Why Fitzgerald and Hemingway Are Literature's Greatest Frenemies

Or at least in the top 10

Between artists, the balance between admiration and jealousy is acrobatics. When art is life, another artist’s success can seem like an invalidation of your own life instead of a triumph to be celebrated. The chemistry between vastly talented people and the rapid-fire exchange of begrudging respect can be dazzling, whether it’s academics, writers, dignitaries, or Steve Jobs yelling at Google co-founder Sergey Brin about poaching Safari developers to build a competing product (Chrome) which would be launched three years later and now owns 67% of the global browser market.

When genius stands in front of a reflection, the reaction is often rage because even the reflection is lacking, the eyes empty glass worlds of paracosm proof that reaching your peak is the opposite of peace and all artistic accomplishments are devoured by the appetite of ambition. In other words, to be a genius is to be starving.

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It’s likely this restlessness that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway saw in each other when they met at a bar in Paris in 1925. Fitzgerald was 29. Hemingway was 26. Fitzgerald had published This Side of Paradise in 1920 and had now lived as a celebrity author for five years. Hemingway, who had gone abroad with his wife as a foreign correspondent had, by 1925, acquired a passion for bullfighting, an affair that would end his marriage, and an appetite, above all, to publish what would be his first novel: The Sun Also Rises.

Hemingway, a decorated World War I veteran, was hypnotically assured about his future fame and fortune and stood at a broadly shouldered six feet as opposed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s five-foot nine. Fitzgerald, who wrote so many short stories that nakedly longed for wartime experience, made no attempt to hide his wish that he had been granted some similar token of validated masculinity. Originally, he had dropped out of college and enlisted in the army in hopes of dying overseas after his first love spurned him but never saw combat or even deployment. In meeting Hemingway, he saw a prototype for everything he believed to be pure and true and struck a friendship negotiated by the divinely insecure arrogance in his own art.

Much has been said about whether Hemingway and Fitzgerald even liked each other. By many accounts, they were frenemies. But in unearthing old interviews with Fitzgerald as his life fell to pieces in the thirties, one will eventually stumble upon the firsthand sources confirming without a doubt whether F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were friends to the end. We’ll save that reveal for last… or feel to scroll around and skim as you see fit. Go ahead. All time is finite.

First, let’s talk about why Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were some of literature’s greatest frenemies since Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare or, later, Calvin and Hobbes’ Bill Watterson and Garfield’s Jim Davis, a relationship most characterized by Watterson in an interview about how Garfield comics were made:

Jim Davis has his factory in Indiana cranking out this strip about a pig on a farm. I find it an insult to the intelligence, though it's very successful.

Here are six reasons why Fitzgerald and Hemingway were such great frenemies:

1. Fitzgerald Helped Hemingway Get Published, But Cut the Manuscript.

Ernest Hemingway may owe his literary career to Fitzgerald in the first place. Fitzgerald is the one who recommended Hemingway to his own publisher, writing editor Max Perkins:

To hear [Hemingway] talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions — but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cuckoo magazines, is very young and feels helpless so far away. You won’t be able to help liking him — he’s one of the nicest fellows I ever knew.

Pause here and admire this uncommon sentiment about Hemingway: F. Scott Fitzgerald, known if for anything his perception, says that twenty-six year-old Ernest Hemingway is one of “the nicest fellows I ever knew.” In the beginning of their relationship, we see mutual respect and admiration and even an acknowledgement of Hemingway’s romantic depth, a quality that gets overlooked on account of his manufactured masculinity and staccato prose. A “nice” war veteran. What would his debut book, The Sun Also Rises, say about war?

Fitzgerald helped him say it, a sin Hemingway later considered unforgivable:

As Hemingway’s sponsor with Scribner’s, Fitzgerald had a considerable investment in the success of The Sun Also Rises. Upon his first read of Sun, Fitzgerald, a seasoned professional with a talent for revision, realized the book was not yet ready for publication. Fitzgerald’s critiques were delivered to Hemingway in the form of a ten-page handwritten letter that alternated between criticism and praise. He began the letter, “Nowadays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for a while, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax. This should frighten all of us into a lust for anything honest that people have to say about our work. Anyhow I think parts of Sun Also are careless [and] ineffectual. I find in you the same tendency to envelope in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke that casually appealed to you, that I find in myself in trying to preserve a piece of ‘fine writing.'”

