`The seeds of their destruction are in them from the start, and the thing to do about writers is to get along with them if you see them, and try not to see them.'
`In the construction of legends truth cannot compete with fiction," concludes Scott Donaldson midway through Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship. The twentieth century, being the most and least human of centuries, was a time when we desperately needed our legends. The story of their lives had to be extended, along with any mythical status, to where they could appear in newspapers, magazines, on film reels. It was vital that our legends be real so that the mass of people could identify with them. It was also important that they be mythical so they could, in some amount of conscience, be destroyed.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald - the most public writers of the twentieth century, in the sense that they were both visible and lauded - both embraced the noose and strung themselves high in the air with booze, celebrity, glamour and legend itself, only to find that, as with most nooses, there ended up being too much space between their feet and the floor. Fitzgerald, before his death in 1940, once wrote an epitaph of his own: "Then I was drunk for many years and then I died." Hemingway, ruined and desperately sick, shot himself in 1961, prompting newspapers to say that it was as if the century itself had come to a violent and premature end. Their sad deaths stood like moral lessons, the world allowing them their sins so that, vicariously, we wouldn't have to live through the many, less public, sins of our own.
The irony, of course, is that it is their writing that lasts, not their lives. Both left masterpieces behind them - a literary history would be left monumentally incomplete without The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Last Tycoon, This Side of Paradise, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, not to mention the other novels, the memoirs and the stories.
Scott Donaldson, one of the pre-eminent American scholars on both writers, has chosen to lay the microscope upon their "friendship". The research in the book is extraordinary and it works as an important, crisply-written historical document, though it is not necessarily a great read. The ornithologist studies the birds - their territory, their flight patterns, the differing weights of their public wings, their occasional crashing together. Unfortunately, in the words of Kafka, it is often the case of "the cage going in search of the bird".
Donaldson begins with a rather terse and jumpy biographical sketch of each writer, followed by a chapter on the emotional cost of the early lost loves of both writers. Ginevra King throws Fitzgerald over with "supreme boredom and indifference". Agnes von Korowsky chooses not to be with Hemingway. Soon both writers go on a "reckless pursuit for a replacement of the departed lover". Donaldson, as scholar, seems to want to impose a magnetic direction on to both men's journeys.
It is not until the two meet in the Dingo bar in Paris in April 1925 that the book finds a foothold. Fitzgerald is already famous. Hemingway is unknown. Yet Fitzgerald grovels to the younger writer - he has already read some of the early stories and considers Hemingway to be "a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate". To Donaldson's great credit he chooses not to rely on Hemingway's later accounts in A Moveable Feast - the scholar is aware that the dice was already loaded by time. He dissects letters, many of which are new, and he brings a logical fair-mindedness to the study.
Fitzgerald becomes a trumpet for Hemingway - generously introducing him to publishers, editors, lending him vast amounts of money which, it seems, are never repaid. In becoming involved with Hemingway's career, Fitzgerald also trumpets himself, of course. At the apex of his career he is scared of the heights that he has attained. In a fascinating section Donaldson details the editing job that Fitzgerald does on The Sun Also Rises.
The two become friends of sorts, going on trips together, drinking themselves towards their famous oblivion. But Hemingway cannot abide being beholden to anyone. While Hemingway tries to pour his wine back into the literary bottle, Fitzgerald seems to squat on the rim in order to drink the spillage. Hemingway grows angry that his fellow writer is squandering his talent, made impotent by critics and wooed by Hollywood. Hemingway becomes increasingly intolerant and unsympathetic, writing at one stage that Fitzgerald has "gone into that cheap Irish love of defeat, betrayal of himself". As Samuel Butler said, "Friendship, like money, is easier made than kept".
Donaldson examines their public lives, their loves, their writings, cataloguing the famous quote where Fitzgerald says that "Ernest speaks with the authority of success, I speak with the authority of failure". There is a fine chapter on their drinking exploits - throwing silverware out the window, Fitzgerald cowering on the bar floor like a dog, an infamous boxing match in Paris, a road trip through France. The writers - away from their writing - come across as unspeakably childish, yet attractively human.
Donaldson chooses neither to elevate nor denigrate them. Nor does he fall face forward into the ditch of trying to choose who was the better writer, each drawing (as Gertrude Stein said) from opposite ends of the colour spectrum.
Hemingway, living longer, eventually comes out the worst, belittling Fitzgerald at every turn, at one stage calling The Last Tycoon "a slab of bacon on which mold has grown". The fact of the matter remains that both writers pushed themselves to the edge until they became the edge - they toppled over by force of themselves, not because of each other.
Hemingway versus Fitzgerald doesn't quite have the narrative force that one might desire - it often seems caught between being a popular study and, at the same time, an intimately researched work. There is a sense that the book is stretched out on a certain elastic, that it was an essay that has become a book. The force of the work is more one for scholars, or perhaps even as a lighthouse flash - a brief but bright warning for younger writers.
An uneasy sense exists in the world of literature these days that the writer is more important than his or her writing. This book bends a little in the direction of the dark and tragic lives, over the equally dark and tragic words. But the words survive. They will always survive. After all - although it sometimes doesn't seem so - the stars are always deeper than their darkness.
Colum McCann's new book, a novella and stories called Everything in This Country Must will be published shortly by Phoenix House