Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

“The gloom intensified when I received a letter from Fitzgerald telling me that Hadley had remarried with Paul Mowrer, a journalist I knew. Gentle, thoughtful man, he was Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Letter said they were going to live in a country place near Crécy-en-Brie, outside Paris. What threw me was how quickly Hadley had

“Hadley would notice the mutilated rejection slips and tell me not to be discouraged, that she loved my stories and that someday somebody would publish them and they would be a big success and my picture would be in bookstore windows, smiling and holding a pipe. “She would put her hands on the sides of my face and pull me toward her and hold me and

When there are two people who love each other, Ernest wrote, the rich are attracted to them but that he and Hadley were naifs who did not know how to protect themselves. Charmed by these rich, Ernest admitted he was as stupid as a bird dog who goes out with anyone with a gun.

“‘Turning me into a vulgar Jew,’ Harold said, ‘what have I done to make me so malicious? I’ve boxed with you, played tennis with you, brought you oysters from Prunier, bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé, introduced you to influential people, helped you meet Paris publishers, only to have people everywhere pointing—There goes Harold Loeb, the repulsive Jew

wrote about Scott, for example, but I gave him a cover name: Julian [in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”].

Lady Duff Twysden, a character right out of a very good English novel who had lost her way. Her look was original, her chic was original, and God knows her speech and her capacity for drink were all original.

“You ever read that old bugger Nietzsche?” he asked. “A little,” I said. “You know what he said about love? Said it’s a state where we see things widely different from what they are.” “Pauline?” “Yup. It didn’t take long to unsee those things. I guess it started when we went to live with her folks in Piggott.

I said I remembered him writing about Le Jockey and the fight with the British sergeant in one of his stories, but the girl wasn’t Josephine Baker. “No,” he said, “I thought her feeling about the soul was her private business, so I invented a woman to take her place in the story and I left out everything about the soul.