Hemingway bristled and begrudged Fitzgerald’s favor, eventually accusing him of ruining The Sun Also Rises by cutting the first two chapters of the final manuscript. According to one account:

The first fissure in their friendship occurred early on when Fitzgerald advised him to cut the first two chapters of The Sun Also Rises, which described the background of the characters and afforded a more leisurely approach to the novel.  Though Max Perkins wanted to keep them, Hemingway cut them and later resented his submission to Fitzgerald’s judgment. The first chapter now begins with a misleading emphasis on the odious Robert Cohn, who seems to be the main character but is actually much less important than Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley.

The idea that two chapters would have served as a more “leisurely” introduction seems a glimpse into a parallel universe that reinvents Hemingway’s signature style, the short and bold proclamations and declarations that would shape a new movement and understanding of literature and storytelling and action. In this case, Fitzgerald, if history is to show anything, made the right choice on Hemingway’s behalf. This kind of generosity may have been even worse:

No friend did more for Hemingway than Fitzgerald. Apart from placing him with Scribner’s, he gave him money when he needed it, lent the family his Riviera villa when their little son John was sick, and personally rushed from Delaware to the Philadelphia railroad station when Hemingway suddenly needed cash to get to Chicago after his father’s suicide. But Hemingway, who valued his independence and disliked obligations, often quarreled with friends who’d helped him.

Hemingway resented ever having to ask for help. It wasn’t manly, and made him vulnerable, and it is fair to speculate that his retroactive anger at Fitzgerald’s edits, which he didn’t prevent at the time, is at least in a shame in his helplessness in the face of an uncaring world, a deep hurt he thought he had hidden away but one that Fitzgerald had seen in him already and, most likely, made the lifelong frenemyship - or friendship - possible.

2. Fitzgerald Was a Sloppy Drunk.

One effortlessly imagines Hemingway with a whiskey in one hand a bottle of wine in another. By firsthand accounts, he had standardized a daily diet of three pre-dinner scotches and two bottles of Claret by the time he moved to Cuba. F. Scott Fitzgerald made a habit of drinking more than thirty beers a day, easily doubling the tempo of Hemingway’s own dance with death. By the mid-thirties, after a nervous breakdown, he had a nurse attending him and ensuring he drank to live at a rate of stasis measured in ounces.

In attempting sobriety sporadically in the final years of his life after his move to Hollywood, Fitzgerald wrote:

I havn’t [sic] even had a glass of beer for a month + shall try it again… The fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps. But not renunciation.

His relationship with alcohol, all his life, seemed one relationship in Fitzgerald’s life that always remained the same: it gave and gave to him until it started to take. Especially when it came to his other relationships. In the early years of their friendship, Hemingway gushed about Fitzgerald, telling him:

I get maudlin about how damned swell you are… You are the best damn friend I have

By 1929, Hemingway’s attitude had changed likely because he had become sloppy and self-destructive. This spiral began with the commercial failure of The Great Gatsby in 1925 and became complicated by his wife’s dalliance with a French aviator, divorce threats, and subsequent suicide attempt. Fitzgerald was a tragic alcoholic in a tragic life. As Hemingway recounted angrily in 1929:

Last time he was in Paris he got us kicked out of one apt. and in trouble all the time. (Insulted the landlord — pee-ed on the front porch — tried to break down the door at 3-4 and 5 a.m.)… I am very fond of Scott but I’ll beat him up before I’ll let him come and get us ousted from this place — as a matter of fact I’m afraid I’d kill him.

Hemingway, who valued discipline in all matters, even self-destruction, detested what he saw as a growing self-doubt that had started to eat away at Fitzgerald’s talent, which he very much admired. Hemingway even speculated, as Fitzgerald himself did, that Fitzgerald had reached his peak and lost it, telling his friend:

A long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions… That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.

3. Hemingway Hated Fitzgerald’s Wife.

. "I never had any respect for him ever,… except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent. If he would have had fewer pompous musings and a little sounder education it would have been better maybe. But anytime you got him all straightened out and taking his work seriously Zelda would get jealous and knock him out of it.”

