11

REACHING PARIS A FEW DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, THE HEMINGWAYS followed Sherwood Anderson’s recommendation and took lodgings at the Hotel Jacob in the heart of Saint Germain-des-Prés arrondissement on the Left Bank of the Seine. The four-story white stucco hotel with a carriage door entrance was inexpensive and well known to writers. Eight years earlier American poet Alan Seeger stayed there prior to his death in battle at the Somme and posthumous fame for his poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

By mid-January the couple found more permanent quarters, renting a Spartan fourth-floor apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Their funds, limited in Chicago, now went far in the City of Light. They had money for meals in restaurants and a maid—what the French call a femme de ménage—who washed pots in the morning and cooked at night. On a short vacation in Switzerland Hemingway took time to report to Katy Smith about the new apartment and his femme de ménage, painting if not a luxurious vision of his Parisian life, certainly an alluring one. “What’s the use,” Hemingway asked, “of trying to live in such a goddam place as America when there is Paris and Switzerland and Italy?”

Within a month Hemingway sent to Gertrude Stein Anderson’s generous letter of introduction. “Mr. Hemingway,” Anderson had written, “is an American writer instinctively in touch with everything worthwhile going on here.” An invitation for tea was issued, and the young couple came to the house that Stein shared with Alice B. Toklas. Under Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso paintings, Stein and Ernest sat by the fire deep in conversation about writing while Hadley was trapped in polite conversation with Toklas in another part of the room. Old enough to be Hemingway’s mother, Stein displayed a maternal interest in his work. She read and critiqued the stories he brought her and shared with him her idea about parsing sentences to their simplest declarative form, as she had done in her Three Lives. A few weeks later she hiked up the narrow stairs to the Hemingways’ apartment for dinner one night and read more of his work while perched on their mahogany bed. One of his stories, Stein said that night, was unpublishable because of its graphic depiction of an adolescent male sex fantasy set on a Michigan dock. In the tale the woman resists the man’s advances.

Neither Jim nor Jim’s big hand paid any attention to her.

“No we haven’t Jim. We ain’t got to. Oh, it isn’t right. Oh, it’s so big and it hurts so. You can’t. Oh, Jim. Jim. Oh.”

Anderson’s letters also introduced Hemingway to Ezra Pound. Soon the aspiring writer was teaching the poet to box. In return Pound shared bits of literary wisdom and promised he might get some of Hemingway’s short stories published in The Little Review, the small circulation Parisian journal known for having serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses.

One day, when Hemingway was still getting his bearings, he strolled over to Shakespeare & Company, a pleasant twenty minutes’ walk from his apartment. Owner Sylvia Beach, a thirty-four-year-old woman, kept the bookstore stocked with American and English books. Expatriate writers flocked to the store particularly to make use of Beach’s lending library. On the day Hemingway came he was without money for a deposit. Beach, nonetheless, insisted he take some books home with him from the lending library. No one, he thought, had been so nice to him.

Before the cherry trees displayed their pink blossoms in the Trocadéro Gardens that spring, Ernest and Hadley were well established in their new life. In his letters home Hemingway not only provided his friends and family with an exaggeratedly romantic portrait of his and Hadley’s Parisian life but also wrote as if he were an old Paris hand. He adopted this tone as well in the articles he sent the Toronto Star. Hemingway mocked his fellow expatriates. Calling Paris a Mecca for bluffers and fakers, he wrote that impostors thrive because of the provincial nature of the French people and the gullibility of its press. Even the impoverished artists and writers who nursed ten-centime cups of coffee for hours at La Rotonde, a café across the street from the Hotel Jacob, were subjected to his ridicule. “They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition.”

Sarcasm was Hemingway’s weapon of choice when his achievements failed to match those around him. He had worn out his “typer ribbon” pounding out stories for the Toronto Star, but the fiction for which he had come to Paris to write filled only a few folders tucked away in a sideboard. Even the autobiographical war novel he had started remained skeletal at best.

Dos Passos basked in his success back in the United States. The publication of Three Soldiers marked the beginning of the literary life he had sought. By April Dos Passos received $8,000 in royalties from the sale of more than forty thousand copies in the first few months of the book’s publication. It was a tidy sum, more than a dozen times the earnings of the average American in 1922.

