Ernesto Read online

  With his Key West handyman Toby Bruce at the wheel, the author stopped in New Orleans with his son Patrick and stayed at the Hotel Monteleone on his way back to Key West from the Nordquist ranch, with a pit stop in Piggott.88 On November 15, 1936, the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced, “Rebels Reported Entering Besieged Capital of Spain: Fascists Declared at the Edge of Madrid After Bombardment from Air Costing 53 Lives” and juxtaposed it with the prodding headline, “Hemingway Stops in City on Way to Key West, Florida: Famous Author Denies Charge He Has Become Soft.” Earlier that month, Ernest had received a letter from John Wheeler that invited him to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), and to Pauline’s dismay, her husband proudly accepted the position, causing her to fear subsequently for his safety. To assure his wife, Ernest told her he would be in Spain with the Jewish bullfighter she knew, Sidney Franklin, but it was not a great relief.

  * * *

  —

  On Christmas eve, Colonel Batista had President Gómez impeached. When Batista had introduced a bill that called for a nine-cent tax on every bag of sugar to create rural schools under army control, Gómez opposed the bill, so Batista maneuvered by threatening to dissolve the civil government and reinstate military control. To avoid dissolution, the House voted 111 to 45 and the Senate voted 22 to 12 for Gómez’s impeachment.89 Two days later, Cuba named the vice president, Federico Laredo Brú, as Gómez’s successor. Brú would support Batista’s initiatives and continue in power for nearly four years until Batista himself took over, becoming president, as well as dictator in name and deed.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Romantic Getaway for Two in Civil-War Spain (1936–1939)

  One morning just after Christmas in Joe Russell’s Key West bar, Sloppy Joe’s, Ernest looked up from his newspaper to encounter two long and shapely legs extending from a bar stool, and then a flash of golden hair tossed back from the pretty head of Martha Gellhorn, a young reporter, purportedly on vacation with her mother and brother in Key West. There has been much speculation among biographers that Gellhorn purposefully engineered the meeting with her future husband.1 As Pauline’s friend from Key West Lorine Thompson later appreciated, “She said she came to see Ernest, she wanted him to read a book she had written, she wanted to know him…There was no question about it; you could see she was making a play for him…Pauline tried to ignore it. What she felt underneath nobody knew…Martha was a very charming girl and if I had known her under other circumstances I would have liked her very much.”2

  After attending private schools, much like Pauline, in native Saint Louis and Philadelphia (John Burroughs School and Bryn Mawr, respectively) the daughter of suffragist Edna Gellhorn had been shrewdly building her career in journalism.3 While still in her midtwenties, Martha had published articles in the New Republic, become a foreign correspondent in France, joined the European pacifist movement, and published a book in 1934 about these experiences called What Mad Pursuit. Martha had also managed to cultivate a friendship and feminist alliance with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, her mother’s friend from Bryn Mawr.4

  When Martha returned to the United States, the First Lady helped her to obtain a post with Harry Hopkins in the Works Progress Administration as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. From the disturbing scenes of the Great Depression that she had witnessed, Martha wrote The Trouble I’ve Seen, a title that took its name from the Negro spiritual. With the support of H. G. Wells, the sixty-nine-year-old British author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, whom she had met at the White House in 1935, Martha published it with Putnam in 1936.5 This collection of hard-boiled vignettes that she wrote at the age of twenty-eight depicting American poverty in terse and irrefutable prose inspired the New York Herald Tribune to compare her style with that of Ernest Hemingway.6 In fact, she had read and emulated him—his imagination, his gift for dialogue and action, his tenacity and genius.7

  In December of that year, she took a spur-of-the-moment vacation with her mother and brother to Key West. In the To Have and Have Not manuscript in progress when he met Martha Gellhorn, Ernest wrote afterward, “She sat on a high stool with her legs tucked under her and looked out at the street. Freddy looked at her admiringly. He thought she was the prettiest stranger in Key West that winter. Prettier even than the famous beautiful Mrs. Bradley.”8 When he first saw her with her brother, he thought he was her fiancé and resolved to get her alone and away from the “young punk” if given three days to do it.9

