13

FOR DOS PASSOS, BEING IN PARIS WAS ALWAYS A JOYOUS OCCASION, MADE particularly pleasing this time as Crystal Ross came from Strasbourg to join him. Taking a break from her work on a thesis comparing the writers O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant, she took a room at the University Women’s Club not far from the Hemingways’ new flat. During this reunion with Dos Passos Ross at last relented and accepted his proposal of marriage. He was certain. She was not. She valued her intellectual pursuits and worried about her independence. “Dos for God’s sake don’t count on me,” she told him. “I’m trying hard not to count on you.”

One early summer evening Dos Passos brought his fiancée to meet Hemingway at La Closerie des Lilas. After drinks the group went to dinner at Lavigne’s and then on to see a wrestling match. Ross found Hemingway to be hulking and handsome, but she was also struck by his manner of dress, from his canvas shoes to his Basque beret. “This fashion of dress is not an affectation,” she decided. “It is a naturalism.”

The group talked about Spain. Pamplona was the place to go, Hemingway said. On Gertrude Stein’s advice he had taken Hadley to the northern Spanish city the year before. “By God they have bull fights in that town,” he wrote a friend upon his return. Hemingway’s idea to go to Pamplona excited Dos Passos. For him, time spent hiking in Basque lands, holing up in Iberian cities, or basking under the Andalusian sun were among the best moments in his life. There he had found an older world mostly untouched by the ravages of industrialization. “It’s the most wonderful jumble,” he told a friend, “the peaceful Roman world; the sadness of the Semitic nations, their mysticism; the grace—a little provincialized, a little barbarized—of a Greek colony; the sensuous dream of Moorish Spain; and little yellow French trains and American automobiles and German locomotives—all in a tangle together!”

But it irked Hemingway that Dos Passos had discovered Spain seven years earlier than he had—Dos Passos had even been to a bullfight four years before Hemingway. When Hemingway adopted a place, he made it his. Two years earlier he had only been in Paris for a few months when he wrote a scathing piece about American bohemians in which he called the café he first frequented a “showplace for tourists” and reveled about “the good old days” as if he were a Parisian. Now he already envied Dos Passos’s literary success and chaffed that his friend turned out to be a more experienced Spanish hand than he.

With Dos Passos and Ross on board for a trip to Pamplona, Hemingway expanded his search for traveling companions by asking Bill Bird, along with his wife, Sally, and Robert McAlmon, his erstwhile Parisian publishers; Eric “Chink” Dorman-Smith, a friend from the Italian war-front who had accompanied Ernest and Hadley on vacation; George O’Neill, a young friend of Hadley’s; and Donald Ogden Stewart to come along.

Hemingway had come to know Dos Passos’s friend Stewart quite by accident several months earlier when Stewart came to Paris with instructions from Vanity Fair editor John Peale Bishop to look up “an interesting young writer named Hemingway.” Dos Passos told Stewart that he must also eat at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the Île Saint-Louis. In 1918 Dos Passos had rented a room above the place, and he so frequented the restaurant that the Lecomtes almost considered him a member of the family.

Following Dos Passos’s culinary advice, Stewart went to Lecomte’s for dinner soon after arriving in Paris. Looking around, he spotted the writer he was under orders to find. It was a lucky break that got even better when Hemingway took an immediate shine to Stewart. “He liked good food and lots to drink and he understood my kind of humor,” said Stewart.

Hemingway’s entourage was complete. Its members agreed to meet in Pamplona in time for the Feria del Toro, a bullfighting event held each July as part of the city’s annual festival honoring its patron Saint Fermín. Ernest and Hadley left Bumby in the care of their femme de ménage and reached Pamplona ahead of everyone else. After checking in at the Hotel la Perla, situated on the main square, they strolled down to the Arga River that ran through the town. Hadley watched women washing clothes and drying them on the pebbly shore while boys forded the river jumping from one stepping stone to another. In her hobble skirt Hadley did her best to keep up with Ernest as he followed the boys.

Meanwhile Dos Passos and Ross took the train to Saint-Jean-Pied-dePort in southern France. Five miles north of the Spanish border, the small town was the usual starting point for pilgrims walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago. Early the next morning the pair set off by foot up to the Roncevaux Pass that crosses the Pyrenees into Spain, famous for supposedly being the site of Roland’s death recounted in the eleventh-century Chanson de Roland.

Dos Passos, a veteran of many hikes across Spain, delighted in the ascent but blithely gave no consideration to Ross, who couldn’t maintain his pace, especially having made the rookie mistake of wearing new shoes that were not broken in. At last an amiable farmer came to her rescue and provided a donkey to carry her the remaining portion of the eighteen-mile hike to Burguete, across the border in Spain, where she recovered, resting by a stream.

