Hemingway refuses Ernest Walsh’s promised literary prize

Hemingway refuses the literary award Ernest Walsh promises him, turning what might have been a windfall into a question of merit and ethics. The episode places that refusal in the precarious economy of expatriate literary life: writers rely on generosity, informal schemes, and promised prizes, but a promise is not the same as an earned award. At lunch, Hemingway doubts Walsh’s approach, declines the prize, and later learns that Walsh had made a similar promise to James Joyce.

Literary Aid and the Promise of an Award

Hemingway recalls the offer against a background in which books and money were scarce. He had no money to buy books, and when he first went to Shakespeare and Company he could not afford the rental-library deposit. Sylvia Beach let him take books anyway, telling him he could pay when he had the money. That earlier act of trust does not explain his decision about Walsh’s award, but it establishes the material conditions in which literary help mattered: access to books, time to write, and financial support were not abstractions for him.

Ezra Pound’s efforts on behalf of other writers provide a more direct context. Hemingway regarded Pound as exceptionally generous, someone who helped poets, painters, sculptors, and prose writers, including people in trouble whether or not he believed in their work. Pound was particularly concerned that T. S. Eliot had to work at a bank in London, leaving him too little time and poor hours for poetry. With Natalie Barney, Pound founded Bel Esprit, a fund intended to get Eliot out of the bank by having contributors give part of what they earned. The project’s aim was to support a writer’s work through collective contributions; Walsh’s later promise of a prize instead attached a substantial sum to a judgment of literary excellence.

The distinction matters because the award was presented as a competition, not simply as general aid. The Dial, an American literary magazine, then gave an annual award of about a thousand dollars for excellence in letters, a sum Hemingway notes could support two people comfortably in Europe on five dollars a day, with enough for travel. The new quarterly of which Walsh was a co-editor was said to plan a substantial award for the contributor whose work proved best after its first four issues. Hemingway preserves uncertainty around the report: he cannot say whether it circulated as gossip, rumor, or private confidence, and pointedly hopes it was wholly honorable. The prize’s promised scale and its stated criterion made Walsh’s personal assurance consequential before the four-issue judgment had taken place.

The Lunch and Walsh’s Approach

Walsh invited Hemingway to lunch at what Hemingway describes as the best and most expensive restaurant in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter. After oysters and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, Walsh approached the subject delicately. Hemingway understood the conversation as a lead-in to a proposal, and compared Walsh’s manner to the way he had supposedly conned people from a boat, while qualifying his own account rather than presenting that earlier episode as certain. The careful qualification keeps the scene’s suspicion attached to Hemingway’s perspective: he suspects a con, but the recollection does not establish every element of Walsh’s conduct as fact.

The table is rendered in exacting detail. Walsh offered another dozen of the flat, coppery Marennes oysters, distinct from the familiar, inexpensive Portuguese oysters. Hemingway accepted and ate them from crushed ice on a silver plate, squeezing lemon over their delicate brown edges and separating each holding muscle from its shell. Walsh did not perform illness for him or cough to make an impression, and Hemingway registers relief at not having to endure that performance. The extended attention to the meal slows the approach to the offer: oysters, wine, and the manners of an expensive lunch surround a conversation whose real stakes are financial and ethical.

Walsh praised Ezra Pound as a great poet and described the condition of the time as tragic. Hemingway answered that everybody had something wrong with them, apparently trying to lighten the mood. Walsh told him he was not marked for death but for life, capitalizing the final word. Hemingway replied that Walsh should give him time. The exchange juxtaposes Walsh’s dramatic language of death and life with Hemingway’s guarded response; it does not resolve the illness or vulnerability implied in Walsh’s manner. Instead, it shows the writer resisting the role Walsh seems to assign him even before the award is plainly named.

The Offer and Refusal

After the meal had moved on to steak, French-fried potatoes, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Walsh stopped circling the subject and told Hemingway that he knew he was to get the award. Hemingway asked whether he was, and why. Walsh affirmed that he was, then began speaking about Hemingway’s writing. Hemingway says he stopped listening. Having his work discussed to his face made him feel sick, and Walsh’s assurance did not persuade him: in his private response, he cast Walsh as a con man trying to con him and contrasted Walsh’s marked-for-death appearance with the unmarked men he had seen in a battalion on a dusty road.

That contrast is Hemingway’s judgment in the moment, not an independently established account of Walsh’s motive. His recollection holds together suspicion and uncertainty: he thinks Walsh is using the appearance of death to make a living from it, yet also insists that death itself is coming. The suspicion shapes the offer before Hemingway answers it, but the stated grounds for refusal are more direct. He told Walsh that he did not think he deserved the prize and that accepting it would not be ethical. He addressed Walsh by their shared first name, Ernest, and framed the name as something both men had to live up to. The personal wordplay makes the refusal pointed without changing its substance: Hemingway rejects the award rather than accept a sum Walsh says is already his.

The refusal is not described as a public denunciation or as a dispute over the quarterly’s formal rules. Hemingway does not claim to know how the eventual prize would be decided, and the evidence does not say whether he received any award. What the scene establishes is narrower and sharper: Walsh presented the outcome to him as settled, and Hemingway declined on grounds of merit and ethics before the promised four-issue judgment could make that assurance an earned distinction.

Confirmation and Significance

Hemingway later discussed Walsh with James Joyce. Joyce asked whether Walsh had promised Hemingway the award; Hemingway said yes. Joyce then disclosed that Walsh had promised it to him too. When Joyce asked whether Walsh had also promised it to Pound, Hemingway could not say. Joyce advised him not to ask Pound, and they left the matter there. This exchange changes the meaning of the lunch: Walsh’s assurance was not shown to be exclusive to Hemingway, and the narrative leaves open whether Pound had received the same promise. The episode offers no final accounting of the quarterly’s prize, but Joyce’s confirmation makes Hemingway’s hesitation appear less like a response to an isolated offer and more like a refusal within a network of competing assurances.

The scene sets literary generosity beside the risk of turning patronage into obligation. Pound’s Bel Esprit plan aimed to give Eliot time to write; Walsh’s promised prize carried money and prestige while ostensibly depending on a future judgment of merit. Hemingway’s answer does not condemn all financial support for writers. It marks a boundary around this particular promise: he will not claim that he deserves it, and he will not accept it as ethical. The later confirmation from Joyce leaves the offer unresolved, preserving the episode not as a story of a prize won or lost, but as a moment when Hemingway refuses to let a promised reward stand in for an earned one.