Bill Smith

Bill Smith was a St. Louis boy who spent his summers in northern Michigan, which is how he met Ernest Hemingway. The two families kept places near Walloon Lake and Horton Bay, and by 1916 the friendship was fixed. Smith had a sister, Katharine Foster Smith, always called Katy, and an older brother, Y. K. Smith, whose Chicago apartment became one of Hemingway's landing places as a young man — it was through the Smith household that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman he married in 1921. Few friendships did more to arrange his early life.

The Michigan years are the ones the writing kept returning to. Smith and Hemingway fished the trout streams and ran drinking contests out of jugs of hard cider, and when Hemingway came back from the war wounded in 1920 he spent part of the summer at Horton Bay with Bill and Katy. That country produced the Nick Adams stories, and Smith stands behind the companion in Big Two-Hearted River — a friendship worked out on rivers rather than in conversation, which is exactly the register the fishing chapters of the novel would later use.

In 1925 he was in Paris, and in July he went to the fiesta at Pamplona with Hemingway, Hadley Richardson, Lady Duff Twysden, Harold Loeb, Pat Guthrie, and Donald Ogden Stewart. When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises weeks afterwards, he split his oldest friendship and his newest comic acquaintance into one character. Bill Gorton is a composite: the vaudeville patter and the professional wit are Stewart's, and the fishing — the five days at Burguete, the wine cooled in the stream, the ease of two men who have known each other since boyhood — is Smith's. It is the only relationship in the novel that costs Jake Barnes nothing, and it is the one drawn from the author's life before Paris.

The friendship did not run smooth. Hemingway quarrelled with Y. K. Smith in the mid-1920s and the brothers' loyalties pulled Bill away for a period, though the two men were in contact again later and Smith remained part of the fishing life Hemingway organised wherever he settled. Katy married the novelist John Dos Passos in 1929, which tied the Smiths to another of Hemingway's important friendships — and to another of his famous ruptures, when he and Dos Passos fell out over the Spanish Civil War. Katy died in a car accident in 1947.

Smith never wrote a memoir and never gave the interviews that made Harold Loeb the best-documented model in the book, so the record of his own life is thin next to the others in the Pamplona party: his birth and death dates are not settled in the sources consulted here, and this record carries none rather than guess at them. What survives of him is in the fiction — the friend on the riverbank, drawn by a writer who was never better than when describing the country the two of them fished as boys.