10

HEMINGWAY FOUND LOVE AGAIN IN CHICAGO. IT WAS OCTOBER 1920. HE had just moved into an apartment belonging to the brother of green-eyed Katy Smith of Michigan summers. Y. K. Smith and his wife, Genevieve, were glad to lend a room to Hemingway while he waited for his war friend William Horne to secure an apartment for the two of them. Horne had urged Hemingway to share a flat with him. It was an attractive idea, especially as Katy Smith now lived in Chicago. It seemed like everyone Hemingway knew was heading to the Windy City and working in advertising. “It’s bushels of fun,” Horne told Hemingway, “keeps you writing and thinking, teaches you quite a lot about a million things, pays you a little more than enough to live on and gives you plenty of spare time to really write.”

Hemingway’s move to Chicago held the hope of ending the nomadic life he had led following his celebrated return from the war in January 1919. Since then he had lived with his family, in their summer home, in a boarding house, and with another family in Toronto. This last spot had sprung up when he had been asked to give yet one more of his talks about the war, in this instance before the Ladies Aid Society in Petoskey, Michigan. There he met a friend of his mother’s whose husband ran the F. W. Woolworth chain of stores in Canada. She invited Hemingway to come to Toronto and serve as a companion for their disabled young son. The stay opened a writing opportunity. Her well-connected husband introduced Hemingway to editors at the Toronto Star, who gave him free-lance writing assignments, sixteen in all, before he returned to Oak Park in May 1920 and to Michigan for the summer.

Now, as autumn descended and his mother, who had grown tired of her son’s mooching off the family, barred him from moving back home, Hemingway jumped at Horne’s proffered solution and took the Smiths up on their offer of a bed. He was drawn into their busy social life. On many evenings their place was chock-full of aspiring writers. For twenty-one-year-old Hemingway the evenings were dreamed-of social gatherings. For those who came he was the man who had seen Paris and the war, carrying the wounds to prove it. At a crowded party one night not long after Hemingway joined the gatherings, Katy Smith introduced Hadley Richardson, an old school chum, to the assembled group. The tall slim woman with long auburn hair tied in a loose coil caught Ernest Hemingway’s eye across the room.

Life had not been easy for Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Born in 1891 to an affluent St. Louis family, she had experienced death early when a sister died in a fire, felt further loss when her father committed suicide, witnessed her sister hospitalized for emotional problems, and suffered her own nervous breakdown from living under her overbearing mother, all before the age of twenty-one.

Her mother’s recent death, however, had released Richardson from her domestic purgatory and left an estate that provided the financial means to be independent. The invitation to come for a visit from Katy Smith, her classmate from an elite St. Louis girls’ school, was perfectly timed.

When Richardson arrived, Smith accompanied her to Y. K. and Genevieve’s place, where she could stay now that Hemingway had vacated the guest room and moved in with Horne. Smith eagerly told Richardson about her Michigan summer friends who were now all in Chicago. They loved words, poetry, and nicknames to such an extent they had created their own dialect. One spoke of seeds (money) to purchase eatage (food) and pills (cigarettes). None of them ever seemed to use their real names. Her hosts Y. K. and Genevieve were Yen and Doodles. Smith was known as Stut, and her friend Hemingway was Wemedge, with whom, she confessed to Richardson, she thought she might be in love.

As soon as they changed into evening clothes she would have a chance to meet them. Richardson pulled a new blue serge dress from her suitcase. She had spent eighty dollars on it in a time when gingham dresses sold for less than one dollar. It was so daringly short that it just barely covered her knee. “I had,” she said, “a lot of confidence in that dress.” That evening it took Wemedge no time to notice the woman who wore it.

Looking up as she played the piano, Richardson saw Hemingway’s brown eyes fixed on her. He was hard to miss in an Italian officer’s cape. She thought him the handsomest man in the room. But her insecurities rose. He likes me because my hair’s red and my skirt is a good length, Richardson thought. She was also much older than he, a deficit in her mind. Hemingway didn’t hesitate. The eight-year age difference, almost identical to that between himself and Agnes von Kurowsky, only made Richardson more appealing.