Even six months after the book’s appearance Three Soldiers continued to cause a ruckus. In March 1922 the Chicago Tribune published a full-page review entitled “Propaganda of Novel Is ‘Blow at Americanism’” by an anonymous writer described only as a “member of the first division, a legionnaire, a father and a citizen.” In explaining his purpose the veteran said, “the reviewer writes as a citizen of a state to warn his countrymen of the anarchistic, Bolshevistic doctrine running through this story, and to call their attention to the book’s affront to every just and decent principle upon which society is founded and organized business and government maintained.”

In the thousands of words that followed, the reviewer offered up a screed that attacked every aspect of Dos Passos’s portrayal of military life and challenged the actions of the book’s characters as if they had been real people. “Dos Passos has become the Knight Errant of all that America does not stand for,” he wrote. Once again the attackers treated the novel as nonfiction, ironically proving the authenticity of the book’s voice.

The Los Angeles Times, which liked Three Soldiers, offered Dos Passos space to rebut his critics. “A novel isn’t a history,” he told readers of the paper. Of course, he readily admitted, there were people for whom the war had been a different experience from the one his protagonists endured. But he insisted what he witnessed at the front was not patriotism but a madhouse atmosphere. More important, he had remained out of the country during almost the entire duration of the nation’s participation in the war. “You see, I couldn’t have written it to smash any illusions, because I didn’t know this country has any illusions,” he said. “I wrote it to get it off my chest.”

Cummings’s wartime book The Enormous Room, which after delays had also been published, faced similar hostility but did not sell well. The New York Times felt a need to editorialize on the two books. “It is a pity that men of peculiar sensitiveness and irritability so frankly confessed by Mr. Cummings ever entered any form of military service, and a greater pity that they will insist on writing books like this one and Three Soldiers—books of the ‘now-it-can-be-told’ sort—books that are utterly false because they are only a part, and a very small part of the truth.”

The attention given to Three Soldiers won Dos Passos entry into the American literary fraternity. He was invited to come around to the offices of Vanity Fair and step out for lunch with two of its editors. A few months earlier, in February, the magazine had put Dos Passos’s photograph on a page featuring nine members of “The New Generation in Literature,” along with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Vincent Benet, Gilbert Seldes, John Peale Bishop, and Edmund Wilson. The latter two worked for Vanity Fair, which did not seem to preclude their appearance on the list. The New York literary world, all white and almost exclusively entirely male, was a cozy affair in the 1920s.

When the elevator door opened on the floor of the midtown New York City building housing the magazine’s editorial offices, the shy Dos Passos exited unprepared for his newfound prominence. He waited in the hall while Bishop went to retrieve Wilson for their lunch date. Not yet thirty years old, Wilson was already among the nation’s most influential critics. Three years earlier he had sent in an unsolicited parody that Dorothy Parker read and liked. It put Wilson on the path to becoming the magazine’s managing editor and gave him a platform that he used eagerly to publish the work of his friends and those writers whom he admired. In fact, just prior to the lunch date he had published one of Dos Passos’s poems in Vanity Fair.

Despite his intellectual reputation, Wilson, known to friends as “Bunny,” was an imp. He drove a motorcycle to work each day from his childhood home in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did magic tricks and puppetry. When the three men stood by the elevator to head out for their meal, Wilson suddenly executed a somersault in his business suit before an astonished Dos Passos.

From his post at Vanity Fair Wilson knew everyone in the literary world. Among his friends was novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first two works, The Beautiful and Damned and This Side of Paradise, had launched his writing career and turned him and his glamorous wife into celebrities. Fitzgerald was taken by Dos Passos’s new book and reviewed it for the Daily News in his hometown of St. Paul. Describing the author as an artist, Fitzgerald wrote that Three Soldiers was “the first war book by an American which is worthy of serious notice. Even The Red Badge of Courage is pale beside it.” He told Wilson he wanted to meet Dos Passos.

In Paris it was Italy that beckoned Hemingway. In May 1922 Ernest and Hadley traveled to a Swiss town on the northern border of Italy. From there they hiked across the Great St. Bernard Pass and took a train that delivered them to Milan. In a city in which he had once courted a nurse with blue-gray eyes, Ernest now escorted his wife about, pausing for a glass of Capri, a young Italian white wine, at the Galleria Vittorio Emanuel, whose glass-vaulted iron arcades connected two of Milan’s main squares.

