Hemingway in Love Read online

  “I felt self-conscious giving them to someone as famous as he was, but after reading them, he said that one of them, ‘Fifty Grand,’ was damned good but would be better if I shucked the first page and started on page two, that the story had more muscle that way. I thought about that and agreed that to start the story, less would be better. Scott said he would send it to his editor, Max Perkins at Scribner if it was okay with me. He had written to him about me and said he’d like him to see my work. Scott had a copy of his new book for me, The Great Gatsby, hoped I would like it.

  “I thought it was one of the best books in a long time, in fact I told him that. Although he had attained considerable fame and I had yet to prove myself, there was a sense of bonding from the very beginning, a sense of brotherhood, a right to intrude on each other’s lives, as if we were somehow responsible for the other one’s missteps and misdemeanors.

  “Max Perkins did like ‘Fifty Grand’ and helped getting it published in The Atlantic Monthly, with a princely payment of three hundred and fifty dollars, which provided winter shoes for Hadley and regular trips to the boucherie.

  “Scott wanted us to meet Zelda and invited us to lunch at their apartment on Rue de Tilsitt, a dark, lifeless place. Hadley and I were put off by Zelda, who seemed intent on stuffing her non sequiturs into the conversation. She spoke about how much time Scott devoted to writing, more with resentment than support, jealous of his writing pad, as if it were a seductive mistress.

  “Scott introduced me to some of his group, the ones who shared his boozy adventures. One of those favorites was Lady Duff Twysden, a character right out of a very good English novel who had lost her way. Her look was original, her chic was original, and God knows her speech and her capacity for drink were all original. She wore a man’s hat tilted over her sculptured blond hair and mannish tweeds that somehow made her look seductive. She was separated from Sir Roger Thomas Twysden, tenth baronet, and, according to her, a sadistic martinet. Humiliated her wherever they went, denigrated her looks, family, intelligence, education. Said he didn’t know why he’d married her. And yet doesn’t want a divorce. Drinks himself purple on his huge estate, gives lavish parties, different women as hostesses, claims not to know where she is or if she is. ‘I don’t give a damn,’ Duff said, since she got a monthly stipend, although not quite enough to get from one month to the next. The humiliation hurts, but Harold and Pat adore her—she needs that, she said, and they contribute to her shortfall.”

  I asked Ernest about Harold and Pat and he explained that Harold Loeb was Princeton from a very rich New York family, had been on the boxing and wrestling teams in college. He had literary aspirations, even started a little magazine in Paris called Broom. Fiercely devoted to Duff, very jealous of Pat, who alternated weekends with Duff.

  Pat Guthrie, Duff’s distant cousin, Ernest said, was a waspish Scot who appeared to be in a rather perpetual state of inebriation; he regularly gave Duff money from his allowance.

  Ernest said that the three of them were inseparable despite the fact that Pat and Harold were constantly at each other. “They often invited me to join them when I finished writing. I’d write mornings either on a table in the Closerie des Lilas, a good café near our apartment, or in a little room I had rented, sixth-floor walk-up in an old hotel, and then find them at the Select, their favorite hangout. The Fitzgeralds sometimes invited the three of them and us to dinner, and on one occasion two sisters, Pauline and Ginny Pfeiffer.”

  “So that’s how you met Pauline? What was your take on her?”

  “First impression? Small, flat-chested, not nearly as attractive as her sister. Pauline had recently come to Paris to work at Vogue magazine, and she looked like she’d just stepped out of its pages. Up-to-date fashion. Close-cropped hair like a boy’s, à la mode back then, short, fringed dress, loops of pearls, costume jewelry, rouged, bright red lips. Said she had attended the Visitation Convent in St. Louis, a few blocks from where Hadley had lived.

  “I never gave Pauline another thought after that dinner. Hadley was the only woman who mattered in my life, her full body and full breasts, hair long to her shoulders, long-sleeved dresses at her ankles, little or no jewelry or makeup. I adored her looks and the feel of her in bed, and that’s how it was. She lived her life loving the things I loved: skiing in Austria, picnics on the infield at the Auteuil races, staying up all night at the bicycle races at the Vélodrome, fortified with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, trips to alpine villages to watch the Tour de France, fishing in the Irati, the bullfights in Madrid and Pamplona, hiking in the Black Forest.

