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As a sequel to last week’s post on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, we decided to cover Lesley M. M. Blume’s book, Everybody Behaves Badly: The Truth Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises this week; it provides critical historical context behind Hemingway’s first celebrated novel. Last week’s post may be helpful to reference alongside today’s post. The contents of the audio and text formats are identical and meant to accommodate your preferences.
"Everybody behaves badly," … "Give them the proper chance."
-Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises
The publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 rapidly established Ernest Hemingway as a renowned author and lifestyle icon. American readers and critics fell in love with a writer whose purported fusion of brain and brawn afforded him deep and wide appeal. The Sun Also Rises is widely recognized as the first successful, truly modernist novel - Hemingway’s celebrated friend F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby the year before, but it covered the subject of modern life with a more traditional approach to writing. Hemingway’s approach omitted excessive descriptiveness and other supposedly superfluous language, contributing to an examination of modern life that also had a more modern approach. The story of how the book was ultimately published with strong critical and commercial reception is inextricably linked to the story of Hemingway’s rise and the formation of his legend / myth. In Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, author Lesley M.M. Blume guides the reader through this story. With skill complemented by depth of research, Blume documents true history in a book that reads like an engrossing novel.
The Road to Paris
At the age of 18, Hemingway wanted to serve in World War I but was refused admission to the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight. He found an alternative route to the battlefield by joining the Red Cross and was attached to an Italian unit as an ambulance driver. Within weeks of arriving on the Italian front, an Austro-Hungarian artillery shell riddled his legs with shrapnel, ending his involvement in the conflict. Importantly, the shrapnel had stopped short of inflicting the permanent damage that Jake Barnes (the protagonist in The Sun Also Rises) sustained from a similar incident. Hemingway recovered in Italian hospitals before returning to the U.S.A. in 1919.
While this unique experience in Europe had gotten the young Hemingway some attention in the American press, he quickly receded into obscurity after returning home. Hemingway found a job as a journalist for the Toronto Star newspaper and would move around a bit before taking up residence at a friend’s apartment in Chicago. In 1920, he met and courted Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, a wealthy young visitor from St. Louis. The two fell deeply in love and married in 1921. Hadley adored her husband and the writing he did as a side project to his journalism job. Her primary focus in these early years became the support of his mission to publish important literary work. During this time, Hemingway made another consequential acquaintance in Sherwood Anderson, who was already an established writer.
Anderson was the first in a long series of influential figures who would be caught in the web of Hemingway’s charm on the long march to the publishing of his first novel. Anderson encouraged Hem’s nascent writing and convinced the newlyweds to honeymoon in Paris instead of sticking to their planned Italian trip. Hem and Hadley set out for Paris in 1921, armed with Anderson’s personally penned letters of introduction to the expatriate literary elites of Paris. At that time, Paris was attracting throngs of foreign visitors. Many American artists were drawn by the heightened buying power of their US dollars driven by France’s post-war economic troubles, as well as by the greater artistic freedom Paris offered compared to the relatively puritanical United States.
Hemingway On the March in Paris
At first, Hemingway and Hadley were underwhelmed by life as outsiders navigating the cold Parisian winter. Hemingway also quickly developed a disdain for perceived faults of Paris’ Latin Quarter milieu, which he expressed quite openly in his dispatches to the Toronto Star:
“The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Cafe Rotonde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow, and with its afternoon and evening levees has made the Rotonde the leading Latin Quarter showplace for tourists in search of atmosphere.
It is a strange-acting and strange-looking breed that crowd the tables of the Cafe Rotonde. They have all striven so hard for a careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity.
…
You can find anything you are looking for at the Rotonde—except serious artists. The trouble is that people who go on a tour of the Latin Quarter look in at the Rotonde and think they are seeing an assembly of the great artists of Paris. I want to correct that in a very public manner, for the artists of Paris who are turning out creditable work resent and loathe the Rotonde crowd. The fact that there are twelve francs for a dollar brought over the Rotonders, along with a good many other people, and if the exchange ever gets back to normal they will all have to go back to America. They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist upon posing as artists.”
