SEVEN

Almost everyone they knew heard the story about Hadley losing Ernest’s manuscripts. The painter Mike Strater recalls that Ernest said to him in early 1923, “You know, Mike, if you had those manuscripts in your trunk, you would not have left them to go and get something to read.” Explaining, Strater added, that Ernest was “very upset because it showed how little she valued what he was doing.” But Hadley’s first biographer, on sound information, concluded that she “was incapable of being artful.” No doubt Hadley feared just such an interpretation, especially from her husband. Her grief at the loss of his manuscripts was deeply felt and lifelong, and Ernest held it against her for the rest of his life. It was not a question of forgiveness. It was a question of never letting her forget that he had not forgotten. As one Hemingway biographer wrote, “Whatever happened between them, he would always have this edge.”

On the 11th of December Ernest had gone with Hadley to Chamby for a little skiing, and they intended to leave Lausanne by the 16th. Negotiations at the conference were by no means over. Lord Curzon was threatening to leave in the face of what he considered Turkish intransigence around December 13, so Ernest shut down his wire service work at a relatively crucial time. (A treaty was not signed until July 24, 1923.) Frank Mason would find someone to take Ernest’s place easily enough, and no doubt at lower pay: at this point Ernest was earning $90 a week and billing for $35 in expenses.

Chink joined Hadley and Ernest in Switzerland December 16, as did the O’Neil family from St. Louis. Dave O’Neil, the patriarch, made his money in lumber but really wanted to write poetry, an aspiration that Ernest mocked rather viciously in letters to Ezra Pound, calling O’Neil a “Celto-Kike.” Dave had a “system” of writing poetry, which was “to write a few words about something he does not understand. The less he understands it the more ‘magic,’ the better the poem.” On January 2 Isabelle Simmons arrived, and soon after that a mother and daughter from St. Louis appeared in Paris as well. The women began to style themselves “the Harem,” with Ernest a sultan. He enlisted all the guests in bobsledding and skiing, making the O’Neils’ teenage sons, George and Horton, his aides-de-camp. In the afternoon they took a railway to Les Avants and from there to the ski run and bobsled courses at the Col de Sonloup. Ernest loved skiing, which was fast and dangerous, and required a good deal of physical exertion; railways and trams could get skiers only partway up the mountain; inevitably, they would need to climb, attaching sealskins to the bottoms of their skis for traction.

Mornings were given over to writing. Almost every word Ernest produced at about this time was right, and his reputation would be built on how he strung them together. He was producing with seeming effortlessness short prose-poems collectively titled “Paris 1922,” building on fragments he remembered from his lost manuscripts; six of these would appear in the February issue of The Little Review in a special “Exiles” number. Two short stories (not vignettes) that date from this period are “Cat in the Rain” and “Cross-Country Snow.” Both are stories of regret, “Cross-Country Snow” about the losses associated with marrying and having a family.

In “Cat in the Rain” a husband, another George, and his American wife, unnamed, are at an Italian hotel when the wife sees a cat outside looking for cover in the rain. When she goes out looking for the cat, it is gone, and she is disconsolate. For an unspecified reason she regrets the things she’s lost: sitting at a candlelit table with her own silver, some new clothes, hair long enough to put up. And a cat: “If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I want a cat.” Though the cat is eventually produced, longing and loss suffuse the story.

An interesting feature of “Cat in the Rain” reflects on a curious stage in Hadley and Ernest’s marriage. The wife wants to let her hair grow out; George likes it cut short, “the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s,” and says he likes it the way it is. But she is sick of short hair: “I get so tired of looking like a boy” (CSS, 131). This casual allusion to hair length reveals (while it also masks) Ernest’s deep-seated preoccupation, anything connected with haircuts and hair color an obsessive interest. The idea that women and men could explore different sexual roles excited him terribly, as did the role that hair could play in such a drama. In two of Hemingway’s best-known novels, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, hero and heroine talk about growing and/or cutting their hair to the same length. Out of context these conversations are not remarkable—just a little unexpected. But Hemingway’s obsessive interest in hair is obvious to any reader of his late fiction, especially The Garden of Eden, where husband and wife embark on a period of trying out different gender roles in bed, and at the same time a course of cutting their hair and dyeing it with henna or bleach to match each other’s. Hemingway seems to have been specifically aroused by the back of the neck of a woman with a boyish haircut, though this should not be taken to suggest any homosexual impulse on Ernest’s part. It was far more complicated.

Of late, this subject has been explored at great length by Hemingway scholars. Critics like Debra Moddelmog, Mark Spilka, Carl Eby, and Rose Marie Burwell have pointed out that Hemingway was hardly conventional in his sexuality, opening up an aspect of his life that directly touches on the work of many contemporary scholars, particularly those engaged in feminist and queer studies.

