Hemingway and Fitzgerald, one hundred years on
'Cat in the Rain' and Gatsby
This month sees the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are plenty of celebrations doing the rounds, and last Friday, the Empire State Building was all lit up in bright green to honour the occasion.
This year also sees the centenary of a short story by Hemingway, ‘Cat in the Rain’, which in its time garnered extravagant praise from the likes of Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, D.H. Lawrence — and Scott Fitzgerald himself. which is especially interesting, considering what is about to be revealed . . .
‘Cat in the Rain’ is the story of an American couple staying at a hotel in Italy. It is raining outside and the ‘American wife’, as she is called at first, is bored. The husband is lying on the bed, reading, when the wife sees a cat down on the hotel terrace and decides that she must have it. That is the gist of the story, which is only three pages long and can be found here. (It’s not essential, but for a full appreciation of this post, it might be worth a quick read now or afterwards, if you’re not familiar with the story.)
Hemingway, as is well known, lived in Paris during the 1920s and made friends with many of the expatriate writers and artists living in that city at the time. One of the writers he befriended was F. Scott Fitzgerald, although their friendship was a somewhat fraught affair. Hemingway especially disliked Zelda, Scott’s famous wife, and in the account he left us in his memoir of the Paris years, A Moveable Feast, he is openly critical of Zelda. He is critical of Scott also, but we shall come to that.
Hemingway records his first meeting with Scott in the Dingo bar, a regular hangout for American ex-pats. In the photograph, Hemingway is standing in the doorway. The woman beside him, strangely enough, is Zelda Fitzgerald.
He describes Scott, at that first meeting — also in 1925 — as ‘a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.’
Leaving aside this rather curious observation, which, however, may have some relevance to what he is about to relate, and some rather disparaging remarks which makes one wonder what kind of a friend he really was, Hemingway goes on to describe a trip he takes with Scott to Lyon, to pick up a car that Zelda had abandoned there — ostensibly on account of bad weather — and which Scott intended to drive back to Paris.
The road trip
Would Hemingway accompany him on the trip? Hemingway is pleased to be asked: Fitzgerald, after all, is the rising star of American letters, the most highly paid short story writer of his day; The Great Gatsby has just been published to resounding reviews, and Scott promises to get hold of a copy for his new friend. So Hemingway is looking forward to the journey, but at the station where they have arranged to meet, the Gare de Lyon, Fitzgerald does not show up. Hemingway is pretty angry. ‘I had never heard, then, of a grown man missing a train; but on this trip I was to learn many new things.’
So, Hemingway is pissed off, but he calms down on the journey, has a good lunch and drinks a bottle of fine wine in the dining car, and enjoys watching the countryside pass by. Arriving in Lyon, he makes a phone call to Scott’s apartment in Paris and learns that Fitzgerald has departed from Paris for Lyon, but has left no word as to which train he is on, nor where he is staying. Hemingway lets it be known which hotel he himself is booked into, and asks for the message to be passed on to Scott. He then calls all the principal hotels in Lyon but cannot locate Scott. Instead he meets a fire-eater in a café and they go for dinner in a cheap Algerian restaurant recommended by the fire-eater, which Hemingway enjoys very much, indicating, perhaps, what a man of the people he thinks he is. Returning to his hotel, there is no word from Scott. However, in the morning. Scott turns up at Hemingway’s hotel, claims that Zelda had been unwell and he had been obliged to take a later train out of Paris. He claims that he never received the message about which hotel Hemingway was staying at, and says he has been ‘hunting all over town’ for him.
After this rather awkward start to the day, the two have breakfast, order a picnic lunch from the hotel and set off in the car. Although it is morning, it is clear that Scott has been drinking already, and looks a little shaky. When they pick up the car, it turns out to be a convertible, but with the top removed — literally cut away — so there is no cover in case of bad weather.
