16
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1926, ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S THE SUN ALSO RISES went on sale. Wrapped in a yellow and gold dust jacket with an illustration of a woman whose loose vestments exposed her thigh and shoulder, Hemingway’s first novel was added to bookstore shelves already crowded with best-sellers such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos and Beau Geste by P. C. Wren. But Charles Scribner’s Sons knew it had something special. Its staff worked on advertisements to place in newspapers, promising the novel would “command the sharpest attention even in a season so crowded with good fiction.”
The New York Times was the first to agree with the publisher’s assessment. “This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature,” the reviewer wrote a week after the book’s appearance. “No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.”
Other reviews soon echoed the Times’s assessment. “The dialogue is brilliant,” said the New York Herald Tribune. “If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it.” The New York Sun also came up empty in seeking a comparison. “There is no one writing whose prose has more of the force and vibrancy of good, direct, natural, colloquial speech.”
Those reviews that did find fault with the work objected to the descriptions of the free-spirited irresponsible life led by expatriates while most Americans remained at home and at their jobs as well as to the perceived promiscuity on the part of the character Ashley. As one critic asked, “Why does Mr. Hemingway, who can draw flesh-and-blood, waste his time on the bibulous shadows?”
Hemingway’s hometown newspaper reflected its pride in the Oak Park youth who had become a noted writer but carped that he was wasting his immense skill on an unworthy subject. “Ernest Hemingway can be a distinguished writer if he wishes to be,” said the Chicago Tribune. “He is, even in this book, but it is a distinction hidden under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality.” His mother was less kind. Grace told Ernest she had avoided attending her book group when it discussed The Sun Also Rises. “It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year,” she wrote. “Surely you have other words in your vocabulary besides ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’—every page fills me with a sick loathing.” Had her son not written it, she concluded, she would have pitched the book into the fire.
But in the end even some of his most vociferous critics capitulated when it came to Hemingway’s ability to write. “A writer named Hemingway has arisen,” announced The Atlantic, “who writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he has fashioned the article of writing himself.”
Like many others, Dos Passos was in awe of the writing as he read the passages of the book in preparation for review in the New Masses. Its bedazzling nature, however, befuddled Dos Passos. “It’s an extraordinarily well written book,” he said, “so well written that while I was reading it I kept telling myself I must be growing dough-headed for not getting it.”
He turned to his typewriter and began his review by chastising his friend, with whom he had once read biblical passages in a Paris café, for beginning the book with a quotation from the Bible. It leads readers to believe the book will be substantial, Dos Passos wrote. “Instead of these things of deep importance you find yourself reading about the tangled love affairs and bellyaches of a gloomy young literatizing Jew, of an English Lady of title who’s a good sport, and a young man working the Paris office of an American newspaper, the ‘I’ who tells the story.”
Frustrated by Hemingway’s plot—or lack of one—Dos Passos said the lost generation needed an epic, but The Sun Also Rises was not it. “This novel strikes me,” Dos Passos wrote, “as being a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival.”
Dos Passos read what he had written. The review, which would be read by all their friends, praised Hemingway’s writing but came down hard on the book’s subject. He took a carbon copy of the review, scribbled “God this is a rotten review” at the top, and stuffed it, along with a note, into an envelope addressed to Hemingway. “I’ve written a damn priggish mealy mouthed review that makes me sick,” he told his friend. “The book makes me sick anyway, besides making me very anxious to see you, and homesick for good drinks and wisecracks and Pamplona and bullfights and all that sort of thing, god damn it and them.”
“I’ve never felt so rotten about anything,” he continued. “Hem, please forgive all this rubbish.” Dos Passos was in a dark mood brought on by the impending execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and the evident futility of what he had written about the case. “Everything I write seems to be crap and everything everybody I like writes seems to be crap.” As writers, they often found it easier to share intimacies on paper rather than in person.
He was not done yet. He rambled on, almost incoherently, comparing Hemingway’s masterpiece to his own Streets of Night, which both Hemingway and Fitzgerald had denigrated, and saying that neither of them could write and should take up charcoal burning. But in the next instant he confessed his enviousness. “You write so damn well and the book is damn readable,” he said. “I’d like to get cockeyed in fine a l’eau in your company.”
