The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2 - Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, Robert Trogdon

By the time covered in volume 2, Hemingway and Hadley have a son, and Hemingway is becoming rapidly disenchanted with working as a newspaperman. Or maybe it was just being a reporter in Canada that did it.

During this stretch, Hemingway gets his collection of shorts stories, In Our Time published, although he spends a lot of letters complaining about how Liveright, his publisher, won't give the thing a proper advertising push, doesn't supply enough copies, etc. He gets the initial draft of the Sun Also Rises written, but actually submits a shorter book, meant to be satirical, called Torrents of Spring. Mostly it sounds like him wanting to talk shit about a bunch of writers he doesn't think much of, but not having read it - or the works of the people he wants to mock - I don't know if that's accurate. His insistence in several letters on how funny it is strikes me as a load of crap, though.

It's more interesting to chart the progression of his relationships with different people. Correspondence with F. Scott Fitzgerald begins, and Hemingway at this stage still speaks pleasantly of Zelda Fitzgerald, or at least doesn't disparage her as convincing Scott to waste his talent. He seems to have a falling out with Gertrude Stein because she won't author a review of In Our Time, and there's far less writing back and forth between he and his sister Marceline. The letters there are don't show any hostility, so maybe it's simply a matter of them each having their own lives, or there being letters in between that weren't kept.

He does rekindle his friendship with Bill Smith, after they hadn't talked for a few years, with Hemingway encouraging his friend to abandon his job as a salesman and come to France to help run one of the literary magazines Hemingway's friends (erratically) publish. Of course, once Smith actually visits, Hemingway writes to a lot of other people that his friend has pretty much been used up or lost his spark, so there's still that trait of his to be both a really good, and extremely shitty, friend. I don't know what exactly it was Smith was or wasn't doing that led to the assessment. Maybe he didn't enjoy drinking and boxing enough.

There's an undercurrent of frustration, about a lot of things. He gripes a lot about the state of Italy, by this point firmly under Mussolini's incompetent rule. About money, about his publishers, about writers and critics he thinks aren't worth a damn, especially if the latter are comparing him to the former (he seems to really despise Sherwood Anderson). The book jacket notes that he starts mentioning Pauline Pfeiffer in the last few letters, when discussing he, Hadley, and Bumby's last winter in Austria. Pauline would end up being Mrs. Hemingway #2, although at this point, he still seems very happy with Hadley and proud of his son, so he isn't vocalizing dissatisfaction with his marriage. Yet.

'But bulls are just like rattle snakes - Gaw - they ain't human and they ain't animals. They got something damn strange about 'em. For 600 years they been bred for viciousness, and speed. They ain't like our bulls. They got the speed of a racehorse, they never move except on the run, and they never back up. Never. They don't do anything to 'em to make 'em sore before they fight. They just let 'em loose in the ring.'