20

WHEN JOHN AND KATY DOS PASSOS ARRIVED IN KEY WEST IN FEBRUARY 1932 they found Ernest and Pauline Hemingway happily ensconced in a two-story, old limestone house with iron-railed balconies. They had bought the rundown place the year before for a modest payment of back taxes owed to the city. After years of rented flats in Paris, extended stays in hotels and resorts, long visits with in-laws, and more rentals in Key West, Ernest finally lived in a place he owned. It pleased him enormously.

It was the first time the two writers had seen each other since Hemingway ran the car off the road in Montana fourteen months prior. His hospital confinement had lasted seven weeks. Even out of the hospital, his damaged arm remained in a sling for a long time. When Hemingway did manage to type with his left hand the result was distressing. “This damned typer skips like a stammering flannel mouthed nigger,” he wrote Peirce almost a year after the accident from Kansas City where he was with Pauline awaiting the birth of their second child.

Nine-pound Gregory Hancock Hemingway made his way into the world on November 12, 1931, by Caesarean section, as had his brother Patrick three years earlier. Also coming after a prolonged labor was Hemingway’s new manuscript, a massive paean to bullfighting. Hemingway put to words his love for what some saw as a sport, others an art form, and yet others a horror. As he wrote, he returned to his pursuit of the one true sentence.

I suppose from a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death, and I should not try to defend it now, only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it.

Bullfighting, bulls, and matadors were the subject, but underneath the accounts, explanations, and anecdotes was a meditation on death. He even recounted the first deaths he saw in war-torn Italy when he collected the mutilated corpses following the explosion at a munitions factory.

In Hemingway’s view death was the one inescapable reality he found among residents of the Old Castile region where bullfighting was most cherished. It was the one thing of which they could be sure, he believed, the only security that surpassed material comforts, and the concept that supported a religion in which life is shorter than death. By the end of the manuscript thirty-two-year-old Hemingway sounded old. Piling on one reminiscence after another, he spoke wistfully of the Spain he had known, lamenting that he would never again ride back from Toledo in the dark washing away the dust with Spanish brandy.

He titled the book Death in the Afternoon and sent it to his typists.

After the car accident Dos Passos had retreated from everyone’s company to finish 1919. By summer’s end in 1931 he had a completed manuscript. Unlike in The 42nd Parallel, he decided to close this book with a poem. It was the single-best poetic work of his life, and it unleashed the rage he had felt since Verdun. Entitled “The Body of an American,” it began with a paragraph, mimicking the Preamble to the Constitution and dotted with Dos Passos’s inimitable compound words, describing the 1921 establishment of a tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.

His pencil churned out the gruesome and frank stanzas that followed.

how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all

you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons

stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of rull puttees?

… and the gagging chloride and puky dirstench of

the yearold dead…

And so on for several pages, describing the idiocy of militarism and the end of the soldier’s life where

The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies, and the incorruptible skeleton, and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki

they took to Chalons-sur-Marne and laid it out neat in a pine coffin and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship and buried it in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheatre in the Arlington National Cemetery and draped Old Glory over it and the bugler played taps.

All of Washington brought flowers.

Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.

Done, Dos Passos sent the manuscript to Eugene Saxton, his editor at Harper. The book went into production rapidly, which pleased Dos Passos because he felt its contents were timely. All was well until Saxton received a cable from the company’s former president and now a trusted adviser. Gene Wells wired instructions that the biographical poem called “The House of Morgan” be stricken from Dos Passos’s book. The Morgan banking operation had provided crucial financing when the publishing company reorganized a few years earlier, and the executives were in no mood to castigate their savior by publishing a poem that referred to war, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus as providing “good growing weather for the House of Morgan.”

“Sorry,” said Wells, “I could not have taken another position. It is difficult to be a businessman and a gentleman at the same as you have often heard me argue.” Dos Passos refused to cut the section. His book, after all, was an attack on industrialization, capitalism, and the materialism of which J. P. Morgan was a patron saint. His agent quickly placed the edited manuscript with Harcourt, Brace. “This is certainly a lousy break all round—but it’s no use worrying any more about it,” Dos Passos wrote Saxton, adding, “Hell it’s only a book after all.”

Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon manuscript was typed by the time Dos Passos arrived in Key West in February. Hemingway was eager to get his friend’s evaluation, especially as Dos Passos had lauded A Farewell to Arms after panning The Sun Also Rises. Praise from an author and friend whom Hemingway regarded as his “most bitterly severe critic” would be sweet. Dos Passos was bringing with him the galleys of 1919, the second volume of his projected trilogy. The two men fished, drank, and read. Sometimes doing all three at once.