Instead Dos Passos packed his bags and grabbed a train.
Getting out of town was a favored way out of problems for Dos Passos. “Locomotion even under the most adverse conditions always cheers me up,” he told his war buddy Robert Hillyer two years earlier while on a ship. After a brief stop in northern Virginia to visit his half-brother, Dos Passos went for a three-day walk in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Nobody in the Virginia mountains had ever heard of Sacco and Vanzetti or Marx or expressionism in the theater,” Dos Passos said. “If they had they didn’t give a damn. What a relief!”
He rode the train on to Louisville, St. Louis, and eventually to Dallas. The ride and stops so far had been to gather material for an expansive novel beginning to take seed in his mind about the United States. The stop in Dallas had a more personal purpose. It was where Crystal Ross lived. Since the last time they had been together Ross had taken a job as a professor at Southern Methodist University. When Dos Passos caught up with her in Dallas, she was also preparing an article for the Dallas Morning News that both recounted their time with Hemingway in 1924 and reviewed The Sun Also Rises. “To say it quickly,” Ross wrote, “Ernest Hemingway’s style is remarkable and exciting, and his book valuable; it is not so valuable as his style.” The story of lost Americans and Brits, drifting and drinking in Paris and Pamplona—in which she appears as the “girl in Strasbourg”—was not the point of the work, she perceptively told readers of the Dallas paper. “The things he writes about seem scarcely worth the care of his artistic energy. But what of it? The thing is perfectly done.”
The suitor who had replaced Dos Passos’s place was a Harvard-educated lawyer. Deciding there was little point in trying to win her back, a defeated Dos Passos returned to the train station. Romance continued to disappoint him. “My private life is such a disorganized menagerie of ill fed desires that I’m no authority on Hymen,” he had written earlier in the year to Rummy when he first heard of Ross’s engagement. “I’ve never understood exactly why people get engaged—The only time I did the most disastrous things happened.” But there was no bitterness between Ross and Dos Passos, and they parted as friends.
In Paris Hadley was sorting out her relationship with Hemingway now that Pauline had muscled in. At first Hadley had—acting, in her words, like Emperor Tiberius—ordered that her husband and his lover remain apart for one hundred days. To fulfill the terms of the edict Pauline had left for the United States. If at the end of such time they were still in love, Hadley said, she would consent to a divorce. But before many of the hundred days had passed, Ernest began pelting his wife with pleas. “She’s going crazy without me,” he would tell a dumbfounded but resigned Hadley when he visited her in the hotel where she had moved.
She capitulated. In the end Hadley knew the marriage was over, and vindictiveness was not among her character traits. But in his desire for the new, Ernest failed to see what he was losing in the old. For a man obsessed with writing the one true sentence, he was giving up his one true love. Pauline got word and rushed back to Paris from her exile in the United States. A French court soon granted the Hemingways a divorce on the grounds of desertion and gave Hadley custody of their three-year-old son.
Dos Passos heard of the breakup when he saw Pauline in New York City during her exile. “I’d like to knock your and Hadley’s head together,” he wrote Hemingway. “Hem,” he quickly added, “please forgive all this rubbish. The trouble with me is that I am expatriated—from Paris. Silly hell, ain’t it, we’ll all be expatriates from the Garden of Eden.” But Dos Passos readily admitted liking Pauline. “Why don’t you get to be a Mormon?” he suggested.
Instead Hemingway became a Catholic. To avail himself of a commonly used loophole in the Church proscription regarding remarriage after divorce, Hemingway claimed a priest had baptized him in Italy when he had been wounded in case final unction was needed. If so, it meant he had been Catholic when he had married Hadley in a civil ceremony. This was sufficient for the Roman Catholic Church to consider his first marriage defective in form and thus not a barrier to a wedding. On May 10, 1927, Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer were married in the Église Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau in the Place Victor-Hugo.
