott. Could you tell me the name of his ship and I will send him a cable. Perhaps it would be better to wire it, the name of his boat or where he is in a night letter as this place seems to be a long way from New York by mail. I wish he would finish his novel or throw it away and write a new one. I think he has just gotten stuck and does not believe in it any more himself from having fooled with it so long and yet dreads giving it up. So he writes stories and uses any excuse to keep from having to bite on the nail and finish it. But I believe that everybody has had to give them up (novels) at some time and start others. I wish I could talk to him. He believes that this novel is so important because people came out and said such fine things about him after the Gatsby and then he had a rotten book of stories (I mean there were cheap stories in it) and he feels that he must have a GREAT novel to live up to the critics. All that is such (***) because the thing for Scott to do is WRITE novels and the good will come out with the bad and in the end the whole thing will be fine. But critics like [Gilbert] Seldes etc. are poison for him. He is scared and builds up all sorts of defences like the need for making money with stories etc. all to avoid facing the thing through. He could have written three novels in this length of time—and what if two of them were bad if one of them was a Gatsby. Let him throw away the bad ones. He is prolific as a Gueinea pig (mis-spelled) and instead he has been bamboozled by the critics (who have ruined every writer that reads them) into thinking he lays eggs like the Ostrich or the elephant.

<…>

This is a splendid place. Population formerly 26,000—now around ten thousand. There was a pencilled inscription derogatory to our fair city in the toilet at the station and somebody had written under it— 'if you don't like this town get out and stay out.' Somebody else had written under that 'Everybody has.'

Would appreciate your asking them to send and charge to me 3 Sun Alsos and 3 Men Without Women (as soon as possible). Nobody believes me when I say I'm a writer. They think I represent Big Northern Bootleggers or Dope Peddlers—especially with this scar.1 They haven't even heard of Scott. Several of the boys I know have just been moved by first reading of Kipling. A man introducing Robert Service's works would coin money if there was any money to coin—but there isn't.

Yrs. always Hemingway

Hope I get nothing incriminating as they open my mail.

Notes:

1. Scar on forehead from the skylight accident in Paris described in EH to Perkins, 17 March 1928. It developed into a lipoma, a hard protuberance which he carried the rest of his life.

47. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

ALS, 2 pp. Kennedy Library; From Correspondence.

c. July 1928

Paris Teenie-weenie Corner
Sunshineville.

Precious Papa, Bull-fighter, Gourmand ect.

It has come to my ears

(a) That you have been seen bycycling through Kansas, chewing + spitting a mixture of goat's meat + chicory which the natives collect + sell for artery-softener and market-glut

(b) That Bumby1 has won the Benjamin Altman scholarship at Cundle School + taken first prizes in Comparitive Epistemology, Diseases of Cormorants + Small Vultures, Amateur Gyncology + Intestinal Hysterics

(c) That you are going to fight Jim Tully2 in Washdog Wisconsin on Decoration Day in a chastity belt with your hair cut a la garconne.

***

Is it all true?

***

We are friends with the Murphys again. Talked about you a great deal + while we tried to say only kind things we managed to get in a few good cracks that would amuse you—about anybody else—which is what you get for being so far away. Incidently called twice on Hadley3—she was both times out but saw Bumby once + think he's the best kid I ever saw by 1000 miles.

Well, old Mackerel Snatcher,4 wolf a Wafer + + a Beaker of blood for me,—and when you come Shadowboxing into my life again with your new similes for “swewa” and “wousy” (which, as you doubtless notice, you've given to the world) no one will be glader than your

Devoted Friend Scott Fitzg—

While in America don't cast any doubt on my statement that you held a bridgehead (or was it a hophead) at Caporetto for three days + utterly baffled the 2nd Austrian Army Corps. In 50 yrs all the people that could have denied it will be dead or busy holding their own bridgeheads—like Lawrence Stallings, who is slowly taking to himself the communal exploits of the 5th + 6th Marines. “Hebuterne—of course I know it—I took that village.”

Do send Lorimer5 a story. I Read Mencken's public apology.6 Not bad for an old man who has had his troubles. God help us all! Have seen a good deal of Joyce. Please come back—will be here till Aug 20th 58 Rue de Vaugirard. Then back to America for a few months.

Best to Pauline!

Notes:

1 Hemingway's first son, John Hadley Nicanor.

2 Hobo writer.

3 Hemingway's first wife, whom he had divorced in 1927.

4 Hemingway had converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer.

5 George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post.

6 Possibly a reference to Mencken's review of Men Without Women in The American Mercury (May 1928).

48. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Piggott, Arkansas, 28 September 1928

Dear Mr. Perkins:

I hope the hay fever is over. There's nothing worse and I do hope it is finished now. Arriving at Piggott I found two letters from you and one from Guy Hickock who said, “Sat next to me Scott Fitzgerald very white and equally sober—” So you can add that to your reports though by now Scott may be back. I hope he is in good shape—though I don't know why I should wish him in US for his own good. He wrote the Gatsby in Europe. He drinks no more there and what he does drink is not poisonous. I'm awfully anxious to see him.

<…>

49. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Piggott, c. 9 October 1928

PUL

Dear Mr. Fizzgeral:

A letter some time ago from Maxwell E Perkins let me in on the little secret that you work eight hours every day—Joyce I believe worked twelve. There was some comparison between how long it took you two great authors to finish your work.

Well Fitz you are certainly a worker. I have never been able to write longer than two hours myself without getting utterly pooped—any longer than that and the stuff begins to become tripe but here is old Fitz whom I once knew working eight hours every day. How does it feel old fellow? What is the secret of your ability to write for eight hours every day. I look forward with some eagerness to seeing the product. Will it be like that other great worker and fellow Celt? Have you gone in for not making sense? If I could only take the slight plunge to going in for not making sense I could work ten and twelve hours a day every day and always be perfectly [word blotted out] like Gertrude Stein who since she has taken up not making sense some eighteen years ago has never known a moments unhappiness with her work.

You dirty lousy liar to say you work (write) eight hours a day.

Send [George Horace] Lorimer a story hell. I'm letting you send Lorimer stories for both of us.

Finished my first draft of the bloody book a month ago—going east now in a couple of weeks. Wanted to write some stories here but laying off writing for a month lost all impetus and now feel too healthy and at the same time mentally pooped. God I worked hard on that book. Want like hell to start re-writing but I know I ought to wait a while still.

Just got back from Montana went there from Wyo.—had a grand time. Pat has doubled his weight in three months—weighed 9 something to begin with. He looks like H [illegible] never cries laughs all the time -sleeps all nights built like a brick shithouse. I am thinking of advertising in the Nation or some suitable medium Are your children Rickety, deformed, in any way unsatisfactory. See E. Hemingway (then pictures of the product—all by different Mothers) Perhaps He can help You. Mr. Hemingway understands your problem. He is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Elliott. He knows what you are up against. His own problem is different. Mr. Hemingway has to avoid children. Since the age of fourteen he has been embarrassed by a succession of perfect Little Ones. Now he has decided to make this great gift available to All. Tear off the enclosed coupon and mail it in a plain stamped envelope and you will receive his booklet Perfect Children for You All.

Just send the coupon and your photo and you will receive a personal answer from Mr. Hemingway himself.

Do not confuse Mr. Hemingway with Mr. FitzGerald. Mr. FitzGerald it is true is the father of a very perfect child with, we must admit, a delightful English accent (a thing Mr. Hemingway cannot guarantee his clients). But Mr. FitzGerald is what is known in the profession as a 'one time performer'. You may take Mr. Fizzgerow if you wish but, in the end, you will be sorry. Mr. Dos Passos, however, we must strongly counsell against. For your best interests do not take Mr. Dos Passos. Mr. Dos Passos is practically 'sterile'. You all know what that means. Mr. D.P. cannot have children. Poor Mr. D.P. It is true Mr. Hemingway sometimes envies Mr. Dos Passos but that is just another proof of Mr. Hemingway's real worth to You.

There has lately been a movement on foot to take Mr. [deleted] Delicacy forbids us to give Mr. [deleted] first name (or last name). We cannot counsel too strongly against this. Do not press us for our reasons. Mr. Donald Ogden Stewart has had a certain amount of publicity lately in this connection but after mature consideration we feel that we cannot conscientiously recommend Mr. Stewart. Mr. Stewart may be a 'one timer.' There is no greater waste of money in modern social hygiene than the employment of a one timer. Then there is the religious issue. Mr. Hemingway has enjoyed success under all religions. Even with no religion at all Mr. Hemingway has not been found wanting. In the matter of Creeds, as in Colours, he is not a Bigot.

You understand, my dear Fitz, that none of this is personal. When I say Hemingway I may mean Perkins or Bridges. When I say FitzGerald I may mean Compton MacKenzie or Stephen St. Vincent Benet the wife of the poet Eleanor Wylie. When I say [deleted] I may mean Horseshit. None of this is even the slightest bit personal or 'mean'. Just good old big hearted Hem speaking. We are on the air tonight through the courtesy of the Kansas City Star and associated newspapers. Oh my this really is a fight. I wish you all could see Tommy Heeney's left eye. Now they are at it again.

Where are you going to be the end of Oct. How's to get stewed together Fitz? How about a little mixed vomiting or should it be a “stag” party.

Write to me Piggott (Arkansas)
Ernest
glad you are friends with Murphy's.

[Partly crossed-out postscript:] I would rather stay friends with, say, Mike Ward than be in and out of being friends with say, Saint Paul or other rich and noble characters. But then the [deleted] aren't Saint Paul nor are they Minneapolis. They are figures in a ballet. A very attractive Ballet. Use that sometime in the Post, Kid.

[In left-hand margin beside the crossed-out portion:] This is crossed-out—Old Hem never speaks nor writes in criticism of his friends and they are my friends…

50. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Piggott, 11 October 1928

PUL

<…>

Instead of thinking Zelda a possible good influence (what a phrase) for Scott, I think 90% of all the trouble he has comes from her. Almost every bloody fool thing I have ever seen or known him to do has been directly or indirectly Zelda inspired. I'm probably wrong in this. But I often wonder if he would not have been the best writer we've ever had or likely to have if he hadn't been married to some one that would make him waste Everything. I know no one that has ever had more talent or wasted it more. I wish to god he'd write a good book and finish it and not poop himself away on those lousy Post stories. I don't blame Lorimer I blame Zelda. I would not have Scott imagine I believed this for the world.

Yours always,
Ernest Hemingway

Will leave here in about three days. I'll give you an address in Toronto.

51. To F. SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

on board Spirit of St. Louis, c. 18 November 1928

PUL

Dear Scott and Zelda:

The train is bucking and pitching or bitching (but not listing anyway).

We had a wonderful time1—you were both grand—I am sorry I made a shall we say nuisance of myself about getting to the train on time—We were there far too early—when you were in the hands of the Cop I called on the phone from our platform and explained you were a great writer—the Cop was very nice—He said you said I was a great writer too but he had never heard of either of us. I told him rapidly the plots of some of your better known stories—He said—this is absolutely literal— “He seems like a Dandy Fellow”—thats the way Cops talk—not as they talk in [Morley] Callaghan's Works.

Anyway we had a grand time and Ellersley Mansion is the most cockeyed beautiful place I've ever seen—Pauline sends her love.

Ernest

I'll write our address in Key West when I know it—Piggott, Ark. will always reach us.

Notes:

1. EH and Pauline had stayed overnight with the Fitzgeralds after attending the Princeton-Yale football game at Palmer Stadium on 17 November.

52. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Oak Park, Illinois, c. 9 December 1928

Dear Scott:

You were damned good and also bloody effective to get me that money —I had like a fool only 35-40 bucks with me after Xmas Shopping— plenty for food and tips enroute to Key West.1

My Father shot himself as I suppose you may have read in the papers. Will send you the $100 as soon as I reach Key West—or have Max Perkins send it—

Thanks again like hell for your werry admirable performance as we say in the automotive game.

I was fond as hell of my father and feel too punk—also sick etc.—to write a letter but wanted to thank you.

Best to Zelda and Scotty—

Yrs always Ernest

Notes:

1. EH and Bumby were on a Florida-bound train from New York City when a telegram delivered at Trenton, New Jersey, told EH of his father's death. He wired Fitzgerald for a loan, left Bumby in care of the Pullman porter, and at Philadelphia caught a train for Chicago.

53. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Corinth, Mississippi, 16 December 1928

Dear Mr. Perkins:

Hope to be back at Key West Tuesday morning and at work on the book again. My Father shot himself—Don't know whether it was in N.Y. papers. I didn't see any of the papers. I was very fond of him and feel like hell about it. Got to Oak Park in plenty of time to handle things— Funeral was Sat. aft. Have everything fixed up except they will have damned little money—went over all that too. Realize of course that thing for me to do is not worry but get to work—finish my book properly so I can help them out with the proceeds. What makes me feel the worst is my father is the one I cared about.

You don't have to write any letter of condolence to me—thanks very much for the wire—there was no immediate need for money—when I get the serial money I will try and fix them up.

For your own information (not Scott) there are my Mother and two kids Boy 12 girl 16 still at home—$25,000 insurance—a $15,000 mortgage on the house (house should bring 10 to 15 thousand over the mortgage but sale difficult). Various worthless land in Michigan, Florida etc. with taxes to pay on all of it. No other capital—all gone—my father carried 20-30 yr. Endowment insurance which was paid and lost in Florida. He had angina pectoris and diabetes preventing him from getting any more insurance. Sunk all his savings, my grandfather's estate etc. in Florida. Hadn't been able to sleep with pain etc.—knocked him temporarily out of his head.

I have what I hope won't prove to be the grippe—so excuse such a louzy letter. Thought you might be worrying so wanted to give you the dope.

Yours always, [Signature cut away.]

54. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

December 28, 1928

ALS, 2 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull.

Dear Ernest:

I’m terribly sorry about your trouble. I guess losing parents is just one of the things that happens to one in the thirties—every time I see my father now I think its the last time.

Thank Pauline for the really beautiful Xmas card. It was great to have you both here, even when I was intermittently unconscious.

I send you what may be news, and what a nice precedent for beating up Mencken. Saw the Murphys for an hour in New York. We’re sailing March 1st + I hope to have the novel here. (Confidential about sailing though until I’m sure—won’t go unless novel’s finished.) Ring thought you were fine—he was uncharacteristicly entheusiastic.

I’m bored + somewhat depressed tonight so I won’t continue. Oh, yes—I met old H. Stearns just before leaving Paris and feeling drunk and Christlike suggested a title to him: “Why I go on being poor in Paris”, told him to write it as an informal letter to me and I’d sell it. In a burst of energy he did + I sent it to Max who wrote a check for $100.00 for it. Now Harold writes me that $100 isn’t very much (as a matter of fact, it isn’t much of a letter either) and exhibits such general dissatisfaction that I think he thinks I held out on him. You’ve got to be careful who you do favors for—within a year you’ll probably hear a story that what started him on his downward path was my conscienceless theft of his royaties.

Spengler’s second volume is marvellous. Nothing else is any good—when will you save me from the risk of memorizing your works from over-reading them by finishing another? Remember, Proust is dead—to the great envy of

Your Crony and Gossip
Scott

Edgemoor
Delaware

Notes:

Hemingway’s father had committed suicide.

A newspaper clipping, “Toreador Is Barred for Beating Up Critic.”

The Decline of the West.

55. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 8 January 1929

<…> Would you send Scott $100.00 I borrowed from him in North Philadelphia. I didn't want to draw it till after the first of the year to hold down my last years income figure. <…>

56. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

[Paris, France]

[Postmarked May 17, 1929]

From Turnbull.

Dear Herr Hemophile: or “Bleeding Boy” as I sometimes call you.

Will you take salt with us on Sunday or Monday night? Would make great personal whoopee on receipt of favorable response. Send me a pneu or answer me in person, save between 3 and 7. Highest references, willing to travel—gens du monde, cultive, sympathique cherche hote pour dimanche ou lundi—answer because I shall probably ask Bishop, if you can come....

God Save us, Preserve us, Bless us.

Yrs, in Xt. Fitzg——

57. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

June 1929

AL, 9 pp. Kennedy Library; From Correspondence, Life in Letters.

Paris

114-121 is slow + needs cutting—2 it hasn't the incisiveness of other short portraits in this book or in yr. other books. The characters too numerous + too much nailed down by gags. Please cut! There's absolutely no psycholical justification in introducing those singers—its not even bizarre—if he got stewed with them + in consequence thrown from hospital it would be O.K. At least reduce it to a sharp + self sufficient vignette. It's just rather gassy as it is, I think.

***

For example—your Englishman on the fishing trip in T.S.A.R. contributes to the tautness of waiting for Brett. You seem to have written this to try to “round out the picture of Milan during the war” during a less inspired moment.

(Arn't the Croats Orthodox Greeks?3 or some Byzantine Christian Sect--Surely they're not predominantly Mohamedens + you can't say their not Christans

122 ect4

In “Cat in the rain” + in the story about “That's all we do isn't it, go + try new drinks ect,”5 you were really listening to women—here you re only listening to yourself, to your own mind beating out facily a sort of sense that isn't really interesting, Ernest, nor really much except a sort of literary exercise—it seems to me that this ought to be thoroughly cut, even re-written.

(Our poor old friendship probably won't survive this but there you are—better me than some nobody in the Literary Review that doesn't care about you + your future.)

P. 124 et sequitur6

This is definately dull—it's all right to say it was meant all the time + that a novel can't have the finesse of a short story but this has got to. This scene as it is seems to me a shame.

Later I was astonished to find it was only about 750 wds. which only goes to show the pace you set yourself up to that point. Its dull because the war goes further + further out of sight every minute. “That's the way it was” is no answer—this triumphant proof that races were fixed!

—I should put it as 400 word beginning to Chap XXI

Still later Read by itself it has points, but coming on it in the novel I still believe its dull + slow.

***

Seems to me a last echo of the war very faint when Catherine is dying and he's drinking beer in the Cafe.

***

Look over Switzerland stuff for cutting

(ie. 2nd page numbered 129)7

129 (NW) Now here's a great scene—your comedy used as part of you + not as mere roll-up-my-sleeves+ pull-off a-tour-de-force as on pages 114-121

P. 130—8

This is a comedy scene that really becomes offensive for you've trained everyone to read every word—now you make them read the word cooked (+fucked would be as bad) one dozen times. It has ceased to become amusing by the 5th, for they're too packed, + yet the scene has possibilities. Reduced to five or six cooked it might have rythm like the word “wops” in one of your early sketches. You're a little hypnotized by yourself here.

133-1389

This could stand a good cutting. Sometimes these conversations with her take on a naive quality that wouldn't please you in anyone else's work. Have you read Noel Coward?

Some of its wonderful—about brave man 1000 deaths ect. Couldn't you cut a little?

13410

Remember the brave expectant illegitimmate mother is an old situation + has been exploited by all sorts of people you won't lower yourself to read—so be sure every line rings new + has some claim to being incarnated + inspired truth or you'll have the boys apon you with scorn.

***

By the way—that buying the pistol is a wonderful scene.11

***

Catherine is too glib, talks too much physically. In cutting their conversations cut some of her speeches rather than his. She is too glib—

I mean—you're seeing him in a sophisticated way as now you see yourself then—but you're still seeing her as you did in 1917 thru nineteen yr. old eyes. In consequence unless you make her a bit fatuous occasionally the contrast jars—either the writer is a simple fellow or she's Eleanora Duse disguised as a Red Cross nurse. In one moment you expect her to prophecy the 2nd battle of the Marne—as you probably did then. Where's that desperate, half-childish dont-make-me-think V.A.D. feeling you spoke to me about? It's there—here—but cut to it! Don't try to make her make sense—she probably didn't!

The book, by the way is between 80,000 + 100,000 wds—not 160,000 as you thought

P. 24112 is one of the best pages you've ever written, I think

P 209— + 21913 I think if you use the word cocksuckers here the book will be suppressed + confiscated within two days of publication.

***

All this retreat is marvellous the confusion ect.

The scene from 21814 on is the best in recent fiction

I think 293-29415 need cutting but perhaps not to be cut altogether.

Why not end the book with that wonderful paragraph on P. 241.16 It is the most eloquent in the book + could end it rather gently + well.

A beautiful book it is!

Kiss my ass—EH17

Notes:

In June 1929 Fitzgerald and Hemingway were in Paris when Fitzgerald read a typescript of A Farewell to Arms while the novel was being serialized in Scribner's Magazine. The nine unnumbered pages of this memo are printed here as units in the order of the references to Hemingway's typescript—except for the pages on which Fitzgerald departed from numerical order. See Charles W. Mann, “F. Scott Fitzgerald's Critique of A Farewell to Arms,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976.

2 Ch. 19, pp. 126-29, of A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1929): the meeting with Meyers and his wife through the conversation with the opera singers and Ettore Moretti. This material is crossed out on Hemingway's typescript, perhaps indicating that he considered cutting it.

3 Ch. 26, p. 189: possibly a reference to the priest's statement “The Austrians are Christians—except for the Bosnians.”

4 Ch. 19, pp. 134-35: Frederic and Catherine's conversation about the rain: “I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”

5 “Hills like White Elephants.”

6 Ch. 20, pp. 136ff.: the account of Frederic and Catherine's day at the races.

7 Ch. 22, pp. 152-55: Miss Van Campen's discovery of the empty bottles in Frederic Henry's hospital room.

8 Ch. 21, pp. 142-43: Henry's report of the British major's analysis of the war. “Wops” refers to the Ch. VIII vignette of In Our Time or Ch. 9 of in our time.

9 Ch. 21, pp. 146-51: the scene in which Catherine announces she is pregnant.

10 Ch. 21, p. 147: “I'm going to have a baby, darling.”

11 Ch. 23, pp. 158-59.

12 Ch. 34, pp. 266-67: Frederic Henry's night soliloquy after his reunion with Catherine at Stresa: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.” Fitzgerald wrote in the margin of the typescript: “This is one of the most beautiful pages in all English literature.” The note was erased but is still readable.

13 Ch. 30, pp. 228, 238. The word was replaced with dashes in print.

14 Ch. 30, pp. 237-41: Frederic Henry's arrest by the carabinieri and his escape.

15 Opening of Ch. 40. This passage was cut by Hemingway.

16 Ch. 34. See note 12.

17 Added by Hemingway.

58. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 24 June 1929

<…> Scott is working hard he says. I have seen Morley Callaghan several times and boxed with him five times I think. He has not the appearance but is an excellent boxer. <…>

59. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

12 Blvd. Eugene Gazagnaire Cannes, France

August 23, 1929

From Turnbull.

Dear Ernest:

I've been working like hell, better than for four years, and now am confident of getting old faithful off before the all-American teams are picked—hence the delay.

I wrote Max (not mentioning your letter) one of these don't-lose-your-head notes, though I, like you, never thought there was more than an outside chance of his being forced to let you down. I felt sure that if it came to a crisis he'd threaten to resign and force their hand.

The book sticks with me, by the way; I'm sure it's all I thought at first and can't wait to read it in printing letters.

It's been gay here but we are, thank God, desperately unpopular and not invited anywhere. See the Murphys once a week or so—Gerald is older, less gay, more social, but not so changed as many people in five years. D. Parker is on the crest—tho I didn't see her as much as I'd liked.

Now—Ruth Goldbeck Voallammbbrrossa not only had no intention of throwing you out in any case, but has even promised on her own initiative to speak to whoever it is (she knows her) has the place. She is a fine woman, I think; one of the most attractive in evidence at this moment, in every sense, and is not deserving of that nervous bitterness.

Not knowing whether you've left Spain I'm sending this to Paris. Hoping you'll be here in September for a week or so.

Bunny Wilson's book1 has a fascinating portrait of Dos in it, and is full of good things, and to me interesting throughout. Oddly enough what it lacks is his old bogey, form. It is shapeless as Wells at his wildest, or almost.

Have read nothing good recently save a book on the Leopold-Loeb case and Harold Nicholson's Tennyson, neither recent.

This is a dull letter but it's late and what's left of the mind is tired.

Always afftly yours,
Scott

Best to Pauline.

Notes:

1 I Thought of Daisy.

60. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,1 From Ernest Hemingway

Madrid, 4 September 1929

PUL

Dear Scott:

About that “nervous bitterness” you remember my blowing up about the people coming in to look at the Apt while I was working. (I paid 3000 dollars on a promise to have it permanently and considered it our home) but you seem to have damned well forgot my coming around the next day to tell you that I thought Ruth Goldbeck Vallambrosa was a fine girl, had always admired her and told you for gods sake never to let her know that I had cursed about the Apt. She did not know I was sore and the only way she would ever find out would be through you. You said you understood perfectly and for me not to worry you would never mention it to her.

I'm damned glad you are going well. There is very small chance of our coming to the Riviera. There was some talk of Gerald and Sara [Murphy] coming here and we going back with them but a wire from Gerald yesterday says Sara has had to go to the mountains with Patrick and a letter following. Havent got the letter yet but believe their Spanish trip off. Would have been damned glad to see them. Havent spoken English to anyone since left Pamplona the 12th July except with Pauline. Havent even heard it. If they aren't coming we will probably go north and see Bumby and Pat. Bumby having good fishing in Brittany he writes.

I cant tell you how glad I am you are getting the book done. Fashionable thing is to deprecate all work and think the only thing is to go to pot gracefully and expensively, but the poor bastards doing this—giving up their writing etc. to compete with people who can do nothing and do nothing but go to pot. Cant finish that Jeremiad without mentioning friends and contemporaries—It sounds pretty bad anyway—Cant write that sort of tripe without a typewriter!

Of course all this may be premature and you may not be finishing your book [Tender Is the Night] but only putting me on the list of friends to receive the more glowing reports—

But I hope to God it's true. As far as I read it was better than anything I ever read except the best of Gatsby. You know what part that is.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.

You could write such a damn fine book. What held you up and constipated you more than anything was that review of [Gilbert] Seldes's in the Dial. After that you became self conscious about it and knew you must write a masterpiece. Nobody but Fairies can write Maspertieces or Masterpieces consciously—Anybody else can only write as well as they can going on the system that if this one when it's done isn't a Masterpiece maybe the next one will be. You'd have written two damned good books by now if it hadnt been for that Seldes review.

Of course there are other complications God knows but they are self made. They're not something that's done to you, like using the juice to write for the Post and trying to write masterpieces with the dregs. But now if your using the juice and are desperate enough so you know you have to write one, Seldes or no Seldes, you will write a damned fine book.

This should be enough from Jeremiah Hemingstein the great Jewish Prophet.

If you want some news Dos is married. And if you write a good and unsuperior letter with nothing about my nervous bitterness I'll write and tell you who he's married and all the dope.

On re-reading your letter I find it Is Not Snooty at all. And old Hem wrong again. Evidently a prey to his nervous bitterness! (This not sarcastic). But if I dont send this will never send any so throw out the N.B. in it (son of a bitch if I have that!) and write care the Guaranty when your not too tired from work. I know how damned pooping it is and I'm gladder than I can ever let you know that it is going finely—

Yours always affectionately, Ernest

Best to Zelda and Scotty from us. Are you going to stay down in Cannes? How long. Might come down later when you get the book done. Max [Perkins] is fine. He'd never let anybody down and I never worry about him.

Notes:

1. This is EH's reply to Fitzgerald's letter of 23 August 1929; Fitzgerald replied to it 9 September. See The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York, 1963), pp. 304-7.

61. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

ALS, 2 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Villa Fleur des Bois

Cannes. Sept 9th 1929

Dear Ernest:

I’m glad you decided my letter wasn’t snooty—it was merely hurried (incidently I thought you wanted a word said to Ruth G. if it came about naturally—I merely remarked that you’d be disappointed if you lost your appartment—never a word that you’d been exasperated.) But enough of pretty dismal matters—let us proceed to the really dismal ones. First tho let me say that from Perkins last your book like Pickwick has become a classic while still in serial form. Everything looks bright as day for it and I envy you like hell but would rather have it happen to you than to anyone else.

Just taken another chapter to typists + its left me in a terrible mood of depression as to whether its any good or not. In 2 1/2 mos. I’ve been here I’ve written 20,000 words on it + one short story, which is suberb for me of late years. I’ve paid for it with the usual nervous depressions and such drinking manners as the lowest bistrop (bistrot?) boy would scorn. My latest tendency is to collapse about 11.00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, + tell interested friends or acquaintances that I havn’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda and often implying current company—after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange palaces. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories—and realizing that anyone in my state of mind who has in addition never been able to hold his tongue is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.

Among them has been Dotty Parker. Naturally she having been in an equivalent state lacks patience—(this isn’t snooty—no one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived.) incidently the Murphys have given their whole performance for her this summer and I think, tho she would be the last to admit it, she’s had the time of her life.

We’re coming to Paris for 2 mos the 1st of October.

Your analysis of my inability to get my serious work done is too kind in that it leaves out dissipation, but among acts of God it is possible that the 5 yrs between my leaving the army + finishing Gatsby 1919–1924 which included 3 novels, about 50 popular stories + a play + numerous articles + movies may have taken all I had to say too early, adding that all the time we were living at top speed in the gayest worlds we could find. This aufond is what really worries me—tho the trouble may be my inability to leave anything once started—I have worked for 2 months over a popular short story that was foredoomed to being torn up when completed. Perhaps the house will burn down with this ms + preferably me in it

Always Your Stinking Old Friend
Scott

I have no possible right to send you this gloomy letter. Really if I didn’t feel rather better with one thing or another I couldn’t have written it. Here’s a last flicker of the old cheap pride:—the Post now pay the old whore $4000. a screw. But now its because she’s mastered the 40 positions—in her youth one was enough.

Notes:

The Hemingways were subletting a Paris apartment from Ruth Obre-Goldbeck-de Vallombrosa.

Writer Dorothy Parker.

62. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Hendaye, France, 13 September 1929

Dear Scott:

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

I'll bet it's damned good—and when you get these crying drunks and start to tell them you have no friends for Christ sake amend it—it'll be sad enough—if you say no friends but Ernest the stinking serial king. You're not burned out and you know plenty to use—if you think your running out of dope, count on old Hem—I'll tell you all I know—whom slept with who and whom before or after whom was married—Anything you need to know—

Summer's a discouraging time to work—You dont feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

Everybody loses all the bloom—we're not peaches—that doesnt mean you get rotten—a gun is better worn and with bloom off—So is a saddle—People too by God. You lose everything that is fresh and everything that is easy and it always seems as though you could never write— But you have more metier and you know more and when you get flashes of the old juice you get more results with them.