A bus delivered the couple to Schio, where Ernest had been posted with his fellow ambulance drivers.

Hemingway told the young woman perched on a stool behind the zinc-topped counter in Schio’s principal bar that he had been there during the war.

“So were many others,” she muttered, taking his money for his drink.

Everywhere he looked nothing matched his memory. He could not even locate the garden filled with wisteria where he and others drank beer on hot nights. Still, perhaps the space where he had been wounded was as it had been. He hired a car and a driver, and they drove to Fossalta. There he found new stucco houses painted in bright colors standing in place of the rubble he had known. Rather than being pleased by the restoration of normalcy and that the citizens of the town had new housing, Hemingway was disappointed that he could not bring his wife to the spot where the mortar had forever changed his life.

In an account of his trip he warned those Toronto Star readers who were war veterans to visit someone else’s front. The green fields that have covered the expanses of shell holes and barbwire, he wrote, “will combine against you and make you believe that the places and happenings that had been the really great events to you were only fever dreams or lies you had told yourself.”

They returned to Paris and passed an uneventful summer.

Under a bright blue sky in late October 1922 Dos Passos walked fast up Fifth Avenue, late and anxious. F. Scott Fitzgerald had summoned him, through their common friend Bunny Wilson, for lunch. Breathless, Dos Passos knocked at the door of the Fitzgerald suite in the elegant Plaza Hotel. Scott answered and scolded his guest for being tardy. Once inside, Dos Passos found that Sherwood Anderson, in town from Chicago, was also joining them for lunch. As was their habit, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald plied their guest with questions. “Their gambit,” said Dos Passos, “was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex.”

Dos Passos fought off the barrage of questions, and Anderson rescued him by talking about his writing. Dos Passos rose from the table, walked about the room, looked north out the window at the trees in Central Park, which had begun to turn. After a knock on the door, an elderly waiter entered and set a glittering lunch table with lobster croquettes and crisp French rolls with creamy sweet butter. They drank champagne and Bronx cocktails, a martini with orange juice. “Scott,” noted Dos Passos, “had good bootleggers.”

After lunch the Fitzgeralds bid good-bye to Anderson and asked Dos Passos if he would pass the afternoon with them on Long Island, where they wanted to find a house. They were paying $200 a week for their suite, and the cash-strapped couple heard that houses on the fashionable North Shore of the island rented from $300 a month. Setting out in a chauffeur-driven red touring car, they came to Great Neck, where they paused briefly at a real estate office to pick up a salesman. He led them to see several mansions, but none of them satisfied Scott or Zelda, who were rude to the real estate man. “They parroted his way of saying ‘gentleman’s estate’ until I was thoroughly disgusted with them,” said Dos Passos. “I tried to stick up for him. The poor devil was only trying to do a little business.”

Failing to find a suitable house, Scott directed the driver to take them to Ring Lardner’s Great Neck home. Unlike Fitzgerald or Dos Passos, none of Lardner’s dozen or so books had been much of a success. His fame rested on readers who delighted in his newspaper sports columns and magazine short stories. At the house, a large mansion like those the Fitzgeralds had toured that day, they came across the writer sitting alone in a drunken stupor in the darkened living room. His wife, Ellis, coaxed her husband to speak, but he stared back in silence. “He was literally out on his feet,” Dos Passos said. They drank proffered whiskeys and got back into the car. As they drove away, Scott told Dos Passos that Lardner was his private drunkard and that everyone ought to have one.

After a stop for a ride on a Ferris wheel at a carnival they returned to the Plaza Hotel, ten hours after their lunch. Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, both Zelda and Scott emerged from the car with public faces of charm. “They were celebrities and they loved it,” said Dos Passos. “It wasn’t that I was not as ambitious as the next man; but the idea of being that kind of celebrity set my teeth on edge.”

In late November Hadley was stuck in Paris, ill with a cold, while Ernest went off to report on a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, to settle a dispute between Turkey and Greece. Reporters from around the world were there. The attraction in the city by Lake Geneva, aside from a possible treaty, was the attendance of Benito Mussolini, who had just come to power in Italy. Hemingway had interviewed the Fascist leader earlier that year in Milan while he and Hadley were in northern Italy. “He was a great surprise,” wrote Hemingway. “He is not the monster he has been pictured.”

