Rapid responses are electronic comments to the editor. They enable our users
to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. A rapid response
is first posted online. If you need the URL (web address) of an individual
response, simply click on the response headline and copy the URL from the
browser window. A proportion of responses will, after editing, be published
online and in the print journal as letters, which are indexed in PubMed.
Rapid responses are not indexed in PubMed and they are not journal articles.
The BMJ reserves the right to remove responses which are being
wilfully misrepresented as published articles or when it is brought to our
attention that a response spreads misinformation.
From March 2022, the word limit for rapid responses will be 600 words not
including references and author details. We will no longer post responses
that exceed this limit.
The word limit for letters selected from posted responses remains 300 words.
Few places have been as perfect for artistic communion as Paris in the 1920s. Paris in those days was an oasis for the artists of Europe. Picasso, the Spaniard, was in the city, taking traditional art into the direction of modernism. James Joyce, the Irishman, was in Paris, working on poems after the fatigue of writing his mountainously innovative novel, “Ulysses.” Two Americans were also in the streets of Paris, and they met in the April of 1925, as petals tumbled into the hesitations of spring sunshine.
They happened upon each other in the Dingo Bar in the south of Paris. The two Americans were Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Both were writers in their twenties, from a time in which educated sons, on both sides of the Atlantic, were enthralled by the idea of literary eminence. On the British side, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were speaking in low tones via the medium of verse, explaining in line after line the event that had blighted their youth - the First World War.
In 1917, America also entered the great war of 1914-1918. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were around the age of twenty, a generation which was earmarked for use as soldiers. Fitzgerald the boy was substandard material from which to make a soldier. He was fair, fragile, and equipped with the slumbrous psyche of the poet. After conscription, he marched away mechanically in a boot-camp, but fortunately the artilleries fell silent before he was steamshipped to Europe. Hemingway was dark, irascible, and had a natural physical pitch which would draw him to perils such as bullfighting. He was in the military at eighteen, and experienced enough bullets to be decorated by the Italians for saving a number of their soldiers.
After the war there was a generation of young Americans who felt crestfallen. They were in the wasteland of the postwar years. Hemingway returned home. Fitzgerald, who had never left, was ekeing out a livelihood by writing and drinking heavily, drawn into the hedonism which was forming after the repressive effects of the war. The government responded by widely banning alcohol in 1920, so much so that bohemians like Fitzgerald were impelled to leave America to pursue their hard-drinking lifestyle in Europe. Paris in 1921 was the escapist destination for the writer and his wife, Zelda, a society beauty who was as equally besotted with the pastime of alcoholic frivolity.
Scott Fitzgerald was under thirty in 1925 when he collided into Hemingway in Paris, but had published three of the five novels which are his imperishable addition to American letters. He had come to Paris after a spell on the French Riviera with Zelda and his namesake daughter, Scottie. Spared rashes of tourists, the Riviera of the 1920s was a town of properties which could be rented cheaply – especially by Americans looking for rooms in which to pen and type imaginative literature. In 1924, Fitzgerald sat overlooking the Mediterranean from the seven-bedroomed Villa Picolette, and wrote in longhand his third and most well-known book, “The Great Gatsby.” When he met Hemingway later in the spring the novel had just been published, and had met with approving reviews, though its sales were to remain meagre in his lifetime.
The acquaintance between Fitzgerald and Hemingway began as the music of artistic communion. Fitzgerald was already a novelist and Hemingway had published a multiplicity of short stories. In their twenties they were geniuses. Fitzgerald’s 1925 Gatsby exerted such an effect on Hemingway that he industriously wrote a bullfighting novel called “The Sun Also Rises,” a work which slid off the press in 1926. Fitzgerald supported Hemingway during the manufacture of his first long narrative, a book on the frontispiece of which run the lines :
"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;but the earth abideth forever...The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose...The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full;unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."
-- ECCLESIASTES
The era had two significant writers at its disposal, and they were two Americans from the same generation who knew each other, each plying his trade, together writing a brand of literature that would influence the accent of the English novel in the twentieth century.
Limited by the walls of a brash personality, Hemingway was condescending towards the mild-faced Scott Fitzgerald throughout their friendship. But there was irony aplenty. Hemingway describes the praise that he received from Fitzgerald when he himself had only short stories to his credit, and such lavish flattery from a peer who had just exuded an intoxicatingly brilliant third novel. It was an innate generosity which again showed when Hemingway went to the Parisian flat where Fitzgerald lodged with his wife and daughter. At the table, Fitzgerald fussed over the meal of his friend with a touchingly avuncular attention.
In the fifteen years from 1925 to 1940, the year in which Fitzgerald died at forty-four, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were to age and drift apart, often corresponding indirectly through a shared literary agent. Hemingway was to become ever more abusive towards Fitzgerald, who, regardless of his emotions, unerringly wrote back to “the risen sun” with equanimity. The notes of their original music had become painfully discordant. The way in which their days were to end was emblematic of their lives. A romantic Fitzgerald was extinguished by a heart attack at forty-four, his creativity having dwindled into a state of ennui, as he struggled wretchedly to produce hack work for Hollywood.
Hemingway had fought mood disorder and alcoholism throughout his life, and ageing for him equated to more frequent phases of mental instability. The Nobel and Pulitzer laureate committed suicide like his father, using a double-barrelled shotgun at the age of sixty-one.