  Martha, or “Marty,” spoke about the civil war in beloved Spain and about the fight against fascism in Europe that she had witnessed firsthand as a reporter in France and Germany. Ernest asked patient questions in the presence of her mother and brother about her writing while she applied the brakes to enthrall and not overpower during that first encounter. It might have been one of the first occasions that Ernest Hemingway had been genuinely impressed with the professional accomplishments of a woman he wanted, an element seemingly heightening the thrill of desire as he moved in for the kill.

  When her brother and mother left Key West, Martha stayed on at the Colonial Hotel on Duval Street. Stirred by chemistry, exhilarating conversations, and the promise of a relationship that would nourish her development, an affair brewed between the two charismatic and iron-willed writers. Despite all encumbrances, such as civil war and marriage, they found a way to rendezvous and grew ever more intimate in Miami, New York, and Madrid.

  Just after her encounter with Ernest, Martha sent Eleanor Roosevelt a full report. The remote and dilapidated island of Key West was “the best thing [she had] found in America.”10 Her first impression of Hemingway reflects a similar perspective; he was falling to pieces, but marvelous in his naturalness, spontaneity, and improbable charms. Defying explanation, he was “an odd bird, very loveable and full of fire and a marvelous story teller.”11 Years later, after marital differences and resentments had taken their toll, Martha’s recollection of their first encounter became much less flattering: reading his mail at the bar, he was a frowzy and smelly man, barefooted, and too casual in a wrinkled shirt and soiled Basque shorts held only by a rope belt. She had innocently wandered into the bar without knowing he would be there, and it was he who had approached her party and pursued the conversation.12 Then he had beguiled her with stories about Cuba, hurricanes, and writing.13 Though Martha said later that she had not intended to seek Ernest out, it is rather unlikely that this was true since she had read him extensively, admired his work, found inspiration in it, and hoped that the trip to Key West would help her with her writing.14

  A year before Martha’s arrival, Ernest’s gentle ribbing of Arnold Samuelson, “Monologue to the Maestro,” as it appeared in Esquire, specified, “If any more aspirant writers come on board the Pilar let them be females, let them be very beautiful, and let them bring champagne,” so it is probable Martha read these lines and knew she had an open invitation and a mentor who might help her to break through.15 It is possible that Martha did not first expect to become romantically involved with Hemingway, or admit to herself that this was among her desires.

  What is clear to most observers of this unlikely and volatile couple is the contrast in their appearances. Though both were tall, at thirty-seven years old and two-hundred pounds, massive Hemingway was still as Joyce described—“a big powerful peasant” as “strong as a buffalo”—but also now showing signs of wear: a receding hairline, a scar across his wrinkled brow, and his large frame burdened by excess weight. In her late twenties, Martha was a knockout. She was tall and thin and had beautiful skin and a “low, husky, eastern-seaboard-accented voice.”16 Youthful, attractive, and stylish, Martha had charm. She was the sort of woman that people noticed as she walked into the room. Beside Martha, Ernest could often appear paternal, talking and acting older than the twenty-eight-year-old with a “fiery, still almost teenage temperament.” Skinner, a Sloppy Joe’s black bartender, said Martha sitting beside Hemingwa
y that day at the bar reminded him of “beauty and the beast.”17

  While Hadley, Pauline, and Martha were all from Saint Louis and believers in the Hemingway cult, these three women were distinct characters. Martha found Pauline “very grumpy” during their first meeting, much as Hadley had found Pauline to be in the car on the way to the Loire when Pauline was attempting to wrestle her husband away.18 As Pauline had written Hadley effusive letters after visiting her and Ernest, Martha wrote Pauline a duplicitous thank-you after visiting the Hemingway home at Whitehead Street: “I had a very fine time with Ernestino…That man—Ernestino—is a lovely guy as you have no doubt guessed yourself, long before this…What I am trying to tell you in my halting way is that you are a fine girl and it was good of you not to mind my becoming a fixture, like a kudu head, in your home.”19

