The Huge Season
Morley Callaghan, who writes this week in our book pages on Hemingway's posthumous, long- awaited volume on Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, is a survivor of those legendary days him- self as well as being a distinguished novelist. Cal- laghan was friendly with Scott Fitzgerald as well as Hemingway. He was a boxer; and when he touched gloves with Hemingway one summer afternoon in 1929 the scene was set for one of the most famous quarrels in American literary his- tory, a tragi-comedy of misunderstandings that parallelti Dickens's break with Thackeray. Fitz- gerald was the timekeeper. Callaghan floored Hemingway, who then rounded on Scott for let- ting the round run too long. Nothing between the three men was ever the same. Callaghan never saw Fitzgerald again; moreover, the author of The Great Gaishy was already suspect in Hem- ingway's eyes as we can see from the pages of A Moveable Feast. And as Callaghan puts it in his splendid memoir of '29, That Summer in Paris, it was thirty years before 'I was glad to hear that in the last year of his life out in Sun Valley [Hemingway] talked . . . affectionately about those days in Paris with Scott and me and sent, me at last his warm regards... .'
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