
One was Katherine Anne Porter, who was at the pinnacle of
her career; her only novel, A Ship of
Fools, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list that day. She would remember the unpleasant meeting with
Hemingway in Paris in the 1930s, her only encounter with him.
Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the legendary Shakespeare
and Co. bookshop, introduced them. “I
want the two best modern American writers to know each other,” the expatriate
bookseller said. Hemingway refused to
acknowledge Porter and stomped out of the shop.
She said that “it must have been galling to this most famous young man
to have his name pronounced in the same breath as a writer with someone he had
never heard of, and a woman at that. I
nearly felt sorry for him.”
John Dos Passos and Hemingway had met in Europe during World
War I and were once great friends. But Hemingway
was always envious of other writers’ success, and the rupture came over
political disagreements affecting the Spanish Civil War. It also was affected by Hemingway’s belief
that Dos Passos was responsible for his crumbling marriage to his first wife,
Hadley.
In a final break, Hemingway, upset over an article that Dos
had written for Redbook, sent him a letter in 1938 in which he said, “So long,
Dos” and added, “Honest Jack Passos’ll knife you three times in the back for
fifteen cents.”
So these two writers had to sit through the primary
after-dinner literary entertainment at the Nobel dinner which highlighted an
unpublished section of Hemingway’s work; it was eventually released as Islands in the Stream. From several accounts, the recitation by
Fredric March was poorly received, not because of the superb actor’s
performance, but by the writing of the late Nobel laureate. We can only wonder what Porter and Dos Passos
thought that night about the man who had disrespected them.
In researching and writing Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars
Partied at the Kennedy White House (ForeEdge, April 3), I was constantly
amazed by the steady stream of relationships—some good, some bad, and some just
forming—between the people there or represented that warm spring night at the
White House. Indeed, there seems to be
an unending number of compelling stories.
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