Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Ernest Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

justice the earnest Hemmingway program specialist here at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on behalf of my colleagues James Roth deputy director of the Library and Museum and Steven Rothstein executive director of the Kennedy Library Foundation thank you for coming for those of you watching on our webcast welcome to you as well I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters of the Kennedy Library forums lead sponsor Bank of America the Lowell Institute and our media partners the Boston Globe Xfinity and WBUR I would also like to recognize the Friends of the artist Hemingway collection for which there are informational brochures at your seats if any of you are interested in joining the friends please fill out the forms that are in the brochure and any staff member would be happy to help you after the event following the remarks made by our speakers we will have a question and answer period so I'll ask that you please hold your questions until that time also if everyone would please silence their cell phones we'd all appreciate it after the forum miss bloom whose work were honored to feature tonight will be signing copies of her book in the Smith Hall lobby which is just outside these doors our bookstore has copies for sale it is my tremendous pleasure this evening to introduce award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Leslie mm bloom miss bloom holds a history degree from Williams College and a master's in historical studies from Cambridge University and began her career as a journalist in addition to the work she will discuss this evening everybody behaves badly the true story behind Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece the Sun Also Rises and her contributions to an impressive array of periodical publications including Vanity Fair Town and Country and vogue she is author of several non-fiction works including the cultural encyclopedia let's bring back as well as four novels and two collections of short fiction for young readers she currently specialises in stories on historical cultural achievements and has documented seminal moments in the careers of Jackson Pollock Truman Capote and tonight's topic Ernest Hemingway Leslie on behalf of everyone at the library welcome thank you for making the trip to discuss your work with us we are excited and honored to have you here it is also my privilege to introduce this evening's interlocutor and moderator dr. Susan F beagle dr. beagle holds her PhD from in English from Yale University and her many years served as editor-in-chief of the Hemingway review the premier journal for academic Hemingway Studies she is author of the book Hemingway's craft of omission as well as over 30 essays on Hemingway and other American writers as well as editor or co-editor of scholarly collections on Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck Susan thank you for agreeing to help us host Lesley and to moderate for our forum audience so our experts on the truths that Hemingway hid Leslie and the words that Hemingway left out Susan we'll take it from here microphone can you guys hear all right so first of all just greetings audience it's wonderful to be here tonight with Leslie and to be here with you folks who turnout to talk about literature and books and reading and writing that's fantastic and we wanted to start just by quickly taking a little poll it's not political okay I promise how many of you here have read Sun Also Rises okay great and how many of you have had a chance to read less less book all right that that helps us to know where to go how many of you were here to find out more okay everyone it's super okay well this is my my first I've done a lot of different things with my life this is my first time out as an interlocutor so let's leave brain started start out with a more personal questions Leslie is among other things not only a talented historian and biographer foreign journalists but she's also an author of children's fiction and in her book Cornelia and the Somerset sisters her heroine is an unusual little girl not only collects dictionaries but she has a thesaurus that and I quote had been owned by a famous writer who lived in Cuba and France and Spain and had written about wars and bullfighting sounds familiar but this this made me wonder Leslie how old were you when you first became interested in Hemingway's work and what made him an important writer for you I can't believe the first word I just said was golly that's so embarrassing probably a life long obsession and in many ways because I feel like by my grandfather sort of modeled himself in a way on Hemingway he was a deep-sea fishermen and a collector of art and a magnificent library and there was something about Hemingway's example for that generation of men really made them rise to a certain appetite of living and so I grew up around a lot of fishing trophies and that kind of thing I feel I feel like I had an awareness of Hemingway before I even knew who Hemingway was because there was a sort of a living admirer of him my dad knew a lot about Hemingway also because my dad liked Hemingway was a reporter and like so many students in America on my first real introduction to Hemingway's writing was old men in the sea which I read when I was in middle school and then quickly Sun Also Rises followed and then I was completely seduced interested I mean I don't know if this it's interesting to me I mean I actually was more of a Fitzgerald a Stan a Hemingway of having a fan in the beginning there was something Hemingway was fascinating but if it's Gerald was so talkative and so for a long time my fascination was with Scott rather than an Ernest and then I came around again when I was when I was in my 20s and became really fixated on Lost Generation Paris they're not necessarily the the more cliched glamour aspects of it but really what was happening in the movement there why were they all there in the first place what were they trying to accomplish and it wasn't really finding a lot of narrative scholarship that was really addressing that sort of thing and sort of went looking for it and ultimately ended up attempting to write it myself okay so when we think about Hemingway I think we all think about a gargantuan life a mythic life this is a man who went to five wars married four women got along pretty well in four languages he traveled and lived around the world he was involved in bullfighting big-game hunting deep-sea fishing he wrote for enduring novels which is a pretty good track record for a writer he was probably the most important pro stylist in the American 20th century and certainly one of our most important short story writers won a Nobel Prize for Literature I could sort of go on there's no shortage of material here yes I'm very intimidating by the way to delve into any anything scholarship related to Hemingway because he's so outsized and so beloved and so scrutinized but you chose to cut yourself a very small slice of this very big pie the years 1921 to 26 and the events leading up to and surrounding the creation of Sun Also Rises and what made you pick that slice I think for a lot of people in my generation in the generation coming up right behind me the notorious Millennials I mean we we all know who Hemingway is and we've all read a little bit of his work but in many ways I feel like youth culture knows Hemingway as a lifestyle icon and may not understand the significance of his literature and so I became extremely interested in the question and how did Hemingway become Hemingway and why why is he so significant which is really what my book