“Bernardine in Paris” by Susan Blumberg-Kason
Bernardine dashed into Closerie de Lilas off the Boulevard du Montparnasse, quickly spotting Hemingway at the back of the near-empty Left Bank cafe. Her twinkling hazel eyes and dazzling smile, framed dramatically by a navy-blue turban, probably captured the attention of everyone as she entered, while many may not have noticed the darkly handsome Hemingway lurking at his table. As Bernardine approached him, seated alone, she noticed a half-nursed drink, a typewriter, and a manuscript.
It was 1925, and Bernardine was twenty-nine to Hemingway’s twenty-six. Although Bernardine enjoyed a closer friendship with his wife Hadley, she and Hemingway went back seven years to their early newspaper days in Chicago. They were novice reporters back then and disciples of Sherwood Anderson. In 1925, Bernardine was leaving her third husband and had moved to Paris. She was following her best friend, writer Glenway Wescott, and his partner Monroe Wheeler to become part of the extraordinary cultural milieu that Gertrude Stein later dubbed “the Lost Generation.”
Moments earlier, Bernardine had received a telephone call at her flat on the Rue d’Assas, not far from the Closerie de Lilas. It was Hemingway, imploring her to meet him as soon as possible. He had just finished his first long piece of work and promised a great surprise. Bernardine, always up for a good story, dropped everything to meet her old friend.
For the first time since the age of seventeen, she felt free from the constraints of marriages to men who initially appreciated her energy but later wished she were something, anything, else—in some cases more conventional and, in others, less. Still new to Paris, Bernardine aimed to make the most of every day, visiting with acquaintances like salon hosts Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, who didn’t completely approve of her because she wore lipstick and was too chatty and feminine for their tastes, while at the same time trying to support herself and her ten-year-old daughter, Rosemary, now tucked away at a Swiss boarding school run by a protégé of the dancer Isadora Duncan.
At the Closerie, Bernardine took the opposite chair while Hemingway downed more of his drink. He nodded but didn’t ask if she wished to order a drink or something to eat. “Now, I’m going to read it to you,” he said as if he were talking to himself. “Every word. By God, THIS will show him up!”
She stiffened. Show up whom? And surely he didn’t actually mean to read every word of this bulky manuscript.
But then he cleared his throat and started reading.
“Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, ‘If winter comes can spring be far behind?’ would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered. Near Yogi at the next window but one stood Scripps O’Neil, a tall, lean man with a tall, lean face. Both stood and looked out at the empty yard of the pump-factory.”
This passage sounded eerily familiar to Bernardine. Although she couldn’t recall the opening sentences of Dark Laughter word for word, she remembered it started the same way.
She knew this because she was familiar with Sherwood’s best seller, a novel highlighting the sexual freedom of 1920s America. Two decades older than Hemingway, Sherwood had spent his precious time advising them about writing and reporting back in Chicago. Gentle, patient, caring Sherwood. Despite their age difference, Bernardine and Sherwood had become close friends and confidants. It wasn’t just because of her newspaper days, but also because her third husband, Otto Liveright, was Sherwood’s literary agent, and Otto’s brother, Horace, was Sherwood’s publisher at Boni & Liveright. Horace was Hemingway’s publisher, too.
Bernardine waited for Hemingway to look up, to laugh, and declare he was just joking about reading the whole manuscript. But he didn’t stop reading. He didn’t even make eye contact with her.
It soon became obvious that Hemingway set out to parody Sherwood’s Dark Laughter, yet Bernardine had trouble figuring out the gist of this new manuscript, other than two men searching for the perfect woman. How was this story-worthy? Bernardine also couldn’t understand Hemingway’s desire to scorn Sherwood, as if he were not worthy of a best-selling novel. She wondered if Hemingway assumed she’d appreciate this mockery since she and Sherwood’s ex-wife, Tennessee, were close. Perhaps Hemingway figured Bernardine faulted Sherwood for that divorce. But he did not understand the complexities of marriage and divorce at that time; he was still on his first marriage while Sherwood and Bernardine had both completed their third.
