The relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, in both its literary and legendary forms, has been so often revised by memory and desire that we can only speak of probabilities, not certainties. The residual evidence, for the most part now public, is as deceptively simple on its surface as the outside of a telephone interchange box; to sort out the maze of colored wires inside, however, requires the acuity of a neurosurgeon. This metaphor, which holds at almost every level of their relationship, is a particularly apt description of their shared interest in medievalism. Because the story of that interest is not linear, the reader must put the parts together for himself.

Part One: The End of Something

Hemingway and Fitzgerald, we have been told, first met in 1925 in a Paris bar, but both writers were well aware of each other before their first shared drink. During the Chicago summer of 1921, Hemingway read and was influenced by Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, the structure of which he considered for his own fledgling war-novel in progress.¹ In August, Hadley, his wife to be, cautioned Ernest against structuring his fiction like Scott’s college novel, which she found “too patchwork.” She reminded Ernest how she had wanted “a long stretch of the same form when Fitzgerald got to pitching from letter to narrator” (Young Hemingway 241-242). Three years later on the basis of In Our Time, whose author he had not met, Fitzgerald recommended Hemingway to Max Perkins as a potentially rising star.

This now legendary relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, once so filled with humor and camaraderie, reached its nadir early in 1936. That was the year Roosevelt tried to balance the budget of a struggling economy, which immediately got worse; those citizens who had jobs were making thirty percent less money than they had in 1929.² It was the year that Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner published their rather different neo-medieval versions of the defeated South, its lost gallantry and its disabled families.³ Between January and April of that year, in Esquire magazine Scott Fitzgerald published three loosely related essays detailing his fall from grace into spiritual isolation, essays we call The Crack-Up.

Writing lyrically, if somewhat vaguely, about his inability to write, Fitzgerald repented of being “a mediocre caretaker” of his own talent, and one who let himself “be snubbed by people” with no more ability or character than himself. He was through with caring about others, he said, for he was no longer able to stand the sight of almost all his former acquaintances, particularly writers. For moral support he had only his childhood dreams of heroic deeds on fields of sport or war (Crack-Up 71-73). Somewhat ironically, this first essay appeared in the same issue as Hemingway’s “Wings Always over Africa,” a natural historian’s take on the Italian dead in the Ethiopian War.

When Ernest read Scott’s essay, he was unamused but untouched, even though he was, presumably, one of the writers no longer to be tolerated. “Once a fellow writer always a fellow writer,” Ernest joked with John Dos Passos, telling him that Max Perkins “says he [Scott] has many imaginary diseases along with, I imagine, some very real liver trouble” (Selected Letters 433). But when the second essay, “Pasting It Together,” appeared, Hemingway was appalled. Not only was Scott wallowing in self-pitying rhetoric, but he was also referring to Hemingway by implication if not by name. “I saw honest men through moods of suicidal glooms,” Fitzgerald wrote, “some of them gave up and died; others adjusted themselves and went on to a larger success than mine” (Crack-Up 77). Ernest must have seen allusions to his own “suicidal gloom” during his 1926 divorce after which he had written Scott that he was “all through with the general bumping off phase” (Selected Letters 232). Fitzgerald went on to refer to a contemporary who “had been an artistic conscience,” and whose “infectious style” he was barely able to avoid imitating (Crack-Up 79). Hemingway, who did not want to be remembered as Fitzgerald’s artistic conscience, wrote Max Perkins that he “felt awful about Scott,” whose public whining he took as the act of a coward. “It is a terrible thing for him to love youth so much that he jumped straight from youth to senility without going through manhood. But it’s so damn easy to criticize our friends and I shouldn’t write this. I wish we could help him” (Selected Letters 437-438). Honest work was the only treatment Hemingway could recommend.

After The Crack-Up, there was nothing left to discuss from Hemingway’s point of view. In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third installment in Esquire, Ernest completed his own version of the writer in despair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” with its now suppressed references to Fitzgerald’s admiration of the very rich.