looks at I mean it looks at the real-life events that inspired the Sun Also Rises but it also looks at how the Sun Also Rises helped Hemingway create Hemingway the revolutionary the literary revolutionary who really did as you as you say you remake literature for the 20th century behind Hemingway's writing was the 20th century fully arrived and the way the Picasso's work was art of the 20th century fully arrived so this this very narrow period of time is Hemingway in 1921 the the extremely ambitious nobly ambitious having nobody and it ends with Hemingway being well on his way I mean when he when he springs from from Zeus's head as I mean he's pretty fully formed you know by the time he becomes known to an international audience in 1928 and 1926 when son is published and so for me that transition it's a very short transition it's really you know five or six years but for somebody to become somebody so significant at such an early age but it's such a fully formed way how in hell does that happen and he's just been such an enduring symbol since then and so just became important to explore why is the symbol so potent why do we care and and to explain to my generation in the next generation what precisely why we do care and why why is so potent significant revolutionary and frankly lucrative today so I think about son it really presents an almost unique challenge because of course Sun Also Rises is a romantic laughs it's a novel about actual people and actual events so instead of you know the usual matter for a literary scholar is to be studying a book that someone imagined while sitting in a room somewhere as opposed to studying a book that an author lived in part and I wonder what attracted that to you and it hadn't been enormously challenging to have all these characters on the stage who were real and it was magical but it was so fun because look at the characters I mean it was like the the host of the the naughtiest and most talented people in Paris at a time I mean who doesn't want to spend time with these people it was it was challenging well first of all I mean a lot of many of the writers in Paris at that time we're writing about each other I mean nobody was was safe everybody was fair game and so it was satire Romano clay like all those were sort of honored you know formats the Hemingway one of the things that attracted me to him in the first place is that he's a reporter and he's a really fine reporter and so he's able to his situational awareness is incredible his ability to take in information about people even through casual seemingly casual conversations and cafes is incredible and he has what he called in what later his son would remind me to get it he had Rattrap memory so he remembered all of these details about everybody and he had this uncanny ability to then repurpose it all this gossip and real like real life events into into high literature so it was while many people you know had been writing from real life and had even had been documenting the Paris colony what was interesting to me is how Hemingway used all that bad behavior but made it into such a literary landmark and use it as a way to showcase his revolutionary style and you know establish himself as the the foremost post post-war post-war writer and not many people were able to make the leap in that in that significant way and some of it had to do with you know his profound ability with reportage but it also had to do with him using that reportage and in a unique way and nobody else was able to do it he had the formula you know we were talking upstairs a little bit before this unless Leslie asked me a question about she asked all of us a question about whether we like Sun Also Rises or not and if I were going to answer that I I'm from I'm from Maine and the the woods and all of that so my favorite text would be something like in our time or old man in the sea and when I think about that Hemingway the Hemingway who wrote big two-hearted River and then I look at the Hemingway who wrote Sun Also Rises it's very hard for me to connect them and can you tell us a little bit about how the man who wrote in our time and all of those beautiful Nick Adam stories and war stories about the woods suddenly went to what you call in your book and I like the expression gossip literature for his breakout book what what caused that gear shift which is substantial oh it's it's it's an interesting question cuz I mean that the dichotomy of Hemingway that you're talking about is in Sun Also I mean we see a lot of a lot of you know when they're in in Spain when the cast of characters is in Spain you see a lot of the fishing writing in the nature and the profound appreciation of nature you see the way he writes about Spain and then on the other hand when you see how he writes about life in Paris it's very obvious which one he prefers and you know the cities or you know this den of emotional depravity betrayal I mean they're very unhappy environments in the ways that he portrays them and then you know you have these bucolic settings and everything is unbelievably beautiful and we know in real life when Hemingway went back in 1925 to the fishing site it had been ruined and in when he restored that in The Sun Also Rises he restored it to its former glory so he really had that that countryside in mind as being you know the sort of the symbol of you know purity in life when I was interviewed as son Patrick Hemingway about Hemingway his feelings about city versus country just that he hated city living he just hated it and even though he portrays Paris in the 1920s it's so poignant Lee I mean it really is one of the closest things we have to you know a living document that showcases what Paris was like at that moment even perhaps more so than literal memoir you know he's showing a very acidic side of urban living and a lot of the the cut material from Sun Also Rises was really damning about about Paris so I think Hemingway in a way he's kind of siding with you I mean he likes the bucolic side of himself he likes the countryside of himself and he's just you know showing himself in in the urban documentation to being a very acid and observer I mean he understands that the city's significance he understands the scenes significance he's laying it out for you but it doesn't mean that he likes it it's an interesting choice Wow okay Mike we're already off script here which is probably an excellent thing but one question I had down here one of the things I really really loved about Leslie support is the way that she goes to the letters and the memoirs of the people who are the characters in what Bernard Saracen was called the sunset really you know you get you get to hear these people speak in their own voices and I wondered a little bit about that process for you of bringing these people forth as as your own characters in biography and and I also wondered whether in that process did did favorite people emerge for you or there's certain people whose memoirs you'd recommend here's a big question did everybody behave badly are there other people that you would have enjoyed spending time with her people that you would cross the street if you saw can you tell us about the people I mean I wish they were hanging out with probably get nothing done well doctor Beagle said we when I was approaching as I was approaching it as a journalist not as much as a scholar and and me well I do have an academic background I mean I really wanted this to be the writing of a reporter and so a lot of that it means putting people in their own words wherever possible you know you're not analyzing there's no psychoanalysis of these characters in my book you are putting them in their own words and the judgments of their community you know the reader is given an enormous amount of credit to decide which testimonies he or she believes and the idea is to to give the reader that agency but also to create an atmosphere of confessional like you were being told about this environment by the participants themselves and nobody believed me is more colorful than these people so I went to you know a lot of a lot of memoirs and by the way it would been really complicated to do this book it a pre-internet era because I was able to summon up you know dusty first editions of memoirs that nobody's read since 1962 you know for like one cent from Amazon and you know my library is consists of these long leaning tall but sheets of memoirs of people who long forgotten and letters letter collections of the characters I mean I spent so much time in the company of these people I mean I did it's like I would go to a real dinner party and have nothing to say to anybody because it was just like so in the in the world of son I mean Harold Loeb was fascinating to me Harold Loeb was the real-life inspiration behind the character Robert Cohn and I mean everything you read about Robert Cohn in the book is literally lifted from Harold Loubs life I mean even down to a fifty thousand dollar inheritance that Loeb slash Cohn received and Princeton while still at Princeton it was fascinating spending spending time with him because he was a bridge between two communities you know the New York wealthy New York Jewish community and Paris and he one of the things that he was so hurt by his portrayal in Sun Also Rises because he was such a loyalist a Hemingway I mean anything that Hemingway wanted every resource this guy had you know Loeb put it at Hemingway's feet and he was felt very betrayed by the yeah by the depiction but when you when you've spent enough time with Loeb on paper and then you read Sun Also Rises again you realize how good a reporter Hemingway was because the tone is spot-on and I mean you you know you're kind of it's it's nasty but you're seeing truth and so he was fascinating to spend time with lady Duff twisting who was the real-life inspiration behind lady Brett Ashley was actually was the most fascinating character for me and she's probably the reason why I delved into the topic in the first place because I've you know the beguiling picture of her that now adorns the front cover of my book and just wanted to know more about her she presented I loved spending time with her because she was the most difficult person to figure out she was an enigma she's one of the only people in Hemingway's life who didn't write memoir or an essay about her time with him and so piecing her together really consisted of relying on testimonies by her peers and that was you know very challenging as a journalist but she she was fascinating because in many ways she embodied feminine like a typical feminine allure like if Hemingway was you know the ultimate had the ultimate masculine Janice a-class she had the ultimate female Janice a claw and his ability to capture her and you know 40 or 41 words as Brett Ashley was was uncanny so she she was was pretty pretty big idling I think you know in terms of you know who would who would you want to hang out with Hemingway would have scared the hell out of me if I've met him in a cafe I would have been you know really intimidated Fitzgerald I would have thrown myself at him my husband's been really nice about it and you know Donald Ogden Stewart was an interesting character for me who was one of the prototypes behind bill Corr bill Gorton because he was so brilliant and funny but also a little bit weak and but very candid about his vulnerabilities and his weakness and in Hemingway's presence and they were all just really interesting ambitious people who were helping you know the decision to shape the the art of their times and it was fascinating long long answer that's a great answer there was it's a long question I'll just throw in as a side eye I didn't know much about Donald Ogden Stewart when I read your book and and I came to really like him and I I liked that he was willing actually to challenge Hemingway on a couple of occasions for yes that's absolutely happiness to Dorothy Parker and that he was when willing to stand up to the blacklisting in Hollywood and not yes no name names but he and he paid for it not once but twice with Hemingway so he gets sent up in Sun Also Rises as bill Horton and a lot of the more anti-semitic comments that are made by characters and Sun Also Rises come from bill and Donnell Duncan Stewart later you know when he's interviewed he admits that he thinks that he was probably socially anti-semitic in those times and he was some shamefaced about it was that after World War Two he liked anybody he did have the balls to admit that it was that it was ham than that you know he had changed and fed and stared that down so yes I mean it when I when I when I said week before I meant weren't sort of more vulnerable to to Hemingway's he wanted to prove himself to Hemingway constantly and and I kind of loved him for being willing to admit that that's what was going on between those two guys and willing to admit you know later on that there he had had certain tendencies that he was ashamed of later and and as you mentioned he he did stand up to the Hollywood blacklist he went from being the highest paid writer in Hollywood to Exile literal exile he died in England so just to clarify fascinating man fascinating so a great question in the original manuscript of the Sun Also Rises Leslie talks about this a bit in her book there was a extensive opening and the first line of the original manuscript was this is a story about a lady f scott Fitzgerald managed to talk him away into cutting those opening pages so that the novel now begins the one that we have read begins Robert Cohen was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton so my question is was something lost there when this is the story about a lady chipped it out of that position is this also rises really Brett Ashley's story or a deaf twisted story what do you think about that cut I think it's an amazing cut and I think you know what what Hemingway was experiment of the things Hemingway was experimenting with at the time was you know icebergs area which we all know about where you know you assume where you're really just writing about one tenth of the iceberg and the rest is is underneath the water and you have to infer a lot of information and so he begins originally Sun Also Rises with this long indictment description of lady Duff by the way who retained her first name all the way to the end of the first draft and you know lifts her biography and it's about how you know she had once been attractive but now she was that dangerous age of 34 so she's teetering into overripe fitness and you know none of the you know the great portrait painters want to paint her anymore it's only the third great ones I mean it's quite it's quite nasty stuff but a lot of it is also you know intensely detailed information about Lady Duff's a literal background and he's he's setting setting her up to be a big deal in the book so in a way it's it's it's pretty nasty stuff but it's also too much information for what he's trying to do and Fitzgerald reads the manuscript and he gives him this letter and it's the really tough editor edit editing letter and but delivered I feel with with enormous respect and and even love for Hemingway Fitzgerald at this point really wants an Hemingway to succeed and what he says to him is that you know the writing is careless it's facetiousness that you know a lot of you know anybody who is writing any writing that has a this is real withdrawn from real life feeling about it is junior varsity in Fitzgerald's opinion and he said Hemingway cannot afford to make his literary debut with that kind of carelessness at the top of this novel it needs to go so Hemingway gets up you know slice slice slice it sends off a note to max Perkins and says well by the way you know the top two chapters of the novel have been lopped off and you know Scott agrees with me that this is a good idea and it's not told you know decades later that the lead Scott's letter emerges and we we realized how pointed that advice was I mean he's probably the only person who ever gave Hemingway such a tough love advice and survived to tell the tale but everything that was cut everything about Duff slash bread that was cut out of introduction in the published version you still infer all of it anyway you know she's of a certain age you know about her or psychotic background you know that it was a very unhappy marriage that she's escaping and he still does manage to get in a few of the details that were in the lengthy and subpar introductory material in like a sentence or two or a fragment of a sentence and that's when it goes from being junior varsity to varsity and you see how effective it was and Hemingway already had a you know in mind that this was his approach to writing but it took Fitzgerald in that moment to help him make the full leap in that particular manuscript remind him of who he was or who he was becoming let's see we we have to talk about Hemingway's bad behavior in this book which part you know as I was reading it you know it's one thing I mean I've been in Hemingway studies it's scary to be here to realize it's almost almost 30 years so no no all of these things but to have them brought together cumulatively is very powerful so you know to me reading the book it seems that his behavior was sort of governed by this kind of almost naked career ISM the need to reject mentors like Stein and and Anderson that he's being compared to the send-up of his own circle of expatriate friends his he was very calculated dumping of his first publisher which he does by writing a satire of Anderson and and I don't know whether asked the second part of the question but then there's also Hadley and I'm and and to me reading this it almost felt like his rejection or divorce of his first wife too was a kind of career move so yeah okay what can you tell us about that career ISM than that the ambition or the drive behind this well I mean I'd love this question because it was actually one of the most surprising aspects of the research for me was how patently ambitious he was and this isn't just from the testimonials of people who surrounded him like Oh Hemingway was viciously ambitious I mean this is Hemingway in his own words and so many of his letters survived and you can see how badly he wanted to be to be somebody and not just in a stupid Kardashian kind of way you know I mean he wanted this I mean he wanted to reinvent literature and he knew he was going to be the one to do it and he was looking at all the other people who were trying to do it and he could see what they were missing so I mean for you know as four-pound he's never gonna sell gazillion copies of a cantos and Gertrude Stein sold what 78 copies of her first book and he's they're both mentoring him and he sees you know oh I can take imagism from Ezra and I can take repetition from Gertrude and I can make it into a commercially viable book whereas you know these these guys they Kemp and and I can and he just he knew I mean the incredible self confidence just kind of stunning you know and it was just burning there and it's to the point where we mean most people who aren't ambitious not openly because it's almost considered you know kind of bad matters you know where he would write letters to an editor and just say I want like hell to be published it's you know it's right there in that beautiful Hemingway handwriting and but it wasn't the the drive was coupled again with a with a vision and I guess the extent to which one forgives Hemingway for certain trespasses really depends on how much you believe that ambition and his vision was was really worth it in the end and I think history is kind of shown that he's pretty pretty profoundly significant and he never he never lost never lost sight of I mean self-sacrifice is certainly not a part of his his makeup at all you know I talked to a lot of a lot of today's writers and some some important writers about who have read the book and you know about an ambition and I think one of the reasons why this book has resonated in New York and Hollywood has because the book is really it's about ambition and what you will do to get what you want and is it worth it in the end you know even in case in cases of you know literary or film masterpiece and so many people see themselves and this when they see the deals that they have cut in this in Hemingway's behavior and so it's it's a mirror for a lot of ambitious people also but yeah I was again again just completely stunned by how how open he was willing to be about about his career goals I was reminded by something that's in of Mary Hemingway's autobiography how it was or she talks about he he was a difficult husband - I wasn't he was a difficult husband - Mary as well but she talks about Ernest giving her the manuscript of the old man the seats rate and after she read it according to her she said to him Ernest I forgive you for every rotten thing you've ever done that way about about son as well but I was wondering about Hadley she's sort of a sacred subject among Hemingway biographer she's kind of a sacred subject in a moveable feast where she's cast in this rosy glow you mentioned and I was fuzzy when I was writing these questions Gerald Murphy who said she was miscast yeah it's Hemingway's wife and unsuited to life on a grander stage which was apt I mean it might seem cruel but it might it was apt also anything hemming away I we were talking about this before and you know was was Hemingway it was Hadley really Ernest Hemingway's great love or was she the perfect wife who got away and she wasn't a perfect wife for him and it was Patrick his son told me you know Hemingway's the husband was a difficult horse to ride for any for any woman but I mean Hadley was she was eight years of senior she was you know when Buckner and Jack came along she was a contented a contented happy mother and that's that's lovely but that's not I mean when we know what we know about Hemingway's ambition where he wanted to go in life and where he did go in life that's not going to be an unproblematic mate for for somebody like Hemingway and I think when he did break up with her he was tortured by it later in life and I think that he really put Hadley on a pedestal and she became a symbol in a way of lost innocence and and also you know possibly a symbol of you know wrongs that he did to not just her but to a great many people during this period of time to realize his ambition that's totally speculative and that's actually pretty outside what I don't usually would like to speculate on motive but I in the question of you know was Hadley should he have been with Hadley all along I'm probably probably not just look at me it's just not human nature you know I mean in many ways Pauline was was a fan even Hadley said this Pauline was after at that moment in time probably a far better partner for him romantically and and otherwise well I'm glad you mentioned speculation because it leads me to another question and another thing I really enjoyed about your book how do I put this is we I'm reading it knowing that you're a journalist I come from the background in journalism and myself being from a background in scholarship scholars have