Free Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner Page B

in the name of friendship."
    "But how can you say Fitzgerald was your friend when he behaved like that?"
    "Well, I was speaking of our overall relation and in that respect he certainly was a loyal and devoted friend who at that time was truly more interested in my career than in his own. It was Scott who insisted that Max Perkins, who was his editor at Scribner's, read my story 'Fifty Grand.' Scott was one of their leading authors so he pulled a lot of weight. The story had already been rejected by Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan, because it was mainly about boxing and had no love interest. Max Perkins liked the story and sent it to the editor of Scribner's Magazine , who said he would pay me two hundred and fifty dollars for it if I would cut five hundred words. I said I had already cut it to its minimum size but if they wanted to they could lop off the first five hundred words. I had sometimes done this with a story and improved it; it would not have improved this story but I figured it was their ass, not mine, and I would have it published properly in a book. But they assigned a young editor to it who cut little snips here and there all through the story so that when he got through it made no sense. That was the end of the Scribner's experience, and where it finally wound up, all in one piece, was the Atlantic Monthly. After that I had a lot of requests to write fight stories but I have always tried to write only one story on anything if I got what I was after the first time, because there was a hell of a lot I wanted to write about and I knew even then that the clock runs faster than the pen."
    "Papa, I wanted to ask you ... I know it's hard to answer for someone else ..." I was embarrassed and wished I hadn't started this. "Well, I lived here for a while after the war, but that was just having fun and spending my severance pay. Now, though—these weeks we've been here—the more I see of Paris with you, the more I feel I should give up job and country and seriously live here and find out if I can be a writer— that's a pretty half-ass pronouncement, but I think you know what I mean. So many men I know in New York work at jobs they say they don't like and they're always promising themselves that one day they will quit and do whatever it is they really want to do. Writing is one of their favorite Canaans. They tell you the plots for their novels and plays which the world is waiting for. Well, I don't want to belong to that fraternity—Alpha Gamma Frustration—but at the same time I can see that chucking an editorial job and rushing off to a Left Bank garret with beret and portable may be overly romantic. It's just that I'm young now and I remember the equation you once mentioned—'hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.'"
    Ernest looked down into his drink; then he looked up and studied our reflections in the speckled mirror behind the bar and talked to my mirror-self. "Well, it's tough advice to give. Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man. Those first years here when I made my run, as you say you now want to make yours, and I quit my foreign correspondent job with the Toronto Star to put myself on the line, I suffered a lot. I had finally shucked off the journalism I had been complaining about and I was finally doing all the good writing I had promised myself. But every day the rejected manuscripts would come back through the slot in the door of that bare room where I lived over the Montmartre sawmill. They'd fall through the slot onto the wood floor, and clipped to them was that most savage of all reprimands—the printed rejection slip. The rejection slip is very hard to take on an empty stomach and there were times when I'd sit at that old wooden table and read one of those cold slips that had been attached to a story I had loved and worked on very hard and believed in, and I couldn't help crying."
    "I