Ernesto Page 14
Fearing for his life after receiving threats, Carlos Hevia, the former interim president of Cuba, fled his homeland in March when civil war broke out anew on the island, as the ABC, Communist Party, Authentic Party, and Joven Cuba group, led by former vice president Guiteras, joined forces in an attempt to topple Batista. They failed. Arriving in Florida via airplane, Hevia, a graduate of the US Naval Academy, reported that the island was in chaos: “Wildest confusion prevails over the island…about 200 persons have been massacred since Saturday morning…They are finding bodies everywhere and before I left Havana this afternoon I was told of the slaying of six or seven persons that I knew. Men are being taken from their homes presumably destined for prison, and their bodies found later. There is no government in Cuba.”9 A general strike had halted business, interrupted postal and rail service, then erupted into armed conflict. To strengthen his position and squash civil unrest, Batista declared labor unions illegal and summoned military courts to administer the death penalty to “offenders and disturbers.”10
Meanwhile the kidnapping of a Cuban “capitalist,” heir to a sizeable fortune, resulted in the payment of $300,000 in ransom, a manhunt, and the arrest of twenty members of a group calling themselves the “Young Cubans.” When police raided Havana’s Hotel Park View, suspicions were that Alvin Karpis, an American gangster, had been a coconspirator in the crime.11 In May, Colonel Batista’s forces killed former vice president Guiteras, a patriot and respected leader in the Authentic Party. Inspired by José Martí’s exile and triumphant return to his homeland, Guiteras was waiting for a boat in Matanzas Province when he was gunned down by military police.12
Ever an art enthusiast, advocate for friends, and entrepreneur, Ernest funded and organized a New York exhibition for Antonio Gattorno’s paintings at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery at 22 East Sixtieth Street from January 6 to 25, 1935, and he recruited Dos Passos to collaborate on the show’s promotional pamphlet.13 Once told by Arnold Gingrich to speculate on rare editions of his own books, the author now advised all his business partners to purchase paintings from Gattorno, whom he pitched as a leader of Cuba’s vanguard: “Gattorno is a Cuban painter who is also a painter for the world.”14
When Gattorno seemed to suspect Ernest of profiting at his expense, Ernest protested that his costs greatly exceeded his profits. Salvaging the friendship if not the business partnership, Hemingway advised Gattorno to emigrate to New York where his work could be best represented and he could make a living with dignity.
Helping other artists had never been an easy business; Ernest had tried several times, occasionally receiving compensation for his efforts. Ernest had smuggled Joyce’s Ulysses into the United States while the book was banned.15 In the United States, he had encouraged Prudencio de Pereda, Ned Calmer, and Luis Quintanilla, whose work he invested in and promoted at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The day after his exhibition opening, Quintanilla was arrested by the Spanish government on charges of conspiracy and held in the Presidio Modelo (the “model prison”) in Cuba, so Ernest signed the petition campaigning for his release.16
With many causes to take up, some more exasperating than others, he soon received a letter from Arnold Samuelson conveying the good news that one of the young writer’s fishing pieces had been accepted for publication in Outdoor Life, with Arnold nevertheless admitting that “when you don’t look over it, the stuff doesn’t seem to go so hot.”17 Bothered by his conscience, Arnold also confessed to Hemingway that he had impregnated an underage Conch girl aboard the Pilar, which was the real reason he left town when he did, for, out of loyalty, he had to spare his mentor a scandal.18 Replying with a few encouraging words and on two occasions with a few bucks, Ernest advised Arnold to keep trying, or accept another career.19 Arnold moved out to North Dakota and lived in a shack pursuing a monastic life similar to the one lived in upper Michigan by his mentor. Now and again, he did some construction for his brother, or on his own to keep himself fed. Travelling to Mexico on a shoestring budget, he sought experiences that he could write about.
