One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. His companions, warming up for the revelries of the night, were Lady Duff Twysden, with whom he was half in love, and Pat Guthrie, the Scotsman she was supposed to marry. These two were to appear, without much disguise, in The Sun Also Rises, but this was late April and the trip to the Pamplona fiesta ruined by sexual jealousy over Duff's amoursβthe crucial event that informed that novelβstill lay months ahead.
After a while Hemingway would walk the half-dozen blocks home to his wife Hadley and son Bumby in their modest apartment above the sawmill on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, but for the present he was having a fine time absorbing the latest Montparnasse gossip with his clever and entertainingly self-deprecatory if worthless friends when in walked two men who'd first got to know each other at Princeton.
Had Hemingway slept with his wife before they were married? Fitzgerald asked him. At this stage in the memoir that Hemingway wrote beginning in , thirty-two years after he and Fitzgerald met and seventeen years after Fitzgerald's death, Chaplin disappears.
He has done his job as a foil, a likable fellow against whom Fitzgerald's shortcomings are measured, and is no longer needed. For the rest of the three devastating chapters of A Moveable Feast devoted to Fitzgerald, Chaplin is replaced by another character whose behavior stands in implicit juxtaposition to that of poor Scott: a hungry, hard-working, happily married young writer totally dedicated to his profession who can hold his liquor and will not allow himself to waste time or money.
There was another good reason for Chaplin to vanish from Hemingway's account of his first meeting with Fitzgerald. Chaplin was not there, not at the Dingo, not in Paris, not in Europe. Hemingway invented him, in all his authoritative specificity, to lend an air of authenticity to his story. In another version of that first meeting, cut from A Moveable Feast and closed to scholars for twenty-five years after Hemingway's death, he wrote that Fitzgerald was accompanied by a friend at the Dingo, but the friend is neither named nor characterized.
