Ernesto Read online

  While Ernest was in Spain covering the battle against Franco’s forces in mid-November, Scribner’s cut much of the “Cuban material” out of To Have and Have Not to make it more relevant to haves and have-nots in North America. While the cuts made commercial sense, they weakened the narrative, for as readers and critics have often remarked, plot structure in the final draft of To Have and Have Not seems incoherent, disjointed, and incomplete.35

  For a decade before the book’s publication, the writer had actively researched revolution in Cuba and had intended to write a book about the subject. He had long been fascinated with the topic of revolutions. Some of his earliest fiction sketched and studied them, such as the short story “The Revolutionist” in 1923, and the full-length novel A New Slain Knight, whose protagonist is a professional revolutionist. He worked on the latter for about a year before he abandoned it because he did not know enough about the topic yet to be able to give such a story authenticity.

  Later in the dialogues of Green Hills of Africa, he confided in his white hunter that he was “studying revolutions.” He thought that they were “beautiful…for quite a while” until they “[went] bad.” When they were with him in Cuba, his sons had witnessed revolution firsthand and became “bloodthirsty” from them, much to Pauline’s horror.36

  Ernest had asked Richard Armstrong, the journalist who had photographed him with the científicos in 1933, to provide him with an expert’s account of revolutionary activities in Cuba so that his story would ring true, and the reporter responded with a detailed analysis of the cellular organization of the Communist Party and its terrorist derivatives: “The Communist party today is an amorphous group, divided…into 22 different groups. The largest group of reds, I’m told are members of the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba of which the notorious Cesar Vilar was the general secretary and boss.”37

  Ernest had integrated the facts from Armstrong’s thirteen-page letter, dated August 27, 1936, into an early version of the manuscript of To Have and Have Not that included a section titled “The Story of the Dynamite Trip and its Capture.”38 This section of “Cuban material” contained a more radical central character named Tommy Bradley who “justifies terrorism as part of revolutionary activity,” but who was cut out entirely—censored before release to American audiences.

  The unedited story develops the viewpoint that tyranny imposes upon its sufferers an impenetrable state of silence. Resistance fighters do not seek approval, but only to break the silence with dynamite and irrefutable bodies that will create the “uneasiness that come[s] before conscience.” It was an idea that would grow in Hemingway’s imagination as his involvement increased in the Spanish Civil War, and he would express it in the plot and characters of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

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  From the third floor of her parents’ St. Louis home, Martha was leading the lonesome life of a “Yogi,” struggling to eke out uninspiring pages, feeling far removed from the world of action, and longing to return to Paris to get “all the facts tidy once more” for her book. She wrote Ernest about her hope to get “to Spain with the boys.” With his departure date also approaching Martha wrote: “I hope we get on the same ark when the real deluge begins. It would be just my luck to survive with the members of the St. Louis Wednesday Club,” adding subsequently, “Please don’t disappear. Are we not members of the same union? Hemingstein, I am very fond of you.”39

  After a hurried trip to Key West to see family and gather affairs, Ernest returned to New York to embark, in the interim campaigning for Spain, organizing relief efforts, and convincing Max Perkins to buy one of Martha’s stories for Scribner’s Magazine. According to Martha’s subsequent accounts, Ernest phoned her often from New York, complained of loneliness, and pleaded with her to come along just before he sailed at the end of February with Evan Shipman and Sidney Franklin aboard the Paris to Le Havre as a war correspondent. Passing through Paris, Ernest continued to Valencia via airplane, and onward to Madrid, where he stayed for nearly two months covering the war and working on the film The Spanish Earth.

