Juan-les-Pins

Juan-les-Pins enters the memoir as a place of hoped-for renewal: an inexpensive villa, warm weather, swimming, and a disciplined routine are meant to restore the good days Ernest Hemingway associates with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stay begins with welcome and conviviality, but its social ease also exposes the tension between companionship and the solitude Hemingway considers necessary for writing.

The proposed retreat

In autumn 1925, while Hemingway and Hadley Richardson were living in the Vorarlberg and he was rewriting the first half of The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald wanted them to come to Juan-les-Pins in June. He promised to find them an inexpensive villa nearby. His plan was a healthier, more restrained version of an earlier shared life: no drinking, swimming, and one apéritif before lunch and another before dinner. Zelda Fitzgerald had recovered from an illness then diagnosed as colitis, Fitzgerald was not drinking and had begun working, and his novel seemed to be progressing well. Income from a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby and the prospect of a film sale made the future appear secure. In Fitzgerald’s account, Juan-les-Pins was to be the setting for a disciplined new beginning.

Arrival and welcome

Hemingway arrived by train from Madrid in May, travelling third class from Bayonne and hungry after running out of money; his last meal had been at Hendaye, near the French-Spanish frontier. The villa was ready, and he was glad to find Hadley managing it well and their friends gathered nearby. Fitzgerald had a fine house not far away. The first apéritif before lunch was followed by several more, already loosening the restraint the proposed routine had promised.

That night, a small welcoming party at the Casino brought together the MacLeishes, the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds, and the people living at the villa. Champagne was the strongest drink served, and Hemingway remembered the gathering as gay. The surroundings seemed exceptionally favorable to writing, yet he identified one missing condition: being alone. The contrast matters. Juan-les-Pins offered an inviting social world, but for Hemingway, welcome and company could not substitute for the privacy his work required.

Zelda’s confidence and the retreat’s limits

At Juan-les-Pins, Zelda appeared beautiful, tanned, friendly, and calm-eyed. Hemingway took her apparent composure as reassurance that all was well and would turn out well. She then confided a startling private opinion about Al Jolson and Jesus. At the time, nobody made much of the disclosure; in retrospect, Hemingway presents it as a secret whose significance was not recognized when it was shared. The image of a hawk sharing something with a man gives the confidence an intimacy that the narrator immediately qualifies: hawks do not share.

The memoir’s later perspective unsettles the promise of the retreat. It connects Fitzgerald’s subsequent difficulty writing good work with his eventual knowledge that Zelda was insane. Juan-les-Pins is not presented as the cause of that outcome, but the remembered scene places a moment of apparent calm beside a trouble not yet understood. Its bright social beginning therefore carries a retrospective tension: the characters could imagine the stay as healthy and disciplined, while the memory records how little that appearance revealed.