GEORGE MONTEIRO
625
take on
In Our Time,
Hemingway's first book for a commercial press. Loeb
was on the trip to Pamplona that furnished Hemingway with the materi–
als for
The Sun Also Rises.
It was on that trip that Loeb got so far under
Hemingway's skin that he turned himself into the model for the scapegoat
of
The Sun Also Rises.
"What infuriated Hemingway was Harold's unpar–
donable crime of being bored with the bullfighting and of abandoning the
brave company of men (at Burguete) to chase after Duff [Twysden],"
thought Donald Ogden Stewart, who had also been part of the "Parisian"
group attending the fiesta of San Fermin. Loeb thought the bull's death
agony was, as quoted by James Mellow, "in some obscure way, shameful."
As he put it in 1972, at a conference in Paris sponsored by the editors of
the
Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual,
"The horses' injuries didn't bother me
much. (That was before the padding, and many of them were gored and
dragged their intestines along the ground.) But the bull came out with
such splendor, to be gradually weakened and weakened and weakened by
picadors and banderilleros until the matador could get near enough to kill
him. It seemed pathetic."
Harold Loeb came of "two prominent Jewish families in New York:
the Loebs and the Guggenheims," writes Baker.
It
will be recalled that the
older community of Sephardim in New York looked down on the Loebs
and Guggenheims, as well as all the other "Germans" who arrived in the
nineteenth century as, in Birmingham's words, "upstarts" and "usurpers."
In fact, writes Birmingham in 1971 of a different New Yorker named
Loeb, "the present head of the banking firm Loeb, Rhoades
&
Company,
is more ancestrally proud of his mother, the former Adeline Moses, than
of his father, who founded the giant banking house." For "the Moseses,"
he explains, are "an old Sephardic family from the South who, though
somewhat depleted from the days when they had maintained a vast plan–
tation with slaves and cotton fields, were nonetheless disapproving when
their daughter married Mr. Loeb, 'an ordinary German immigrant.'"
The Professors Like Vodka,
dedicated to Malcolm Cowley, was Harold
Loeb's second novel. He had followed up
Doodab
(which Hemingway read
in page prooO, with his own novel about Americans in Paris in 1927. It is
known that Hemingway requested a copy of the latter novel, though what
he thought of it remains anyone's guess. Whatever else its intentions,
The
Professors Like Vodka
can be read as Loeb's answer (before the fact) to
The
Sun Also Rises
(1926). When Loeb complained about Hemingway's turn–
ing him into Cohn, his complaint was personal, the complaint of a friend
who acknowledged the fictional character's personal traits as his own. He
did not cry "anti-Semitism." For, as he later insisted, he had never found
Hemingway or
The Sun Also Rises
to be anti-Semitic. He explained, in an
afterword to a later re-issuing of the novel:
