19

ADOPTING DOS PASSOS’S HABIT OF BEING FAR AWAY WHEN REVIEWS OF his books appeared, Hemingway was in Paris when A Farewell to Arms neared its publication date. It had been a long editorial battle to preserve the salty vocabulary sprinkled about the book. “If a word can be printed and is needed in the text than it is a weakening to omit it,” Hemingway told Perkins. “If it cannot be printed without the book being suppressed all right.” In the end his editor conceded to son of a bitch and whore but fuck and cocksucker had been struck from the book, replaced with dashes.

The battle over these words in the manuscript had ended in a draw, but not so with Scribner’s Magazine, which was publishing excerpts. Its editor insisted on such a rigorous cleaning of the excerpts that even the rather chaste scene in which Barkley and Henry have sex was reduced to a mention of beating hearts. The expurgation was insufficient for the Boston crowd. The Watch and Ward Society, whose original name the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice revealed its purpose more clearly, succeeded in barring newsstands from selling issues of Scribner’s with the book excerpts. “Hey you old pornographer,” Dos Passos teased Hemingway. “They’ve nailed Scribner’s family journal in Boston.”

On September 27, 1929, A Farewell to Arms appeared in bookstores. “First reviews splendid,” Perkins telegraphed Hemingway in Paris the next morning. Indeed, the critics were saying the kinds of things writers dream of hearing. They certainly gratified the author with an insatiable appetite for praise. Critic Percy Hutchison, reviewing the book for the New York Times, was so thoroughly smitten by Hemingway’s prose that he referred to “what may be termed the Hemingway school.” Best of all for this critic as well as others, the daring nature of the writing in the earlier novel, The Sun Also Rises, was now accompanied by a dramatic story of war and love in this new work. “It is a moving and beautiful book,” Hutchison concluded.

Paper after paper joined the chorus of approval. The Chicago Tribune, which had complained about The Sun Also Rises, said readers would find in this book “a blossoming of a most unusual genius of our day.” Its critic, Fanny Butcher, confessed that she sobbed uncontrollably reading the final pages. Even Hemingway’s mother, who had wanted to burn The Sun Also Rises, wrote an ecstatic letter of praise.

Dos Passos put into print the compliments he had conveyed privately to Hemingway earlier that year when he read the carbon copy of the manuscript. “Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms is the best-written book that has seen the light in America for many a long day,” Dos Passos wrote in his review for the New Masses. “The stuff will match up as narrative prose with anything that’s been written since there was an English language.”

The book took off. Within a month it had sold nearly thirty thousand copies and had displaced Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front on the best-seller’s list. “Hem,” wrote Dos Passos, “do you realize you’re the King of the fiction racket?”

In October Dos Passos faced an editorial fight of his own, similar to what Hemingway had endured with A Farewell to Arms, over what four-letter words the public could handle in print. His editor at Harper’s, Eugene Saxton, was more willing to accept impolite words in The 42nd Parallel than when he had published Three Soldiers eight years earlier while working at the more conservative Doran. “Clap,” “hard on,” “crissake,” and “they loved each other on the sofa and she let him do everything he wanted” survived the editorial blue pencil but not “feeling her tongue in his mouth.”

The ambitiousness of Dos Passos’s project was visible on every page of the manuscript he turned over to Saxton. The book held three streams of action braided together. Making their way through a tangle of modern challenges until their lives slowly converge were a member of the International Workers of the World, a stenographer, a public relations man, an artist, and a mechanic from Fargo, North Dakota. Between their tales Dos Passos interspersed his newsreels filled with scraps of news and songs. Their appearance marked off time. Additionally, the camera eye contained fragmentary autobiographical scenes. If those elements alone didn’t complicate the manuscript sufficiently, he added finely written poetic renderings of famous figures such as Eugene V. Debs, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, and Robert M. La Follette, among others.

Fortunately for the reader he greatly cut down the use of made-up compound words, but he retained the sense of urgency and the sense of constant motion of his earlier novel Manhattan Transfer. Unlike anything he had written before, Dos Passos was now working on an immense canvas, one that could not be contained in a single book. He realized it would require three books to execute his plan. He shared his plans with Hemingway. “You can always think that if volume one is shit, volume two will be swell,” Dos Passos told him. “Jesus, I hope it’s not the beginning of the end.” Hemingway tried to soothe his friend’s nerves. “Trilogies are undoubtedly the thing,” he replied. “Look at the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—Nothing’s gone much bigger than that.”

