Ernesto Read online

  At a time when he was wearing other friendships thin, Jane, in awe of his accomplishments, was remarkably tolerant, not to mention someone who certainly would not think to test his ego or his desires during alcohol-enriched escapades at sea. Handling the rod beautifully, never getting seasick, and even delivering provisions and helping with the cooking aboard, she was the perfect drinking and fishing partner; it was the ideal setup, one that Ernest relished.58 And so that summer, in the logbook of the Anita, someone inscribed “Ernest loves Jane,” like the initials of two wayward lovers scratched at the base of a rotting oak.59 Taking the occasional day off to write at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, Ernest spent most of the end of April and the beginning of May fishing, at sea with Jane, Charlie Thompson, Charlie’s brother Norberg, Josie, Bra Saunders, and their old bait-rigging jig.60 On May 11, Jane departed via airplane for New York, and Pauline returned on the nineteenth to her place at her husband’s side on the Anita just before a fresh volley of violence kicked off.61

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  The day after Pauline’s return to Cuba, the political situation there got much uglier. As democracy on the island neared its historic birthday of May 20, 1902, the police were uncovering new “plots to overthrow the government” every day, it seemed, and arresting hundreds of journalists, engineers, politicians, professors, and students from respected families. On the day Pauline cruised in on USS Florida, President Machado had ordered the cancellation of Independence Day, prohibited all celebrations, increased security, suspended constitutional rights, and fled the city. “Machado Bans Freedom Fetes in Cuba Today—Troops Guard Island in Threat of Revolt.”62 Having raided athletic clubs, schools, and sewing circles, his administration warned through the propaganda mill that it had beefed up security around the presidential palace, appropriated arms, seized membership ledgers, and confiscated seditious literature urging citizens to revolt.

  Advising military officials to lock up “everyone of a suspicious character and to adopt full precautions,” a government communiqué adverted that it could not reveal the identities of those who had been arrested, but it promised that citizens would be surprised when the identities of the incarcerated were revealed, for many of them “would never have been suspected because of their high positions.”63 All government officials and their residences would be closely guarded. No assemblies of more than three people would be permitted. People would not be allowed to idle and would be ordered to keep moving. The military governor, a colonel, would clear the streets at midnight. The police and soldiers would stand guard throughout the night.64 Despite these precautions, or perhaps in direct disobedience, the ABC initiated its campaign precisely as it had planned, launching a series of bombs at military brass like Major Rasco, Captain Samaniego, and Lieutenant Diego Diaz. Some arrived in boxes via post, still others by letter, while many were simply hurled at the officers’ homes.65

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  The fish were not biting, and duty was calling. With pressure from Perkins to complete Death in the Afternoon, Ernest holed himself up at Ambos Mundos with the solitary task of reviewing the galleys of his manuscript.66 Sounding lonesome in his letter, Ernest wrote Dos Passos to invite him to join him in Havana and to thank him for his feedback on his nonfiction work in progress.67

  Further along in the letter, his advice to Dos Passos, or perhaps to himself, was clear: Do not get caught up in politics, do not allow the nose-picking twerps and critics to spoil their day. Hadn’t they had their fill of dogma at the front? Now was the time to relish the moment, to create their art, to embrace the mystery in their immediate world. Life was too short and nasty to become involved in politics, and human weakness too formidable a foe to conquer.68 Likewise, the following month Ernest got into a rankle when a random fan, Paul Romaine, wrote him a letter to tell him he admired his writing, then informed him that he did not appreciate his refusal to take up the political causes of their day. The writer responded that he would not follow fashion by “swinging to the left”; putting one’s politics into one’s writing was “horseshit.”69 By 1932, Ernest had already lived “the old lie” that dying for one’s country was “sweet and right.”70

  In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest expounded on bullfighting, death, beloved Spain, the art of writing, fear, honor, and “grace under pressure.”71 Grace under pressure was something different from “guts,” he had written Scott Fitzgerald in a letter eight years before: “Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers.”72 The experimental mode in Death permitted him to interview himself so that he could elucidate previous works, theorize about literature, wax poetic, muse philosophical, and joke impudently about life, death, the craft of storytelling, and anything else under the sun.

