Dear Harold:


 
I’m sorry as hell to hear you had such bad luck with Doodab. I suppose it is all a gamble and that you can’t always hit them on the nose.

Sorry to hear they are not making any attempt to sell In Our Time. What reviews[1] I have seen looked pretty good. Sylvia Beach[2] orders 12, they send her 6. Sells them in one day and has to cable for more. It has been six weeks since Brentano’s[3] ordered theirs and they haven’t come. Various people write me that they have read reviews and had to order the book. It not being on sale. Evidently they made up their minds in advance that it was not worth while trying to sell a book of short stories whether anyone wanted to buy it or not.

Well one learns, supposedly, as one lives. The important thing is to keep on living. This I am doing quite happily. Have been working like hell. Have three new stories. One, which I am writing now, a long boxing story called FIFTY GRAND. It is a hell of a good story. Scott FitzGerald thinks he can sell them for me. Hope so.

What do you hear from Bill?[4] I have had only one letter from him since he left.

We have been playing quite a lot of tennis and I have been boxing[5] three times a week. Am in damned good shape. Work ten rounds split up between three different partners each time. Am working at a good gym where there is a hot shower and have big enough gloves so I don’t bust my hands all the time. Haven’t been in as good shape since we were in the mountains[6] last winter.

Hadley is also very fit. See nobody around except Dos and the Scott Fitz’s and go into the quarter[7] very rarely. Saw Kitty,[8] looking well, last time we were at the select.[9] She was with Bob Coates,[10] the Peterson girl[11] and another girl whose name I didn’t catch. Have been drinking a lot of champagne with Scott but the regular training boils it out.

Finished the novel and am waiting to re-write it and type it out in Austria. So far am calling it The Sun Also Rises. May change the title. Have had three swell offers for the novel. So far I tell everybody I am very satisfied with Boni and Liveright, that they have treated me very decently, that I am very pleased etc. It’s up to them to keep me happy though and that means they’ve got to give In Our Time a good ride and that I must have a good advance on the novel. I’m not sore but I’m annoyed they have done nothing in Chicago where hells own amount of books are sold and which is my home town and where I would have a certain amount of sale anyway.

They are certainly putting Sherwood over big and will evidently make the boy a lot of money. I suppose it all takes time and that they know what they are doing. They are evidently playing the book of stories as a sort of classic and then planning to splurge on the novel. I think they are damn good publishers. The only angle to me is that I work all the time and I have to eat all the time. Also Bumby has an expensive nurse[12] and I’ve got a wife named Hadley that has to eat too.

We’re going down to Schruns the fifteenth of December. Will stay down there as long as we can afford it. Ford,[13] by the way, is again running his Bal Musette[14] dances. Also has Thursday at home. Haven’t been to either but Hadley has. afternoons

We’ve been seeing a lot of Pauline Pfeiffer. Ginny’s15 gone back to the states. Why don’t you swim in the pool[16] for exercise? That will keep you fit. Young Evan Shipman[17] is back. He came into about twelve or fifteen hundred bucks a year when he was twenty one this fall and so he’s all right now.

This is getting to be a long letter.

NOTES

[Notes are by Jeffrey Meyers.]

    1. In Our Time was favorably reviewed by Hershel Brickell, Burton Rascoe, Paul Rosenfeld, Schuyler Ashley, Ernest Walsh, Allen Tate, Louis Kronenberger, Robert Wolf, and anonymously in the New York Times Book Review and Time.return to text

    2. Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), Hemingway’s good friend, owned the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.return to text

    3. American bookstore in Paris.return to text

    4. Bill Smith (1895–1972), Hemingway’s oldest friend, arrived in Paris in April 1925.return to text

    5. Hemingway played tennis on the red-clay grounds near the guillotine of the Santé prison on the Boulevard Arago and boxed at the American Club in Paris.return to text

    6. Hemingway spent the winter of 1924–25 at the Hotel Taube, while skiing in Schruns, in southwest Austria, and returned for three months on December 10, 1925.return to text

    7. The bohemian Latin Quarter, on the Left Bank of the Seine.return to text

    8. Kitty Cannell (1892–1974), Harold Loeb’s girlfriend, whom he jilted for Lady Duff Twysden.return to text

    9. Popular café on the Boulevard Montparnasse, mentioned several times in The Sun Also Rises.return to text

    10. Robert Coates (1897–1973), minor American novelist.return to text

    11. Possibly Isabel Paterson (1885–1961), close friend of Ford Madox Ford, dedicatee of his novel The Last Post (1928).return to text

    12. Marie Rohrbach, Bumby’s French nurse, took him to Brittany in the summer of 1925, while the Hemingways were in Spain.return to text

    13. Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), English novelist, published Hemingway’s early stories and articles in the Transatlantic Review.return to text

    14. Popular Paris dance hall, with accordion band, patronized by Ford and his friends. Chapter 3 of The Sun Also Rises portrays the party given by Braddocks, a character based on Ford, at this dance hall.return to text

    15. Virginia Pfeiffer (1902–73), Pauline’s sister and sometime lover of Elizabeth Bishop.

    16. Loeb had the use of the pool at the Princeton Club at Park Avenue and 39th Street.return to text

    17. Evan Shipman (1904–57) belonged to the wealthy Biddle family. He loved drinking and was passionate about horse racing.return to text