Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (28 page)

A few days later, Hemingway tells a friend about meeting ‘a kid in the 4th Division named Jerry Salinger’. He notes his disdain for the war, and his urge to write. He is also impressed by the way Salinger’s family continues to post him the
New Yorker
.

The two men never meet again,
¹²²
but they correspond. Hemingway is a generous mentor. ‘First you have a marvelous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet ... how happy it makes me to read the stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are.’

The chumminess of their single meeting is captured in a letter Salinger writes to Hemingway the following year from the military hospital in Nuremberg where he is being treated for combat stress:

Nothing was wrong with me except that I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane. They asked me about my sex life (which couldn’t be normaler – gracious!) and about my childhood (Normal) ... I’ve always liked the Army ... There are very few arrests left to be made in our section. We’re now picking up children under ten if their attitudes are snotty. Gotta get those ole arrest forms up to Army, gotta fatten up the Report.

... I’ve written a couple more of my incestuous stories, and several poems, and part of a play. If I ever get out of the Army I might finish the play and invite Margaret O’Brien to play with me in it. With a crew-cut and a Max Factor dimple over my navel, I could play Holden Caulfield myself. I once gave a very sensitive performance as Raleigh in ‘Journey’s End’.

I’d give my right arm to get out of the Army, but not on a psychiatric, this-man-is-not-fit-for-the-Army-life ticket. I have a very sensitive novel in mind, and I won’t have the author called a jerk in 1950. I am a jerk, but the wrong people mustn’t know it.

I wish you’d drop me a line if you can manage it. Removed from this scene, is it much easier to think clearly? I mean with your work.

Around this time, Salinger experiences some sort of nervous breakdown fuelled by the horrors he has endured.
¹²³
His biographer Ian Hamilton suggests his chummy letter to Hemingway cannot be taken at face value. It is, he believes, ‘almost manically cheerful’. He is probably right. Years later, Salinger tells his daughter: ‘You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.’

In Greenwich Village in 1946, Jerry Salinger has regained some of his old bravado. To his poker-playing friends he speaks disparagingly of many
well-known writers, Hemingway among them. ‘In fact, he was quite convinced that no really good American writers existed after Melville – that is, until the advent of J.D. Salinger,’ recalls one.

Hemingway, on the other hand, is happy to name Salinger one of his three favourite contemporary authors; when he dies, a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
is found in his library. He is neither the first writer with a disciple who turns against him, nor the last.

TURNS AGAINST

La Closerie des Lilas, 171, boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

Autumn 1924

Twenty years earlier, Ernest Hemingway is himself a young man of twenty-five. He is sitting outside his favourite bar in Paris, when he hears the words, ‘Oh, here you are. May I sit with you?’ His mentor, Ford Madox Ford, twenty-five years his senior, joins him at the table.

Eighteen months ago, Ford, novelist and editor, launched
transatlantic review
, largely as an outlet for younger writers. He is Hemingway’s keenest supporter: ‘I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything that he sent me.’ He has also taken him on as his assistant editor, published his stories, and introduced him to Paris literary society. But the familiar tale of discipleship is soon to unwind: the more Ford helps Hemingway, the more Hemingway despises him.

Encouragement is repaid with irritation. ‘The thing to do with Ford is kill him,’ Hemingway complains to Ezra Pound. ‘... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary. You see Ford’s running the whole damn thing as a compromise.’ He believes Ford has reneged on his promise to favour young writers, and has settled for the old and the mainstream, ‘except Tzara and such shit in French. That’s the hell of it.’

Hemingway’s claim to be fond of Ford grows shakier and shakier. He is irritated by Ford’s mannerisms, his walrus moustache and his war reminiscences (‘I’m going to start denying I was in the war for fear I will get like Ford’). Nor does he trust him. ‘He is an absolute liar and crook and always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility.’

