Tag: please ruin Hemingway all the time

is an unfinished woman the one where she tells the story about dorothy parker throwing a typewriter at ernest hemingway’s head? that is maybe my favorite story in all of literary history and i cannot remember where i read it, but i think it was in in one of hellman’s memoirs. (possibly the typewriter was thrown off the deck of a ship, at ernest hemingway’s head? i may have embellished this a little over the course of ten years. anyway the only downside to any of this is that she missed.)

tyrannosaurus-trainwreck:

havingbeenbreathedout:

sophiagratia:

lenorajoon:

Nope! Or rather, if so I missed it, which would be incredible because that story is incredible.

There’s a great story in there about Dashiell Hammet and Hemingway getting into a masculine-honor pissing contest that starts with Hemingway throwing a glass against Parker’s fireplace at a party for absolutely no apparent reason? and ends with Hammett telling Hemingway to “go roll a hoop in the park” instead of bothering him further. Also a story about Hemingway getting mad at Hellman for noticing his own terrible editing job on one of the novels and retaliating by telling her he wouldn’t sleep with her (her response: “who asked?”)

stories about how no one liked ernest hemingway are important to me. also marriages founded on a shared gift for derision. 

i really want to believe i didn’t invent the typewriter story; it is very important also. can anyone source it? ( @havingbeenbreathedout, perhaps?)

This is, indeed, an amazing collection of literal and metaphorical awkward historical dinner parties. “Go roll a hoop in the park” may be the most perfect insult ever directed at a Hemingway type; I will try to remember & use it.

Re: the typewriter story, I can’t immediately find a reliable source, but it does seem to be floating around out there. It’s casually referenced in this 2009 blog entry (”I am coming to despise the very medium of my writing, just like the aforementioned Parker who threw her typewriter at Ernest Hemingway off the side of a cruise ship to New York “There goes my only means of livelihood,” she said.”) The blogger’s name is also Sophie, incidentally, so maybe this is you. The story’s also mentioned in this comment on a separate blog entry, also from 2009. Maybe there was a shared source in 2009? A Salon.com article or something? If so I couldn’t find it.

I did unearth this hilarious little series of anecdotes, about Parker, Hemingway, and Robert Benchley’s 1926 ocean crossing to France (from Marion Meade’s What Fresh Hell is This?):

Nothing like saltpeter & pubic lice to liven up a transatlantic crossing.

You chuck an old-school typewriter at somebody’s head, you fucking mean it.  Those things were heavy as hell.