Glory Years: Hemingway in Paris

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The story begins when Sherwood Anderson introduced himself to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Company. She in turn introduced him, by note, to Gertrude Stein:  “…he is anxious to know you, for he says you have influenced him.” Anderson had carried around Gertrude’s Tender Buttons and enjoyed her use of words. They became lifelong friends. On his return to America, he told Ernest Hemingway about Paris and Gertrude Stein. As luck would have it, in 1922, Hem was on his way to Paris as a new employee of the Toronto Star. Anderson gave the handsome young journalist a letter of introduction. Gertrude later wrote: “I remember the first impression I had of Hemingway…he was an extremely good looking young man.” He was 23 with “passionately interesting eyes.” Gertrude was 48 at the time. They sat near her fireplace and, as he said, “they gave you good things to eat…tea and distilled liquors.” She talked and he listened. “She talked like an angel” about his writing and tried to purge his work of the extra adjective. He would often arrive at ten in the morning and stay until late at night. “Isn’t writing a hard job?” He confessed, “It used to be easy until I met you.” She chided him to “begin over again and concentrate. Remarks are not literature.” There are places in his work where he uses repetition for effect; you can see Gertrude’s influence. When she went out, Alice would say, “Don’t you come home with Hemingway on your arm.” She often did and Alice became jealous. Alice was afraid that Hemingway wanted to sleep with Gertrude. Actually, later in life, he confessed that it was true. One day he came to her apartment inebriated. “Hem, you are drunk,” she said. “You leave here and never come again.” He left and never returned. Gertrude had found a way to appease Alice. “You are 90% Rotarian,” she told him. “Can you make that 80%,” he asked. “No,” she said, “I can’t.” Years later, however, they both had good things to say about each other. He wrote that he had two teachers at that time: Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. “Ezra was occasionally right and Gertrude was always right.” Hemingway, they said, was a heavy, shiftless man with an open collar and enormous feet. He would sit back in a chair with his feet up and arms behind his head. He wore big boots in the salon. He could be preposterous. “Yes, but I have a weakness for Hemingway,” Gertrude confessed. She and Alice had become the godmothers of Hemingway’s baby, John Hadley Nicanor. Gertrude renamed him ‘Goddy.’ He lived for a while at 113 rue Notre Dame Des Champs, above a sawmill. It was noisy there and his son, John, called Bumby” was a distraction. He would walk to the corner of Boul. Montparnasse and write at a back table of the Closerie Des Lilas. When I was last there, Hemingway’s portrait adorned the menu. He lived across from Ezra Pound, who also tried to influence and help the young writer. It was while he was in Paris that The Sun Also Rises was written. Hemingway had an ear for dialogue and that special ‘bare bones’ style. He once chided Gertrude by saying that “she couldn’t write dialogue. She learned that from my stuff.” Hemingway had many friends in Paris. Aside from Sylvia; he befriended Ford Madox Ford, the editor of “Transition” and talked Ford into serializing Gertrude’s “The Making Of Americans.” When Morley Callaghan arrived in Paris from Toronto, he looked up Hemingway. They and Scott Fitzgerald spent time together, drinking, talking and boxing. Callaghan had been on the University of Toronto boxing team and Hem was passionately interested in boxing. He asked the smaller Callaghan to spar with him; Fitzgerald would be the referee. As the fight wore on it was evident to Fitzgerald that Callaghan was more skilled than Hemingway thought. At one point Scott was so engrossed in the fight that he forgot to ring the bell. Callaghan caught the big man with a hard punch to the head and knocked a tired Hemingway down. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were on the ‘outs’ after that. Even when Callaghan became a successful writer, he was shunned by Ernest, who could carry a grudge forever. While in Paris, Hemingway and Hadley also lived with their son at 74, rue Cardinal Lemoine, near rue Mouffetard. He worked around the corner at a friend’s apartment on rue Descartes. He was the macho man, filled with a warped sense of filial relationships. A few years later, he and Hadley were divorced. “I left Hadley”, he said, “because I’m a bastard.” She lived near Gertrude at 35, rue de Fleurus and later at 98, Boul. Auguste-Blanqui (sixth floor). Ernest, newly married to Hadley’s friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, lived at 6, rue Ferou near St Sulpice while he worked on A Farewell to Arms. In To Have and Have not, he wrote, The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him, the quicker he gets tired of you. Hemingway’s haunts are still well known in Paris and continue to be a magnet for tourists. The store under his Cardinal-Lemoine apartment is called “Under Hemingway’s.” The Ritz bar is still synonymous with him as is the Closerie, Shakespeare and Company and 27, rue de Fleurus. In 1964, Scribners published A Moveable Feast. Here Hemingway looks back on his days in Paris and says that wherever you go for the rest of your life the city stays with you since “Paris is a moveable feast.” He was also great enough to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On Sunday…
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