This may seem far afield of Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920s, but a controversial new edition of Hemingway’s Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, shows abundant early evidence of his fetish, suggesting that Ernest was acting on it in Paris with his first wife a willing partner. The edition contains other chapters of the memoir that did not appear in the 1964 edition, which was posthumously selected and edited by Mary Hemingway, the author’s fourth wife. In 2009, Seán Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, revised the text of the 1964 volume and added ten new “sketches” as well as other fragments of manuscript; the new material was found among Ernest’s papers at the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library, and includes a fascinating sketch called “Secret Pleasures,” about the role of Ernest’s hair fetish in his first marriage.

The sketch is about Ernest’s desire to wear his hair long. Ernest had been extremely impressed by the long hair sported by some Japanese painters he had met at Ezra Pound’s studio; the sketch goes on to re-create a conversation he had with Hadley on the subject. Husband and wife discuss Ernest’s growing his hair long while Hadley, who then had close-cropped hair, said she would cut hers periodically so that their hair would be the same length. The whole notion arouses Ernest, and when she returns from the hairdresser the next day he is very excited: “I put my arm around her and felt our hearts beating through our sweaters and I brought my right hand up and felt her neck smooth and the hair thick against it under my fingers that were shaking.” He feels the blunt haircut against her neck and says “something secret.” Hadley replies, “Afterwards.”

The sketch describes a conversation later in the year but refers to events in Switzerland, where “nobody cared how you dressed or how you cut your hair,” from the winter of 1922–23. The editors of the revised edition of A Moveable Feast make note of a fragment cut from this new sketch:

When we lived in Austria we would cut each other’s hair and let it grow to the same length. One was dark and the other dark red gold and in the dark in the night one would wake the other swinging the heavy dark or the heavy silken red gold across the others lips in the cold dark in the warmth of the bed. You could see your breath if there was moonlight. (AMF, 183–89)

The specific nature of this language is reminiscent of Hemingway’s descriptive writing at its best, yet this style, along with the repetitions of “dark” and “heavy,” characterizes all of Hemingway’s later writing about hair and sexuality to an extent that suggests the specificity and repetitions of pornography. Indeed, Ernest’s letters about her hair to his fourth wife, Mary, with whom he freely enjoyed acting out sexual fantasies about haircuts and hair dyeing, are frankly pornographic; he admits that writing about her hair and its color hugely excites him.

“Secret Pleasures” conveys to the reader a sense of the sexual excitement and experimentation that characterized Ernest’s first marriage; when he and Hadley were apart, letters between them dwelled on how happy they would be when sleeping together again. And certainly Ernest, objectively speaking, found Hadley’s hair very attractive, as did most observers. It was beautiful when it was waist length, and it was beautiful when she had it bobbed in New York City just before the couple sailed for Europe in December 1921. Grace Hemingway had always admired red hair, and it seemed right that Hadley’s hair was a reddish gold of the sort Ernest had come to admire. Letters showed a solicitude about her hair that might otherwise be unremarkable but for the context of his lifelong hair fetish. Just before they married Ernest apparently showed some concern over how her hair might look at the September wedding; Hadley reassured him that she was washing it with Castile shampoo, drying it in the sun, and then applying Brilliantine to it, which was said to soften hair and bring out its shine. “It looks a thousand times better,” she assured him. All descriptions of the wedding by those present mention Hadley’s long, thick hair, still damp from swimming earlier that day. Her hair was a critical component of Hadley’s attractiveness—especially to her husband.

*  *  *

On February 7 Ernest and Hadley left Chamby by train, stopping in Milan and then going on to the seaside town of Rapallo, where Ezra Pound was living with his wife, Dorothy, and writing cantos about Sigismondo Malatesta, the Renaissance patron of the arts and soldier of fortune. Pound urged Ernest and Hadley to come to Rapallo and join him on a walking tour to uncover more information about Malatesta. By the time they arrived, however, Pound was about to set out on another literary mission of some kind. He managed to convince the Hemingways to stay at Rapallo while he was away and begin the promised tour with the Pounds when he returned.

While in Rapallo, Hadley came to believe she was pregnant, and told her husband sometime during February. Although they must have discussed having a child, Ernest was shocked by her news.

“I am too young to be a father,” Ernest complained “with great bitterness” to Gertrude Stein, who found his remark so amusing she quoted it to Hadley. “He felt deeply sorry for himself at times,” remembered Hadley later. But he came around to the idea and resolved anew to bring money in by his writing. In the meantime, Hadley did not let her pregnancy slow her down at all; she felt “exuberant” and “realized what I’d been born for.” She would visit a doctor a few weeks later in Milan, who confirmed the pregnancy and told her she could pursue any activity she wanted “as long as I promised I wouldn’t fall down,” she told a biographer.

In Pound’s absence, Ernest and Hadley were delighted to spend some time with Mike Strater and his wife, also in Rapallo. Mike was a graduate of Princeton, where he had known F. Scott Fitzgerald; he appeared as Burne Holiday in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920). Ernest had met Mike at the end of 1922 in Pound’s Paris studio; the two struck up a friendship and frequently boxed together. In Rapallo, where Mike was ensconced with his wife, Maggie, and their child, Ernest hoped Mike could box with him or at least replace Pound as a tennis partner, but Mike had sprained his ankle. Mike was an accomplished artist who had studied at the École Julien in Paris, and he had painted a portrait of Ernest two months before. Now he painted another, which made Ernest look, Hadley thought, like Balzac; Ernest sported a mustache and his hair was long, presumably because the Star wasn’t sending him anywhere in the near future where it would matter how he looked.