Ernest and Hadley showed up the next day, and the four of them set off together for Pamplona. Over two days they crossed fields of corn and passed through groves of poplar trees until they looked up at the fortifications of the centuries-old city, once the capital of the Kingdom of Navarre.

There was confusion when they reached the Hotel de la Perla on the Plaza del Castillo at the center of Pamplona. When Hemingway had booked rooms earlier for the group he did not reserve any for Dos Passos and his fiancée. “He, speaking Spanish, can always get a place to stay,” Hemingway told Stewart. Unwilling to admit his mistake in not securing a sufficient number of rooms, Hemingway claimed that one of the double rooms under his name was intended for Dos Passos and Ross. The pair was aghast that Hemingway presumed they were sleeping together. Rooms were quickly reallocated. Ross took the one Hemingway secured for Stewart, who then moved into a double room with Dos Passos.

The Feria del Toro began each night in Pamplona when a large number of bulls were hurriedly moved through the streets under the cover of darkness. Only the sound of their hooves on the cobblestones and the lingering bovine smell marked their passage. Early in the morning bands incessantly beating a drum roused the sleepy city, many of whose inhabitants were suffering from hangovers. Thousands rose from park benches or poured out of hotels and houses. Many went straight to the bullring. Others, however, found a spot along the nine hundred yards of streets that were lined with wooden barricades.

Soon the half-dozen bulls selected to fight that day were let loose from the corral where they had spent the night, and they charged down the barricaded streets. Those men and women who were daring ran ahead of the pack. Invariably some fell and were bruised or suffered broken bones from the hooves of the fast-moving herd. Others barely escaped injury by curling up in a gutter. In minutes the dash to the bullring was over.

The real danger to participants came when a bull got separated from the others and, in its disoriented fury, attacked. Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the rest of the group decided against running with the bulls. It was a fortunate decision because that summer the crowd mistakenly put itself into the path of an angry lone bull. The men were so tightly bunched that twenty-two-year-old Esteban Domeño Laborra was fatally gored when he could not jump over the fence. The death did not escape Hemingway’s attention, and he recorded it, as he did with everything else he saw that week, in the notebook he carried with him.

It was, in fact, death that had brought Hemingway to Pamplona. In trying to write fiction in Paris he had struggled to capture feelings, events, or moments essential to bringing characters to life. He decided, instead, to begin with basics. “One of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death,” he said. “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring.”

Every member of the group was conscious of Hemingway’s obsession with bullfighting. Some, like Stewart, also grew enamored with the pastime. On the final day of the festival Stewart took up Hemingway’s repeated challenge to join him in the ring during the novillada, the portion of the program when spectators, thinking themselves matadors, taunted heifers or aging bulls whose horns are padded with leather sheaths. “The only reason I got into the ring at all,” said Stewart, “was because Hemingway shamed me into it.”

Stewart was handed a cape. As he shook the hand of the toreador who gave him the cape, a bull charged. It tossed Stewart into the air. His glasses flew from his face, and the cape lay crumpled in the dust. The bull pawed the ground and made ready for another charge. “An amazing thing happened.” Stewart said. “I lost my fear completely.” He stood, put his glasses back on, grabbed the cape, and resumed his dance with the bull, this time more successfully. “I had shown that I could take it,” Stewart said. His two cracked ribs were soon treated and became a badge of merit. Hemingway clapped him on the back, and the men went off to an evening of dancing and drinking.

An exaggerated account made it into the Chicago Tribune claiming that when the bull threw Stewart, it had been Hemingway who came to his rescue. Ever since the interview on the docks of New York City when he returned from his service in the Great War, Hemingway never minded guiding inflated accounts of his bravery into the press. The Chicago Tribune article, written no doubt by a colleague in the European press, also incorrectly claimed Hemingway had been a member of the American Expeditionary Forces and was the first American wounded on the Italian front.

Dos Passos had also followed Stewart into the ring, finding his excuse of nearsightedness insufficient against Hemingway’s entreaties. “His American compatriots felt they had to show their mettle too,” Dos Passos said. However, when he found himself face-to-face with one of the bulls, Dos Passos turned and ran. He made for the edge of the ring, where a wooden barrier created a kind of alleyway. The bull jumped the barrier and came up behind Dos Passos.

In the nick of time two Pamplonians hoisted Dos Passos up the footholds on the ring’s wall and out of the bull’s path. “My story,” he said, “was that I was finding an elevated spot to make sketches from.”

Indeed, sometime later Dos Passos took to his paintbrush rather than his pen to capture the American foray into the novillada. In the water-color he executed, Hemingway holds a heroic stance before a bull. Two men are on the ground, one is in the air, evidently having been tossed, and another figure—perhaps Dos Passos himself—is fleeing. The exaggerated features, poses, and rage of the bull make it seem like painterly sarcasm. It certainly fit Dos Passos’s distaste for the adventure. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were just got on my nerves,” Dos Passos said. It was a manly week filled with heavy drinking and, for some, nightly visits to whorehouses, so busy during the festival that there were lines to get in. While Hemingway wished Hadley had not come, Dos Passos found that Crystal Ross’s company preserved his sanity. “Between us,” he said, “we built ourselves a sort of private box from which we looked out at all these goings on, in them but not of them.”

