Just a couple of weeks after meeting for the first time F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway wrote what is the earliest surviving letter between perhaps the two most influential American “Lost Generation” authors.
Characteristically, the July 1, 1925 letter was sardonic, part of Hemingway’s pose of appearing disillusioned and unimpressed, even by an older peer who had already achieved popularity (This Side of Paradise) and critical acclaim (The Great Gatsby, published only three months before the Hemingway letter). Even, let it be said, by an older peer who was sparing no effort to induce his own editor, Scribners’ legendary Maxwell Perkins, to sign up this former journalist with an arresting, different writing style.
Scott might not have minded that sarcastic tone in their correspondence—he even tried his own, atypical version of it—but when he found it polluting the opening section of the novel Hemingway would begin at the end of the month, The Sun Also Rises, he urged his new friend, in the strongest possible terms, to delete it. Hemingway complied, to the book’s—and his own—advantage.
Speaking of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway was writing from Pamplona, Spain, where he was attending the fiesta and bullfights that would inspire his classic of postwar drifting, drinking and disillusion.
The man who became famous for slavish self-discipline concerning the craft of writing took a jocular tone concerning his work habits now: “Don’t you like to write letters [sic]. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet you feel you’ve done something.”
(By the way, before I go further, note something else that Scott and Hem had in common besides being Midwestern-born twentysomethings hoping to live cheaply with their small families as expatriates in Europe: their weakness with spelling and grammar. Were they alive today, they’d be the despair of English teachers, not to mention of copyeditors who wonder, Salieri-like, how these child-men who continually disregarded spelling conventions could be so unfairly gifted by God with writing skill.)
But Hemingway—who’d just met Fitzgerald a few weeks before in the Dingo bar in Montparnesse in Paris—decided to tweak his new friend a bit further. Hemingway hadn’t exactly hit it off with Scott’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald and was absolutely bewildered by his friend’s disconcerting habit of asking each new acquaintance exactly how much money they made.
This next sentence takes all this in, and then some: “I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”
Characteristically, the July 1, 1925 letter was sardonic, part of Hemingway’s pose of appearing disillusioned and unimpressed, even by an older peer who had already achieved popularity (This Side of Paradise) and critical acclaim (The Great Gatsby, published only three months before the Hemingway letter). Even, let it be said, by an older peer who was sparing no effort to induce his own editor, Scribners’ legendary Maxwell Perkins, to sign up this former journalist with an arresting, different writing style.
Scott might not have minded that sarcastic tone in their correspondence—he even tried his own, atypical version of it—but when he found it polluting the opening section of the novel Hemingway would begin at the end of the month, The Sun Also Rises, he urged his new friend, in the strongest possible terms, to delete it. Hemingway complied, to the book’s—and his own—advantage.
Speaking of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway was writing from Pamplona, Spain, where he was attending the fiesta and bullfights that would inspire his classic of postwar drifting, drinking and disillusion.
The man who became famous for slavish self-discipline concerning the craft of writing took a jocular tone concerning his work habits now: “Don’t you like to write letters [sic]. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet you feel you’ve done something.”
(By the way, before I go further, note something else that Scott and Hem had in common besides being Midwestern-born twentysomethings hoping to live cheaply with their small families as expatriates in Europe: their weakness with spelling and grammar. Were they alive today, they’d be the despair of English teachers, not to mention of copyeditors who wonder, Salieri-like, how these child-men who continually disregarded spelling conventions could be so unfairly gifted by God with writing skill.)
But Hemingway—who’d just met Fitzgerald a few weeks before in the Dingo bar in Montparnesse in Paris—decided to tweak his new friend a bit further. Hemingway hadn’t exactly hit it off with Scott’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald and was absolutely bewildered by his friend’s disconcerting habit of asking each new acquaintance exactly how much money they made.
This next sentence takes all this in, and then some: “I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”
Count the little thrusts there:
1) “Wealthy”—Hemingway was already chafing deeply at Scott’s obsession with the rich;
2) “Monogamists”—Why on earth, Hemingway wondered, was Scott so besotted by a woman whose mental instability would undermine his talent and ability to work?
3) “Unable to obtain booze”—It was becoming increasingly obvious that Scott couldn’t hold his liquor and that, consequently, he made a fool of himself, requiring constant day-after apologies.
4) “Secret sorrows”—this sounds like a faint parodic echo here of a famous phrase from the opening section of The Great Gatsby: “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
1) “Wealthy”—Hemingway was already chafing deeply at Scott’s obsession with the rich;
2) “Monogamists”—Why on earth, Hemingway wondered, was Scott so besotted by a woman whose mental instability would undermine his talent and ability to work?
3) “Unable to obtain booze”—It was becoming increasingly obvious that Scott couldn’t hold his liquor and that, consequently, he made a fool of himself, requiring constant day-after apologies.
4) “Secret sorrows”—this sounds like a faint parodic echo here of a famous phrase from the opening section of The Great Gatsby: “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
And then this premonition of his own fate: “To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.”
Besides the love of fishing and bullfighting, you see here something that’s going to produce much trouble for Hemingway for the rest of his life: women. Within two years, he’d be divorcing wife Hadley—the one he loved “truly and well”—and beginning a kind of serial monogamy. The pattern went something like this: a couple of years of wedded bliss, then boredom, then an affair with, then divorce, then repeating the cycle with the woman he’d just had the affair with. Three wives would succeed Hadley. None ended in a happy relationship with Papa. (Mary, his last wife, did not end up divorced, but she turned out to be more nurse than wife in the years preceding his 1961 suicide.)
As Scott watched much of this unfold in the remaining 15 years of his own life, he surmised that Hemingway needed a new woman for each succeeding big book. I suspect there was more truth to this than he realized. (In the early 1950s, Hemingway still was venting to eventual biographer Carlos Baker about Fitzgerald's monogamous streak. Evidently, Hemingway's obsession with that tendency continued.)
The Fitzgerald-Hemingway relationship was shot through with more undercurrents of competition, resentment and other petty annoyances—as much as real admiration—than can be summarized here. But we can close the circle on this with Fitzgerald’s last letter to Hemingway, a graceful final tip of the hat to the younger man he had once championed, on the occasion of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940: “I envy you like hell and there's no irony in this.”
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