  In her next letter to the Roosevelts, Martha would write that the time in the Caribbean had been good for her, but it felt now that the world was going to hell as Hitler offered his support to Franco with two divisions, and another great war appeared inevitable.20 Like Ernest, she would conclude that the thing to do was “to work all day and all night and live too, and swim and get the sun in one’s hair and laugh and love as many people as one can find around and do all this terribly fast, because the time is getting shorter and shorter every day.”21 If Hemingway represented a pathway to greatness for this brilliant and determined young woman from Saint Louis, heartbreaks experienced together as combat correspondents and in the context of their troubled relationship became an unresolvable reality that shipwrecked their hopes and made their paradise island a living hell.

  Nevertheless as Martha departed just after their first meeting in Key West and headed home to Saint Louis via Miami and Jacksonville, Ernest hastened via airplane to catch up with her, meeting her in Miami to dine on steaks with her, as friends, chaperoned by a champion heavyweight fighter (with an uncommonly large head) from New Zealand named Tom Heeney. In the station before Martha departed to Jacksonville and before he departed to New York, Ernest gave her a tender kiss on the forehead and said, “Goodbye, daughter.” Knowing Martha’s fondness for lost causes, Ernest had given her the manuscript of To Have and Have Not to take with her. It contained all the sordid details of a marriage that seemed to be on the ropes.

  A correspondence between the two writers began. By mid-January, Ernest officially signed the contract with NANA to cover the Spanish Civil War at one thousand dollars per article and five hundred dollars per cable. Forming Contemporary Historians, Inc., he, Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and Lillian Hellman would collaborate with Dutch director Joris Ivens to produce a film about the war called The Spanish Earth. Joining American Friends of Spanish Democracy, he would head a committee to fund the purchase of Loyalist ambulances. Though Martha had not been able to secure an official assignment to report on the war in Spain, she would continue seeking an assignment in Madrid.

  While Mr. Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn would soon rendezvous in Spain, Pauline Hemingway passed the time with a young writer named Jack Latimer, who took her up on her offer to edit a manuscript for his mystery novel. Latimer later remembered Pauline as “not pretty, but very winning, very bright. Her face was not beautiful, but so intelligent and alert that she became attractive.”22 While touring Mexico with her friend Esther Chambers in March, Mrs. Hemingway wrote her lost husband to kvetch that she felt misplaced and lonesome, she missed being with him very much, and she missed their secret jokes and “the way we pass the time.” Returning home, she wrote more of the same: “[I am] sick and tired of all these people in Key West and I wish you were here sleeping in my bed and using my bathroom and drinking my whiskey.”23 The uncertainty of her sexual relationship with Latimer perhaps gave rise to Pauline’s unflattering characterization as an adulteress in To Have and Have Not, a “little Mick slut” who became tipsy and smitten with drunken John MacWalsey in her husband’s absence.

  To Have and Have Not picked up protagonist Harry Morgan’s story—that of a fisherman from Key West, fallen on hard times—where “One Trip Across” and “The Tradesman’s Return” left off. The characters were so identifiably based on real events and people Ernest knew that it would cause an argument with his editor that could be resolved only with a lawyer’s intervention. It also shows an author in transition—trapped somewhere between his modernist detachment and his recognition of the inevitability of World War II and his espousal of the Loyalist cause. While Morgan appeared on the surface to respond to the critics clamoring for Hemingway to adopt a stronger position on the struggles of the oppressed, the novel was apolitical and somewhat nihilistic. While class struggle appeared to be a central theme, the whole corrupt society was ultimately too great for one man to take on and—as in A Farewell to Arms—this society kills him. Though the narrative portrays the class struggles, repression, lawlessness, revolution, and betrayals that Ernest had seen, he also abhorred “political systems at least as much as their practitioners,” and as the story unfolded, he made his beliefs abundantly clear.24