In addition to winning the church’s approval for his new marriage, Hemingway had placated Hadley with a promise of financial support, especially as she had custody of their child. He agreed to give over all income from The Sun Also Rises to Hadley, to whom he had dedicated the book along with their son, Bumby. As a result, except the advance, he was earning nothing from his first moneymaking book, which was now well into its third printing. “The Sun has risen,” his editor Max Perkins said, “and is rising steadily.”
When Hemingway read Dos Passos’s review he sloughed off the main criticism but took exception to his comment that the Pamplona described in the book was not as exciting as the place itself. “It would be easy to write about for Dos and make it exciting—because he has been there,” Hemingway wrote Perkins. “But written for him it wouldn’t mean anything to the quite abstract reader that one tries to write for.”
Besides, Dos Passos was becoming a convert to the book’s legion of fans. “The funny thing about The Sun Also Rises,” he wrote to Hemingway from Mexico, where he had gone after seeing Ross in Dallas, “is that in sections it isn’t shitty. It’s only in conjunto that it begins to smell. Of course, it’s perfectly conceivable that it’s really a swell book and that we’re all of us balmy.” Being out of the country in the early part of 1927, Dos Passos was unaware of the book’s popularity. Now into its sixth printing, in April students at Yale had selected the book as their favorite, and even some young women took on the mod dress style of the character Lady Brett Ashley and young men the aloof airs of the protagonist Jake Barnes.
But while Dos Passos begrudgingly admitted to Hemingway that his book had hit the mark, he held his ground in his opposition to his friend’s use of real people for his stories. Beginning in The Torrents of Spring and continuing in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s stories were thinly veiled accounts of the real lives of his friends. It was a dishonorable technique in Dos Passos’s eyes. “I think that all the tendency to write about friends is rotten,” Dos Passos told Hemingway “Writers are per se damn lousy bourgeois parasitic upperclass shits and not to be written about unless they are your enemies.”
Although Dos Passos certainly recognized his former fiancée’s appearance in the novel as the “girl in Strasbourg,” he was unaware that he too had been originally slated for a cameo appearance in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway struck the passage from the second chapter of the book when he cleaned the manuscript of real names. His blue-penciling, however, was insufficient. Everyone in the Paris expatriate community knew who was who in the book. Some, like Donald Stewart, were amused—but he made a living writing satire. Others, like Kitty Cannell, whom Hemingway had told earlier when he was writing the book that it would tear “those bastards apart,” were furious.
The book revolted Cannell. Hemingway had been untrue when he told her she would not be in it. Frances Clyne may not have looked like her, but there was no question she spoke in Cannell’s manner, right down to her jokes. When the poet Hart Crane arrived in Paris and went for a drink at the Coupole brasserie in Montparnasse, he overheard a woman speaking near him at the bar. “Why you’re Kitty Cannell!” he exclaimed. “I’d recognize you anywhere from descriptions.”
“So apparently did everyone in Montparnasse,” Cannell ruefully wrote. But what irritated Cannell the most was Hemingway’s portrayal of Harold Loeb, her former lover. She took to bed where she remained for three days. For his part, Loeb put on a public face and claimed not to have read the book. Later he admitted how offensive he had found Hemingway’s use of him and decided it came from Hemingway’s jealousy over his weekend tryst with Duff Twysden on the way to Pamplona. When Hemingway later ran into Twysden at the Dingo bar she told him she had not been bothered by the book but made sure to point out that unlike the character Ashley in the book, she had not slept with the “bloody bullfighter.”
In the United States, readers took pleasure from the voyeuristic view of the lives of their country’s expatriates. “He drank with them, played with them and in their company watched many an hour slip by,” wrote Joseph Hilton Smyth in the Boston Globe. “Then he went home and wrote a book about them.” The transgression darkened the City of Light, and Hemingway began, for the first time, to consider living elsewhere.
In the end Hemingway accepted Dos Passos’s criticism. “You are right about sticking people’s names in,” Hemingway told him. “You shdn’t do it.” But he couldn’t resist, now that he too had a novel to his name, adding some smug advice regarding Dos Passos’s current writing travails. He did so with a sexual reference, keenly aware of his friend’s discomfort with the topic. “Lay off,” said the younger writer to his older mentor. “What is the use of trying to screw if you are dry. Lay off and it always comes back.”
