Everybody Was So Young (27 page)

“Gosh, what news of Transatlantic Charlie!” wrote Gerald to Hadley when he heard that Ernest had landed a contract with Scribner’s for The Torrents of Spring and for the Pamplona novel, which was now entitled The Sun Also Rises. “It certainly broke prettily for him. . . . It is a great title ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ Some day he’ll write ‘Yet the sea is not full’—or its equivalent. We read it the other day & were blown out of the water afresh.”

The rest of the letter contained a disappointment: Dos Passos had had to cancel plans for their glacier flight—a play of his was in rehearsal in New York, he said; or he was going to, or coming back from, North Africa—and when he scrubbed, Gerald and Sara had had second thoughts. Neither of them had any real skiing experience, and the trip down from the two-thousand-meter-high Silvretta would be grueling, and possibly dangerous, for novices. So now they, too, bowed out—although they “felt like skunks about” it. In the end, though, they couldn’t disappoint Ernest entirely; in late March, accompanied by Dos Passos (who had miraculously materialized) they went to Schruns for a short ski holiday.

The snow in the valley was uneven so the Hemingways, Murphys, and Dos Passos took the little electric train up the mountain to the Hotel Zum Rossle-Post at Gaschurn, where the Hemingways had stayed in January with Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest proceeded to give the beginners skiing lessons. There were no lifts or tows in those days, nor any fancy boots and bindings: you just strapped heavy wooden skis to your feet and added sealskins on the bottom to give yourself traction, climbed up the slope, took off the skins, and skied downhill. Gerald “spent two days doggedly practicing and falling down, and learning the elements of the stem Christiana and the Telemark,” but, he said, “Dos didn’t bother . . . because his eyesight was so bad he knew it was no use.” Still Gerald felt himself somewhat at a disadvantage: “Dos has always had hugely powerful legs and tremendous restless energy, and Ernest was an expert climber,” he recalled. But the same spirit with which he had conquered the elements in the Picaflor asserted itself:

I struggled along, trying to keep up with them, and felt terribly ashamed that I was holding them up. . . . Ernest always gave you the sense of being put to the test, and he was an absolutely superb skier. . . . When we started down, Dos just decided to go straight and sit down whenever he saw a tree, with the result that his pants were not only torn to shreds but his backside had all the skin taken off it. I managed to get down the first part without falling. Then in the second part, we had to go through a forest. I managed that pretty well too, falling only once or twice. Ernest would stop every twenty yards or so to make sure we were all right, and when we got to the bottom, about half an hour later, he asked me if I had been scared. I said, yes, I guess I had. He said then he knew what courage was, it was grace under pressure. It was childish of me, but I felt absolutely elated.

The elation lasted all the way down the mountain to Gaschurn, where, in the evening, all five of them sat by the hotel’s porcelain stove and ate forellen im blau and drank kirsch and told stories. Ernest got out the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises and read some of the parts he had revised, and Gerald and Sara said how much they would like to go to Pamplona and Ernest urged them to join him the next summer. Dos couldn’t promise to be there, but Hadley’s friend Pauline was coming. Why not Gerald and Sara as well? He showed them photographs of the bullfights—Gerald was so struck by the look of the dark bull’s head that he made a note to use it as the “nucleus” of a painting. So they made their plans, and drank more kirsch, and slept under feather quilts while the stars shone on the snow.

One day they posed for a photograph, the five of them—Dos, the Hemingways, the Murphys—standing in the cold slanting sunlight, bundled in woolen caps and thick sweaters. Their faces were merry and brown; their bodies, as they stood touching one another easily, were relaxed. It was, said Dos Passos later, “the last unalloyed good time” they all had together.

That spring Gerald had two pictures in the Salon des Independents, Laboratoire and a still life—a third painting, meant to have been exhibited as well, never made it past the registration stage and must have been either withdrawn or damaged. Laboratoire was almost certainly the painting described in his art notebook as a “group of chemical retorts,—diaphanous, white line profile shapes, tender colors, sure, graceful forms, ghosted. On glass, transparent paint with colored papers background, laboratory table as setting.” The Nature Morte might have been the painting also referred to as Roulement a Billes (Ball Bearing), now lost, which showed the sculptural machine part Gerald had so admired and placed on his piano like a work of art. Or it might have been any of a number of pictures outlined on the ruled pages of Gerald’s notebook: a view of a drugstore window; a collection of sewing implements—needles, thread, scissors; a still life of batterie de cuisine with rattan rug beaters hung on the wall behind; a view of Gerald’s black-and-white marble bureau top with a bunch of violets in a vase; “a table with real objects (glass) in foreground in front of a ‘nature morte’ of real objects in false perspective (treated).”