a dreadful tendency to have a thesis and write it it can make books quite dull and and you've already mentioned as a journalist your training is to allow everyone to tell their side of the story and not to perhaps get involved in settling who's right or you know to to present the evidence and let and let readers go with that and it makes for a fantastic read and I really really love that combined with this kind of research but I want to see if I can pressure you into taking aside and I think you're going to do it but we'll see here close your ears is a Ramana clay and that it has characters that are based on actual people in the plot based on actual events raises some questions for some people about the literary merit of The Sun Also Rises Leslie quotes the Saturday Review at the time saying it's more an example of exciting incisive reportage than fictional accomplishment our friend Donald Ogden Stewart says it was so absolutely accurate that it seemed a little more than a skillfully done travelogue but you also quote Bill Smith who who said Hemingway was not a Diaries he was an artist so I went would you choose a side in that argument since you're probably the best qualified person to settle it um yeah I mean I don't I don't think the fact that the Sun Also Rises was at its base an act of reportage I don't think that takes women's literary merit you know at all and again I said show me a writer who doesn't write from life I mean maybe not as literally lifting life it's having what I did in this case I mean it's Sun Also Rises is pretty literal not just in terms of the backgrounds of the characters I mean which were very literally co-opted from real-life people I mean there are a few concessions to imagination at the end of the book but at the same time because we were talking about when we sat down I mean a lot of people were writing romano clays and in Paris and I mean Hemingway rendered this in a way that showcased this new literary style and she made it commercially viable in a way that nobody else was able to do and so he's explaining his his literary approach to not max Perkins but his previous editor editor Horace louver right he wasn't talking about son yet but it's definitely applicable and son and all of his work later on and he said he's talking he's explaining that he has a high-low formula and he says there's nothing in my book that somebody without a high school education can't read anybody conveyed the sitzt it's a total accessibility point because of the way that it's been the spare way that it's been written at the same time that the highbrow critics you know that Ben Wilson's the main mentions of the world are gonna read the book and they're gonna know what he's up to so it's gonna titillate the highbrow critics also and then he says you know for people who have no interest in the literary merit he says there's a lot of dope about high society it might work and that and I was always you know worth something that's always exciting so so he has this this formula and it's an electric formula and it's one of the one of the things that has made made him beguiling immediately then but it still makes him beguiling now I mean it's the formula that doesn't quit and it's it's deceptively complicated and you know Joan Didion writes about studying the first paragraph of a farewell the arms and trying to figure out what in hell makes this work and she's had and she can't imitate it and and there's nothing worse than a poor imitation of Hemingway and so he was able to showcase that I mean this was he had showcased it in you know the vignettes and short stories that preceded the Sun Also Rises but this didn't have a wide readership I mean the Sun Also Rises was a novel it was his first novel in novels were the Holy Grail at that time and a novel was big mass entertainment so if you can showcase this style in a novel with you know the juicy high society gossip and the literary style and a deeply accessible style then you've really got something so the accomplishment of the book is just so enormous on so many different levels and so savvy okay ask a little bit of about about your process I recently came across an expression new to me research rapture which is defined as a state of exaltation arising from exhaustive study of a subject or a period of history the dangerous condition of becoming repeatedly sidetracked and following intriguing threads of information or that's why I have a tick constantly searching for one more elusive fact and I wondered I'm sure that you that you suffer from this that's one reason why your book is so good so I wonder could you share with us some of your favorite discoveries some of the finds that that make research addictive and maybe some of their frustrations like the ones that got away that are still out there that you'd like to get hold of well this is I mean this is actually a truly getting into the realm of confessional because it gets to the heart of you know a nightmare for a journalist and that is what did I miss what did I miss what I miss I mean the dread of having missed something that could be significant or you overlooked something seminal I mean it just think that it's there's nothing that it's that bad whether you're writing a 500 word article or 100,000 100,000 work book but then when you find something and you know nobody else has it this is like the disease of the journalist you get like really excited about it you know so for instance lady Duff very few images of her exist and once in a while you come across something in a book and it was it was exciting but you know there it was a book and it been published and I think I probably saw maybe three or four pictures of her from her entire lifetime in research and I was trying to desperately to find anything from her she married after ish is she married after this whole episode a young Texan who was a disinherited arrow named Clinton King and they lived you know North America New York New Mexico and so I was trying to track down anything that would have been left over from her estate which would have been therefore folded into his estate and then he had remarried so it would have been in his final wife's estate and so tracking tracking tracking tracking that thread and apparently his subsequent wife had hated Duff had thrown everything away nothing was left over that said you know one of his literary executor still had a few boxes of his of Clinton Kings his her final husband down in a basement of his house in Santa Fe and he said I assure you there's there's nothing there I mean the the second wife threw everything away so please just do me this favor I will send you a fruit basket a Christmas just look at any whatever you would teen in toluca whatever can you just look through that box and this guy was so he looked through the box and he called me a few weeks later and he said I don't know how to tell you this but I have found a picture of da Frank before she died it might be the last unpublished photograph of lady Duff twisdon so you know I almost peed in my pants at that moment please do you have an iPhone can you take a picture of this incentive to be right away and he sent it to me and I looked at it and yes it looked like her and then I you know can you how can we verify that this pic this picture is her and we had another literary executor of Kings look at it and both of them attested that they felt that this was lady Duff as photographed by Clinton King in South West just around the time of her death and in the 1930s and that moment when you know that you're looking at something rare and it was a really beautiful photograph also and so lonely and you know here's this woman who entering her lifetime had been spent you know with