SOURCE: "The Silly Wasters: Tzara and the Poet in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'," in The Hemingway Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 50-6.

In the following essay, Johnston discusses Hemingway's treatment of Dadaism—particularly its most important figure Tristan Tzara—in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris at the end of 1921 to launch his writing career, another expatriate, Tristan Tzara, was already there making a circus of the literary scene. It would be hard to imagine two more disparate artists: the quiet, unknown American, shy and serious, totally dedicated to his craft, slowly and meticulously shaping his "true sentences" in the solitude of a rented room; the brash, notorious Romanian, bold and mischievous, totally dedicated to the demolition of traditional art and literature, chanting his Dada sense and nonsense in the streets and at public soirees.

The antics and manifestoes of the Dadaists were...