Inevitably, it starts raining an hour out of Lyon, and the two get soaked. Scott, who is portrayed by Hemingway as a whimpering hypochondriac and entirely unmanly — a cardinal sin in Hem’s lifestyle guide — begins to worry about the effect of the rain on his health. He fears he may suffer from a condition he describes as ‘congestion of the lungs’. The two argue about this term, and whether or not it is the same thing as pneumonia. They drink a lot of wine, which doesn’t seem to prevent them from driving, in the rain, all the way to Chalon-sur Saône, north of Macon, where they stop off to buy four more bottles of wine.
Here’s what Chalon would have looked like at the time. No doubt feeling the effects of the day’s alcohol intake, the two men find a hotel — possibly the one on the right of the picture — and Fitzgerald takes to his bed as soon as they are shown to their room. He is convinced that he is going to die from ‘congestion of the lungs’ and asks Hemingway, somewhat melodramatically, to take care of Zelda and their daughter Scottie after he is gone.
Hemingway takes Scott’s pulse and tries, with great difficulty, to locate a thermometer. He can find nothing wrong with Scott, who, however, continues to insist that he is dying. During this extended altercation, Fitzgerald — as depicted by Hemingway — is insufferably bossy and unreasonably demanding. He makes offensive remarks about the French. ‘At that time’ writes Hemingway, ‘Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.’
The invalid
Hemingway manages to get hold of some aspirins and orders whisky to be brought up from the bar. Perversely, he appears to think this is going to do his friend some good, so he tries to order a bottle, but they only sell it by the glass. Hemingway reads the newspaper and Scott sits up in bed ‘with his eyes open’ but ‘looking far away.’
“You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” he says to Hemingway, eventually. “You can sit there reading that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor?” asks Hemingway.
“No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor,” replies Fitzgerald.
“What do you want?”
“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American Hospital at Neuilly.”
“Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,” says Hemingway. “Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?”
“I want my temperature taken.”
This kind of thing goes on for some time, until the waiter brings a thermometer.
Fitzgerald complains about the thermometer, which is ‘a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath’ — and which in any case is broken. Hemingway doesn’t tell Fitzgerald this, but puts it under his arm and pretends to read it, and tells him his temperature is normal.
Although Scott is a little suspicious, Hemingway convinces him he really has no temperature. Scott is relieved.
“We can be happy it cleared up so quickly,” he says. “I’ve always had great recuperative power.”
‘I want’
The events described here, with the scene in the bedroom, bear an uncanny resemblance to those of ‘Cat in the Rain’, which was published later in the same year. First there is the scene in the hotel bedroom in Chalon, with Hemingway reading —just like the husband in ‘Cat in the Rain’ — and Fitzgerald, who becomes transgendered into ‘the American wife’ in the short story, acting in a demanding and querulous manner.
Consider the similarities in the dialogue, in ‘Cat in the Rain’:
She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out. It was getting dark.
‘I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,’ she said. ‘I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.’
‘Yeah?’ George said from the bed.
‘And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.’
‘Oh, shut up and get something to read,’ George said. He was reading again.
His wife was looking out of the window. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm trees.
‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said, ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.’
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway has Fitzgerald likewise recite a list of his demands:
“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American Hospital at Neuilly.”
And then, once more:
“I want my temperature taken.”
Hemingway likens Fitzgerald’s face to a girl’s, while in ‘Cat in the Rain’, the wife complains about wearing her hair short — her husband’s preference, incidentally — because it makes her look ‘like a boy’. It is clear in the memoir that Fitzgerald plays the female role, which is then elaborated in the female character in the short story.
In ‘Cat in the Rain’, the American wife — who has, in the second half of the story turned into ‘the American girl’ — becomes restless and agitated, making a series of complaints.
First she expresses concerns about her hair:
‘I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,’ she said. ‘I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.’
And she continues with a litany of demands:: ‘I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.’