men at her feet everywhere she went and she's alone on a horse in the middle of the you know the American Southwest and to see it's like almost seeing her come to staring down what's right in front of her and having that a moment of moment of solitude it was so beautiful and that was a champagne night and so you know there and there are you know there are always you know little bits of information that in when you're gathering you know all of the thread and you know that all of these little bits of information that have never been pulled together in one place before or making a narrative in a way that hasn't been told before it's really exciting and that's that's when it gets worth it and that's that's really the counterpoint of the dread the rush was to live with during the years of the writing of this book well maybe a slightly less serious question there are some marvelous details in this book one of them that really stood out for me was Pauline Pfeiffer's chipmunk coat yes I'm gonna think about that every time I refill my bird feeder another of Leslie books that purely mentioned is called let's bring back and encyclopedia of Forgotten yet delightful things from from times gone by Leslie has a strong interest in nostalgia yes and in artful living and this made me wonder what objects of fashion or material culture or customs would you bring that if you had a time machine what would you bring back from Hemingway's Paris besides Fitzgerald yeah I mean so in creating physical portraits of these people which so when you talk about finding little bits and pieces I mean so assembling you know that portrait of Pauline you know I mean from one you know a cable testimony we have the fact that she was wearing you know was prone to wearing diamond emerald drop earrings you know that was exciting I was like oh that's something I haven't seen before so let's put that in that portrait of her you know like because when you're when you're a woman looking at another woman when you look at how they accessorize or present themselves it matters and you know finding another testimony from you know another woman is saying she was you know she loved wearing Louise the long suits and I mean your your create when you hear all these different pieces of information about somebody's self presentation come from so many different places I mean this is a woman who cared about fashion she cared about cutting edge of fashion and was presenting herself in this a very jaunty stripped-down modern kind of way and it sounds like it's superficial but it's not I mean this is this is you know who one of the this is one of the things that concerns these people and and preoccupies her and and Serena Pauline was actually a really accomplished fashion journalist for Vogue something that gets overlooked constantly even in her most important biography and that's it was no small consideration and so pulling together all these little bits of information really helped me I felt to create a more nuanced portrait of her in terms of what would I bring back transatlantic crossings this is an absence as opposed to bringing something back but I mean think about how rich these like the the the absence of mobile technology really allowed coincidence to take place a lot more we first of all it meant that there were certain cafes where you would go that were sort of nerve centers and you know that you would be you would run into certain people but there was still the chance of coincidental meetings whereas now things are way more you know where everybody is and things are you know you're just one social life is more contrived and more three-dimensional I mean more two-dimensional and I love the idea of having that sort of more serendipitous sort of a meeting place kind of social life as I love that and I and I also love the idea of bringing back the salon you know where people are genuinely talking about forwarding creative goals artists movements I mean it might seem passe I mean in my generation I don't really know that many people who are doing those kinds of things I don't really know that there are even literary movements right now let's bring back a literary movement I mean how grand would not be chipmunk oh let me think about that bring back that book but I think you know also most importantly I mean this sense the sense of adventure and I think in many ways people were able to have a greater sense of adventure because the world wasn't so readily available at their fingertips if you wanted an adventure you actually had to go to the site of the adventure it's good to go to the adventure so they're there in many ways I think what you're asking me is what appealed to me about this world enough to immerse myself in it for so long and so you know just being able to dwell in that kind of an environment at least on paper was you know really um anything about that world I preface this by saying I have a historian friend who was once at work on a book about the Mayflower Puritans and after a long tough day he said to me I have got to get out of the 17th century these people are crazy so I got the flip side of the question there are things about you know given that history writing is a kind of time travel or are there things about Paris in the 20s obviously there are many things that you loved and enjoyed are there things that made you want to come home it was pretty it was pretty grand I mean if anything I would come out of that me like god I'm craving Pernod and my husband's like oh are you I really need to steak frite right away you know anything I found myself food control you know I was living in New York City at the time I mean really is seeking out you know Bistro culture or you know that that kind of thing and I mean I really I loved being in that world I mean yeah I mean it's nice to have some counterpoint and after you know you're and when you're handing in the third draft of your book and you're ready to kill yourself you're like oh my god next book I'm gonna write about Justin Bieber because I can't I can't be in another archive again decade yeah yes there's there's that but I mean I have an affinity for this world I really really love it I was fortunate enough to get to revisit Hemingway's Paris what's his end-of-life assistant Valerie Hemingway hoo-wee for a magazine story went together to he had taken her in 1959 to fact-check a moveable feast and had taken her on a tour of his 1920s Paris and she in turn took me to Hemingway's Paris that she and we retraced that that Odyssey and I mean that I mean I was heavens gonna be anti-climactic not that I get to go to heaven but yes so no I really I miss and I miss it too like when I stopped when I you know did when we got out of the writing portion of the book it was like I'm with real people [Laughter] direction you know so it would be nice to go back but you know ground well covered all right so one last question setting it up a little bit I've always been struck by the differences between the people this is slightly political the difference is between the people who like Hemingway at various times Fidel Castro John McCain and Barack Obama have all cited Hemingway as their their favorite author unless Leslie pointed out that so it also arises as a novel that gave currency to Gertrude Stein's expression lost generation and made me think a lot about Hemingway's appeal across very different generations of readers when I started my career at thirty years ago for instance some of us who loved Hemingway were early feminist children of the 60s and we were reading with white male veterans of World War two and the Korean War in this this made for very strange bedfellows a lot of fireworks sometimes but all equally passionate judging by the success