In an Esquire “High Seas Letter” called “Monologue to the Maestro,” Ernest satirized the failure of the kid he had invited to apprentice as a writer and deckhand in Cuba. Though it was all in good fun, in it he voiced his frustration with mentoring a pupil who seemed doomed to fail. As he told the story, he was “flattered and appalled” when the young man from Minnesota turned up on his doorstep and told him he always wanted to become a writer and go out to sea. Taking pity on him, Hemingway wrote that he tried to give him both: he offered him a job and took him to Cuba, attempting to fulfill the wishes of the young man he nicknamed “the Maestro” for the violin he carried in a beat-up case and played badly aboard—or “Mice,” for short. To help another man with so much resolve to become a writer yet so little aptitude was frustrating indeed.20 Overwhelmed by his time with Hemingway, Arnold was never happy with what he had written.21 Over his life, Arnold’s inner frustrations seemed to express themselves in the domestic abuse and the estrangement of his children as he withdrew, became the county crank, and was ostracized in the town where his family abandoned him and left him to die alone.22
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Wiring his Cuban skipper, Hemingway told Carlos Gutierrez he would sail south for Havana to fish the marlin that were running as soon as he could fix the Pilar’s failing engine, but the weather and ongoing mechanical trouble aboard halted his plans. Rushing out to fasten down his new boat, Hemingway and his family braced for the storm they would later call the “Labor Day Hurricane” of 1935. In a letter to Max Perkins, Hemingway graphically described the hurricane as it tore through the Keys and how he found bloated bodies of veterans that he had personally known floating in the stagnant water afterward.23
After the Bonus Army had irritated a conservative government by marching across the nation and camping on the White House lawn to receive their promised “bonus,” they had been assigned public works projects, including the revitalization taking place at Matecumbe Key. Leaving the vets endangered in a temporary work camp and failing to come to their aid when the Labor Day Hurricane approached was a negligence that enraged the author when he helped with the eventual clean-up and retrieved their swollen corpses from the surf.
In response, Hemingway launched an article in New Masses magazine titled, “Who Remembered the Vets?”24 In it, he addressed politicians and candidly and graphically presented the reality of the scenes he had witnessed. He insisted that these deaths were preventable and suggested that the public officials did not evacuate the veterans because a hurricane was an expedient and convenient way to dispose of the annoyances of the Bonus Army.25 Vividly he described the bodies of men abandoned by the feds, drowned, bloated, and blistering in the sun.26 The bodies of the veterans belonged to men he had known—they had served in World War I, as he had, and they had drunk at Josie’s bar. Remembering and burying them was the least that he could do to honor what he considered to be his band of brothers.
Was he now writing for the journal that he had once called “the most puerile and shitty house organ I’ve ever seen”?27 The position he took in New Masses was one of the most politically charged he had taken to date, and the “literary revolution boys” seemed to approve of his transformation. Hicks said Hemingway’s newfound identification for the working class had a quality “that had been disastrously absent from his previous work,” suggesting that “Hemingway was going somewhere.”28 During the same week, Roosevelt aroused the public’s admiration with the dedication of the Hoover Dam. Whoever had neglected to protect the veterans of Matecumbe Key at the beginning of the month could be disregarded in the name of progress.
The president had larger geopolitical problems as well. In 1935 the Third Reich’s ascension to power, Germany’s rearmament and intervention in Spain, Mussolini’s invasion of East Africa, and the victory of Nationalist armies in Jiangxi, China, mesmerized America. To the vindication of roaring crowds, Hitler reviled the Treaty of
Versailles, assembled his forces, and promised glory für das Vaterland. Intellectuals and artists, horrified by these developments, felt it was their duty to do something, and among them there was mounting pressure to take a side and take a stand. As New Masses editor Mike Gold proclaimed, “Every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme or it is merely confectionary.”29
At first Ernest Hemingway disagreed: the thing to do was to stay the hell out of it. In “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” written for Esquire in September 1935, he defined his position unmistakably against the United States’ involvement in the war in Europe: It was a “hell of a broth…brewing…we have no need to drink…We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and we should never be sucked in again.”30 While lying wounded in the mud on the Italian front during World War I, he had promised himself that he would do everything he could to prevent another war, young men’s lives thrown away, because of the fashions and deceits of politics.31
In October, Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia while the world gasped, too far removed to prevent these acts of conquest. Esquire ran Hemingway’s article “The Malady of Power: A Serious Second Letter.” Recalling his days in Europe as a reporter covering a flawed peace process after World War I, he told readers about his fellow reporter’s theory: any politician or patriot, once given the supreme office of the state, deteriorated under the malady of power. “War is coming in Europe as sure as winter follows fall,” but President Roosevelt must not succumb to his ambition and serve his countrymen by keeping them out of Europe’s never-ending wars.32 To his credit as a reporter at the Toronto Star, Ernest had criticized the Treaty of Versailles and had foreseen the forthcoming consequences of “an unjust, conqueror’s peace” in 1922.33 On the other hand, could he not see the degree that his own ego and ambition were maladies of power affecting his art?