  “Even though I never thought about Pauline after that first encounter, as I was to find out, she had serious thoughts about me, thoughts that became schemes and ruses, subterfuges, connivances.”

  “How did she get into your life?” I asked.

  “I think it began,” Ernest said, “with a conversation that Pauline and Ginny had with Hadley that evening at the Fitzgeralds’. Hadley had told them about our son, Bumby, and they asked if they could visit. And they did. Brought him presents from that swank toy store on Rue Saint-Honoré. Pauline took a liking to Hadley, invited her to tea at the Crillon, to some of the fashion showings, brought her fashion magazines and books. Occasionally I’d see Pauline and Ginny in the Dingo when I’d be having a drink with Scott or Dos Passos, and sometimes they joined us. Ginny was much more attractive than Pauline, who was smaller, kind of a boy look. They knew the latest slang and smoked cigarettes from ivory holders. Ginny usually had an affectionate lady friend in tow, so that narrowed the field. I wondered if being a lesbo ran in the family. Didn’t matter. The sisters were witty and up-to-the-minute, but I wasn’t interested. Life with Hadley was solid.

  “Occasionally, they’d come by my workplace end of a day, that little bare room I had rented on the fifth floor, sans heat, sans lift, sans most everything, in the old shabby hotel on Rue Mouffetard. They’d corral me for drinks at a nearby café, bringing good humor and wit and liveliness to what had been a frustrating, unproductive day. After a time, Ginny didn’t come anymore and Pauline came alone, looking up-to-the-minute chic, cheerful and exuding admiration, which, of course, after a tough day felt good. She had a genuine or feigned affection for Bumby, visited him, took him to Punch and Judy shows in the Tuileries, offered to babysit whenever Hadley and I wanted to go out, but broke as we were, we never took her up on it, since we didn’t have the scratch to go anywhere.

  “Pauline would invite us to a restaurant, suggesting that our femme de ménage, Marie Cocotte, look after Bumby, but Pauline knew Hadley was loath to leave Bumby at night and she knew Hadley would urge me to go without her. Of course I was broke and Pauline paid whenever I did go. She was clever and entertaining and full of desire. She had the ‘I get what I want’ hubris of a very rich girl who won’t be denied. The Pfeiffer clan owned the town of Piggott, Arkansas. Pauline’s old man owned the bank, the cotton gin and the corn, wheat, soybeans, and other stuff produced by his tenant farmers. Also a chain of drugstores and God knows what else—maybe all of Arkansas. Her uncle Gus had all the money her father didn’t have—he owned Richard Hudnut perfume, Sloan’s liniment, Warner Pharmaceuticals, and other such shit. Gus was childless and he fawned on Pauline—whatever she wanted, all she had to do was ask.”

  I asked him how he felt being around someone so rich when he was so poor.

  He took a while answering. He teased his beard and looked away, as if consulting something in the distance. The scalded patches on his face added years to his looks.

  “Back then, to be honest, probably liked it—poverty’s a disease that’s cured by the medicine of money. I guess I liked the way she spent it—designer clothes, taxis, restaurants. Later on, when reality got to me, I saw the rich for what they were: a goddamn blight like the fungus that kills tomatoes. I set the record straight in ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ but Harry, who’s laid up with a gangrenous leg, is too far gone by then and he dies without forgiving the rich. I think I still feel the way Harry felt about the rich in the story. Always will.”

  Ernest summoned the floor waiter and discussed wines with him. They decided on an interesting Chianti.

  Ernest asked if I had been to the feria in Pamplona, the annual bullfight festival that honored their patron saint.

  I said I hadn’t.

  He proceeded to describe a trip there with Lady Duff Twysden and her group, a trip that would be the turning point both in his writing life and his other life. “Pamplona then was its own true self,” Ernest said, “before the tourists ruined it. The lure of those ten days with Duff and company goaded me into trying to capture it on paper. I started to write soon after we left Pamplona, and for the next five weeks it overwhelmed me, like I had a fever that roared through my head every day, and left me as empty as the pod of a shelled pea. But by morning I was reloaded and ready to fever my way through another day. That fever was an out-of-control brush fire that swept me into Pauline’s maw. She’d have me for a drink in her attractive apartment on Rue Picot, and that started it.

