Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on a Disastrous Boxing Match)

“Knew I would be asleep by 5—so went around with Scott [Fitzgerald] to get Morley [Callaghan] to box right away—I couldnt [sic] see him hardly—had a couple of whiskey’s enroute—Scott was to keep time and we were to box 1 minute rounds with 2 minute rests on acct. of my condition…Morley commenced to pop me and cut my mouth, mushed up my face in general—I was pooped as could be…Can still feel with my tongue the big scar on my lower lip…I slipped and went down once and lit on my arm and put my left shoulder out in the first round and it pulled a tendon so that it was pretty sore afterwards.”—Ernest Hemingway, letter to his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, August 28, 1929, in The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins: Correspondence 1925-1947, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with the assistance of Robert W. Trogdon (1996)

A good deal more was injured than Ernest Hemingway’s left shoulder and lip in this incident, one of the most famous non-professional boxing matches of all time, at the American Club in Paris, a month before the account to Perkins. His pride also suffered a blow. The macho writer, a pugilist far more enthusiastic than skilled, hated the idea of losing, let alone losing badly, let alone losing badly to another amateur with a somewhat pudgy physique.

Instead of blaming his insufficient skills, or even his stupidity in drinking when he needed his reflexes, Papa blamed F. Scott Fitzgerald for not keeping proper time.

I’m not sure about the data of the photo accompanying this post, but my guess is that it was some years later than Hemingway’s now-legendary bout with 26-year-old Canadian expatriate writer Morley Callaghan. Hemingway himself had just turned 30. Gray would not have seeped into his beard at this point, nor would his weight have become so problematic. (By the time he liberated the Ritz Bar 15 years later, Hemingway weighed 250 pounds on his six-foot frame.)

The future Nobel laureate was always testing himself against somebody else. If he was writing a war novel, it was against Tolstoy. If it involved boxing, it would be whoever was at hand. He almost come to blows with Budd Schulberg a decade later after challenging him with, “What makes you think you know so much about prizefighting?”

Underlying tensions among Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan were brought to the surface by this match. Their friendships would never be the same.

Hemingway and Callaghan had become pals when they were correspondents for the Toronto Daily Star. This wasn’t the first time they’d fought, nor even the first time Callaghan had made him bleed—which should have taught Hemingway to be careful. Hemingway had become internationally known with his novels and short stories a mere three years before, but now the younger Callaghan was receiving attention. In other words, Hemingway had a rival.

The relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was, by this time, even more fraught than that between Hemingway and Callaghan. When they first met, Fitzgerald was the older, more successful writer, and he lent Hemingway money and some excellent advice on The Sun Also Rises.

But Hemingway was surpassing Fitzgerald and had begun to view his friend cynically. Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway formed a mutual hatred society. Nor did it help that another in their expatriate circle, gay author Robert McAlpon, had spread a false rumor that the two men were lovers.

Fitzgerald made the mistake of agreeing to become the timekeeper in the match. He became so enthralled by the action that he forgot the prescribed limit, letting the round in which Hemingway was KAO’d go longer. “Oh my God!’ he cried out after Hemingway went down. “I let the round go four minutes!’

“Alright Scott,” Ernest said. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

It’s almost comical, this notion of a literary version of the Dempsey-Tunney “long count” fight, isn’t it? Only the results for the friendships turned out not so funny. The grievous blow to Hemingway’s pride was worsened when somehow the incident made it into the newspapers. Fitzgerald quarreled with Callaghan and, worst of all, Hemingway now had it in for Fitzgerald.

Really, that’s the only thing you can conclude after reading Papa’s A Moveable Feast. I didn’t think it possible that the highly effective malice on display in the originally published version of the memoir could be exceeded, but it appears to be now in the new version of the book.

Yes, yes—Hemingway allowed that Fitzgerald was a fine writer. But he also included an anecdote that 99 people out of 100 who’ve read the book will remember—i.e., Fitzgerald’s fear (pushed by Zelda) that he wasn’t—well, well-equipped.

The new account of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship includes this conversation between Papa and son John, or “Bumby”:

“Monsieur Fitzgerald is sick Papa?”

“He is sick because he drinks too much and he cannot work.”

“Does he not respect his métier?”

“Madame his wife does not respect it or she is envious of it.”

“He should scold her.”

“It is not so simple.”

The beauty of this conversation is that Bumby, at only about five or six years old, would probably be too young to remember it years later—or, more important, dispute its truthfulness.

Hemingway did not write about the Callaghan bout in A Moveable Feast. The Canadian did, however, in his memoir, That Summer in Paris (1963). In old age, he was annoyed at the amount of attention this incident received at the expense of his work. “I want to be remembered for some story I wrote, not for this nonsense,” Callaghan said, in a clip included in the CBC documentary, The Life and Times of Morley Callaghan.

Hemingway should have kept away from boxing and literary assassination and stuck to fiction. There he really was a champ, as he was about to prove again with the novel he was proofreading at the time of his encounter with Callaghan: A Farewell to Arms.