When Green Hills of Africa appeared at the end of October, sales were disappointing, and criticism was largely negative. Though the author was sure he had written a good book, several critics condemned it, and his Esquire “letters,” as a waste of talent. Abner Green called the leisure pieces “potboilers” and asked him directly to give up features about hunting, fishing, or bullfighting. Mike Gold said he was “too bourgeois” and should consider the common man. His friend Edmund Wilson asked him to stop imposing this overblown image of himself and instead write the honest prose he claimed to love about “important themes.”34 Writing for the New Republic, T. S. Matthews lamented, “It used to be pretty exciting, sitting down to read a new book by Hemingway, but now it’s damn near alarming…he thinks he can write about anything and get away with it. He probably can, too. But it isn’t the hot stuff he says he knows it is.”35 In a letter to his editor, Ernest complained and blamed Scribner’s marketing and pricing of the book, as well as his own bad judgment in arrogantly rubbing certain key critics the wrong way.36
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Facing continuing civil unrest, bombings, and insurgent intimidation, President Mendieta resigned in December. Colonel Batista remained as head of the military—sparking further controversy and unrest when Cuba appointed José Agripino Barnet (from the National Union party) as its seventh provisional president since Machado’s deposition.37 Without a plan or support from student and paramilitary groups, Barnet was also destined to fail. In a private letter expressing his hope for a type of election that would allow them to continue to work with Batista behind the scenes, Caffery wrote Welles, “The hardest nut to crack is, of course, this matter of elections because it is required and still requires my constant daily hammering.”38
Contending with Fitzgerald’s submission of the first part of The Crack-Up in Esquire, the second installment of Ernest’s novel To Have and Have Not appeared in January 1936. Its title, “White Man, Black Man, Alphabet Man,” was later changed to “The Tradesman’s Return.”39 Unlike Perkins who censored him often, Gingrich would never take issue with an off-color remark, or with racy or risky insinuations about tense alliances between white and black working classes (Conch Captain Morgan and his black shipmate Wesley), enmity against the affluent, or criticism of governmental agencies like FERA and the WPA.
To settle accounts with his friend Antonio Gattorno, Ernest persuaded Gingrich to publish several full color reproductions of his work in May in Esquire in a two-page spread along with excerpts from a monograph Ernest had written and published in Havana that year. Gifting him his own fans in North America, Ernest publicly endorsed the Cuban painter: “At thirty-one, he is the youngest person that I know although there is no youth in his painting. There is simply good painting.”40 The Fifteenth International Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago soon after selected Gattorno’s watercolors for exhibition, resulting in his receiving the Watson F. Blair Purchase Prize. “There now, my boy, did not Daddy do you right?” Hemingway told Gattorno. “Although there was only six years’ difference in our age he always called me ‘my boy,’” said Gattorno years later, after taking Hemingway’s advice and moving to New York. “He was just like a brother to me.”41
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In spite of A Farewell to Arms’ cinema presence and the writer’s unrivaled fame, feelings of failure, anxiety, and depression overtook Ernest as 1936 began. Wherever they travelled throughout the 1930s, inequities were obvious. The sobriety and courage of men, mariners, soldiers, and hunters contrasted with the superiority and effeminacy of privileged imposters, fakers, and would-be artists, never seeming to work in Ernest’s midst, filled him with loathing and defined the characteristics of the villains in stories that he was producing in a torrent at that time. As relationships shifted and his deep need for financial independence remained, a cocktail of irritation and intention combusted in the exquisite craft in several stories containing damning descriptions of his family and friends, which he would publish later that year.
