The tough and the tender
William Scammell
HEMINGWAY VS. FITZGERALD by Scott Donaldson John Murray, £25, pp. 352 They met in Paris in the spring of 1925. At 28 Fitzgerald was already rich and famous, author of three novels and two col- lections of short stories, including his recently published masterpiece The Great Gatsby and the tales that thrilled readers of the Saturday Evening Post, which gave their name to the Jazz Age. Scott and Zelda didn't just give parties, they were the party, as Donaldson aptly remarks. They'd sailed to Europe to escape from their own destructive self-image. Hemingway, three years younger, was an ex-journalist who had published only a handful of stories and poems in little magazines. He and his wife Hadley lived cheaply in rented rooms while he served his apprenticeship to Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, and gave out large signals of promise. Both were Middle Western middle-class kids with dominant mothers and put-upon fathers. Both took their prose seriously, though one was a descendant of Keats with Ivy League trimmings and the other invent- ed a sort of tough-guy prose poem that married American demotic with doomy modernism. Both had been wounded by early love affairs: Fitzgerald was rejected by the society beauty Ginevra King, Hem- ingway by Agnes von Kurowsky, the night nurse who looked after him in Italy in 1918.
It was Fitzgerald who made the first approach, full of admiration for Heming- way's war experience and his charismatic presence. From the outset he adopted the younger man as his 'artistic conscience', slightly ashamed of the hack work that brought him in such a handsome income from popular magazines, and convinced that Hemingway was about to deliver the great American novel, if not several. He lent him money, helped revise The Sun Also Rises, got him taken on by his own editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, wrote admiring reviews of his books, and advanced his reputation in every quarter that he could think of. His reward was life- long denigration: a stream of bitchy stories (and downright lies) in Hemingway's letters and interviews, and then the coup de grace in A Moveable Feast, with 'poor Scott' as the poor lush who couldn't hold his drink or his women or his talent. Hemingway himself, on the other hand, stars as the superhero who could outdrink, outbox, out- shoot, outfish, outwrite and outfuck every other man in town.
'Those two ... brought out the worst in each other', said a mutual friend. Fitzger- ald behaved badly to everyone when in his cups, then abased himself in frenzied apologies the next day. Hemingway disliked his girlish-looking mouth and confiding, ingenuous manner. He also disliked Zelda — he thought she was jealous of Scott's work, and encouraged him to drink too much — and the feeling was mutual. She thought him a 'poseur'. Her pithy summary of his first novel was 'bullfighting, bullsling- ing, and bullshit', translated by another critic, surveying the Hemingway oeuvre, as 'the short and simple annals of the hard- boiled'. If ever there was a case of the tough and the tender, the raw and the cooked, Papa and Scott were it, though of course the binaries break down under clos- er inspection.
Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos later that Scott
should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago before she was diagnosed as nutty — He is the great tragedy of talent in our generation.
Hemingway got rid of his own wives, saleable or not, at regular intervals. Scott and Zelda remained an item, even when she was immured for the rest of her life in various expensive padded cells. Like Eliot's first wife Vivienne, she remained touching- ly close to his life and work, and came out with some remarkably sane comments on both, no matter how much in the grip of mania. Sooner or later, unfortunately, Scott managed to antagonise or fall out with all his friends and heroes, including H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson.
Donaldson takes us through every step of the friendship and subsequent woundings with impeccable scholarship, save for the odd small howler (a mangled quote from Four Quartets, a failure to realise that Daisy Ashford had `visiters', not visitors). The famous boxing match between Hem- ingway and Morley Callaghan, refereed by Fitzgerald, is rehashed again and again by the great white hunter into something more in keeping with his pride. (Callaghan knocked him down; Hemingway thought Fitzgerald had deliberately let the round go on too long.) Zelda took up dancing and fell in love with her ballet teacher, Egoro- va, before her final breakdown. In a case of self-projection, or wishful thinking, she announced that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were lovers. This is extremely unlikely but an interesting thought since both, though outwardly homophobic, had complex sexu- al make-ups. Fitzgerald wasn't averse to a little cross-dressing in his student days; he appears as a lovely chorus girl in one of the Princeton revues he adored writing and acting in. Hemingway was famously fond of 'boyish' women with cropped hair, and wrote some weirdly defiant confessional prose late in life about what he and his then wife liked to do in bed, hinting darkly at all sorts of non-missionary doings.
They only met a few times after the first flush of friendship in 1925/6, and then not happily. Hemingway's star rose, Fitzger- ald's sank. 'I talk with the authority of fail- ure — Ernest with the authority of success', said Scott. (Drinking is slow death,' he warned Robert Benchley. 'Who's in a hurry?' Benchley responded.) They kept in touch occasionally by letter, more often by their mutual correspondence with Max Perkins, who sat at the centre of this triangular relationship trying to encourage both and keep the peace. Ernest continued to lecture Scott on his shortcomings, hated the 'Crack-Up' pieces (not manly), and ordered him not to 'poop away such fine material' as the death of one's mother and father. In fact those short confessional pieces are among Fitzgerald's finest work, and probably worth more than all Heming- way's late novels put together. Scott summed up their respective temperaments: 'His inclination is towards megalomania and mine towards melancholy.' Not that the one excludes the other, as subsequent events proved.
Though he appears to think that Hem- ingway is still 'the most famous writer in the world' Donaldson remains impartial throughout this book, insisting that each writer was 'different, not better. Each was great in his own way.' On the purely human level, however, Hemingway comes off a poor second, bad-mouthing his generous rival at every opportunity, increasingly imprisoned in his own myth. I'm inclined to agree with Zelda that there was something 'bogus' about him, and about that famous prose style too, which took the world by storm. Scott's poetry of memory and desire, on the other hand, looks set to go the dis- tance, hand in hand with every new lost generation that falls mint from the Ameri- can dream.
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