In Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, he describes the first time he met F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre where, as Hemingway describes it, “…a very strange thing happened.”

As Hemingway was sitting and drinking with some “completely worthless characters,” Fitzgerald came in with a tall young man who turned out to be the famous baseball pitcher, Dunc Chaplin. Hemingway was no baseball devotee and had never heard of Chaplin, but recognised Fitzgerald, and took this chance to introduce himself, which went something like this:

” Mr Fitzgerald, forgive me, but my name is Ernest Hemingway, I am a writer.”

” Call me Scott. May I call you Ernest?”

” Yes.”

” Well, Ernest, this is my friend Dunc Chaplin, who plays baseball and went to Princeton like me.”

” Please to meet you…”

” Dunc, call me Dunc.”

” Dunc.”

Scott then ordered a bottle of champagne.

” To celebrate my two new friends, one of whom plays baseball better than I ever did, and I never did, and one who writes better than me, and that takes some doing.”

Fitzgerald then went on to explain how he’d come across Hemingway’s work in the newspapers, and a couple of small magazines, and how he genuinely thought Ernest was the new voice of the 20th century, and had said so to his editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, and that Hemingway’s work would outlast his own scribbles.

Throughout Fitzgerald’s discourse Hemingway observed the famous novelist, describing how he was a man who looked like a boy with a “…face between handsome and pretty, and with fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.”

Hemingway disliked the way Fitzgerald repeatedly kept praising his [Hemingway's] work, as there was a system in those days that said, “…praise to the face was an open disgrace.”

And although this may sound strange to us in the early part of the 21st century, in those years after the First World War was all too understandable: no one wanted to be picked out for praise above anyone else. If, in the fullness of time, your talents grew, and you were seen to be better than the rest, so be it. But no praise until such times. In a way this was the rule of the trenches, of warfare, of camaraderie, and Hemingway realised Fitzgerald had not seen war, therefore could not know. He was a child in comparison to many, in comparison to himself, even though he was three years older than Hemingway. But although Hemingway would never say it, he thought Scott Fitzgerald one of the greatest writers on earth.

Ernest also recalled that Fitzgerald was lightly built, but not in good physical shape, with a puffy face, although his expensive Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well, and the white button down collar shirt and a Guards neck-tie looked very smart. In fact Fitzgerald created a style that would last until the 1960s.

But what about that Guards neck-tie?

” Are you entitled to wear that tie, Scott? There’s an Englishman over there, an old soldier, who may very well be offended, if he were sober.”

Fitzgerald took off the neck-tie and threw it into the street, and then explained that he didn’t want to offend anyone – sober or drunk – over a neck-tie, and anyway he’d bought the thing for half a dollar in a flea market in Rome in 1919.

” God alone knows what happened to the owner?”

The three of them drank their champagne for a while, and no one spoke, which suited Chaplin because he didn’t have a lot to say, not even about baseball, which he found irritating beyond belief, but was prepared to put up with it as the money was so good.

” Did you have sex with your wife before you were married, Ernest?” asked Scott.

” I don’t know.”

” What do you mean, you don’t know? Of course you know.”

Fitzgerald was getting drunk, awfully drunk, and on just three glasses of champagne. Hemingway realised Scott could not take his drink, that drink made him ill and turned him into a small, well dressed monster.

” I don’t remember, really Scott. And is it important?”

” Of course it’s important.”

” If you say so.”

” To be honest I don’t remember if Zelda and I made love before we married either. I wanted to, but I don’t remember. What about you, Dunc?”

Before Dunc could answer Scott Fitzgerald fell off his bar stool.

” Come on, Dunc, we better get him home.”

” No, he’s okay.”

” Okay? He looks as if he might be dying?”

” No, drink takes him that way.”

” A drunk who can’t take his drink. I saw his face change, the skin tightening so you could almost see his skull breaking through. Come on let’s get him into a taxi.”

Which they did, and three days later, when Hemingway met Fitzgerald again at the Negre de Toulouse restaurant, he reminded him of what had happened at the Dingo.

” Don’t be stupid, Ernest, nothing happened. I was just tired and went home. Sick of those damned English you were with too. Damned snobs.”

” But I wasn’t with any English, they were on another table. You were with Dunc Chaplin. Remember?”

” Dunc who?”

” Dunc Chaplin, the baseball player?”

” Never heard of him. Now, what shall we have to drink before we order?”