Look how it is at the start—all juice and lack to the writer and cant convey anything to the reader—you use up the juice and the kick goes but you learn how to do it and the stuff when you are no longer young is better than the young stuff—

You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless—there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing. I wish there was some way that your economic existence would depend on this novel or on novels rather than the damned stories because that is one thing that drives you and gives you an outlet and an excuse too—the damned stories.

Oh Hell. You have more stuff than anyone and you care more about it and for Christ sake just keep on and go through with it now and dont please write anything else until it's finished. It will be damned good—

(They never raise an old whore's price—She may know 850 positions— They cut her price all the same—So either you arent old or not a whore or both) The stories arent whoreing, they're just bad judgement—you could have and can make enough to live on writing novels. You damned fool. Go on and write the novel.

We drove here from Madrid in a day—Hendaye-Plage—Saw our noted contemporary L. Bromfield. Going up to Paris—Have you heard from Max [Perkins] if the Farewell is out? Got a bunch of literary periodicals from Brommy all full of Great German War Books—It was funny how I couldn't get into [Remarque's] All Quiet etc. but once in it it was damned good—Not so great as they think—But awfully good—L. Bromfield is writing a war book. It's bad luck maybe that mine comes out now and after all these that [I] have not had opportunity to profit by them in writing it. In about 2-3 years a man should be able to write a pretty good war book.

Old Dos married Kate Smith—She went to school (college) (not convent) with Pauline—He met her down at Key West last winter— She's a damned nice girl.

We've had letters from Gerald and Sara. It's a damned shame about their Patrick being sick—I think he'll be all right—

Good day today—water nice to swim and the sun the last of summer—

If this is a dull shitty letter it is only because I felt so bad that you were feeling low—am so damned fond of you and whenever you try to tell anybody anything about working or “life” it is always bloody platitudes—

Pauline sends her love to you, Zelda and Scotty—

Yours  always—Ernest

63. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

After 8 October 1929

ALS, 1 p.1 Kennedy Library; From Correspondence.

Paris

As you'll see from this, while Ober was simply wondering if you wanted to use him Reynolds went ahead + constituted himself your agent, though as his only approach to you was through me, he was stepping forth. Of course this letter is nothing but Ober being sore and your work is financially safe with Reynolds so long as he doesn't go senile. I simply pass this on to show how the battle over your work increases in speed now that you don't need any help. In any case I shall step out here, not even answering this letter except in the vaguest terms I liked Cowly's review in Sun. Tribune.2 First intelligent one I've seen

Scott

Notes:

1 Written in the margin of Harold Ober's 8 October letter to Fitzgerald, which Fitzgerald sent to Hemingway. Ober's letter is printed in As Ever, Scott Fitz—, eds. Bruccoli and Jennifer Atkinson (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1972). Fitzgerald made two other marginal notes: On the second paragraph, “This was sixth months back it seems to me—maybe not”; on the third paragraph, “(This is the offer of $300 or 600 you told me about months ago) F.S.F.”

2 Malcolm Cowley's review of A Farewell to Arms.

64. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 22 or 29 October 1929

PUL

Dear Scott:

Saw Gertrude Stein the other evening and she asked about you. She claims you are the one of all us guys with the most talent etc. and wants to see you again. Anyway she has written me a note asking me to ask you or youse if you would come around Wed. Eve. to her place—after 8:30 or so I fancy—[Allen] Tate or Tates too—A merchant named Bernard Fay or Bernard Fairy to be there too.

Am going—Tate too—Would you or youse like to call by here before 8:30 or then—if not Gertrude's address is 27 rue du Fleurus—But if you come we might go together—

By the way, Gallipoli Memories by Compton MacKenzie (yr. old school fellow) is damned good and the most amusing war book I've read since Repington—Wdnt wonder if it wd go down with G. Moore's Hails and Farewells—

I'll be glad to buy it for you—There are to be 4 more volumes which is best news I've had in a long time—

Yrs. always affect— Ernest

[Postscript:] No new news from Max [Perkins]. What about yr. suit against McCalls?

65. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 24 or 31 October 1929

Dear Scott:

Your note just came and am utilizing a good hangover to answer it.

I was not annoyed at anything you said (You surely know by now, I've written it often enough, how much I admire your work). I was only annoyed at your refusal to accept the sincere compliment G. Stein was making to you and instead try and twist it into a slighting remark. She was praising her head off about you to me when you came up she started to repeat it and then at the end of the praise to spare you blushes and not be rude to me she said that our flames (sic) were maybe not the same—then you brood on that—

It is O.K. to not accept the compliments if you dont wish (most compliments are horseshit) but there is no need for me to have to re-iterate that they were compliments not slights. I cross myself and swear to God that Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise. That is absolutely true. The fact that you do not value or accept it does not make it any less sincere.

As for the comparison of our writings she was doing nothing of the kind—only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent and I had a small one—implying I had to work a damn sight harder for results obtained—then to avoid praising you to your face and pooping on me she said she wasnt saying the flame was of the same quality. If you would have pressed her she would have told you to a direct question that she believes yours a better quality than mine.

Naturally I do not agree with that—any more than you would—any comparison of such a non existent thing as hypothetical “flames” being pure horseshit—and any comparison between you and me being tripe too—We started along entirely separate lines—would never have met except by accident and as writers have nothing in common except the desire to write well. So why make comparisons and talk about superiority—If you have to have feelings of superiority to me well and good as long as I do not have to have feelings of either superiority or inferiority to you—There can be no such thing between serious writers— They are all in the same boat. Competition within that boat—which is headed toward death—is as silly as deck sports are—The only competition is the original one of making the boat and that all takes place inside yourself. You're on the boat but you're getting touchy because you haven't finished your novel—that's all—I understand it and you could be a hell of a lot more touchy and I wouldn't mind.

This is all bloody rot to write in bed with a bad stomach and if you succeed in finding any slurs slights depreciations or insults in it the morning has been wasted (It's wasted anyway). Gertrude wanted to organize a hare and tortoise race and picked me to tortoise and you to hare and naturally, like a modest man and a classicist, you wanted to be the tortoise—all right tortoise all you want—It's all tripe anyway—

I like to have Gertrude bawl me out because it keeps one['s] opinion of oneself down—way down—She liked the book very much she said— But what I wanted to hear about was what she didnt like and why— She thinks the parts that fail are where I remember visually rather than make up—That was nothing very new—I expected to hear it was all tripe—Would prefer to hear that because it is such a swell spur to work.

Anyway here is page 4 [of this letter]—Will enclose Max's letter—

I'm damn sorry Bromfield started that rumor but it cant hurt Scribners when I nail it by staying with them—I'd be glad to write him a letter he could publish if he wanted—

Look what tripe everything is—In plain talk I learned to write from you—In Town and Country from Joyce—in Chic Trib from Gertrude— not yet reported the authorities on Dos Passos, Pound, Homer, McAlmon, Aldous Huxley and E. E. Cummings—Then you think I shouldnt worry when some one says I've no vitality—I dont worry—Who has vitality in Paris? People dont write with vitality—they write with their heads— When I'm in perfect shape dont feel like writing—feel too good! G. S. never went with us to Schruns or Key West or Wyoming or any place where you get in shape—If she's never seen me in shape—Why worry? When they bawl you out ride with the punches—

Anyway will write no more of this—I'm sorry you worried — you weren't unpleasant.

Yours always affectionately, Ernest

66. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 12 December 1929

Dear Scott:

Your letter didnt come until last night—They'd held it at the bank.

I know you are the soul of honor. I mean that. If you remember I made no cracks about your time keeping until after you had told me over my objections for about the fourth time that you were going to deliberately quarrel with me. The first time I thought I had convinced you. You came back to it and I, and Pauline, thought we had convinced you again. On the fourth time after I had also heard how McAlmon, whom I'd given a letter of introduction to Perkins had lied about me, how Callaghan whom I'd always tried to aid had come to you with preposterous stories I was getting sore.

You'll remember though that I did not, sore as I was about everything in general, accuse you of any such time juggling, I only asked you if you had let the round go on to see what would happen. I was so appalled at the idea of you saying that you were going to deliberately quarrel with me that I didnt know (just having heard this vile stuff from Mc A and C. which I thought I should have heard a long time sooner, if I was to hear it, and it was to go so long unresented) where the hell I stood on anything.

Besides if you had let the round go on deliberately—which I know you did not—I would not have been sore. I knew when it had gone by the time agreed. It is something that is done habitually at amateur bouts often. When two boys are really socking each other around the time keeper gives them an extra ten, fifteen or thirty seconds—sometimes even a minute to see how things come out. You seemed so upset that I thought you had done this and regretted it. But the minute you said you had not I believed you implicitly.

You as I say are a man of the greatest honor. I am not, in boxing at least. When I boxed Jean Prevost here in Paris I proposed Bill Smith as time keeper. I was in bad shape and told Bill to call time (we were supposed to box 2 minute rounds) any time he saw me in trouble. One of the rounds was barely 40 seconds long! Prevost just thought the time went awfully quickly. When I had him going Bill let the rounds go 2 minutes and over.

Having done such things myself you cannot expect me to control my reflexes about what is happening to me. But you can believe me when I say that I at once threw out any such idea and coming home told Pauline you had been interested and forgotten all about time.

You remember too that I put no importance on the incident afterwards and was more pleased than anything. I remember telling it with pleasure at the Deux Magot[s], praising Morley and giving him all credit for knocking me around. I thought, then, he was a friend of mine. It was only when I read his lying boast that I became angry. Then, being sore, I was sore at your carelessness which had given him the opportunity to make such a boast.

I would never have asked you such a thing if you hadnt gotten me nearly cuckoo with this talk about deliberately quarreling with me.

Let me repeat again—I have not the slightest suspicion of you having been disingenuous—I believe you implicitly and did at the time.

I know how valuable your sense of honor is to you, as it is to any man, and I would not wound you in it for anything in the world.

As an attenuating circumstance, though, please look at the different way we each look at sport—You look on it as a gentleman and that is the way it should be. But look how it has been with me—

One of the first times I ever boxed—a fellow named Morty Hellnick— after the bell for the end of the round I dropped my hands. The minute I dropped my hands he hit me with a right swing full to the pit of the stomach. After the fight I was sick for nearly a week. The 2nd time I boxed him I was winning easily—he had lost the fight anyway—so he fouled me deliberately—have never had such pain in my life—one ball swelled up nearly as big as a fist—That is the way boxing is—Look—in so called friendly bouts—you are never trying to knock them out—yet you never know but that they will try to knock you out—you get the complete habit of suspicion—Boxing in the gym with a fellow he let his thumbs stick out beyond his gloves in the infighting—the thumb caught me in the left eye and I was blinded by it—He blinded, in his life, at least 4 other men. Never intentionally—just the by-product of a dirty trick—I mention this only to excuse the reflex of suspicion which I never carried over for a minute.

It was only when you were telling me, against all my arguments and telling you how fond I am of you, that you were going to break etc and that you had a need to smash me as a man etc that I relapsed into the damn old animal suspicion.

But I apoligize to you again. I believe you implicitly and I have always, and I only wish to God you didnt feel so bum when you drink. I know it's no damn fun but I know too everything will be fine when your book is done....

Anyway every kind of luck to you—Did you know Harry Crosby who shot himself yest?1 He told me about this girl before he went to N.Y. Mac Leishes introduced her to him. He was a hell of a good boy and I feel awfully bad today about him. One of my best friends died two weeks ago and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose you as a friend through some bloody squabble. Best to you always—yr. affectionate friend

Ernest

Notes:

1. On Crosby's life and suicide, see Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun (New York, 1976). EH and Crosby had never been particularly close.

67. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 15 December 1929

<…>

I must certainly apologize—I think I have already—for having written that time after Scott got me alarmed about the sale stopping. But came home from Berlin feeling fine and found Scott had been here with some alarm. I went over to see him and he showed me something you had written about the book going well and the only thing to watch was the market slump. I thought there was nothing alarming in what you had written but he knows so much more about the financial side of writing than I do that I imagined, he did not show me the whole letter, but only the part referring to the book that there was some contingencies I did not know about. Also he seemed so alarmed.

Am damned fond of Scott and would do anything for him but he's been a little trying lately. He came over the other day, a little tight, and said “People ought to let you alone. They ought to let you work and not worry you.” And then proceeded to tell me the god damndest stories about myself that I've ever heard. He has my interests at heart and wants only to help me but really I have been out in the world making a living for a long time, ordinarily get on with people, have been familiar with slander, jealousy etc. although do not believe it exists as much as people make out and would prefer to ignore things—if they're not true they always die out. But when things are brought to your attention they make you sore as hell. Scott is working hard and well and I know he will be fine when he finally gets his book done.

<…>

68. To MORLEY CALLAGHAN, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 4 January 1930 [Misdated 1929.]

Dear Morley:

I traced the story2 and found that Pierre Loving was responsible for putting it out both in Paris and N.Y. I found out where he lived and sent him this wire to his address, Waverley Place, N.Y.C.

—“Understand you saw Morley Callaghan knock me cold answer Guaranty Trust Paris”—I received no answer.

Scott wired you that he was waiting amicably to read your correction of the story & telling you where the story appeared / at my request and against his own good judgment. I did not know whether you had ever seen the story and since over 3 weeks had elapsed since it was first published in N.Y. Post it was up to him to correct it as a witness if you had not seen it and already done so. He, Scott, assured me you would have seen it and did not want to send the wire (which contained his insinuations against you). Since I had not seen the story in 3 weeks I had no way of being sure you had seen it.

It is, however, entirely my fault that the wire calling your attention to the story was sent, and since some pretty tough words have been passed around apropos of who sent the wire I want you to know that it was in no way an idea of Scott's. It was entirely my fault.

If you wish to transfer to me the epithets you applied to Scott I will be in the States in a few weeks and am at your disposal any place where there is no publicity attached.

Yours always, ph. Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

2. This relates to a boxing bout between EH and Callaghan in Paris, June 1929. Fitzgerald as timekeeper mistakenly let one round last four minutes. See Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York, 1963), pp. 241-51; and Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York, 1969), pp. 201-2, 206-7. Callaghan (b. 1903) became a leading Canadian novelist. He first met EH in Toronto in 1923. See A Life Story, pp. 119-21.

69. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Paris, c. 5 January 1930

PUL

Dear Scott:

Your note just came. It's tough luck but there are no bullfights in Spain after end of November.

Climate in San Sebastian [from] now on cloudy damp and drisly. Town deserted. Best medium luxe hotel damned good Hotel Biarritz. ARANA— more moderate.

Pamplona, now cold, maybe raining, rain comes from the sea—or melting snow—nothing to do. Hotels (1) Grand Deluxe deserted (2) Quintana (the Montoya of Sun Also pretty simple for your tastes perhaps) (3) La Perla—1/2 way between the two.

In winter Madrid is clear and cold—cold as hell—Hotel Savoy.

Where people go in Spain in winter for good climate is Tarragona— South on the Coast from Barcelona—Hotel de Paris—Lovely old town on a hill above sea.

Malaga further south—good climate—Hotel Regina, and

Ronda—beautiful situation up on R.R. from Gibraltar. Lovely place— nothing much to do but beautiful and romantic—where I would go for a honeymoon for instance if had lots of money—Hotel Maria Christina (maybe called Regina Christina). It's neither, it's Reina Victoria! And also Hotel Royal.

If I can give you any dope let me know. But San Sebastian and Pamplona would be a hell of a disappointment to you in winter!1

Ernest

P.S. I forgot to tell you to charge the wire to my account. Please forgive me. Glad you liked the books. Hope it (Graves) makes you glad you missed the war! It gives me a hell of a respect for poor Siegfried Sassoon. [Robert] Graves too! Have read [D. H. Lawrence's] Lady Chatt—It didn't hold me.