Much like in his father, anxiety originating in financial worries grew into recurrent depression as he entered middle age.42 These matters occupied his mind even while the extraordinary wealth of the Pfeiffer family amply assured their needs. From Pauline’s family had come the house, the pool, many cash advances, and most of the trust fund for his mother after his father’s suicide.43 The modest successes of Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa had checked his vainglorious ambitions, fueled resentment about his dependence on the Pfeiffers, and put the squeeze on his freedom and pride. Pauline, sensing this displeasure, tried to ease her husband’s mind: for the Pfeiffers, money was really nothing to worry about, she reassured. But these assurances backfired on a husband determined to fend for himself and led to a growing animosity with respect to subsequent gifts, such that he increasingly asserted his independence aboard the Pilar and during weeks out on the water with Jane Mason.44
Continuing to chase Tiamat and Leviathan in Bimini in June and July, he caught a 785-pound mako, nearly a world record, and a 540-pound marlin, his largest ever. To distract him from his worries, Ernest had invited F. Scott Fitzgerald to join him on the island. Whenever fishing lulled, he laced up his boxing gloves and taunted any takers, while literary rival Scott stood by and watched: “Any [Bahamian] Negro who could stay in the ring with him for three-minute rounds” could win a $250 prize.45
A letter that Ernest wrote Scott just after the trip reveals the intensity of their friendship and Ernest’s competitiveness. In a response to Scott’s complaints about his poor health, about Zelda’s mental illness, and about his impotence on the page, Ernest expressed sympathy, made suggestions, attempted jokes, and tried to distract him by inviting Scott on another exciting trip, this time to Cuba, where a big-ticket boxing match between Joe Louis and Isidoro Gastanaga was scheduled to take place.46 Himself a writer prone to insomnia, Ernest suggested Scott just lie in bed even when unable to sleep, so he would still get some rest: “If you can lie still and take it easy and just consider your life and everything else as an outsider and not give a damn—it is a he
ll of a help.”47 Getting some exercise or fresh air might help as well, though Ernest admitted he sometimes lay awake thinking on the boat and looking up in silence at the stars. Perhaps Scott’s obsession with youth prevented him from coming of age, Ernest speculated, then cut through his airs of superiority: “You have taken so damned much punishment I have no business trying to tell you anything…Would love to see you though.”48 Unable to hold the event in a warzone, promoters feared losing their investment, so Ernest guessed that the fight would be canceled, but he invited Scott anyway to come to Cuba, fish, learn about revolutions (as every writer should), and spend some quality time.49
As 1936 began, both writers continued to suffer from writer’s block, insomnia, and morose moods that left them on edge. Ernest gained weight, snapped at family and friends, and became difficult to abide.50 When at a cocktail party, a few months away from his thirty-seventh birthday, Ernest overheard Wallace Stevens speak ill of him to sister Ursula, he stormed out, struck the drunken poet several times in the head, and said he felt much better after giving him “a good beating.”51 To his mother-in-law, he confided that it was his first experience with true sorrow: “Had never had the real old melancholia and [I] am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.”52
While critics belittled him and finances worsened, Ernest told friends, such as Sara Murphy, that he was “going to blow his lousy head off.”53 Whether this despair was family inheritance or writer’s curse, it became chronic and conspicuous. In Sara’s words, “There were days when he was absolutely a malevolent bastard, full of self-loathing. But the awfulness would leave him after a couple of hours. Generally, before he lost that black mood someone caught hell for it.”54 These periods produced some of his best work, but friends and family often paid a price as he lashed out during the pain of the writing process and in unflattering portrayals of his intimates.