14

AFTER HANDING OVER HEMINGWAY’S MANUSCRIPT TO STEWART IN NEW York City, Dos Passos took up residence again in the small Brooklyn apartment where a year earlier he had begun the novel he now needed to finish. His editor, who had moved to Harper & Brothers and brought Dos Passos along with him, wanted the manuscript on his desk by the end of spring so as to include the book on the 1925 fall list. “I’ll be a raving maniac if I don’t get this goddamn piece of work off my chest immediately,” Dos Passos told Rummy.

The four-story brownstone on a sycamore-lined street away from the distractions of Manhattan possessed a remarkable view. “Just imagine,” wrote the poet Hart Crane, who also lived in the building, “looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the statue of Liberty, way down the harbor, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right.” In fact, the view of the bridge was so perfect that fifty-five years earlier its engineer oversaw the construction by telescope from the same brownstone after a decompression accident crippled him with caisson disease.

The vista was uncannily appropriate. The city across the river was, in a sense, the protagonist of Dos Passos’s manuscript, now called Manhattan Transfer. Even the iconic bridge in the view from his window earned a role in the book. Bud Korpenning, one of a dozen characters created for his book, comes to New York City from the country. Wandering the street, he is unable to find work, and eventually feeling defeated, Korpenning walks on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The sun has risen behind Brooklyn. The windows of Manhattan have caught fire. He jerks forward, slips, dangles by a hand with the sun in his eyes. The yell strangles in his throat as he drops.

None of the other characters in the book fare much better. Individuals, far from heroic, come and go and sometimes connect with each other. But they have little or no say in their destiny. Joe Harland loses a fortune on Wall Street and becomes a beggar. Ellen Thatcher Oglethorpe parts with her integrity for a stage career. The man she loves leaves her for another actress and then perishes in a fire. Trouble follows all the rest, from bootlegger Congo Jake to politician George Baldwin. Dos Passos’s characters illustrate Manhattan’s decadence, a city of unbridled desires. Continuing his signature habit of combining two, sometimes three words into one, he wrote,

Bars yawned bright to them at the corners of rainseething streets. Yellow lights off mirrors and brass rails and gilt frames round pictures of pink naked women was looped and slopped into whiskyglasses guzzled fiery with tipped back head, oozed bright through blood, popped bubbly out of ears and eyes, dripped spluttering off fingertips.

Dos Passos sought to infuse the novel with the same kind of motion he felt traveling on the city’s mass transit. Everyone in the book is constantly on the move. The title itself, Manhattan Transfer, he took from the railway station in Harrison, New Jersey, where New York–bound passengers moved from steam-powered trains to electric ones that dove into a tunnel under the Hudson River. The painterly style found in small doses in his earlier novels explodes here. Rather than asides in the story, his word paintings are imbued with action. When he wrote of the flags on Fifth Avenue, the stars “jiggle” in the blue background, the red and white stripes “writhe” and the flags themselves turn into “hungry tongues.”

Dos Passos felt confident that the manuscript he delivered to his editor contained something expressively new. But his triumph exacted a cost. He had ignored his strep throat and succumbed again to rheumatic fever, as he had in Spain in 1919. The onset of the fever confined Dos Passos to the Midtown Hospital on East 57th Street. From his bed he wrote his Harvard friend and ambulance corps colleague Robert Hillyer. The attack, Dos Passos said, “has ruined me in every way, reduced me to an immovable painful vegetable.”

During the weeks that followed he was in and out of the hospital. Back in his Brooklyn apartment Dos Passos looked so weak that his neighbor Hart Crane believed he had come close to death. Matters of the heart complicated his recovery. Crystal Ross arrived in New York having completed her studies in France. Her Texan father and brother also came to the city to meet her. They were at the dock, along with a weakened Dos Passos feeling very much the fifth wheel, when Ross’s ship made fast. She and Dos Passos managed to get together for some meals and even took in a play, escaping her father, who disapproved of her choice of suitor. But he needn’t have worried. Ross made it clear to Dos Passos that she was breaking off their engagement. She was going back to Texas to teach at the university. She loved Dos Passos but could not imagine a life as the wife of a novelist—she had her own ambitions.

Ross, her brother, and father boarded a train for Texas, and Dos Passos headed back to the hospital. His rheumatic fever had returned.

