THE UNFILTERED TRUTH: MAKING A LIVING

Ernest Hemingway

Dearest Ernest,

In your letter to your editor, Maxwell Perkins, dated November 19, 1926 You write about some of your short stories. You speak to the fact that what you are paid for articles is all over the place. You mention a story for The New Republic that was 1200 words in length and for which you were paid $50.

Hem, your honesty in your writing and your pursuit of what is, rather than what we wish was, leaves you, at times, at a disadvantage. You speak to the fact that, “The Sun Also Rises could have been and should have been a better book.” Regarding The Sun Also Rises, you write of this literary work, “I figure it is better to write about what you can write about and try and make it come off than have epoch making canvasses etc.”

I really admire that about you, Ernest: being accepted or lauded takes a back seat to what you feel contributes to the quality of your work. It’s easy to understand why you were usually battling with editors over your writing as the demands of perceived marketability came up against your creative freedom to write your truth as you saw it.

There is so much that you are continuing to learn as you wrestle with your prose, “Also have discovered that most people don’t think in words - as they do in everybody’s writing now - and so in the Sun Also Rises the critics miss their interior monologues and aren’t happy - or disappointed. I cut out 40,000 words of the stuff that would have made them happy out of the first Mss - it would have made them happy but it would have rung as false 10 years from now as Broomfield.”

Even as The Sun Also Rises is gaining traction you are busy writing short stories about WWI. I see you’ve sent off In Another Country, Now I Lay Me, and A Simple Enquiry. It’s such a blessing to have Max Perkins working for you, stateside, in getting your stories out to publications as well as publishing your short stories in Scribner’s own Scribner’s Magazine. I love your line from In Another Country, that was in the original manuscript but was edited for publication, “The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the whores - and I believe they still are patriotic.”

Your stories are now getting picked up by such noteworthy publications as The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. In many ways, Hem, you have arrived. It’s unfortunate that other aspects of your life will hold you back from being able to embrace and own that feeling. You write to F. Scott Fitzgerald on December 1, 1926, “As for personal life of the noted noteby who, author, Hadley is divorcing me. Have turned over to her all existing finances and all received for British rights.Have been eating one meal a day and if I get tired enough sleeping - working like hell lately - find starting life poorer than any time since I was 14 with an earning capacity of what stories I sell to Scribners very interesting. I suppose everybody’s life goes to hell and anyway have been very healthy and, lately, able to use the head again.”

I fear, dear Hem, that this challenge for you of “being able to use the head” may be something that will continue to dog you throughout the rest of your life. Living fast and hard has its price.

Despite the struggles and challenges, I sense that you feel that your capacity to be published and read is growing and that confidence has allowed you to be OK with having to tighten your belt in order to pursue your heart's desire. I’m wondering how you will balance everything. Time will tell.

I’m looking forward to reading more about your literary connections and how they evolve even as your writing does.

Warm Regards,
Betsy McDowell

BIMINI ON MY MIND

Ernest Hemingway in Bimini

Dearest Hem,

It has been months since I've written, and for that I apologize. I needed to unplug for a a bit - I know you can understand that urge - for you, the bull fights in Pamplona Spain, trips to Austria for winter sports and camping. Sometimes you just have to "step away" in order lend some perspective to the life you're immersed in.

You did inspire me, dear Hem, to step outside of my comfort zone and take a trip to Bimini. They still remember you there. Your name is written in the stories they tell on Bimini. On the Big Game Club Resort & Marina, where you used to deep sea fish out of. You lived there from 1935 to 1937, and, after going there I can see why it was a place you found escape.

I fell in love with Bimini the moment my feet touched it's sandy soil. The airport is sooo laid back. If you fly in on a commercial flight (a small plane), you land in one part of the the island (south Bimini) and then have to take a water ferry to the other part of the island (North Bimini) where there are limited accommodations. We rented a privately owned bungalow just off the beach. It was off season, which I highly recommend, and we ate local foods and snorkeled to our hearts content. 

I understand your love for this place. There is such a good-natured, happy feel about the island and its people. It's not over developed and overrun with outsiders and it still has that sleepy feel of an island fishing village. There are cars, but there's no need for one. Everything is within walking distance, and the walking is interesting as you get to see all of the locals going about their daily business.

Food is a challenge if you're looking for something other than local fair. But being from the mainland, local fair of sea food and rice and beans is plenty delicious when seasoned with curry and cummin and coconut. Locals we met would bring island offerings and leave them on our porch: two types of coconuts - one that is just good for the coconut water inside and the other the traditional coconut that you can eat the meat of and drink the coconut milk. 