Dos Passos was already deep into the second volume as he proofed the galleys of the first one in October 1929. He was calling it 1919. It also featured five characters, several of them from the first book, but their lives would be easier to follow as Dos Passos reduced the nonfictional elements. Instead, the book revolved more around the often-autobiographical tale of a pacifist ambulance driver who gets in trouble with his superiors for disloyalty while in Italy, carries buckets of severed limbs out from a Paris war hospital, and falls in love with a woman who like Crystal Ross was from Texas, but unlike her becomes pregnant and meets a tragic end when she agrees to take a ride in a French officer’s plane that crashes.

The 42nd Parallel had left readers at the moment in 1918 when Charley, the Fargo mechanic, signs up as an ambulance driver and boards the Chicago, the same ship that took Dos Passos and Hemingway to the war. In 1919 Dos Passos returned to his memories of the European battlefields. Hemingway may have worked the war out of his system with A Farewell to Arms, but Dos Passos was not yet done.

With The 42nd Parallel proofed and consigned to his editor, John and Katy Dos Passos took what little money they had and headed to Paris. The decline in the cost of passage by ship helped make the trip more affordable. Since the collapse of the stock market in October ocean liners were departing from New York with empty cabins. As neither Dos Passos, who never had much money, nor Hemingway, despite his recent financial success, held investments or factory jobs, they were less buffeted than many others by the Great Depression. Sales of A Farewell to Arms also seemed unaffected. “My books,” said Dos Passos, “could hardly have sold less anyway.”

When they reached Paris in late November 1929 Dos Passos was the happiest he had been in years. He eagerly took Katy on a Bateaux Mouches ride on the Seine, looking up at the ancient buildings of Paris bathed in the winter sun. Another day they rode the train to Sceaux-Robinson, a small town eight miles southwest of Paris renowned for its scenery. There they ate lunch in one of the restaurants built on the branches of massive chestnut trees, the presence of which had inspired residents to add Robinson of the book Robinson Crusoe to their town’s name. Back in Paris they made the rounds of the cafés in the company of the poet Blaise Cendrars and took a meal in the home of artist Fernand Léger, whose wife cooked the best blanquette de veau Dos Passos had tasted but didn’t remain in the house at night because she had a lover. “They lived up to the rest of the obligations of matrimony in a curious formal French way,” said Dos Passos.

John also introduced Katy to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Scott and Ernest Hemingway had been quarreling by mail over remarks Gertrude Stein made comparing the two authors that Fitzgerald had taken as a criticism. Hemingway, usually willing to hold his position to the bitter end, tried assuaging Fitzgerald’s feelings. “I’ll be damned if I going to lose you as a friend through some bloody squabble.” It was clear, as the Dos Passoses soon learned when they visited, that not all was well in the Fitzgerald household. Scott was drinking heavily, and Zelda was exhibiting the beginnings of a mental breakdown, telling Dos Passos she wanted to dance in the Ballets Russes. “For anyone who was fond of the Fitzgeralds,” said Dos Passos, “it was heartbreaking to be with them.”

The Dos Passoses and the Hemingways caught up with each other a few days later. Ernest’s mood surprised them. He should have been celebrating his success with his new book and the financial security it provided, especially as royalties from his first successful book, The Sun Also Rises, still went to Hadley, but he was downhearted about the mysterious death of Harry Crosby. A former ambulance driver, Crosby had been an important part of expatriate literary life in postwar Paris. He had been found dead from a bullet wound in a hotel in what the newspapers deemed a suicide pact with his lover, who was also found dead at the scene.

Crosby’s death added to Hemingway’s growing sense of loss about Paris. His use of friends in The Sun Also Rises book had closed the door on any return. “The Hemingway who sat nightly in the Latin Quarter is no more,” wrote a reporter for the New York Evening Post. “The Sun Also Rises,” he continued, “marked his permanent exodus from the Dome, the Rotonde, and the rest of the Bohemian resorts of Montparnasse.”

Equally responsible for Hemingway’s foul disposition was gossip. He had discovered the cost of fame. Among the most stinging bits of malicious talk came from Robert McAlmon, his first publisher, who claimed that Ernest was a homosexual whose lover was Fitzgerald and that Pauline was a lesbian. Zelda Fitzgerald, apparently dissatisfied with her husband’s bed skills, added to the tempest by saying publicly that Scott had “an unusual attachment” to Ernest. There was probably no other single thing that could rile Hemingway as much as an attack on his much-cultivated masculinity.