  “I first called the book Fiesta, only later on The Sun Also Rises. Over those five weeks, I wrote it in various places, promising myself that when I returned to Paris, I’d avoid Pauline, but the fever of writing and rewriting opened me up to her. She’d persisted herself into a narcotic, and though I hate to admit it, I became as attached to her as I was to Hadley.”

  He refilled his wineglass. I passed.

  “You ever loved two women at the same time?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “Lucky boy,” he said. “It was complicated, like that time on the Riviera. Our drive to Pamplona will take us over the Alps onto the Grande Corniche and at Antibes—I’ll show you the villa where we were staying on Cap d’Antibes, the place Bumby had his whooping cough. Actually, there were two adjoining villas separated by an iron fence with ornamental spikes. The larger villa was the Villa Saint-Louis, where the Murphys and their guests stayed; the small one was the Villa Paquita, where we were. You know about the Murphys?”

  I didn’t.

  He explained that Gerald and Sara Murphy were a very rich young American couple who lived in Paris. They were celebrity collectors, predominantly artists and writers. Ernest said he met them via Fitzgerald. He said of course he wasn’t a celebrity (The Sun Also Rises hadn’t been published yet), but it was the coldest and iciest winter in Paris in God knows how many years and he thought the Murphys took pity on them and invited them to come down to the Riviera. They brought Marie Cocotte, to look after Bumby, who had a nagging cough.

  “The Fitzgeralds, John Dos Passos and Archie and Ada MacLeish were guests of the Murphys and we all enjoyed beach time and dinners together. But soon after we arrived, Bumby’s cough got worse, and Sara Murphy, concerned about her young children, summoned a doctor, who found that Bumby had whooping cough and that’s when all three of us were quarantined. Of course that cut off any contact with the Murphy house but they came every evening at sundown, bringing their drinks and hors d’oeuvres to the spiked fence and we shouted back and forth, us on the veranda. After a while all those spikes were decorated with upside-down booze bottles, Scott’s leading the way.

  “Pauline had been writing me, sending cables, making sure I kept her in my sights. She was on vacation, staying here at the Danieli with her uncle Gus and aunt Beatrice, when I wrote and told her where we were staying on the Riviera and that we were quarantined with Bumby’s whooping cough.”

  “And?”

  “She said she missed me and that since she’d had whooping cough as a child she’d come visit, since she was immune and I could explain she was coming to help with Bumby.”

  “And you said okay?”

  “That’s my regret—I didn’t tell her not to, a four-legged regret with six sharp horns.”

  Ernest got up and went to the bathroom. When he returned he settled in his chair and refreshed his wine.

  “Soon after the quarantine, Pauline Pfeiffer showed up. I’d already told Hadley she was coming to help out with Bumby. Pauline moved into a room next to ours and right away she took charge. Brought the morning coffee and croissants to our room, sat on the edge of my side of the bed while we three shared our petit déjeuner. I was nervous but excited with her there. She went to the beach with us every day, and even though Hadley had a sketchy back from a childhood accident, Pauline insisted on trying to teach her to dive. Poor Hadley wound up with days of back pain. Pauline was just as set on teaching Hadley to play bridge, though Hadley was hopeless. One thing Hadley did enjoy was our long afternoon bike rides all over the streets of Juan-les-Pins.

  “When the quarantine was lifted, we spent our evenings at the Murphys’. Pauline stayed on, although Bumby wasn’t whooping anymore. And when the Murphys’ lease on Villa Paquita ran out, I booked a room at the Hôtel de la Pinède down the beach from us. Pauline took a room right next to ours. Bumby and Marie stayed in a little place next to the hotel.

  “Pauline kept expressing her gratitude to Hadley for letting her be with our family. Said it was very difficult being an American women alone in France. Said Hadley was like a sister, but”—Ernest started to laugh—“she never had her petit déjeuner on sister Hadley’s side of the bed.”

  I asked Ernest if Hadley had complained to him about Pauline’s presence.