The Lausanne conference, like other gatherings of politicians that he covered, brought Hemingway into the company of American journalists. He saw Dos Passos’s friend the socialist Max Eastman as well as the muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens. Hemingway had met Steffens before and had showed him a horseracing story. Steffens was so taken by the tale that he had mailed it to his friend Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan. Now, in Lausanne with Hemingway, Steffens asked whether he could see more of his stories.

Recovered from her cold, Hadley decided to respond to the entreaties from her lonely husband. He was pleased. “I do so hate for you to miss what is the most comfortable and jolly time for mums,” wrote Hemingway, who tracked Hadley’s menstrual cycle on a calendar.

Hadley wired Ernest that she would join him in Lausanne. Afterward they planned to vacation in a pension in the French skiing village of Chamby with a British war friend. Hadley raced about their flat packing for an extended absence from Paris. She filled a large suitcase with her clothes. Grabbing a valise, she went to the dining room, where she gathered up Hemingway’s handwritten drafts, typed manuscripts, and carbon copies. Into the smaller bag she placed virtually the entire collection of her husband’s work, what he hoped would launch his writing career.

As nightfall came the owner of the dance hall on the rez-de-chaussée of their apartment building drove Hadley to the Gare de Lyon. Aboard the Paris-Lausanne overnight train Hadley found a seat with legroom where she hoped she might catch some sleep. On the rack above she placed her suitcase, and at the foot of the seat she deposited the valise filled with the manuscripts she had presumed her work-obsessed husband wanted. She had gotten to the station with plenty of time before the scheduled departure, so Hadley left her seat and stepped off the train.

In the hubbub of the busy station vendors could be heard advertising their wares with shouts, and passengers called for porters. The engines let off clouds of steam, their boilers stoked in anticipation of hauling their loads into the night beyond the city.

“Tous à bord!” yelled the conductor of the Paris-Lausanne train, and Hadley climbed back on board. At first she thought she was in the wrong compartment—the valise was not where she had left it. But when she saw the suitcase on the rack, she realized to her horror she had found her seat. The bag was gone.

She looked furiously about for it. A newspaperman heading to the peace conference assumed that only her suitcase had been taken. “My wife will lend you some of her things,” he kindly offered. Sobbing uncontrollably, Hadley explained what was missing, and a policeman was called to the car. He asked questions, left, and the train pulled from the station. Into the darkness it sped, with Hadley in tears.

In the morning the train pulled into the Lausanne station where Hemingway and Steffens were waiting. The tears still falling so profusely, Hadley could hardly get the words out. Hemingway listened stoically, but Hadley understood the enormity of the loss. “His heart was broken,” she said. “I could see that.”

Steffens and another journalist were heading to Paris. When they reached the Gare de Lyon they checked the lost and found but reported to Hemingway that nothing had been turned in. Hadley and Ernest continued on their way to Chamby, where they spent Christmas and returned to Paris after the New Year. The exuberance of a young marriage lived out in one of the world’s most romantic locales was gone with the va-lise. Fault mattered less than the loss’s association to Hadley. From now on, whenever Ernest picked up a pen to compose a new story, to try to recompose his missing work, or even to think about what was lost, the disaster would be tied to Hadley. For a marriage it was an emotional cancer.

As 1923 opened, Hemingway was further than ever from his goal of being a writer. “Sure seems there is a curse on me,” Hemingway said. He told Pound of his loss at the hands of Hadley. “You, naturally, would say ‘Good’ etc.,” he wrote. “But don’t say it to me I ain’t yet reached that mood. I worked 3 years on the damn stuff.”

Since returning from the war he had told everyone he was a writer, but he had nothing to show for it except one unnoticed publication in a tiny New Orleans magazine edited by a friend of Sherwood Anderson. Certainly Hemingway’s editors in Toronto were pleased with the news pieces he had filed, and he had made valuable connections with writers. But on the matter of actually becoming a writer of fiction Ernest had made little progress. His attempts at fiction had been stacked in the dining room cupboard, and were now gone except for one story. “My Old Man” had not been in the valise—it was the story Steffens had sent to a New York editor.

Hemingway gave this short example of his work to Ezra Pound’s friend Edward O’Brien, who edited an annual anthology of best short stories. The piece deeply impressed O’Brien, and he asked whether he could publish it in the anthology even though it had not yet appeared in print. Hemingway was exultant, but once again literary progress was put on pause. Hadley announced she was pregnant.