The price of fame, paid by others

Patrick Skene Catling

LESS THAN A TREASON: HEMINGWAY IN PARIS by Peter Griffin OUP, £14.95, pp. 197 Ae there any happy novelists out there? — happy, virtuous novelists? The more intimate that literary biographies become, the more certain it seems that the answer must be no.

Here is a, case in point. The first instal- ment of Peter Griffin's biography of Ernest Hemingway, Along With Youth (1985), deservedly 'won wide acclaim,' as they say in publisherspeak, for its colourfully detailed account of the early years. This second entertaining instalment, Less Than A Treason (the enigmatic title comes from Robert Frost's poem 'Reluctance'), is equally thorough and equally sympathetic or at least tolerant, yet reveals the macho Nobel laureate in young manhood to have been a parasite, a misanthrope, an exhibi- tionist, and a jealous and disloyal friend, lover and husband. It is still possible to marvel at Hemingway's dedication to his craft, the ruthless obsession for which so many persons of letters are noted.

Volume One covered his life from child- hood in Oak Park, Illinois, to 1921, when, at the age of 22, he married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Volume Two contin- ues the story from their honeymoon jour- ney to Paris until, five years later, the marriage came to an end. It is a writer's painful success story about buying the time to do the writing he really wanted to do.

Hadley brought the income from a small trust fund, which rapidly shrank under the administration of a dishonest trustee. Hemingway's own income was irregular, earned mainly as an occasional roving cor- respondent for the Toronto Star. From January to October of their first year in Europe, he sent the paper 82 articles, 64,000 words, while otherwise writing only a few poems and short stories. He sold seven poems to little magazines in Ameri- ca, but not one story.

'His faith in journalism as the best train- ing for a writer,' Griffin says, 'he now thought misplaced.'

His newspaper assignments strained the Hemingways' marriage, whether he left her behind or took her with him. She accompa- nied him to Italy, where he interviewed Mussolini, whom he admired.

By the time Ernest had arranged, conducted and then written up the interview . . . Hadley was 'sick' of Milan. Ernest said he was tired and sick too — the throat again.

Hemingway believed that writing as well as he could was not enough to achieve publi- cation of his fiction.

To be published right off [according to Griffin's interpretation,] you had to be both mediocre and lucky. Other than that, you had to have influential friends.

Sherwood Anderson (whom Hemingway was later to satirise in The Torrents of Spring) had provided Hemingway with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. 'At their first meeting, Ernest thought Pound, with his wild red hair and open Byronic collar, a pretentious fool.' Like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein had a colossal ego.' However, they did their best to help him, and he accepted their help. Attending Stein's poetry salon, he met Picasso, who nicknamed him 'The Savage'.

Hemingway visited Sylvia Beach in her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Compa- ny. She reminded him of 'a small animal,

self-sufficient, but friendly'. He disapproved of homosexuals but 'noticed that she had lovely legs'. 'Ernest had heard that Miss Beach had published James Joyce's new novel, Ulysses, and he asked her when Joyce might come in.' Griffin records no meeting of the two incompati- ble writers. He mentions Hemingway's envy:

James Joyce, who was, after all, a 'measly and shitty' guy, was having a great success with his art because, with a patroness, he'd had the liberty to do it.

Hadley lost all Hemingway's short-story manuscripts in a valise stolen from a train. Her trust fund dried up — and she became pregnant. He felt compelled to get a job on the staff of the Star in Toronto. 'After a year in Canada, Ernest said, he'd be ready for suicide'; but that was to come much later, long after his father's.

They returned to France on the prover- bial shoe-string, gambling on his fiction. His first two books, Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time (short stories), made next to nothing. He admitted that he ' "sucked after", as he put it, the expatriate literati.' He found rich American idlers

useful, such as Gerald and Sara Murphy, who had a palatial villa and a 100-foot yacht at Juan-les-Pins.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was already successful, greatly admired Hemingway's writing and recommended it to Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Scribner's, who had managed to reduce Thomas Wolfe's cumbersome novels to some sort of order. Hemingway's first novel was his breakthrough. He gratefully (or derisively) named his cat F.Puss.

He paid a high price for The Sun Also Rises, which was largely autobiographical. During the running of the bulls, his favourite stooges in public displays of courage,

Pamplona, 1925, had given Ernest his first novel, but it had also fouled much of his life. He had made a fool of himself over an alco- holic nymphomaniac (Lady Duff Twysden, the model for Lady Brett Ashley) who, he felt, had betrayed him with a 'kike' for the price of her drugs. His [Hemingway's] wife, hurt and humiliated by Emest's passion for Lady Duff, had fallen in love, she said, with a handsome bull-fighter half her age.

From then on, the mrriage, fell apart.

New York critics extravagantly praised The Sun Also Rises, so his friends, of course, in the traditional way of fellow writ- ers, were quick to tell him what was wrong with the book. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a let- ter saying he thought 'parts of Sun Also are careless and ineffectual,' and complained of Hemingway's 'elephantine facetious- ness.' John Dos Passos chummily began a letter 'Say Hem' and went on: 'The book makes me sick.' Even his editor, after all the wonderful reviews, expressed mis- givings: Hemingway should have shown from the beginning that he found,'nothing glamorous' in Lady Brett Ashley, for she was a 'loose woman'. Hemingway observed that Maxwell Perkins in this instance seemed to be 'a narrow-minded prig'.

As his notes show and he acknowledges, Griffin has drawn heavily on Carlos Baker's 'official' biography of Hemingway. But Griffin's own research, helped by his friend Jack Hemingway, Ernest's and Hadley's son, offers new insights into Hem- ingway's relationship with Pauline Pfeiffer.

She and the Hemingways established a ménage a trois, swimming nude together and playfully sharing a bed. The Heming- ways separated. Pauline returned to the United States.

Ernest felt he lay upon the rack [Griffin relates]. He had been celibate for weeks, and he had not masturbated because he consid- ered it an act of cowardice, a waste of an orgasm of which a man had just so many.

In consideration of this original medical theory, Hemingway slept with his estranged wife, while maintaining his love affair with Pauline by post. When she came back to Paris, Ernest and Hadley were finally divorced, and Pauline became the second Mrs Hemingway. Need one add that Pauline had money?