To which the husband responds — as we might imagine Hemingway responding to the whingeing Fitzgerald — as indeed he probably wished to respond:
‘Oh shut up and get something to read.’
Which surely resonates with the scene in the bedroom in Châlon, when Hemingway sits reading, prompting Scott to complain: “You’re a cold one, aren’t you?”
But the American girl is not finished. She delivers one more sally before the story’s denouement:
‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said, ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.’
Clearly, Hemingway is taking elements from his altercation with Fitzgerald, and putting them in the mouth of the ‘American girl’ in his story — or, even, we might conjecture, vice versa. But what is apparent is the way that he used the experience with Fitzgerald to furnish the dialogue between the two protagonists in his short story, as well as some of his underlying concerns — which have been attributed to Hemingway by some commentators — about his own sexuality, and certainly place a question mark on his posturing as a macho, gun-toting, big-gaming-hunting fan of the bullfight. But that is another story.
In A Moveable Feast, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald have finally returned to Paris, Hemingway is reunited with his wife, Hadley. The scene is conjured as follows:
When I had left him [Fitzgerald] at his home and taken a taxi back to the sawmill, it was wonderful to see my wife and we went up to the Closerie des Lilas to have a drink. We were happy the way children are who have been separated and are together again and I told her about the trip.
“Isn’t Scott happy at all?”
“Maybe.”
“Poor man.”
“I learned one thing.”
“What?”
“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
“Isn’t that fine?”
“Yes. And we’re going to Spain.”
“Yes. Now it’s less than six weeks before we go. And this year we won’t let anyone spoil it, will we?”
“No. And after Pamplona we’ll go to Madrid and to Valencia.”
“M-m-m-m,” she said softly, like a cat.
“Poor Scott,” I said.
“Poor everybody,” Hadley said. “Rich feathercats with no money.”
“We’re awfully lucky.”
“We’ll have to be good and hold it.”
We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.
In this passage Hadley speaks softly, ‘like a cat’. ‘Rich feathercats’, of course, refers to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the literary equivalent, perhaps, in the 1920s, to Posh and Becks (UK) or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (USA) in the early 2000’s — or Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce today. But the cat is there, in Hadley’s reported utterances, and the story of ‘Cat in the Rain’ can be traced to real events that took place in Hemingway’s life, and which he remoulded to suit his purposes.
Conclusion
The Wikipedia entry on ‘Cat in the Rain’ informs us that Hemingway wrote the story as a tribute to his wife Hadley. The couple had only been married a few years, and lived in Paris where Hadley was left alone for hours at a time while her husband worked. She asked for a cat but he told her they were too poor. When she became pregnant he wrote ‘Cat in the Rain’, apparently based on an actual incident in Rapallo, (where they visited Ezra Pound in 1923). Hadley found a stray kitten and supposedly said, "I want a cat ... I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun I can have a cat” — the line that is uttered, word for word, in Hemingway’s story.
We can safely assume that ‘Cat in the Rain’ was an assemblage of events and utterances, spoken by both Fitzgerald and Hadley, but that the underlying tensions in the story most likely emerged as a result of Hemingway’s ill-fated road trip with Fitzgerald, as well as Hemingway and Hadley’s visit to Rapallo, and that the figure of the ‘American wife’ in the story was a curious admixture of Fitzgerald and Hadley.
In such ways, writers build upon personal experience, and take from life to make fiction. ‘Cat in the Rain’ is simply one example upon which we can practice a kind of archaeology of origin, because the clues are there in Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. Writers fictionalise their lives the whole time, and can do so, as we have seen, to sometimes bizarre effect. The message from this is that, for the writer, lived experience is our greatest resource, to do with as we will. But by his revelations in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway gives himself away rather more than he might have wished.
Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. His books include The Color of a Dog Running Away, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, The Blue Tent and Ambassador of Nowhere. For many years he led the graduate programmes in Creative & Critical Writing at Cardiff University. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.