Ernest and Pauline honeymooned in a small fishing village in Southern France. As he did each summer, Ernest wanted to go to Pamplona. But worrying that his Spanish friends would not approve of his divorce, he left Pauline in San Sebastian and went on in the company of a new friend, a fan actually. Maine native Waldo Peirce, a gregarious talkative painter, had sought out Hemingway in Paris after reading The Sun Also Rises, and the two had hit it off. After a while Ernest went back to San Sebastian to fetch Pauline for the final days of the fiesta. For a brief moment Pamplona was like the July days of 1924 and 1926 and unlike the disastrous one of 1925. Hemingway possessed literary success and the woman he thought he wanted, but monetary riches still escaped him, especially after having given over to Hadley all the royalties from The Sun Also Rises that continued to sell. So he went to work assembling a collection of stories that Perkins could bring out in the fall in hopes of cashing in on his new-found fame.
His parents wrote, not having heard from him in months. Hemingway paused from his work on the story collection to send a six-page reply, apologizing for the shame and suffering his divorce had caused them, telling them that he had not committed adultery and that he would have stayed with Hadley if she had wanted him to. At age twenty-eight he was still lying to his parents and remained angry at his mother for her disapproval of his writing.
“My work,” he wrote, “is much more important to me than anything in the world except for the happiness of three people and you cannot know how it makes me feel for Mother to be ashamed of what I know as you know that there is a God in heaven is not to be ashamed of.”
His new collection of stories was set to appear in October. The title he chose was Men Without Women.
Dos Passos returned to New York from Mexico but was still disconsolate about work. “I can’t seem to get any writing done and I am in a great state of mental and moral decay,” he told his friend John Lawson. He pined for the productive days of Paris, hours at cafés, and mostly for times with Hemingway, “For Christus’ swoote sake Hem you old ostrich,” Dos Passos wrote Hemingway. “Why didn’t you wire me that you wanted to go to Mexico. Geezus I hate mighthabeens.”
The Sacco and Vanzetti case still weighed heavily on Dos Passos’s mind. He had assembled his book on the case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee had published it under the title Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen. Loaded with documents and long excerpts of testimony, the work was more than a defense of the accused; it was a prosecution of American attitudes toward immigrants. “The attitude of press and pulpit, howling about atrocities, civilization (which usually means bank accounts) endangered, women nationalized, put the average right-thinking citizen into such a state of mind that whenever he smelt garlic on a man’s breath he walks past quickly for fear of being knifed,” Dos Passos wrote. “A roomful of people talking a foreign language was most certainly a conspiracy to overturn the Government.”
Emotionally spent from completing the book and his rheumatic fever resurfacing, Dos Passos took a boat to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to hide and rest. St. Thomas’s sun and glasses of “Barbadian enfuriators” and “green swizzles” and planters’ punch worked. “My God Sir,” he wrote to Hemingway, “the drinking down here is amazing.”
After a short stay Dos Passos left St. Thomas refreshed, his fever checked. But back in New York City he learned that a committee appointed by the Massachusetts governor, which included the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, decided the trial had been fair. Incensed, Dos Passos circulated a letter he sent to Lowell. He accused the president of being party “to a judicial murder that will call down on its perpetrators the execration of the civilized world.”
Dos Passos was convinced that Lowell had contributed Harvard’s name to a whitewashing of the state’s failures in the case. Venting his outrage in the Communist paper The Daily Worker, whose press credentials he carried in his pockets, Dos Passos said the actions of Lowell and the committee “draped a pall of respectability over the frame-up and had effectually silenced the ‘best minds.’”
Demonstrations on behalf of the two convicted men grew in number and size in both the United States and abroad. Dos Passos went to Boston to join a small band of protesters on the day before the scheduled execution. At the gold-domed capitol at the top of Beacon Hill five or so policemen looked on, seemingly uninterested in the small band of protesters. But as the protesters marched back and forth, a crowd gathered. A police captain decided matters had gone far enough. “Loitering and sauntering is against the law,” he announced as he stepped into the path of the protesters. “You have seven minutes in which to disperse. Move on.”
