Ernest Hemingway by Mary V. Dearborn

Author:Mary V. Dearborn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Ernest may have thought that a story about a writer undone by his association with the rich was an appropriate forum in which to raise such a question, but there was no need to use the name of a real person in a piece of fiction. The point he was making, that Scott was naive and even stupid in not seeing through the rich as he did, suggests an exculpation for the narrator of “Snows”: however misguided he may have been, there was at least one other famous writer who was more so. The gesture was hardly a kind one.

But rearranging the anecdote so that Scott was the butt of it, when in actuality Ernest had been, was underhanded in the extreme. Scott had actually used the phrase in his 1926 story “The Rich Boy,” one of the most sharply observed portraits of the rich in fiction: “Let me tell you about the very rich,” Scott wrote. “They are different from me and you.” But the exchange comes from a totally different incident. Max Perkins and Ernest had been having lunch in New York with the writer Mary Colum. It was Ernest who provided the opening for the line. He said, “I am getting to know the rich,” and Colum got off the reply: “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Ernest simply transferred the mild humiliation inflicted on him by a woman writer to Scott, in doing so also taking the credit for a shrewd observation and a funny remark.

Scott wrote him a short, to-the-point note about the matter, which began, bluntly, “Please lay off me in print,” adding, “And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?” When the manuscript of The First Forty-nine Stories came in to Scribner’s in August 1937, Max Perkins noted that Ernest had simply cut Scott’s last name. Max told Ernest this wasn’t enough, and in the end Ernest substituted the name Julian.

But this contretemps marked a final turn in the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship, as exemplified by Scott’s response to Ernest’s latest high jinks—his much anticipated confrontation with Max Eastman. A year later, in August 1937, in Max Perkins’s office, Ernest encountered Eastman, whose jaw he had been threatening to break ever since Eastman, in his scathing review of Death in the Afternoon, accused him of having false hair on his chest. Ernest bared his chest and pulled open Eastman’s shirt to reveal his. Eastman picked up a copy of the book in which his review appeared, and Ernest slammed the book into his face. Blows were exchanged right there in the Scribner’s office, though it is unclear who bested whom. In one telling the meeting ended with the two men on the floor in a clinch, Eastman on top, but Ernest vigorously disputed this version, supplying reporters with his own, which held that Eastman had attacked him “like a woman,” clawing at his face with open hands.

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