“Kiss my ass”: when F. Scott Fitzgerald made edits to an Ernest Hemingway masterpiece
Today, the terms Baby Boomers and Generation Z are commonplace since these two generations are still very much a part of our fractious demographic. The Baby Boomers are the ageing generation Generation Z accuses of causing all of today’s problems, and in return, the Boomers tell Gen Z to get off their smartphones and climb a tree. Less prevalent in modern conversation is the Lost Generation, to which Ernest Hemingway was a party.
The Lost Generation refers to those born between 1883 and 1900. While all those born during this period are now truly lost to the sands of time, their influence lives on in modern culture, especially literature. “Lost” refers to the changing attitudes in this generation due to post-World War I alienation and disillusionment.
The term is also synonymous with literary figures of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane, among others. Alienated by US current affairs, these American authors and poets made European cities, often Paris, their home for several years of eminence.
Gertrude Stein is often credited with coining the term “Lost Generation”, though it was Hemingway who popularised it. In his acclaimed 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounted that Stein had overheard a French garage owner disparaging the younger generation as a “génération perdue”. Stein then applied this term to Hemingway during a conversation, telling him, “You are all a lost generation.” Inspired, Hemingway used this phrase as the epigraph for his generationally pertinent novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.
Born in 1899, Hemingway was in the Lost Generation by the skin of his teeth, but with his literary output, he embodied the generation more than any other. Hemingway wrote in a blunt, understated fashion, which suited his culturally reflective narratives. This style was especially effective in his 1929 war novel A Farewell to Arms.
A Farewell to Arms was set during the Italian campaign of World War I, inspired by Hemingway’s experiences serving in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. Some will declare later works like The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls as superior, but as his first best-seller, A Farewell to Arms is essential.
In the 1920s, around the time he wrote Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway lived in Paris, where he met Fitzgerald among several other expatriates of the “Lost Generation”. The pair became friends, although their relationship was complex and fraught with competition and envy. The tension intensified in 1925 after Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, which Hemingway greatly admired.
Hemingway was often critical of Fitzgerald’s wild social life, especially his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Zelda. He exhumed some of these criticisms in A Moveable Feast, in which he discusses Fitzgerald in both complementary and disparaging terms.
When drafting A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway sent the manuscript to Fitzgerald for review. At the best of times, the pair’s postal correspondence was sarcastic and tense, but it reached a new pitch altogether after Fitzgerald sent back ten pages of edits for A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway replied with a comic line that veiled his vexation very thinly: “Kiss my ass.”