In A Moveable Feast Ernest would write of his Rapallo stay, “It was a bad time and I did not think I could write any more then” (AMF, 70). He was possibly referring in part to Hadley’s loss of his manuscripts and in part to her pregnancy, arguably holding her responsible for his failure to start writing again. But if her pregnancy had stalled his writing momentarily, it had not checked his ambition. He felt financial pressure, no doubt, to come up with a steady means of support for his growing family, but he also seems to have felt that if he was old enough to have a child he was old enough to be launched as a successful young writer.

Ernest’s journalist friend Bill Bird had by this time announced that he would publish a Hemingway collection as a book in a six-part series edited by Pound, importantly described as “an inquest into the state of contemporary English prose.” The previous October Bird had bought a seventeenth-century printing press on the Île St.-Louis and intended to produce finely printed editions for his Three Mountains Press. In February and March Ernest was just sending off to Jane Heap at The Little Review the short journalistic sketches that he had been working over for the past six months: a description of the execution of six Greek cabinet members during the war with Turkey, an account of a bullfight (though he hadn’t yet seen one), and a description of the Greek refugees passing through Adrianople (from his Star story), among others.

Ernest was immensely proud of these sketches, and they would eventually also appear as interchapters in the commercially published In Our Time. But he knew that on their own they added up to a rather thin book. Though Pound’s imprimatur would help, he felt sure, he had little hope that Bird’s publication of his first book would do anything for him financially. And even if copies found their way into influential hands, practically speaking Bird was unable to print enough to ensure a wide readership.

But in his short stay in Rapallo Hemingway had two encounters that would give his career a spectacular boost. When Hadley and Ernest first got to Rapallo, the Pounds had taken them on a hike to the top of Montallegro, Rapallo’s mountain. A brisk six-hundred-meter climb took them to the top, which commanded a view of the village and the Bay of Tigullio beyond. Sitting at a table in the Hotel Ristorante Montallegro, Pound spotted Edward O’Brien, a writer and editor who was staying at a mountaintop monastery to devote himself to his work.

Born in 1890, O’Brien was “a gentle, shy man, pale, with pale blue eyes,” according to Hemingway. Perhaps they discussed their hair, for Ernest noted O’Brien had “straight lanky hair he cut himself” (AMF, 69–70). Among O’Brien’s published work were two volumes of poetry and a fictional diary called The Forgotten Threshold (1919), and in a few years he would begin to write literary criticism. He was best known, however, for his annual compilations of the best stories of the previous year, published by Small, Maynard since 1915, when O’Brien began the series with The Best American Short Stories of 1914. He was known to work “heroically,” claiming he read eight thousand stories a year, and the anthology was widely admired, publishing such authors as Ring Lardner, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker.

Ernest could see immediately that O’Brien was someone to cultivate, and he set out to impress him, telling him his life story to date—the dramatic version, full of untruth. O’Brien was immediately impressed. Later, in a 1929 critical book about short stories, The Dance of the Machines (1929), he wrote that he had met Ernest “some years ago on top of an Italian mountain,” when Ernest “told me some of his war experiences.” He explained, “During the war he joined the Italian Army. He was a brave member of the Arditi. He was made an officer. He had never seen life before. He was to see it now.” O’Brien’s thesis was that the coming of “the machine,” or modern mechanized life, caused a great disillusionment, especially among writers and artists: Hemingway “went into the war a pious boy. Then he witnessed the spiritual destructiveness of machinery.” He wanted to see anything Ernest had written so that he could consider it for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1923.

Ernest gave him one of the two finished short stories he had in his possession, “My Old Man,” a racetrack tale about a boy who learns with bitterness that his father, a jockey, is dishonest; the story is commonly said to be derivative of Sherwood Anderson’s work, both in its subject (Anderson wrote racetrack stories) and the youthful naïveté of the protagonist. O’Brien liked Hemingway and the story so much that he accepted it on the spot and, in an extremity of feeling, asked Ernest if he could dedicate the volume to him. (O’Brien printed the story as by “Ernest Hemenway,” but in the dedication his name was spelled correctly.) Moreover, he agreed to write a letter of support when Ernest submitted the story to Arthur Vance of the Pictorial Review; Vance rejected it, and Ernest had to write an awkward letter to O’Brien asking whether the letter had gone astray. The story was never accepted by a magazine, but “My Old Man” would be published in the book Bill Bird was putting out in 1923, so it would indeed qualify as a published story for O’Brien’s anthology. Moreover, O’Brien’s promise was certain enough that Ernest felt he could trumpet this triumph to any interested party, and did.

