Hemingway’s “Scott Fitzgerald” in A Moveable Feast recounts their sudden friendship. Among his anecdotes is their picnic on a drive from Lyons to Paris in 1925. Hemingway was uneasy with Fitzgerald’s character peculiarities, especially his intolerance for alcohol and hypochondria.
Unfortunately, it was a botched journey. From the start, it was rainy, and Fitzgerald’s Renault Torpedo did not have a roof. Zelda Fitzgerald had ordered it removed. So, when it rained, they had to stop often. Hemingway says they may have stopped as many as ten times. They had no raincoats, and Fitzgerald got chills and claimed to be dying of pneumonia.
Before departing their Lyon hotel, Fitzgerald ordered a picnic lunch of truffled roast chicken and bread. Hemingway was annoyed because it was expensive and something he might have done if he had the money (which he did). They ate along the way, often stopping because of the rain while picnicking on the chicken, bread, and several bottles of white Mâconais.
At the end of the first day at Chalon-sur-Saône, they were still 212 miles from Paris. Fitzgerald was buzzed and ill. Hemingway claimed to be stoical but was pissed. “If we had waterproof coats,” he writes, it would have been pleasant enough to drive in that spring rain.” But he wryly concludes, “It was not a trip designed for a man easy to anger.”
Fitzgerald’s Notebooks report that “it was a most pleasant trip,” and he later wrote to tell Gertrude Stein that Hemingway was “a peach of a fellow” and puns that they had “a slick drive through Burgundy.”
Featured Image: F. Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald, and their daughter Scottie in their Renault Torpedo in Paris, 1925c.
See A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners,1964), A Moveable Feasted, The Restored Edition. Edited by Patrick Hemingway, New York: Scribner, 2009; Matthew J. Bruccoli. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. New York: Carol & Graf, 1994; F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and the assistance of Judith S. Baughman. London: Macmillan, 1994; The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.