There and we know.
Hemingway.
How do you do and good-bye. Good-bye and how do you do. Well and how do you do.
Hemingway wanted to reciprocate her kindness. In 1924 he was guest editor for a month of Ford Madox Ford’s literary magazine Transatlantic Review. He showed Ford pages of The Making of Americans, then wrote to Gertrude about serializing it:
Ford alleges he is delighted with the stuff and he is going to call on you. He is going to publish the 1st instalment in the April No. going to press the 1st part of March. He wondered if you would accept 30 francs a page and I said I thought I could get you to (Be haughty but not too haughty) I made it clear it was a remarkable scoop obtained only through my obtaining genius. He is under the impression that you get big prices when you consent to publish… Treat him high wide and handsome…
They are going to have Joyce in the same number.
After four instalments, Ford complained to Gertrude that he had not known her book had 565,000 words – Hemingway had inferred it was a ‘long short story which might run for about three numbers’. Ford and Hemingway fell out, Gertrude blamed Hemingway, John Quinn, who financed Transatlantic Review, died suddenly in July 1924 aged fifty-four, the magazine foundered after a year of life and Gertrude did not get paid.
Hemingway marked the souring point in his and Gertrude’s relationship from when, in 1926, Alice cut Gertrude’s hair very short with the kitchen scissors. He thought this made her look like a Roman emperor, whereas before she had seemed to him like an earth mother, a northern Italian peasant woman with ‘lovely, thick alive immigrant hair’. After he and Gertrude quarrelled, their interaction became as bitter as if they had been lovers.
Like his father, and in the same manner, in 1961 Hemingway ended his own life. On Sunday 2 July, before seven in the morning, three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, near the Wood River, with a view of the Sawtooth Mountains, he took a double-barrelled Boss shotgun from his storeroom and blew his brains out. His wife Mary – Kitten Pickle, he called her, she was his fourth wife, he was her third husband – found him. They had been married since 1946. She claimed his death was an accident and that he shot himself while cleaning his gun.
Gertrude and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald first met Hemingway in a bar in Paris in May 1925. He, his wife, Zelda, and their daughter, Scottie, had moved to Paris the previous month and were living at 14 rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe. He was twenty-eight, three years older than Hemingway, and had just published The Great Gatsby. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, sold 40,000 copies in 1920, the year it was published, and he followed this with The Beautiful and Damned in 1922. Gatsby did not sell particularly well but he was proud of the book: ‘it is something really NEW in form, idea structure – the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.’
F. Scott Fitzgerald © Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images
T.S. Eliot read it three times and thought it the first step forward for American fiction since Henry James. Hemingway, full of admiration, took Fitzgerald to meet Gertrude. She told him This Side of Paradise ‘really created for the public the new generation’. He wrote to her that she was very handsome, acutely sensitive, gallant and kind:
I am a very second rate person compared to first rate people… and it honestly makes me shiver to know that such a writer as you attributes such a significance to my factitious, meritricious (metricious?) This Side of Paradise.
He called often at rue de Fleurus and they discussed his drinking problem. Gertrude’s way of dealing with drunk people was to treat them as if they were sober. ‘It is funny,’ she said,
the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son… If anybody thinks about that they will see how interesting it is that it is that.
Hemingway said of Fitzgerald:
If he was not an alcoholic I never saw one nor met one, nor knew one well in my life… Every time I would get him to stop drinking or drink only wine Zelda would get jealous and get him off of it.
Hemingway downed liquor without apparent mood change, Fitzgerald got drunk very quickly.
Gertrude praised and encouraged them both and they treated her like an oracle. There was passing paranoia when she said Fitzgerald had a ‘stronger flame’ than Hemingway. Fitzgerald thought she was somehow belittling one or other of them. Hemingway wrote a four-page letter to reassure him:
I cross myself and swear to God that Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise. […] As for comparison of our writings she was doing nothing of the kind – only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent […] If you had pressed her she would have told you to a direct question that she believes yours a better quality than mine. Naturally I do not agree with that – anymore than you would…
Thus they deferred to Gertrude’s judgement and revealed to her their insecurity and need.
In June 1925, Fitzgerald told Gertrude he was anxious to read The Making of Americans, learn from it and imitate things out of it. Six months later he said he was in ‘“the geographical center” of it, and fascinated by it’. He made no written reference to ever finishing or making sense of it.
Gertrude told him