Ernest accomplished as much in this chance meeting, careerwise, as he had done in all his reportage to date. He seemed to have a magic touch. “Believe me, he’s going places,” wrote Robert McAlmon, another writer who also made a powerful connection with Hemingway in Rapallo. McAlmon was born in a small town in Kansas, one of ten children of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. His family moved often, always further west, eventually landing in California, where McAlmon grew up. He worked as a farmhand and merchant seaman, and served in the Air Service in the Great War, though he never saw combat. He began writing, poems originally, and migrated to Chicago and then New York, where he supported himself as a nude model. In New York he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet William Carlos Williams, and with Williams started a journal called Contact, which would publish Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and H.D.

McAlmon was dark and angular, often wearing a turquoise earring that matched his eyes. He seems to have been bisexual, and when he was a young man, a rich man wanted to adopt him, in an echo of Ernest’s relationship with Jim Gamble. McAlmon’s life took a dramatic turn when, in New York City, he met the Imagist poet H.D. and her companion, Bryher, whose real name was Winifred Ellerman. Bryher, also a writer, was the daughter of British shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, who supported his daughter with a generous allowance. H.D. and Bryher were lovers, and wanted to continue living and traveling together. Sir John was threatening to “come after” Bryher, according to her friend Marianne Moore, because he did not approve of her traveling in Europe and America “without an escort.” Bryher proposed a marriage of convenience to McAlmon: she would share her allowance with him, while he was to be what is known as a beard.

Their “marriage of convenience” was to become a favorite story of the literary 1920s, especially among the Paris expatriates. It served both parties cleverly, was sexually bohemian, and carried an added element of sticking it to the rich. And the money the marriage made available launched McAlmon’s career as a publisher, which would take off when he founded Contact Editions, an important modernist imprint that published the newest and most talented of the expat writers. Bryher would later say, bluntly, “We neither of us felt the slightest attraction to each other, but remained perfectly friendly.”

The real story, however, was slightly different and far more interesting, and helps to explain this complicated character and his role in Hemingway’s life. When Bryher and McAlmon first met, in September 1921, she gave McAlmon a copy of her novel, Development (1920). Upon reading it, McAlmon felt he had met a kindred bohemian soul. But Bryher left in medias res for a stay in California; soon after, McAlmon wrote to tell her he was going to ship off to China. Evidently Bryher then returned in haste and made her proposal. McAlmon and Bryher were married on Valentine’s Day 1921, and both soon departed, separately, for Europe.

There are indications that all was not as it seemed; Bryher and McAlmon evidently felt a mutual attraction when they met, though Bryher withdrew quickly because of her relationship with H.D. McAlmon seems not to have really understood the terms of the agreement, and was initially embarrassed and ashamed that he had entered into the marriage without full knowledge of Bryher’s expectations. “Maintaining that he chose to marry Bryher because he loved her,” a McAlmon biographer writes, he “repeatedly asserted that he had been surprised and distressed by her refusal to consummate their union.” Indeed, he would later break off his friendship with Williams when the poet said in his Autobiography that the marriage was unconsummated. It seems that McAlmon genuinely wanted a marriage with Bryher, sexually and otherwise.

Furthermore, Bryher was not in fact receiving a very large allowance from her father; it was £600 a year, or roughly $38,000 today, and had to support her as well as her husband. It was enough, maybe, for McAlmon to pay for his drinks, but not much more. The Ellermans, however, were without a doubt very rich; McAlmon later said he hadn’t really known how rich until he saw the family’s mansion in London. On this visit Bryher and McAlmon masqueraded as loving bride and groom; Bryher genuinely did not want to displease her parents. McAlmon, whose personal charm was considerable, struck up separate friendships with Lady Hannah Ellerman, who loved the nightlife of London (her husband didn’t) and often went to nightclubs with her new son-in-law; and the Ellerman butler, who could be counted on to let McAlmon into the house late at night and generally cover for him when necessary. But the most important friendship he formed was with Sir John himself. “The fact of my being a minister’s son impressed him from the first moment, and he feared I might disapprove of his serving wines and whisky at and before meals,” a theory, McAlmon said, that was soon “discredited.” Ellerman knew of and even took an interest in McAlmon’s plans for supporting and publishing artists, and in the winter of 1922–23 conferred an outright gift of $70,000 on his son-in-law. The equivalent of $750,000 today, this gift was what made McAlmon’s writing and publishing career possible, not the relatively small part of Bryher’s allowance she had promised him in exchange for marrying her.

When Ernest and McAlmon met in Rapallo in February 1922, McAlmon was riding high. He had published a book of poems, Explorations, with the prestigious (if small) Egoist Press in London, and A Hasty Bunch, a book of short stories (the title suggested by his friend James Joyce). In 1923 he would publish two titles, a book of stories called A Companion Volume, and an autobiographical novel called Post-Adolescence. He was considered to have great promise; Ernest Walsh, the editor of This Quarter, would call McAlmon “the most honest and authentically American of our writers, and the only one who can seriously compete with Joseph Conrad and James Joyce.” T. S. Eliot, who met him in London, spoke of him as “a very charming man of lively intelligence and amiable personality.” Hemingway himself wrote McAlmon, shortly after the two met, that his not yet published novel Village was “absolutely first-rate and damned good reading.” And Hemingway would continue to champion McAlmon’s work throughout the 1920s.