Bernardine could have stood up and left, but for many of the same reasons she remained in bad marriages longer than she wished, she continued to stay put. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings and figured her discomfort would be easier to handle than any consequences of upsetting him. Plus, they socialized in the same literary circles, and she depended on these ties for the few articles she sold to magazines and newspapers to stay afloat in Paris. Thinking of their common friends, Bernardine could only imagine how Gertrude Stein would view this betrayal of Sherwood.
Years later, Bernardine wrote, “The writing seemed sloppy. The malice was inexcusable, and I was bewildered that any writer would take out so much time from his true métier to produce that little book of childish rancor.”
Finally, Hemingway neared the last few pages. Bernardine still hoped he would look up to gauge her reaction, yet he kept his head down, continuing on until the last page.
“The warm wind is blowing,” he read with emphasis. “The tall Indian stops, moistens his finger and holds it up in the air. The little Indian watches. ‘Chinook?’ he asks. ‘Heap Chinook,’ the tall Indian says. They hurry on toward town. The moon is blurred now by clouds carried by the warm chinook wind that is blowing. ‘Want to get in town before rush,’ the tall Indian grunts. ‘Red brothers want be well up in line,’ the little Indian grunts anxiously. ‘Nobody work in factory now,’ the tall Indian grunted. ‘Better hurry.’”
“When after an eternity,” Bernardine recalled, “he got to the end, he did not ask me what I thought of it (fortunately for me) but finished his drink, said the one thing he couldn’t do but wished he could was to see Sherwood’s face when he read it.”
Bernardine remained silent after it was over, but it’s unlikely Hemingway even wanted her feedback. He probably got as much out of her stunned reaction as if Sherwood himself had been sitting across the table. For if there were one surrogate for Sherwood in Paris, it would be Bernardine.
Perhaps these thoughts ran through Bernardine’s mind, or perhaps she was still trying to come to grips with the manuscript, but before she could say something, Hemingway pushed his chair from the table and suddenly stood. Without another word, he grabbed his manuscript and typewriter, turned from Bernardine, and headed for the front door. She remained seated, frozen in place. Surely, her former brother-in-law, Horace Liveright, would refuse to publish such garbage. Even if Hemingway could get out of his contract with Boni & Liveright, Bernardine couldn’t see how another press would take it on. “I felt so certain it would never be published that I quite controlled any apprehension as to how Sherwood would feel about it.”
But another press did take it on, and The Torrents of Spring was published by Scribner’s the following year in May 1926. Bernardine and Hemingway’s mutual friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, called it “about the best comic book written by an American.” Others did not agree. Hadley Hemingway found her husband’s ridicule of Sherwood to be offensive. And whether or not Bernardine ran to Gertrude Stein to relay the content of this manuscript, Stein did end up excommunicating Hemingway from her salon.
In her book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote about this rift in Toklas’s voice and admitted that she and Sherwood had issues with their mentee. “Hemingway had been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds.” Sherwood visited Paris soon after Torrents came out. According to Stein, “Hemingway was naturally afraid. Sherwood as naturally was not.”
Not long after The Torrents of Spring came out, Bernardine had just started the day in her studio apartment at 90 Rue d’Assas off the Luxembourg Gardens when her phone rang. It was Hadley Hemingway, and she could barely get a word out.
“Hadley,” Bernardine all but shouted, “What’s the matter?”
After calming down enough to string a few words together, Hadley asked if she could come over right away. Bernardine readily agreed. What could be troubling her at eight o’clock in the morning?
Before long, Bernardine heard a knock at her door. She opened it, and there stood Hadley, her face flushed and her eyes puffy and red. It appeared Hadley hadn’t brushed her hair since the previous day and must have dressed in a hurry. Her blouse wasn’t buttoned properly and gaped in the center.
Bernardine placed an arm around Hadley and drew her closer. “What in the world is wrong?” she asked.
“It’s Ernest.” Hadley began to cry.
“What happened?”
Hadley continued to sob. “He came home last night and said, ‘Hadley, do you love me?’
I said, ‘Of course I love you, you KNOW that.’
He asked, ‘How much?’ and I said, ‘How can one measure how much—I just love you.’
‘Do you love me more than anyone in the world? You and Bumpy, the baby?’
‘Why?’
‘Do you love me more than you do yourself?’