On board a ship heading home and perhaps feeling he was at a safe distance, Dos Passos delivered his verdict on Death in the Afternoon. “The Bullfight book—is absolutely the best thing can be done on the subject—I mean all the description and the dope—it seems an absolute model for how that sort of thing ought to be done,” he wrote.

Compliments given—Dos Passos knew his audience—he set forth his criticisms. The discursive sections, the portions that sounded like a lecture where “Old Hem straps on the long white whiskers,” and the pontifications about writing need to go. The book is so good, Dos Passos implored, “that it would be a shame to leave in any unnecessary tripe—damn it I think there’s always enough tripe in anything even after you’ve cut out—and a book like that can stand losing some of the best passages.” As always, after delivering a blow, Dos Passos backpedaled. “But I may be packed with prunes with all this so for God’s sake don’t pay too much attention to it—the Book’s damn swell in any case.”

But Hemingway did pay attention. Once Dos Passos had been the one with the money and fame. But no longer, especially in comparison to the Key West scribe. Yet Hemingway still valued his advice and promised to “try to cut the shit as you say.” Within a few months he discarded large sections from the book in galleys. “I cut out all you object to,” Hemingway reported to Dos Passos when he finished, adding, “seemed like the best to me God damn you if it really was.” In turn, Hemingway offered up his take on Dos Passos’s 1919.

“The book is bloody splendid—it’s four times the book the 42nd was—and that was damned good,” Hemingway told Dos Passos. He wasn’t flattering his friend. At other times that year Hemingway told others that he believed Dos Passos could be an excellent writer and was getting better with each book. But Hemingway worried that the characters were too perfect in 1919. “Remember it was Bloom and Mrs. Bloom that saved Joyce,” he said, referring to the main figures in Ulysses. “If you get a noble communist remember the bastard probably masturbates and is jealous as a cat. Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols.”

In this moment the path the two writers had followed since the ambulance-driving days led them in separate ways. Hemingway still believed that the perfect representation of an imperfect world alone was sufficient. Dos Passos wanted his writing to change the world. “For Christ sake don’t try to do good,” Hemingway said. “Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good. If you try to do good you’ll not do any good nor will you show it.”

The politics that animated Dos Passos’s prose were not confined to the page. During the past year he had worked with novelist Theodore Dreiser to draw attention to the plight of striking mine workers in impoverished Harlan County, Kentucky. Miners were battling coal mine operators who cut wages after the start of the Great Depression. Violence, the involvement of the United Mine Workers union, and the popularity of the folk song “Whose Side Are You On?” written by the wife of a strike organizer, brought national attention to the struggle.

Dos Passos admired the sixty-year-old Dreiser and had read his novels growing up. Meeting him at last, Dos Passos found that the author’s long nose and the way his skin wrinkled around his eyes reminded him of an elephant. In November 1931 Dos Passos traveled with Dreiser and other members of the National Committee to Aid Striking Miners Fighting Starvation to Harlan County. Local officials did their best to thwart the outsiders. When Dreiser entertained a woman in his hotel room vigilantes propped toothpicks against the door to see if it would open again before morning. They were still upright at dawn, resulting in an indictment against Dreiser for adultery. The case never went to court.

Dos Passos was dismayed when he saw the miners’ living conditions. Their houses were up on stilts. The thin walls had cracks stuffed with newspaper, and the tarpaper roofs were barely able to ward off rain. He had seen similar shelters in the shantytowns of Florida, but here in the cold of the Kentucky mountains, he wondered how the families stayed warm in the drafty houses burning coal, mostly bought from the mine companies. “It wrings your heart,” Dos Passos wrote, “the way the scantily furnished rooms have been tidied up for the visitors.”

Dos Passos watched as the witnesses, whose speech reminded him of Elizabethan lyrics, came one by one to the county’s main hotel where Dreiser masterfully conducted the committee’s hearings. “These were fine people,” Dos Passos said. “I desperately wanted to help them.” As he had done during the fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos Passos helped the committee write a report. For his efforts Dos Passos was among those indicted on a charge of criminal syndicalism—criminal acts conducted for a political purpose—a few weeks later after leaving Kentucky. Like the adultery charge against Dreiser, nothing came of it.