In the midst of his health and romantic traumas Dos Passos heard from Hemingway in Paris. The handwritten letter he received was uncharacteristic. Hemingway was writing to thank him for having helped, along with Sherwood Anderson, persuade Boni & Liveright to publish In Our Time. He would now have a real book to his name, and the company was sending him a $200 advance. Neither Three Stories and Ten Poems nor in our time published by small Parisian presses had earned Hemingway any money.

“Jesus I wish you were over here so we could get drunk like I am now and have been so often lately,” wrote Hemingway, thanking Dos Passos for his help in getting a contract for the book. “You are a good guy and I wish to hell you were here.” Not surprisingly, Hemingway reported, the editors were cutting the “Up in Michigan” story because “the girl got yenced,” he said. “I suppose if it was called ‘Way Out in Iowa’ Mencken would have published it if the fucking would have been changed to a community corn roast.”

Sherwood Anderson, who had just signed on with Boni & Liveright, contributed a blurb, and Dos Passos did so as well. Hemingway’s entry into the world of publishing looked promising. In June journalist Robert Forrest Wilson told readers of Bookman, the leading American literary journal, that Hemingway was a writer to watch for. “His work promises to remove him from the three-hundred-copy class of authorship,” Wilson wrote. “He pursues his own ways, and his friends expect him to go far.”

The question facing Hemingway was what to write about next. It had been seven years since the mortar fell on him. A year earlier he had made a furtive attempt to tell his war story.

Oh, Jesus Christ, I prayed, get me out of here. Dear Jesus please get me out. Christ. Please, please please Christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say.

At first his efforts didn’t satisfy. He toyed with pronouns and decided, in the end, to make it an observed scene from the perspective of soldiers in a nearby trench. He called it “Religion” and set the 143-word piece into the stockpile he was building. Up until this moment, that had been the extent of his effort to make the war into a story.

Now he took out a blue notebook and wrote “ALONG WITH YOUTH A NOVEL” across its cover. As Dos Passos had done, he began his war story on board the Chicago, the ship that, at separate times, had taken them to the war. Nick Adams, the alter ego Hemingway created for his short stories, is deep in a drunken conversation with three other men as the ship neared Bordeaux. As he frequently did, Hemingway used the real names of the men on board. His effort endured for twenty-seven rambling pages before he put it aside. Perhaps, after all, he was not yet ready.

Hemingway began planning another trip to Pamplona. Of the 1924 contingent only Donald Ogden Stewart was available this summer. Dos Passos remained too ill to leave New York. So Hemingway filled out the group with his Michigan friend Bill Smith, who had come over to Paris, and compatriots of the Paris expatriate community: Duff Twysden, a British lady now on her second divorce; her fiancé, Pat Guthrie; and writer Harold Loeb. Hadley consented to join the group, leaving Bumby in the care of friends.

The intoxicating and adventurous spirit of the previous Pamplona trip was absent. “The Garden of Eden wasn’t the same,” said Stewart. “Something had gone out of Pamplona.” The companions became mired in sexual intrigue, roiled with jealousy, and almost resorted to fisticuffs, all fueled by drunkenness. The fetching Twysden took up with Loeb in Saint-Jean-de-Luz prior to the fiesta, and then she turned her sights on Hemingway. “When I got there,” recalled Stewart, “I found that someone had left the door open and Eve had walked into my male Garden of Eden.” Eve’s name was Lady Duff Twysden. As for the centerpiece of the fiesta, the bullfighting disgusted most of the group, except veteran Stewart and, of course, the leader of the pack.

Not only was the gathering different from that of the previous summer, Hemingway also appeared changed to Stewart. The affable guide of 1924 seemed ill-tempered in 1925. Absent of the calming influence of Dos Passos and Ross, the group frequently triggered angry outbursts from Hemingway. “You were not to disagree with the Master in any way from then on,” Stewart said. Hemingway, in his eyes, had become “a dangerous friend to have.”

Hemingway and Hadley went on by themselves to Madrid. There they were entertained by Cayetano Ordóñez, the matador who had wowed Ernest in Pamplona and had given Hadley an ear from a bull he killed. Seeing Ordóñez at work helped redeem the summer. Inspired, Hemingway began work on a story with a matador modeled on Ordóñez.