The bullfighting at an end, at least for that year in Pamplona, the group broke up. Unfinished books, stories, articles, and academic studies awaited them in Paris, Strasbourg, and points beyond. Ross grabbed a Paris-bound train with Stewart. She and Dos Passos made plans to meet by summer’s end. But first he wanted to hike. There were few things he loved better. It also leveled the playing field between him and Hemingway after a week-long pursuit of brawny bravura. Hemingway may have been a deft boxer, a practiced outdoorsman, and now a bullfighting aficionado, but when it came to hiking he was no match to Dos Passos. The man’s long, indefatigable legs could stride across any countryside.

Leading the way out of Pamplona, Dos Passos set off in the company of Smith, McAlmon, and O’Neill on a planned 270-mile hike to Andorra, the miniature nation nestled in the midst of the Pyrenees. “We were going,” Hemingway wrote his mother, “but Hadley did not feel absolutely fit when the time came to start and it was a trip where you need to be in absolutely perfect condition.” What Hemingway didn’t tell his mother was that he was in a foul mood. As usual he tracked Hadley’s menstrual cycle on his calendar. The markings convinced him that she was pregnant again. He took out his frustrations on everyone. “Stop acting like a damn fool and a crybaby. You’re responsible too,” said Sally Bird, wife of the Paris publisher. “Either you do something about not having it, or you have it.” A day later Hemingway wrote in his notebook, “Kitty commenced.” The crisis had passed.

On the sixth day of the hike McAlmon’s gout and blisters defeated him, and he returned to Pamplona. That left Dos Passos in the company of two. The weather remained good as they made their way over high passes of the Pyrenees. “Silence and solitude were a delight after the gabblegabble round the tables under the portales at Pamplona,” said Dos Passos.

Averaging twenty to thirty miles a day, a little more on days when they tapped into their supply of brandy, they reached Andorra in just under two weeks. The final miles were hard. It poured rain, and in the darkness they lost their way. Soaked and so cold that their teeth were chattering, they entered the capital city Andorra la Vella in the middle of the night. Most everything was closed, but they found an inn with three beds. With sore legs and bruised feet and desperate for sleep, they made their way upstairs to a dingy and foul-smelling room. “The minute we stretched out in dry clothes,” said Dos Passos, “the bedbugs came like shock troops, wave after wave.”

Dos Passos soon traded his bug-infested bed for the luxury of a room in the Hotel du Cap in Antibes on the Côte d’Azur at the invitation of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who had rented the entire place for the summer. Almost like children who couldn’t play on their own, the couple encouraged all their friends to come. The Fitzgeralds, in the midst of a marital crisis following Zelda’s affair with a French naval officer, rented a villa down the coast. Stewart came from Paris for a quiet rest while his ribs recovered from the bull-induced damage. “The Riviera in summer is a strange and rather exciting place,” Dos Passos wrote Jack Lawson after settling into a red-plush carpeted room.

In the mornings Dos Passos worked. After lunch with the Murphys he usually bathed in the sea or went with the whole group to a bookshop in Nice. The manuscript consuming Dos Passos’s hours was different from anything he had written previously. When he began a year earlier in the rooming house of Far Rockaway his goal was clear in his mind, but the execution was not. He wanted, like Hemingway, to be free of the traditional strictures of writing. He enthusiastically promised a friend it would be “utterly fantastic and New Yorkish.”

For a considerable time he had been scribbling down slogans he had read, bits of conversation he had heard, and odd facts he had learned on scraps of paper and in his notebooks. He drew from his collection for the openings of each chapter. In one, for instance, a man is impatiently shouting from a soapbox in front of a Houston Street café about how the wealthy, like vampires, are making wage slaves of the citizenry.

Then, sticking words together like heavy wet snowflakes, Dos Passos wrote on.

Through the plate glass the Cosmopolitan Café full of blue and green opal rifts of smoke looks like a muddy aquarium; faces blob whitely round the tables like illassorted fishes. Umbrellas begin to bob in clusters up the snowmottled street. The orator turns up his collar and walks briskly east along Houston, holding the muddy soapbox away from his trousers.

But the chapters Dos Passos was constructing that immediately followed these slice-of-life vignettes played like disjointed scenes in a movie with no transition from what came before. Gone was the traditional plot line he had used in Three Soldiers. In its place he worked at creating nearly two dozen stories dotted with snatches of song lyrics and newspaper headlines.