Although Fitzgerald and his apologists have, at some length, described the unfairness of this comment by the dying narrator of “Snows,” we have not seen the story as Hemingway’s answer to The Crack-Up. Harry Walden berates himself for the same never-dids that Fitzgerald bemoans in his essay. Both are writers of squandered talent, never having written the fiction of which they were capable. True to his early advice to Scott—“use your hurt”—Hemingway compiled a collection of unwritten short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing those stories. “Snows of Kilimanjaro” is, among other things, an object lesson to Fitzgerald: here is what he could have done with his hurt.

Although we have no Hemingway letters to Fitzgerald written after The Crack-Up, Scott would haunt him to the end of his life and well into ours, as seen in Hemingway’s posthumous A Moveable Feast. Fitzgerald, who canonized himself as the authority on failure and Ernest the authority on success, either missed the point of their conversations or chose to ignore it. From beginning to end, it was neither success nor failure about which their relationship circled; the focal question was always how does it behoove a writer to behave in our time when the traditional guides—family, church, community, and state—no longer provide convincingly moral imperatives. Refurbished medievalism wasn’t the only available answer, but it is a palpable presence for both writers, a presence better understood in a broader cultural context.

Part Two: The Education of Young Men, Sad and Otherwise

In their disparate youths, Hemingway and Fitzgerald absorbed various elements of medievalism from the ambient cultural air of the Midwest, air redolent with the literary deeds of British heroes, for as Spengler suggested and Fitzgerald seems to confirm in Tender and Tycoon (Moyer), civilization was the tawdry extension of a past culture no longer redeemable, and American civilization, cut off from its cultured British roots, had declined without ever having been a distinct culture.

Despite Mark Twain’s attempt to make buffoons of King Arthur’s court and to mock the courtly lover, everyone knew, at the turn of the last century, there was not yet an American literature. We remained a country in love with the English past. Tennyson, Scott, Shakespeare, and Chaucer were required high-school reading in any college preparatory curriculum, and Kipling was ubiquitous. In Oak Park schools, Hemingway read Idylls of the King, The Cloister and the Hearth, Ivanhoe, General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and the Knight’s Tale at least twice. When he was courting his first wife by mail, she referred to him as her “gentil, parfect, knight.” In Paris, soon after meeting the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways were reading and discussing George Moore’s Heloise and Abelard, a medieval romance that accompanied Hemingway back to Key West and eventually to Cuba (Reynolds, Reading). Fitzgerald’s medieval reading was at once more structured and perhaps less effective. At Princeton he took the standard regime in British and French literature, but there is little corroborative evidence that it made much of an impression. Fitzgerald regularly flunked or barely passed courses, in part because he seldom attended classes. Almost every year he exceeded his fifty allowed cuts, which forced him to take an extra course the following year. In the fall of 1915, Fitzgerald’s sophomore English course included Spencer, Marlowe, Sidney, and Chaucer; in French literature, he studied the Romantic Movement. However, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson were more important intellectual influences than were his academic tutors. His out-of-class reading of British decadents and the Irish generation from the 1890s was probably more formative than any of his class reading except for Keats, whose unrequited, ever young, and undisappointed “Urn” lover becomes one of Scott’s stock male characters (Bruccoli 43-79). With Fitzgerald, the question is—almost always—How to Love. With Hemingway, the question is—most frequently—How to Lose. Both questions, as this disjunctive discourse hopes to show, found partial answers in the authors’ helter-skelter absorption of medievalism.