Hemingway sought, as he often did, to put geographical distance between himself and his woes. He and Pauline left town and followed John and Katy Dos Passos to Montana-Vermala, a tiny village in the Swiss Alps where the Murphys had gone for the winter. Their nine-year-old son Patrick had tuberculosis, and doctors had urged he get mountain air. Dorothy Parker, who had gotten arrested with Dos Passos during the Sacco and Vanzetti protests, joined the group. Parker had just published an adulation of Hemingway in the New Yorker rife with errors, and he had little patience for her. But she did her best to enliven the gathering with her celebrated humor. John and Katy Dos Passos joined the effort. “We skied and laughed our heads off over cheese fondue and the magnificent local white wine evenings in front of the fire,” he said. “We were all set on keeping the Murphys cheered up. For a while it worked.”

Hemingway contributed little to the jollification. He came down with a cold, and he and Pauline soon returned to Paris. As soon as Ernest left the Alps, Donald Stewart showed up. He had also been invited but delayed his arrival until Hemingway was gone. They had not spoken since the publication of The Sun Also Rises. What remained made for a morose gathering. “Trapped on this desolate snow-covered silent mountain,” Stewart said, “with Death seeming to be waiting mockingly in the cold clear air outside, were two people who had been our models for the Happy Life.”

The Dos Passoses took their leave. John had known the Murphys’ son Patrick since he was little child and had no idea whether he would see him again. The couple went next to Schruns, Austria. John wanted to show Katy the spot where in 1926 he had spent what he deemed “the last unalloyed good time” with Ernest, who was then still married to Hadley. Katy knew of the moment because Hadley had written from Schruns, urging her to come as well. The couple went back to Paris and then down to Spain, again revisiting many of John Dos Passos’s favorite places. When they finished their tour of Europe in February, which had amply substituted for a honeymoon, they headed across the ocean bound not for their home in Cape Cod but for Key West via Havana.

The first reviews of The 42nd Parallel reached Dos Passos soon after settling in for a long stay in Key West. “The Great American novel has never been written, perhaps never will be,” proclaimed Time magazine. “But author Dos Passos has made a bold bid for it. Certainly no U.S. novel has ever been more comprehensive than The 42nd Parallel, none has ever given a broader, more sweeping view of the whole country.”

Edmund Wilson, who by now had become one of the nation’s premier critics, predicted that Dos Passos’s trilogy “may well turn out to be the most important novel which any American of Dos Passos’s generation has written.” Again, as he had earlier, Wilson told readers Dos Passos was the only novelist concerned with the important political and social issues of the time. “The 42nd Parallel is not superior to Hemingway, for example, from the point of view of its literary originality and its intellectual interest, it seems to me by far the most remarkable, the most encouraging novel which I have read since the War.”

Other complimentary reviews made their way down to the tip of Florida. On the whole they shared Wilson’s estimation of the book’s importance, but some complained about Dos Passos’s continued efforts at experimentation. The Nation, for instance, was so put off that the magazine decided the only unifying aspect of the novel was its binding.

Ernest persuaded John to accompany him on a ten-day fishing trip to the Dry Tortugas. The men went and left Katy and Pauline in Key West. As usual, being on the water with a fishing pole was Hemingway’s ideal way of spending time. If not a nightmare for Dos Passos, it certainly was not his idea of fun. But whenever he was in Hemingway’s company Dos Passos worked to overcome his insecurities. He tried to keep up with Hemingway on all fronts, even imitating aspects of his friend’s braggadocio behavior and coarse language in his letters.

Dos Passos wished he had Hemingway’s financial success, as he was always having to rapidly dash off articles just to make ends meet. But Dos Passos had something Hemingway coveted: with or without cause, Hemingway was jealous of the critical praise Dos Passos got. “It is true,” Hemingway confessed to Fitzgerald a little more than a year earlier, “Mr. Hemingway sometimes envies Mr. Dos Passos.”

The revolution they had set off to make in literature had, in large measure, succeeded. Everyone who read books knew of Hemingway. Literary circles admired Dos Passos’s work, even if they had not read it. The two men had come to a juncture in their lives. They were both in their thirties, and instead of being in the position of having to write an attention-getting work, they were under pressure to write a better book than the last one.