Notes:

1. The Fitzgeralds went instead to Algeria in February. Zelda was then on the brink of a severe nervous breakdown. See Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York, 1970), pp. 157-70.

70. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 12 April 1931

PUL

Dear Scott:

We're both terribly sorry that Zelda had such a rotten time and I would have written long ago. I hope to God she's getting along well now and that you are too. I know you had hell. You have our deepest sympathy.

Outside of this arm have been having a damned fine time and was going well on book until accident on Nov 1—didn't write a line after that until this week. Feel in damned good shape now to go well—nerve in arm has regenerated and paralysis all finished.

We come abroad in May. I'll be working all summer in Spain finishing book [Death in the Afternoon], and will look forward like hell to seeing you. If you're still in Switzerland will come down there to see you in the fall. We might take one of those topless motor trips. I havent kept up with Arland [Michael Arlen] or any other of the boys and you could give me cultured synopsis of what the lads have been doing. My operatives in N.Y. report you have become a grave, courageous and serious citizen. This all sounds like horseshit to me and have cut my operatives wage scale accordingly. Give my best to John Bishop when you see him or write him—I would write him but can only write about 400 or so words still before arm poops out and am putting those 400 or so into reducing our national debt to Max—will write him anyway—arm is getting well fast.

Have you become a Communist like Bunny [Edmund] Wilson? In 1919-20-21 when we were all paid up Communists Bunny and all those guys thot it was all tripe—as indeed it proved to be—but suppose everybody has to go through some political or religious faith sooner or later. Personally would rather go through things sooner and get your disillusions behind you instead of ahead of you.

Ah Fitz but we are profound chaps—we word lads.

Enclose latest passport picture showing new alterations in pan [face] caused by last summer's defective horsemanship.

Best always to Zelda. Tell her not to feel any worse than she can feel about dancing. She started it too late anyway. You start it at 6 as in bull fighting to get well up in it. She wouldn't have wanted to start late and be the Sydney Franklin of the Ballet would she? You know us word merchants Fitz—always ready to give comforting advice to others while pewking with the other hand about our own troubles.

By Christ my only trouble now is to have pen and ink (pencil O.K.) and paper and 3 mos. clear to write in. But imagine troubles will be furnished.

So long Scott and our best love to you both.

Ernest (the man who discovered Curro Carillo)

How does your Ex-Marine write?

I'm sorry you had a trip to U.S. on such sad business. Hope to read your acct. of it between board covers rather than in Post. Remember us writers have only one father and one mother to die. But don't poop away such fine material.

71. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 26 December 1931

<…> What about Scott? <…>

72. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 5-6 January 1932

<…> There have been plumbers—roofers—screeners—electricians etc. here to drive you bughouse. Since I started this book have had compound fracture of index finger—bad general smash up in that bear hunt—14 stitches in face inside and out—hole in leg—then that right arm—muscular spiral paralysis—3 fingers in right hand broken—16 stitches in left wrist and hand. Eyes went haywire in Spain—with glasses now. Can't do more than about 4 hours before they go bad. Pauline's 2nd Caeserian etc. etc. etc.

Scott on the other hand had his wife go nutty which is much worse— plenty more worse. During Sun Also plenty happened while during Farewell to Arrums—outside of Patrick being born only incident was my father shooting himself and me acquiring 4 new dependents and mortgages. Then some shitfaced critic writes Mr. Hemingway retires to his comfortable library to write about despair—Is that what I write about? I wonder.

<…>

73. To JOHN DOS PASSOS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, c. 12 April 1932

<…>

Am working hard. Cut a ton of crap a day out of the proofs and spread it around the alligator pear trees which are growing to be enormous. Second crop of limes. 3rd crop of Gilbeys.

Writing a fine book about Scott Fitzgerald oddly enough. Very interesting and instructive. Am going to have a camera eye looking up a horse's ass and newsreels of you singing in chinese and give a drink of hot kirsch to every customer. Lieterature has got to be put on its feet or on its what shall we say lads on its—

<…>

74. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Nordquist Ranch, Wyoming, 27 July 1932

<…> Poor old Scott. He should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago before she was diagnosed as nutty. He is the great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation. <…>

75. To THE EDITORS, HOUND AND HORN, From Ernest Hemingway

Nordquist Ranch, 27 August 1932

Sirs:

Referring to Mr. Lawrence Leighton's very interesting and revealing autopsy1 on Mr. Dos Passos, Mr. Fitzgerald and myself, may I take exception to one sentence:

“One feels behind Radiguet, Mme. de Lafayette, Benjamin Constant, Proust, even Racine.”

Surely this should read “Radiguet behind Mme. de Lafayette.” The rest of the sentence might stand although it would be more just to place Cocteau behind Radiguet and give Racine the benefit of the doubt. But perhaps Mr. Leighton has a feeling for Racine and would not wish to deprive him of his place.

Yours very truly Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. EH's reply to Leighton's “An Autopsy and a Prescription,” Hound and Horn 5 (July-September 1932): 519-39, in which the work of Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and EH is called “repulsive, sterile, and dead.” EH plays heavily with the closing sentence of the supercilious essay, which celebrates the work of Radiguet.

This letter was printed in Hound and Horn 6 (October-December 1932): 135.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's annotations to this article.

76. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 15 November 1932

<…>

Thanks, too, for sending the books. Could they send me Somerset Moom's [Maugham's] new The Narrow Corner? Zelda I found to be completely and absolutely unreadable. I tried to read it [Save Me the Waltz] but I never could. Scott acknowledged the book so I guess the others must have got theirs too. Thanks for sending Zelda's. I will be glad to forward it to anyone you think might be able to read it.

<…>

77. To JANET FLANNER, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 8 April 1933

<…> Was in N.Y. Benchley has new woman. Terrible. Dotty [Parker] very pretty. Mac Lain out. [Donald Ogden] Stewart back from coast buying everybody mink coats and referring [to] Irving Thalberg as the genius of the age. Dos Passos broke. Hopes go Spain with us. Who else do you know that I know? Phil Barry fat and dumb. Parky died. Mac Gregor that works for Robert had a stroke. Scott become communist (just too late). Came in to N.Y. and told Dos he was in touch with communists in Baltimore. This over phone. I told Dos he will now go back to Baltimore and tell the communists he went to N.Y. and got in touch with Dos Passos. I'm in touch with you I hope Miss Flanner. <…>

Notes:

1. Janet Flanner (1892-1978), born in Indianapolis, spent much of her life in Paris, serving for nearly fifty years as foreign correspondent for the New Yorker under the pen name Genet. In a letter of 27 December 1966 to Carlos Baker she recalled her long friendship with EH as having begun in the early 1920s in Paris.

78. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland

May 10, 1934

From Turnbull.

Dear Ernest:

Did you like the book?1 For God's sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can't hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers' jargon out of my head.

Ever your friend,

Scott

All I meant about the editing was that if I'd been in Max's place I'd have urged you to hold the book2 for more material. It had neither the surprise of I.O.T.3 (nessessessarily) nor its unity, and it did not have as large a proportion of first-flight stories as M.W.W.4 I think in a “general presentation” way this could have been atoned for by sheer bulk. Take that opinion for what it's worth.

On the other hand you can thank God you missed this publishing season! I am 5th best seller in the country and haven't broken 12,000.

Notes:

1 Tender Is the Night.

2 Winner Take Nothing.

3 In Our Time.

4 Men Without Women.

79. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 28 May 1934

PUL

Dear Scott:

I liked it and I didn't like it [Tender Is the Night]. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can't refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn't come from, changing them into other people and you can't do that, Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can't make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples' pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can,who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.

There were wonderful places and nobody else nor none of the boys can write a good one half as good reading as one that doesn't come out by you, but you cheated too damned much in this one. And you don't need to.

In the first place I've always claimed that you can't think. All right, we'll admit you can think. But say you couldn't think; then you ought to write, invent, out of what you know and keep the people's antecedants straight. Second place, a long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions. You had good stuff in too that it didn't need. That's what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That's no insult to you in person) not listening. That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.

It's a lot better than I say. But it's not as good as you can do.

You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won't jump.

For Christ sake write and don't worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write [right] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale). You can't think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece and if you could get rid of [Gilbert] Seldes and those guys that nearly ruined you and turn them out as well as you can and let the spectators yell when it is good and hoot when it is not you would be all right.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.

About this time I wouldn't blame you if you gave me a burst. Jesus it's marvellous to tell other people how to write, live, die etc.

I'd like to see you and talk about things with you sober. You were so damned stinking in N.Y. we didn't get anywhere. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write. Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It's not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course you're a rummy. But you're no more of a rummy than Joyce is and most good writers are. But Scott, good writers always come back. Always. You are twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvellous. You know I never thought so much of Gatsby at the time. You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

Go on and write.

Anyway I'm damned fond of you and I'd like to have a chance to talk sometimes. We had good times talking. Remember that guy we went out to see dying in Neuilly? He was down here this winter. Damned nice guy Canby Chambers. Saw a lot of Dos. He's in good shape now and he was plenty sick this time last year. How is Scotty and Zelda? Pauline sends her love. We're all fine. She's going up to Piggott for a couple of weeks with Patrick. Then bring Bumby back. We have a fine boat. Am going good on a very long story. Hard one to write.

Always your friend Ernest

What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance?

I dint put in about the good parts. You know how good they are. You're write [right] about the book of stories [Winner Take Nothing]. I wanted to hold it for more. That last one I had in Cosmopolitan would have made it.*

Notes:

* For Fitzgerald's balanced reply to this letter, dated 1 June 1934, see The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York, 1963), pp. 308-10.

80. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

TLS, 6 pp. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

1307 Park Avenue,

Baltimore, Maryland,

June 1, 1934.

Dear Ernest:

Your letter crossed, or almost crossed, one of mine which I am glad now I didn’t send, because the old charming frankness of your letter cleared up the foggy atmosphere through which I felt it was difficult for us to talk any more.

Because I’m going egoist on you in a moment, I want to say that just exactly what you suggested, that the edition of that Chinamen-running story in the Cosmopolitan would have given Winner Take Nothing the weight that it needed was in my head too. Allow me one more criticism, that while I admire your use of purely abstract titles I do not think that one was a particularly fortunate choice.

Next to go to the mat with you on a couple of technical points. The reason I had written you a letter was that Dos dropped in in passing through and said you had brought up about my book what we talked about once in a cafe on the Avenue de Neuilly about composite characters. Now, I don’t entirely dissent from the theory but I don’t believe you can try to prove your point on such a case as Bunny using his own father as the sire of John Dos Passos, or in the case of this book that covers ground that you personally paced off about the same time I was doing it. In either of those cases how could you trust your own detachment? If you had never met any of the originals then your opinion would be more convincing.

Following this out a little farther, when does the proper and logical combination of events, cause and effect, etc. end and the field of imagination begin? Again you may be entirely right because I suppose you were applying the idea particularly to the handling of the creative faculty in one’s mind rather than to the effect upon the stranger reading it. Nevertheless, I am not sold on the subject, and especially to account for the big flaws of Tender on that ground doesn’t convince me. Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of the Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archeology, etc. upon the bible story; and in the second, of Shakespeare’s trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch’s Lives and Hollinshed’s Chronicles. There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. You can accuse me justly of not having the power to bring it off, but a theory that it can’t be done is highly questionable. I make this point with such persistence because such a conception, if you stick to it, might limit your own choice of materials. The idea can be reduced simply to: you can’t say accurately that composite characterization hurt my book, but that it only hurt it for you.

To take a case specifically, that of Gerald and Sara. I don’t know how much you think you know about my relations with them over a long time, but from certain remarks that you let drop, such as one “Gerald threw you over,” I guess that you didn’t even know the beginning of our relations. In that case you hit on the exact opposite of the truth.

I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over—in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that. (By the way, I didn’t read the Wescott story of Villefranche sailors till I’d done my own version. Think that was the wisest course, for me anyhow, and got a pleasant letter from him in regard to the matter.)

To go back to my theme song, the second technical point that might be of interest to you concerns direct steals from an idea of yours, an idea of Conrad’s and a few lines out of David-into-Fox-Garnett. The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which leave respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. The second contribution to the burglary was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very end of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draft—or at least the first one I saw—gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary of the future lives of the characters: “The priest became a priest under Fascism,” etc., and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this—nevertheless, you convinced me. The third piece of burglary contributing to this symposing was my admiration of the dying fall in the aforesaid Garnett’s book and I imitated it as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of Tender, telling the reader in the last pages that, after all, this is just a casual event, and trying to let him come to bat for me rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with MacCallagan or McKisco, Sweetie?)

Thanks again for your letter which was damned nice, and my absolute best wishes to all of you (by the way, where did you ever get the idea that I didn’t like Pauline, or that I didn’t like her as much as I should? Of all that time of life the only temperamental coolness that I ever felt toward any of the people we ran around with was toward Ada MacLeish, and even in that case it was never any more than that. I have honestly never gone in for hating. My temporary bitternesses toward people have all been ended by what Freud called an inferiority complex and Christ called “Let him without sin—” I remember the day he said it. We were justlikethat then; we tossed up for who was going to go through with it—and he lost.

I am now asking only $5,000 for letters. Make out the check to Malcolm Republic, c/o The New Cowlick.

Ever your friend,
Scott

P.S. Did you ever see my piece about Ring in the New Cowlick—I think you’d have liked it.

P.S.S. This letter and questions require no answers. You are “write” that I no longer listen, but my case histories seem to go in largely for the same magazines, and with simple people I get polite. But I listen to you and would like damn well to hear your voice again.

Notes:

“One Trip Across.”

Dos Passos.

“The Sailor,” Good-bye Wisconsin (1928).

British novelist David Garnett, whose best-known work was Lady into Fox (1922).

Fitzgerald is punning on McAlmon and Callaghan; McKisco is a character in Tender Is the Night.

Malcolm Cowley was the book-review editor of The New Republic.

81. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

Wire. Kennedy Library; From Correspondence.

BALTIMORE MD 1934 DEC 3 PM 1 03

DEAR ERNEST SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO GET DOWN THIS WEEK AND I CERTAINLY REGRET IT AND I APPRECIATE YOUR INVITATION1 HAD SO MANY THINGS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT WITH BEST ALWAYS TO YOU AND YOURS
SCOTT.

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald had been invited to go fishing with Hemingway at Key West.

82. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

Wire. Kennedy Library; From Correspondence.

BALTIMORE MD 1935 MAY 13 AM 7 07

WANT TO SEE YOU AS AM GOING TO CAROLINA FOR SUMMER COULD MAKE THREE DAY STAY KEYWEST ARRIVING THIS THURSDAY BUT WANT TO INTERFERE YOUR PLANS STOP NOT UP TO ANYTHING STRENUOUS PROBABLY RESULT OF TEATOTALING SINCE JANUARY WIRE THIRTEEN NAUGHT SEVEN PARK AVENUE BALTIMORE1
SCOTT.

Notes:

1 Pauline Hemingway wrote on the telegram: “Wired Scott Ernest in Bimini, forwarding your message so sorry Love P.” Fitzgerald never visited Hemingway in Key West.

83. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 7 September 1935

<…> 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. <…>

84. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 16 December 1935

Dear Scott:

It was good to hear from you but a shame you thought you had to write about the book. I only asked Max whether he'd heard if you ever got it because of your changing addresses and one thing and another. It didn't require any bread and ink letter.