  When it seemed Cuban politics could not get any worse, it did, the following month of June 1932.73 Militants detonated bombs in Havana’s private schools and tried again to kill the president, inciting hundreds of additional arrests and raids.74 When the rebels assassinated Captain Calvo, chief of the secret police, the following month, the US embassy increased its security to prevent any indiscretions.75 Tensions were running high and fierce against soldiers in America as well. It was business as usual, Ernest wrote in Esquire, disgusted when President Hoover ordered police to drive the veterans of the Bonus Army from their encampment on the National Mall.76 The police killed William Hushka and Eric Carlson, two vets who had served in the trenches in World War I, and President Hoover ordered General MacArthur’s Twelfth Army Regiment to roll tanks, fix bayonets, and release riot gas to clear the rest.77 There were ferocious clashes and resentment from veterans who had loyally served, making Hoover so unpopular that he lost the next election against Franklin D. Roosevelt in November of that year.78

  Four days before Ernest left Havana, Machado declared a state of emergency in Cuba and imposed conditions of military law on the island to protect his power and the peace.79

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  Having already advanced too much money to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Max Perkins stopped to check in on them at their new place in Baltimore. In a letter to Ernest, his star author, Max reported that the place had nice trees between which he would have liked walking had Scott not been so intent on sitting down to drink gin rickeys.80 These days, Zelda was looking “less pretty,” but had “more reality in her talk,” an improvement by Max’s calculations and a sign of better days to come. From Wyoming, Ernest wrote back fed up with both Zelda and Scott and in full harmony with Max: “Poor old Scott—He should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago before she was diagnosed as nutty—He is the great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation.”81 In 1935, Zelda was admitted to a psychiatric facility in Highland Hospital for chronic schizophrenia, and it became harder for the darlings of the Jazz Age to see each other without upsetting each other.

  In November, Ernest began a new story that he called “Fathers and Sons,” a title he borrowed from Ivan Turgenev. The young son in the story said he would not like his father to be buried overseas where he could not visit the grave, and his father agreed: they had to find a convenient place to be buried in America. “Couldn’t we all be buried out at the ranch?” the son asks, a suggestion that now evokes Ernest’s own eventual grave in Ketchum, Idaho, near which his son Bumby, or Jack, decided to live.82

  After arousing the ire of so many real people with The Sun Also Rises, the narrator of “Fathers and Sons” expresses a new resolution not to betray the living. His art was important, but there were people he cared about that he had to protect.

  From Thanksgiving to the Christmas holiday, Ernest stayed with his son and the Pfeiffers in Piggott and wrote another story about death and life called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Two waiters in a café serve brandy to a lonely old man who they know had tried to kill himself. They want to go home, but the old man does not want to leave the “clean and well-lighted” café where he finds some comfor
t. The younger waiter, who has a wife waiting at home, objects to the old man’s hanging around. The older waiter doesn’t mind as much. He understands how the old man feels. Perhaps, one day, darkness will come to him, and someone will help him to find the light. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”83 Four years after his father’s death, Ernest was purging intense emotions and defending empathy and solidarity in a simple story that many readers understood and appreciated.84

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  When Paramount unveiled the film version of A Farewell to Arms at the end of 1932, the Hollywood adaptation of his work so irritated Ernest that he declined the studio’s invitation to the premiere hosted for him in Piggott. After a fire in the barn where he had been working at the Pfeiffer house, Ernest took leave of Piggott, inviting Max Perkins down to meet him and blast ducks—the sort of shooting that only their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had known, while the ducks descended on the rice fields along the White River in December in southeastern Arkansas. Ernest had already rented a houseboat for them and wrote persuasively and insistently in his letter to his editor that it would be good for him and good for business. Max later wrote of those days as “some of the coldest hours of [his] life.” “There was just a powdering of snow on the steep banks…where we waited for ducks to drop to the water. It was just like the rivers in Harper’s Weekly Civil War pictures.”85