I would be failing to do the island justice, regarding the food eaten there, if I didn't speak to the many recipes that feature conch. I tried the conch salad and the conch fritters. They were delicious. I did take the lead from a number of locals who pointed us to places to shop and eat that were more traditional and didn't cater heavily to tourists.

Thank you, Hem, for steering me towards Bimini. I loved it and I will be going back. Perhaps next time to try my hand at deep sea fishing. Though, I am a "catch and release" kind of fisherperson.


When last we connected you were in a dark place and Pauline was isolated in the states, at her parents home, and missing you terribly. If your travails in the world of love aren't something to drag you down, it's disheartening to hear that Samuel Roth, publisher of the American literary magazine Two Worlds is using your material, without permission, as well as Joyce's Ulysses, and he's lying through his teeth as he tells publishers he's doing it with your consent. How presumptuous! 

I was also pleased to read, in your letter to Hadley, dated 18 November, 1926 that the she was waving the need for the continued separation from Pauline and agreeing, and actually requesting that you start the divorce proceedings. In hindsight, I believe that Hadley knew you better than you knew yourself, but she also recognized that when you were embroiled in passion there was little she could do to steer you to calmer, more sustaining waters. Hadley wrote, "I am not responsible for your future welfare - it is in your hands and those of God (pretty good scout and a swell friend)." The divorce decree was final by the end of April, 1926.

So, dear Hem, begins the next chapter. This one off to a rocky start with several stumbling points but never shy of passion. I look forward to staying in touch and exploring "life according to Ernest Hemingway."

Wishing you all the best,
Betsy

TORTURED LOVE

Ernest Hemingway at work

Dearest Hem,

Your letter to Pauline, dated November 1926 is a sad testament to a tortured soul when it comes to love, and attachment, and obsession. There is so much of your passion reflected in this letter but reflected in such a way that the figure in the glass is a distorted, wounded, self debasing vision of the "man's man" of a writer that you give the world. My heart breaks for you.

What I see is that little boy Ernest, trying to be what others want, or need, or expect, and losing himself in the process. Being the caped hero can be exhausting, and being the caped hero who portrays wearing a cape as something for sissies is debilitating. This process has you intentionally cutting yourself off at the knees to prove you're a man's man and to debunk any and all stories that you live in the shadow of your mother. When it comes to women your relationship with your mother has forever tainted whatever comes after.

You are desperately down when you write Pauline, "Now I can look back on the days when I had just strait lonesomeness and waiting for you - but knowing that everything was all right and that it was just waiting - and they seem unbelievably happy. Because now you have given yourself and your heart as a hostage to your mother too and the whole thing seems so absolutely hopeless." Dear Hem, you have found a kindred soul in Pauline as you both are held hostage by your mothers. It's no wonder that the conditions of the separation have the capacity to reach right down and rip your heart out.

I am amazed at your level of insight, my friend, when you write, "I know you did the extra three months because you thought that was what Hadley wanted - and also because at the time you were in such a state that sacrificed seemed like the thing to do. And of course al that Hadley wanted was to delay the divorce - anything to delay the divorce - she didn't want to just smash us both up - she won't admit it but she knows we're the same person - sometimes she has admitted it - but instead of giving her the delay that is practically the only thing left in the world that she wants we railroad her toward divorce and smash ourselves both up at the same time. That makes nice thinking too."

The most telling thing that you share in this heart wrenching letter is when you speak about killing yourself because of the apparent hopeless nature of the situation. You point to the fact that you had made a promise to Pauline not to act rashly until she had returned from her exile, but, in the light of her personal emotional deterioration, as well as yours, you asked if this didn't excuse you from your promise. You write, "But now it is getting all out of control again and you have broken your promises and I should think that would let me out. Only nothing ever lets you out. But I'm not a saint, nor built like one, and I'd rather die now while there is still something left of the world than to go on and have every part of it flattened out and destroyed and made hollow before I die."

At the end of your letter, like the soliloquy before the hero plunges the dagger into his heart, you write, "And all I want is you Pfife and oh dear god I want you so. And I'm ashamed of this letter and I hate it. But I had to get this poison out and I've just been stewed in it and not hearing and all the mail boats that get in with nothing on them and then that horrible awful letter from your mother yesterday in which you were getting your just punishment." And there it was, the affirmation that your own life echoed, that the punishment of a mother is the most damning, the most damaging, the most lasting - there is nothing more lasting than a mother's "love."

