Fitzgerald and Hemingway:
A Dangerous Friendship
By Matthew J. Bruccoli
Carroll and Graf, 230 pages, $21.95
Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway with long memories will recall that 15 years ago Matthew J. Bruccoli published “Scott and Ernest,” an account of the two great writers’ whirligig friendship. In that volume Bruccoli often was forced to paraphrase, because the Hemingway estate had not released permission to quote from Hemingway’s letters, although the Fitzgerald estate had given Bruccoli free rein in quoting. Now that the Hemingway letters have been published, such paraphrase is no longer needed.
Also, much new material has arisen, including the results of Bruccoli’s own biographical and editorial labors in the Fitzgerald and Hemingway factories (these results include “Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,” his life of Fitzgerald, as well as a mountain of other books on Fitzgerald and four volumes on Hemingway).
Bruccoli now sees “Scott and Ernest” as a warmup work for the more intense version here given. And intense it is, but in a maddening, not joyous or suspenseful way. Studying the backsides and clay feet of heroic writers can leave sad damage among readers.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway first meet at the Dingo bar in Paris in 1925, with Fitzgerald very taken by the immense freshness of Hemingway’s prose in a pamphlet version of “in our time” (lower case for publication in Paris). Hemingway later remembers the meeting quite differently and says he was much more taken with Fitzgerald’s companion, Duncan Chaplin, a college baseball star. Bruccoli then makes clear that letters from Chaplin to him show that Chaplin “was not in Europe in 1925; Chaplin never met Hemingway.”
Among many versions of this meeting, the most celebrated is Hemingway’s in “A Moveable Feast,” a book written 30 years after the events it tells of. Perhaps Hemingway mistook someone else for Chaplin or Chaplin’s name fell into his head over the years. Bruccoli, however, has seen the working drafts of “A Moveable Feast,” with their warnings that the memoir might well be seen as a work of fiction. Thus he considers the published version of the unfinished memoir, as revised by Hemingway’s wife, Mary, and Scribner editor Harry Brague, to be the “revised text of an unfinished autobiographical novel . . . a roman a clef that retains the characters’ real names.”
In brief, Hemingway was an untrustworthy reporter and, as it turns out, quite unreliable in his letters as well. Following U.S. publication of “In Our Time” (upper case for the American public), with its superreal reporting of many violent incidents, Hemingway was seen as an incredibly agile and horn-skinned reporter who had been to all the places he described. Many of his descriptions were, in fact, adapted by him from reports in the London Times and elsewhere. Hemingway comments in a letter to Fitzgerald that in the Chicago Post a reviewer of “In Our Time” 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.”
At age 26 Hemingway laughs about the reviewer’s innocence, but very soon we hear him on the page as he slips into his superman legend, then slips into mastery of “the true gen” (his special knowledge of how things work “truly”) and at last into Papa Hemingway.
As he ages, his need to be master of all things under his eye, to know why a Fitzgerald novel or story does or doesn’t work, becomes ever more important. He goes through a sea change, shoring up his self-image as year after novel-less year passes between the highly praised “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) and the patchwork “To Have and Have Not” (1937) before he produces a “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940).
While Hemingway swells into the country’s leading writer, Fitzgerald, the slightly older writer who helped him into first publication in the States and led him into the arms of his own editor, Maxwell Perkins, crawls through the hell of alcoholism and his wife’s insanity. In the two writers’ letters to Perkins, their mutual editor, Hemingway fires wad upon wad into Fitzgerald-and is not against slapping Fitz around in his letters to the man himself. For his own good, of course, Hemingway says.
Much of this seems to stem, as Bruccoli shows, from Fitzgerald’s early aid to Hemingway, helping him cut a long, “ponderously facetious” opening to “The Sun Also Rises” and giving advice on cuts in “A Farewell to Arms”-advice that Hemingway pretty much followed, improving his novels greatly, but then disallowed as having happened. For the rest of his life he belittled to Perkins Fitzgerald’s sense of the novel, trivializing his best works behind a mask of largely solemn know-how mumbo jumbo.
By 1929 Hemingway had misgivings about a friendship with Fitzgerald: “He instructed Perkins not to give him his Paris address. Fitzgerald had caused him to be thrown out of one apartment by fighting with the landlord, urinating on the porch, and trying to break down the door at three or four A.M. Hemingway wanted to see Fitzgerald in public places only. The news that Fitzgerald was coming to Paris gave Hemingway the horrors,” Bruccoli writes.
Fitzgerald meanwhile sent young Hemingway surprise checks while complaining about writing elegant trash for The Saturday Evening Post. In 1932, after Zelda Fitzgerald’s first hospitalization for mental problems, Hemingway wrote Perkins: “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.” Later that day Hemingway sent Perkins an apology about the brutality in the letter above, “explaining that the Fitzgerald marriage always made him bitter.”
Both writers spell poorly and their letters often slop with feelings but are short on expression, as when Hemingway exhorts Fitzgerald to shape up and write without inventing “anything that would not actually happen,” as Hemingway believed Fitzgerald had failed to do in “Tender Is the Night”:
“You can’t 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 might(y) fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won’t jump.”
That’s just rant. And years later Hemingway came to like “Tender Is the Night” in ways he could not see when the novel was fresh-and threatening.
Hemingway outlived Fitzgerald by 21 years. He had, Bruccoli says, written nearly all of his important work by age 29. It is as though the huge literary success of “A Farewell to Arms” acted on Hemingway exactly as the similar success of “The Great Gatsby” had on Fitzgerald, according to Hemingway, paralyzing him with the need to write masterpieces. Thus “Fitzgerald and Hemingway” essentially shows us one writer (Hemingway) whaling away at another (Fitzgerald) for his very own flaw.
