Ernest Hemingway

Parental Discretion Advised

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"Mother said I'm not old enough to read For Whom the Bell Tolls."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

- Ernest Hemingway in Conversation, 1956.

Of course everyone knows that Ernest Hemingway's first novel was The Sun Also Rises.

NOT!!!!!

Nope. Instead the first published novel of the American writer Ernest Miller Hemingway was the now forgotten and almost never read The Torrents of Spring. It was issued by Scribner's Publishing Company in 1926 just before The Sun Also Rises.

However, Scribner's believed The Sun Also Rises would be a much better seller and they took Torrents because...

Well, maybe we don't know exactly why Scribner's accepted the book when they knew it wouldn't sell all that great. But at least thereby does hang a bit of a tale.

In 1925 the New York publisher Boni and Liveright had just brought out a new book titled In Our Time. This was a collection of short stories by a virtually unknown author whose publications had so far been limited to small Paris literary magazines and the limited hand printed editions of local Left Bank presses. But Boni and Liveright believed the author - Ernest Hemingway - had a future and they offered him a contract for his next three novels.

However, Scott Fitzgerald, already a well established and best selling American author, had met Ernest in Paris. He had been impressed with Ernest's short stories and mentioned them to Max Perkins, the chief editor at Scribner's. At that time Scribner's was New York's most prestigious publisher and had issued Scott's books. Although Boni and Liveright was a perfectly respectable firm, Scribner's was the big time.

Max wrote Ernest a letter of inquiry and asked if he had any novels ready for publication. If he did, he could send them in for consideration.

But Ernest explained he had just signed on with Boni and Liveright for at least three books. Max wrote back saying he understood, but that if Ernest was ever in a position to send him a novel, please do so.

At this point comes a bit of controversy. The contract with Boni and Liveright stated that if they rejected any of Ernest's books, then Ernest would be free from the terms. He could send any of his work somewhere else.

Before he received Max's letter, Ernest had been writing the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. The intention was to send it as his first novel to Boni and Liveright whose editors were fully aware of this work in progress and hoped to get the manuscript soon.

But suddenly in mid-novel - and after receiving Max's letter - Ernest began to write another book. This was a rather biting satire on the best selling novel Dark Laughter by the American author Sherwood Anderson. Although Sherwood is rarely read today and his works are out of print, he was a big literary name in the 1920's. And he was one of the most popular authors published by - get this - Boni and Liveright.

Ernest's parody was - and there's no other way to put it - hammered out in a week to ten days. Then rather than finish The Sun Also Rises, Ernest sent Boni and Liveright the new novel that he named The Torrents of Spring.

By submitting a novel ridiculing Boni and Liveright's most prestigious author, it was as if Ernest was deliberately wanting the book to be rejected so he could take his books to Scribner's. But that's absurd, is it not? Ernest would never resort to such subterfuge, would he? Certainly he always denied he acted in bad faith even though his friend, the artist Mike Strater, wrote that The Torrents of Spring was a "cold-blooded contract breaker".

But whatever Ernest's motivation, The Torrents of Spring was rejected within the month and Boni and Liveright wrote that they were patiently waiting for The Sun Also Rises.

They never got it and Ernest wrote a friend, "So I'm loose!" He sent the manuscripts to Scribner's, who published both books, and Ernest eventually ended up as America's most influential author of the 20th century.

The Torrents of Springs is indeed a strange novel and people who read it will likely scratch their heads that it ever got published. Of course, the book is satire about an author that no one reads, and so the humor must remain elusive. Satire about something no one remembers will rarely succeed.

But you wonder. Did Scribner's really want the book or did they think taking only The Sun Also Rises would look bad? Certainly their outlay wasn't much for Torrents. For over a decade there was only the one printing of 1250 copies with each volume priced at $1.50. Production costs may have been something like $800. But Scribner's launched a major promotional campaign for The Sun Also Rises, and the first printing quickly sold out. Reprints were immediately ordered and continue to sell today.