How are you anyway? I hear that you're not drinking and haven't been for months. Then that you're on it. That your insides are on the bum etc. etc. Let me know how you are and what you're doing will you? The line about the body was very good. But I'd rather know really what you have or haven't.

Was delighted from the 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. That means, anyhow, that you're not haveing any sudden flashes of insight or intelligence that would mean The End. The other day going through some stuff found the fifteen some pages you wrote me about what would have to come out and what should go in Farewell To Arms and this letter you have written is just the same.

When did I erroneously think you didn't like Death In The Afternoon? And why? and what about it? You know you are like a brilliant mathematician who loves mathematics truly and always gets the wrong answers to the problems. Of course you're like a hell of a lot of other things too but what the hell. Also you are like nobody but yourself and in spite of the fact that you think when you meet an old friend that you have to get stinking drunk and do every possible thing to humiliate yourself and your friend your friends are still fond of you. I'm damned fond of you. Up in Saranac Sara [Murphy] talked for a whole afternoon about how much she cared about you. She said you wrote her a swell letter.

I started up to see you last September in Asheville [North Carolina]. Then the infantile paralysis was so bad in N. and S. Carolina (had Bumby and Pat with me) that left the car in Columbia S.C. and took them on a train to N.Y. I miss seeing you and haveing a chance to talk. In talk you can winnow out the bullshit which we put out so pontifically when we write literary letters and we get a good sound understanding. I got your wire about coming down two weeks after you sent it when we were cruising in the Bahamas. Tried to get Max and Gingrich both to bring you down.

The more I think back to it the better book Tender Is The Night is. This may irritate you but it's the truth. Why don't you come down here? Am going over to Havana to see the Louis-Gastanaga fight there on Dec. 29th. Come on down and we'll go together. I can get two press seats.

Write here will you—we'll be here all winter. Don't know whether Dos is coming down or not. Have a hell of a lot of things to tell you that don't go in letters. A couple you could get a good story out of.

Best always, Ernest

85. To F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 21 December 1935

Dear Scott:

Well [Joe] Louis must have figured on your necessities because the fight is put off until Feb 2. So come on down then if it's all right to leave Zelda. I'm terribly sorry she was so ill again. And you with a bad liver, lung and heart. That's damned awful. How are you doing now? We all get those livers. Mine was in a hell of a state about six or seven years ago but got it all cleared up. What is the matter with your heart? And your lung? I mean what does the Doctor say? Non sleeping is a hell of a damned thing too. Have been haveing a big dose of it now lately too. No matter what time I go to sleep wake and hear the clock strike either one or two then lie wide awake and hear three, four and five. But since I have stopped giving a good goddamn about anything in the past it doesn't bother much and I just lie there and keep perfectly still and rest through it and you seem to get almost as much repose as though you slept. This may be no use to you but it works with me.

If I get exercise and go out in the boat sleep like a log right through the night or if I wake on the boat can go right back to sleep. Or if I lay awake on the boat I'm all right. The trouble is that if you start thinking about anything in that wakeing time you go all through it and exhaust it and are pooped in the morning when you have to write. If you can lie still and take it easy and just consider your life and everything else as an outsider and not give a damn—it is a hell of a help.

You put so damned much value on youth it seemed to me that you confused growing up with growing old but you have taken so damned much punishment I have no business trying to tell you anything. Would like to see you though. There is a good chance the fight is off because the niggers that own Louis think he is too valuable a piece of property to risk so far away as Havana where there is shooting etc. The next revolution is being financed by money raised through kidnapping, bank robbery etc. It's damned strange the violence that is bred from violence and what a lot of those kids have turned into. Cuba is a hell of an interesting place now and has been for last five years. Probably before too you say. But only know what I've seen. Anyway am writing a story about this next revolution. Come on down any time and I'll take you over there in the boat and you'll get a good story out of it anyway. If you really feel blue enough, get yourself heavily insured and I'll see you can get killed. All you'll have to do is not put your hands up quick enough and some nigger son of a bitch will shoot you and your family will be provided for and you won't have to write any more and I'll write you a fine obituary that Malcolm Cowley will cut the best part out of for the new republic and we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel, one lung to Max Perkins and the other to George Horace Lorimer. If we can still find your balls I will take them via the He de France to Paris and down to Antibes and have them cast into the sea off Eden Roc and we will get MacLeish to write a Mystic Poem to be read at that Catholic School (Newman?) you went to. Would you like me to write the mystic poem now. Let's see. Lines To Be Read At the Casting of Scott FitzGerald's balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes Alpes Maritimes)

Whence from these gray
Heights unjockstrapped wholly stewed he
Flung
Himself?
No.
Some waiter?
Yes.
Push tenderly oh green shoots of grass
Tickle not our Fitz's nostrils
Pass
The gray moving unbenfinneyed sea deaths deeper than
our debt to Eliot
Fling fang them flung his own his two finally his one
Spherical, colloid, interstitial,
uprising lost to sight
in fright
natural
not artificial
no ripple make as sinking sanking sonking sunk

Aw hell you'll have to get MacLeish to write the mystic poem. I'll just give a few personal reminiscences of his Paris Period. Get that insurance now, pal. If they won't give you health or life insurance get accident insurance. So long Scott-Let me hear from you. Merry Christmas! Pauline sends her love.

Yours always affectionately Ernest

86. To JOHN AND KATHARINE DOS PASSOS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 13 January 1936

<…> My god did you read Scott's account of his crackup written under influence of Wm. Seabrook.1 Once a writer always a fellow writer. Had been writing to Scott trying to cheer him up but no cheer up. See the reason now. He's officially cracked up. That idea about what a crack it would be in Grand Canyon is amazing if you go in for those things. Max says he has many imaginary diseases along with, I imagine, some very real liver trouble.

<…>

Notes:

1. EH refers to the first of Fitzgerald's three “Crack-Up” articles, which appeared in Esquire 5 (February, March, April 1936).

87. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 7 February 1936

<…>

Feel awfully about Scott. I tried to write him once (wrote him several times) to cheer him up but he seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one comeing too. I always knew he couldn't think—he never could—but he had a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public. Good God, people go through that emptiness many times in life and come out and do work. I always thought, from when I first met him, that if Scott had gone to that war that he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. But that has nothing to do with his writing, a writer can be a coward but at least he should be a writer. Hell I can't write about this and it is rotten to speak against Scott after all he had to go through. But I saw all the first part of it and it was so avoidable and self imposed and always from the one source—though the source spread into many channels and some of them you would never believe came from the same spring. Maybe the Church would help him. You can't tell. Work would help him; noncommercial, honest work—a paragraph at a time. But he judged a paragraph by how much money it made him and ditched his juice into that channel because he got an instant satisfaction. While if you don't make so much and somebody said it was no good he would be afraid. It was a terrible thing for him to love youth so much that he jumped straight from youth to senility without going through manhood. The minute he felt youth going he was frightened again and thought there was nothing between youth and age. But it is so damned easy to criticize our friends and I shouldn't write this. I wish we could help him.

<…>

88. To SARA MURPHY, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, c. 27 February 1936

<…> Poor Sara. I'm sorry you had such a bad time. These are the bad times. It is sort of like the retreat from Moscow and Scott [Fitzgerald] is gone the first week of the retreat. But we might as well fight the best goddamned rear guard action in history and God knows you have been fighting it. <…>

89. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 9 April 1936

<…>

Gingrich wired me too that Scott seemed better. I wish he would pull out of that shamelessness of defeat. We're all going to die. Isn't it time enough to quit then? What is he doing? What is he going to do? He can't have adopted being through as a career can he? He and Maxie Baer have something in common. <…>

90. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

July 16, 1936

ALS, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Asheville, North Carolina

Dear Ernest:

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes 1 it doesn't mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night's sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

It's a fine story2—one of your best—even though the “Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.” rather spoiled it for me.

Ever your friend,
Scott

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

Notes:

1 “The Crack-Up.”

2 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

When the story was collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (Scribners, 1938), the name was changed to “Julian” at Perkins’s insistence.

91. To Ernest Hemingway, from Fitzgerald.

ALS (on Western Union form; in unknown hand). Kennedy Library; From Correspondence

Asheville, North Carolina

Sheville—N.C. via N.Y.C. 9/28/36

Ernest Hemmingway

Ranch—Cooke City

If you ever wanted to help me your chance is now Stop A man named Michael Moch has taken advantage of an interview to spread me all over the N.Y. Evening Post in an absurd position Stop It cuts in on me directly and indirectly—1

Scott

Notes:

1 Fitzgerald's answer to Hemingway's offer of assistance implies that he had sent two telegrams: WIRED UNDER IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE IN NEW YORK NOTHINC CAN BE DONE AT LONG RANGE AND ON COOLER CONSIDERATION SEEMS NOTHING TO BE DONE ANYHOW THANKS BEST ALWAYS SCOTT. (Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 295) It is noteworthy that Fitzgerald turned to Hemingway after the “Poor Scott” reference in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

92. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

Postmarked June 5, 1937

ALS, 1 p. John F. Kennedy Library; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Pennsylvania Railroad stationery

It was fine to see you so well + full of life, Ernest. I hope you’ll make your book fat—I know some of that Esquire work is too good to leave out. All best wishes to your Spanish trip—I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.

Ever Yours
Scott

Going South always seems to me rather desolate + fatal and uneasy. This is no exception. Going North is a safe dull feeling.

Notes:

Fitzgerald had attended a meeting of the American Writers’ Congress in New York City where Hemingway had denounced fascism. Following the meeting Fitzgerald had advised Hemingway to include stories with his forthcoming novel To Have and Have Not (Scribners, 1937).

93. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

July 13, 1937

Wire. John F. Kennedy Library; Life In Letters.

Los Angeles

THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE
SCOTT.

Notes:

Shortly after Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, Hemingway showed The Spanish Earth there to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists.

94. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Key West, 25 March 1939

<…>

I found Scott's Tender Is the Night in Cuba and sent it over. It's amazing how excellent much of it is. If he had integrated it better it would have been a fine novel (as it is) much of it is better than anything else he ever wrote. How I wish he would have kept on writing. Is it really all over or will he write again? If you write him give him my great affection. (I always had a very stupid little boy feeling of superiority about Scott—like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.) But reading that novel much of it was so good it was frightening.

95. List of encounters with Hemingway

c. 1940

... Four times in eleven years (1929 - 1940). Not really friends since '26.

List of Encounters with Hemingway, compiled by Fitzgerald somewhere in 1940.

96. To Fitzgerald, from Hemingway

After 21 October, 1940

Inscription in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribners, 1940). Bruccoli

To Scott with affection and esteem Ernest

97. To Ernest Hemingway, From Fitzgerald

CC, 1 p. Princeton University; From Turnbull, Life In Letters.

Hollywood, California

November 8, 1940

Dear Ernest:

It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the side shows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death—and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.

I never got to tell you how I liked To Have and to Have Not either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance—paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoiefski in their undeflected intensity.

Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoiefski with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

With Old Affection,

P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November—you can’t flunk out in November) and how I am an awful suck about the rich and a social climber. What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit—how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anybody. Not even Allan Campbell who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.

P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.

Notes:

Screenwriter Alan Campbell was Dorothy Parker’s husband.

Hemingway married journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn in 1940.

98. To Maxwell Perkins, From Ernest Hemingway

Hong Kong, 29 April 1941

<…>

Hope Bunny Wilson will not knife Scott in that thing he is going to write.1 Since they both went to Princeton together and all that I suppose he won't. It is damned hard on Scott to publish something unfinished any way you look at it but I suppose the worms won't mind. Writers are certainly dying like flies. It is a damned shame about old Sherwood.2 He always liked living very much. I suppose finally no one will be left alive but the Sitwells. <…>

Notes:

1. The Last Tycoon, the unfinished novel, with The Great Gatsby, five stories, and a foreword by Edmund Wilson, was published posthumously by Scribners in 1941.

2. Sherwood Anderson died 8 March 1941.

99. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

Sun Valley, Idaho, 15 November 1941

Dear Max:

<…>

I read all of Scott's book [The Last Tycoon] and I don't know whether I ought to tell you what I truly think. There are very fine parts in it, but most of it has a deadness that is unbelievable from Scott. I think Bunny Wilson did a very creditable job in explaining, sorting, padding and arranging. But you know Scott would never have finished it with that gigantic, preposterous outline of how it was to be. I thought the part about Stahr was all very good. You can recognize Irving Thalberg, his charm and skill, and grasp of business, and the sentence of death over him. But the women were pretty preposterous. Scott had gotten so far away from any knowledge of people that they are very strange. He still had the technique and the romance of doing anything, but all the dust was off the butterfly's wing for a long time even though the wing would still move up until the butterfly was dead.1 The best book he ever wrote, I think, is still “Tender Is The Night” with all of its mix-up of who was Scott and Zelda and who was Sara and Gerald Murphy. I read it last year again and it has all the realization of tragedy that Scott ever found. Wonderful atmosphere and magical descriptions and none of the impossible dramatic tricks that he had outlined for the final book.

Scott died inside himself at around the age of thirty to thirty-five and his creative powers died somewhat later. This last book was written long after his creative power was dead, and he was just beginning to find out what things were about.

I read over the stories and I think Bunny Wilson made a very poor selection. “The Rich Boy,” if you read it, is really profoundly silly. “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz” is simply trash. When you read in “The Rich Boy” about his gradual decay and suddenly see that Scott has given twenty-eight as the age for this oldness setting in, it is hardly credible that he could write that way.

I am happy the book had such a fine review by J. Donald Adams in the Sunday Times with such a good picture of Scott. I think that should please Scotty very much and be very good for her because she never really knew how good Scott was. But J. Donald Adams is not really a very intelligent man, and to someone who knew Scott truly well and is in the same trade, the book has that deadness, the one quality about which nothing can be done in writing, as though it were a slab of bacon on which mold had grown. You can scrape off the mold, but if it has gone deep into the meat, there is nothing that can keep it from tasting like moldy bacon.

When you wrote Martha, you said that Hollywood had not hurt Scott. I guess perhaps it had not because he was long past being hurt before he went there. His heart died in him in France, and soon after he came back, and the rest of him just went on dying progressively after that. Reading the book was like seeing an old baseball pitcher with nothing left in his arm coming out and working with his intelligence for a few innings before he is knocked out of the box.

I know you're impressed by all the stuff about riding in aeroplanes on account of you not doing that and Scott had done it so recently that it impressed him too and he got something of the old magic into it. But in the things between men and women, the old magic was gone and Scott never really understood life well enough to write a novel that did not need the magic to make it come alive.

This sounds gloomy and critical, but I know you would want me to write what I really thought about it. You've had three guys. Scott, Tom Wolfe and me. Two of them are already dead, and no one can say what will happen to the third one. But I think it is best to criticize strongly so when you get the new ones that will come along afterwards, you can talk to them truly.

<…>

That's all I know about to write now. Please excuse the long letter, and if I sound deprecatory about Scott, remember I know how good he is and was only criticizing Wilson's selections and the posthumous work.

