624
PARTISAN REVIEW
sumably because as a novelist he would understand what Hemingway had
to put up with), "so I sent word around that I would be found unarmed
sitting in front of Lipp's brasserie from two to four on Saturday and
Sunday afternoon and everybody who wished to shoot me was to come
and do it then or else for christ sake to stop talking about it. No bullets
whistled. There was a story around that I had gone to switserland
[sic]
to
avoid being shot by demented characters out of my books." Twenty-five
years later, justifying his use of "actual people" in fiction, Hemingway
again brought up the case of Harold Loeb. "When I started I wrote some
short stories about actual things and two of them hurt people," he
explained to a young scholar writing about Hemingway's apprentice years.
I felt bad about it. Later if I used actual people I used only those for
whom I had completely lost respect and then I tried to give them a
square shake. I know this all sounds very noble but it is not really
horse-shit. The man who identifies himself as Cohn in
The Srm Also
Rises
once said to me, 'But why did you make me cry all the time?' I
said, 'Listen, if that is you then the narrator must be me. Do you think
that I had my prick shot off or that if you and I had ever had a fight
I would not have knocked the shit out of you? We boxed often
enough so that you know that. And I'll tell you a secret: you do cry
an awful lot for a man.'
That Loeb had long since lost Hemingway's respect is evident in his
comment to the painter Henry Strater in 1932 regarding the racial or
national identity of someone named Klein. He wondered whether he was
"one of those Kleins-Germans are swell-kikes not so good-We don't
want him to turn out to be Harold Loeb." Weighing in on the subject as
well was Kitty Cannell (Hemingway's model for Frances Clyne [suggest–
ing
Klein],
Cohn's mistress), who later claimed that her friend had boasted:
"I'm tearing those bastards apart [in
The
Sun
ALso Rises].
I'm putting every–
one in it and that kike Loeb is the villain."
Harold Loeb (1891-1974) was a native of New York. He attended
Princeton University, graduating in 1913. He had met Hemingway in Paris
in the spring of 1924 at one of Ford Madox Ford's Thursday literary teas
in the Quai d'Anjou . Carlos Baker, Hemingway's biographer, describes
Loeb as he appeared at the time: "a well-dressed, dark-haired young man
with broad shoulders, a firm chin, and the profile of a classical Greek
wrestler." The two young writers became friends, taking trips together and
playing tennis. Boni and Liveright published Loeb's first novel
Doodab
in
1925, and Loeb seems to have had a hand in getting the same publisher to
