Everybody Behaves Badly

Novels have begun to bore me because real life seems so much more interesting.  I am overly enamored of the 1920's, so I was glad to read Lesley M.M.Blume's Everybody Behaves Badly.  Fittingly, I was reading it on Ernest Hemingway's birthday.  The book is a look at the real life antics that became the basis for Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Many of the main character's are featured in "real life" in the above photo that is used on the cover of the book.

From left to right there is Ernest Hemingway (Jake Barnes), Harold  Loeb (Robert Cohn), Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett Ashley), Hadley Hemingway, Donald Ogden Stewart (Bill Gordon), and Patrick Guthrie (Mike Campbell). 

The book reveals everything one knows about "Papa" in spades. Ernest Hemingway was a dick. He was a real dick to women, but frankly, he wasn't much better toward the men in his life. The people whose lives were used to create the cast of The Sun Also Rises began to refer to their lives as "B. S" before Sun and "A. S" after Sun but all felt as though they were collateral damage in Hemingway's attempt to write a bestseller.  He got what he wanted.

A great lover of the bullfight and the man who single-handedly made the running of the bulls in Pamplona a tourist mecca,  Hemingway was always dragging his friends to bullfights. He loved encouraging them to jump into the ring with the bulls. This stunt backfired on one of his visits when Harold Loeb was nearly gored, but instead, grabbed the horns of the bull and road around the ring on the bulls head. It made Loeb a star in Spain and photos of the event made it all the way back to New York. Hemingway, in an attempt to outdo Loeb, quite literally, "grabbed a bull by the horns" and wrestled it to the ground (as seen in the above photo) but his bravado was still overshadowed by Loeb.

As one might suspect, Hemingway never like to be outdone.  I loved the insights into the publishing angles, the fights between publishing houses, and the work of Max Perkins. 
While Everybody Behaves Badly doesn't cover any new ground, it is a fantastic distillation of the writing and publishing of one of America's great books.  Not to mention a fine snapshot of the 1920's.

Happy Anniversary -- Scott and Zelda

Everyone went so ga-ga over Baz's The Great Gatsby movie and having "twenties" parties were all the rage.  I had that "been there, done that" feeling.  A few years ago, wait, it was a few lifetimes ago...anyway...Richard Peabody and I threw an anniversary party for Scott and Zelda.  Much like those parties in The Great Gatsby, a good time was had by all. No one was run over by a car or shot because of it, so maybe we didn't have such a great time, but I digress.

During the height of last year's Gatsby roaring twenties overload, the Huffington Post published a list of 12 Things You Didn't Know about Scott and Zelda.  Well, we knew them, but I must confess, it was the first time in years that I had seen the word "furbelows" in print.

In honor of Scott and Zelda's anniversary, I though I would give a shout out to gin...no wait...a shout out to two relatively new books I enjoyed.

Sarah Churchwell's Careless People derives its title from Fitzgerald's assertion that "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy...."  Churchwell delves into a then-famous but now forgotten murder of a married Episcopal minister and his married love interest.  Edward W. Hall and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills died in an abandoned farm house.  The bodies were found with their love letters littered about and the site became a tourist attraction.  The stories of their affair and murder were rampant during the time The Great Gatsby was being written.  Careless People is rooted in the facts of the case, but the case for for it being a large influence on Fitzgerald is quite speculative.  Still if you love the twenties, you will enjoy this book immensely. 

The other book is Flappers, by Judith Mackrell.   I wrote about it in February, so you can check it out, here. One of the six flappers is Zelda.  (Speaking of Alabama, one of the other flappers is Tallulah Bankhead.) 

Zelda died locked in a mental institution.  Scott died broke with his books out of print.  One does hope there is a heaven.  That they are happy and know that we still love them. 

And now...I am off to be careless and drink gin...

Happy Birthday Zelda

Self-Portrait by Zelda Fitzgerald

In honor of Zelda Fitzgerald's birthday, we urge you to read her one and only novel.  Regardless of what one might have been told, Save Me the Waltz is a beautiful book and well worth a read.  For a view of Zelda's paintings, check out  Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald, published in 1996.  It features many of her whimsical paintings like The Mad Tea Party.

Zelda Fitzgerald's Paintings

It’s very difficult to be two simple people at once,
one who wants to have a law to itself and the other
who wants to keep all the nice old things

and be loved and safe and protected.

Zelda Fitzgerald

In her novel, Save Me The Waltz, the character, Alabama Beggs, utters the above. To me, it is the quintessential definition of Southern women. At a tag sale several years ago, a friend looked up to see me walking with my purchases -- a pair of motor cross boots and a sifter painted with roses. "You are too confusing," she said. She never read Zelda Fitzgerald! My explanation: I might need to bake a cake and rush it to someone on my motor bike.

Save Me the Waltz is a flawed book, though we don't have the original manuscript of the novel. Scott Fitzgerald believed that "their" life was "his" property and when he found out that Zelda's novel used the same material he was mining for Tender Is the Night, he forced numerous changes before he allowed it to be published. The original manuscript and well as the revisions have been lost.

Fortunately, we sill have Zelda's paintings. This weekend, Harry Lowe and I were talking about artists from Alabama and he mentioned Zelda. It had been a while since I had looked at them.

Times Square

A series of her images of New York City were turned into note cards several years ago. These are the images.

Grand Central

Fifth Avenue

Central Park

Brooklyn Bridge

In 1996, Eleanor Lanahan, Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, collected her painting for publication in Zelda: An Illustrated Life.

It is well worth the price of admission. It is also very difficult to be two simple people, but it can be a lot of fun.