The narrative of the Fitzgerald and Hemingway lives was as tumultuous as that inside their novels. At the end, their young selves, from a Parisian spring in 1925, seemed like nice people they had once known, unfamiliar to them as the characters in their combined legacy of a dozen or so novels.
Competing interests:
No competing interests
24 March 2014
Jagdeep Singh Gandhi
Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
Worcester Royal Eye Unit
Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Worcester, UNITED KINGDOM
Re: Letters from a Musical Friendship
Few places have been as perfect for artistic communion as Paris in the 1920s. Paris in those days was an oasis for the artists of Europe. Picasso, the Spaniard, was in the city, taking traditional art into the direction of modernism. James Joyce, the Irishman, was in Paris, working on poems after the fatigue of writing his mountainously innovative novel, “Ulysses.” Two Americans were also in the streets of Paris, and they met in the April of 1925, as petals tumbled into the hesitations of spring sunshine.
They happened upon each other in the Dingo Bar in the south of Paris. The two Americans were Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Both were writers in their twenties, from a time in which educated sons, on both sides of the Atlantic, were enthralled by the idea of literary eminence. On the British side, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were speaking in low tones via the medium of verse, explaining in line after line the event that had blighted their youth - the First World War.
In 1917, America also entered the great war of 1914-1918. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were around the age of twenty, a generation which was earmarked for use as soldiers. Fitzgerald the boy was substandard material from which to make a soldier. He was fair, fragile, and equipped with the slumbrous psyche of the poet. After conscription, he marched away mechanically in a boot-camp, but fortunately the artilleries fell silent before he was steamshipped to Europe. Hemingway was dark, irascible, and had a natural physical pitch which would draw him to perils such as bullfighting. He was in the military at eighteen, and experienced enough bullets to be decorated by the Italians for saving a number of their soldiers.
After the war there was a generation of young Americans who felt crestfallen. They were in the wasteland of the postwar years. Hemingway returned home. Fitzgerald, who had never left, was ekeing out a livelihood by writing and drinking heavily, drawn into the hedonism which was forming after the repressive effects of the war. The government responded by widely banning alcohol in 1920, so much so that bohemians like Fitzgerald were impelled to leave America to pursue their hard-drinking lifestyle in Europe. Paris in 1921 was the escapist destination for the writer and his wife, Zelda, a society beauty who was as equally besotted with the pastime of alcoholic frivolity.
Scott Fitzgerald was under thirty in 1925 when he collided into Hemingway in Paris, but had published three of the five novels which are his imperishable addition to American letters. He had come to Paris after a spell on the French Riviera with Zelda and his namesake daughter, Scottie. Spared rashes of tourists, the Riviera of the 1920s was a town of properties which could be rented cheaply – especially by Americans looking for rooms in which to pen and type imaginative literature. In 1924, Fitzgerald sat overlooking the Mediterranean from the seven-bedroomed Villa Picolette, and wrote in longhand his third and most well-known book, “The Great Gatsby.” When he met Hemingway later in the spring the novel had just been published, and had met with approving reviews, though its sales were to remain meagre in his lifetime.
The acquaintance between Fitzgerald and Hemingway began as the music of artistic communion. Fitzgerald was already a novelist and Hemingway had published a multiplicity of short stories. In their twenties they were geniuses. Fitzgerald’s 1925 Gatsby exerted such an effect on Hemingway that he industriously wrote a bullfighting novel called “The Sun Also Rises,” a work which slid off the press in 1926. Fitzgerald supported Hemingway during the manufacture of his first long narrative, a book on the frontispiece of which run the lines :
"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;but the earth abideth forever...The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose...The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full;unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."
-- ECCLESIASTES
The era had two significant writers at its disposal, and they were two Americans from the same generation who knew each other, each plying his trade, together writing a brand of literature that would influence the accent of the English novel in the twentieth century.
Limited by the walls of a brash personality, Hemingway was condescending towards the mild-faced Scott Fitzgerald throughout their friendship. But there was irony aplenty. Hemingway describes the praise that he received from Fitzgerald when he himself had only short stories to his credit, and such lavish flattery from a peer who had just exuded an intoxicatingly brilliant third novel. It was an innate generosity which again showed when Hemingway went to the Parisian flat where Fitzgerald lodged with his wife and daughter. At the table, Fitzgerald fussed over the meal of his friend with a touchingly avuncular attention.
In the fifteen years from 1925 to 1940, the year in which Fitzgerald died at forty-four, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were to age and drift apart, often corresponding indirectly through a shared literary agent. Hemingway was to become ever more abusive towards Fitzgerald, who, regardless of his emotions, unerringly wrote back to “the risen sun” with equanimity. The notes of their original music had become painfully discordant. The way in which their days were to end was emblematic of their lives. A romantic Fitzgerald was extinguished by a heart attack at forty-four, his creativity having dwindled into a state of ennui, as he struggled wretchedly to produce hack work for Hollywood.
Hemingway had fought mood disorder and alcoholism throughout his life, and ageing for him equated to more frequent phases of mental instability. The Nobel and Pulitzer laureate committed suicide like his father, using a double-barrelled shotgun at the age of sixty-one.
The narrative of the Fitzgerald and Hemingway lives was as tumultuous as that inside their novels. At the end, their young selves, from a Parisian spring in 1925, seemed like nice people they had once known, unfamiliar to them as the characters in their combined legacy of a dozen or so novels.
Competing interests: No competing interests