Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Friendship

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friendship was both an alliance between writers and an uneven practice of care: Hemingway admired Fitzgerald’s talent, tried to protect the conditions in which he could work, and stayed loyal through drinking, jealousy, and conflict. Their closeness did not make Hemingway an unquestioning confidant. He sometimes doubted Fitzgerald’s accounts, withheld unfinished work, and gave blunt advice; Fitzgerald, in turn, could be generous and loyal when sober, but often disrupted Hemingway’s work when drunk.

First confidences and literary regard

One early measure of the friendship comes on a night when Fitzgerald is distressed by spending the first night apart from Zelda Fitzgerald since their marriage. He insists that he must speak to her and asks Hemingway to understand what the separation means to them both. Hemingway cannot see how the couple could have slept together the previous night, but decides there is nothing to argue about. As Fitzgerald drinks a whisky sour quickly, Hemingway returns the thermometer, checks on their drying clothes, and urges him to sip the next drink slowly. Fitzgerald is worried about the separation; Hemingway is also worried that a cold could become serious enough to require hospitalization. When Fitzgerald can no longer wait for the call, he puts on his dressing gown and goes downstairs to place it.

While waiting for the call, Fitzgerald drinks more and tells Hemingway the outline of his life with Zelda Fitzgerald: how they met during the war, lost and regained each other, married, and experienced a tragedy at Saint-Raphaël. His first account of Zelda Fitzgerald falling in love with a French naval aviator strikes Hemingway as genuinely sad, and Hemingway continues to believe that first version even after Fitzgerald later tries out other versions, apparently as material for a novel. Those later tellings improve in the telling, but, for Hemingway, do not wound in the same way. His uncertainty about which version is true sits alongside his emotional response: intimacy here means listening closely without claiming certainty about another person’s story.

Hemingway also distinguishes Fitzgerald’s fluency as a storyteller from the difficulties visible in his letters. Fitzgerald speaks articulately, though Hemingway had known him for two years before Fitzgerald managed to spell Hemingway’s name correctly. Hemingway gives him credit for learning to spell it and observes that he learned to spell more important things and tried to think more clearly. The affection in the appraisal does not erase the vulnerability it records; it lets Fitzgerald’s verbal gifts and limitations occupy the same portrait.

After reading Fitzgerald’s book, Hemingway decides that Fitzgerald’s behavior should be understood as something like an illness and that he should try to help him and be a good friend. The book’s garish dust jacket initially embarrasses Hemingway, but Fitzgerald explains its connection to a billboard important to the story and encourages him not to judge the book by its cover. Hemingway reads it, recognizes in Fitzgerald the capacity to write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby and perhaps an even better one, and resolves to enlist himself among Fitzgerald’s many friends. He does not yet know Zelda Fitzgerald or understand the formidable pressures Fitzgerald will face.

Work, loyalty, and interference

In late spring and early summer, Fitzgerald struggles to work, managing it only in snatches. Hemingway recalls him as cheerful and companionable, sometimes desperately so, and says he listened during the worst periods and tried to encourage him to hold on to himself and keep writing. Fitzgerald jokes about himself, which Hemingway takes as a sign that he is still safe. In that difficult stretch Fitzgerald writes one strong story, The Rich Boy; Hemingway believes he can do better, as he later does.

The friendship is tested by the way each man’s work is interrupted. Zelda Fitzgerald says that she does not encourage the people pursuing her and has nothing to do with them, but the attention amuses her and makes Fitzgerald jealous; he accompanies her to places, and the pattern damages his work. Hemingway describes Zelda Fitzgerald as more jealous of Fitzgerald’s work than of anything else. Later, when Fitzgerald is drunk, he often seeks Hemingway out and interferes with Hemingway’s writing, much as Hemingway feels Zelda Fitzgerald interferes with Fitzgerald’s. Yet Hemingway distinguishes the drunk man from the sober one: when sober, Fitzgerald is pleasant, jokes, and remains, over the years, one of Hemingway’s most loyal friends. The qualification is central to Hemingway’s account—affection persists, but it does not make the damage disappear.