Part Three: An Idea Almost as Big as the Ritz

When Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Era went bankrupt in the aftermath of World War One, and Western Europe reeled under a series of self-serving and short-sighted treaties guaranteed to produce another war, and when England’s remaining young men sat down to tell sad stories about the demise of empire, and a displaced American summed it all up in a poem called The Waste Land, when all of these omens were obvious as chalked messages on the sidewalk, several texts captured the fears of the post-war generation: Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1932, one-volume edition); Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1932); and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Reflections on the End of an Era (1934, the same year that Hemingway was writing Green Hills of Africa and Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night and four chapters of his medievally set Phillipe novel). Some citizens actually read Spengler and company; most absorbed their fears through the media’s discussion; others simply agreed with the titles: civilization was in decline and many were discontented.

That year Hemingway wrote his own epitaph for America mired in the Great Depression: “A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of an importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable” (Green Hills 109).

Part of the American cultural discontent resulted from the impact of new technology in the home. Parents who had grown up with horse-drawn carriages, gas lighting, live theater, dreamy waltzes, and light opera gave birth to a generation who dated in automobiles, listened to raunchy blues singers on the phonograph, talked for hours on the telephone, watched scantily clad young lovelies at the moving pictures, and found their parents altogether out of date. It was the generation that learned to kiss and smoke from the movies, learned to drink from pocket flasks, and began dancing to a beat their parents did not know.

Simultaneously in America and England, neo-medievalism with its chivalric ideals appeared if not as a counter statement to modern times, at least as an alternative set of values. In England, two Oxford intellectuals came of age whose fiction and non-fiction would reaffirm medieval ideals: C. S. Lewis with his Narnia novels and his Allegory of Love and Tolkien with his Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings trilogy. As the Thirties came to a close and the great crusade to free Europe from the fascists began to mount its forces, Lewis argued that: “The medieval ideal taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he needed that lesson. It demanded valor of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was, as likely as not, to be a milksop” (Living Age 110). A generation of urbane and modest young men were soon to be taught that forbearance was deadly and humility unbecoming to a warrior; they would leave their names and their bones in Normandy and the Ardennes, across North Africa and the South Pacific.

Publishers’ records from the period lend support to Lewis’ position that the medieval ideal “was something that needed to be achieved, not something that can be relied on to happen” (Living Age 111). Between 1928 and 1937, six editions of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and thirty-nine editions of all or part of Idylls of the King appeared; fifty-two books on King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table were written; over one hundred books were published about the Middle Ages. That generation on the edge of what we would call “the last good war” came of age with chivalric ideals close at hand. The same semester that Hitler invaded Poland, Stanford University, in response to “the growing interest in medieval studies,” began an experimental curriculum whose core courses included: Chivalry, The Church Fathers, Medieval Mysticism, Medieval Technology, and Medieval Heresies (White 55-57).

Meanwhile in Peoria, Hackensack, and Amarillo, grown men became Knights of Columbus, Knights of Pythias, Knights of Rhodes and Malta, Knights of St. John, Teutonic Knights, and, of course, Knights of Labor. Knighthood was also flourishing in the backwash of the new technology. Popular fiction gave us Knights of the Air and of the Wing; Knights of the Wheel; Knights of the Cockpit. There came Knights Riding and Flying. Knights were found in every clime: Knights of the Desert, Knights of the Boomerang, Knights of El Dorado, Knights of the Moon, Knights of the Horseshoe, of the Saddle, and of the Silver Shield. These stalwarts rode in various dress: Knight Errant in Chaps, Knight in the Tiger’s Skin, Knight in a Slouch Hat, and Knight in Motley. They also had a variety of interests, these modern chevaliers: Knight of the Pen, Knight of the Virgin, Knight of the Road, of the Range, of the Shire, and of the Snow Storm. In February 1937, the medieval comic strip Prince Valiant first appeared in American newspapers. Like any idea watered down for mass consumption, this popularization of medieval values was but a shadow of the more rigorous medievalism that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were moving toward throughout the decade. When Fitzgerald’s last half-courtly lover, Dick Diver, retreated into obscurity, Scott turned to Phillipe, Count of Darkness, a harder man by far, a man in need of love but with little of the “Urn” lover’s patience. Phillipe and later Monroe Stahr both want to control others, manipulate, consolidate the fiefdom at hand. Hemingway’s medievally-based characters from the Thirties are hard where Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry were soft. Harry Morgan and Robert Jordan also need a woman, but their mental hardness, worn like armor, keeps them focused on the tasks, the challenge at hand.

