In his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes at length about his relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He tells of their first meeting in the spring of 1925, at the Dingo Bar, where Hemingway was “sitting with some completely worthless characters,” namely Duff Twysden and Pat Guthrie, on whom Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises were based. Behind the bar was legendary barman Jimmie Charters. And if this didn’t already sound like a who’s who of 1920s expat Paris, in walked F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway knew of F. Scott; he was already a successful writer, and The Great Gatsby had just been released.
As it happened, F. Scott overindulged at that first meeting and passed out. Hemingway came to learn that this was simply a “thing” for both F. Scott and Zelda. “Becoming unconscious when they drank had always been their great defense,” Hemingway noted. It wouldn’t take much drinking for them to “go to sleep like children…and when they woke they will be fresh and happy, not having taken enough alcohol to damage their bodies before it made them unconscious.”
They met again a few days later at the Closerie des Lilas. Here, F. Scott asked Ernest a favor. F. Scott and Zelda’s Renault motor car had been left “in Lyon because of bad weather,” and would Hem be good enough to help F. Scott retrieve it? They could ride down together on the train, get the car, and then drive it back to Paris. Hemingway thought it a fine idea, as it would give him a chance to spend time with a more accomplished writer.
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The trip was a debacle, something to laugh about years later, perhaps. Or write about. In Lyon, Hemingway was “astonished to find that the small Renault had no top.” See, F. Scott and Zelda had been “compelled” to ditch it in Lyon because she’d ordered the top to be cut off after a minor accident in Marseille. She liked convertibles, anyway, it seemed. So, F. Scott and Hem started off for Paris in their topless French car.
Unfortunately, they “were halted by rain about an hour north of Lyon,” and “were halted by rain possibly ten times.” Along the way, they ate an excellent lunch of truffled roast chicken, washed down with white Mâcon wine. They bought several bottles, which Hemingway “uncorked as we needed them.” Drinking wine straight from the bottle was particularly exciting for F. Scott, “as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.”
But the fun soon ended the wetter they got; F. Scott feared that he’d contracted congestion of the lungs, and he insisted that they stop at the next town before “the onset of the fever and delirium.” Hemingway hoped that a few more swigs of the Mâcon might make F. Scott feel better since, after all, “a good white wine, moderately full-bodied but with a low alcoholic content, was almost a specific against the disease.” His father was a physician, after all.
They finally found a hotel in Chalon-sur-Saône, and F. Scott took to bed. Hemingway became doctor and nurse, and while their rain-soaked clothing dried, he ordered “two citron pressés and two double whiskies,” which F. Scott dismissed as one of “those old wives’ remedies.”
Hemingway tried to order a full bottle but they only sold it by the drink. F. Scott soon revealed himself to be an insufferable hypochondriac, demanding aspirin and a thermometer. Eventually the hotel waiter brought both, however the thermometer was intended for measuring bathwater (it had “a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath”). Hemingway “shook the thermometer down professionally” and wryly said, “You’re lucky it’s not a rectal thermometer.”
He took F. Scott’s temperature under his arm, and somehow convinced him that 37.6 degrees Celsius (99.7 degrees Fahrenheit) was normal. F. Scott insisted that Hemingway take his own temperature, which he did, reporting the exact same number. “I was trying to remember whether thirty-seven six was really normal or not,” Hemingway recalled. “It did not matter, for the thermometer, unaffected, was steady at thirty.”
“Scott drank the whisky sour down very fast now and asked me to order another.” Which Hemingway did. They soon went down to the hotel restaurant, where they had a carafe of Fleurie (a dry, light red from Beaujolais) with their snails, followed by a bottle of Montagny, “a light, pleasant white wine of the neighborhood,” with their main course, poularde de Bresse. And then, F. Scott did what he often did: he passed out, “with his head on his hands. It was natural and there was no theater about it and it even looked as though he were careful not to spill or break things.” Hemingway and the waiter got him back upstairs to bed, and Hemingway went back down and finished the dinner (and the wine).
The next day they drove back to Paris, the weather was beautiful, “the air freshly washed and the hills and the field and the vineyards all new.” He said his goodbyes to F. Scott, and Hemingway returned to his apartment. Happy to be back home, Hemingway and Hadley celebrated with a drink at the Closerie des Lilas. He told Hadley that he’d learned one thing, “Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
A final note on the Whiskey Sour, Harry MacElhone was quoted in 1951 as saying he missed the good old days when Hemingway and Fitzgerald were customers, and that “Hemingway could down 20 whiskey sours at one sitting and then go back to his hotel to work.” I’m a little dubious of this story, but it comes with the territory.
INGREDIENTS:
- 1.5 oz Whiskey (your choice, Scotch, rye, Bourbon, Canadian, et cetera)
- .5 oz Fresh lemon juice
- .5 to .75 oz Simple syrup
- Glass: Cocktail
- Garnish: Lemon peel
DIRECTIONS:
Add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.
TASTING NOTE: Use whichever whiskey you want, be it bourbon, rye, Scotch, Canadian, Japanese, et cetera. This drink works well on the rocks or up, your call. You can make it as a classic sour, measuring whiskey, lemon juice, and sugar/simple syrup, or just add whiskey to homemade lemonade, as it seems Hem and F. Scott did.
From A DRINKABLE FEAST by Philip Greene, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Philip Greene.
