Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Doomed to Friendship

The most striking writerly friendship in American literature, strange as it may sound, contains many pitfalls. Matthew Brookley, publisher of many works on Scott Fitzgerald, has recently undertaken a study of the writer’s friendship with his contemporary Ernest Hemingway. In his 1994 book Fitzgerald and Hemingway, A Dangerous Friendship, Broekkoli quotes a passage from Hemingway’s The Holiday That’s Always With You, according to which the writers met in Paris in 1925 at the Hotel Dingo, where a certain Duncan Chaplin was also a guest.

Bruccoli goes further and claims that Chaplin was not in the hotel that day, moreover, the man was not even in Paris in 1925, and, among other things, he never met Ernest Hemingway. In fact, Bruccoli provides dozens of stories from the private lives of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, which are debunked as myths as the researcher delves deeper into their relationship. Like a sailor grasping a long-awaited land with both hands, Bruccoli tries with all his might to stick to a credible version of their history together. Perhaps this is why his work consists mainly of the writers’ correspondence, as its authenticity is not questioned.

Among other things, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were real legends, but each in his own way. And legends are always strangely influenced by facts, just as astrophysicists tell us that light begins to curve near a black hole. We, who are unable to verify this with our own eyes, have no choice but to believe what we hear. Despite the obvious differences in the figures of each of the writers, it is impossible to deny a note of striking similarity in their fates. The first thing that comes to mind is their mutual and blind pursuit of self-destruction, though each of them raced to meet infinity at different speeds. “The Feast That’s Always With You” is especially popular for its chapters on Scott Fitzgerald, but like everything else they had in common, these passages can hardly be taken at face value. That said, it would be wrong to accuse their content of a complete lack of truthful facts.

First Encounter

Fitzgerald and Hemingway actually met for the first time in Paris in 1925. By that time Fitzgerald, three years older than his companion, was already a fairly prominent writer. He had already managed to publish, though not perfect, but quite informative and popular novel This Side of Heaven (1920) as well as an equally successful work, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). His third work, and in fact his first masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published the year they met. By the time he met Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway had only a small collection of short stories, In Our Time, and so his name was little known outside the narrow literary communities of Paris. This collection sold a small circulation of only 1,300 copies.

The acquaintance with Fitzgerald was another smile of fate for the young Hemingway. Earlier, in 1921, he had met Sherwood Anderson in Chicago, which resulted in a letter of recommendation to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound; now Fitzgerald himself was deeply impressed by the novice writer’s talent and introduced him to his editor, Max Perkins, adding that Hemingway would be a great asset to the Scribner publishing house. If Fitzgerald did not personally raise Hemingway’s star to the firmament, at least he contributed tangibly. In the coming year, Scribner publishes Hemingway’s debut novel, And the Sun Rises, which paved the way for its author to reach the top of literary Olympus.

Origins of the Writers

The relationship between the two writers has since taken a rather unusual form. The older and more successful (at the time of their acquaintance) Fitzgerald voluntarily accepted the role of “younger brother” to the more stocky and overbearing Hemingway. The reason for this lay in similar backgrounds, but radically different characters. Both were born in the Midwest: Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota, while Hemingway was born on the outskirts of Chicago. Both had weak fathers and strict mothers. Scott had two older sisters who died when his mother was pregnant with him. Later another son was born, but he did not live one hour. Hemingway grew up under the same roof as his many sisters and spent his entire childhood dreaming of a younger brother. But when his brother Lester was born, Ernest had long since passed the adolescent stage of life. Since childhood, Fitzgerald had made a separate corner in his imagination for a real hero. Studying at Princeton, which he never finished, the writer idealized burly and stout soccer players, whom he could not match in any way. In turn, everyone who knew him singled out all the aforementioned athletic traits in Hemingway, which is why the two writers were a perfect match: Fitzgerald badly needed a hero, and Hemingway was that hero.

Different Writer’s Fates

The key element that makes it possible to draw a clear dividing line between the friendship of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is the essential difference between their writing careers, shaped by their own life circumstances. In fact, Scott Fitzgerald earned a mere pittance from the publication of his novels. By 1930, on the other hand, he had managed to amass a decent capital by writing short stories, but later that source of income dried up for the writer. He was in dire need of money. In 1920 he married the glamorous but volatile Zelda, and from then on the couple became the epitome of the luxurious and extravagant life. In Europe they were used to living surrounded by wealth, so Fitzgerald, who wanted to create novels, was forced to write more financially profitable short stories, mostly of second-rate quality even according to Fitzgerald himself. Fate-villain turned out to be a rather fastidious lady, and so his bad stories sold even better than the really high-quality stories.

Ironically, Fitzgerald’s career as a novelist-novelist came to a standstill just the year he met Hemingway. Thus Scott Fitzgerald did not write a single novel for the next nine years until he finished A Night Is Tender, which was considered a real failure by critics and general readers alike. According to Hemingway, the reason for this stagnation in creativity was the book The Great Gatsby, the success of which created doubt in the author’s soul that he would never be able to write such a text again. Beginning in 1925, Fitzgerald’s life became a three-way war: he battled alcoholism, his wife’s constant fits (in 1930 Zelda was hospitalized with a mental illness), and an unwitting ambition to write real novels, while being forced to write simple stories for newspapers to cover all the underlying costs. Later, during the Great Depression, even newspaper stories stopped generating any worthwhile income, and Fitzgerald was forced to seek his new career in Hollywood for writing movie scripts, which also failed at the box office.