  Coached and encouraged by Papa, Martha obtained a letter from Collier’s that identified her as a member of the press and allowed her to file stories with their weekly review, though they did not offer a salaried post. Her husband off to war, Pauline found herself home alone on the island of Key West and abruptly inutile, or so it seemed, in stopping the momentous forward march of history or her husband’s wanderlust. To his Pfeiffer parents, Ernest wrote matter-of-factly before departing, “I hate to go away, but you can’t preserve your happiness by trying to take care of it or putting it away in mothballs and for a long time me and my conscience both have known I had to go to Spain.”40

  In March, Martha arrived in Madrid to join the boys and their band of bold reporters, staying at the Hotel Florida. Using terms from ballistics that he had read about, Ernest was able to explain to the others how the architecture of the towers of the hotel prevented projectiles from striking them during the frequent artillery shelling that they heard around them, and he lied so well that they believed him. If there was any doubt whether Martha and Ernest were sleeping together, it was dispelled one evening when, after a bombing raid, all appeared in the lobby in their underwear with the two of them emerging from the same room.

  Crossing the border at Andorra on foot with fifty bucks in her pocket and a knapsack full of canned food on her back, Martha had caught a ride to Barcelona, then Valencia. From Valencia, Sidney Franklin took her the rest of the way. By her accounts, she was shocked when Ernest greeted her warmly, then took credit for her determined arrival against all odds: “I knew you’d get here, daughter, because I fixed it that you would.”41 Protectively, he then locked Martha in her room at the Hotel Florida even when she pounded furiously at the door to be released. In retrospect, Martha would see that she should have known then what lay in store.

  Despite the Loyalist’s esprit, Spanish Nationalists, armed and reinforced by Hitler and Mussolini, had taken Burgos, Segovia, Avila, Saragossa, Teruel, Pamplona, Navarre, and most of Extremadura. They took few prisoners, instead preferring to exterminate civilians, such as in Málaga, in February when they corralled hundreds and opened fire with machine guns, filling the plaza de toros (bullring) with the blood of their own. As women, children, and elderly were fleeing Málaga on the road to Almería, Nationalists chased down five thousand of their former neighbors, and in some cases family members, and murdered them.

  By the end of April, German pilots bombed civilians in Guernica, reducing the city to rubble and inspiring Picasso, a Málaga native, to paint these atrocities in his characteristic style. At the end of May, Hemingway passed through New York on the way to Bimini where he would spend a week and return to New York at the end of the month to speak at the League of American Writers Conference where he received a standing ovation for his speech “Fascism Is a Lie.”

  Spending his time alternatively in Bimini, New York, and Key West, Hemingway completed revisions of To Have and Have Not in June. In July, he, Gellhorn, and documentary director Joris Ivens dined with the Roosevelts at the White House and presented The Spanish Earth. Then he flew west with Pauline to Hollywood to raise funds among celebrities for la causa.

  When bulking, hot-tempered, and thin-skinned Ernest Hemingway returned to New York, and Max Perkin’s office, in August, Max Eastman, one of his severest critics, had the misfortune to be there. At first uncomfortable yet outwardly polite, Ernest was soon replaying some of the harshest sentences from Eastman’s “Bull in the Afternoon” article through in his mind, and with blood inflaming his cheeks and a knot in the gullet, he gnashed his teeth and finally blurted out, “Hey, what do you mean accusing me of impotence?”42

  Ernest then opened his own shirt to show the chest hair he had on it. “Look false to you, Max?” Gathering steam, he unbuttoned Eastman’s shirt to compare: “Why…look, it is as smooth as a bald man’s head!” Trying to calm the situation, Eastman asked Er
nest if he had read the article; bringing a copy of the book that contained it down on Eastman’s nose was his response, so Eastman lunged at Ernest, and the two writers were soon in a fracas on Perkins’s floor, with the editor attempting to pull them apart. Afterward, Ernest would exploit it as a media opportunity, printing a hilarious interview in the New York Times, playing up his side of the scuffle and boasting that he would donate one thousand dollars to the charity of Eastman’s choosing for the privilege of spending an hour in a locked room with him with “all legal rights waved.”43