Part Four: All Along the Watch Tower

In November of 1934, Fitzgerald, whose first chapter of Phillipe, Prince of Darkness had appeared in the previous month’s Redbook, asked Max Perkins about the setting for Hemingway’s next book (Green Hills of Africa), “I hope to God,” he wrote, “it isn’t the crusading story he once had in mind, for I would hate like hell for my 9th century novel to compete with that” (Dear Scott 212). To understand Fitzgerald’s concern, its immediate foreground must be considered.⁴

Between 1922 and 1927, Hemingway’s appreciation of medieval cathedrals and their attendant way of life was richly developed in Paris (Notre Dame), during his several visits to Chartres, and during his summers in Spain (Burgos, Zaragoza). In 1927, traveling the “Milky Way” from Paris across the Pyrenees and down the spine of Spain, he followed the medieval pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of St. James at Santiago de Compostela.⁵ By 1924, Hemingway was discussing The Song of Roland with friends. During the summer of 1925, before his romance with Pauline Pfeiffer led to his Catholic conversion, Hemingway created a Catholic narrator for The Sun Also Rises. In that novel of a misdirected pilgrimage, Jake Barnes, the would-be-good Catholic, prays and confesses as he is able.

In April of 1925, just as The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald, the lapsed Catholic, first met Hemingway, Catholic to be, in Montparnasse, two months before Ernest and Hadley left for Pamplona and the events that produced The Sun Also Rises. From their first encounter, the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship was strained by the differing needs of both men. Scott, the failed collegian, was continually trying to educate or improve any man, woman, or child who came within his reach. Hemingway, the high-school graduate sensitive about not having gone to college, resented Scott’s instruction. Hemingway, never able to suppress his competitive drive, always wanted to displace Fitzgerald in the marketplace, in the heart of Max Perkins, and finally in the literary history of their time. These conflicting drives are present in the composition history of The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald’s now famous critique of Hemingway’s typescript has that genial but slightly superior tone of the upperclassman explaining to the green freshman that certain things simply aren’t done by Princeton men. In Hemingway’s unpublished preface to the novel, he warns his reader that his generation “that is lost has nothing to do with any Younger generation about whose outcome much literary speculation occurred in times past. This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us.”⁶ This blatant belittling of Fitzgerald, consigning him early to the museum of ideas, has that bluster of the new kid on the block marking off his turf.

In March of 1926, with his new Scribner’s contract in his pocket, Hemingway made notes toward his next novel, which he titled “A New Slain Knight,” taken from the medieval poem “The Twa Corbies.” Quoting four lines in his notebook, Hemingway was clearly focused on the bleaker version of the poem where the ravens sit down to feast on the dead knight whose lady has already “tane anither mate.” Having by this time thoroughly digested The Great Gatsby, Hemingway planned to write a “picaresque novel” about an escaped convict. “It will not be the story of a weak disappointed youth caught and sucked up by fate,” he promised himself. “It will be the story of a tough kid lucky for a long time and finally smashed by fate.”⁷ This less than kind, left-handed judgment of Jimmy Gatz as a “disappointed youth” shows Hemingway chafing from his recent and profitable negotiations with Scribner’s, in the same month when Fitzgerald, Scribner’s golden boy, was publishing All the Sad Young Men (February 1926).