One of the strangest plot points in The Torrents of Spring and what today detracts from what little humor that might remain is the depiction of some Native American characters (then, of course, called "Indians"). The "Indians" wear breech cloths, give "war-whoops", ask the "white chief" for liquor, use superlatives limited to "heap big", and otherwise speak with such a stilted pigdin English devoid of adjectives, articles, and with verbs lacking any tense inflections that it's a stretch even to call their speech a parody.

The critics, though, didn't seem to note anything amiss with such - and we must admit it - puerile characterizations. But they didn't find anything unusual in the racial language routinely used by the "good guys" Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, either.

Yes, we're talking about The Sun Also Rises.

It's not just the epithets hurled at the character Robert Cohn (who was Jewish) or the anti-Catholic sneers used by Bill when they found out that a church group traveling to Lourdes had reserved all the lunch spots on the train. But Jake himself - the hero of the book, remember - also makes some decidedly prejudiced and completely off-plot remarks about a black jazz drummer in one of the Paris night spots.

Today there are people who read The Sun Also Rises and are so put off by the ethnic slurs that they dismiss Ernest as the most overrated writer in history. At the very least they will caution that parental discretion is certainly advised as The Sun Also Rises is no more a children's book than is Huckleberry Finn.

Of course, Ernest's fans will rise to his defense and point out that Jake and Bill were fictional characters speaking the language of the 1920's. Even in "well-bred" society such prejudicial speech was quite common well past the mid-20th century.

It's important, Ernest's fans remind the readers, not to confuse an author's actual views and opinions with the views of their characters. The language notwithstanding, there are stories where Ernest depicts black and white men interacting as equals (such as Bugs and Ad Francis in "The Battler"). In The Sun Also Rises Ernest was trying to write a novel that realistically portrayed the society in which he lived, not necessarily writing his autobiography or about his personal philosophy.

Of course, that much of Jake Barnes's character was modeled after Ernest can't be denied. As soon as the book hit the stores, it was immediately recognized that the group in the The Sun Also Rises was based on Ernest and his friends who in some cases quickly became his former friends. Ernest himself cautioned that the characters may have been based on people he knew but their depiction was not exact. Lady Duff Twysden - Lady Brett Ashely in the book - did not have an affair with the matador Niño de la Palma (Cayetano Ordóñez and the fictional Pedro Romero). And El Niño certainly didn't get beat up by writer Harold Loeb who was the model for Robert Cohn.

Jake's situation in Paris mirrored that of Ernest but again it wasn't exact. Ernest had moved to Paris as the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and soon gave up journalism to be a full time fiction writer. In later years Ernest liked to regale his friends about his days as a struggling writer. He would tell stories that when the dinner pot was "absolutely devoid of content", he'd snatch pigeons from the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Actually Ernest managed quite nicely by living on his wife's trust fund. Hadley Richardson had come from a well-to-do family and had inherited a $250 monthly stipend. That was quite good money in the 1920's and very good money for an American living in Paris. Typical wages were about 3 - 5 francs per hour (about 25 - 30 francs a day) and basic living expenses were about 400 - 600 francs per month. So at an exchange rate of 3 francs to the dollar, Ernest, Hadley, and their young son Jack (known as Bumby) had plenty to live on and even have some left over for travel and entertainment. Ernest's own estimate was that two people could live well and travel on $5 a day.

Of course there was money from his writing. However, Ernest's first publications were in the small magazines that paid little and relied on a "patron" to foot the bill. The patrons were usually wealthy British or Americans and often came from what can be called the aristocracy. Patrons sometimes even doubled as the editors and publishers. For instance, the nephew of mega-financier J. P. Morgan, Harry Crosby, and his wife Caresse founded Black Sun Press which published works by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Henry Miller, and yes, Ernest Hemingway.

The Torrents of Spring excepted, Ernest's output was by no means at the crank-'em-out-and-set-'em-up rate. From 1926 to 1930 he published his two major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, plus two short story collections, In Our Time and Men Without Women. Later books were the non-fiction introduction to bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa about a hunting safari to Kenya, the Key West novel To Have and Have Not, the famous For Whom the Bell Tolls about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Across the River into The Trees with its plot drawn from World War II, and The Old Man and the Sea which was a short novel set in the fishing village of Cojimar, Cuba. Other story collections were Winner Take Nothing and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. So during his lifetime, Ernest published seven novels, two non-fiction books, and four short story collections. Compare this to William Shatner's literary output of thirty books which includes 22 novels.

