In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

14 ARRAYS
is a journalist who has been left sexually impotent by a war injury and
is seeking to restore meaning to his life. Brett, whose portrait is inspired
by Hemingway's Paris acquaintance Lady Duff Twysden, can never overcome
the trauma of her fiance's death in the war. She seeks satisfaction
(and of course finds frustration) in regular alcoholic and erotic excesses-after
which she always returns to Jake, whose impotence makes
such intermittent closeness part of a vicious circle. Robert Cohn, the
character based on Harold Loeb, a wealthy Jewish emigre who once won
the middleweight boxing championship at Princeton University [see Boxing],
is in love with Brett-a passion that mirrors Loeb's affair with Lady
Duff just as Brett and the narrator's scorn for Cohn mirrors the condescension
that Lady Duff and Hemingway display toward Loeb. Jake's
friend Bill, a writer from Chicago who has become successful in New
York, is modeled on Bill Smith, Hemingway's companion from his youth
in Oak Park, Illinois (Burgess, 48ff.). Rather than admiring the refinement
of European culture, such representatives of the American "lost
generation" are seeking in Paris what they miss at home: a more liberal
attitude toward extramarital and homosexual relationships (Benstock,
99ff.; Prost and Vincent, 536f£.), a sympathetic milieu for their claims to
artistic talent, and, above all, hard liquor. [see Bars] Their celebration of
Gene Tunney's victory over Jack Dempsey in the world heavyweight
boxing championship, as described by the New York Times on September
24, becomes a national orgy away from home: "The most typically
American crowd gathered in a well-known American bar in the heart of
Paris and over bottles of champagne and other cheering beverages; they
were listening to the reading of bulletins brought every few minutes from
an American newspaper's office."
Sometimes the immediate motive for an American's departure for
Europe is an unhappy love affair or a divorce, as in the case of the highly
acclaimed (and even more highly paid) designer Ralph Barton, who
comes to Paris in March. If travelers from America have more than such
purely negative motives, they are usually disappointed. For Parisian
intellectuals indulge in feelings of crisis and rituals of self-flagellation that
are liable to plunge lovesick foreigners like Barton into even deeper
depressions: "Paris is a mess. I confess it who never felt this way about
it before ... Even the French are dismal about it and suicide is a regular
subject. It is cold and wet every day. And I am impotent at last" (Kellner,
135; Willett, 168). Thus, ironically, the title of Hemingway's novel points