Hemingway is scooped up by the burly
grande dame
of Parisian literary life, Gertrude Stein. Bypassing Ford, he assures her that
transatlantic review
will publish her vast novel
The Making of Americans
, all 925 pages of it. It is, he says, ‘one of the very greatest books I’ve ever read’, and ‘a
remarkable scoop for his magazine’. Stein shares his high opinion, and is delighted.
¹²⁴

In fact, Hemingway has told Ford that
The Making of Americans
is merely a long short story, not a six-volume novel, which leaves Ford in the awkward position of having to tell Stein he can’t publish it in its entirety. Consequently, Stein is furious with Ford. Is this all part of Hemingway’s plan?

Soon he is undermining Ford’s authority with almost systematic rigour. The moment Ford leaves for America to rustle up funds for his ailing magazine, Hemingway changes the July and August issues. He prints an attack on Ford’s beloved Dadaists, as well as writing an unsigned editorial against three of Ford’s favourite authors: Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara and Gilbert Seldes. He also drops the scheduled serialisation of Ford’s own novel, replacing it with terrible poems already rejected by Ford.
¹²⁵

Ford is a very forgiving man, so doesn’t sack him. Hemingway regards such magnanimity as a sign of weakness. When his old friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad dies on August 3rd, Ford persuades Hemingway to contribute to a special memorial issue. Hemingway writes in it that he could never reread Conrad, and is even ruder about another friend of Ford: ‘if I knew that by grinding T.S. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder on Mr Conrad’s grave Mr Conrad would shortly appear ... I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder’. Ford apologises to Eliot for this insult; his apology further annoys Hemingway.

‘Oh, here you are. May I sit with you?’

This is the beginning of Hemingway’s description of having a drink with Ford, written thirty-five years later, when Ford is safely dead. He describes him as resembling an ‘up-ended hogshead’ with a ‘heavy, stained mustache’. He is a ‘heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence’.
¹²⁶

And smelly, too: ‘I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air ... I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.’

According to Hemingway, during their drink together Ford sees Hilaire Belloc passing, and cuts him dead. Hemingway gets on his high horse: ‘The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford but I thought Belloc might have made it better.’

As Hemingway relates it, Ford insists that ‘a gentleman will always cut a cad,’ then starts telling him which of their acquaintances is a gentleman, and which is not: Ezra Pound is not (‘he’s an American’), Ford himself is (‘naturally – I have held His Majesty’s commission’), Henry James was ‘very nearly’, Trollope was not (‘of course not’), nor was Marlowe, and Donne was clearly not (‘he was a parson’). Thus, Hemingway sets out to portray Ford as a ludicrous snob.

But did this particular meeting take place in the way described? Friends of both men doubt it. Basil Bunting, who worked on the magazine, suggests Hemingway’s sketch of Ford is ‘deliberately assembled to damage the reputation of a dead man who had left no skilled close friend to take vengeance; a lie cunningly adjusted to seem plausible to simple people who had never known either Ford or Hemingway and to load his memory with qualities disgusting to all men and despicable to many’. Ford’s loyal biographer, Alan Judd, sees it as an act of revenge against Ford for being Hemingway’s ‘superior in age, status, experience, knowledge of his craft, sensitivity and ability’.

When he first employs Hemingway, Ford seems to have an intimation that his protégé is set to betray him. ‘He comes and sits at my feet and praises me,’ he confides. ‘It makes me nervous.’ But why does Hemingway feel such antagonism towards a man who treats him so generously? Might it date back to the time Hemingway asked Ford for his truthful opinion of his novels? Ford replied that, for all their undoubted virtues, they were weak on construction, and that this was something he should work on. Is this honesty his unforgivable mistake?

EITHER HELPS, OR FAILS TO HELP

Montmartre, Paris

November 1899

In 1944, the twenty-five-year-old J.D. Salinger meets the fifty-year-old Ernest Hemingway in Paris; in 1924, the twenty-five-year-old Hemingway meets the fifty-year-old Ford Madox Ford in Paris. Leap a further quarter of a century back, and the twenty-five-year-old Ford Madox Ford is meeting the forty-five-year-old Oscar Wilde, also in Paris. Each encounter carries peculiar echoes of the others.

