“And then there was the loving letter from my loving mother that I carry next to my heart.” Ernest took his billfold from his hip pocket and extracted a tattered slip of paper that he read from: “‘Ernest, I have received the inscribed copy of The Sun Also Rises, which you sent to me. Although as your Mother, I am pleased to hear that it is selling

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

Ernest captured not only the events but, more important, the emotional nuances that gave the book its thrust.

“I first called the book Fiesta, only later on The Sun Also Rises.

“Something even sadder happened that time in Paris.” He slowly shook his head and took his time remembering. “I was at Lipp’s on their enclosed terrace having a drink—there was a taxi stand there and a cab pulled up to discharge a passenger and damn if it wasn’t Hadley. Hadn’t laid eyes on her since our divorce. She was very well dressed and as bea

I said I remembered him writing about Le Jockey and the fight with the British sergeant in one of his stories, but the girl wasn’t Josephine Baker. “No,” he said, “I thought her feeling about the soul was her private business, so I invented a woman to take her place in the story and I left out everything about the soul.

and he appeared to have diminished somewhat; I don’t mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of indomitableness seemed to have gone out of him.

What I felt was the sorrow of loss. I had contrived this moment, but I felt like the victim.

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