Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Sara Mayfield's Drippy Tomato Sandwiches
You never heard of her but she was with them in Paris and she wrote about them.
“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I drink to make other people more interesting.” Ernest Hemingway
They left America to chase their dreams in the 1920’s. Some found fame and fortune. Some found fame and heartbreak. They were the expatriates of the Jazz Age. One of their closest observers was Sara Mayfield.
She grew up in Montgomery, Alabama with her dear friend, Zelda Sayre, who later married Scott Fitzgerald. Those two inspired a lot of drunken foolishness in Paris, New York and the Riviera in the 1920’s, which Scott famously chronicled and labeled as “The Jazz Age”. Sara joined Zelda for many of those times and later wrote a book about her experiences with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and other expat Americans titled “Exiles From Paradise”.
I was introduced to Sara years ago at her home in Tuscaloosa, by Dr. Joe Billy McMinn, my philosophy professor and good friend at the University of Alabama, who enjoyed spending long hours drinking beer and expounding on Plato while getting peacefully inebriated and winning arguments about the Socratic method and Aristotle’s influence on Alexander the Great. Those were some worthy and often memorable gatherings.
As I walked into Sara’s house that first time with him she smiled warmly at me, shook my hand and asked if I’d like a drink. “Well, yes, that would be nice,” I said.” She then instructed Professor Bill to go back into the kitchen and make the drinks. “I almost never keep whiskey in the house,” she said, “but Bill said he was bringin’ you over and I wanted to be hospitable.”
We talked long into the evening with that “drink or two before supper” finally leading to carry-out barbecued pork sandwiches. Actually, Sara did most of the talking because I was too amazed at her stories to waste time saying anything.
“Zelda was just incredibly beautiful,” she said “and she was as wild as she was pretty. She would drink toasts to her male admirers from her slipper and dance on table tops just for fun.”
“Scott was just as unbridled as Zelda,” she added, “and once got drunk and dived into the Pulitzer fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York, fully clothed, shoes and all. At a posh literary tea in New York, he passed out with his head on Zelda’s shoulder. I believe his almost constant drunkenness caused Zelda’s nervous breakdown and their final break-up.”
“Hemin’way (as she pronounced his name) reputedly spent a lot of time at the court of Gertrude Stein in Paris and legend has it that he learned some of the elements of his terse writin’ style from her. I don’t know. He respected Miss Stein for what she was but, frankly, I’m not sure it was all affection. But then she probably helped him.”
“Then, of course, there were the parties. Everybody you ever heard of would sooner or later show up at these things. It was Picasso or Hemin’way or John Dos Passos or Jean Paul Sartre or James Joyce. I enjoyed many of them but some were just utter bores. Hemin’way could drink all night and still hold his own but Scott was three sheets to the wind after a couple of drinks. Gertrude Stein referred to us as ‘the lost generation’. Maybe we were.
I asked her about Hemingway and whether he and the Fitzgeralds were close when they were in Paris.
“In some ways, yes, they were,” she said, “but Hemin’way never forgave Scott for helpin’ him. Or anyone else, for that matter, including Sherwood Anderson, the editor who first published his work on the recommendation of Fitzgerald and also Gertrude Stein. I think there was considerable jealousy in Hemin’way. He and Scott were close but quarreled frequently. At first Ernest didn’t appreciate Scott’s “Tender in the Night” but then later wrote to Maxwell Perkins that he thought the book to be ‘almost frightening how good it was.’ ”
Sara studied at the University of London and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She wrote for both the Paris Herald and the Baltimore Sun and wrote a biography of H.L. Mencken titled “The Constant Circle”, published by Delacorte Press.
“Mencken,” she said, “was often portrayed as a bitter curmudgeon and little else but, in fact, he was one of the warmest and most charming people you could ever know. My book about him focuses on his large circle of friends.
Sara and I kept in touch afterwards. Occasionally I would drive over to visit and listen to more stories about the romantic artists and writers of her generation whom she considered friends.
She and I decided to collaborate on a book about her and Zelda when they were kids in Montgomery but her agent would have none of it. So we abandoned that project and I went back to hearing about her pals in the Roaring Twenties. Most of them were dead. Among those was her childhood friend, Zelda, who perished in a fire at a mental hospital in Asheville, NC, on March 10, 1948.
It is really sad to read about Scott and Zelda. They threw their lives away in drunken revelry and went broke repeatedly in the process of breaking themselves. The happiness they sought was continually lost chasing the false gods of fame, glamour and wealth. Hemingway’s excessive boozing probably initiated the depression which led him to kill himself in July, 1961.
“Zelda and Scott lived a fast life,” she told me, “marked by increasing tension and sadness which drove them apart. They both drank too much. Scott could handle one drink and sometimes two but he got drunk at three. There were times he got wildly drunk and even violent. He would write morning-after letters to the people he had offended the night before. Scott died of a heart attack in December, 1940. Zelda lived a very lonely life until her death.”
Fitzgerald wrote about the tumultuous life he lived and how it ground to a protracted and painful end in his book: “The Crack Up”.
On one of my visits to Sara’s home I brought a bag of big, red tomatoes which I had grown in my backyard garden. She was impressed by their almost perfect shape.
“These’ll be wonderful for tomato sandwiches,” she said. “I have a fresh loaf of bread. Why don’t make some for lunch.” I readily agreed. I sliced the tomatoes about 1/2 inch thick as Sara got plates, potato chips and a pitcher of tea.
“You’re cuttin’ them the right way,” she said, “people ruin a tomato sandwich by makin’ the slices too thin. Plus you never want to make a tomato sandwich on any other kind of bread than just regular old sliced white. Not toasted! Then you gotta use real mayonnaise, not salad dressin’ or even homemade mayonnaise and, of course, you use salt and a whole lot of black pepper.”
“Furthermore,” she added, “you don’t want to put bacon or lettuce on a true tomato sandwich. Just those things.”
“Is that all the recipe requires?” I asked.
“Yes. And you know you have a good tomato sandwich if it’s drippy when you bite into it. Tomato sandwiches are not tidy. You want them to be drippy and unsophisticated.”
How odd, I thought it was —- to be there in Sara Mayfield’s kitchen; a person who had chummed around Europe with some of the best-known writers, artists, poets and newspaper journalists in the whole world at that time discussing, of all things, how to make an approved, bonafide, genuine, old-fashioned, authentic tomato sandwich. Who could have imagined that? Certainly not I. So we got to the table and I bit into this big, fat, mayonnaise-loaded, salted and peppered tomato sandwich.
“It’s drippy,” I said.
“Right-oh, she replied. Way to go.”
“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” Zelda Fitzgerald
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Tremendous writing. And, oddly and coincidentally, I had a tomato sandwich for lunch today (actually had two) with fresh, thick sliced tomatoes from a friend's garden. The recipe is exact. Very fresh white bread and Best Foods Mayo. (Hellman's). I've heard Duke's mayo is pretty good too, but they don't sell it her in California.
Absolutely fascinating story!!!