Back in Paris Hemingway seemed no closer to his goal of being a writer than when he had quit working for the Toronto Star eight months earlier. His only remunerative literary work came from helping Ford Madox Ford edit the transatlantic review, whose name was modishly set in lowercase. If it weren’t for his wife’s trust income, the Hemingways would have been out on the street. The review had published a Hemingway short story, “Indian Camp,” a few months earlier but nothing more. Dos Passos, however, at the invitation of Ford, had a portion of his manuscript featured in the August issue.

If he were to be in the game, Hemingway needed to churn out a sufficient number of new stories to build a publishable collection of his work. He was discouraged. “I am going to have to quit writing because we haven’t any money,” he told Ezra Pound, lamenting Ford’s drain on his time. “The Transatlantic killed my chances of having a book published this fall and by next Spring some son of a bitch will have copied everything I’ve written and they will simply call me another of his imitators.”

Still Hemingway labored on. Michigan and Italy became his most common backdrops as he began to conjure up a youthful version of himself—Nick Adams, the son of a doctor who fishes, hunts, and pursues love in Upper Michigan and faces battle in Italy.

Adams’s name was an invention, but in the bundle of manuscript pages Hemingway carried with him each day to the café, other characters, such as Bill Smith, retained their true identity. This, he knew, might need to change when the book was prepared for publication. But as of now he reinhabited the halcyon days of Michigan, where his creation Nick Adams romped with Kate “Katy” Smith. For Hemingway one of the powers of writing was that he could have on paper what he did not have in real life.

Nick, going by Hemingway’s nickname, takes Kate into the woods. Naked, under a blanket, Nick turns Kate over as she exclaims, “Oh, Wemedge. I’ve wanted it so. I’ve needed it so,” and the action begins.

“Is it good this way?” he said.

“I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh, come, Wemedge. Please come. Come, come. Please, Wemedge. Please, please, Wemedge.”

Hemingway drew a large X across the scene. He did not need Gertrude Stein to tell him the scene was unpublishable.

In other stories the war was never far from Hemingway’s thoughts, but he had not yet made up his mind what about the war he needed to tell. In one of his longer stories Harold Krebs returns to his parents’ home after participating in some of the worst battles of the war. Like many who have experienced battle, Krebs believes no one can understand what he went through. Hemingway, unlike Dos Passos, worried less about war itself than coming to terms with it. War was personal for him, not political.

The title in our time that he had chosen for his first collection of stories and wanted to use if a larger collection could be published came from the English Book of Common Prayer. In a responsorial portion of the prayers the minister requests, “Give us peace in our time, O Lord,” to which the congregation replies, “For it is thou, Lord, only, that makest us dwell in safety.” Hemingway, however, meant to apply the request for peace not as a request for a war-free world but for his generation who had been at war and carried the experience with them.

As the summer of 1924 came to a close, so did the Murphys’ extended party. Dos Passos returned to Paris. He was running short on money and even tried pawning his typewriter. But he had credit at a hotel and in a few restaurants, and that’s all one needed in Paris for a good time. He put on three elaborate dinner parties and caught up with Hemingway. The younger would-be author was feeling better about his prospects because he was closing in on his goal. “I have written fourteen stories and have a book ready to publish,” he wrote O’Brien, who had published one of Hemingway’s earliest stories in the annual collection he edited. “It is much better than anything I’ve done.”

But the work had been hard. One night Lincoln Steffens, whom Hemingway knew from his days of reporting on peace conferences; his new wife, Ella Winter; and Dos Passos gathered in a Chinese restaurant. Winter was trying to decide what kind of work she might pursue. Both Dos Passos and Hemingway urged her to write. Tapping her chin with a soft left hook, Hemingway said, “It’s hell. It takes it all out of you it nearly kills you; but you can do it. Anybody can. Even you can, Stef.”

Dos Passos agreed. He knew his new book still needed more work, and now it was time to complete it. But before he could return to New York there remained unfinished business. He went to be with Ross. “Ate a great deal of choucroute in the rain under the dripping eaves of Strasbourg and drank riesling-muscat in rhomantick schlosses popeyed with weldschmerz and weiblich liebe until the cows came home,” he wrote Rummy, using German to cryptically convey to his favorite correspondent his melancholy about Ross’s unwillingness to agree on a date for their wedding—she was unwilling to commit to anything until she finished her thesis.

Further discussion of marriage would have to wait until both of them had completed their respective work. Dos Passos went to Le Havre and found a ship to take him home. Like many American readers who had been to France, he hid a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, still banned in the United States, in his suitcase that he hoped to sneak by customs. Also with him was a freshly typed copy of Hemingway’s expanded in our time.

In New York City Stewart was awaiting him at the Yale Club. Together, they decided, they would use their publishing contacts to find a way for their friend Hemingway to break out from the small exile literary journals, with their ridiculously miniscule press runs, and onto the bookstore shelves.