Ernest Hemingway has a special place in the heart of Torontonians. In the early 1920s he worked for the Toronto Star as a reporter, writing from post-WWI Europe and also Toronto. The brevity of his style and the ability to soak in detail, capture dialogue and explain character were elements he learned as a journalist and were brilliantly transferred to his fiction, as Lesley M.M. Blume describes in Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. It was Hemingway’s first great novel, a roman à clef. I spoke to Blume from her home in Los Angeles; our conversation has been edited for length.

Jennifer: You note, “No one was a better promoter of Hemingway than Hemingway.”

Lesley: He had charisma; he was larger than life. He came to Europe at the age of 22 as a Midwesterner with a big outdoor lifestyle and a huge appetite for living. Writers didn’t look like Hemingway. He is a guy who breathes the outdoors. He is sexy; he is handsome; he lives in Paris; and in a seemingly unintellectual way, he is exceedingly intellectual. He is reinventing modern language. It was an intoxicating formula to promoting Hemingway.

Jennifer: We’re proud of Hemingway’s tenure at the Toronto Star. As I reread The Sun Also Rises I could see the influence of journalism, the brevity, the lack of great swathes of description and subordinate clauses. But he complained about being a reporter.

Lesley: He protested too much. He didn’t hate being a reporter. He hated that it was taking away time from what he considered his real writing. He was terrified someone else would do what he was trying to do in prose and break through before he did.

Hemingway was a really good reporter. He got huge assignments for a rookie reporter. He was 23 and interviewing Mussolini. The confidence of his dispatches, his knowledge of world events and his ability to encapsulate what was happening in Europe is incredible.

Hemingway’s journalism did inform his style and gave him a huge amount of material to work with. All his short stories come from materials he accrued when ricocheting around Europe.

Hemingway wasn’t the only one who wanted to strip down Victorian frippery. But he was the first one to do it.

He told one of his editors: ‘There is nothing in my work that somebody without a high school education can’t relate to.’ He also said the highbrow critics “will get what I am up to.” He was able to hit both the high note and the low note.

Jennifer: He could turn on you. Think Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wives, all the people who supported him whom he pushed away.

Lesley: Documenting this period in his life was trying to understand the nature of his charisma that would draw people to him even though he constantly turned on them. The Sun Also Rises was strong public evidence of Hemingway’s ability to turn on those who had helped him. The book was breathtakingly literal. The people he chose as characters were so shrewd and so cool and so accurately reported. Everything you told Hemingway became his property. As Nora Ephron later said: “Everything is copy.”

He inspired slavish devotion, even though he was unable to maintain happy relationships. It was hard for me to understand how he could flip so dramatically; he became a dark, vengeful person. It was challenging to portray that while offsetting it with the enormity of his accomplishments and his ability to inspire. One of his editors asked: “If you could do it over again would you be easier on these people?” And Hemingway said: “Hell no.”

Jennifer: Tell me about the term “Lost Generation.”

Lesley: After Hemingway had written The Sun Also Rises, Gertrude Stein told him about an encounter she had with a local garage owner. She had been to the garage and the car wasn’t repaired yet, and the car garage owner said: “Half of you between the ages of 21 and 27 are lost.”

He originally considered calling The Sun Also Rises “The Lost Generation.” He planned a novel that looked at how the war swept away institutions, and young people had nothing to look forward to and no guidance anymore.

He shortens the whole thing, he quotes Gertrude Stein — “You are all a lost generation.” It was a really crafty move. The book is about a drunken, scandalous, sexually driven group of people, an elite group. Expressing the idea that these people are members of a lost generation cast it as a postwar commentary. He became the voice of his generation.

It captured what everybody was feeling at that moment.

Jennifer: Maybe this is a question I should have asked first: why write about The Sun Also Rises today? Most of us don’t read Hemingway for pleasure anymore; we read him in English Lit classes.

Lesley: It is the 90th anniversary this year of The Sun Also Rises and it seemed like an opportunity to look at the book and how it contributed to the Hemingway legend.

I’ve also been a Lost Generation obsessive. For my generation, and the one coming up behind me, I wanted to write about how Hemingway became Hemingway.

I saw the opportunity to go back and look at this work of literature that has been given short shrift.

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It did bring modern literature to the commercial masses. When I interviewed the head of the Paris Review, he said many of the manuscripts that still cross his desk read like Hemingway. He is more influential than people may realize. You look at people’s fascination with Hemingway’s life: The Paris Wife, the novel by Paula McLain, Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris.

From his reporting in the Toronto Star and from The Sun Also Rises you can see who Hemingway is going to become. You can see the shrewdness, the ambition, the development of the style. It offers a way to see how Hemingway became the writer he did.