McAlmon was also riding a wave of social success. He was “certainly the most popular member of ‘The Crowd,’ as he called it,” observed Sylvia Beach in her memoir. Moreover everyone took their cues from him. Beach continued, “Somehow he dominated whatever group he was in. Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronized at the moment was the one where you saw everybody.”

In the winter of 1922–23 McAlmon had decided to start a publishing company to be called Contact Editions, its name recalling the literary magazine he had edited with William Carlos Williams in Greenwich Village. The first two books to roll off the press were his own, but in a remarkably short time he arranged to publish works by Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, Williams, and Bryher. The outright gift from Sir John Ellerman in mid-1923 would ease finances considerably, enabling McAlmon to follow through on his expansive plans for the press.

Sometime in early 1923, perhaps as early as February, when he was with the Hemingways in Rapallo, McAlmon decided to take on a book by Hemingway, at this date designated only as “Short Stories.” There was one immediate awkwardness or difficulty that quickly turned into a happy coincidence: Bill Bird’s projected Hemingway book. Part of the series on prose to be edited by Pound, the book was listed as “Blank,” because when the series was announced it was not clear what Hemingway would be supplying Bird. (Evidently Ernest sent a copy of Bird’s prospectus back home, for two separate orders came in from Oak Park: letters from both parents on their respective letterheads, each ordering five copies of “Blank.”)

McAlmon esteemed each of the authors printed by Contact Editions in 1923, Marsden Hartley especially—though no critic publicly noticed Hartley, otherwise a well-known painter. Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker (misspelled by McAlmon) was highly thought of, and Williams was well launched on his career as a major modernist poet. McAlmon was taking a bit of a chance on Hemingway, though the news of his part in O’Brien’s anthology of 1923 short stories no doubt made him feel more certain. McAlmon was very discerning, though of course he made some bad calls. He was dead-on, however, when it came to Hemingway. When he said Ernest was “going places,” he added, “[He’s] got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy. He’s the original limelight kid, just you watch him for a few months. Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay.”

Ernest and Hadley spent only a couple of evenings with McAlmon and the Straters before Ezra returned and the Hemingways set off on a walking tour of sites associated with Malatesta. Ernest showed a particular interest in the battlegrounds where the condottiero’s military campaigns were carried out, while Hadley remembered, “This was…a rucksack trip, and we always lunched from our sacks on some hillside—native cheese, figs, and wine.” The couples went their separate ways at Sirmione, Ernest and Hadley going on to Cortina for some spring skiing. There the Star’s John Bone telegraphed Ernest, declaring his intention to send him on a month-long tour of the French-occupied Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. Ernest agreed to go for ten days only, and left Hadley in Cortina while he went briefly to Paris to get a visa and the necessary letters to get him into Germany, which was strangely difficult. He then climbed aboard a Strasbourg-bound train. He wrote ten articles for the Star about Franco-German relations and the Ruhr occupation, but three of these were filed from Paris. He was not a particularly astute critic of the occupation and the crisis surrounding war reparations. Indeed, this would be his last sustained foreign trip for the Star, for after the summer Ernest and Hadley were returning to Toronto, where Hadley would have her child and Ernest would work full-time for the newspaper. They preferred to have the baby closer to the U.S. Ernest evidently thought that as a newly domesticated family man, he should be working full-time.

*  *  *

In the summer of 1923 Hemingway discovered Spain, and he discovered the bullfight, both life-changing developments. While in Rapallo, Mike Strater had waxed rhapsodic about Spain and bullfighting, and Ernest had already been hearing about the bullfights from Gertrude Stein, herself a bit of an aficionada. (She had written a poem, included in her 1922 Geography and Plays, which Ernest had read, called “I Must Try to Write the History of Belmonte,” about the matador Juan Belmonte.) In his own bullfighting bible, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway would say he had heard Stein talking about the matador Joselito and seen photographs of her and Toklas at a bullfight. Citing his memory of the Greeks’ torturous treatment of their pack animals, he would add that he had murmured something about not wanting to see the horses injured—often disemboweled—by the bulls.

With the advantage of hindsight, Hemingway analyzed why he thought it was important for him to see a bullfight at this juncture in his life. His remarks were extremely insightful and, as it happens, fairly accurate: “The only place that you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things,” adding, “and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death” (DIA, 91). It might be contemporary hindsight alone that makes his remarks seem accurate, for we are now used to the idea—having read our Hemingway—that the writer who portrays life the most simply and fundamentally works from close observation and consideration of violent death. At the time that Hemingway wrote, however, this was by no means a commonplace. It could be argued that he well knew the contradictions in his argument, and that was the reason he would write a full-length book (and, late in life, a second one, A Dangerous Summer) about the subject. It was strange to associate violent death with writing, and it speaks to some remarkable features of Hemingway’s character. Hemingway remarked to Bill Horne about bullfighting, “It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing to happen to you.”