In May 1927, Ernest and his new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, climbed the battlements of Aigues Morte, the beautifully defended castle built by sainted Louis IX as a gathering and launching point for the ill-fated seventh and eighth crusades. Four months later, he returned to his notes for “A New Slain Knight,” no longer the narrative of an escaped criminal, but a father-son story of a divorced revolutionist, which floundered about for twenty chapters before Hemingway abandoned it. But the title and its object, the fallen knight on the field of battle, were with him for the rest of his life. Instead of the “tough kid smashed by fate,” Hemingway began a different story about the somewhat passive Frederic Henry who is only slightly smashed and whom no one would call “tough.” However, the book’s title, A Farewell to Arms, came from George Peele’s poem which embodies the chivalric ideal once embraced by warrior knights.

In March of 1929, the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds both, but separately, returned to Paris. Despite Hemingway’s request to Max Perkins that he not give Scott the Hemingway address, the two writers did spend time together that year. Both were at a changing point: Fitzgerald had not published a novel in five years and would not for another five; Hemingway, riding a crest, would not publish his next full-fledged novel for another ten years. Each, in his own way that year in Paris, was searching for a new course amid the floating wreckage of the Twenties, wreckage at home and abroad which between them Scott and Ernest had documented in Gatsby and The Sun.

It was during that Paris spring of 1929 that Fitzgerald and Hemingway discussed the possibilities of using a medieval setting for their fiction. We can see Hemingway’s interest in the crusader bound on a holy mission reflected in his reading at Sylvia Beach’s lending library where he borrowed Coulton’s Life in the Middle Ages and Villehardouin’s Chronicles of Crusaders, and he apparently bought a copy of Haye’s Ancient and Medieval History published that year.⁸ In 1933, Hemingway invented a medieval quote to title his new collection of short stories.

A year later, 1934, Fitzgerald began his ninth-century story of Phillipe, Count of Darkness, who returns to the Loire Valley to claim his patrimony in a time of civil chaos. In his notebook Fitzgerald wrote: “Just as Stendhal’s portrait of a Byronic man made Le Rouge et Noir so couldn’t my portrait of Ernest as Phillipe make the real modern man” (Notebooks #1034). Twenty years later, Hemingway amused himself and his fourth wife, Mary, by pretending to be a medieval knight as they drove down the Loire Valley (Baker; Stoneback).

Part Five: Closing the Circle

For both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the love of knights was rooted in Morte D’Arthur and Idylls of the King, but first and always in Chaucer’s Knight who “loved chivalrie, trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisie…and though that he were worthy, he was wys, And of his port as meeke as is a mayde.…He was a verray, parfit gentil knight.” With that worthy knight, you may recall, there rode his young squire, hot and lusty we are told. The beginning and the end, youth and age, they were, those two pilgrims, not unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, each bound on his own life’s journey. If with Fitzgerald the question most frequently is how to love, or what happened to love, with Hemingway the question becomes how to live and die alone. Fitzgerald turns outward toward the social world; Hemingway, inward toward the dark self. These two views are not competitive, but complementary; one does not have to choose between them. And both views have their attendant devils.

Hemingway’s earliest fictions were about young men trying desperately to please either women or fathers, but he quickly gave up that theme. The post-1930 Hemingway character is most often focused on his duty or his profession; for him, it is no longer a question of whether he will lose: losing is a given, a constant in the equation that he learns to accept. The variables are how will he lose and on whose terms. Like Chaucer’s aging knight, Hemingway’s characters between 1930 and 1950 are battle-scarred veterans, tender towards women when women are in sight, but relentless in battle; Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan, Colonel Cantwell, Thomas Hudson—each in his own way chivalric—form a progression as Hemingway experimented with medieval values in contemporary settings. Harry Morgan, in modern idiom, “does what a man has to do” to support his family; he lives violently and dies broken, but true to himself. Robert Jordan is much closer to the crusader knight, fighting not for an ideology but to free a land important to himself. When all is doomed, the attack botched, the bridge probably no longer important, Jordan, true to his duty, dies in its perfect execution. With Maria he is the careful, considerate lover so long as she does not come between him and the bridge. Colonel Cantwell, the warrior at rest, is the aged courtly lover; Renata, his inviolate princess; Venice, their romantic domain. If we are less satisfied with Cantwell than with Jordan, it may be that for Hemingway courtly love does not translate as well as the crusader’s zeal. One might note that the Colonel, like Fitzgerald and Monroe Stahr, is dying from failure of the heart. For Thomas Hudson, artist and warrior, the question of courtly love is moot. He tells us that love is past, honor long lost, only duty remains. “Duty,” he says, “you do.”

