Free Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner

write in the first person because you could involve the reader immediately, so I again took that advantage with Farewell, but later in To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls , I used the third person; it's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
    "The writing of Farewell really had quite an itinerary—after Paris, wrote on it in Key West, then Piggott, Arkansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Big Horn, Wyoming; and then back to Paris to work on the galleys. First draft took six months in contrast to six weeks of Sun Also Rises. But I knew I had it made with Farewell when I finished the first draft. Everyone who read it treated it as a special thing right from the beginning. You know you're in if you hit a ratio of ten to one—that is, if you get your writing to have a truth and a reality ten times stronger than the original reality you are drawing on. I sent the finished manuscript to Max Perkins at Scribner's and he was delighted.
    "Max was a terribly shy man who always wore his hat in the office—I can't prove that the two have any connection, although maybe they have. I went back to New York to discuss the book with Max, and he said he had only one change which he wanted—the deletion of that pesky four-letter word which seems to be okay verbally, especially in the army, but verboten on the printed page.
    "Max was too shy to say the word out loud, so he wrote the word on his calendar pad. I said it was okay to delete it and suggested that since we had completed the rewriting, we go out to lunch and enjoy ourselves. Along about three o'clock that afternoon Charlie Scribner came into Perkins' office to consult him about something, and not finding him at his desk, went over and looked at the calendar pad to see where he was. Opposite twelve o'clock, Charlie found the notation f-u-c-k. Later that afternoon, when Charlie did find Perkins at his desk, he said solicitously, 'Max, why don't you take the rest of the day off? You must be done in.' "
    Ernest stopped to study a row of buildings. "In the basement of one of these buildings," he said, "was the best night club that ever was—Le Jockey. Best orchestra, best drinks, a wonderful clientele, and the world's most beautiful women. Was in there one night with Don Ogden Stewart and Waldo Peirce, when the place was set on fire by the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will. Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles. Very hot night but she was wearing a coat of black fur, her breasts handling the fur like it was silk. She turned her eyes on me—she was dancing with the big British gunner subaltern who had brought her—but I responded to the eyes like a hypnotic and cut in on them. The subaltern tried to shoulder me out but the girl slid off him and onto me. Everything under that fur instantly communicated with me. I introduced myself and asked her name. 'Josephine Baker,' she said. We danced nonstop for the rest of the night. She never took off her fur coat. Wasn't until the joint closed she told me she had nothing on underneath."
    Our wanderings had taken us onto the Rue Bonaparte, and now as he talked Ernest occasionally glanced into the windows of the antique stores. He had stopped to study a set of pearl-handled dueling pistols. "When they published Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Toklas ," he said abruptly, "Picasso and I were very disappointed."
    "Why?" I asked.
    "Because it was so full of lies."
    He gave his full and serious attention to the antiques the rest of the way to the Closerie des Lilas, where we settled ourselves comfortably in the dim, quiet bar. One of the barmen remembered Ernest, but everyone else was new. "Joyce came here with me a few times," Ernest said. "I knew him from 1921 till his death. In Paris he was always surrounded by professional friends and sycophants. We'd have discussions which would get very heated and sooner or later Joyce would get in some