Although The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms sold well, they were by no means like today's blockbusters. So after Ernest married his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, his income continued to be supplemented by the family fortune of his in-laws. Pauline's Uncle Gus provided them with the $25,000 needed for the safari that led to The Green Hills of Africa and it was Pauline's money that paid for their house in Key West, Florida, where they lived from 1931 to 1940 (for what it's worth, Mark Twain's wife, Libby, paid for their home in Hartford, Connecticut).

It was in Key West that Ernest wrote To Have and Have Not. Today this is often seen as one of Ernest's more political books about how the poor and downtrodden struggled to weather the Great Depression. From the fate of the protagonist, Harry Morgan, the reader learns how even a good man can be driven to extremes by economic necessity.

Actually Harry Morgan was a jerk who peppers his thoughts and conversation with racial epithets as if he was sprinkling paprika over marhapörkölts. He was also a man who would get money any way he could and was equally adept at losing it.

As the book opens, it's the height of the Great Depression but Harry has a lucrative charter business based in Key West, Florida. He had been hired by a wealthy American named Mr. Johnson for a fishing trip to Cuba at $35 a day.

After hooking no fish for three weeks, on their last day out Mr. Johnson loses Harry's $360 fishing rig overboard. Although at first Mr. Johnson objects to paying for the extra cost of the rod and reel, eventually he seems to agree. Then on the pretext of going to the bank, he catches a plane back to Florida and was able to avoid paying any of the $825 due because Harry had neglected to collect the pay at the end of each week like he should have.

Now broke, Harry agrees to take a dozen illegal Chinese immigrants from Cuba and land them in America at $100 a piece. But he knew that no one was going to pick them up even if they arrived. Mr. Sing, the man who arranged the scam, had smilingly mentioned if the group came back on his hands, he would have to inform the United States consulate about Harry's involvement.

So the simplest solution was for Harry to throw everyone overboard once they were out to sea. Harry, though, figured there was an alternative. He would just kill Mr. Sing once the passengers were locked in the cabin, dump his body overboard, and then return the group to a deserted beach in Cuba. All in a day's work.

Later Harry gets shot in the arm by the Coast Guard while running a load of bootleg liquor and has his boat seized by customs. Now without a way to make a living and minus his arm, he gets involved in a harebrained scheme to make money by agreeing to ferry a group of bank robbing revolutionaries to Cuba.

The result is yet another of Harry's monumental foul-ups. The robbers kill Harry's friend Albert and the crooked lawyer named Bee-Lips who had arranged the deal. After the robbery, they commandeer the boat that Harry borrowed from a friend and make him steer it toward Cuba. As half of the revolutionaries lie in the bunks incapacitated from seasickness Harry shoots them all but in the fight is himself shot in the stomach and dies after being rescued, leaving his wife and three daughters on their own.

Certainly one of Ernest's less stellar efforts, To Have and Have Not was derived from two short stories originally printed in Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazines. Harry had borrowed $3300 from the Esquire editor so he could buy his fishing boat which he named the Pilar, and the second story was written to help pay off the debt. A third section was added to make a full length book.

Economic necessity may have hurried Ernest's hand but the writing of To Have and Have Not is definitely not his best. Since Harry had lost his boat to customs, he arranges with Bee-Lips to charter a boat to use in the robbery. The boat's owner is a local bar owner named Freddie who is a good friend of Harry's. But Freddie thinks Harry is just going on a fishing trip. As usual for an absentee charter, Freddie requires a security deposit for the price of the boat. Bee-Lips hands Harry $1080.

"It should be twelve hundred."

"Less my commission," said Bee-Lips.

"Come on with it."

"No."

"Come on."

"Don’t be silly."

"You miserable little crut."

"You big bully."

Not Ernest's most deathless prose.

Today there's more interest in Ernest than ever but often not about his writing. Instead fascination with his personality never seems to wane, particularly the manner in how his psyche melded with his art. Recently the effects of his never ending series of physical injuries which involved repeated head trauma (which led to eight concussions and a fractured skull) have been studied by historians since Ernest was often in pain for which he self-medicated with generous libations.

