Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald Hit the Road
France 1925
After their first, somewhat inglorious, meeting in The Dingo Bar in Paris, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald met again a few days later for lunch at the Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway said how sorry he was that the booze had hit Scott the way it had at The Dingo, and that maybe he had drunk it too fast while they had all been talking and having such a good time?
Fitzgerald professed to not having a clue what Hemingway was talking about, in fact denied he’d been drunk at all in The Dingo, that he’d simply become tired of the British Hemingway had been talking to and went home. Hemingway explained that he’d not been talking to any British there, other than the barman; but Fitzgerald was having none of it, at which point Hemingway gave up, and as he reveals in A Moveable Feast…
“ … he asked me why I liked this café and I told him about it in the old days and he began to try to like too and we sat there, me liking it and he trying to like it, and he asked questions and told me about writers and publishers and agents and critics and George Horace Lorimer, and the gossip and economics of being a successful writer, and he was cynical and funny and very jolly and charming and endearing, even if you were careful about anyone becoming endearing. He spoke slightingly but without bitterness…
