The author, Morley Callaghan, met Hemingway in 1923 when they were both working for the Toronto Daily Star. It was a summer job for Callaghan, who was in his second year of law. He was also boxing, playing football, and "reading wildly" (Dostoevski, Conrad, Flaubert, Sinclair Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, The Dial, The Adelphi).
Hemingway had brought to Toronto his first wife so she could give birth to their first child there, and showed Callaghan the proofs of his first book, In Our Time. On reading them, Callaghan knew he was "getting a glimpse of the work of a great writer." Hemingway in turn read one of Callaghan's stories and said, "You're a real writer. You're writing big time stuff."
In 1929 Callaghan, having published some stories and realizing that law was not for him (even though he had graduated and articled) went to Paris with his newly married wife. That Year in Paris is his account of their time there. They met many of the stars in that firmament, including Joyce, Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, and many others, but at the heart of the book is the famous boxing incident when he knocked Hemingway on his butt. It's a well-told story with an expert built-up and several reverberating after-effects.
Callaghan shared an editor, Max Perkins, with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and has many fine observations about them and others. He is particularly good at describing people: a friend in the Star Weekly office was "a little man with a wonderful strut," a ship's doctor was "a stuffed owl of a man." And some famous people:
Sherwood Anderson - "a square-built man with rugged features and a lion's head."
Sinclair Lewis - "a gaunt thin sandy man, with staring protuberant blue eyes, many freckles on his flushed face; the forehead broad, the face tapering sharply -- skin over a skull. This strange excited wild face lit up as he came to me with his arms out."
"Jimmy" Joyce - "a small-boned, dark Irishman with fine features. He had thick glasses and was wearing a neat dark suit. His courtly manner made it easy for us to sit down, and his wife, large bosomed with a good-natured face, offered us massive motherly ease."
But the observations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald are the best. "Poor Scott, with all his talent and all his fine sensibility, forever managing to be the one who got himself into a bad light no matter how honorable his intentions." He reads to Callaghan a favourite passage in A Farewell to Arms, and takes offense when Callaghan does not respond with unreserved enthusiasm. "Would this impress you, Morley?" he asks, and gets down on the floor and tries to do a head-stand.
As for Hemingway: "He had a strange and delightful candor, and every time I looked at his warm dark face with restless eyes I liked him more." But "he had a peculiar, and for him, I think, fatal quality. He made men want to talk about him. He couldn't walk down the street and stub his toe without having a newspaperman who happened to be walking with him magnify the little accident into a near fatality... Even in those days everything that was happening to Hemingway was magnified by someone." Hemingway's own tendency to magnify himself probably had a role in this. For example, in Toronto he asked Callaghan how old he was, then responded by saying he was seven years older." This was untrue, for Hemingway was born in 1899 and Callaghan in 1903. Why such a venal lie?
Callaghan went on to publish 13 novels, one of which, It's Never Over, he wrote while in Paris that summer. The Loved and the Lost won a G-G for him. He also wrote a number of plays and contributed to many magazines (The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Maclean's, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, and others). Ninety (!) of his short stories have been collected in a 4-volume series.
I'm definitely going to be reading him.