During the following weeks the two delighted in each other’s company over steaks and bootleg wine, in back rows of movie theaters, and at the Smiths’ continual stream of parties. Their romantic cavorting even included a nighttime visit to Lake Michigan’s shore, where Richardson rolled down a dune into an embrace with Hemingway. “Your hands can make me do all sorts of nice things for you by the littlest touch—make me want to, I mean, but then, so can your eyes,” Richardson wrote upon her return home. “I’d do anything your eyes said.”

Richardson listened attentively as Hemingway talked unceasingly about his desire to be a writer. He even let her read some of his work. But unlike conversation between the two, this did not go well. Richardson thought his journalism was fine, but his fiction put her off. She told him she didn’t get it. “It was not the kind of writing I adored,” she said. “I adored Henry James.” She was also unconvinced about his future as a writer. At the time, despite only having held some modest journalism jobs, Hemingway held a high estimation of his potential. “You know,” Ernest wrote to his sister Ursula, “sometimes I really do think that I will be a heller of a good writer some day.” Hadley did not share in that confidence but decided that loving him required doing so. “He was absolutely sure of what he wanted to do, and I learned to be sure of it too.” But the seed of doubt remained in her mind.

When Richardson’s three-week stay came to an end, Hemingway took her to the train station, where the breeze ruffled her skirt as he held her close and kissed her hair. Several days later the mail brought a photo of her in a bathing suit with a group of friends. The short accompanying note soon grew into a torrent of letters flowing between Chicago and St. Louis, usually overnight thanks to the new airmail service between the two cities. “Yes,” Richardson wrote, “I think you are the nicest lover a person ever had.”

In December Hemingway had good news for Richardson, who now went by the nickname “Hash.” He had procured a job. The Co-operative Society of America, a new and startlingly successful venture—although financial observers doubted its viability—had launched a monthly magazine, The Cooperative Commonwealth. For forty dollars a week Hemingway joined its stable of writers. Richardson, however, did not think it a wise move. “Not having your name connected there may save a lot of trouble for your litry name later on,” she said.

The verbal passion of their correspondence intensified as Richardson’s love for Hemingway grew. “I’d like to hold you so and kiss you so that you wouldn’t doubt whether I wanted to or not,” wrote Hemingway, signing off with the Italian flourish of “sera.” Hadley recollected the times they had walked the street of Chicago hand-in-arm and sat in lobbies or streetcars. “Not talking or anything,” she wrote, “just loving you so hard, so longing to get hold of you to love you with my arms and lips when a certain look came into your eyes.”

But the presence of Katy Smith in Chicago loomed threateningly. The girl who had been Hemingway’s summertime teenage crush had grown into an educated and striking woman. Smith, noted one acquaintance, “could go anywhere, even a desert, not knowing a soul, and in ten minutes cause a riot.” Hemingway did little to correct the impression of sexual sophistication he gave off that led friends to believe he had slept with Smith in Michigan and Kurowsky in Italy. Even Hadley presumed Smith had been a lover, especially as Smith seemed irked when they announced their engagement. “Of course,” Hadley wrote Ernest, “I know it about you that Kate’s affairs in relation to you are kept to yourself and you told me some of the points so’s to keep close to me in every way.”

The Smith threat receded briefly as Richardson accepted Hemingway’s marriage proposal. But it resurfaced when, in January of 1921, he told her to keep their nuptial plans secret. Even when they became public, Richardson worried after Hemingway failed to come to St. Louis for the engagement party on the excuse of work pressures. He remained, after all, in Chicago where Smith lived while she was hundreds of miles away in St. Louis.

But on a warm and clear September 3, 1921, Ernest made good on his promise, and he and Hadley were married in the Hemingways’ summer retreat in Horton Bay, Michigan, and set up home in a small rundown Chicago apartment. Ernest had an eye on using the savings from their frugality and Hadley’s income from her trust fund to return to Italy until Sherwood Anderson came to dinner.