of your incredibly fabulous book and some other recent efforts on Hemingway like Paula MacLaine's novel the Paris wife Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's boat Hemingway has still got considerable appeal for your generation for Generation I just picked up the New York Times Book Review this weekend and there's a review of a book called when Paris sizzled and I just wondered this is our last question can you comment for us on why Hemingway is such an important isn't is an important writer for Generation X and why this author this time and this place hold a fascination for us now at our own kind of incredibly weird moment in history you know it's so interesting I mean that the nostalgia for that period of time seems unreal emitting and when you look even Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris I mean how many how many films does that guy made and that was I think his highest grossing film ever and I've you know every night was trying to figure out like the allure of the Sun Also Rises and why why it continues and it leads back to the title of the book everybody behaves badly I mean a lot of that book was about human nature and little the human nature that Hemingway portrays and Sun Also Rises has changed and I think that you know Hemingway and so we're seeing our salts in that book even though it's about the 1920s in Paris and we're seeing people that we know and I think you know Hemingway writes about human nature and really compelling way I think Hemingway's a humanist and I mean nobody writes about war I mean like I mean I will I will say that Hemingway's not the best writer about sex but when it comes to war and about you know subtleties between human interactions and about status anxiety and that sort of thing he's just masterful he there's there's something not just about the writing but also about the way that he lived in his example and his enormous appetite for living and you know at times you know people he's he's easy to caricature in many ways but at the same time you can't dismiss in this caricature and that's why he keeps coming back as his potent symbol and you know his you know Susan and I are women documenting Hemingway and that's a very specific category and its own right and we were talking before we came up unto the stage when people found out that I was writing this book you know as I was writing it and they would often ask there was seem to be an assumption that I would come out swinging against Hemingway and because you know because I was a woman I would you know have a visceral reaction against what people perceive as being a hyper macho image and motoki about the diverse likeability of Hemingway I mean I would actually come out swinging against that assumption because I was like well actually no is a you know I love him because you know he's a hardcore reporter and I started out as a you know I was trained as a war reporter and my beginning career and I took you know a lot of a lot of inspiration from that and I think self-sacrifice is overwhelmingly expected of women and I don't didn't really want to wasn't that down with that and you know really kind of liked his example there and why why does he get to do this and I don't oh there's just because of society's expectations not my own so I'm gonna have that I'll have that career too and and also again talking about his abundant appetite for life I mean he we live in a very two-dimensional society right now Hemingway lived in three dimensions he hunted he fished I mean these were not affectation he loved doing that stuff the physical life it was it was incredible and then finally you know wouldn't something else I admired about him was his relentless curiosity I mean he wanted to know how everything worked and so you know I just moved to Los Angeles from New York and I was like I want to think about this the way how many wait and think about I mean having I hated Hollywood but he would want to know about you know all the trees he would want to know about you know earthquakes he would want to know about you know where does the water come from he wanted to know how everything worked and the it was a constant reminder to me to be curious in that way too and so you know I I just you know loved him for for all of those things like frankly I quite resented the assumption that I there could only be one way as a woman to look at Hemingway so is that is that a good place to end audience it's your time to ask questions it's a little hard to see you up here with the light in our eyes there's okay there's a microphone for you to use so do you want to come to the microphone can actually see you we can actually see you if you do that I have I have a question pertaining to your writing technique you talked about doing years and years of research for your book and you say that you left it to the reader to make a decision about the characters that you were writing about and I was wondering what was your writing technique over that long period of time and over that extensive information that you had what was your writing technique when you're sitting in your room or wherever it is in deciding what to put in your book for the the reader to capture that seemingly precise depiction of the characters you were describing that clear yes thank you well I mean I always knew that I had to build a roadmap to this book as I was researching and so I created an outline for myself and I everything that I knew that was interesting to me or in fact it went into the outline and by the time it was start to time to write the book it was 1,400 pages long and but at the same time there wasn't really anything that anything that was gonna go in the book was pretty much in that outline unless something new came along and so you you just kind of know when you're writing you know what what do you sometimes I mean you would have you know 30 pages on one subject and you would need that much background to give you the courage to say one line in the book and you you would kind of know and then so the first draft of the book ended up being on a 135 thousand words and I remember my poor editor calls me and he was like okay this is you know you're gonna have to work really hard to find the narrative and this because it's still sit there's still too much back back back back back in it we need to you know we need not you know the chunk of rock spilled River we need the swiftly flowing river and he made me make some very painful cuts and I'm was hating him every second but you know kind of grateful at the same time now I'm abundantly grateful and then you know so I started I saw this I was like haha I know how I'm gonna fix this idea I can't get rid of this is a tasty bit of information so I'm gonna put it in the footnotes and then I got a call from from my editor or less so you can't have 50,000 words and footnotes caller Li community will about you know was didn't shave her legs at this moment poor guy was so patient so I did have a really really amazing partner and wingman in my editor who really Eamonn Dolan who helped keep me on that path and honestly in the end something he said to me this is I've never actually admitted this before but this is a because it's a very personal anecdote but I was really scared to move from the more scholarly first draft to the more highly narrative second draft and he said I have seen your research you have you you have deserved you have earned the right to be brave is what he said to me so you know convince this you don't need to hide behind the relent less Faraj the facts put it in your voice but it in your voice but it in your voice and you know so it's still very much a reported biography and it's all these people in there and they're in