C rack - up Richard Shone Scott and Ernest: The Fitzgerald uge!ningway Friendship Matthew
J. Bruccoil (Bodley Head £6.95) Ernest Hemingway and his world Anthony Burgess (Thames & Hudson 450) :,Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded l'r!enciship Faded'. Gertrude Stein's title might stand at the head of this account of ElertUrigway and Fitzgerald. It might sta.nd att the head of several books detailing neroingway's relations with several writers Gertnide Stein herself, Sherwood Anders°rl, many more. He made friends easily, surf-riding into people's lives in what seemed, at first, ideal conditions. It was all slaps on the back, camaraderie, hominage even and then, the wave ridden, he could round on the person with inexplicable brutality• Or he would leave a friendship to die !Ike a dog in the street, giving it the occasion. al kick to see if it were alive but hastening its end. Hemingway's friendship with 'ltzgerald petered out with the latter 's • in Hollywood in 1940. They had .inet 1925 but Fitzgerald noted that their intiinacY lasted not more than a year. U was Oyer almost before it began. This book documents the muddy trail of misunderstandings, jealousies, a few 'good tunes and their friendship's eventual end. Scott Fitzgerald was the more hurt for he orshipped Hemingway. That was part of flie problem. The younger man found Increasing embarrassment in the older 's attachment though he was not averse of 'icIlltse to using Fitzgerald's professional elP. For Fitzgerald, the attachment returned him to his youth and a youth different from his own. Their difference lo age was more a matter of achievement than actual years for only three separated them. But Fitzgerald was published, married to Zelda, highly paid for his stories and beginning to drink. Already the glow in which he had lived was perceptibly giving way to an endless round of being on and off the wagon, of marital quarrels and an incurable sense of talent spent; 'a frightened angel' Hemingway later called him. When they met in Paris, Hemingway had published a few stories and was living with his wife and child in modest circumstances. But the legend was gathering force and Hemingway as war hero was not the least seductive part of it for Fitzgerald. He admired the younger man's physical and sexual piowess and, above all, what he had seen of his writing. Hemingway was soon taken on by Fitzgerald's New York publishers, a move marked by Hemingway with a mixture of gratitude and resentment. When Hemingway wrote criticisms of Fitzgerald's work they were patiently attended to whereas Fitzgerald's comments on Hemingway's were disregarded. And so it went on. Zelda was the evil influence to whom Hemingway never became reconciled, since he considered her responsible for Scott's decline in the Thirties. By then the tables had turned and Hemingway was rich and famous. He had nothing but contempt for Fitzgerald's public whining in the confessional Crack-Up stories. Fitzgerald's sales dropped. Financially pressed, he joined MGM in Holywood and wrote The Last Tycoon, the unfinished novel which, in passages, shows him at his very best. Matthew Bruccoli is an academic with the passion of a termite for facts and documentation. His book is accurate but dry, lacking any sense of nuance or psychological insight. Here are two typical sentences: 'Scott writes that he never thought Callaghan started the false report, but felt that Callaghan should issue the denial from America. Callaghan asks Perkins to send Caroline Bancroft's letter to either Scott or Ernest.'
All the more welcome then is AnthonY Burgess's book, an excellent addition to an excellent series. He maintains that Hemingway was a bully, bore and fake. With suggestive precision and swiftness of language, we move from Oak Park, Chicago to the first World war in Italy; through four marriages, countless sporting exploits (and two plane crashes) to the Nobelwinning Papa, 'physically etiolated, profoundly psychotic', who put a doublebarrelled shotgun to his head in 1961. Here and there I would disagree with Anthony Burgess; I think Hemingway's literary reputation has declined since his death (and Fitzgerald's has not been so high); and the assessments of some of the later books are too charitable, particularly of The Old Man and the Sea. But Burgess's commentaries on the earlier novels and stories are sharp and discriminating. What is curious is that, in spite of the mauling his character gets (and often deserves), Hemingway emerges as an affecting, even invigorating figure — like his heroes, destroyed but not defeated. In the first chapter of The Danger Tree, Olivia Manning's previous novel, there is an extraordinary scene: Harriet Pringle, her long-running heroine, is present at the death of a child. Angela Hooper's son has picked up a grenade in the desert; he is brought into the house and his parents refuse to accept the, fact of death in spite of appalling injuries. Olivia Manning's description of this scene of horror: understatement, discretion and dream-like matter-of-factness, is a perfect example of the way in which this most acute writer continues to treat events in her new book, which pursues the story of people caught up in events only half understood, and how personal dramas are set against great events. For the ex-patriates stranded in Cairo, the desert war is almost an irritating hiccup in the tenor of their lives, exasperating not because of an imminent sense of danger, but because it removes men, like Edwina Little's horrible lover, from her grasp: far more important to her is that he turns out to be a married bounder. The two worlds are linked by Simon Boulderstone, who returns to the battlefield, fired with thoughts of revenge for his beloved brother's death. The tank battle, in which he finds himself, is one of the high points of the book; a remarkable feat of imaginative intuition.
Interesting that Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel somehow leaves one far less involved, though springing from direct battle experience. Straight reporting of that particular hell made us all only too familiar with the horror, the death, the poverty. 'He knew what he would see and he saw it. He was not stricken by what he saw, he was not angered by it, or made to grieve . . .': an only too common reaction among those who went there. O'Brien has tried to extend the hideous truths into meaning, by this semiallegory about a squad of men who might have followed their dim buddy, Cacciato, into a flight to Paris. It's a strained effort, and what should have taken off into solutions only comes back again and again to a series of skilful war reportages.
David Batchelor's nastily knowing piece about the moral disintegration of a tacky art dealer and his brother, and their decline from already rocky grace is chronicled in a winking and nodding manner both tedious and unappetising. Loading every rift with bores and excessive downgraded moral detail and then throwing in the odd bit about sin being its own punishment is not, to my mind, demonstrating moral decline but comes dangerously close to lip-smacking.
Mary Hope
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