Hemingway had met Anderson through Y. K. Smith, who knew the writer from work. The now-successful author was an animated presence at the Smith soirees and was the envy of the men with literary aspirations. Hemingway listened carefully to what Anderson had to say. In return the older writer took a shine to him.

Born in an Ohio farming town, Anderson had begun life with a spotty education, worked in a wide variety of jobs, served in the Spanish-American war, and when at last he achieved a modicum of business success, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Renouncing business, he turned to writing. His third published work, Winesburg, Ohio, was already being regarded as an American classic. The book was neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. For lack of a better term, critics called it a story cycle united by characters in a common setting of a fictitious town in the 1890s. Winesburg, Ohio was a startling change from the formulaic short stories readers had come to expect in that Anderson jettisoned plot and replaced it with psychological insights.

Purists were hostile. “It seems to me,” said one, “a distillation of the sort of leering gossip one would expect to find bandied about by male scandalmongers chewing tobacco on cracker barrels in a dirty cross-roads grocery store.” But on the whole, critics recognized they had something new in their hands. The work’s understated prose, unembellished scene setting, and sophisticated expectation of readers won them over.

In the summer of 1921 Anderson and his wife journeyed to Paris. There he found a thriving expatriate writing community and a bevy of new literary publications. During his time in the City of Light Anderson was given an audience with Gertrude Stein, the poet, author, and literary grande dame of the city. They became instant friends. When he perused the shelves of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Anderson met Ezra Pound, the poet and critic, who had just moved to Paris. And at a Saint-Germain-des-Prés café, he drank beers with Dos Passos, who had published one war novel, which no one had read, and now had a new one in stores that everyone was talking about. Just before coming to dinner Anderson wrote a letter of praise to the author, who was said to be out of communication on a five-month odyssey across Asia Minor.

Over dinner with the Hemingways upon his return, Anderson urged the couple to abandon their plans for Italy—Paris was the place for them. They could get inexpensive rooms at a hotel where he had stayed until they found more permanent lodgings. He promised he would ease their way by writing letters of introduction to Stein and Pound as well as to journalist and playwright Lewis Galantière.

The traveling Dos Passos was unaware of the success of Three Soldiers that the Doran Company had finally brought out in October. Discouraged by the disheartening failure of One Man’s Initiation: 1917, Dos Passos had decided he wanted to be as far away from New York as possible when his second war novel was published. So after signing off on the proofs of Three Soldiers, he persuaded E. E. Cummings to catch a ride to Lisbon on a Portuguese steamer. From Portugal the men went to Spain, where Dos Passos took over as tour guide, taking Cummings to Seville for its annual festival and bullfights.

Meeting up with Jack Lawson in northern Spain, Cummings and Dos Passos hiked across the Pyrenees in dangerously foul weather, and from-Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France they took a train to Paris. Dos Passos idled the summer days away in Lawson’s flat working on chapters of a second book for Doran, hanging about with other writers, and drinking with visiting writers such as Sherwood Anderson.

In September, with a small amount of money from his shrinking inheritance and armed with his press credentials, Dos Passos boarded the Orient Express and spent the fall on a US destroyer getting a close-up look at the fighting between the Greeks and Turks; on an Italian steamer to Georgia, having been granted permission by the Soviets to travel overland to Tehran, he came down with malaria; and to Baghdad, where he met the intrepid English writer, spy, and archaeologist Gertrude Bell.

He escaped his world easily, but getting back from these far reaches proved to be a challenge. In Baghdad a caravan heading to Damascus was willing to take Dos Passos. Riding a camel called Rima, he set out with the group. For days on end they rode across sand-and pebble-strewn hills, in frigid cold and stifling heat, dodging bandits until the cold wind of Damascus, as it was known, signaled the near end of their journey. After thirty-nine days they reached their destination. Dos Passos removed the Arab keffiyeh, agal, and thobe he had worn and headed for a Western hotel, bidding his companions farewell. “I actually found myself crying after I said goodbye to them,” he wrote Rummy.

Shaved and dressed in Western garb, Dos Passos took the short train ride to Beirut, where five months of mail had accumulated awaiting his arrival. Luxuriating in a bathtub at the hotel, Dos Passos discovered he was famous.