Recent biographies tend to give considerable attention to Ernest's daily intake of alcohol in which he regularly - quote - "had been tapping into in all likelihood since dawn" - unquote. However it's not quite correct to refer to Ernest's "battle" with alcoholism since he never seemed to put up much of a fight.

There are those, though, who claimed Ernest didn't drink all that much. In an interview one of his friends was adamant that he never knew Ernest to drink in excess. On the other hand this same friend also described Ernest drinking champagne in the morning and taking snorts from a hip flask at the day long horse races at the Hippodrome d'Auteuil in Paris. Another first hand account mentioned him sampling liquor while touring the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Somewhat paradoxically Ernest's friend who said he didn't drink to excess also mentioned Ernest talked about reducing his drinking as sometimes circumstances mandated moderation. In the 1950's Ernest was recovering from injuries sustained in a plane crash in Africa. When a physician friend saw him he immediately conducted an examination and put Ernest on a special diet which reduced his drinking.

And just what was this doctor prescribed "reduced drinking" diet?

One glass of wine per meal and five ounces of whiskey per day.

How much was that again?

One glass of wine per meal and five ounces of whiskey per day.

Now given what dietitians call a "standard drink", Ernest's limited diet translates to - and we presume Ernest didn't drink at breakfast - 4⅓ drinks per day. That's 30 drinks a week.

Now the recommended limits on how much you should drink varies by country. But in the Good Ol' US of A the recommendations are men should not drink more than 2 drinks a day and women should limit themselves to a single drink (although there is some criticism over such gender differentiated recommendations). In other words, Ernest's

DOCTOR PRESCRIBED DIET

TO

LIMIT HIS DRINKING

...was twice what is considered excessive.

Makes you wonder just how much Ernest drank when he was healthy.

His friend's defense notwithstanding, that Ernest drank more than was good for him has generally been accepted by his biographers. The famous Spanish matador Miguel Dominguin also mentioned Ernest's early morning drinking - and a lot more - in a rather negative evaluation:

It was difficult to converse with him, especially at his finca [country home] in Havana, because his Spanish was extremely poor, even childlike. Because he worked in the mornings and because he began to drink heavily as soon as he stopped writing, there was only a brief period during the first few drinks when good talk was possible.

Hemingway told Cuban reporters that I had come to Havana to ask his advice about bullfighting. When they questioned me about this at the airport, I said: "That's absurd. Hemingway can't tell me anything about bulls." And when I disparaged his achievement and sarcastically remarked: "Hemingway won the Marshall Plan Nobel Prize," he became angry, our relations cooled considerably. Hemingway was all or nothing about people, always demanded that they agree with him.

Hemingway had no knowledge of bullfighting. He knew more than most Americans but less than almost all Spaniards. I never read Death in the Afternoon [Hemingway's non-fiction book about bullfighting] though I've been told about it, because there is nothing I could learn from it.

We have to be honest and say that by the time he gave this assessment, Luis Miguel had a bit of an axe to grind. A second opinion from the other end of the telescope so to speak is by Antonio Ordoñez (the son of Cayetano Ordoñez] who was Luis Miguel's brother-in-law and also a successful matador. Luis Miguel and Antonio performed together in the mano-a-mano bullfights reported in Ernest's book The Dangerous Summer.

He was a fine human being: strong, sympathetic, warm and kind. We made a pact and agreed that I would not advise him about how to write books and he would not tell me how to fight bulls. We spoke of all the things you normally talk about with comrades: food, drink, friends, love, travel, business, politics, books, art, and Spain.

Hemingway's knowledge of Spanish and of Spain was very good. He knew more about the country than most educated Spaniards. I always got along perfectly with him. I never felt he was possessive or domineering.

His knowledge of bullfighting was virtually perfect, though Spaniards never respect the opinion of foreigners about either bulls or flamenco. The people erected a bust of Hemingway outside the Pamplona bullring, and today they respect, admire, and even love him.

The last work Ernest completed in his lifetime was A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his early years in Paris prior to and during writing The Sun Also Rises. The book has been used extensively by biographers as source material on how Ernest dealt with his friends and acquaintances in the days just before he achieved literary immortality. In particular, his reports of meeting with Scott Fitzgerald have been cited extensively.