There is no winner to be found in this version of Sartre's Huis Clos that is your life at this point. My heart goes out to you, to Pauline, and to Hadley and Bumby who's lives will be forever changed by these events that have been set in motion.  Sometimes there's no benefit to identifying a winner. Sometimes it's simply about picking up the pieces after the storm and trying to piece life back together again into something that allows you to move on.

Hem, I trust in your capacity to construct a story line and I trust in your ability to create something of the pieces that lie at your feet.

Wishing you better days,

Betsy

SUCCESS SHADOWED BY CHANGE

Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer

Dear Ernest,

It was so good to read your letters to your friends, in the early part of 1926. It seems as if everything is coming together. After all of the struggle, and rejection, and doubt (particularly that of your parents) around whether you were really made of the stuff it was going to take to be a successful writer. Here, finally, it's starting to unfold.

You write to William Smith and Harold Loeb, "I got loose from Liveright on account him turning down the satire. Scribners say they will back me solidly and loyally no matter how the books turn out financially. So now I don't have to worry. Only to work. will try and write some swell ones. I'm not going to think any more about what is to happen to the stuff. Just work."

In addition, my dearest Hem, you have found a true place of creative retreat in Schruns, Austria. Here, in the company of fast friends the likes of John dos Passos and Expats John and Sara Murphy you exercised your passion for the outdoors and devoted yourself to editing The Sun Also Rises.

Your relationship with Scribners would prove to be an over twenty-year partnership that was bound by your personal friendship with Maxwell Perkins, your editor at Scribners. It is interesting, dear Hem, that just as you were forging this lasting relationship with Scribners and Perkins, you were, at the same time falling for yours and Hadley's dear friend, Pauline Pfeiffer. Latter, in your biography, A Movable Feast, you wrote, "I should have caught the first train from Gare de l'Est... to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second, or the third. When I saw my wife again... I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her."

What I find interesting is that you continued to muddle along, going between the two women in your life and purposefully avoiding doing anything about it, particularly when it came to your family. You actually took extra measures to keep the whole affair under wraps and secretive. 

Hem, you had to have known it would happen sometime. Hadley discovered the affair in early May when all of you, including Pauline's sister, Virginia, were on a trip through the Loire Valley, in France. However, the rest of the world was still in the dark.

The avoidance was certainly made easier by your preoccupation with putting the finishing touches on The Sun Also Rises, writing back and forth with the likes of Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and traveling back to Spain for the bull fighting season. By July and August of 1926 you still hadn't resolved anything and you were still carrying on the charade of Pauline being "simply a family friend" even though there were now those in your inner circle who definitely knew better. 

Hadley, in her infinite wisdom (or mutual efforts at avoidance) invited you and Pauline to come and stay with her and Bumby, at F. Scott Fitzgerald's place in the French Riviera where she and Bumby were recuperating from whooping cough. You even wrote about the experience in your novel The Garden of Eden. But, your marriage, eventually did fall apart, didn't it?

You and Pauline returned to Pamplona, Spain for the bull fights and Hadley and Bumby returned to Paris to set up separate residences. Dear Hem, even as you continued to try to live your life on your terms and to write on your terms, the world, people, and events would continue to press back, censoring, editing, shaping and ultimately, from your perspective, constricting that freedom you were so driven to express. You write to your editor, Maxwell Perkins, in August of 1926, "I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane - or perhaps more sacred."

It was all bound to come to a head, Ernest, and it did when Hadley insisted that you and Pauline live apart for six months, with no contact, and if at the end of that time you still felt you were in love she would give you her blessings and grant the divorce. So, September of 1926 saw Pauline sailing for the States to spend the six months with her parents, and you facing a that same extended time without her.

What will come of all of this only time will tell. 

Hoping it all works out,
Betsy

EMERGING INTO THE LIGHT

Hadley, Bumby, and Ernest

Dear Ernest,

So sorry to hear about the rejection of your book Torrents of Spring by Liveright. I do have to ask, after reading it, if you didn't believe that the possibility existed for Liveright to reject the story? The book is clearly a parody of Sherwood Anderson's work, Dark Laughter. 