there in their own voices but the complete ISM of detail of that time fell away and you know there are other biographers who have written you know five volume biographies and you know those are denser and detail on yes I mean I still have 35,000 words of endnotes but I mean really in the end prioritized being able to tell the story in a way that would really keep people engrossed and it was a harder process than it probably looks like but it was a huge learning process for me you know even when I'm working on other stories like magazine pieces now I ask myself that have you have you urged the right to be brave yet with this piece have you done enough research to be able to really strip it down to that trajectory and until the answer is honestly yes when I keep researching she writes great footnotes - you know I'd say that lightly is there someone else that are brave enough to approach the microphone Leslie welcome to Boston thank you pleasure of meeting you in Oak Park at the international Hemingway conference in July we had a wonderful conversation at that point I had not read the book but I since it read it you you graciously signed it and I want to congratulate you on a very fine job thank you I have two questions I'm very not related but hopefully you can offer insights first of all you did mention Pauline as a book writer and editor and however III believe in Ruth Hawkins biography she said that excellent writings of hers are scarce did you find that no not really I vote archives are there and my everything yeah I mean my research assistant and I went in and we found great evidence of her writings and I wrote a story about it for Vogue around the time the book came out where I was talking about how you know when people talk about Pauline and hurler for her allure to Hemingway I mean I think that it tends to be very dated and they talk about you know her as a sort of a man trap she lured him in with her money as she was an heiress but I mean they were colleagues and I mean I'm married to one of my colleagues we were we were fellow reporters I know how fellow reporters work I mean she was in them she was in the scrum in Paris she was writing about the collection she had no deadlines she there are a lot of by lines of hers she was a clever writer she was a great atmosphere writer she understood character I mean there weren't like it wasn't like a book of writings but they weren't they were there and she was constant byline and in this in the story I you know excerpt quite a few of those articles and I mean she and many ways lived more in hemming work Hemingway's world than Hadley who you know shared that their home together I mean they spoke a common language and in the end you know it was it was the Pauline who was opining on on The Sun Also Rises as he was editing it not not Hadley and you could see how she might have you know some pretty shrewd editorial judgment because even though they're not she's writing about fashion and not war they're still there's the mentality of being a journalist is still there's still the overlap there and my second question is a handli was crestfallen after she read The Sun Also Rises manuscript according to what I have read because his she his wife was not not depicted in any way do you think was it because she was too good among everybody who behaved badly I mean my opinion is that she just wasn't a relevant character in in Sun Also Rises I mean in the first in the earliest paperback material is its art that's not that was badly so it in Hemingway's earliest draft it was a series of loose-leaf papers and he started to lay out vignettes and material that had just happened in Pamplona that was importantly gonna make the leap into the book some of it did make the leave some of it was repurposed for moveable and Hadley was was in it but really only mentioned like two or three times just as part of the the Pamplona group and then she's she she doesn't make the leap to the notebooks when he's writing the actual draft I just don't think that the character lent anything to like every every other character the net among the characters in son was so intricate but taut and there there was no place for her and you know Hemingway as Jake you know conveniently he needed to be a free agent he wasn't married in that and so I mean he needed to be free to be obsessed with Brett and so you know Hadley his omission in that sense makes make sense so I don't know that it necessarily was a moral judgment where he was sparing her but maybe it was I mean having way maybe it was partially motivated that way maybe he just didn't have want to shed truth on Hadley the way that he did on on the other characters that I would probably see it I mean Hemingway was very shrewd about making literary decisions and so for instance and one of his short stories he's writing about a real-life event that happened to him where he and Hadley are being led by a really inept mountain guide and Hemingway in real life complained about the guide to their local inn where they were staying the guy kills himself and so Hemingway writes a short story but he doesn't mention in the suicide or he doesn't mention his role in the suicide in the short story and then later on he's explaining the omission ESCA Fitzgerald he said it didn't work as a literary device you know so it's pretty cold and so I think that if something doesn't work as a literary device for him I think that's probably the most important thing but again this is just your conjecture on my part yes yes thank you presses and lovely to see you again other questions there's the microphone over here is it on okay we have a question from someone who's watching the webcast professor Caretti biani benka of SUNY Ulster asks having worried that young readers social cultural foundations might create missed ratings or misunderstandings of Sun Also Rises and what do you hope these young readers will take from your book with them into perhaps reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time I mean if anything I would hope that looking at Hemingway and his community will reignite a desire for meaningful accomplishment because I don't think that's something that's especially valued in youth culture right now I mean these these people were Hemingway and his colleagues they were intensely glamorous and living a very interesting incredible quite naughty life and they were there was a lot of dissipation but at the same time a lot of them were in Paris and acting in concert with each other to reinvent literature and to create art that reflected their times and look at where they were going and and in a meaningful way and you know it's what we were talking about before I mean how much you forgive Hemingway of his trespasses how much you forgive Hemingway for his trespasses may have in part to do with how much you feel the Newfield the nobility of his goals and so again for me it all comes down to an admiration for the meaningful accomplishments of those periods of times and I hope that that resonates with readers and creates a desire to move not not get back to that standard but create that standard within our own context other folk all right well then I think we should thank you all for coming and let you know [Laughter] that Leslie is going to be available to sign books in the lobby and we thank her for being here tonight thank you so much and this is a very big honor for me to share a stage that's out there you go

Channel: JFK Library

Views: 33,319

Rating: 4.7476339 out of 5

Keywords: ernest hemingway, lesley m m blume, the sun also rises, susan beegel, the hemingway review, hemingway's paris

Id: cBPPAbn2d34

Length: 68min 32sec (4112 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016