Jordan, Cantwell, and Hudson live and die epitomizing the advice that Chaucer’s knight gives us at the end of his tale:

Throughout the Thirties and Forties, Hemingway’s characters accept “necessitee” and die in the “best of name.”

If Hemingway chose the crusader as a model, Fitzgerald chose the squire. The book of courtly love seems written with many of Fitzgerald’s unrequited characters in mind, “the young man who performs a grand deed for the sake of his beloved and who sometimes breaks against her selfishness” (Bruccoli 35). Keats’ “Urn” lover is the prototype: always seeking, never satisfied but never disappointed. Jay Gatsby, that unlikely courtier whose perfect gestures continually betray him, lives and dies by the rules of courtly love. Dick Diver, meek perhaps to a fault, self-destructs in his need to be kind, brave, wise, and loved “if he could fit it in.” That Daisy and Nicole never quite match their courtly lovers’ expectations does little to dampen their male ardor. Phillipe, Count of Darkness, and Monroe Stahr came too late and too little to balance the cult of love that Fitzgerald embraced.

Part Six: Knights’ Gambit

A cold December day, 1929, in the Palace Hotel for consumptives, Montana-Vermala, Switzerland. Looking out across the frozen valley of the Rhone beneath them, they could see the snow fields white in the sun, but here there was no skiing, no drinking, no loud laughter. This was a different winter. Nine days earlier in New York City, madcap Harry Crosby lay down with a lover in a borrowed bed to put a bullet through his lullaby. On Wall Street the bull market had been drawn and quartered. In his chilled room at the Palace, Patrick Murphy, son of Gerald and Sara, was beginning his eight-year journey into death by tuberculosis. Gathered round were his parents, Ernest and Pauline, Scott and Zelda, John and Katy Dos Passos, Dotty Parker and Donald Ogden Stewart: the last time this group would gather.

Ten Decembers later, another field of snow, this time the mountains of Idaho, 1939: Ernest alone in the Sun Valley Lodge for the moderately wealthy. Patrick Murphy is two years dead, having outlived his brother Baoth, dead of meningitis in 1935. In Key West, Pauline has locked and left the Hemingway house, taking their children with her; Ernest’s second marriage is finished. Zelda Fitzgerald has found her last home in Highland Hospital for the mentally ill. John Dos Passos and Ernest, having divided over the Spanish Civil War, are no longer speaking. Scott Fitzgerald, with twelve months to live, is in Hollywood planning The Last Tycoon. Ernest has written an epigraph for Martha Gellhorn’s new novel, an epigraph that claims to be “from a Medieval chronicle.” It reads:

That’s what they all eventually did, lose; some in flames, some forgotten, some lonely. They died by automobile, by failing heart, by shotgun to the forehead. And with them died the last of the nineteenth century, the last literary generation that century coughed up to modern times. That they took with them to the grave their codes of behavior is altogether fitting. What chance would courtly love have in a discourteous age; who among the tabloid generation would value honor or duty? Fitzgerald and Hemingway were children of the last century abandoned into this one, searching for a moral imperative to give guidance. Fitzgerald chose love; Hemingway, duty. That neither choice held back the night is not the fault of the choosers.

Source

From Zelda and Scott/Scott and Zelda: New Writings on Their Works, Lives, and Times, edited by Donald R. Noble, pp. 131-145. Copyright © 2005 by Whitston Publishing. Reprinted with permission of Whitston Publishing.

Works Cited