In your draft of your letter to Horace Liveright, dated January 19, 1926, you write,"I did not submit the Torrents of Spring to you in the hope that you would turn it down. I consider it a good book and John Dos Passos, Louis Broomfield and Scott Fitzgerald, who are people of different tastes are enthusiastic about it. Your turning it down was your own affair." You further share with Liveright your belief that this rejection constitutes a breach of contract regarding the agreement that you had with him, "As Torrents of Spring is my second completed book and as I submitted it to you and as you did not exercise your option to publish it; according to my contract with you your option on my third book then lapses. This is quite clear and open and shut."

Wow! Bold move, my friend! I know you have not been comfortable in the relationship you have had with Boni & Liveright for some time. It is apparent that you feel that their strict censorship (from your perspective), is no longer tolerable. As well, their sense of priority when it comes to their authors, and the possibility that they are deferring your work to that of their primary author (Sherwood Anderson) has to rub you the wrong way. 

I have to believe, Hem, that you have a heightened sensitivity to being forced to live in another's shadow. You have, in your own life, made the bold move to step out of the shadow cast by your family, and it follows that you would not be very tolerant of any relationship that recreated those conditions and feelings.

Timing is everything, right? You are certainly in good company and, I'm sure, under advisement from those close to you, in your literary circles, that finding the right publisher is everything. 

You wrote to Liveright of these influences, "...I have already received offers for the Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, which I am still working on, from several publishers. I have not approached these publishers. They have heard of the books from friends who have seen manuscripts and in whose judgement they place some confidence."

It seems, Hem, that you've formulated a plan forward and have the support of friends and colleagues who have the ears of top publishers and publications. I look forward to seeing how and where you settle as you continue to build momentum in your writing and in your readership. 

I'm looking forward to learning more about how you're putting it all together. This is a very fluid time in your life with lots of possibilities, and lots of decisions and choices. It's good that you have Hadley and Bumby to help anchor you during this time. When I think of you and Hadley, I am reminded of a poem by John Donne, 

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end, where I begun.

It seems to be written in your stars, dear Hem, that you are destined to "obliquely run" and having that home port to return to can feel like both a blessing and a curse. I know, I've felt that way many times.

I do so love your letters!

With Warmest Regards,
Betsy

COMERADESHIP

Ernest and Bumby-Photo by Man Ray

Dearest Hem,

It is obvious that you are in the midst of a creative maelstrom that promises to sweep you up in it and take you to places yet unimagined!  In your letter to your fellow writer and friend, Ernest Walsh, dated January 2, 1926 you write, "There is comradeship today and I have it with Don Stewart and Dos Passos and a guy named Chink and a guy named Howy Jenkins and several other guys and would have it with you if we could bum around together."

You have such strong emotions around this idea of "comradeship." It is almost as if those who you hold dear in this exclusive circle of friendship are like your family to you. Your expectations of their commitment and loyalty are such that they can be hard to live up to.

In your letter you speak of your disappointment with poet and writer Robert McAlmon. This is the same man who published your first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923, and who financed and accompanied you on your first trip to Spain. In a sense, McAlmon was one of those key people who nurtured and supported you when, perhaps, others weren't yet on-board.

In your letter to Walsh you share that, "The last day I was in Paris I went around looking for him (McAlmon) intending, when I found him, to beat him up..." In your letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, dated December 24, 1925 you called McAlmon, "a son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toe nail."

Ernest, you are a difficult person, at times, and that's not to say that those who care about you aren't accepting of that difficulty. That being said, there may be times when those who care about you simply aren't able to stand in the gale force winds that you're life sometimes whips up.

Walsh put it best in his poem entitled "Ernest Hemingway" that was published in the second number of This Quarter (Autumn-Winter 1925-1926):

Papa soldier pugilist bullfighter

Writer gourmet lionhead aesthete

He's a big guy from near Chicago

Where they make the shoes bigger and

It's a good thing that because he aint

Got french feet Napoleon and him

Wouldn't have said much together

he'd have pulled Buonaparte's nose

And absolutely ruined french history

Dear Hem, your passion for what you do and how you love the written word permeates your letter to Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead dated January 15, 1926. You write, "This Quarter came this morning. IT IS SPLENDID... as it should be - and mechanically a hell of a fine performance. As for what is in it: it is the first exciting magazine I have read since I was 13 and used to wait for the baseball magazine to come out. That's God's truth."

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, "If I was a dog I'd roll in it."

I'm looking forward to reading more of your letters and coming to understand "life according to Hemingway". 