By any measure, Gerald had been prodigiously busy in the preceding months, the images crowding both his brain and the pages of his notebook. And he hadn’t limited himself to images: the notebook also held, in addition to a meditation on the difference between “‘painting’ forms and ‘mechanical’ forms,” an idea for a play about a family breeding farm where “the regular life of ‘sire-dam-service’ talk” plays “against a running obbligato of prudery in human relations.” What would happen, Gerald wondered, if a family devoted to an honest, animal expression of sex suddenly came across someone who used sex dishonestly, sophisticatedly, as a tool or weapon? “Is there dramatic material,” he asked Philip Barry in a letter, “in the fact that intelligent people, taking a frank interest in the workings of sex and its results in animals, are at a loss and unable to see or act clearly as regards sex in the case of human beings”? There’s no record of Barry’s reply, if there was one. But soon Gerald got another kind of answer.

The spring of 1926 was cold and rainy in the north of France, and Sara and Gerald, mindful of how drafty and cramped the Hemingways found their Paris flat, were determined to bring them down to stay at the Villa America. Ernest wanted to go to Madrid to write and see the San Ysidro bullfights in May, and so Gerald and Sara proposed that Hadley leave little Bumby with them and join Ernest in Spain; then they could return to Antibes until Pauline Pfeiffer joined the party and all five of them went to Pamplona in July.

But Ernest and Hadley (unbeknownst to Gerald and Sara) had quarreled about Ernest’s increasingly apparent partiality for Pauline. Under Hadley’s questioning, he stoutly denied it, but in fact he and Hadley’s friend had become lovers that winter in Paris, when he stopped over on his way back from New York. Now he went off to Spain by himself in a cloud of self-righteous indignation, leaving Hadley and Bumby, who had come down with a persistent cough, in Paris.

The Murphys persuaded Hadley to come with Bumby to Antibes anyway; it would cheer her up, they felt, and the MacLeishes and the Fitzgeralds were settled nearby, which would make things lively. Unfortunately, as soon as Hadley and Bumby arrived, the boy’s croup was diagnosed as whooping cough and it was advised that he be quarantined. The Fitzgeralds were in the process of moving from their villa—the lease was up in June—to a larger one they’d taken for the remainder of the summer, so they offered the empty villa to Hadley, and Gerald summoned (and paid for) the Murphys’ British doctor to care for Bumby. He wrote immediately to reassure Ernest: “Hadley seemed so tired when she arrived . . . [but] she’s in great form now and resting finely. There’s no doubt that Bumby’s better off. We have the best doctor we’ve ever known: an Englishman. Hadley likes him. It’s one of those crazy train of incidents which seems to lead to a situation somehow good. Don’t worry—you.”

That, to Gerald and to Sara, was the most important thing—that Ernest not worry, that he be able to do his work in peace. What they didn’t tell Ernest (but Hadley later confessed) was that they were also paying for Hadley’s grocery bills and other expenses, which galled Hemingway, who was both anxious and prickly about money and who resented (even while he accepted) the paternal role Gerald so often played in their relationship. As he did so often, Hemingway now used his fiction to get back at the object of his resentment: revising The Sun Also Rises, he put Gerald into the latest version as the rich dilettante hopelessly in love with, and ultimately humiliated by, the fallen angel who became Lady Brett Ashley. In his original draft, entitled Fiesta, the character has the same name as his real-life counterpart, Harold Loeb; in the final version he is Robert Cohn. But for a brief period Hemingway’s classic portrait of a patsy—a man whose money the other characters spend, and insult him for the privilege—was called Gerald Cohn.

Neither Gerald nor Sara knew this, of course. They were busy planning a celebration for when Ernest rejoined his family and friends: they would give a party at the little Juan-les-Pins casino, which would help the casino’s owner and make a fiesta for Ernest. And now, while they waited for Bumby to get better and Ernest to come back from Spain, they tried to keep Hadley amused. At “yardarm time” they would enlist the Fitzgeralds and Ada MacLeish (Archie was in Persia with the League of Nations Opium Commission until June) and drive over to the Villa Paquita, where they’d park just beyond the fence for a quarantined cocktail party—Hadley on one side, the Murphys and company on the other. “By the time we left,” remembered Hadley, “that fence was covered with glass bottles artfully arranged. It was great fun.”