By the time Ernest and Hadley reached Valencia, their next stop in Spain, the short story he had envisioned about a bullfighter had grown past one hundred pages and was populated with the retinue of expatriates who had accompanied him to Pamplona. At first Ernest retained actual names. Later thinking it the wiser course, he rechristened the members of the group. Harold Loeb became Robert Cohn, Bill Smith and Donald Stewart merged into Bill Gorton, and Duff Twysden’s fiancé became Mike Campbell. Twysden herself still had not yet undergone an authorial rechristening. Hem himself became Jake Barnes, with a few differences. He altered nothing of the settings. From the cafés in Paris to the journey in Spain, every detail is recounted with such accuracy that those who had been there would recognize what he was writing.

However, the story so closely resembled his Pamplona group that the name changes he adopted did little to mask his characters’ identities. Everyone in the expatriate community of Paris would know who was who if the book were published. Hemingway gave no hint that he cared. Back in Paris he continued to fill the pages of his notebooks with his story. One night he strolled with Kitty Cannell, an arts correspondent for American newspapers, to dinner at the Négre de Toulouse. Ahead of them walked Hadley in the company of Loeb and Smith. “Well,” Ernest said, “I’ve taken your advice at last. I’m writing a novel full of plot and drama. Everybody’s in it.” Then, with a gesture to the two men ahead, he added. “I’m tearing those bastards apart.”

“But not you, Kitty,” he continued. “I’ve always said you were a wonderful girl! I’m not going to put you in.”

To see if she believed him, Hemingway turned and looked at Cannell. She stared back at his rosy cheeks and his smile full of white teeth that reminded her of an eight-year-old boy. “It made you feel like giving him an apple—or maybe your heart,” she said.

Several days later Hemingway wrote “The End” in the seventh notebook.

In New York Dos Passos was feeling sufficiently recovered to sail to Europe. He joined Gerald and Sara Murphy in Cap d’Antibes for a cruise on Gerald’s new yacht. The Picaflor, Spanish for hummingbird, was a racing sloop with a Russian captain at the helm. Sara chose to leave the men to their sail, and they headed for Genoa, Italy. In the moonlight, with all sails up, the men reveled at the nighttime beauty of the Mediterranean. The sea, however, had less regard for them, and a strong wind came up. “Suddenly it seemed like one of those windstorms in Vergil’s Aeneid when the winds blow from all directions at once,” said Dos Passos. The men, clueless on proper handling of sails except for the Russian, barely managed to lower sufficient amounts of canvas before the wind knocked the yacht over. They limped into the port of Savona, almost foundering on the rocks of the channel into the harbor.

The Picaflor was swamped and listing and needed a tow in a hurry. As Murphy and the Russian bailed, Dos Passos tried to find the appropriate Italian word in a dictionary to call for help. The word he settled on was for steamboat. “It certainly didn’t sound right, but for what seemed like hours I hung in the shrouds drenched to the skin and howled ayuto and pyroscafo at dim figures round the lighthouse.” They were eventually rescued.

Dos Passos said his good-byes and made his way to Paris for a reunion with a boisterously happy Hemingway. Autumn brought the publication of Hemingway’s first book from a major publisher. Boni & Liveright printed thirteen hundred copies of In Our Time, publishing the title in upper and lower case to differentiate from the smaller Paris collection of stories that was sold under the name in our time. Reviews were complimentary, although the lack of a story in many of the stories puzzled a few critics. The New York Times greeted the book with enthusiasm. “Ernest Hemingway has a lean, pleasing, tough resilience,” the paper said. “His language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean: his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own. Every syllable counts toward a stimulating, entrancing experience of magic.” The Book-man was more reserved. The collection offered, it said, “sketches which show clear, vigorous beauty and a vigorous acceptance of life in its proper proportions.” But the magazine did not list it as a recommended selection. That honor went to Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter along with some other titles.

Hemingway loaned his copy of Dark Laughter to Dos Passos, and the two talked about the book over lunch in Paris. Rather than be pleased for Anderson, Hemingway opted to bite the hand of the man whose advice had brought him to Paris, encouraged his writing, and contributed a strong endorsement on the cover of In Our Time. In a matter of only a few short weeks Hemingway penned a cruel parody of Anderson’s Dark Laughter.