  The hero of the novel seemed to be just as adamant as its author about his independence: “Harry Morgan symbolizes the struggle of self-determination.”25 Politics were ephemeral, but he and his art were not. Later in life, Ernest insisted, “If anyone thinks that I am worried about anyone reading political implications in my stories, he is wrong…my only concern is that my stories are straight and good.”26

  By 1933, American investors owned 8 percent of Cuban sugar, and creditors held the reins of the sugar industry, tobacco, banks, railroads, streetcar lines, electric plants, telephone systems, and public utilities, but the viewpoint Ernest represented in To Have and Have Not was not the one for which fashionable critics clamored.27 Hemingway never lost his “cynical distaste for all politicians”; after his speech at the Second American Writers Congress on June 4, 1937, he “re-emphasized his abiding lack of faith in governmental solutions to social problems, and reaffirmed his personal and artistic independence from all political parties and ideologies.”28

  To Have and Have Not expresses much irritation with the excesses of the rich and a significant degree of self-loathing from an artist who subsists in their shadows. It resembles “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” except here the writer-protagonist is named Richard Gordon. Richard betrays his rich wife, Helen Gordon, with the even richer and prettier Helène Bradley in a scene strongly resembling Ernest’s affair with Jane. The slight variance in the spelling of their names suggests that the two women are nearly interchangeable. Marginalized and disingenuous, Gordon is an inglorious character in this story who appears awkward between two domineering and demanding ladies of means as he attempts to unite with the working people, whom he romanticizes by writing a book about a strike in a textile factory. Riding a bicycle home from Freddy’s Bar, he crosses paths with Marie, the wife of the working-class hero Harry Morgan:

  A heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blond hair showing under her old man’s felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size? Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn’t she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific.29

  Having seen Marie, not as a person, but as an object, Richard rushes to the typewriter to write about her, but he fumbles the description, creating a caricature rather than a character. Thus Richard’s narrative becomes self-conscious and autocritical self-parody of Ernest Hemingway, the author who had created him.

  While Richard is having sex with Helène, her husband appears, but she begs Richard not to pay attention to him. When Richard says he does not wish to continue with her husband there, Helène slaps him across the face.30 Following this scene, Richard Gordon returns home to his wife Helen, who interrogates him: “You have lipstick on your shirt…And over your ear. Where have you been?” When Richard explains that he has
been at “the Bradleys,” Helen answers: “I know. Don’t come near me. You reek of that woman.” “It’s over,” declares Helen. “If you weren’t so conceited and I weren’t so good to you, you’d have seen it was over a long time ago.” Richard responds: “You bitch.”31

  While the scene is fiction, the characters’ manner of speaking and the resemblance to the Pauline, Ernest, and Jane triangle are so scathing that it must have pained anyone who knew the Hemingways to read. To characterize the wife, Helen, Hemingway references her deep religious convictions, her close relationship with her mother, and her abortion, details all alluding to Pauline.32 She is also portrayed as a woman who loves her husband more than anything else in the world, just as Pauline was dedicated to her husband, but Ernest was dedicated to his writing.33

  After reading the manner in which Ernest took aim at all who could have kept him down in the pieces of the manuscript that were scheduled to be released first in Esquire, Gingrich insisted that he alter the content to avoid being sued for libel; he flew down personally in January to Bimini to discuss these changes with Ernest, Pauline, and Ernest’s lawyer, Moe Speiser. For more than a week, they fought bitterly about the particulars: “It was like those Paris riots, where the rioters and the cops would lay down their brick bats and nightsticks respectively, and adjourn two hours for lunch, then come back and pick them up again…Ernest and Pauline and Moe and I would ‘riot’ all morning, then Ernest and I would go out fishing for the afternoon, then in the evening we would riot again.”34