Ernest Hemingway’s daughter-in-law Valerie Hemingway, left, with Lesley M. M. Blume at the Plaza Athenee in Paris, 2015, photographed by Alex Michanol

A century later and it can be argued that Ernest Hemingway — the man and the myth — has surpassed any character or storyline he created. Our collective fascination with him continues, and author and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume’s latest novel Everybody Behaves Badly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) fuels those Hemingway fires as it delves into the backstory of what inspired The Sun Also Rises. As meticulous a history of the early 20th Century as it is a true drama-fueled page-turner starring characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Everybody Behaves Badly ticks both beach read and academic columns. Here, Blume delves a little deeper.

The inspiration behind Everybody Behaves Badly
I’ve always been obsessed with The Sun Also Rises, which was Hemingway’s debut novel. Released in 1926, it branded the Lost Generation and its pages were filled with louche decadence. Several years ago, I was looking at a photo of young Hemingway sitting around a cafe table with a handful of comrades, and next to him was an alluring, coquettish, fashionably thin woman. I did some light research and learned that her name was Lady Duff Twysden, and that she was the real-life inspiration behind Lady Brett Ashley, the glamorous, anguished femme fatale in The Sun Also Rises. I dug deeper, and it turned out that Hemingway had based all of Sun’s characters on real people; he lifted their backgrounds in detail and recorded for posterity much of their bad behavior in his novel. I looked for a book that compellingly documented the backstory of The Sun Also Rises, and none existed. So I wrote it instead. And the photo that first inspired the project now adorns the cover of Everybody Behaves Badly.

First Hemingway book I read…
The Old Man and the Sea when I was 12, and I still remember how transporting it was. It was almost like you could feel the hot sun and smell the sea while you were reading it. Then I read The Sun Also Rises a year or two later, and was transfixed by his depiction of 1920s expat Paris — and by Lady Brett in particular. She is one of several female characters in modern American literature who epitomize mysterious allure; Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is another. I studied the hell out of these ladies, trying to crack their code. I still find them beguiling.

F. Scott Fitzgerald vs Hemingway — whom I would rather sit next to at dinner…
Ohhhh… this is a really hard question, and it is forcing me to reveal a deep, dark secret: I am actually totally in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I even used to dress up — heels, lipstick, jaunty fedora — when I went to his archive at Princeton; how ridiculous is that? He was, by all reports, charming, alive, funny, terribly clever… and utterly loyal. I’m mad about him. But he might also have been a simply terrible dinner companion, because he drank so much — sometimes into oblivion. Hemingway, on the other hand, held his booze and could command a table for hours. In 1920s Paris, he became an “overwhelming prize” at social gatherings, as one of his fellow expats put it. He was a deep listener, which is always compelling in a dinner party companion. “If you knew all about roses, he would talk to you about roses until he knew everything you knew,” one of his friends told me. “He’d smile at you encouragingly and ask you questions. It was very flattering to be listened to like that.” But I think I would have been intimidated by Hemingway. So I choose Scott.

One unsung writer of the Lost Generation…
I think all of those guys are pretty “sung” — what generation of writers gets more attention? Although I think too few people read the work of poet Archibald MacLeish or writer John Dos Passos these days. Also, no one really thinks of Dorothy Parker as “Lost Generation” because she was mostly across the Atlantic, whooping it up at the Algonquin in New York, but she hung with the Hemingway crowd too and had serious literary aspirations. Like Hemingway, I feel like everyone knows who she is today, but too few people have actually read her work. I love her stories “Big Blonde” and “The Standard of Living.”

If I was one of Hemingway’s Paris crew, whether I would be in the thick of it or more of an observer…
Are you kidding? I’d want to be right smack in the thick of it. I love that scene, and would give anything for a time machine so I could go back and run with that crowd. They were all so decadent and naughty, but they were driven by intelligent ambition. “Fame was what they wanted in that town,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, but it wasn’t empty fame they sought. It was all about seismic creative accomplishment.

On my current summer reading list…
I am working on a little Fitzgerald side-project, so I’ll be re-reading all of his work. This will also be the first summer in years during which I can actually read something non-Hemingway-related. On my list: Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today ..and a debut novel called The Last One by Alexandra Oliva, which I’m told has some super smart commentary on reality TV and the media.

Last great fiction book I read…
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Ulysses by James Joyce, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. All masters of their respective styles.

And last great nonfiction book I read…
I just moved from NYC to LA, so re-reading Joan Didion was practically mandatory. Her Slouching Towards Bethlehem blew me away all over again. And while it’s not a book (and while we’re on the topic of the Bolshoi), David Remnick’s “Danse Macabre,” a story about the recent Bolshoi scandal in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, was truly iconic journalism; I think about it almost every day.

Book I love to give as a gift…
I used to give Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, but now I give Marlene Dietrich’s A. B. C., which is basically an alphabetized list of her musings on everything from love and sex to camera lighting to the meaning of life. She’s just so goddamn funny and glamorous, and such a mensch. And if I really like someone, I’ll give him or her an early or first edition of A Moveable Feast.

My next book…
Like Hemingway, I’m superstitious about talking about what I’m working on. But broad strokes: another non-fiction historical project about a different seismic period in American history. And a screenplay inspired by a story I once wrote for Vanity Fair.



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