Hemingway Adventure

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Paris, France (first day)
Country/sea: France
Place: Paris
Book page no: 76

Paris, France (first day)

Paris, France
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Gertrude Stein, friend, creative influence and baby-sitter, with Jack (alias Bumby), Hemingway's first child, in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

She was one of the contacts that Sherwood Anderson had given Hemingway when he left the USA for Paris just before Christmas 1921, and she proved to be the most influential. They became good friends and she provided him with the fresh, invigorating, modern ideas about art and life that he had never found in Oak Park. She encouraged a style of writing that relied less on traditional syntax and fluent, fully rounded sentences and more on the overall feel and emotion of language. (Not everyone was as taken with it as Hemingway. The writer Wyndham Lewis called it her ‘infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter.’) Literature, she felt, could learn from art and something like Cézanne’s technique of painstakingly applied repetition of line and brushstroke to build up an image could be applied to the written word.

‘He wanted to write like Cezanne painted,’

Hemingway has his alter ego, Nick Adams, saying in a short story called ‘On Writing’.

He took Stein seriously as a teacher (though he did tell Hadley, his wife, that he thought her breasts ‘must have weighed ten pounds apiece’) and she took him seriously as a writer, encouraging him to give up the journalism that was paying his way in Paris and concentrate on fiction.

It was Gertrude Stein who recommended he go to see bullfighting in Spain and taught him to cut his wife’s hair. It was at her soirées that he met writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and artists like Picasso and Juan Gris. But she paid scant attention to Hadley, and the relentless championing of her husband may have contributed to the tensions that broke up the Hemingways’ marriage four years after they arrived in Paris.