On publication day in October nervous Doran executives had placed an unusual advertisement in the New York Times. The notice described how, when first reading Dos Passos’s manuscript, the editors believed it deserved a wide readership because for the first time it put into words the thinking of the men who had gone to war. “It voices the protests of youth, its energy and progress,” read the advertisement. “But it was also agreed that even after necessary editing the books would probably come as a distinct shock to many, especially those who had not previously been made aware of the intense anguish of many youths who suffered disillusionment in the decay of idealism that alone made possible their surrender of personal liberty.” They needed only to look a few pages away from the advertisement to see their fears were well founded.

“This is the kind of book that any one would have been arrested for writing while the war was yet in progress,” began the New York Times lengthy review. “It is so savagely explicit in its accusations that it deserves no quarter at the hands of the reading public.” At length Coningsby Dawson, who had served in the Canadian military for most of the war, tore apart the book’s facts, even though it was fiction. At its core, he charged, the novel was an attack on the men who had valiantly served and “a dastardly denial of the special chivalry which carried many a youth to a soldier’s death with the sure knowledge in his soul that he was a liberator.” Three Soldiers sparked a literary firestorm. So many letters poured into the New York Times offices that they published two collections of them, sometimes printing only extracts. A first lieutenant in the Air Service rose to Dos Passos’s defense, claiming the book accurately portrayed military life, and an infantryman found it a legitimate cry of passionate indignation. But an infantry captain said anyone familiar with the training of its soldiers “does not need to be told the utter folly, balderdash, bathos and nonsense the chapters of his book contain,” and another, who said he had served in the ambulance corps, described Dos Passos as representing a school of writing “from whose eyes the glory has gone and see in life nothing but a seething mass of putridity.”

The paper took the unusual step of running a second lengthy review two weeks later. “Every one now seems to have taken part in the discussion of John Dos Passos’s brilliantly written novel of the American Expeditionary Forces except those who know most intimately the material of which Three Soldiers professes to be made—the men who served in the ranks of the front line,” began Harold Norman Denny, a former infantryman who had been wounded in the Argonne forest. Dos Passos’s depiction of men crushed by the machine of war was “arrant tommyrot,” and had the author served as a combatant, he would have written a big book in which the gospel of individualism “would have been sung instead of whined.”

Other critics were of a different mind from those commissioned by the conservative-minded New York Times editors. The Los Angeles Times reviewer, for instance, joined in praising the book’s passion and called it a “work of art.” Columnist Heywood Broun, writing in the Bookman, praised its honesty and eloquence. And the New Republic hailed its brilliant expressiveness and beauty. “It shows what sins have been committed in this country’s name,” wrote one of the magazine’s editors.

As often is the case, the negative review attracted sales-spurring curiosity in the book, perhaps even more than the favorable ones. Bookstores delighted in the sales. One Greenwich Village store placed the book in its window, posting with it a likeness of the Greek God Apollo being run over by a steamroller.

Along with the clippings that reached Dos Passos in Beirut were numerous letters from his friends in the United States. They wrote excitedly about Three Soldiers. The book had created a “grandiose rumpus” and was the subject of conversation from subways to churches, said Jack Lawson. “You are as famous as Wrigley’s.”

It was time to end his self-imposed desert exile and go home. From Beirut Dos Passos went to Paris and then to London to find passage back to New York.

In Chicago the Hemingways decided to follow Anderson’s advice and move to Paris. Hemingway convinced the Toronto Daily Star to take him on as a stringer covering European politics and sports. Next he booked passage on the French ship Leopoldina, leaving New York on December 8, 1921. On the eve of departure Hemingway showed up at Anderson’s apartment building. He climbed the stairs, shouting Anderson’s name as he went up, laden down with a rucksack full of canned goods. “Bringing thus to a fellow scribbler,” said Anderson, “the food he had to abandon.”

As John Dos Passos rushed back to United States to claim his literary fame, Ernest Hemingway set off to Paris to seek his.