Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (review)

Abstract

• BOOK REVIEWS Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall ofa Literary Friendship. By Scott Donaldson. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1999. 341 pp + index. Cloth $29.95 Paper $7.95 Fewmodern writers are as definedbytheirpersonal and professional associations as Hemingway: his relationships with his parents, sons, and wives, as well as his friendships with Pound, Stein, and Fitzgerald, to name only a few examples.Nonewas arguablymoredefinitivethan Hemingway'srelationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. UntU Scott Donaldson's Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall ofa Literary Friendship (1999), we had only a fine article by Ruth Prigozy and two excellent books by Matthew Bruccoli to frame and explain this friendship. Donaldson'sbookcomplementsthesepreviousworks aboutHemingwayand Fitzgeraldinadistinctivewayandconfirmswith finalitythat to understand one writer trulyyou have to understand the other. If Hemingway and Fitzgerald had not been perfect foils to each other in actuality, then Modernism would have had to invent them because their friendship so perfectly frames the rich literature written in their lifetimes. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are figures synonymous with their times, and their friendship,which began affectionatelyand endedbitterly, stands as one ofthe most important in the history ofliterature in English. Their complex personalities and immense talents, as weU as their excessive lifestyles, have provided biographers with an enormous amount ofmaterial to analyze and consider. The study of this up-and-down friendship began with Prigozy's 1971 Commonweal article, "A Matter of Measurement." She surveys the boundaries oftheir relationship, measures the original basis oftheir attraction to each other, and evaluates the prodigious means of their eventual estrangement. In Scott and Ernest: TheAuthority ofFailure and theAuthority ofSuccess(1978),Bruccoli providesmuch oftheprimarymaterial concerning the relationship, material later revised and expanded in Hemingway and Fitzgerald:A DangerousFriendship (1994). Recognizing the essential value of previous scholarship on the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship, Donaldson rightly differentiates his the hemingway review, vol. 20. no. 2, spring 2001. Copyright © 2001 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 108 ¦ THE H E M I N G W A Y R E V I E W work from Bruccoli's, clearly setting the course of his book in the beginning : This is not the first book on the friendship between these two writers, or even the second. In two separate volumes Matthew J. Bruccoli has provided "a documentary reconstruction of Üíeir friendship and estrangement." The documents he presented— letters mainly, but also notes and comments from the published writings—constitute an invaluable resource for aftercomers. You cannot interview the dead. What I have tried to do is to engage those documents, along with many others, in telling the story of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway relationship. I've had a stUl more difficult goal in mind, too: to arrive at an understanding oftheir faUed friendship and what it has to teU us about each of these two great writers and their work. And that is what Donaldson so successfully does: tell the story of their friendship in terms that are meaningful to all us involved in the tragic experience of living. Donaldson, who has previously written highly readable biographies of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writes about these two men's lives as if they were the stuff of their own fiction, as indeed they were. In this book's Preface, Donaldson recounts a dream that he had about Hemingway and Fitzgerald engaged in a boxing match. He writes: During the early morning hours of March 31, 1999, 1 dreamed about Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps it was the blue moon outside the window that brought them to life, but there they were, in the ring, boxing. I knew this made no sense. There is no record that Scott and Ernest ever duked it out, and it would have been a terrible mismatch, with die larger and heavier and more experienced Hemingway liable—as Maxwell Perkins used.to say about him, as a fighter—to "kill" the slightly built Fitzgerald. This dreamed-up fighting bout, the basis of the rather aggressive "vs." in the book's title, immediately pitches the comparison in the elementaUy BOOK REVIEWS · 109 competitive terms Hemingway thrived on, but Fitzgerald shrank from. Donaldson argues that Hemingway's pugnacious desire to dominate and Fitzgerald...