The only one who didn’t find it much fun was Scott Fitzgerald, who was beginning to feel a kind of free-floating hostility that he expressed in a variety of ways as the summer progressed. For the first time in a while he had no financial worries—a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby and some healthy magazine sales had brought in money—and, as he later remembered it, “I made one of those mistakes literary men make—I thought I was a ‘man of the world’—that everybody liked me and admired me for myself but I only liked a few people like Ernest and Charlie McArthur [the playwright Charles MacArthur, coauthor of The Front Page and husband of Helen Hayes] and Gerald and Sara who were my peers.” But his feelings of self-confidence were undercut by uneasiness about Zelda, who had been acting strangely, and by a nagging jealousy about Hemingway, his friend and sometime protégé. Why were the Murphys, who had been his friends first, so crazy about Ernest? Why did they rave so about his writing, when they were so diffident about his own?

As often happens with insecure people, Scott transmuted his feelings of anxiety into belligerence, and when the drink was on him he got nasty. He ragged Gerald for the very thing that made him so irresistible to his friends: “I suppose you have some special plan for us today,” he sneered when he met Gerald at the beach one morning. And he grew more and more demanding of Sara. A scene in the draft of the novel he was writing is telling: One of the characters, a promising composer ruined by drink, is talking to the beautiful Dinah Roreback, a woman so closely modeled on Sara that in this version of the manuscript the name “Sarah” is crossed out and replaced with “Dinah.” “I’ve been in love with you for several years,” says the composer. “In my imagination I sleep with you every night.”

His infatuation has made him dislike her husband, Seth (originally called “Gerald” in this version); but she won’t let him tell her why: “I can’t discuss Seth with you,” she says. Just as Sara, in a tart note written to Scott that summer, said, “It’s hardly likely that I should explain Gerald,—or Gerald me—to you.” Years later Gerald implied to a friend that Fitzgerald’s portrait of a marriage in Tender Is the Night—not a “cooled relation,” but “active love . . . more complicated than I can tell you”—was true of himself and Sara too. Whatever complications might have been caused by Gerald’s own self-doubts, at this time the connection between himself and Sara was physical, and sexual, as well as emotional. But at this point Scott, perhaps willfully, could only sense the complications.

Hemingway’s arrival in Antibes, welcomed by Gerald and Sara with champagne and caviar, made things worse. Fitzgerald wasn’t a professionally envious man—his unstinting editorial and tactical support of Hemingway is proof of that—but he had fierce personal jealousies. And what he saw at the Juan-les-Pins casino made him deeply unhappy. It wasn’t the grim minuet of Hadley, Ernest, and Pauline that caught his attention, though; it was the way in which Gerald and Sara—particularly Sara—hung on Ernest’s every word. And perhaps there was something else. As Ellen Barry, who was there with her husband, Philip, later pointed out, Fitzgerald wasn’t the only man at the party who was attracted to Sara. “So was Ernest,” she recalled. Identifying with Gerald, as he often did, Fitzgerald had to feel uneasy about the danger Hemingway might pose to him. Anxious, hurt, and jealous, Scott proceeded to make a fool of himself and a shambles of the party with his behavior to Gerald and his moans that “Sara’s being mean to me.”

The Murphys were either ignorant of all these fault lines or chose to ignore them, as if they could ward off disaster with gaiety. When Archie MacLeish landed in Marseille on June 16 after his three-month trip to Persia, they made an occasion of it, bribing an officer of an ocean liner moored in the harbor to let the two of them and Ada watch his arrival from the liner’s bridge, and then performing an Indian war dance on the pier. They organized morning beach outings for their friends and guests, all carefully chronicled in Sara’s photograph albums: Scott and Zelda and little Scottie wading in the azure water and squinting in the sunlight; Ernest, tall and brown in striped bathing trunks, grinning at the camera, with Bumby on his shoulders; Hadley, fully dressed, kneeling by her son in the sand; “Ada of the Flying Fingers,” as Gerald called her, knitting under a checked beach umbrella, with Sara beside her, glancing seductively over her shoulder at the camera, her pearls looping over her bare back.