Best to you always, Ernest

Notes:

1. The butterfly image reappears in A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), p. 147.

100. To CHARLES SCRIBNER, From Ernest Hemingway

San Antonio, 12 December 1941

<…> You and Max were impressed by Scott's last because you never ride in airplanes. That's kidding. The Thalberg part was very good. But he wouldn't have finished it in 2000 years. His brain was starting to work OK but his glands wouldn't and he didn't have enough brain to replace the loss of that other stuff he used to get for nothing and not even know where it came from. I re-read Tender Is The Night last summer and that, all balled up so he didn't know who was Gerald and Sara and who Scott and Zelda and all, is still the best and finest thing he ever wrote. Parts of it are really wonderful. <…>

101. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, c. 16 November 1943

<…>

So sorry Waldo [Peirce] is haveing woman trouble. That's one thing you have to hand to Charley Sweeny. He doesn't take nothing from them. If they start to make any trouble with Charley he gives them that old tone of command. A man who suffers from women like Evan [Shipman], say, has a more incurable disease than cancer. And penicillin doesn't cure it. The drug I mean. A woman ruined Scott. It wasn't just Scott ruining himself. But why couldn't he have told her to go to hell? Because she was sick. It's being sick makes them act so bloody awful usually and it's because they're sick you can't treat them as you should. The first great gift for a man is to be healthy and the second, maybe greater, is to fall [in] with healthy women. You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. Sick in the head Marry in heat and repent at leisure was one thing thought up on the boat the other day and the other was something about Custody that great proof of chastity. Maybe I'll turn out to be the Henry James of the People or the comic strips.

<…>

102. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 25 February 1944

<…>

I wish you would keep all the Scott letters for a definitive book instead of letting Bunny Wilson pee them away in his usual malicious driblets. He never asked me for any letters from Scott and I have very many; unfortunately all packed in Key West but available anytime I have something to do besides this war. Have letters from Gatsby period all through the Paris time and all the rest. All of them about writing and showing Scott's great strength and most of his weaknesses. I should suggest you save all of your letters; don't give permission for any of them to be used; until we could get out a good book on Scott and his letters. I know him, through some periods, better than anyone and would be glad to write a long, true, just, detailed (all of those I mean in the measure that anyone can do any such thing) account of the years I knew him. It might be better to wait and write it for my own memoirs1 but my memoir expectancy has been so slight these last years that might be good to write a good piece about Scott before I get too punchy to remember. Would suggest that John Peale Bishop who knew, loved, and understood Scott much better than Wilson ever did edit the letters. John is unfailably kind, impersonal and disinterested while Wilson is usually twisting the facts to cover some expressed error of critical judgment he has made in the past or some prejudice or lack of knowledge or scholarship. He is also extremely dishonest; both about money and about his friends and other writers. I know no one who works so hard at being honest and [has] less true inner honesty within himself. His criticism is like reading second rate gospels written by some one who is out on parole. He reads most interestingly on all the things one does not know about. On the things one knows about truly he is stupid, inaccurate, uninformative and pretentious. But because he is so pretentious his inaccuracies are accepted by all those with less knowledge of what he is writing about than he has. He is the great false-honest, false-craftsman, falsegreat-critic of our exceedingly sorry times which, if every one was honest in himself and what he writes, have no need to be sorry in any way. You can trace the moral decay of his criticism on a parallel line with the decline in Dos Passos's writing through their increasing dishonesty about money and other things, mostly their being dominated by women. But let us not attack that theme with limited time available. Anyway above is my suggestion with regard to Scott's letters. When I am through with this war will have to get in training and shape again to write and would be glad to help on the Scott book to warm up and get going.

<…>

Notes:

.1. Three sketches of Fitzgerald appear in A Moveable Feast (New York, 1965), pp. 147-93. 2. EH saw Perkins in New York in May on the first leg of his trip to London as correspondent for Collier's.

103. To MAXWELL PERKINS, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 23 July 1945

<…>

Will you have them send me Bunny's book on Scott?1 I feel badly not to write anything about Scott when I knew him, possibly, the best of any of them. But you cannot write anything true as long as Zelda is alive anymore than I can write with my bitch of a mother still able to read. When I was liveing with Georgie Wertenbaker's P47 group there was a man named Jonah something or other (a preposterous name) maybe not even Jonah; who gave me all the Gen on Scott's last time. He was with him when he died etc. Also at the terrible thing with Sheilah [Graham]. He never would have finished the book of course. It was more an outline to draw advances on; a mock-up of a project than a book. That was why the wonderful grandiloquence of it so impresses those people who are not in the secret of how writers are. The Epic, as we know, is usually false. And he pitched that at an Epic note that would be impossible for anyone to sustain. It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Scott was almost completely uneducated. He knew none of the laws. He did everything wrong; and it came out right. But geometry always catches up with you. I always feel that you and I can talk truly about Scott because we both loved him and admired him and understood him. Where other people were dazzled by him we saw the good, the weakness and the  great flaw that was always there.  The cowardice, the dream world that was not a late symptom as (reading the reviews Bunny seems to feel). He always had the dream of football greatness, war (which he knew nothing of) (The Sour Science) and when he couldn't walk across Fifth Avenue in traffic he thought, 'With what I know now what a great broken field runner I would be.'

Next time I'll write what was good in him. But we take it for granted people should be good. And in a horse, a regiment, a good writer I look for what is wrong. Take it for granted they are good or would not be looking at them.

Forgive long and stupid letter. Things have been a little bit difficult or I would have written sooner. Thanks for depositing the money. <…>

Notes:

1. The Crack-Up, with Other Uncollected Pieces, Notebooks, and Unpublished Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York, 1945).

104. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 6 July 1949

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Thank you for your letter about the Fitzgerald biography.1 I am very sorry that I do not have any of Scott's letters here. Most of them were stored in Key West and were probably eaten by either mice or roaches, since that is not a good latitude for the preservation of important documents. I had everything filed in a cabinet and in pretty good order, but while I was away at one of the wars someone [Pauline] decided to use the cabinet to keep their files while setting up a small antique business and as a consequence, much of my early manuscripts, Scott's letters and other more or less valuable documents became rat and roach food.

If you were ever around and wanted me to give you any true gen on Scott I would be glad to do so. Who you could get the best dope on his end on the Coast would be from a movie critic named Sheila something or other, and a man I met in the Air Force in the last war named either Jonah or Judah or some such fantastic name. He was with Scott when he died and worked up to dying. The movie critic's name, I now remember, is Sheila Graham and she could give you the name of this other character who could give you an enormous amount of really true gen if he is not writing a book himself.

I loved Scott very much but he was extremely difficult with that situation he got himself into and Zelda constantly making him drink because she was jealous of his working well. There are lots of other aspects of it and if you are writing a really good biography of him I would be glad to tell you many things as truly as I can remember them from the first time I met him. [Maxwell] Geismar's stuff on him made me sick. John O'Hara's introduction to THE PORTABLE FITZGERALD was wrapped in O'Hara's old coonskin coat that he never wore to Yale. Bunny Wilson and John Bishop were his pals but they never saw much of him when he was at his best, which was over a short time. He had a very steep trajectory and was almost like a guided missile with no one guiding him.

This sort of letter is no good to you if what you need for your book is documentation. The rats ate the documentation. But, if you ever want to talk about him I would be glad to talk any time it was convenient with you. I am very sorry that I cannot be of more practical use to you.

Yours very truly, Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. Mizener was at work on The Far Side of Paradise (New York, 1951). This and all subsequent letters to  Professor Mizener  are used  courtesy of the Me Keldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park.

105. To CHARLES SCRIBNER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 25-26 August 1949

<…>

This is a strange year. We are in August; tailing off; and still have mangoes which should finish in June. The flamboyante trees did not flower until late July and they should flower in May. There are no Avocados and there always were no matter what. My best coco-nut palm is dying and there is no plague. Have had four good crops in the garden (vegetable) when three is all I rate until now. My fighting chickens are moulting; but they don't molt as they should.

It is August 25 and all our cats and dogs (34 cats; 11 dogs) have their winter coats. The marlin run is three months late and warblers that should be here in late September and October have arrived already.

What is it Charlie? You, as a countryman, should have some idea. I do not wish the opinions of Wolfe, Fitz Gerald, Alfred Knopf, any Doubleday nor David Smart. Might take a reading from Winston Churchill if he was sober. Will not receive any opinions from Harry Truman, Harry Vaughan nor any justice of the Supreme Court.

But it is a god-damn funny year. I'm hitting around .430 writing and I am only a consistent .300 hitter. Can fuck better than when I was 25 and write good afterwards which was never true before.

It is a very strange year. But if it is odd we might as well see how many fucking ball games we can win.

Your friend Ernest

<…>

106. To CHARLES SCRIBNER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 4 October 1949

Dear Charlie:

The hell with writing today. The enclosed letter will show you why I did not want that magazine bitch jumping my mother. Among other reasons.

So the boys can't tell a story. You know why? They couldn't tell it if they put them on the stand. If you have a story it is not hard to tell. Maybe people won't believe it. But you can tell it straight and true.

A writer, of course, has to make up stories for them to be rounded and not flat like photographs. But he makes them up out of what he knows.

Most of them, that write, never did it, do not know it, and are sort of devious thieves or presumptuous pricks. I haven't known a writer who was a good guy since Jim Joyce died. And he was spotty sometimes. But he did say to me one time when he was drunk, “But Ernest don't you think what I write is really awfully suburban?”

“Yes, Jim. But that's what you know better than anybody.”

“Yes that's what I know,” he said. “God pity me.” Of Henry James you would like, I think, Madame des Mauves. It's quite short. There are a couple of other good ones too. But the greater part of it is rather snobbish, difficultly written shit.

You can have your boy Tom Wolfe too, and his sainted mother. If Max hadn't cut ten tons of shit out of Wolfe everybody would have known how bad it is after the first book. Instead only pros like me or people who drink wine, not labels, know. I guess you know all right.

Then we have Scott borrowing on the outline of a thing he'd never, and never could write, giveing samples here and there like a mineing prospector with a salted mine.

It gives you the creeps. Anyway we are over 44,000 [words] with lots of dialogue and you can go out and buy that horse if you like. Tomorrow we get the series. This noon I go into town to see the oldest and best whore I ever knew. She is the same age I am and I knew her when she was a kid, when she [was] the mistress of Primo de Rivera's boy that started Fascism in Spain (good boy but mis-led in his head), and we will tell sad stories of the death of Kings and get the local gossip. She tells me everything about everybody and gives me all the handkerchiefs her boy friends leave. Have initialled handkerchiefs from every sugar king in the Island. That will kill today and Roberto [Herrera] is bringing the young, new, beautiful whore out tonight. Then will work good tomorrow morning and Miss Mary comes on the plane in the evening in her coat on Thursday…

<…>

107. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 18 April 1950

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Have just gotten home and find your letter which my secretary had filed with her idiotic answer under Priority—To Be Answered.

All I can do is apologize and tell you that you have full permission to use the excerpts from the letters to Scott and to you.

I am so sorry about this when you have been workeing hard on something and trying to get it straight.

Send this to you in a hurry and wish you luck. I read the one lift from your book in Partisan Review. Where did those Partisans fight? (The other day an Italian boy who had been in Partigiani1 saw the review and said to me, “Oh, I never knew Partisans had enough money to publish a review. Does it commemorate their dead?”) He said it without irony, and [I] thought it was straight and ok as far as I knew the epoch you dealt with.

Please call on me to straighten out anything I can recall accurately. Have done the final re-write of book (that was the vacation Miss Juanita J. Jensen referred to) and am now waiting for the galley proofs. After that will have some time.

Yours always, Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. Gianfranco, elder brother of Adriana Ivancich of Venice (see EH to Adriana Ivancich, 3 June 1950, note 1). On his wartime experiences in the desert under Rommel and his subsequent service with the partisans in the Veneto, see Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York, 1969), pp. 471-72.

108. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 22 April 1950

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Am awfully glad the permission was there in time. Beautiful Nita, my Secretary, did a wonderful job when I was away. It is a wonder I have a friend left. Some old boy will write at Christmas saying Dear Ernie you probably don't remember me but I took over such and such a company when so and so was killed and you loaned me your frenchmen that time we had the thing at the cp [command post].

So Miss Nita thinks company commander eh? I guess Papa wouldn't wish to be bothered with someone who only had a company and only got the company because someone was killed. So she answers the letter as follows, “Dear Sir: Mr. Hemingway is away on a short vacation in the European area and your communication will be called to his attention on his return. No date has been set for his return.”

And I would have answered the letter the day I received it anywhere and no matter what I was doing. Finishing a book and going over the first draft has never been my idea of a vacation either.

Will help any way I can on Scott if you run into anything I know that you need to know. By then I should be pretty well in the clear on this book. Getting galleys now. But want to have them all before I start as I die every time I read or write the book and I do not want to die peace-meal.

Poor Scott how he would have loved all this big thing about him now. I remember one time in N.Y. we were walking down Fifth Avenue and he said, “If only I could play foot-ball again with everything I know about it now.”

I suggested that we walk across Fifth through the traffic since he wanted to be a back-field man (It isn't difficult at all really for anyone who can do it). But he said I was crazy.

Then there was always the war. He was lucky he never was in a war. It was almost like being broken hearted because you had missed the San Francisco earthquake (the fire).

None of this is for quotation. Am only trying to give a brother writer something I know, or think I know, about another brother writer once he is dead. I never say or write anything about him I would not say to his face or write him. I never had any respect for him ever except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent.

If he would have had fewer pompous museings and a little sounder education it would have been better maybe. But any time you got him at all straightened out and takeing his work seriously Zelda would  get jealous of him and knock him out of it.

Also alcohol, that we use as the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would not have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.

Here's something you should know too; he never slept with another girl except Zelda until Zelda went officially crazy. She was crazy all the time I knew them but not yet net-able. I remember her at Antibes saying, “Don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?” I said, “No,” which was the only answer I knew at the moment.

A boy named Bud Schulberg who is extremely nice and sensitive and straight, but without either talent or much perception, is writing some sort of life story of Scott and yours should be a corrective of sorts. He wrote a novelized life of Primo Carnera full of strange distortion due to the fear of libel and Carnera said to a friend of mine, “I wish so much Mr. Schulberg would have come to me because I could have told so much more interesting things.”

Did I write or tell you how Zelda really ruined Scott? Probably I did. Anyway, in case I didn't, she told him A: That he had never given her sexual satisfaction. B: That it was because his sexual organ was too small (am sending this through the mails so employ these high-flung terms).

He told me this at lunch and I told him to come to the lavoratory with me and would give him a reading on it. His sexual organs were perfectly normal. I told him this (the lunch was at Michauds on the rue Jacob). (He wanted to lunch there because Joyce and I used to eat there.) He wouldn't believe me and said that his organ did look small when he looked at it. I explained that that was because he observed it from above and thus he saw it fore-shortened. Nothing would convince him. So you can see he was not designed to take a punch.1

He was romantic, ambitious, and Christ, Jesus, God knows how talented. He was also generous without being kind. He was un-educated and refused to educate himself in any way. He would make great studies about foot-ball say and war but it was all bull-shit. He was a charming cheerful companion when he was sober although a little embarrassing from his tendency always to hero-worship. His heros were Tommy Hitchcock, Gerald Murphy and me. He probably had others that I don't know about. But in those three he certainly played the field. Above all he was completely undisciplined and he would quit at the drop of a hat and borrow some-ones hat to drop. He was fragile Irish instead of tough Irish. I wish he were here and I could give him this letter to read so he would not ever think I would say things behind his back.

