Fights without rules

About the book of Scott Donaldson "Hemingway vs Fitzgerald"

Friendship of Hemingway and Fitzgerald has long become a lady in the tongue. Young readers still monitor complex relationships between Ham and Fitz, as if they were not recognized classics, but living and resonant stars of Korean pop music. Biographer Scott Donaldson decided to dot all the “I” in this battle, and Olga Polinkina tells how much he succeeded.

Scott Donaldson. Hemingway vs Fitzgerald. Friendship and rivalry of two geniuses. Translation from English by I. Protsenko. M.: Gonzo, 2018

The book of Scott Donaldson about Hemingway and Fitzgerald was written 20 years ago, but the method of writing presented in it did not lose its relevance, and this proves the Russian translation that has just appeared.

Donaldson, a well -known theorist and practitioner of the genre of literary biography, means his approach to the material in the introduction. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are represented as those who appeared to the author in a dream - the fruit of the work of his own consciousness, the result of the perception of their lives and the texts they wrote, and, therefore, at the same time as historical faces and characters created by the author.

The dual nature of the text is enhanced by a thorough documentary base. The facts, weaving into the narrative, have the form of fictitious, but all of them are verified, links to sources and scientific literature are attached.

Although the book is not used in the original subtitle of the book, as in the Russian translation, the word “genius” (“friendship and rivalry of two geniuses”), the reader unfolds the story of complex relationships of two brilliant personalities, which have irresistible attractiveness, enchantingly talented, who came to literary glory in very young years.

Donaldson seems to consider it his main task not to miss a single nuance of this repeatedly described story, to get to its essence. He creates two equal plot centers, giving his heroes as owners of similar life experience - from childhood in the Middle West and failure in first love to life in Paris, alcoholism of later years and unstable writing reputation.

Everything is in this book in a double copy: the history of the family, youth, the nature of marriages, relations with a variety of common acquaintances, from Robert Makalmon to Henry Luis Menken and Gertrude Stein, and publishers, the history of publications, fees, and sales.

In literary terms, Donaldson represents his heroes as commensurate values, offering to compare the final scenes of the “Great Gatsby” and the novel “Farewell, Weapons!” - The works that each of them finished at 29 years. He insists on the great meaning that Hemingway and Fitzgerald had for each other as writers - about “Heminguye echoes”, distinguishable in the novel “The Night is Tender”, and the echoes of Fitzgerald’s prose “The Sun rising and rising”.

They met in Paris, when Fitzgerald was already a famous author of three novels and two collections of stories, and Hemingway was just starting his writer's career. Even before his personal acquaintance, Fitzgerald recommended his publisher Skribner as a young talent and subsequently did a lot for him: he negotiated with the publishers, gave laudatory reviews, in every possible way promoted and advertised - finally, picked up the money and brought the Hemingway Villa family at the disposal of the family when their little son fell ill with a cocrax. In Paris, Hemingway read and edited, helping to get rid of the lightweight journalistic manner, the two most eminent master of modernism - Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

Fitzgerald played his role. Donaldson gives several examples of his editorial work with Hemingui texts, how he helped to build the whole, convincing to reduce some pieces. So it was with the story “Fifty thousand”, which, at the suggestion of Fitzgerald, was reduced by (approximately) 500 words, so it was with the novel “And the Sun rises”.

Donaldson writes in detail about the latter case, turning the story of the editing of Roman Fitzgerald and the “legendary editor” by Makswell Perkins into one of the most fascinating stories of his book - despite the fact that there is a description of the social life on the Riviera with the participation of Sarah and Gerald Murphy, which was subsequently withdrawn in the novel Fitzgerald “Night tender "; and the dramatic story about how Pauline Pfaifer took Hemingway from his first wife Hadley; and colorful descriptions of the drunken outputs of Scott Fitzgerald; And the full irony of the story of how Hemingway lost the boxing duel to a weaker opponent and accused Fitzgerald of this, who, being far from boxing, let the random go for four minutes instead of three. In the story with the novel “The Sun” rises, the editorial (and diplomatic) efforts of Fitzgerald led to the fact that Hemingway abandoned the first two chapters (16 typewritten pages), which made the impression of “condescending unceremoniousness”, from which the novel won a lot. Further, insulting attacks against G. James and F. M. Ford were removed from it, while other parallels with writers were softened. As the author of the novel wrote: "shortened in the Granks, the book is perhaps good."

In his manner, Hemingway paid Fitzgerald with the same coin, for several years tirelessly encouraging him to quit drinking, stop writing stories for the sake of money and finally ending the novel, which eventually became known as “The Night is Tender”. He wrote to Perkins: Fitzgerald stops the idea inspired by criticism that his next novel can only be a masterpiece. When the novel “The Night is Tender” was published, Hemingway, in a letter to Fitzgerald without any diplomacy, explained in a patronizing tone that in the novel is not so, using phrases like: “Before you learn to write seriously ...”. The letter ends with a request to help break into Hollywood.