‘Heavens, of course.’ I began to feel a little queer about all this.
‘Would you do anything in the world for me?’”
Hadley took a moment to wipe her eyes before continuing. “‘Well, short of murder, I guess.’”
She described to Bernardine the pained expression she saw in her husband’s eyes, an expression she had seen a few times before. She sensed she must brace herself for bad news. Ernest put his hands on Hadley’s shoulders and drew her in so close that they stood face to face.
“‘Would you do anything in the world to make me happy?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Hadley replied, almost to the point of screaming. Her eyes teared up. ‘What IS all this? What are you getting at?’
‘Then give me a divorce without making me feel a heel.’”
Bernardine consoled her friend, knowing exactly what she was going through. Soon after that meeting at 90 Rue d’Assas, Ernest left Hadley for Pauline Pfeiffer, which has been the subject of several novels and narratives.
Bernardine continued attending the salon at Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’s flat. She called them “Miss Stein” and “Miss Toklas,” even on paper. Of Stein, Bernardine remembered that “she wore her hair in a small spiral standing straight up on top of her head. Her skin, dark and shiny, her very sharp bright eyes, a large good-natured smile, the thick woolen stockings that showed above flat-thonged sandals, a beautiful garnet sunburst at her throat, all seemed in complete harmony.” Of Toklas, Bernardine found her “a living contradiction to all Miss Stein suggested” with long, thin features.
At one gathering at the women’s Parisian flat, Bernardine was joined by American tourists, French friends, and famous artists and writers. “I looked at little else than the room and its decorations,” Bernardine recalled. “The walls were covered with the so justly famous Picassos. On the table were amusing little objects that Miss Stein had picked up in her travels about France in her also famous car, a tiny rattling one-hoss-shay of a car which bore the affectionate name of Godiva. There was a frosted, white glass hand, a butter dish made of blue glass in the shape of a cow, and white glass paperweights with kaleidoscopic colored designs inside and bits of silly and entertaining porcelains. At the far end of the room was a blazing fire and there were many chairs and benches everywhere.”
Sometimes, Bernardine sensed that Gertrude Stein didn’t care for her. She and Zelda Fitzgerald would often chime in during a conversation at Stein’s salon, usually in the same spontaneous way as Zelda’s husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bernardine recalled Stein’s reaction when she and Zelda casually shared their opinions. “Miss Stein would turn her large Roman head and look at the one of us who had spoken and, raising her hand for silence, would ask in her deep ringing voice, ‘And WHY, may I ask?’ You see, we didn’t usually know why or why not. Suppose it was a special picture or an actress or a church, we just liked it. It made shivers run up and down our spine, or else it didn’t, and Zelda and I were both emotionally responsive, rather than analytically, and we didn’t much care WHY. But somehow Miss Stein, in the silence that she managed to prolong after asking WHY, made us feel as if we were stupid, pretentious, silly females.” Bernardine also wondered if Stein didn’t like Zelda and her because they wore makeup.
Before Bernardine moved to Paris in the late spring of 1925, she had socialized regularly with the founders of The New Yorker, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, over lunches at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, dubbed the Algonquin Roundtable. Now in Paris, Bernardine had an idea for an article to submit to her friends back in New York: an interview with Gertrude Stein. Despite Bernardine’s misgivings about Stein’s feelings toward her, she asked Pavel Tchelitchew, a Russian-born painter, if he could inquire about an interview. Stein readily agreed and scheduled a time for Bernardine to speak with her to collect “material” for the article.
As much as she tried, Bernardine struggled to come up with original material. Stein had been written about so much that Bernardine felt she was just repeating what others had said. “I struggled over the story, and each time I did it over, it was almost word for word what everyone else had written about Miss Stein. Well, what was there to say? Everyone described the studio, the walls lined with famous and fabulous modern paintings. Everyone described the lady herself and her companion and sometimes put in touches about the bonne and the high-stepping Ford. Anyway, what I wrote sounded so exactly to me like what everyone else had written that finally I told Pavlek it was no good, so unoriginal that it had better be dropped as I was ashamed to show it.”