  “Yes, at times she was a little annoyed but Pauline kept saying that she hoped she wasn’t intruding and so forth which made Hadley assure her we were pleased to have her. Looking back on it, I guess I was happy to have two attractive women looking after me, but at the same time I was certainly uncomfortable.

  “Occasionally I’d sneak down to a little beach café with Scott to get a break from the group at the Murphys’. The last time we were at this café was when Scott opened up on me. He said he could see it coming right from the start. I knew what he was going to say but I played dumb. ‘What do you mean? Start of what?’ He said, ‘I’ve got eyes. The way she looks at you. Hangs around. Coddles Hadley. Now showing up here. You are being set up by a femme fatale. When she first arrived in Paris word was out that she was shopping for a husband.’

  “I was annoyed having him bring it up, but also eager to talk about it.

  “‘She wants you for herself,’ he said, ‘and she’ll do anything to get you.’

  “I leveled with him and confessed I loved both of them.

  “He said he’d give it to me straight: ‘She’s going to bust up your marriage if you don’t get rid of her.’

  “I said I really wanted to, I tried, but damn it, I just couldn’t.

  “Scott got angry, said I sure as hell could and he’d tell me how. ‘Just say, “Pauline, you’re a terrific woman, but I’d like you to get the hell out of my life, because if you don’t, I’ll lose my wife and my little son and my whole existence.” Why’d you let yourself get into this mess?’

  “Naïve, that’s all naïve. A very attractive woman shows up, becomes friendly with Hadley, goes places with both of us, is totally interested in me and my work, free and willing to keep me company, to go places when Hadley is tied down with Bumby—all the signs she’s got me in her sights but I don’t recognize any of ’em. All I see is after a really tough day writing, there’re two women waiting for me, giving me their attention, caring about me, women both appealing, but in different ways. Told Scott I liked having them around. Stimulating, fires me up, and before I know it, I’m in love with both of them, totally naïve, never suspecting Pauline wasn’t there as a single woman enjoying being around a family but a woman who wanted to break us up and get me for herself. But now I love them both. May bring me bad luck but hope not. Hope we can go along like this.

  “Scott said, step easy, I was walking on eggshells. He quoted an old piece of wisdom: ‘A man, torn between two women, will eventually lose ’em both.’

  “I said yes I was torn but that I needed both of them and intended to keep them, somehow.

  “Scott said I was a sad son of a bitch who didn’t know a damn thing about women. He gripped my arm and pulled me toward him. Raised his voice. ‘Get rid of her! Now! Right here! It’s a three-alarm fire! Now’s the time! Tell her!’

  “We finished our drinks and walked back to the villa to join the others. That night I thought about talking to Pauline, actually started to but, hell, I couldn’t.”

  “So you never followed Fitzgerald’s advice?”

  “I wanted to, damn it, but what happened, I’d go off, try to work her out of me, thought I had, but I’d go back to Paris and Pauline’d get it going again. But to allay Hadley’s suspicions, Pauline kept up the pretense of caring about her. I truly loved Hadley and I wanted to get us straight again. So I decided to get us out of Paris and the temptation of Pauline. Hadley and I packed up that winter and went to Schruns [an Austrian ski resort] with Bumby to ski. We stayed at the Hotel Taube, a couple of dollars a day for all three of us. I was going to cut Pauline off. But, shitmaru, she followed us to Schruns, booked herself into the Taube, said she wanted to learn to ski, would I give her lessons. Hadley wasn’t happy about it but she was a good sport. Actually, Pauline wasn’t nearly as good as Hadley skiing or horseback riding, shooting, fishing, name it.

  “When she had to go back to Paris to do the collections for Vanity Fair, I was relieved that maybe alone with Hadley I could shape up and lose the pressure of loving both of them.

  “But a cable arrived from Max Perkins, editor at Scribner, with the terrific news they were going to publish Sun Also Rises. Would I go to New York for contracts and all that. I took off for Paris immediately and booked myself on the first decent boat, four days later. Hadley and Bumby stayed in Schruns and I said I’d return as soon as I got back from New York. I checked into the Hôtel Vénétia in Montparnasse.