Literary parodies were much in vogue, and Donald Stewart had done well with his. But Hemingway’s motivation was more than pecuniary: he planned on thrusting a literary rapier at Anderson to publicly break with his mentor as well as Gertrude Stein while he was at it. Any hint that he was an imitator was an affront. His parody, which he named The Torrents of Spring, made no pretention of being more than a hurriedly penned spoof. One chapter had been written in a mere two hours, Hemingway confessed to readers. “Then went out to lunch with John Dos Passos, whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides. This is what is known in the provinces as log-rolling.” Over sole meunière and wild rabbit stew accompanied by bottles of Montrachet and Hospice de Beaune wine, 1919 vintages, as well as a bottle of Chambertin, Hemingway read the chapter to Dos Passos, after which he claimed his friend exclaimed, “Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece.”

The still-unknown Hemingway was giving himself imaginary compliments from Dos Passos, his more famous and successful friend. It got Dos Passos to wonder whether Hemingway was getting back at him for strictures in the book contract he had helped obtain. It required that Hemingway provide an option on his next two works. The aspiring writer, with only a short story collection to his name, was not one to be contractually shackled, especially when he believed unperceptive editors were the only barriers to his eventual success.

Possibly this was Hemingway’s motive, Dos Passos thought: “Was he deliberately writing stuff that Liveright, as Sherwood Anderson’s publisher and friend, couldn’t possibly print, or was it just a heartless boy’s prank?” The work was certainly funny, and Dos Passos laughed at the table in La Closerie des Lilas where Hemingway read aloud from it. But publishing the book would be asking for trouble, and Dos Passos told him so. The book is not good enough to stand on its own, he said. More important, it was not a worthy successor to follow on the tails of In Our Time. When they parted, Dos Passos thought he had talked his friend out of publishing it.

Hadley also implored Ernest not to publish The Torrents of Spring. But another woman in Hemingway’s world was of a different opinion. Pauline Pfeiffer was the newest member of the Hemingway court that drank at La Closerie del Lilas or ate cassoulet at Négre de Toulouse. She told Hemingway to disregard Dos Passos’s advice and urged him to submit the parody to his publisher. He listened to what she had to say.

Hadley had only herself to blame, as it had been she who brought this woman into their circle. They met at a tea given by Kathleen Cannell in her apartment a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower. Cannell, who knew almost the entire expatriate community, frequently introduced newcomers. It was fur coat weather, and Pauline, accompanied by her sister Virginia, came dressed in a new chipmunk coat from a noted Paris couturier. The dark-eyed sisters were petite with black bobbed hair cut across the forehead in such a way as to remind Cannell of Japanese dolls.

Pauline Pfeiffer and Hadley found they had much in common, having both grown up in St. Louis and sharing the friendship of Katy Smith, whom Pauline had met at the University of Missouri journalism school. As a matter of fact, it had been Smith who urged Pfeiffer to look up the Hemingways in Paris. In turn, after coming to Paris Pauline urged Katy to come as well. Her letter also included a suggestion that the city was fertile hunting grounds for a husband. Smith chose to remain stateside.

Disregarding the advice of his best friend and that of his wife as well, Hemingway wrapped up the manuscript of The Torrents of Spring and mailed it to his publisher, asking for a $500 advance, more than twice what he had been given for In Our Time. The money, however, was not what mattered: the move was strategic. If Boni & Liveright rejected the book, Hemingway would be contractually released from the publisher’s option on future works. It had been a part of the deal he had agreed to, as most first-time authors do, feeling like a beggar at the table when being offered one’s first contract. But now that Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, was interested in his work, Hemingway wanted his freedom.

Fitzgerald had told Max Perkins that, although he had not met Hemingway, this unknown writer in Paris had a significant literary future. Perkins, one of New York’s leading book editors, was not one to miss out on the opportunity of signing a writer at the beginning of a career. In turn Hemingway told Perkins he would send him his manuscripts if he could get free of obligations to Boni & Liveright. Perkins was willing to suffer through publishing the frivolous Torrents of Spring in order to get his hands on the serious but incomplete manuscript set in Spain.

