Writing about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and how it’s the little things that ruin a friendship.
Whenever I would think of these two men who had been my friends, I would find myself growing fascinated at the way little details, little vanities, little slights, shape all our relationships. It is these little things, not clashes over great principles, that turn people against each other.
From That Summer in Paris, by Moreley Callaghan (published 1963).
Morley Callaghan met Ernest Hemingway while Hemingway was working as a reporter for the Toronto Star in 1920. (Hemingway later referred to that city as a “fistulating asshole.”) A few years later, Callaghan wrote to Hemingway in Paris and informed him that he was writing book reviews for the Star. Hemingway, who felt that writers should not be in the business of reviewing the work of other writers, replied with the following warning (as paraphrased by Callaghan):
Avoid reviewing books. It is alright to talk about a writer if you had to, but always remember that you can’t run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.
From That Summer in Paris, by Morley Callaghan (published 1963).
Hemingway really understood the nature of memoir:
If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.
From the preface to A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (published 1964).
David Bourne, Hemingway’s avatar in The Garden of Eden:
He started to write and he forgot about Catherine and what he saw from the window and the writing went by itself as it did with him when he was lucky. He wrote it exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.
From The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway, published posthumously in 1986.
Jimmy, the bartender at the Falstaff in Paris, describing what Lady Duff, the inspiration for Lady Brett in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, was really like:
You won’t tell Hemingway, will you? No? Well, she was one of those horsey English girls with her hair cut short and the English manner. Hemingway thought she had class. He used to go dancing with her over on the Right Bank. I could never see what he saw in her.
From That Summer in Paris, by Morely Callaghan (published 1963).
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