  Stopping over in New York en route to Key West, Ernest advanced his career by meeting with his literary rivals Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe (for the first time), and with critic Edmund Wilson, who observed during an intimate dinner one evening, during which Scott became quite drunk, that “Hemingway was now a great man and Scott so much overcome with his greatness that he embarrassed me by his self-abasement.”86

  He also met Arnold Gingrich during this trip at Louis Henry Cohn’s rare-book shop, who flirted and stroked Ernest’s ego by mentioning his growing collection of “Hemingway first editions.” Receptive to flattery, Ernest wrote Gingrich in a letter: “Am glad you liked the last chapter in the last book [Death in the Afternoon]—it is what the book is about but nobody seems to notice that…Papa feels pretty good.”87

  Back in Key West on Whitehead Street in his writing barbican, Ernest surveyed the three peacocks preening across his grassed enclosure as he continued his letter exchange with Gingrich, who was openly courting him and informed him that he would soon be launching a magazine. It would be “to the American male what Vogue is to the female,” he said, “but it won’t be the least damn bit like Vanity Fair. It aims to have ample hair on its chest, to say nothing of adequate cojones.” Ernest would be guaranteed top billing and could write about whatever he pleased: “You write and I print.”88 The rising writer dictated his terms to the man that he would later call a weasel: “This is a very I, me, mine letter, but you said you were interested.” The $250 per article fee was nonnegotiable, and Ernest would write four dispatches: the first letter would be from Cuba, the second from Spain, and the third and fourth from Africa.89

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  By the end of the January 1933, as Ernest was in Key West and fishing from Bra Saunders’s boat with other invited guests, the newspapers made the situation in Cuba sound hopeless: “REVOLT BY TERROR GOING ON IN CUBA; FEAR OF RIOT GROWS. 150 DEATHS LAID TO POLICE…Killings Augmented by Retaliatory Bombings by ABC…MANY URGE INTERVENTION. Americans in Cuba Are Ready to Close Business.”90 New York Times reporter Russell Porter had gathered his facts in Havana and returned to the United States to publish where he would not be censored: The political situation was “very ugly,” and no one could predict when it would end. President Machado had ruled with an iron hand and put down rebellion after rebellion using repressive measures to kill off the competition, which only increased opposition and terrorist acts. Cuban prisons were overcrowded with students, young doctors, lawyers, labor leaders, and others. Based on Porter’s sources, 150 to 200 people had been killed in secret that year, such as the journalist Armando André, who dared to publish an article against Machado before he was murdered in secret by the police.91

  Writing by morning and fishing most afternoons, Ernest completed two more stories by the end of February, and three and a half chapters of a new novel, To Have and Have Not. Self-promoting and schmoozing via letter with his new business partner Mr. Gingrich, he pushed Gingrich to visit him in Havana so that they could talk business, fish, and chin-wag.92 Ernest departed on April 12 in a rented boat for his second annual two-month fishing trip to Cuba, during which he would happily receive a visit from Gus Pfeiffer and Pauline’s brother, Karl. That month, “Homage to Switzerland” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, about Mr. Johnson, Mr. Wheeler, and Mr. Harris, stuck in the train station due to heavy snows while attempting to return to Paris. The story showcases an ear for dialogue and dialect, as well as much persistent regret about the author’s divorce and his father’s suicide. Ernest also published “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” rounding out a lucrative season of magazine pieces. In conversation with an ambulance driver resembling the author, two doctors, one Christian and one Jewish, tell the story of a young man distraught with lust who came to see them requesting a castration. When the doctors refused, the man’s troubled conscience ultimately compelled him to perform the operation himself, resulting in his death.