Good luck with book Ernest Hemingway

I am happy if you like what you have seen of the book. I would like it [to] be better than Proust if Proust had been to the wars and liked to fuck and was in love. umd EH

Notes:

1. This anecdote is repeated in A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), pp. 189-91.

109. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 12 May 1950

Dear Mr. Mizener:

In doing the book it would be good if you would not let yourself be influenced too much by [Edmund] Wilson. He is an excellent critic about many things but he has strange leaks in his integrity and his knowledge; leaks so bad that if he were an aqueduct he would be dry. Probably I am unjust but when they start writing those over-detailed F~k scenes there is a pretty good chance they couldn't f——k themselves out of even Princeton. If you make love to a girl and are fool enough or shit enough to write about it you write to please her unless she has given you the clap or something. And then it isn't her fault because somebody gave it to her.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead. I think Scott in his strange mixed-up Irish catholic monogamy wrote for Zelda and when he lost all hope in her and she destroyed his confidence in himself he was through. It was like makeing your God a canoe, say, or an air-plane or anything that will not last, instead of a good graven image.

My God painted many wonderful pictures and wrote some very good books and fought Napoleon's rear-guard actions in the retreat from Moskova and fought on both sides at Gettysburg and did away with yellow fever and taught Picasso how to draw and sired Citation. He is the best god-damned God you ever knew. But I have never met him. I've seen a lot of his pictures though in the Prado and I read his books and his short stories every year. And I know the exact details of how he killed George Armstrong Custer, which nobody else knows, and my God when he played foot-ball was Jim Thorpe and when he pitched he was Walter Johnson and the ball looked as big as a small marble and it would kill you if it hit you. So my God never dusted anybody off ever.

Scott's God, at the end, was Irving Thalberg. A very nice guy. But your God shouldn't die on you so (can't spell fragily).

You don't have to write a book that is okayed by Wilson, Scottie and anybody else do you? Scott and Zelda are dead. Max [Perkins] is dead. John Bishop is dead. Treat me exactly as though I were dead. I've never squawked to the referee yet. I get sick of Bunny Wilson writing about some mysterious thing that changed or formed my life and then dismissing For Whom The Bell Tolls in a foot-note. Why doesn't he say what the mysterious thing is? Could it be that my father shot himself? Could it be that I did not care, overly, for my mother? Could it be that I have been shot twice through the scrotam and through the right hand, left hand, right foot and left foot and through both knees and the head?

I have a beauty picture of him [Wilson] being kicked in the ass by a photographer that Max Perkins sent me and that evens it all up. Or it should. But it doesn't. First: I am sorry he was kicked in the ass or that anybody should be ever. Second: I wish he would write straight instead of occasionally straight.

You picked a tough subject to write about in Scott and I feel that I have let you down because I don't have his letters. I remember [Ford Madox] Ford telling me that a man should always write a letter thinking of how it would read to posterity. This made such a bad impression on me that I burned every letter in the flat includeing Ford's.

Should you save the hulls a .50 cal shucks out for posterity? Save them. o.k. But they should be written or fired not for posterity but for the day and the hour and posterity will always look after herself.

Lately I am lonely quite a lot, not haveing the children around and not likeing the way things go so that picking up the paper is like (we'll skip it). Anyway I write letters because it is fun to get letters back. But not for posterity. What the hell is posterity anyway? It sounds as though it meant you were on your ass.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

The Last Tycoon, after the part that is written, and was as far as he could write, is really only a scheme to borrow money on. For me the best of the books, in spite of any inconsistencies, is Tender Is The Night. He seemed more grown up in it in spite of the starting with Sara and Gerald and then shifting to Zelda. I thought Gatsby was ok with reservations. No one of the stories is a great story but the best are Babylon Revisited and The Rich Boy I guess. I am someone who would like things to be perfect. I thought, when I read it at the time, haveing come home from Italy that This Side Of Paradise was comic. Couldn't read The Beautiful and the Damned. I remember thinking who the hell said they were beautiful and what the hell were they damned by? I thought the people on the Grappa and Pasubio and the Basso Piave were damned and it did not seem to me you were necessarily damned because you made a little money.

You've probably had about enough of this.

Will sign off.

Yours always Ernest Hemingway

110. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 1 June 1950

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Thank you for the letter. I only warned you about Wilson because if he is screwed up about me he might be about Scott too. It was not to squawk about anything about me. If you want to hit a critic hit him with a book and make him wrong.

I think you are right about Wilson's despair and that is what makes him love Scott's despair so much. But Scott's was a sort of chickenshit, ill-arrived at despair; a very complicated one. Actually I have little respect for either of their despairs because they were too easily arrived at. (You tell me if this makes sense.)

Not that any of it matters: I was desperate when I was 19, 45 and 50 and I did not give a shit about anything except writing, which I respect, for at least ten years in between. The local despairs used to bore me. When I was a kid I missed reform school so close it wasn't funny and after first war I missed Penitentiary so close it was funny. And always Scott's sort of cavorting and Tom Wolfe's interminable flow and his silly love affairs and Scott's aborted virginity and their thirst for fame bored me. But I thought this is the literary life and that's what you are in, boy.

Jim Joyce was the only alive writer that I ever respected. He had his problems but he could write better than anyone I knew. Ezra was nice and kind and friendly and a beautiful poet and critic. G. Stein was nice until she had the menopause. But who I respected was Mr. Joyce and not from reading his clippings.

Scott always seemed like a child trying to play in the big league. Maybe a child could. But I used to tell him that for an artist “D'abord il faut durer” [First one must last]. You can translate that into correct French. I can speak and read French but cannot write it; nor Italian, nor German. But can write Spanish. English sometimes too, maybe.

I love to write and I love to write well enough to waste it. However Wilson is on me doesn't mean a shit. [Maxwell] Geismar is through. He has had menopause of the brain. He started good too. But he threw his arm away.

Anyway I can help you on the book about Scott always let me know. This was just a letter to pass the time of day after I'd done 42 galleys from 0600 to 1300 and was bored shitless listening to the Cuban election news on the radio. Will put on a mixed program of Fats Waller and Mozart now. They are really very good together.

Best always Ernest Hemingway

111. To HARVEY BREIT, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 9 July 1950

<…>

Have no correspondence with Dr. Maxwell Geismar and you are the only critic with whom am in active correspondence (due to Jackson LaMotta and the pride of Trieste). Except I write to a guy [Arthur Mizener] at Carlton College, Northfield, Minnesota who is or has been writing a book on Scott Fitzgerald. I try to give him the straight dope on Scott because he, Scott, was crazy about immortality etc. and I was very fond of him even though he was a horses ass.

(End of literary criticism) <…>

112. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 4 January 1951

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Thank you very much for the book and for the dedication. It is a splendid piece of re-search. There are many errors that I would be willing to submit you corrections on for any future editions.

Poor Scott; and didn't he know that the man in The Snow's of Kilimanjaro would have spoken of him, or thought of him, exactly as he, Scott, would have mentioned actual things, cars and places?

For your information the Callaghan thing was pretty bad. Scott, John Bishop and I had lunched at Pruniers and drunk a great deal of Sancerre. At the end of the lunch I remembered that I had promised to work out with Callaghan who was a good amateur boxer and promising writer but who could not hit a lick. I thought I could chance it anyway though ordinarily you do not box on a full stomach etc. John had an appointment and Scott went with me to our flat and then to the gym. We agreed on two minute rounds and at the end of the two minutes I was o.k. I figured on a minute's rest. Scott let the first round go thirteen minutes and Callaghan after about the fifth minute was hitting me freely and well for a period of some eight minutes. But he did me no harm and could not knock me down nor put me away. Scott liked the spectacle and was fascinated by it and I don't know why he ever called time at all. I was cut badly in the mouth and swallowed the blood.

At the end of the round, which he had let go thirteen minutes, I said to Scott, “You son of a bitch.”

He said “What do you mean? I'm your greatest friend.”

I said “Did you like what you let happen to your best friend for eight full minutes when all you had to do was be honest and call time?”

Callaghan had punched himself out on me and I did not have any difficulties with him in the other rounds. I am pretty sure I could have knocked him out. All of the Prunier lunch had been punched out of me and I felt good. Also I knew, truly, he couldn't hit. But I did not want to knock him out. He boxed well. He was a promiseing writer; and I liked him. Also no part of it was his fault. It meant a lot to him to knock me out and the only trouble was he could not hit. I just was thankful to him for the regular exercise and I truly wished him well.

You know it is a horrible thing to be somebody's hero and have them attribute all sorts of qualities to you when you are only a man trying to work at it as well as you can. If this is megalomania make the most of it. But I was Scott's bloody hero for a while and Archie's [Mac Leish's] and it was only embarrassing to me. They both got cured of it. One by death and the other—

The reason I criticized Scott's books, except for kidding, was because I wanted him to write perfectly and straighten up and fly right.

It embarrassed me when Scott wanted to make a hero out of me and I didn't like it when he would get sore, and finally I decided it was not important any more. We had the Spanish war and the China and then all the rest of it and I couldn't be interested when he was so rum-dumb. He always wanted to play foot-ball and wouldn't cross the street through traffic. He had a great fantasy about going to war and asked me how he would have been. I told him that for his actions in civil life as a criterion he would probably have been re-classified or shot for cowardice.

This was too rough; but it was always trying to get him to work and tell the truth at least to himself.

Well the hell with all of it. He's dead and you've buried him for better or for worse and what he wrote that will stand up will stand up.

It was good of you to work so hard on the research. I like Budd Shulberg very much but I felt his book was grave robbing. Your's is good undertakeing. Almost as good as the job they did on my father's face when he shot himself. One remembers the face better as it actually was. But the undertaker pleases those who come to the funeral.

It is good to counter [Maxwell] Geismar and such people though. But why shouldn't critics have to write a book sometime to become familiar with the process ie. move out of the dissecting room into the operating room? Poor Bunny Wilson writes prose and many people like it. (Please excuse the typewriter which has become very sticky and must be sent in for complete cleaning. But hate to have it go out when I am working well.)

The above is unjust about critics as many have written well; not many; but a few.

We, the writers, like them when we learn something from them. I have learned much from this book.

Best luck for what looks like as bad a year as we have seen.  Ernest Hemingway

113. To ARTHUR MIZENER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 11 January 1951

Dear Mr. Mizener:

Thanks for the letter. Writing is a rough trade et il faut d'abord durer. Never be sore at me if I make a rough joke nor mis-spell nor do not like critics when they teach me nothing. I said your book did tell me many things I did not know and you can see how I would feel to see Scott laying, or is it lieing or lying, naked and dead in the market place. Not like the nakeds and deads of [Norman] Mailer; but really naked and really dead. From the book I learned a lot and I was very grateful; but I did not learn nearly as much of the true thing as I have never said and never written. I am sure this will not make you sore because you are a serious guy working hard and well on a serious subject.

When Scott was in that last period, or next to last, I had given him up because of his small bickerings and senseless jealousies etc. and Madrid, Jarama, Teruel, China, and then the other things held my attention and my hopes. He did not hold any hope for me anymore and I was out of touch. (You never should be out of touch; but many times you are.)

With you I have tried to be absolutely straight and I don't hate critics. I only wish they were co-ordinated a little better together with writers.

But maybe that is too pious a wish.

Let it stand though as the hundredth least important wish of the week.

Good luck with the book.

Ernest Hemingway

I'll give you the corrections when I finish my book. The long one. Have the first third (the sea part) whipped now. I hope it will please you, eventually, more than details of my life which I do not give a shit about. Incidentally I never knew Scott was sore at me except in a drunken fashion. He would write angry letters sometimes and I would try to answer him as you would some one who was not responsible. I always thought he wrote beautifully when he wrote beautifully and stupidly when he wrote stupidly. Thought he was a rummy (for cause) as well as a straight alcoholic. I have a letter in which he told me how to make A Farewell To Arms a successful book which included some fifty suggestions including eliminateing the officer shooting the sergeant, and bringing in, actually and honest to God, the U.S. Marines (Lt. Henry reads of their success at Belleau Woods while in the Cafe when Catherine is dying) at the end. It is one of the worst damned documents I have ever read and I would give it to no one. EH

114. To CHARLES SCRIBNER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 18-19 May 1951

<…> I loved Max very much too and knew him pretty well and he always trusted me even when I was unjust and mean. (Excuse this machine.) Please bury Max's ghost for keeps and cut out this about he, Tom Wolfe and Scott being gods and you etc. It makes me ashamed. Max was Max with five daughters and an idiot wife. Tom Wolfe was a one book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice. Scott was a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money with the in-bred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel.

Why not forget all that shit and be a fine publisher and a brave man as you are and should be? <…>

115. To EDMUND WILSON, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 28 November 1951

<…>

It was bad luck about Christian Gauss. We were quite good friends in Paris one year when Scott was really trying to straighten out and work. I'm very sorry that he is dead.1

Would you mind telling me, sometime when you have time, what you think of the business of putting Tender Is The Night into chronological order rather than the way it was published. I read it all through and it seemed to take the magic out of it. Nothing came as a surprise and the mystery had all been re-moved. I think it was one of those ideas Scott had sometimes, like his titles that Max Perkins kept him from useing, which was not too good. But I would like very much to know what you thought about it. But only when you have plenty of time.

Best always, Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. Dean Gauss of Princeton had died suddenly in Pennsylvania Station, New York City, 1 November 1951.

116. To THOMAS BLEDSOE1, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 9 December 1951

<…>

Probably soon, at the way things are going, there will be no writers and only critics. Then the critics can go to the coast to write the way the writers have done (and none survived). Then the motion pictures will die from the writings of the critics. What do you want to bet Arthur Mizener won't be a star on Television within our time? The only thing we have to do is to get him another Scott Fitzgerald. But you see? These are the sort of jokes a writer shouldn't make.

Best holiday greetings, t.c.  Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. An editor at Rinehart.

117. To WALLACE MEYER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 21 February 1952

<…> Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Mizener made money and did some pretty atrocious things (to young Scotty and any offspring she might have) with his book on Scott and every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering (this may not be the correct word. If not you please supply it). <…>

118. To WALLACE MEYER, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 4 and 7 March 1952

<…> I am tired of not publishing anything. Other writers publish short books. But I am supposed to always lay back and come in with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or be considered a bum. This is probably very bad for a writer and I will bet it did more to wreck poor old Scott than anything except Zelda, himself and booze. I know Max would have been happy with a truly good and sound book from Scott. But Scott tried to be a better writer than he was and he threw the ball over the grandstand (where I must throw this typewriter if it isn't over-hauled). <…>

119. To HARVEY BREIT, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 9 July 1950

<…> I get fed on that County sometimes. Anything that needs genealogical tables to explain it is a little bit like James Branch Cabell. Then if you need the longest sentence in the world to give a book distinction you might as well hire Bill Veek [Veeck] and have midgets. As a technician I would say that sentence was not a sentence. It was made of many, many sentences. But when he came to the end of a sentence he simply did not put in the period. It would have been much better if properly punctuated. As it was it was damned good but as always I felt the lack of discipline and of character and the boozy courage of corn whiskey. When I read Faulkner I can tell exactly when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with Tender Is The Night. But that is one of the things I thought writers should not tell out-siders. But he did not understand about writers sticking together against out-siders. It is not a question of log-rolling or speaking well of each other. It is a question of knowing what is wrong with a guy and still sticking with what is good in him and not letting the out-siders in on secrets proffesionel.