-Ernest Hemingway writing on Fitzgerald’s death (1961)

It must be noted that Hemingway, once studied, could effectively said to be a poetic bully. He certainly never hesitated in plainly telling his feelings about Zelda Fitzgerald, who he accused of dooming his friend to a legacy of destitution and loathed so deeply still couldn’t get over what he thought he had seen even after both of the Fitzgeralds had died in their forties, writing in a letter in the fifties:

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful; Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead. I think Scott in his strange mixed-up Irish catholic monogamy wrote for Zelda and when he lost all hope in her and she destroyed his confidence in himself he was through.

The crackling romance between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would warrant another Litverse essay (and will). Two geniuses who kindled each other as much as they burned one another, F. Scott Fitzgerald paid for his wife’s psychiatric treatments until the end and worked hard to make that possible. But her perceived infidelity with a French aviator, which consisted of many late-night dances in casinos along the French Riveria, only made up one of many episodes Hemingway witnessed and turned him against her permanently.

It is in A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway’s post-mortem memoirs of Paris, that Hemingway accuses Zelda of envying her husband’s talent and even sabotaging it by actively destroying his confidence. In the most famous exchange, Hemingway inspects Fitzgerald’s member in the bathroom of a Parisian cafe and delivers a firm assessment of penile measurements and overall potential after Fitzgerald confesses to him:

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

Hemingway’s analysis? It was “perfectly fine.”

Hemingway became convinced Zelda was unstable and vengeful and wanted to destroy F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda, an artistic genius in her own right, recognized how Hemingway saw her. Fitzgerald listened to both interpretations, but seemed immunized to taking any sort of action thanks to a grinning, grimacing embrace of tragedy as the highest art. By the end of their lives, both Scott and Zelda had attempted to suicide multiple times. F. Scott Fitzgerald never blamed his wife for his misfortune, once writing her in the aftermath of their potential:

People say we destroy each other, but I never felt we destroyed each other, I felt we destroyed ourselves.

Hemingway, who married four times in his life, only saw what was inexcusable: Zelda reminded Scott that he wasn’t the hero. He overlooked that F. Scott Fitzgerald always knew that and that’s why their own friendship worked.

4. Fitzgerald Fell as Hemingway Rose.

Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this.

-Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Hemingway on For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940

As Fitzgerald’s star fell and Hemingway’s rose, Fitzgerald’s respect curdled to envy. In a letter to editor Max Perkins, Fitzgerald contrasted his own laborious writing to Hemingway’s deceptively effortless ease. After The Great Gatsby (1925) was revealed to be a commercial failure and failing to redeem himself in his own eyes or in sales numbers with Tender is the Night (1934), he couldn’t help but indulge in grieving himself, writing in 1936:

I talk with the authority of failure — Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again... He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

Fitzgerald’s unfailing perception was his superpower, but became his weakness as he overanalyzed his life and paralyzed himself with melancholy. But he foresaw in 1936 that Hemingway’s superpower was self-aggrandizing grandeur, the very persona he had built so carefully, a megalomania that would shatter multiple marriages and end up leaving Hemingway just as hollow eventually. Yet there’s a valuable lesson here: megalomaniacal genius almost always outlasts melancholic genius. Fitzgerald suffered a fatal heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44 after spending years wallowing in the masterpiece of his failure. Hemingway would outlive him some twenty years before taking his own life in 1961 after being subjected to involuntary electroshock therapy, still somewhere inside of himself holding the sensitive and “nice” man Fitzgerald had met in 1925.

By the mid-thirties, Hemingway couldn’t help but see his friend as a pathetic has-been, an attitude he cemented in a 1934 letter after the publication of Tender is the Night:

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start… But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it… You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write. Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It’s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course you’re a rummy. But you’re no more of a rummy than Joyce is and most good writers are… You are twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvellous… All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

Fitzgerald took many of these letters to heart, but already knew them all to be true and, like a prophet with an ability to see all but change nothing, he continued followed the only path he perceived as purpose: tragedy.

5. Hemingway Despised Fitzgerald’s Weakness.

The 1936 collection of Fitzgerald’s controversial confessional essays

Hemingway’s rage at what he believed to be Fitzgerald’s wasted potential reached new heights when Fitzgerald wrote a series of confessional essays about his nervous breakdown for Esquire that would be published as The Crack-Up (1936). Esquire even included one of these confessional essays and one of Hemingway’s finer short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in the same issue - a short story in which one “poor F. Scott Fitzgerald” is mentioned as a writer corrupted by his marriage to a wealthy woman and “wrecked” by his “romantic awe” of the rich. Needless to say, this rather blunt and bullying betrayal didn’t help Fitzgerald’s melancholy.