At the Dingo American Bar and Restaurant in Montparnasse, a new favorite haunt of late-night drinkers, as it was open all night, Hemingway met Fitzgerald. His behind-the-scenes benefactor was drunk and, in his stupor, heaped high but slurred compliments on Hemingway. Friends brought an end to this first meeting between the writers when Fitzgerald looked like he might pass out. They took him back to his hotel room. The second meeting a few days later at La Closerie des Lilas went better. Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to read The Great Gatsby, which had just come out. Hemingway found it to be terrific, and the two began a literary friendship.

Both from the Midwest and only three years apart, the two men took up in conversation and correspondence the themes common to their generation. For Fitzgerald, who had not witnessed the war, alcoholism, love, money, decadence, and despair were the stuff of his first three novels. The Great War earned a brief mention in his first novel This Side of Paradise when the protagonist takes a protracted leave from the pages when he serves in the army.

This was not the case for Hemingway. He believed the war had left an infection in its wake. It had fractured their generation’s world. Its survivors—at least those in their circle—seemed to be on a hopeless search for meaning that took on a pursuit of sex, adventure, and conversation awash in booze. Hemingway was thinking of calling his book The Lost Generation: A Novel, after a comment Gertrude Stein had made to him. As Bill Gorton, a character in the novel-in-progress, explained, “You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see?”

Writing about the war itself, not its later effect, remained a cathartic pursuit for Hemingway. He carried physical and mental scars from the moment when the mortar fell near him along the Piave River. He needed, as Dos Passos had done, to get it down on paper. The books Americans were reading that year included Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and Dark Laughter by Anderson, which Hemingway described as “about 350 pages of perfect diahorreah or however it is spelled.” They were the works of authors who had all missed being part of the Great War. Hemingway’s frontline experience set him apart from them, with the exception of Dos Passos. Hemingway, after all, had the scars and shrapnel wounds to remind all that his near-death experience made him different.

Hemingway was like those soldiers who had returned from the war with varying degrees of psychological trauma. British doctors were only beginning to use the term shell shock and were among the first to come to terms with the neurotic cracks they found among the men they treated. Typical of the soldiers seeking help in British hospitals was one who had suffered an injury similar to Hemingway’s at about the same time in the war. “I was one of the first to be hit,” he had told British doctors, “and, despite the pain of the wound and the terror that I should bleed to death before I was attended to, I kept on repeating to myself ‘It’s over now. It’s over now.’ And so it was, for me at any rate.” But when the soldier was released from the hospital many months later, he found he was physically healed but not psychologically. “I was just twenty-one years of age, but I was an old man—cynical, irreligious, bitter, and disillusioned. I have been trying to grow young ever since.”

W. H. Rivers, a British psychiatrist who worked at Craiglockhart War Hospital, was convinced the trauma his patients experienced was made worse by their belief that if they repressed the haunting memories, they would cease to be a problem; rather, Rivers sought to have his patients make the memories more bearable by confronting and examining them. One of the means to do so was by writing about the trauma.

Feeling inadequate for having only made it as far as a stateside military training camp before the war ended, Fitzgerald admitted to Hemingway he regretted not having been part of the war. “The reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all,” Hemingway replied. Then in a remarkable admission for a man who had dined off exaggerated war tales, Hemingway continued. “Don’t for Christ sake feel bad about missing the war,” he told Fitzgerald, “because I didn’t see or get anything worth a damn out of the whole show.”

Hemingway confessed he had been too young when he went to Italy. But Dos Passos, said Hemingway—whose work both writers admired—there was a man who had seen and understood the war. “Dos, fortunately, went to the war twice and grew up in between.” His first effort One Man’s Initiation had been lousy, but not his second book, Hemingway continued. “What made Three Soldiers a swell book was the war. What made Streets of Night a lousy book was Boston. One as well written as the other.” Fitzgerald shared Hemingway’s dismal view of Dos Passos’s Boston novel but now found the early faith he had in Dos Passos, based on Three Soldiers, had been restored.