Bob McAlmon, whom Ernest spent some time with when he returned to Paris in May, was planning a trip to Spain. In McAlmon’s memoir of the period, Being Geniuses Together, written a decade later, he reports that he, Ernest, and Bill Bird talked about taking such a trip for a week before agreeing that Ernest and Bob would travel together, Bird joining them in Madrid, for the first two weeks in June. Somewhere along the line it became clear that McAlmon would be footing the bills.

McAlmon was a heavy drinker, but Ernest could match him drink for drink (no account reveals Bird’s habits), and they were already “well lubricated with whiskey” when they boarded the train. At one point en route to Madrid occurred the incident of the dead dog, familiar to all readers of Hemingway biographies. McAlmon told the story in Being Geniuses Together. In a rail yard, their train pulled up to a flatcar on an adjacent platform on which lay the maggot-ridden carcass of a dog. McAlmon looked away, but “Hemingway gave a dissertation on facing reality,” McAlmon wrote. Ernest told Bob that he had seen in the war the stacked corpses of men, maggot-eaten in a similar way. He advised a detached and scientific attitude toward the corpse of the dog. He explained that those of their generation must inure themselves to the sight of grim reality. McAlmon continued his account by adding that Ernest had then asked, “Hell Mac, you write like a realist. Are you going to go romantic on us?” McAlmon concluded his description with the remark that he took himself off to the bar car “with an oath”; he had seen plenty of maggot-eaten corpses himself and he had no need to look upon a dead dog in the name of literature.

McAlmon’s sarcastic reasoning is seductive, though in almost all accounts of this incident Hemingway is seen as having the upper hand, carrying the argument. Again, this is only with the benefit of hindsight. Given what we know of Hemingway’s achievements in the line of looking unflinchingly at death, it is seductive to see him as triumphant over McAlmon’s jaded cynicism in the service of a higher truth. The incident served as emblematic of their whole experience in Spain, where Ernest emerged as the only one of the three men who could really appreciate the profound tragedy of the bullfight and of its centrality not just to experience but to art.

In Madrid, Ernest had somehow divined at which pension the matadors and their cuadrillos stayed, and there Bird joined the two men. They saw several novillados in Madrid, and then they went on to Seville and saw their first really full-scale bullfight, or corrida. Though Hemingway was never able to convey exactly what bothered him about McAlmon’s response to the Seville bullfight, he did give it a lot of thought, so that he was still trying to figure it out eight years later, when he included a description of McAlmon’s reaction in Death in the Afternoon. McAlmon, called X. Y., became one in a category of “types” who watched bullfights:

X. Y. — 27 years old; American; male; college education; ridden horses on farm as boy. Took flask of brandy to his first bullfight — took several drinks at ring — when bull charged picador and hit horse X. Y. gave sudden screeching intake of breath — took drink of brandy — repeated this on each encounter between bull and horse. Seemed to be in search of strong sensations. Doubted genuineness of my enthusiasm for bullfights. Declared it was a pose. He felt no enthusiasm and declared no one else could. Still convinced fondness for bullfights in others is a pose. Does not care for sport of any sort. Does not care for games of chance. Amusements and occupation drinking, night life and gossip. Writes. Travels about. (DIA, 466)

Hemingway’s contempt is unmistakable.

Considerable tension between the two men had surfaced, based on opposing reactions to profound experiences or about the ability to stomach pretty strong stuff—as well as on McAlmon’s sexuality. Late in life, McAlmon supplied Yale professor and H.D. scholar Norman Holmes Pearson (whom he knew through Bryher) with some almost certainly imagined details about Hemingway making a sexual advance in their hotel room on this trip, supposedly pretending he was having a dream: “[In Hemingway’s dream] I was Vicky, the buxom, tough and beautiful tart of the cabaret of the night before.”

McAlmon no doubt manufactured this story about Hemingway’s closeted homosexuality when he wrote to Pearson in 1952, probably because he was tired of being asked about Hemingway’s sexual tendencies over the intervening thirty years. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that sexual currents contributed to the tension between the men on the Spanish trip. First, though, it is important to state that McAlmon was attracted to women as well as men (to his wife Bryher, for one) and, as a contemporary noted, “It was clear he was far from being the kind of invert whose predilection shapes his whole personality.” The most likely scenario is that the subject came up, not because either man made any kind of pass at the other, but simply because they were two handsome men whose looks appealed to gay men, because they moved in a setting in which homosexuality was commonplace, or because each had seriously considered attaching himself to an older homosexual to further his career.