  By that time, international newspapers were now also calling for an end to Machado’s “reign of terror.” As a military junta composed of Machado opponents assembled in Miami, the world watched, optimistic that a new US president would mean military intervention to stop the flow of blood. Others, remembering previous invasions, remained skeptical. Flanks exposed and pretenses irrecoverable, Machado retaliated against anybody who appeared to deceive. Under pressure, Roosevelt shuffled the deck, changed the guard, and appointed Sumner Welles to assistant secretary of state. A Harvard graduate from New York City whose family had long been connected with the Roosevelts, Sumner spoke Spanish, had some experience in Latin America, but no obvious ties to big sugar, and was “generally familiar with the Cuban situation.”93 The watching world hoped Welles could deliver some relief to a tense situation. All wondered if the new statesman in Washington could calm an ever-increasing dictatorship and the violent protests.94 From Key West where she had returned to attend to the house and children, Pauline wrote, missing her husband still in Havana: “No papa to admire with red-orange brown skin and handsome moustache over tightly closed mouth.”95

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  One of the first Cubans to sniff Papa out at the taverns and along the docks of Havana was a sociable and enterprising newspaperman. Having himself received an education in the United States, José Antonio Fernández de Castro loved American artists and writers with whom he could hold a stimulating conversation in English. As a young man, José Antonio revolted with twelve other concerned intellectuals (called “the Thirteen”) against President Alfredo Zayas, one of the island’s shadiest leaders who had “won” the lottery twice and erected statues of himself while still alive. Subsequently, young José Antonio had been imprisoned and exiled.96 Returning to Cuba after the situation had cooled, José Antonio became editor-in-chief of Orbe, the magazine produced by Diario de la Marina, Havana’s most respected newspaper. When José Antonio heard the author of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms was in town, the resourceful newsman tracked him down and seduced him by telling him he wanted to interview him about his fishing exploits.97

  Urbane, street savvy, and daring, José Antonio was invited frequently aboard the Anita after his “fishing interview” in May 1933 and led Ernest along the soft, lovely underbelly of Havana throughout the summers of thirty-three and thirty-four.98 Also in that world was Walker Evans, who had travelled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by journalist Carleton Beals. Soon Evans and Hemingway became drinking buddies. Hemingway encouraged him to continue his work, lent him some mo
ney, and, aboard the Anita, helped him to smuggle his provocative photographs out of the country during the oppressive regime.99 “Dinner with Walker Evans,” marked Ernest in the Anita logs; he later reminisced that he and Walker “were both working against Machado at the time.”100

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  When she swerved her Packard to evade a bus in the other lane, Mrs. Mason splashed Ernest’s name across the national newspapers. Her car dropped off the soft shoulder, rolling down a forty-foot embankment into a ravine, with Tony, her adopted three-year-old boy, and two of Ernest’s sons, Patrick and Jack, entrusted to her company.101 Miraculously, the car landed on its feet: four wheels on the ground. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Mason. I’ll get you right out,” Bumby, who was nine years old, reassured Jane.102 Pushing their way out of a window as bystanders watched from the road, they were shaken up, having escaped disaster with only a few bruises.

  Outwardly calm, Jane kept an obligation to attend a dinner at the embassy that very evening. But as she was retelling the story of the accident, the ambassador made the mistake of laughing and she slapped him across the face, making a horrible scene.103 Afterward, Jane had to inform Mr. Hemingway about the “massacre” she had brought upon their sons.104

  “Well they have got to have a motor accident sometime in their life and I am very glad they started with you, Mrs. M.,” he joked nervously, perhaps to release her from the guilt.105 Appearing with a hangover at the docks to fish with him the following day, she wrestled in two marlins. But something had broken between them, she could sense it: she had now become the insane woman who had endangered his sons.106 Sending the children and their nanny back to Key West, Ernest went out with Josie and Jane; she caught three tunas but showed signs of more unstable behavior, jumping from an open window the following day, May 29.107 By the thirtieth, Pauline had arrived in Havana. After fishing all day with Ernest aboard the Anita, she insisted that they visit Jane to check on her condition at her Jaimanitas home.