Crowds of pretentious, frivolous and lazy pretenders hanging on to a small core of true practitioners may be a recognizable pattern to the Citizen Scholar reader who has spent enough time around certain universities, pockets of the economy or creative circles. Hemingway set out to make the most of these circumstances. He continued to write short stories, eventually quitting his job and trying to support his growing family on his wife’s dwindling trust fund proceeds.
Getting Published
Hemingway dedicated himself single-mindedly to writing. His overwhelming personal charisma during scarcer leisure time was widely noticed, and he cultivated more and more powerful mentors like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They helped him improve his revolutionary writing style until it was recognizable as the toolkit that would be used to craft the defining book of the modernist generation of artists - The Sun Also Rises. First, however, Fitzgerald and others helped Hemingway get a book of short stories, In Our Time, published. In Our Time put Hemingway on the map, but he was still consumed with the need to publish a novel to achieve true literary greatness.
This opportunity came after the fateful 1924 trip to Pamplona that became the basis of the plot for The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s contempt for most of the Parisian expat community had found a vessel for its expression, and it would take him only about six weeks to produce a manuscript for the book. It was almost as much a work of journalism as a work of fiction, as some contemporaries noted. Certain elements of the real story were changed in the book. Hemingway was in fact enamored with Lady Duff Twysden, the real Lady Brett Ashley from the book, but Lady Duff was less romantically interested in Ernest Hemingway than Lady Brett had been in Jake Barnes. His portrayal of Harold Loeb, the basis for Robert Cohn, was equally mischievous in its divergence from reality. Hemingway seems to have retaliated for Twysden’s greater interest in Loeb and for Loeb’s bullfighting exploits exceeding his own in Pamplona by downplaying the importance of their affair in The Sun Also Rises and by making Robert Cohn more effete than Harold Loeb. This is a question we’d love to hear more from Citizen Scholar readers about, especially after you’ve come to your own conclusions about the great detail and nuance in Blume’s book. To what extent was Hemingway a rascal or a villain for portraying his companions so unmercifully and himself so charitably?
Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others who read the book manuscript before it was published knew that it was special and were convinced it would be a hit upon release. Confident of his impending graduation to the literary elite, Hemingway acted ruthlessly to secure the best possible outcome for his book and stopped hiding his contempt for the perceived failings of those around him. Most conspicuously, he didn’t give advanced notice to those companions he portrayed derisively in the story itself. He justified this public humiliation of people who largely admired him by citing personal grievances with each one that are outlined in Everybody Behaves Badly. Hemingway also insisted on publishing The Torrents of Spring, a poor parody of Sherwood Anderson’s work. His first great literary mentor was deeply hurt. Aside from turning on friends whom he’d come to resent, Hemingway traded in the publishers of In Our Time for the more prestigious Charles Scribner’s Sons, who could spend more on marketing his book. With his accession to the literary Mt. Olympus imminent, Hemingway even traded in his loyal and devoted wife for the wealthier, flashier Pauline Pfeiffer. She would become the second of his four wives.
Final Reflections
Everybody Behaves Badly is worth reading whether you liked The Sun Also Rises or cringed upon seeing our last post on it, because Blume tells the story so well. It’s even more worth reading for the excellent context and detail, especially if you like The Sun Also Rises as much as we do. Learning the true story behind the book has also caused us to think more deeply about the ambition that’s often necessary for high achievement. Ernest Hemingway yearned to be a great writer and made clear that it was a much higher priority for him than schmoozing at Parisian cafes or even than having a happy family life. He worked and charmed his way to becoming the voice of a generation - the generation that insisted on Ezra Pound’s slogan “Make it New” to a fault. Along the way he repaid many friends, mentors and wives distastefully, to say the least. Today, he’s still in a tiny club of artists who become lionized household names and are remembered by history. Did Hemingway just practically make the more glamorous choice in an inevitable trade-off? Many of us steadfastly cling to big dreams, but hesitate to sacrifice relationships with people who help and who love us. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this perennial and thought-provoking subject.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
Discussion #5: Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, by Lesley M.M. Blume