Maybe that is what he was trying to do in that statement. But it was complicated by so many other things. What got me was that he believed the majority criticism and thought that I was through and that he was being asked to help me out. Maybe because he had won the Nobel prize. It sure was a busher's reaction. <…>

120. To EDMUND WILSON, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 8 November 1952

Dear Edmund Wilson:

Thank you very much for sending me the book [The Shores of Light] and for writing in it as you did. I wanted to send you the Old Man and The Sea book very much but because we had exchanged a few civilized and friendly letters I thought you might think I was sending it hoping for a favorable notice. You know I was thinking about actual sharks when I wrote the book and had nothing to do with the theory that they represented critics. I don't know who thought that up. I have always hoped for sound, intelligent criticism all my life as writing is the loneliest of all trades. But I have had little of it except from Kashkin and from you. Some of yours I disagreed with very much and others were illuminating and helpful.

It made me very happy to see how your journalism stands up as prose and I read the book until three o'clock in the morning. That was the mystic hour that haunted Scott. It always seemed to me the best hour of the night once you had accepted insomnia and no longer worried about your sins. Now I have about three good night's reading on the book left and I am saving it carefully. One of the best things was to read how you felt about things at the time. Your review of Scott's book, the early one, was very sound. Dos fooled us all I think. But he fooled himself the most. The last book, Chosen Country [1951] made me sick to read. My only hope for him as a writer was that it was a re-write of something dear Katy had written for a Woman's Magazine. But that is not a very fine hope. Have you ever seen the possession of money corrupt a man as it has Dos? When Eisenhower received his tax free money from the Democrats for his book he became a Republican. His political development, and that of Dos, have very strange parallels.

It was comic to read how you were robbed of your good books by the Russians and that strange and funny story. I knew them only through Kashkeen who I had never met but who wrote excellent letters and I thought, within his doctrinaire straight-jacket, was a wonderful critic. I thought that he knew what I was trying to do better than I did. It was like having a wonderful catcher if you are a pitcher. Then I met them in Spain and Koltzov seemed to want me to know the truth about how things were. He let me have the run of Gaylord's and concealed nothing and let me know how things really were. They were not good. But he wanted me to know how things really were whether they were good or not. So while you had those awful and chicken experiences with them I was seeing them behaving at their best. I watched Konieff learning tank tactics by trial and error; mostly error. I saw Walter at a bridge with nothing to blow it and the fascists tanks on the other side thinking it was mined and four of us watching them. Under these circumstances Walter could make jokes. Lucasz was killed. Heilbrun was killed. Hans and I rowed across a river, the Ebro, under bad enough circumstances. Now all of these people are dead. But this was not a Stalinist experience. These were episodes in the defence of the Spanish Republic. The Russians pulled out and were gone, giving Spain up as a hopeless problem for them, by October of 1937 (would have to check the exact date). But they decided to pull out after the failure of the attack on Fuentes del Ebro. They left a few people but pulled out their effort.

All the history of that war is written by people who care nothing about the truth but are only proving their theories and beliefs.

I read, in the Times, a good piece about you by Harvey Breit.1 He wrote something about you wishing to learn Spanish and know Spanish literature. The language is easy to learn superficially. But there are so many meanings to each word that, spoken, it is almost double talk. In addition to the known meanings of a word there are many secret meanings from the talk of thieves, pick-pockets, pimps and whores, etc. This occurs in all languages and most of the secret language is very ancient. If you want to start on it I would think that the best book to head in with is Gerald Brenan's The Literature of The Spanish People published by the Cambridge press. It is a sound book. His book The Spanish Labrynth (probably mis-spelled) is the best book I know on Spain politically. If you really want to learn the language you can skip a lot and start in with Quevedo. It is tough to cut your teeth on. But the fashionable thing of learning Lorca is completely stupid. His poetry is based on Andalusian music. If you do not know the disonnances of that music, or if you do not know Arabic, it is almost meaningless. (If I mis-spell please do not think I am basically illiterate as Scott was. I know each time I mis-spell a word. But how would you finish a hand typed letter if you worked with a dictionary? I use a dictionary or dictionery to check on spelling when I write for keeps. Sometimes the dictionary, in English, is wrong. I accept it in languages I was not born to.)

In the matter of the homo-sexuality in Stein I wish you had maintained your position rather than qualified it. I will give you all the material you will ever need on that if you wish to back up the position you took in the review of the early book. She talked to me once for three hours telling me why she was a lesbian, the mechanics of it, why the act did not disgust those who performed it (she was at this time against male homosexuality but changed later out of patriotism) and why it was not degrading to either participant. Three hours is a long time with Gertrude crowding you and I was so sold on her theory that I went out that night and fucked a lesbian with magnificent results; ie we slept well afterwards. It was this knowledge, gained from G.S., that enabled me to write A Sea Change, which is a good story, with authority. This conversation, in which Toklas left the room, was one of the reasons for her later malice. At one time it reached the proportions of, “You give up the friendship of Hemingstein or you give up me.” Toklas used to be quite wicked to Gertrude but Gertrude's ego grew vaster than that thing Andrew Marvell described2 and finally it was all she needed. But her whole attitude toward life and toward the practice of letters changed with the menopause. It was the year she had the menopause that she broke with all her old and good friends.

This only for your information.

Thank you again for the book and for the dedication. Keep well and keep on writing.

Your friend Ernest Hemingway

Notes:

1. Interview with Wilson in the New York Times Book Review, 2 November 1952. Reprinted in Breit, Writer Observed (Cleveland, 1956), pp. 267-69.

2. “To His Coy Mistress,” lines 23-24: “And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.”

121. To CHARLES POORE, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 23 January 1953

<…> I did the last of the re-write [Farewell to arms] in Paris I'm pretty sure. Or maybe the proofs there. I rewrote the last chapter over 40 times but I hope it does not read that way. Now I remember; I am sure the last re-write was done in Paris. Because I had a long letter sent over by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which among other things he said I must not under any circumstance let Lt. Henry shoot the sergeant and suggesting that after Catherine dies Frederick Henry should go to the cafe and pick up a paper and read that the Marines were holding in Chateau Thierry. This, Scott said, would make the American public understand the book better. He also did not like the scene in the old Hotel Cavour in Milano and wanted changes to be made in many other places “to make it more acceptable.” Not one suggestion made sense or was useful. He never saw the Mss until it was completed as published. (This comes under being lonely when you have the point.) I had learned not to show them to him a long time before. Will tell you about that some day; too long to write now when am trying to give you the gen you said you needed. <…>

122. To DOROTHY CONNABLE, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 17 February 1953

<…> The man [Charles] Fenton is one of those who think that literary history, or the secret of creative writing, lies in old laundry lists. Thank you for warning him off and please do not co-operate with him in any way. He has been invading my privacy for two years now. He has a pleasant approach, a plausible story and then when he obtains some private information about your life it might as well be in the hands of Arthur Mizener the man the friends of Scott Fitzgerald all trusted. <…>

123. To HARVEY BREIT, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 18 August 1954

Dear Harvey:

Glad you are taking the vacation the way you are and working well.

I see nothing wrong with you doing a play about Scott. He is in the public domain now. I did not like many aspects of the Mizener. What you will have to watch in Budd's [Schulberg's] novel as I remember it is that it is not a very good novel and the woman wasn't very convincing. I would not be tied too closely to the book if I were either of you. You can draw on Mizener's book which supposed to be history and common knowledge is certainly in the public domain now as much as Scott is.

If it is any use to you as basic background: When I knew Scott in Paris and on the Riviera he had never slept with another woman than Zelda. This is the straight gen.

She was unfaithful to him first with a young French naval flying officer.

That was the first thing that busted Scott up. Then she was crazy (Scyzophrenic; you look up the spelling. I've mis-spelled and it is too far to the dictionary in Mary's room) for a long time and nobody knew it. She was insanely jealous of Scott's work and any time he would work hard she would bust it up. This wasn't difficult as he was a much more than potential rummy. What saved him was that he couldnt drink. He had no tolerance then for alcohol and would pass out cold at the number of drinks that would just make you feel good. He enjoyed passing out cold too because it made him the center of attention. Without meaning to be he was a terrific exhibitionist and as time went on he became a nastier and nastier drunk. Budd knows him from one trip and I don't know how much in Holywood (Insert an l). I knew him for a long time and under all sorts of circumstances and was his hero which is a job you can have any time.

He had all the smugness of the rummy combined with the self abasement of the Irish rummy. He also had wonderful talent, almost no education and he lost his confidence when Zelda told him that his penis was smaller than that of a normal man and that he had never satisfied her. He told me this dreadful secret in Michaud's restaurant and I asked him to step into the John where I took a good look at how he was built. He was quite normal in build. I explained to him that he had been looking at his prick from the top which always made it seem fore-shortened. He thought I was taking a great sorrow flippantly. I explained that it was the angle of erection and the ability to stay erect and a few other basic things such as thinking about your partner's pleasure that made a man good or bad in bed. But he had siezed on this excuse for defeat and nothing would cheer him up. I offered to take him over to the Louvre and show him how people were built in the old days but he didn't want to cheer up. Zelda had told him this so it was true. Zelda at this time was completely crazy.

This stuff may be no good to you but it might be. Scott after he got to be a really nasty drunk used to be very bad. I would go out to dinner with him and he would insult people and I would have to square it to keep him from being beaten up. He could never fight a lick on the best day he ever lived and he got so he liked to hit people and I would have to take over. This is one small sample of how it was in Paris. I lived over a saw-mill on the second floor of a Pavillion. My landlord lived on the first floor. Coming up to see us with young Scotty he had her make pe-pee on the floor at the foot of the stairs just outside the landlord's door. It ran in under the door and the landlord came out and very nicely told Scott there was a toilet under the stairs. He thought the child had been caught short.

“I know there is you son of a bitch,” Scott said. “And I'll take you and shove your head in it.”

There were hundreds and hundreds like that. But when, after one awful night when I had to give a large sum to the doorman at the Plaza to square something really awful Scott had done, I told him I couldn't ever go out and eat with him any more unless he would promise not to be horrible to people, or make an effort not to be anyway, he was able to write that thing about how he spoke with the authority of failure and I with the authority of etc. and so we would never be able to sit at table together again. A fairly smug version.

Zelda ruined him all right because every time he would get straightened out she would get him on the booze. But Harvey he used to seem to love to be humiliated and, of course, to humiliate whoever he was with. I've seen him do things you could hardly forgive a legitimate crazy for doing. At the start he used to be terribly contrite afterwards. Finally he didn't remember. He was always generous and he could be so damned nice sober.

If this gen is no use to you or is confusing throw it away. I never saw him in his Hollywood days and the play is about a guy then. So this sort of gen is probably no good to you. This is about the six years or so after he wrote Gatsby maybe ten I guess [c. 1925-1935]. If any of it is in any way bad for your conception of the character you are writing about forget it. I'm sure he must have been very different in Hollywood and that is where Budd knew him.

When I first knew him he was very good looking in a too pretty way and every time he took a drink his face would change a little and after four drinks the skin would be drawn and it would look like a death's head. I guess you could do that in a play with lighting. But maybe he wasn't that way when Budd knew him. He was nice when he drank wine then or just a couple of aperatifs.

Hope you have luck with the play and with the book.

Would like to have seen that [Ezzard] Charles-[Rocky] Marciano fight. Right now I don't have any feeling for the fights. But when I see a good one again will get it back.

Have to write another letter now to Philip Percival who is very ill in London. Then have to swim a 440. Very hot here now and heavy rains nearly every afternoon.

Have finished one short story and have twenty some pages done on another. Guess I wrote you that before.

If I can be any use to you and help you out on mid twenty stuff with Scott am glad to. It isn't all sour as this letter sounds. Sometimes it was funny. But it never was sound. I knew him better than anybody did then, I guess. Gerald and Sara Murphy (Gerald is head of Mark Cross) knew him very well and saw him oftener than I did. They could help you. So could Archie MacLeish. I think everybody though is a little reluctant about helping on anything after what Mizener did. Pauline would have been good to talk to. But she's dead.

Best always, Hemmingstein

124. To HARVEY BREIT, From Ernest Hemingway

La Finca Vigia, 3 July 1956

<…> I think outside of Jim Joyce and an old writer in Chicago named Henry B. Fuller (the Cliff Dwellers etc.) and a man named Edwin Balmer who wrote pot boilers and helped me when I was a kid the only writers I ever liked, really, were Dos when he was still straight in early days, Scott when he was sober (but it was always full of pity as though you had a butterfly or a moth for a friend), Sholem Asch, old Berenson in letters, dear good, kind crazy Ezra, Archie MacLeish when he would be funny and not noble (never has so few suffered so much from the deaths of so many others), Christ it is getting to be quite a list and John Peale Bishop who was a distracted gentleman; and Owen Wister. He was the most unselfish and most dis-interested and the most loving. When my father shot himself and things were not good at all and I was making trust funds and having to discipline my bitch mother and put it all out of my head and do the re-write on A Farewell To Arms as though no aircraft had crashed nor anyboody been run over by this or that street car he wrote me and sent me a very huge check and said for me not to have any money worries and he would back me all the way and Harvey he did not know anything about the book nor had I shown him the Mss. He just thought I was a good writer and he loved The Sun Also Rises and I think he had seen me ride a horse or something like that. <…>

125. To ANDREW TURNBULL, From Ernest Hemingway

at sea, 1 November 19591

Dear Mr. Turnbull:

Been laid up with grippe or flu. Got up to come down and see you but you were not in your cabin and am sweating too much to hunt the deck etc.

Nothing to say about Scott. Am trying to write a little about him when I knew him. Good luck. I enjoyed your stuff on him in New Yorker very much.

Am going up to the bar at 1st Salon—near bow—known as Jeans, to pay out etc. Will check with Dr and see if can stay up. Otherwise at [stateroom] 48 packing and writing some notes.

Yours. E.  Hemingway

Notes:

1. Note delivered to Turnbull aboard the Liberte westbound shortly before landing. Turnbull had been in Paris gathering material for his life of Fitzgerald, Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1962). EH was carrying the typescript of A Moveable Feast for delivery to Scribners on 3 November and was not disposed to reveal his trade secrets to a stranger. Turnbull was saddened by EH's evident physical debility at age sixty. See his article “Perkins's Three Generals,” New York Times Book Review, 16 July 1967.

126. To L.H. BRAGUE, JR., From Ernest Hemingway

Ketchum, 6 February 1961

<…> This is all being done under difficulty but it is being done. Thank Charlie for his note and for his Faut d'abord Durer letter [first one must last]. Have sure tried. Drs fixed my allowed alcohol intake as 1 liter of claret a day. Have not drunk 3/5 of this any day but one and not had a drink of hard liquor. My liver was OK when checked in and when checked out of Rochester. Hangar negative. Cholesterol normal. You, Max and Charlie Scribner are accustomed to the lies of Scott [Fitzgerald]—But this is the true gen.

About 1/3 of books have come through so far.

Best always Ernest

WHO'S WHO

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) provided Fitzgerald’s most intense literary friendship, which involved Fitzgerald’s admiration for Hemingway and Hemingway’s rivalry with Fitzgerald. When they met in 1925 Hemingway had not yet published a book, and Fitzgerald worked to advance Hemingway’s career, bringing him to Scribners. Fitzgerald later wrote of him that “a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me—I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot.” See Bruccoli, Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success (New York: Random House, 1978).

Published in various collections:

1. Letters from Hemingway, also Hemingway letters concerning Fitzgerald, were taken from Ernest Hemingway: Selected letters 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker, 1981.

2. Letters from Fitzgerald to Hemingway were taken from: Turnbull (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1963), Correspondence (The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1981).

Перевод: «Никакие не друзья после 26 года»
Переписка Ф. Скотта Фицджеральда и Эрнеста Хемингуэя.

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