In 1978, with the publication of two books, by Matthew Bruccoli and Anthony Burgess respectively, about the American novelists Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, the writer Malcolm Bradbury revisited their famous friendship for NS. They represent, he argued, radically different literary traditions in the lost generation.
All friendships are fragile, but none can be more precarious than a friendship between two writers—especially if both are of the same sex, are leading figures of their time, and yet stand for different versions of literature’s contemporary potential. Good writers, especially when they are successful, often think they own writing, and since writing is the fictional order of life, they often tend to think they own it too. If they write life right, it must follow that other writers write it wrong.
However, there is the society of the craft and the special admiration writers gain for the work of others. Friendships often come, but with difficult conditions. It will be sad to see one’s friends go bad, although of course they inevitably will. They will marry foolish partners, damaging their talent and possibly the friendship itself. They will choose stupid friends who will deceive them about where the surname is going in our time. However, if their failures will be tragic, so will their successes. They will be for the wrong books, or the wrong reasons. In any case, success is a betrayal of friendship. Here is a so-called friend who publishes another best-seller in the same season, appearing as a counter-claimant for the same literary honor (Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel) or offers critical judgments – which, however favorable, must be nonsense – of one’s work, competing for the attention of the same publisher, perhaps even having a better one. To further complicate matters, literary friendship often appears in the literature of literary friends. The effects of this are usually devastating, as with all portrayals of “real” relationships in fiction, though to a special degree since the other writer has equal claim to the subject.
In short, literary friendship is a minefield, waiting to explode when something goes wrong. And so it was with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. As Mathew Bruccoli reminds us in his new study of the subject, the friendship began in a strange balance. They met in 1925, when Fitzgerald was the author of three widely acclaimed novels and rapidly consuming his talent, and Hemingway was virtually unknown. However, it was Fitzgerald’s admiration for Hemingway that fueled the relationship. Fitzgerald secured Hemingway’s publication with his good publisher, Scribner’s, and advanced his cause everywhere. He read and made valuable suggestions about typesetting The sun also riseswhich the following year made Hemingway a success. From the beginning, Fitzgerald reached out to Hemingway, exposing his wounds, confiding his anxieties. He was foolish enough to consult Hemingway about the size of his penis, which Zelda had despised: Hemingway and other objective testers later found it normal, but it didn’t help. Hemingway was to use the episode in his obituaries A portable partya text that displays considerable disdain for Fitzgerald. By then, of course, Fitzgerald was dead, and Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner. In the competition for literary reputation, it was easy to see who had won and what had been won: a version of the writer and the writing.
The fact is that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were superficially similar but fundamentally different types of literary performers. Both were quintessential voices of their era, the twenties; both took the American novel to the world league. In different ways, This side of heaven (1920) and The sun also rises (1926) spoke to the neo-romantic, brilliant styles and anxieties of a generation cut off from its ancestors by a war in which Hemingway went and was wounded, and in which Fitzgerald almost went, boarding a troop ship only to realize they were signing an armistice. This gave Hemingway an edge in that crucial grasp of the era, the scourge of war and modernity. Both achieved best-selling success, but Fitzgerald first and suddenly, so his career seemed to be going on a downward curve, Hemingway later and more assuredly, so his career was headed upwards. Both undertook to bring together the new lifestyle and the new art style, but in opposite ways.
For Hemingway, the wound was something to overcome, through stoicism, existential precision, the economic limitation of self and language. As Anthony Burgess puts it in his book – a lively rewriting of Carlos Baker’s standard biography, with excellent illustrations and some odd variants (Burgess wounds Hemingway in Fossalta on the opposite foot from previous commentators) – Hemingway the man “was as much a creation as his books, and a distant creation”. The strong stoicism of that creation made him a writer who contains and formalizes those inner elements of consciousness and psychology that drive him to write. Fitzgerald did not believe in control; it spread through and into the culture, plunging, like Dick Diver, into disorder, loss, and psychic stress.
The result was that space opened up between two different types of modern writers. We have two modern arts: one of economy and controlled stylistic form, another of immediacy, narration, endangered consciousness. Fitzgerald IS one of his beautiful and cursed; Hemingway observes the doom but seems to stand beyond it under stoic control, demanding a heroic stance. In personal matters, Hemingway did not trust all of Fitzgerald’s performance. He could not hold liquor, control his drunken companions, manage his writing, manage his wife.
“How could he ever know people except on the surface, when he never called anyone, no one said anything to him except in answer to a question, and he was always too drunk late at night to remember what anyone actually said.”
Hemingway observed Malcolm Cowley. For Hemingway, the true calling of the writer was with experience; From this he got his authenticity, his sense of life and the true sentence. Fitzgerald lacked this precision. Of the many crises in the relationship, one came when Fitzgerald published his essay “Crack-Up.” It is actually a remarkable essay on the historical exposition of the writer, making close connections between Fitzgerald’s own disorders of consciousness and the economic and social fragmentation of the time. Hemingway read it as a dangerous weakness and published, in the same magazine, his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, which refers to “poor Scott Fitzgerald” and identifies him with cowardice.
But by now Hemingway had become very protective of his friendships, largely limiting contact to admirers rather than writers. His existential, stoic performance was breaking him in mind and body. His feelings of “weakness” had been magnified by his father’s suicide, defeated by his wife. Finally, Hemingway’s shell collapsed; he died of psychosis and suicide, 20 years after Fitzgerald’s tragic death. Did he win for literature? Since then, we seem to have returned to an age of narrative writing. Narrative is a place where most writing begins: a place of self-discovery, accusation, and attack. This is what we can glean from the form, from the Jamesian panoply, or from the more complex stoicism that Hemingway modeled for us. Books will be dramatized, supplemented, made safe as texts. On the other hand, we can, as Norman Mailer proposes, engage primarily in endangering consciousness itself. Then the writing will have raw edges, a sense of incompleteness, a quality of painful exposition. It will approach the first person and the present tense. Fitzgerald’s misfortune was not complete; his teaching holds.
The Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship, if that is the right word, is a modern fable, re-analyzed and interestingly placed, given the many errors that have accumulated around it, in Mathew Bruccoli’s book. There are small lessons about friendship in it, and big ones about writing, including its options today. There may also be lessons for computer dating: can you ever match writers as friends?
(Further reading: From the archive: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Restraint Measure)