Another difficulty had to do with the fact that McAlmon was paying the bills and Ernest was not being especially gracious about it. Whatever the cause, the tension between Hemingway and McAlmon was noticeable to Bill Bird when he arrived. He later said that he found Ernest speaking to Bob “only in snarls,” while McAlmon was, when Ernest was present, acting indifferent and remaining very quiet. Kay Boyle, in her contrapuntal, often annoying, contribution to McAlmon’s narrative in the later edition of Being Geniuses Together, notes Bill Bird’s long-ago remark to her regarding the trip to Spain about “Hem making Bob the goat of that trip. All the bills were paid by Bob, of course….Hem had to have his bottles of Johnnie Walker, or whatever the brand was, even in Spain, and at Bob’s expense. The price of them was enough to ruin a millionaire, and Bob was never that.” This pettiness, coalescing into resentment of anyone who had been generous to him, was revealing itself to be a distressingly recurring pattern in Ernest’s twenties.

More important, because more closely related to his complicated psyche and his complicated approach to writing, was the emergence of a certain possessiveness Ernest took toward bullfighting. Bird continued bitterly to Kay Boyle, “When a choice of seats came up at a bullfight, Hem would throw his stalwart honor to the wind and have to have the one good seat left, down by the ring, because he was ‘studying the art of it’ while Bob and I, not knowing anything, I suppose, about art in any shape or form, could just as well sit in the bleachers.”

With Bird and McAlmon, Hemingway saw bullfights in, besides Madrid and Seville, Ronda, Granada, Toledo, and Aranjuez. In July, Ernest went back to Spain with Hadley to see more bullfights. They went to Pamplona for the Fiesta of San Fermín, which began July 6—a red-letter day for aficionados. Every morning the bulls stormed down the streets of Pamplona to the bullring, accompanied by a group of rowdy young men in blue shirts with red handkerchiefs tied around their necks; festivities—food, drink, music, and dancing in the cafés and streets—continued all day, the contests starting in the afternoon. Rain delayed the events this July, dampening spirits but bringing anticipation to a fever pitch. When the fights began, Hadley was relieved (as was Ernest) that she did not find them difficult to watch; she brought her knitting, and during particularly gruesome interludes concentrated on that. In his catalogue of spectators’ reactions to bullfights in Death in the Afternoon, in which he described McAlmon, or “X. Y.,” as suspicious of poseur fans, he described Hadley as “Mrs. E. R.,” whose favorite author (like Hadley’s) was Henry James. He noted with satisfaction that “she was not shocked nor horrified by [the deaths of] horses and enjoyed it as a part of bullfight which she enjoyed greatly first time and became great admirer and partisan of” (DIA, 467). Hadley observed and learned together with her husband the styles and skills of each matador, coming to appreciate nuances in the fights, which Ernest was absorbing at an amazing rate.

By the time they left Pamplona, Ernest was a true aficionado and could talk of little else. Some friends became fascinated by his descriptions and signed on for future tours, especially the July fiesta in Pamplona with the Hemingways. Others quickly tired of his enthusiasm. McAlmon observed that Ernest, who when walking the streets with a companion energetically shadow boxed, was now more likely to be shadow-bullfighting, brandishing an imaginary cape and demonstrating imaginary sword thrusts into an imaginary bull’s shoulders. Like many tourists who have made exciting discoveries, he was both eager and reluctant to pass on his experiences in Pamplona. Soon he became downright proprietary about it. Filling in for the absent editor of the transatlantic review, a publication read avidly by the Paris expatriates, he would write, about the Festival of San Fermín, “The less publicity it has, the better,” because almost everyone “who deserved to be at Pamplona” had been there. “The more people that think it is a terrible, brutal, degrading relic of etc. the better.” It is not clear whom he considered his audience for these observations.

Meanwhile, Hemingway was producing several more of his short “pieces,” or vignettes, to build on those he had published in The Little Review in February, which he was carefully revising. Several were about bullfighting, including one about the death of the matador Maera, whom he had seen in Pamplona, that mixed fact and fiction—for Maera was not gored and killed until the following year. When the earlier vignettes were accepted by The Little Review, he had titled them “In Our Time,” after the verse from the Book of Common Prayer: “Give peace in our time, O Lord,” and he told Bird he wanted to keep that title.

Bill Bird’s Three Mountains collection was supposed to come out that year, but in the meantime proofs arrived for the Contact Editions’ Three Stories and Ten Poems from McAlmon’s press. With his fiction and poetry thus spoken for, Ernest began sending his vignettes to Bird. When he received bound copies of Three Stories and Ten Poems in August, he was pleased by the looks of the book, a slim, pocket-sized volume with the titles of the stories and poems printed on the front cover. He exuberantly described Contact Editions to his old friend Bill Horne as “the same gang that published Ulysses,” but the book appeared initially to critical silence; the scant reviews would not appear until the fall. Gertrude Stein had promised to review it, however, so Ernest was hopeful.

The Hemingways were due to sail for Toronto on August 17, but their ship was delayed for over a week. Hadley was enormous and often did not feel well, but they managed to squeeze in a boxing match and a visit or two to the horse races, which had become one of their favorite activities in France. They made the rounds of their Parisian universe; at Shakespeare and Company Sylvia Beach loaned them $100 and gave them some copies of Ulysses that they had agreed to smuggle into the States. When they called on Pound at his studio he gave Hadley a velvet and brocade smoking jacket (which she would wear for years as a bathrobe) and took her aside to say, “Well I might as well say good-bye to you here and now because [the child] is going to change you completely.” Ernest feared the same would be true of him.