Ruined and almost penniless, Wilde is drinking alone in a cabaret bar in Montmartre. He is presently living as a guest of the patron in the Hôtel d’Alsace, having been kicked out of the Hôtel Marsollier for not paying his bills. He can no longer find a reason to live. ‘I have lost the mainspring of life and art,
la joie de vivre
; it is dreadful,’ he writes to Frank Harris, in one of many begging letters. ‘I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me.’ He means to write something wonderful, but he doubts he ever will.
¹²⁷
‘The cruelty of a prison sentence starts when you come out,’ he observes.

He never rises before noon, and drinks throughout his waking hours, first advocaat, then brandy, and finally absinthe, which, he writes to a friend, ‘has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?’ To another friend, he says, ‘I have discovered that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.’ There is still humour in him, though it sometimes comes close to drowning.

He is often to be seen drinking in the boulevards. His front teeth have fallen out, and he has no plate with which to replace them. ‘Like dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage is not a success. I hate the bride that has been given to me.’

The writer Frédéric Boutet remembers coming across him sitting outside a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The pouring rain has turned his straw hat into a candle-snuffer and his coat into a sponge. The waiter, desperate to get rid of this last customer, has piled up all the chairs and wound up the awning, but Wilde is unable to leave because he has run out of money to settle his bill.

There are countless stories of old friends crossing the street to avoid him. But one night, the palmist Cheiro spots him in a restaurant and goes over to him. ‘How good of you, my dear friend,’ says Wilde. ‘Everyone cuts me now.’ They have met only once before, at a society party back in 1893; Cheiro had been performing blind readings of guests’ palms.

‘The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile,’ he told Wilde.

‘At what date?’ asked Wilde.

‘A few years from now, at about your fortieth year.’ Wilde, ever superstitious, left the party without another word. Six years on, Wilde tells Cheiro that he has often reflected on the truth of his remarkable prediction.

Ford writes two wildly differing accounts of his youthful meeting with Wilde in Paris, one in 1911, the other in 1931. In the first, he portrays him as a tragic figure, sitting at a table at a cabaret, ‘lachrymosely drunk, and being tormented by an abominable gang of young students of the four arts’. Though impoverished, Wilde has managed to keep an ivory walking stick from his days of prosperity. Prowling about the club is a man Ford describes as ‘a harmless, parasitic imbecile’ called Bibi Labouche. The students convince the sozzled Wilde that Labouche is in fact a dangerous criminal who is planning to murder him for his walking stick while he is on his way back to his hotel.

In this version, Wilde cries and protests; Ford is so disgusted by the casual cruelty of the scene that he leaves the café at once, ‘permanently cured of any taste for Bohemianism that I may ever have possessed. Indeed, I have never since been able to see a student ... without a feeling
of aversion.’ He adds, by way of an afterthought, ‘I do not know that I acted any heroic part in the matter.’

But in his second version, written twenty years after the first, Ford has expanded his own role, injecting it with heroism. In this one, he encounters Oscar Wilde not once but ‘several times’ in Paris, and each time Wilde is the butt of these merciless students, their pranks still centring around his walking stick, which is now not only ‘of ebony with ivory insertions, the handle representing an elephant’, but a gift from Lady Mount Temple.

In this version, the tearful Wilde continually surrenders his stick to the students, who keep returning it to his hotel the next morning, by which time he has forgotten everything that happened the night before. Instead of simply skulking off in a fury, Ford rushes to Wilde’s aid. ‘I once or perhaps twice rescued his stick for him and saw him home ... He did not have a penny and I, as a student, had very little more. I would walk him down the miserably lit Montmartrois streets, he completely silent or muttering things that I did not understand. He walked always as if his feet hurt him, leaning forward on his precious cane ...’