Montparnasse by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

SCOTT FITZGERALD MEETS ERNEST HEMINGWAY

RUE DELAMBRE, THE FORMER DINGO AMERICAN BAR AND RESTAURANT, NOW THE AUBERGE DE VENISE

After working all morning in the Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway sometimes walked down Boulevard du Montparnasse to the intersection with Boulevard Raspail. Since tourists had overrun the Dôme, he preferred to drink at the unassuming Falstaff or Dingo on the thoroughfare behind the boulevard that Strindberg called “dark and quiet rue Delambre, a street that more than any other in the neighborhood can make you miserable.”

It was at the Dingo that Don Stewart introduced Hemingway and Fitzgerald early in 1925. Initially, Hem liked the new arrival. “Scott Fitzgerald is living here now and we see quite a lot of him,” he wrote to Max Perkins in June. “I have read his Great Gatsby and think it is an absolutely first-rate book.” He asked Fitzgerald to comment on the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. Scott responded with ten pages of suggestions, many of which were adopted.

Sure he had found a friend, Fitzgerald invited Hemingway to accompany him to Lyon to retrieve his car, which had broken down on the way back from Italy. “We had a great trip together,” Hemingway told Perkins, “driving his car up from Lyon through the Côte d’Or.” To Gertrude Stein, he wrote that they had “a slick drive through Burgundy. He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.” The worst he has to say of him is that he misspells his name “Hemminway.”

The relationship began to sour once Hemingway met Zelda. Recognizing jealousy as the root of her hostility, he employed a characteristic metaphor to describe her—“Hawks don’t share.” Intuiting her increasingly evident schizophrenia, he mentioned it to Scott, who took no notice. His love encompassed all her defects.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recast his relationship with Fitzgerald as that of an established author pestered by a needy admirer. He insisted he didn’t read Gatsby until after they met, and denied soliciting Scott’s advice on The Sun Also Rises. His account of their first meeting, replete with suspiciously well-remembered dialogue, further mocked Fitzgerald, depicted as so effusive that Hemingway halts him in mid-flow, chiding him that, in his circle, “praise to the face is open disgrace.” The “great trip” to Lyon becomes a catalogue of disasters. Fitzgerald misses the train, leaving Ernest stranded overnight in Lyon. When Scott finally arrives, he’s drunk, becomes more so, then collapses with what he fears is pneumonia. To top off the ill-starred expedition, they drive back to Paris in the open car, periodically drenched by rainstorms.

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