They met in Paris 100 years ago today, on April 24, 1925, two weeks after publication of The Great Gatsby.
Scott Fitzgerald was eager to meet Ernest Hemingway, whose magnetic personality and gift for literary expression lured Scott to the Dingo American Bar that night.
Scott was the literary great, though he was so taken with Hemingway’s charm and clear talent that he readily worked to help this literary newcomer scale the heights of greatness.
If he had had a personality more like Hemingway, Scott might have left him to his own devices.
But he had a Catholic heart and was there to help.
Also, Zelda, Scott’s wife, had glommed onto the French aviator, Edouard Jozan, while Scott was toiling away on his Gatsby masterpiece, and, the marriage damaged, Scott felt adrift, and wanted the solace of friendship with Hemingway.
Theirs was a storied friendship.
When Hemingway read The Great Gatsby, he knew he, too, must write a novel. His short story miniatures, as he called them, were just the prelude.
Soon Hemingway was off to Spain for the third of his “fiestas” in Pamplona to celebrate the corrida – bullfights – with good food, good wine, and good camaraderie, while ducking into the cathedral, dedicated to Santa María, now and then to pray, feeling he did not quite measure up.
Scott, back in Paris, and Hemingway corresponded and opined about Heaven and confession.
They both needed confession’s cleansing.
In Hemingway’s case, that summer’s fiesta was marred by contretemps related to Lady Duff Twysden, whom Hemingway had taken a shine to. So had Harold Loeb, whose literary magazine had folded just as Hemingway began getting serious about writing.
They came to blows when Hemingway found out Loeb had slept with Duff Twysden.
Hemingway had his story — The Sun Also Rises, a tale of debauchery and spirituality, featuring Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn, the fictional names of these two real-life characters.
The contrast between café-society aimlessness and spiritual illumination was palpable.
Fitzgerald, reading Hemingway’s work, lopped off the first 10 pages. A masterstroke. Then too he had opened the doors to Charles Scribners’ Sons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Meanwhile Hemingway warmed up to the Catholic faith he had converted to while in Italy in 1918, surviving grave injuries through which he became close to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, whom he considered Jesus’ “listening post,” he told George Herter; while Scott never quite penetrated the depth of his faith, devoting himself to caring for an ailing Zelda, while perplexed over how Hemingway could just dump him.
It was tough on Scott, drinking himself to death, to Hemingway’s chagrin even as he focused laser-like on his next great novel, A Farewell to Arms, which Scott gave his unvarnished assessment of, rankling Hemingway.
Then, too, there was that boxing match Scott was supposed to be timing, and losing track, Hem was decked.
And the friendship floundered.
Hemingway believed Zelda held back the flowering of Scott’s talent, which was true.
Then, too, Hemingway was just very competitive.
In the end, he softened and realized Scott’s second-to-last novel, Tender Is the Night, was better than, at first blush, it seemed; and he asked Max Perkins, their Scribners’ editor, to send Scott his “great affection,” noting how “excellent” much of it was, and explaining parenthetically, “I always had a very stupid feeling of superiority about Scott — like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.”
The excess drinking taking its toll, Scott would drop dead of a heart attack in Hollywood some six years later on December 21, 1940.
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings,” Hemingway wrote of his dear friend in A Moveable Feast. “At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did . . . later he became conscious of his damaged wings . . . and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”
The feeling was mutual.
In his last letter to Ernest, Scott wrote and thanked him for the inscribed copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It’s a fine novel, better than anyone else writing could do,” he wrote. “I envy you like hell . . . and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.”
He closed: “with Old affection.”
Soon, he would not be envying Hemingway, but, I’m convinced, helping him from Heaven.