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  Churning out phrases like “the great black wings of fascism” that had spread across Europe and “the light against the night,” Léon Jouhaux, André Malraux (author of L’Espoir), foreign volunteers, and hundreds of other artists and intellectuals found meaning in the struggle against fascism. As Hitler and Mussolini sent food, munitions, and crack troops to support Franco’s army as it pushed forward like a shadow to envelop Madrid, the Loyalist battles against dark, relentless, and deadly Nationalists came to signify the struggle against death itself. Amidst them, an impractical and hopelessly romantic esprit grew. It was a cause they could believe in and said they would be proud to die for.44 In this evocative struggle, volunteers of the era found a form of happiness. As Martha wrote, “Spain was where our adult hope was (the sum total of the remaining hope of youth with a reasoning and logical hope of adults). Spain was a place where you could hope, and Spain was also like a vaccination which would save the rest of mankind from some fearful suffering.”45

  A rift arising from distasteful alliances and ideological differences fractured the Loyalist cause, a luxury it could not afford when fighting the Axis powers, undivided like a malevolent shadow. Some Comintern leaders like André Marty and journalists like Josephine Herbst saw the Soviet Union as their movement’s North Star. Others, particularly many Americans, wondered what might result from deals with “red devils.” Under Soviet influence, Loyalists purified and policed their ranks and condoned secret executions of their brothers in the International Brigade.

  José Robles became one such casualty that troubled John Dos Passos’s conscience and made him question the utility of this war. In his other life in America, Robles was a Spanish professor at John Hopkins University who had translated Dos Passos’s The Manhattan Transfer. When he returned home to war-torn Spain, he soon disappeared, and Dos Passos went looking for him, committing the uncomfortable faux pas of asking about his disappearance. Cauterized Communists insisted that he had been a fascist spy who had gotten what he deserved. Likewise defending intellectual responsibility in reportage, Dos Passos protested, certain the allegations were untrue. If Robles had been murdered, the criminals had to be brought to justice: what good was winning the war if they lost reason along the way and committed such treacheries? However, radicals from the left considered ideological integrity and Soviet alliances critical to defeating Franco, who benefited from Hitler’s support.

  As far as Ernest was concerned, the truth was not enough: Robles and Dos Passos, and other weak-willed intellectuals who did not know the first thing about winning a war, should focus on the task at hand and keep their outrages and discussions to themselves. Mindful of the odds, Martha and Ernest had committed themselves to winning whatever the cost. After all, these were not normal circumstances. In the face of Hitler, what good was intellectualism? Would the fascists allow dissenters to dilute their intentions? Insisting that the executions were justified, Hemingway expressed impatience with Dos Passos’s softness. During war, said Ernest, he should stop asking awkward questions and sentimentally defending rights with “the good-hearted naiveté of a typical American liberal,” for he was only endangering lives—his sensibilities were out of place.46

  The arguments over Robles poisoned their relationship. Writing from Paris at the end of March, Ernest wrote to correct all misconceptions, to ask Dos Passos to pay back all his loans, and to say “so long” in a letter where Ernest was plainly hurting.47 In an article Ernest wrote for Ken three months later, he mentioned the row, and decades later, he continued settling the score through slashing descriptions of his “good old friend” Dos Passos.48 If during the war Marty and Ernest shared a fervor for the cause, they also shared great disappointment when it seemed all for nothing, and Ernest’s novel about the Spanish Civil War depicted divisions between far left and left center as a central theme.

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  In mid-August, Hemingway again set sail for Paris where he met Martha before continuing to Madrid. By fall, To Have and Have Not hit the shelves, and Ernest began a play inspired by his Hotel Florida experiences: The Fifth Column. The fifth column, a term originally signifying the people supporting invading forces, came to mean by extension acts of espionage when cited by Nationalist general Emilio Mola. By the end of December, Ernest returned to Pauline, who at last understanding the error of leaving her man alone, had crossed the Atlantic by herself to investigate why “the war had such a hold on her husband.”49 Demanding he meet her in Paris and tolerating his delays, Pauline awaited him just before Christmas.

  Travelling with Martha as far as Barcelona, Ernest had Christmas dinner with his mistress and put her on the ocean liner Normandie, where she would begin a twenty-two city, two-month lecture circuit in the United States to raise money for medical aid. After cashing a royalty check from The Trouble I’ve Seen, she paid him what she owed him for her expenses while in Spain.