By the autumn of 1925, Fitzgerald is drinking during the day as well as at night and coming to Hemingway’s rooms at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs whenever he is drunk. Hemingway recalls that he has become rude to people he considers beneath him. On one visit, Fitzgerald is caring for his young daughter because the English nurse has a day off. When the child needs the bathroom, Fitzgerald begins to undress her at the foot of the stairs; the proprietor points out a nearby toilet, and Fitzgerald threatens him. Hemingway’s account places the humiliating outburst beside the practical demands of caring for a child, making Fitzgerald’s decline visible in an ordinary encounter rather than in a general judgment.

Even in that difficult autumn, Fitzgerald has begun a novel and works when sober. Hemingway sees him rarely in that state, but continues to recognize his humor and his capacity for self-mockery. Their bond is therefore not simply a story of one writer helping another: Hemingway records how Fitzgerald’s drinking repeatedly intrudes on his own work, while also insisting that sobriety brings back a companion and loyal friend.

Manuscripts, boundaries, and hoped-for renewal

Fitzgerald is upset when Hemingway refuses to show him the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway explains that the manuscript will mean nothing until he has revised and rewritten it and that he does not want to discuss it or show it to anyone first. The refusal marks a boundary within a friendship otherwise shaped by mutual interest in work. Hemingway goes to Schruns in Vorarlberg to revise the novel, rewrites its first half there, takes it to New York to show Max Perkins at Scribners, and returns to Schruns to complete the rewriting. Fitzgerald sees it only after the completed, cut manuscript has been sent to Scribners at the end of April. Once the work is finished, Hemingway recalls joking with Fitzgerald and finding him anxious to help, as always. The sequence distinguishes the help Fitzgerald wants to give from the help Hemingway can accept while working: loyalty does not entitle a friend to access to an unfinished book.

During that winter, Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, and their child leave Paris for a watering place in the lower Pyrenees. Zelda Fitzgerald is ill with what is diagnosed as colitis after too much champagne; Fitzgerald is not drinking and is starting to work. He invites Hemingway and his household to Juan-les-Pins, promising an inexpensive villa, swimming, health, and only one apéritif before lunch and another before dinner. Fitzgerald says his novel is going wonderfully, money is coming from a successful dramatization of The Great Gatsby, and there are no worries. The invitation presents a possible return to the “old good days,” founded on sobriety, work, and shared domestic ease. Hemingway arrives hungry after running out of money on the journey, but finds the villa well run and is happy to see his wife and friends. At a small welcoming party at the Casino, only champagne is served; the place seems splendid for writing, except for the one condition the gathering cannot provide: solitude.

Intimacy and the limits of reassurance

Much later, after Zelda Fitzgerald has what is then called her first nervous breakdown, Fitzgerald asks Hemingway to lunch at Michaud’s. He says he has something of the greatest importance to ask and requires an absolutely truthful answer. Hemingway knows that such demands make honesty precarious: Fitzgerald may become angry later, after brooding over the answer, and sometimes the words seem to require destruction, with Hemingway himself potentially caught up in it. Fitzgerald drinks wine at lunch without being affected and has not prepared by drinking beforehand. They talk about work and people, but he postpones the question until the meal is nearly over, over cherry tart and the last carafe of wine.

Fitzgerald then says that he has never slept with anyone except Zelda Fitzgerald. Hemingway’s response is to address the physical insecurity that lies behind the question. He reassures Fitzgerald that he is fine, suggests that he is judging himself from an unhelpful angle, and recommends looking at statues at the Louvre before comparing himself with his reflection in profile. He also explains that size in repose is not the main issue and offers practical advice. When Fitzgerald mentions a woman who has been kind to him but hesitates because of what Zelda Fitzgerald said, Hemingway tells him to forget the remark, have confidence, and do what the woman wants. Fitzgerald answers that Hemingway does not know anything about Zelda Fitzgerald; Hemingway lets the disagreement stand and reminds him that he came to ask a question and received an honest answer.

The lunch brings the friendship’s strengths and limits into sharp focus. Hemingway offers reassurance and practical counsel, but his dismissal of Zelda Fitzgerald’s words as an attempt to destroy Fitzgerald is a judgment Fitzgerald rejects. Their intimacy permits sexual candor and unusually direct advice, yet does not give either man complete authority over the other’s marriage. Across the friendship, Hemingway’s loyalty is most durable when joined to limits: he listens, encourages, and offers help, while keeping his manuscript private and acknowledging that he cannot settle every truth Fitzgerald asks him to tell.