To say Scott doesn't come off looking too good is like saying Anthony Fremont was a handful for his parents. Scott is shown as someone who can't handle even a single glass of wine and acts like a petulant and childish hypochondriac. Then in a later chapter Scott comes to Ernest for advice, because his wife, Zelda, had made comments that he was not up to his husbandly responsibilities due to, well, due to the design of the machinery.

As Ernest told the story he then took Scott into the nearest toilette messieurs where the two men were able to consult and make the proper comparisons. Ernest then offers Scott some sage advice and leaves with Scott still being unsure of himself.

The latter story has been repeated in articles about Ernest, but which also fail to mention what one of Ernest's friends called his "mischievous pleasure" - of the - quote - "practical joke fantasy" - unquote. The less courteous might call this regaling gullible listeners with stories that are completely and totally horse hockey, bullshine, and poppycock.

One example of the "practical joke fantasy" is when Ernest told a well-wined group of diners of his amorous encounter with the femme fatale spy Mata Hari. One listener was impressed until he remembered Ernest first went to Europe as a Red Cross worker and ambulance driver in 1918 and Mata Hari had been executed as a spy in 1917.

Another possible example of Ernest's practical joke fantasy was the story that while on an African safari in the 1950's he had taken an African bride. Although again this story is reported in various accounts of Ernest's life, his son, Patrick, who was then living in Africa and went along on the safari, remembered no such event.

That Scott Fitzgerald, four years Ernest's senior, married for five years, and with a daughter, needed tutoring in physical activities is hard to believe and it's certainly likely we're reading another possible example of Ernest's "practical joke fantasy". It is likely, though, that A Moveable Feast will continue to be dipped into for anecdotes of Ernest's amusing and adventurous life and as a repository of Hemingway wisdomable quotes.

But perhaps the one quote that should be remembered was the one he wrote in the preface of A Moveable Feast.

"If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction."

- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1960.

Caveat Historicus!

References and Further Reading

Ernest Hemingway: The Man and the Legend, Richard Lyttle, Atheneum, 1992.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker, Atheneum, 1968.

Hemingway: A Biography, Jeffrey Meyers, Harper Collins, 1986.

Hemingway, Kenneth Lynn, Harvard University Press, 1995.

"Valerie Hemingway Contends Ernest Hemingway was a Shy Guy", Janet Martineau, Saginaw News, MLive, April 25, 2008.

"The Sun Also Rises", [Washington] Evening Star, p. 4, January 9, 1927.

"A Portrait of Mr. Papa", Michael Cowley, Life, January 10, 1949, pp. 86 - 90, 93 - 94, 96 - 98, 100 - 101.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964.

Ernest Hemingway and the Little Presses: The Paris Years, Nicholas Joost, Barre Publishers, 1968.

"How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?", Lillian Ross, The New Yorker

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, Lesley Blume, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

"Here's How Much Alcohol Is OK to Drink in 19 Countries", Rachael Rettner, Live Science, April 13, 2016.

"Hemingway's Paris, Seen Through the Eyes of His Last Assistant", Lesley Blume, Town and Country Magazine, January 21, 2016

"Wages in France", Labor Review, Volume 25, Number 1, United States Printing Office, 1927.

"A Farewell To Friendship", Joe Scotchie, Long Island Weekly, April 25, 2017.

"Here's What Things Cost 100 Years Ago", Alex Aronson, Country Living, July 30, 2020.

"Caresse Crosby, Patron of the Literary Lost Generation", Francis Booth, Literary Ladies Guide, June 8, 2021.

"The True Story of the Booze, Bullfights, and Brawls That Inspired Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises", Lesley Blume, Vanity Fair, May 12, 2016.

"Mr. Hemingway Writes Some High-Spirited Nonsense (Review of The Torrents of Spring), The New York Times, June 13, 1926.

"Ernest Hemingway", The Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize.

Hemingway, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, Florentine Films, Public Broadcasting System, 2021.

"10 Hungarian Dishes for Paprika Lovers", Alex Mackintosh, Culture Trip, March 2, 2017.