  Ernest continued to Paris where he found his better half upset, for she had come to save their marriage and found him distant and unmoved.50 Though she had gone to great lengths to obtain a visa and braved danger to reach her husband during the war, her disappointment with him was evident. Their reunion degenerated into arguments as she “stormed and raged, promised to get even, to make him pay dearly, threatening to jump off the balcony of their suite at the Hôtel Elysée.”51 Ernest responded that he did not understand why she had come looking for him if she was to be so unpleasant. The fighting continued between them for two weeks during a long cold trip back across the Atlantic. When the Hemingways arrived by liner in Key West, Ernest took the Pilar alone to Havana via No Name Key.52

  At the end of January, Ernest wrote Hadley a nostalgic and somewhat embittered letter detailing his many perilous activities in Spain, enclosing checks from Gus Pfeiffer for Bumby’s education and for Christmas, alluding to suicidal urges, and expressing his admiration for the relationship she enjoyed with her new husband, Paul.53

  After Grace Hemingway attended a Chicago event where Martha spoke passionately against fascism at an Oak Park ladies group meeting, she wrote her son to tell him how impressed she had been. The newspaper account that day described Martha: “With a short black dress setting off her taffy-colored hair hanging childishly about her face in a long bob, Miss Gellhorn looked sixteen but spoke in a luscious, deep, free flowing voice with words of maturity and an emphasis of authority.”54 One witness who saw her speak at the University of Minnesota to three thousand people remembers how she leaped, “spread her legs, threw up her arms like a cheerleader,” and shouted “Vive la Republique!”55

  By mid-February, Ernest wrote his editor from Key West to tell him he was in “an unchristly gigantic jam” such that he might have to go back to “being hungry again,” which he appreciated was bound to be good for his writing.56 Even with the support of one of the wealthiest families in the country, the author was often strapped for cash and in need of a loan. Though Ernest’s doctor prohibited alcohol consumption due to a liver condition, he was stubbornly drinking fifteen to seventeen scotch and sodas over the course of the day. At the end of the month until the beginning of March, Ernest and Josie Russell escaped the hoopla in Key West surrounding the completion of the Overseas Highway by taking a brief trip to Havana to fish.57

  That March, the word was out that Franco’s forces had launched a new attack to crush the Catalans by pushing them into the sea: the Aragon Offensive.
After Pauline had packed his bag, she accompanied her husband as far as Newark, where he boarded the Île de France, and mid-March to mid-May 1938 Ernest returned to the war and to further entangle himself with Martha Gellhorn. Ernest’s and Pauline’s letters exchanged with friends and family like Virginia, Uncle Gus, and Max Perkins confide a marriage at a crossroads. Writing from Key West at the end of April in a tone reminiscent of that in Hadley’s letters, Pauline offered her husband, “If you are happy over there don’t come back to be unhappy but hope you can come back and we can both be happy.”58 In an early draft of Ernest’s play, The Fifth Column, the character Dorothy, fashioned from Martha, is in a predicament with Phillip, a character that resembles Hemingway, for he can be happy only with her as his mistress. Dorothy wishes to become his wife, despite his many macho idiosyncrasies. While this fantasy seems far-fetched, the reality of Martha’s relationship with Ernest is that she was exasperatingly low on his totem pole and had to determine whether to detach, or fully engage; to flee the scene with her autonomy intact, or marry him and become a “kept woman.”

  In way of a retreat, Martha took Pauline’s entrance as her cue to exit, departing on assignment for Collier’s. She reported from Czechoslovakia during Hitler’s Anschluss, or unification, with neighboring Austria, which many felt was a euphemism for annexation, then travelled in England and in France. All the while she remained unsure of the nature of her relationship with Ernest Hemingway, or what the future between them might bring. To her mother, Martha wrote to explain, “Ernest sailed yesterday and I am not exactly happy but am being what the French call ‘raisonable.’ There isn’t anything left to be, I have tried everything else. I believe he loves me, and he believes he loves me, but I do not believe much in the way one’s personal destiny works out, and I do not believe I can do anything about this. So I am hurrying at last on my Collier’s job.”59 Strategically speaking, one had to be wise enough to know which battles should not be fought when one hoped to win a war.