As it had been with the Sacco and Vanzetti case, none of what Dos Passos told Hemingway moved him to lend his support. Hemingway remained uncommitted to political causes of any sort. He told his friend he could not be a Communist because he hated tyranny and perhaps government. “But if you’re ever one its swell with me. I can’t stand any bloody government I suppose.” Paul Romaine, whom Hemingway had known in Paris and was now a Milwaukee book dealer, wrote Hemingway and urged him to join American leftists in their efforts to end the Great Depression through economic reforms. Hemingway replied. “There is no left and no right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.”

Worse, Hemingway said, is that writers who are on the left will eventually swing to the right. “Dreiser is different. He is an old man and old men all try to save their souls in one way or another,” he wrote. “Dos Passos doesn’t swing. He’s always been the same.”

Dos Passos’s 1919 received a warm welcome when his new publisher brought it out in March 1932. Of course, Dos Passos was nowhere to be found. He and Katy had gone to Mexico after leaving Key West and did not return until long after the book had been published. But the reviews he saw when they got back home were gratifying.

The New York Times compared him at length to Hemingway, linking Dos Passos’s method of interspersing mood changes through newsreel, camera eye, and biographical sections with those found in Hemingway’s In Our Time. But critic John Chamberlain believed that when it came to subject material Dos Passos stood on his own. “One may safely call him the most adventurous, the most widely experienced, the man with the broadest sympathies (we do not say deepest), among our novelists since Sinclair Lewis bade goodbye to Martin Arrowsmith.”

Chamberlain complained, as Hemingway had, about characters serving as symbols. But he judged this war novel far superior to Three Soldiers, praising Dos Passos for its broad reach. “Hemingway who is Dos Passos’ closest competitor in exploring the jungle,” Chamberlain said, “has been almost solely oriented in personal problems raised by the war.”

Hemingway had his turn with book critics six months later when his Death in the Afternoon appeared. It wasn’t fun. “One’s guess is that it will be less successful than the novels in making new Hemingway addicts,” decided the New York Times. “Action and conversation, as the author himself suggests, are his best weapons. To the degree that he dilutes them with philosophy and exposition he weakens himself.” It was an echo of Dos Passos’s observation. As it was Hemingway’s first book since A Farewell to Arms, his new work garnered considerable interest but not the praise given to Dos Passos’s most recent work.

Publicly Hemingway shrugged off the critic’s view of Death in the Afternoon, telling Dos Passos, “a man should be pooped on by the Times.” The hometown Chicago Tribune, whose Fanny Butcher had become a Hemingway fan following the publication of A Farewell to Arms, provided praise amid the lukewarm batches of reviews sent to Key West. Death in the Afternoon, she wrote, “is death incarnate, and Mr. Hemingway looks upon it and records its functioning with an art which is supreme.”

Nonetheless for an author who had been the darling of the literary scene for his first three books, he was unprepared for the less-than-charitable treatment given to a famous writer when his work falls short in the minds of critics. Max Perkins mailed a stack of reviews along with a note that said, “I know there are things in them which you will hate.” After reading them Hemingway grew sullen; he distracted himself with bear hunting in Wyoming. At first shooting at grizzlies—rather than critics—did not provide the bromide he needed. His companion had killed one, but Hemingway had not. But soon the smell of horsemeat laid as bait drew in a five-hundred-pound black bear. Hemingway reached for his rifle, took aim, and fired. He had his trophy.

If the judgment of critics was the measure of success in the book trade, Dos Passos was back on top for the first time since 1924, the year he helped Hemingway get his first book published. But by the all-important measure of sales, a book with Hemingway’s name on the spine found readers no matter what the critics said. 1919 had sold only nine thousand copies, fewer than the first print run for Death in the Afternoon. It hardly felt like success when, to make ends meet, Dos Passos had to ask Hemingway for a loan.

Max Perkins, from his perch at Scribner’s, offered an explanation for Dos Passos’s failure to catch on with readers. “The truth is I do not think his way of writing and his theory make books that people care to read unless they are interested objectively in society or literature for pure sake,” Perkins confided to Fitzgerald. “They are fascinating, but they do make you suffer like the deuce, and people cannot want to do that.”

Hemingway had fame and fortune; Dos Passos had unremunerated literary praise. For Hemingway the world, its wars, depressions, and politics remained a personal matter. Dos Passos, however, believed writing without a larger purpose was indulgent. In Key West the adulation given to the Provincetown writer for the purity of his principled approach to writing began to grate on his friend’s nerves.