Compared to such struggles, Hemingway’s fate shone with the brightest colors. While Fitzgerald’s career began its downward spiral, Hemingway was just beginning his long journey upward. After publishing his novel And the Sun Rises in 1926, Hemingway divorced his first wife Hadley Richardson and married a rich girl, Pauline Pfeiffer. In his life there is room for 2-m spouses, and on this occasion, Fitzgerald made a caustic remark, saying that Ernest every time he needs a new wife, when he wrote the next book. The novel Farewell to Arms was written on the west coast of America, where an influential uncle of Pauline gave the young couple a mansion. With no need to write just to make a living thanks to the success of his first novel and the affluence of his second wife, Hemingway could and did allow himself to look down on Fitzgerald’s newspaper work. Later, in the thirties, Hemingway also escaped the fate of writing Hollywood screenplays, in which even William Faulkner wallowed. Incidentally, he worked on a screenplay based on Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not”, but Hollywood is Hollywood, and in the released film almost nothing remains of the original work. The year 1940 was marked by two major events: parallel to the death of Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway’s career reaches its climax with the publication of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. As a result, we see an example of a friendship between two writers, one on the way down and the other on the way up.

The “internecine” relationship

Hemingway’s attitude toward Fitzgerald in The Feast That’s Always With You can, to some extent, be called a mishmash of exaggerations and memories tainted by alcohol. One of Hemingway’s biographers even suggested that Fitzgerald’s portrayal of a weak, drunken, unstable man was nothing more than a deliberate attempt to “defile” a comrade after Edmund Wilson and many other critics had reassessed their views on Fitzgerald’s work after his death. But despite the presence of certain distortions of meaning, Hemingway was hardly the only person who found it difficult to be around Scott Fitzgerald. Charming and touching when sober, Fitzgerald completely lost control of himself and his emotions when he drank. As one of the most famous drinkers in American literature, Fitzgerald, in reality, had a poor tolerance for the effects of this poison. Ignorance of his own measure automatically diminished the writer’s authority in Hemingway’s eyes, for it was a prerequisite for passing his “manhood test. Their mutual friends, including Gerald and Sarah Murphy, also attest to the fact that Fitzgerald became unruly when drunk. Hemingway even stated that at certain times he left orders that no one should give his Paris address to Fitzgerald to avoid his drunken visits. After several weekends spent at Scott’s house in 1928, Hemingway said that a bullfight seemed more tempting than a couple of days alone with the writer.

Up to a certain point the relationship between the writers was quite strong, even though Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald hated each other (Hemingway accused her of indulging Fitzgerald’s weaknesses). They kept up a regular correspondence, mostly very friendly, and Fitzgerald, as a true critic, among other things, left some pertinent remarks on the novel Goodbye Gun, which helped shape Hemingway’s style. Later their relationship deteriorated somewhat. The reason for this was the publication by Fitzgerald of a number of articles in which he recounted his own failures. Hemingway was horrified by such frank confessions of a friend; he honestly believed that every man has to find a solution to their own problems alone, you can not take it all out in public court. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway unequivocally rebukes his friend, which hurt Fitzgerald’s soul. And later the flow of harsh criticism from a previously friendly party does not stop: in 1934, Scott published the previously mentioned novel “The Night is Tender”, about which Hemingway speaks mostly negatively. To the writer’s credit, a few years later he rereads the novel and changes his attitude toward it.

Misfortune Friends

Perhaps the main difference between the two writers is that in the minds of the public Fitzgerald is largely perceived as a loser. But we should not forget that Hemingway, too, had his weaknesses, which Scott Fitzgerald was the one to point out. For example, he was right in his judgment of the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s life. He preferred to solve marital problems by running away from them, so he had four wives. Despite Zelda’s severe mental illness, Fitzgerald remained faithful to her until the end of his life. In addition, Fitzgerald noted that, like him personally, Hemingway also had psychological vulnerabilities, though of a slightly different order. He attributed his problems to the realm of melancholy, while his comrade was prone to megalomania. And so it turned out! By 1940, when Scott Fitzgerald passed away and Ernest Hemingway was at the height of his fame, neither of them could have imagined that the latter’s last days would not be much different from the former’s. Hemingway never even mentally put himself in the uncomfortable position that Fitzgerald found himself in in 1937, when he went to Hollywood to write screenplays. But the last years of Hemingway’s life were haunted by the same ghosts that haunted his friend: alcoholism, mental problems, and an ever-growing anxiety that he would never reach his own level again. He marked the chapters on Scott Fitzgerald in The Feast That’s Always With You with such an introduction:

His talent was as natural as the pattern of pollen on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did, and he didn’t notice how the pattern wore off and faded. Later he realized that his wings were damaged, and he understood how they were arranged, and he learned to think, but he could not fly anymore, because his love for flying had disappeared, and all that remained in his memory was how easily he had once flown…

It was 1957 when Hemingway addressed these lines to his late friend, and, in fairness, they are no less relevant to their author.