Ernest Hemingway

Fitzgerald is described by Donaldson as a person who feels uncertainly in male society and who, in an awkward attempt to correspond to himself. Hemingway, who even then cultivated the image of a strong man (“Bulls and Boxing”, according to Fitzgerald), from the very beginning “learned the tone of light sarcasm in relation to him, suggesting his own superiority,” despite the fact that Fitzgerald was older for years; When they met, he just released the Great Gatsby. Hemingway aroused his boyish admiration for the appearance and power of the quota and the fact that he happened to visit the war, but Fitzgerald highly appreciated him as an artist. The rivalry in their relationship, according to Donaldson, was mainly the lot of Hemingway, although Fitzgerald could not help but be annoyed when "the fashion for him was replaced by fashion for Hemingway."

Hemingway is widely known for the fact that at different stages of life he sought to “destroy” his teachers: he exposed in the unfavorable light of Anderson, Pound and Stein, already for that time, somewhat archaic wishing to imagine his work as an original product of the author. Donaldson connects the beginning of his rival attitude towards Fitzgerald with the writer's success of the last and really great fees of those years that Fitzgerald loved to boast, somewhat exaggerating. In the letters, Hemingway in every possible way belonged to Fitzgerald’s contribution to the editing of the novel “And the Sun rises” (years later, in the “Art of the Story” (1959), he “introduced himself as his best editor”).

In the case of the novel "Goodbye, weapons!" Hemingway did not just ignore the criticisms and suggestions of Fitzgerald, he distributed a false rumor that Fitzgerald proposed to finish the novel “A brief message in the newspaper, where the hero reads about the victory of US sailors.”

The success of Hemingway himself only exacerbated his competitive instinct, and it seemed to him that Gertrude Stein puts above Fitzgerald's talent. In the manuscript of the “green hills of Africa”, Fitzgerald is called “a coward with great charm”, the published text contains eloquent attacks against writers who, having blessed, begin to produce waste paper, and also trust critics and consider their “good” books by masterpieces. In the magazine version of “Kilimanjaro Snows” “Poor Scott Fitzgerald” is mentioned as the one who owns the rich. Jealous and sharply Hemingway opposed Fitzgerald in the 1950s, when the glory of Fitzgerald began to revive. Donaldson shows that in an autobiographical “Feast that is always with you” (1964), Hemingway shifts accents, depicting Fitzgerald as a “childish hypochondriac, an unreasonable motion, a powerless husband and a morally untenable artist that compromises his talent with template stories for glossy magazines, and himself as“ hungry, as a “hungry,“ hungry, “hungry,“ hungry The hardworking, happily married young writer, undividedly devoted to his profession, who knows how to handle alcohol, and will never allow himself to waste time or money. ” A fun trip in a car with a cut off from Lyon through the entire golden shore, in which they drank so much French wine together that “they have not missed a single year from Montrash to Shaberten” (from a letter to Hemingway to Ezra Pound), turns into a “festival that is always with you” into an instructive story about “in vain living on the bottom”.

Having built the vectors of the attraction-repulsion, Donaldson talks about the deep feelings connecting two writers, about love that had no erotic coloring: “Scott loved the idealized version of a man of brave, stoic, powerful, which he himself could never be in Ernest. Ernest loved the vulnerability and charm in Scott, which he invented for himself demanded to despise. ”

The book is undoubtedly interesting both from the point of view of the idea of ​​the literary process of the 20th century, and from the point of view of the psychodynamics of relations between two outstanding writers and outstanding personalities. The pleasure of reading is greatly contributed to the translation of I. B. Protsenko, although the good editor would not have prevented this publication - in addition to some language oddities, there are malfunctions in the names: the famous Flewus Street, where the salon of Gertrude Stein was located, and the writer's lover of Hildel E. Ellerman “Brayer” is transmitted as “Brayher” In one case, and as a "Bricher" - in another.

A curious book and the thought of how literary reputations are changing before our eyes. The heroic halo that surrounded Hemingway in the eyes of the Soviet sixties has faded for a long time, for today's taste, his mythologized figure has a gloomy coloring: a fighter of African animals and large fish, equating the immoderate consumption of alcohol to male valor, which had the habit of rebuilding others with his courage - he no longer seems to be a hero of his time. In the stories about his trips during the Civil War to Spain, Donaldson focuses on self -promotion.

Hemingway of these years is mainly a celebrity whose portraits resemble portraits of Clark Gaibla. The American criticism back in the 1980s, after the publication of the novel “Paradise Garden” (1986), which is considered an expression of Androgyn (or even transsexual) trends in his work, said: “The Hemingway whom you studied at school is dead.” As for Fitzgerald, the story has once again committed a circle, and in modern publications about Hemingua it acts as a literary authority, the very mention of which gives the weight of the story described.