Manhattan Transfer, which was in stores, was “astonishingly good,” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins. The book was eclipsing Hemingway’s modest success with In Our Time. The New York Times heralded Manhattan Transfer as “a powerful and sustained piece of work.” Comparing his efforts to change the nature of novels with that of James Joyce, the lengthy review gave Dos Passos’s book the prominent and expansive space reserved for works of importance. The reviewer, in breathless prose much like that of the author’s, told readers that “the real ‘meat’ of his strange book comes in the host of human moths more or less singed or wilted, who flutter and swarm round the lights of Broadway and Fifth Avenue—tramps, drunkard, wastrels, homo-sexualists, prostitutes more or less accredited, ‘Villagers,’ waiters, bootleggers and ruffians, with the shadow of Jefferson Market Night Court somehow never far from their shoulders.”

Sinclair Lewis told readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Dos Passos’s work was a novel of great importance. “I regard Manhattan Transfer as more important in every way than anything by Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust or even the great whiteboard, Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses.”

It was a moment of triumph, but as was his habit, Dos Passos had elected to be in an inaccessible spot when the critics delivered their verdict. This time he was in the outer reaches of Morocco. When he reemerged and reached a city with international communications he learned critics had acclaimed Manhattan Transfer and that the book was already in its third printing. He picked up a postcard featuring a street scene of a cobblestone street in Algiers with a merchant wearing a white apron looking toward the cameraman with curiosity and veiled women making purchases. Addressing it to Hemingway, he scribbled, “Algiers is just like Belloc-Lowndes’ description of Lacville—gambling everywhere and insufficient lights. It’s swell. Met John the Baptist on the street, also Julius Caesar, Seneca, Tadius, Iscariost.… Up to neck in couscous. Love to Hadley.”

It was time to emerge again from hiding. In March 1926 Dos Passos persuaded a pilot to let him sit with the cargo in a plane bound for Marseille. The flight was cold and rough, with stops in Spain. In the turbulence Dos Passos vomited into his hat. Once in France he went straight to Cap d’Antibes, where the Murphys welcomed him. Dos Passos learned from them that Boni & Liveright had rejected Hemingway’s parody of Anderson. Freed from his contractual obligations, Hemingway had made a rapid round trip to New York City and signed a contract with Perkins at Scribner’s to publish both The Torrents of Spring and the novel he was finishing.

While Hemingway was in New York City the Nation magazine published an article comparing his work to that of Dos Passos. Both men are writers of unusual integrity, poet and essayist Alan Tate wrote. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer would alter American consciousness and Hemingway’s style would be noticed, he predicted. “The passionate accuracy of particular observation, the intense monosyllabic diction, the fidelity of internal demands of the subject—these qualities fuse in the most completely realized naturalistic fiction of the age.”

Back in Europe, Hemingway urged Dos Passos to join him and Hadley in Schruns, Austria, where the high, powdery snow that spring made for great skiing, and to bring the Murphys along. When they got there in the middle of March Dos Passos and Gerald Murphy looked over the scene with trepidation. Massive snow-covered mountains surrounded the village on all sides. As Dos Passos had not skied since his days in boarding school and Gerald had few of the necessary skills, the slopes looked daunting. They both knew it was useless to try to keep up with the more athletic Hemingway, an inequality their host greatly enjoyed. Murphy did his best, and Dos Passos resorted to using his backside to slow his downward speed whenever he spotted a tree or obstacle. By the end of several runs he had a hole in the back of his pants.

As they did whenever together, Dos Passos and Hemingway talked shop. Hemingway had been reading Manhattan Transfer and had mixed feelings about it. “Twice I didn’t think I would be able to finish it—or care about finishing it and each time when I started reading again it was much more interesting,” he confided to his new editor, Max Perkins. What disturbed Hemingway the most was Dos Passos’s conjoining of words such as in the sentence: “It was a narrowwindowed sixstory tenement. The hookandladder has just drawn up.” The two argued about it. Hemingway believed the additional shade of meaning gained by combining the words is lost by the jolt given the reader by its oddity. “Dos himself,” Hemingway reported to Perkins, “says now he thinks it was a mistake coupling the words.”

In the evenings, spent and exhausted, the Hemingways, Murphys, and Dos Passos gathered around radiating porcelain stoves, where they ate trout and drank hot kirsch. Feeling the warm comfort of friends, one night Hemingway brought out his much-revised manuscript, due in New York in two months. For the first time an audience listened as he began to read aloud from his first novel.