Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

Ernest signaled the waiter to replenish the daiquiris. Looking at my littered plate, he gave me a puzzled look. “Why’d you leave the shrimp heads? That’s the best part.” He picked one up and crunched it happily. I crunched one but not happily.

I asked Ernest about Harold and Pat and he explained that Harold Loeb was Princeton from a very rich New York family, had been on the boxing and wrestling teams in college. He had literary aspirations, even started a little magazine in Paris called Broom. Fiercely devoted to Duff, very jealous of Pat, who alternated weekends with Duff.

“I invited her into Lipp’s for champagne. We discussed people we knew and what had become of them. I said, ‘You know, Hadley, I think about you often.’ “‘Even now?’ “‘You know what I’m remembering—that evening when The Sun Also Rises was published, and I put on my one necktie and we went to the Ritz and drank champagne with fraises des bois in the

“Hadley would notice the mutilated rejection slips and tell me not to be discouraged, that she loved my stories and that someday somebody would publish them and they would be a big success and my picture would be in bookstore windows, smiling and holding a pipe. “She would put her hands on the sides of my face and pull me toward her and hold me and

there was a sense of bonding from the very beginning, a sense of brotherhood, a right to intrude on each other’s lives, as if we were somehow responsible for the other one’s missteps and misdemeanors.

I told Ernest how moved I was reading his loving tribute to Hadley in the final chapter he had given me. I said, “No man has ever loved a woman more or written about that love so tenderly. I only wish that one day I would meet a woman I would love like that.” “Hadley and I were lucky. The stars were perfectly aligned for us. Hadley believed in me a

“Harold jumped up, overturning his chair, threatening to knock my block off. Duff took over. She told us not to get feisty. Told me I should go and take my books with me. ‘We are who we are,’ she said. ‘We used to be your friends.’

“Yes but not for long. Poor Scott. Terribly black-ass. He’d come to collect some things he’d left in storage.” “Was he with Zelda?” “No, he had to put her somewhere for safekeeping. He was feeling bereft and sorry for himself, and for her. We were having dinner at the Closerie. ‘Just imagine,’ he said, ‘ten years ago we were the Golden Girl and her

But when I approached them at the Dôme with inscribed copies of the newly minted The Sun Also Rises they turned on me. Pat called me Judas and said they didn’t want my stinking book. I said, ‘What’s eating you? It’s only about our Pamplona trip. What’s wrong with that?’ ‘What’s wrong,’ he said, ‘is the whole world now sees me as a pathetic drunk wh