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Enter Brett Ashley. Chances are that Harold Loeb would never have been a character in a Hemingway novel if Duff Twitchell had not riveted his eye in the mirror of the Select Cafe in Paris and said, in her low, exciting voice, "It is the only miracle"—meaning love. Duff took love and drink in immoderation. Depending on the flow of checks from England, she and her upper-Bohemian lover, Pat Swazey, lived on champagne or birdseed. Duff called strangers "darling" and friends "good chaps," had a title by marriage, and as anyone may guess, was the model for Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley. Though happily married, Hemingway was apparently just enough involved with Duff himself to be oath-muttering mad when she and Harold took off for a two-week seaside idyll at St.-Jean-de-Luz.
At the fiesta in Pamplona the tensions boiled over. Pat and Duff were back together, but the lovesick Harold could not quite believe that the great affair had ended. He irritated Hemingway by finding the bullfights less than rapturous, indeed "shameful" (Loeb momentarily rode a young bull's head, broncobuster fashion, in the amateur frolic). On the last night of the festival, they stepped into an alley to slug it out. "I don't want to hit you," said Harold. "Me either," said Hemingway. The hairy-chested novelist saved his punch for The Sun Also Rises.
The Gatsby Syndrome. There is no counterpunching in The Way It Was, except for the implications of the title itself. Loeb, 67, has fashioned an independent career for himself as an economist, but in the '20s, his personal position was that of a man caught between two worlds. He had turned his back on the world of money, but had just enough left to be treated as an easy mark by many writers and artists. As a writer he had just enough talent to wonder if he had enough.
In The Way It Was, love and memory are enough; he has fashioned a timeless frieze of the titans and the lotus eaters of the '20s. It is perhaps typical of Loeb that a decade later he was a devotee of technocracy. His generation could never escape the Gatsby Syndrome, the belief in "the green light" ever beckoning toward an elusively perfect tomorrow.