Fitzgerald responded in a letter:

Dear Ernest:

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though the “Poor Scott Fitzgerald ect” rather spoiled it for me

Ever Your Friend
Scott

In published collections with The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the writer’s name would later be changed to Julian. The grudge may have lasted longer, but Fitzgerald later in the same year came to Hemingway for help after an interview with The New York Post that turned out so poorly that he attempted suicide by morphine. Some critics even point the finger at Hemingway’s short story as a contributing factor. As Fitzgerald continued to shrink from the public eye, Hemingway at times seemed cold, even calloused toward the man who had done so much for him but, also, been a terrible and repetitive alcoholic who so often moaned and whined but never changed.

Despite the strange dynamic of their friendship by 1936, when Fitzgerald begged Hemingway for help in dismissing the interview, Hemingway replied that he was ready to help. The two men’s dedicated correspondence for over a decade shows that, regardless of what else life had given them to hold and to lose over the years, they would never not be able to find one another within reach.

It is in this same interview, the one that Fitzgerald believed put the final nail in the coffin of his career, in which Fitzgerald proves for posterity, without a doubt, what his feelings were toward Hemingway at the end of his life, telling the interviewer:

My father lost his grip and I lost my grip. But now I'm trying to get back. I started by writing those pieces for Esquire. Perhaps they were a mistake. Too much de profundis. My best friend, a great American writer - he's the man I call my artistic conscience in one of the Esquire articles - wrote me a furious letter. He said I was stupid to write that gloomy personal stuff.

Even here, Fitzgerald identifies his grasp of genius as something he must “grip” but it is Hemingway who he thought of, immediately, as his artistic conscience. Even in 1936, when so much good and so much bad had transpired between them, he calls Hemingway his best friend. But then he sinks back into despair at the next question in the interview:

"What are your plans at the moment, Mr Fitzgerald? What are you working on now?"

"Oh, all sorts of things. But let's not talk about plans. When you talk about plans, you take something away from them."

Fitzgerald left the room.

"Despair, despair, despair," said the nurse. "Despair day and night. Try not to talk about his work or his future. He does work, but only very little - maybe three, four hours a week."

What’s his solution?

Soon he returned. "We must celebrate the author's birthday," he said gayly. "We must kill the fatted calf or, at any rate, cut the candled cake."

The interview says that Fitzgerald, who had been drinking shots at a clinical clip throughout the interview, then proceeded to smile at the nurse who was there to somehow maintain him and took another drink. "Much against your better judgment, my dear," he tells her

He would be dead three years later.

Hemingway, his best friend, didn’t show up at the funeral.

On Retrospectives

It took until the 1950s for Hemingway to express what he felt about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death. In these letters, one sees either a tone of cruel disrespect or the tone of a friend angry at someone he loved who, for more than a decade, destroyed himself with such decisive deliberation that the purposelessness had become the purpose.

In a series of retrospective letters from the 1950s, Hemingway wrote:

I loved Scott very much but he was extremely difficult with that situation he got himself into and Zelda constantly making him drink because she was jealous of his working well...He had a very steep trajectory and was almost like a guided missile with no one guiding him.

He even reasoned that his bullying of Fitzgerald was all an effort to motivate him to make use of his wasted “golden talent.”

I told him that for his actions in civil life as a criterion he would probably have been re-classified or shot for cowardice. That was too rough; but it was always trying to get him to work and tell the truth at least to himself. Well, the hell with all of it. He's dead and you've buried him for better of for worse and what he wrote that will stand up will stand up...Yours is a good undertaking. Almost as good as the job they did on my father's face when he shot himself. One remembers the face better as it actually was. But the undertaker pleases those who came to the funeral.

If it is true that we remember the face better than it actually was, let us put to rest the debate about whether F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were friends or secretly hated each other or somewhere between: the face of their friendship, when we look at it from every angle, seems to be steeped in a richness that is rare as any genius. And the best part about friendship? It can never be wasted when, through any darkness, you always know where to find that other familiar face, whatever you think it looks like.

Raise a glass for, if not the half-mad birthday interview that revealed the friendship for what it really was, then for the pure beauty of being that is holding onto a friendship against fate.