Tchelitchew relayed this message to Gertrude, and it didn’t go over well. As he told Bernardine, “Darling, Gertrude is furious. ‘Where is the article?’ she asks me. Many times. ‘Why did she say she was going to write an article if she didn’t mean to?’ she keeps asking me. I say to her, ‘Bernardine cannot finish.’”
Although only Bernardine and Tchelitchew were in this conversation and no one else was around to hear them, he leaned in to whisper, “Gertrude, she looves pooblicity. Darling, if you want her to be happy, giver her pooblicity.” Yet Bernardine just couldn’t find something original to write about Stein. This back and forth between Stein, Tchelitchew, and Bernardine occurred several more times before Pavlek conveyed the news that she was no longer welcome at Stein’s salon. Gertrude was just too upset about the missed opportunity for an article.
“I was sorry because it had been interesting to go to her studio,” Bernardine remembered later. “There were always amusing people and warm mulled wine and yellow Russian caramels, hot crescents stuffed with nuts, and a glowing fire and the thrilling paintings. The conversation was quick and friendly, and once she read aloud to us the speech she was going to make at Oxford. She was really enormously excited about that.”
Although this article never materialized, Bernardine did publish a small essay in the July 11, 1925, issue of The New Yorker titled “From Paris.” It was a page-length column that regaled readers with all the goings on at the Russian Ballet, which was in town before heading to London. “Henri Matisse, with sharp eyes, reddish grey furry beard, and most amiable smile was several times at the Ballet, accompanied by his son, Pierre. Stravinsky came one night with his niece, a very tall lady, with strange long eyes, and silver gauze wrapped turban-wise around her head, almost sheathing her eyes.”
Bernardine was close to Pierre Matisse, perhaps from their New York days. Pierre, an artist himself, had opened a gallery in New York a year earlier. In this New Yorker piece, she filled an entire page of who’s who at the ballet. In writing about the wife of Tudor Wilkinson—another art collector who, in the early years of the Second World War, would save Sylvia Beach of the famed Shakespeare and Company—Bernardine colorfully described Mrs. Wilkinson.
“Of course Dolores, Mrs. Tudor Wilkinson, always is the last word in excitement, wherever she appears (and you may be sure if the function is smart and notable, she will be there). Her hair is now cut exactly like a man’s. Very close to her head, and very tight, and smooth as a satin cap, although not in the least artificially sleeked. It is like softly stroked burnished gold. She wears the most simple costumes, but of course if she dressed up to her beauty it would be more than one could bear. She is called, all over Paris, the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Two months after Bernardine’s “From Paris” article was published, Janet Flanner penned a “Letter From Paris,” also in The New Yorker. From there, Flanner went on to write a decades-long column for the magazine and became known as The New Yorker’s famous Paris correspondent. Flanner also went on to pen more than half a dozen books about Paris. Like Bernardine, Flanner was a regular at the Algonquin Roundtable back in New York and then at Stein’s salon after she moved to Paris. The magazine editors had a choice when it came to their “Letter from Paris” columnist, and, even though Bernardine penned the first one, they decided to go with Flanner. It would not be the first time Bernardine was passed over for another person, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Bernardine wasn’t out to make a name for herself and had plenty of chances to do that everywhere she lived, including an essay about Gertrude Stein that may have gained some attention if she had been able to complete it. Bernardine’s love of the visual and performing arts was genuine and not something she engaged in to bring attention to herself or, as Tchelitchew said of Stein, to obtain “pooblicity.” She just liked bringing people together over their common interests in the arts. And while she may have started the idea of a letter from Paris in The New Yorker, which went on to become an integral part of the magazine for decades to come, that wasn’t something for which she demanded recognition. If she could share something about the Russian Ballet with readers back in the United States or in other countries that sold The New Yorker, that was all that mattered to her.
At the age of twenty-nine, Bernardine in Paris quickly became a part of the Lost Generation. After four years, she could have continued to flit between Paris and the French Riviera with her expat friends who socialized with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Somerset Maugham. Yet, in 1929, she chose to leave that all behind. Bernardine did not return to Chicago or even back to New York. She took the most daring risk of her life, setting out for one of the largest cities in the world—Shanghai, where she would begin to write her own story.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, as well as a memoir. She is the co-editor of Hong Kong Noir and a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books and World Literature Today. She lives in the Chicago area.