*  *  *

Hemingway sent Pound the first letter he wrote from their new home in Toronto, declaring, “It couldn’t be any worse,” referring to any “of that stuff about America, Tom Mix, Home and Adventure in search of beauty.” His job at the Star was made nearly impossible by his immediate supervisor, Harry Hindmarsh, the assistant editor of the Daily Star. In France he had worked under Herbert Cranston, the editor of the Star Weekly, and he was in the good graces of John Bone, the managing editor of the daily edition. But Hindmarsh seemed determined to humiliate Ernest with trivial assignments of middle-of-the-night inconvenience, quickly becoming Hemingway’s bête noire.

Hadley wrote her in-laws, Ed and Grace, about Ernest’s overwork: “So many trips, no sleep and countless unimportant assignments.” The young reporter Morley Callaghan, who noted the “sweetness in [Ernest’s] smile and a wonderful availability,” remembered that he was “appalled” when he looked at the assignment lists and saw the “piddling” events Ernest was ordered to cover: “just junk assignments.”

Ernest and Hadley lived in a hotel for almost three weeks before they found an apartment at 1599 Bathurst Street, and even then Ernest was out of town on assignment and unavailable for the move. A railroad flat overlooking a ravine, beautiful with fall foliage, the apartment had a Murphy bed in the bedroom, which was squeezed between the kitchen and living room. The baby was due in early October, yet it was not until September that Ernest told his parents. Hadley explained that the expectant parents hadn’t wanted to cause worry, and pleaded with the Hemingways to understand if they didn’t hear from Ernest often.

On October 5 Ernest left for a six-day trip to New York City to cover the arrival of former prime minister David Lloyd George in the U.S. and to join him on a train trip to Toronto and then across Canada, which practically assured that Ernest would miss the birth of his child. When he arrived back in Toronto on October 10, a Star employee met the train and told him that Hadley had given birth to a son, but could give no report on her condition. Ernest rushed to her side. By that time Hadley was quite recovered—her labor lasted less than three hours—and calm. It was Ernest who broke down. “Ernest came in about 9 the next morning and wept—he was frightened too, poor lamb—they didn’t break it to him very gently and he was bitter about having been sent away just at that time too.” She told Isabelle Simmons (now Godolphin) that he “quite broke down for a while from fatigue and strain,” though she added that he “pulled together” and “was as sweet as you and I know he can be.” Certainly Ernest was wracked by worry and elation—and fatigue, to be sure, and anger at his boss. But perhaps his breakdown and distress owed something as well to the exclusive attention paid to Hadley and the newborn.

They named the boy John Hadley Nicanor—Nicanor for the matador Nicanor Villalta—and reported to Isabelle Simmons that he was a “corker,” with Ernest’s eyes and nose and a thatch of dark brown hair. Ernest reported that when the baby nursed, “he makes a noise like a little baby pig,” noting, “He is perfect and his body is very beautiful.” They found they were calling him Bumby “because of the round, solid feel of him.”

Ernest and Hadley began planning to leave Toronto and return to Paris while Hadley and the baby were still in the hospital, and Ernest made the decision final when he returned to the newspaper and Hindmarsh scolded him for not coming to the office before going to the hospital. Luckily, he was transferred to the Star Weekly office at the end of October. On the Weekly he went back to writing features, many of which harked back to his stay in Europe; he filed articles on bullfighting and on trout fishing in Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. After setting a January 1 departure date he produced a storm of stories, on subjects ranging from nightlife in Europe to the bookies of Toronto. He wrote three entirely frivolous articles on how Christmas was celebrated in Switzerland, Italy, and France, respectively.

It was impossible for Hemingway to spend any time on his own writing, and the disjuncture between his life in Paris and the drudgery of his journalistic work began to feel almost surreal. He worried about his state of mind and its effects on his writing. As he wrote Pound, “Feel that I’m so full of hate and so damned, bitchingly, sickeningly tired that anything I do will be of little value.” He officially resigned in December and collected a final paycheck on New Year’s Eve. Several legends circulate about his resignation and his revenge on Hindmarsh, probably because his fellow reporters took vicarious pleasure in imagining a confrontation. Nobody liked Hindmarsh.

Over Christmas Ernest paid a quick visit to Oak Park. The family’s delight at seeing the long-absent son and brother was tempered by their disappointment over missing Hadley and John Hadley Nicanor. Ed Hemingway told Ernest, “I feel like running away from here and going to Toronto and New York to see him. Wish I had the chance.” Hadley and Ernest slunk out of the Bathurst Street apartment, for they were breaking their lease. Even as a new parent and an unemployed writer, Ernest must have been enormously relieved to shake the dust from his heels and board, on January 14, the steamship Antonia, bound for France.