With Warmest Regards,

Betsy

MAKING A PLACE FOR YOURSELF

Ernest Hemingway and poet and writer Robert McAlmon

at the bullfights in Madrid

Dear Ernest,

1925 was certainly an action packed year for you! 

The month of April saw you pitching in to help out with Ernest Walsh's quarterly publication, The Quarter, to help get it out the door and published. You wrote Ezra Pound about it, "...and the continued activity of myself working like a son of a bitch to get Walshs magazine into the and off the press. Walsh put it my hands as a friend to help him outa his mechanical difficulties. Two hundred and sixty four pages and fifty reproductions can present considerable difficults when being printed by printer hitherto only done job printing."

At the same time you were wrestling with Walsh's publication and an inexperienced printer, you were struggling with your own issues. Having sent In Our Time off to your publishers, Boni and Liveright, you then found yourself going back and forth with the publisher over the stories that comprised In Our Time. At the same time you were being courted by Maxwell Perkins, from Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers.

Throughout the exchange of letters between yourself and Boni Liveright I detect that the restraints, that Liveright was working to put on your work in order to make it "publishable" in their eyes, were a point of some irritation for you - sometimes more, sometimes less. Throughout your correspondence with Liveright it never feels like you are able to be truly comfortable with their approach to you or your material.

Your letter to writer, John Dos Passos, dated April 22, 1925 reflects the beginnings of a long and colorful friendship as well as your discomfort with your publishers, "Jesus I wish you were over here so we could get drunk like I am now and have been so often lately... You're a good guy, Dos and I wish to hell you were here... I sent back the signed agreement to Liveright on the 1st of April about and they were to send me the $200. but it hasnt come yet. Nor any word from them. A Mrs. George Kauffman is here and she claims they want to cut it all cut the Indian Camp story. Cut the In our Time chapters. Jesus I feel all shot to hell about it. Of course they cant do it because the stuff is so tight and hard and everything hangs on everything else and it would all just be shot up shit creek. There's nothing to bother anybody. Not a dam thing."

You close your letter to Dos Possos with, "Dont let them cut it. Tell Liveright not to be a damned fool.

As colorful as your letters are to your literary friends, your letters back to your parents are as comparatively conservative and dry, focusing on fishing, an overview of your writing accomplishments, and their grandson, Brumby. 

You write to your father, "I do hope you will get some fishing. We plan to go to Spain June 25 for a mo or 6 weeks. Get ten days of fishing in the North. I have a commission to write a book on bull fighting for a German publisher and will follow the corridas from Pamplona July 7-13 down to Sragossa, Madrid and Valencia. I will be in the ring some of the time studying the business from close to but if you hear any reports of my being hurt discount them and don't worry as I will take good care of myself."

Compare what you wrote above with what you wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, while on your trip to Spain, on July 16, 1925, "We have had a fine time and no bad hot weather and seen Belmonte cogida-ed and he is not so bad, and had a bull dedicated to us and Hadley got the ear given to her and wrapped it up in a handkerchief which, thank God was Don Stewarts. I tell her she ought to throw it away or cut it up into pieces and send them in letters to her friends in St. Louis but she wont let it go and it is doing very nicely."

Dear Hem, as you begin your long love affair with the running with the bulls, so too do you initiate relationships with various literary and creative figures that will influence you in many, many ways. You count, among your friends, associates, and confidants the likes of Sherwood Anderson, American novelist and short story writer; George Antheil, American avant-garde composer; Sylvia Beach, owner of the Left Bank Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company; John Dos Passos, American writer and author; F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist and short story writer; Zelda Fitzgerald, American writer and painter; Lewis Galantiere, journalist, translator of French literature and playwright; Christian Gauss, professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University; Alyse Gregor, novelist and managing editor of the Dial; Jane Heap, co-editor of the Little Review; Eugene Jolas, journalist, poet, translator and editor; Harold Albert Loeb, American writer and editor; Archibald MacLeish, American poet and writer; Robert Menzies McAlmon, American poet, fiction writer, and publisher; Edith Moorhead, painter and influential Scottish suffragist; and the list goes on, and on, and on.

It's impressive the level of immersion you've achieved in your art, in the literary world at large and in Paris in particular. In my lifetime I can only name a handful of people who have achieved the notoriety or fame that those in your general circle of influence have achieved, and you at the "ripe old age" of 26. You, my dear friend, are in for the ride of your life. 

I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds for you. I just hope you can survive the meteoric effects of the life of immersion you've chosen. 

Wishing you all the best,
Warmest Regards,
Betsy