“The minute he began to have some sort of obligation to you of love or friendship … then is when he had to kill you.”
—Donald Ogden Stewart, Hemingway friend
In his Paris Review interview with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer again spoke with reverence of Hemingway but concluded: “I think if we had met it could have been a small disaster for me.”
Meeting the legendary novelist had indeed been disastrous for many of his contemporaries.
Steinbeck met him in 1944. He was finishing Cannery Row at the time and riding high from The Grapes of Wrath. But, to his annoyance, many still dismissed him as “the poor man’s Hemingway.” As for Hemingway, his For Whom the Bell Tolls had come out in 1940, but he was entering an eleven-year drought.
With great expectations, John O’Hara and John Hersey arranged a summit at a Manhattan restaurant. After shoptalk and a few rounds, Hemingway bet $50 that he could break O’Hara’s prize blackthorn walking stick—a gift from Steinbeck—over O’Hara’s head. Papa promptly did so, triumphantly threw the pieces down, and demanded his money. Head in hands, O’Hara was on the edge of tears.1
As a point of honor, Steinbeck prided himself in not criticizing colleagues. The walking stick incident moved him to change his policy: He launched into diatribes about Hemingway.
Earlier, Ernest Walsh, Sinclair Lewis’s editor, had called Papa’s Torrents of Spring hatchet job on his competitors “The Cheapest Book I Ever Read.” In another essay, Walsh failed to include Hemingway in his list of “the six greatest living literary artists.”2 When, months later, the editor died of TB at age thirty-one, Hemingway wrote Pound, “I have known too many good guys die to be able to sweat much from the eyes about the death of a shit.”3
While they were still on speaking terms, Hemingway had assured Walsh that his other title that year, The Sun Also Rises, would contain “no autobiography and no complaints.” But it contained all the characters and events of bullfighting season in Pamplona the year before. The Jewish antihero, Robert Cohn, was his former traveling companion and boxing sparring partner, Robert Loeb, was Peggy Guggenheim’s cousin. After the publication of the novel, he avoided his former “friend” for fear of being shot.4
With Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway introduced bullfighting as a sacrificial passion play. Bristling at the parodies that followed, he told one of his picadors, William Saroyan, “We’ve seen them come and go. Good ones, too. Better ones than you, Mr. Saroyan.”
The next year, he vented to his editor, Max Perkins: “You see what they [critics] can’t get over is (1) That I am a man; (2) That I can beat the shit out of any of them; (3) That I can write. The last hurts them the worst. But they don‘t like any of it. But Papa will make them like it.”
However, he failed to make them like his follow-up, The Green Hills of Africa (1935). Now he wanted to do more than beat the shit out of his detractors. “I would like to take a tommy gun and open up at 21 [Club] or in the N.R. [New Republic] offices or any place you name and give shitdom a few martyrs and include myself,” he wrote his friend John Dos Passos, whom he called a money-grubbing “pilot fish.”
By 1951, fearing that James Jones’ From Here to Eternity was overshadowing his own war novels, Hemingway wrote to their publisher, Charles Scribner, Jr.: “I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not damage his or your sales.”
In his otherwise laudatory and diplomatic memoir,5 Scribner wrote, “Working with Hemingway was rather like being strapped to an electric chair,” adding that he was “a two-timer and not above despicable tricks.”
Had the Life and Argosy celebrity sportsman been deprived of Spanish bulls and African trophies,6 one imagines that he might have adorned his Ketchum hunting lodge walls with the heads of Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, and the others imprudent enough to help him.
“Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, explaining his friend’s idea of camaraderie. Fitzgerald had indeed been higher up in 1925 after Gatsby but was overtaken by Hemingway’s Sun the following year.
This is how things stood when the American heavyweight faced off with the Canadian Morley Callaghan, with Fitzgerald filling in as ref. A former Toronto Star colleague of his opponent, Callaghan had only one novel7 to his credit before their bout at the American Club of Paris, where they sparred regularly.
Though four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter, Callaghan knocked Hemingway down late in the second round. Regaining his feet, Papa struggled to stay up until the three-minute bell from Fitzgerald. But the three minutes seemed to him the longest he had ever endured in the ring. Callaghan delivered a barrage of haymakers that returned him to the mat several times. When at last Fitzgerald counted him out, through swollen eyes Hemingway saw that the clock was closing in on four minutes. Scott apologized profusely.
“If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so,” bellowed Ernest. “Only, don’t say you made a mistake!”
The relationship of the two masters was never quite the same. Some years later, Hemingway began publicly denouncing his former friend for cowardice and self-pity.
“Please lay off me in print,” Scott wrote him. “If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse.”
1 Steve Newman, “John Steinbeck Meets Ernest Hemingway,” The Bookstove, December 15, 2010.
2 Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Robert McAlmon, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Emanuel Carnevali.
3 Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (New York: Scribners).
4 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
5 Charles Scribner Jr., In The Company of Writers, (New York: Scribner, 1991).
6 In Papa: A Personal Memoir, Gregory, who inherited his father’s passion for hunting, wrote, “I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic.” Gigi, as Papa had called Gregory, had a sex change and called himself Gloria. He died in a Florida women’s detention center after being arrested for indecent exposure. He called his father’s swan song, The Old Man in the Sea, “sentimental slop.” Papa had always called the youngest of his three sons “the mean one.”
7 Morley Callaghan, Strange Fugitive (New York: Scribner, 1928).