Dos Passos returned to his ambitious multivolume fictional portrait of America. Done for the time being with writing about war, Hemingway set off to write a book about bullfighting.

In October 1930 Dos Passos sorely needed a break. His manuscript 1919 was being obstreperous, and he felt mired in the morass of politics. Between his rabble-rousing in the New Republic and the New Masses and trying to finish the book, he had not rested since his springtime fishing trip with Hemingway. Meanwhile his friend had continued his pursuit of killing things with a hunting trip south of Billings, Montana.

Hemingway’s letters were filled with news of his most recent slaughter of elks, rams, and bears. Pauline’s wealthy and generous uncle funded the trip to polish Hemingway’s marksmanship before a planned African safari. “Grizzlies are best training for Africa—the only dangerous animal in North America,” Hemingway wrote to an old friend. The rich uncle now offered to pay for Dos Passos to join Hemingway for ten days of hunting. Pauline had returned home to care for their child, and as everyone knew, Hemingway liked an appreciative audience.

Nearsighted and fainthearted, Dos Passos was no hunter, but time with Hemingway far removed from the pressures of writing promised to be restorative. Besides, Katy was all for it. In late October Dos Passos descended from a train in Billings, Montana, and found Hemingway waiting to take him to the ranch.

Early the next morning Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the ranch owner set off on horses followed by a string of mules loaded down with supplies, including an ample supply of liquor. They soon came across big animal tracks in the snow but not the creatures that had made them. For Dos Passos this was a measure of comfort. Hemingway had given him a Mannlicher rifle that was very popular with deer and big-game hunters. But in Dos Passos’s hands it was an unwieldy contrivance. He couldn’t release the safety fast enough when game was present, and when he did the gun jammed. Soon he knocked the telescopic sight out of line. Elks, bears, and antelope had little to fear from Dos Passos, who spent his time reveling in the open western landscape and watching Hemingway hunt. “He’d smell a bull elk almost as soon as the elk would smell him,” said Dos Passos.

After ten cold days of tracking and shooting, the men returned to the ranch. Dos Passos was due to take a train but instead accepted Hemingway’s offer to return east by car with him. They packed their belongings in a Ford roadster Hemingway had once used to motor to Pamplona that had been shipped home by boat from Bordeaux. A ranch hand seeking to hitch a ride took the rumble seat in the back.

They spent the first night camping in Yellowstone Park. At the end of the next day they approached Park City, a few miles to the west of Billings. Conversation was animated as they made their way down Route 10, which ran along the north side of the Yellowstone River. The two-lane road had been recently resurfaced, leaving it without a centerline, and the sun was setting behind them. As in Spain, time together included booze. “Of course,” said Dos Passos, “we had been drinking right much bourbon.”

The headlights of a car emerged from the shadow-lined dips and rises of the road. Hemingway was momentarily blinded and steered to the right to give the oncoming automobile room. He discovered—in his words—“there wasn’t enough road.” Their car plunged into a ditch and flipped over. Dos Passos and the ranch hand crawled out uninjured. But Hemingway was pinned behind the wheel. They helped him out of the car. When he stood up the men saw Hemingway’s right arm hanging limp and askew.

A passing car stopped and gave them a ride to the St. Vincent’s Hospital in Billings forty minutes away while Hemingway kept his arm immobile between his legs. Once in Billings Dos Passos wired Pauline, who was with her family in Piggott, Arkansas. She immediately boarded a train, and Dos Passos met her at the station two days later. By then her husband had the good fortune of being seen by Dr. Louis Allard, a noted orthopedic surgeon. Allard opened Hemingway’s arm above the elbow and discovered the fracture traversed the bone in a twisting angle. He drilled holes through the bone that he then threaded with kangaroo tendons to bind the injured portion, a technique developed, not surprisingly, by Australian surgeons.

With Pauline by her husband’s bedside, Dos Passos returned to the car, which had been pulled back onto the road. Its doors were mangled, but it was drivable. He took it to a mechanic in Columbus, some twenty-five miles to the west, and then found a train to take him home to Provincetown.

Archibald MacLeish flew out to see Hemingway. After enduring terrifying flights on Northwest Airlines, he reported finding Hemingway “in bed with a magnificent black beard, full of suspicion of my motives and convinced—or so he said—that I had come out to see him die.”

Instead, Hemingway began months of convalescence, frustrated at having lost the use of his writing arm. In the race to get their next book to readers, Dos Passos had the lead.