The protesters continued marching. Two patrol wagons pulled up, and dozens of police officers spilled out and rushed at the protesters. They grabbed the men by the coat collars and the women by their arms. Dos Passos made a run for it. But he ran smack into a state police officer who obligingly turned him over to a member of Boston’s finest. Along with Dos Passos, writer Dorothy Parker was among those taken into custody. Charged with “loitering and sauntering,” Dos Passos and thirty-nine other protesters were freed after a few hours of custody.
The following day at 11:27 p.m., thirty-three minutes before the first of the men was to be escorted to the electric chair, the Massachusetts governor postponed the execution for eleven days to give the courts a final chance to review last-minute appeals. Dos Passos grew frantic and telegraphed his friends to come to Boston. He wired Edmund Wilson, who was close by in Provincetown. Wilson sent a curt reply of no. Only John Lawson came.
On August 22, as the hour drew near for the execution, Dos Passos went to the Boston Commons, where this time a large numbers of pro-testers had turned out. As the crowd of two thousand began to march toward the state capitol, the police lining both sides of Beacon Street tightened their ranks and warned the oncoming marchers that they were violating the law. After the first group was arrested, Dos Passos and Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet and playwright, came up the hill next, leading a contingent of writers and poets. The police repeated their warning, waited the prescribed seven minutes, and took the group into custody.
Dos Passos, having been previously arrested, now faced a second set of charges. He pleaded not guilty in a courtroom packed with sympathizers. The judge ordered a trial date. Millay’s husband, the wealthy Eugen Boissevain, provided the bail money for everyone, and the group was freed.
At eleven past midnight that night Nicola Sacco was strapped to the electric chair. He cried out “Long live anarchy” as the guards attached the electrodes to his body. Eight minutes later he was dead. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was brought into the execution chamber, and a few minutes later he was dead as well.
Overseas, condemnation of the American execution of the two Italian immigrants came swiftly, and protests frequently turned into riots. Paris saw the worst street violence since before the war. Rioters surged in cafés, turning the saucers, glasses, and tables into weapons against the police attempting to restore order.
Dos Passos was glad to take his leave of Boston, a city in which his most recent novel—as well as Hemingway’s—was banned from sale under the state statutes that prohibited the sale of indecent literature. He fled to Provincetown. He rudely turned down an invitation to his friend Wilson’s party, still angry at his failure to come and join the Boston protests. Dos Passos soon apologized. “You can’t imagine how queerly your wire jangled my nerves—Jesus X Columbus—man didn’t you realize that we were virtually all mad up in Boston—You try battering your head against a stone wall sometime.”
The execution of the two anarchists was for Dos Passos like the European battlefield horrors he had witnessed a decade earlier. But what he had considered an unprincipled and unnecessary war led him to indict the military, not the nation. Now his disillusionment was complete. The United States had let him down. He rushed a thirty-one-line poem into print in the New Masses filled with a sense of despair.
They are dead now
The black automatons have won.
They are burned up utterly
Their flesh has passed into the air of Massachusetts
their dreams have passed into the wind.
The horror of it all was such that Dos Passos renounced even the form of his response, closing the last stanza with,
The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti pushed Dos Passos further to the political left and strengthened his resolve to use his writing as a tool of social change. It also painfully placed a wedge between him and his most cherished literary collaborator. It had been only a few years since he and Hemingway had plotted a radical new course for postwar fiction at a Paris café. But now his friend remained unmoved when Dos Passos urged him to also join the campaign to save the two anarchists. “So Papa Primo won’t let his little innocents hear about the atrocities in the U.S.A.,” Dos Passos caustically wrote. “I’m not sure he’s not right—Well it’s all over now and gone down in History—as far down as the public press can push it.”
A decade earlier, near the French front, Dos Passos and his friend Robert Hillyer had ambitiously begun work on the “G.N.,” referring in code to the “Great Novel” by its initials, like the Jewish prohibition of spelling the name of God. The time had come, Dos Passos decided, to resurrect that ambition and embark on an all-consuming attempt to write the Great American Novel in which he would put the United States on trial. Let Hemingway write about the meaningless life of expatriates, a symptom of a great societal sickness. He would take on the malady itself.