Ernesto Read online

  “Well, did you see it?” Martha asked, when he returned to their hotel room.

  “Trop chère,” he said, meaning the one hundred dollars per month rent. “Too far from town and it would take months to fix it up.” He had tolerated Pauline’s overhaul of their Key West home for a decade. Why would he want to go through that again? For two dollars per day, two hotel rooms simplified his life and provided for his every need, such that he could avoid all entanglements and concentrate on his work. Did she expect him to stop writing to renovate a decrepit manor at the precise moment when his next book was going so well? What if he lost it and never got it back? Martha, undeterred, signed the lease with D’Orn. To make the house more habitable, she used her own scarce funds to complete renovations, construct furniture in Spanish style, repair the cracked swimming pool, and resurface the tennis courts. Thus she created a writers’ retreat in the middle of the Gulf Stream for this literary duo.11

  By March 18, a few days after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Martha reported in a letter to the First Lady, “I have taken possession of my Finca…what in God’s name shall I do with this place now that I have it.” After a brief breakdown brought on by overexertion during the renovation, Martha feared becoming entrapped by material possessions and believed herself ill suited for domestic life. She worried that acquiring a house would cause her to “never write again but…spend the remainder of my life telling servants to scrub the bathroom floors and buy fresh paper for the shelves,” but after sleeping on it she awoke and looked out her window only to see “a saba [ceiba] tree, so beautiful you cannot believe it, and hear the palms rattling in the morning wind, and the sun streaking over the tiled floors, and the house itself, wide and bare and clean and empty, lying quiet all around me.”

  Simultaneously delighted and ashamed to have so much while she had seen so much suffering in the world, she comforted herself with a resolution to write the book that had haunted her but had not yet been written. Though her money would soon run out and she would have to work hard for it again, she had a “brief breathing spell” now, so she was going to make the most of it. When she was working as a cub reporter at the Times Union in a four-dollar-per-week room in Albany, she had never thought that one day through her writing she would be able to live in such a place: “I never dreamed I would write myself into a grove of palms and bamboos and flamboyant trees, nor a terrace covered with bougainvillea, nor a swimming pool: and I can’t believe it yet.”12

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  Though the Finca was cause for celebration, ten days later, after heavy bombardment, boots and tank tracks crumpled across the cobbled plazas of Madrid when the city fell, and after they had taken Valencia two days later, the flat, metallic voice of the commanding general for Nationalist forces, Francisco Franco, came on the radio and announced the Republican government’s surrender: “Today, after having disarmed and captured the Red Army, the Nationalist troops have secured their final military objective. The war is ended. Burgos, April 1, 1939. Year of Victory…a totalitarian state will reign in Spain…the real power of the Spanish people will be to show their support for the family, the city, the state, and the corporation.” As they heard the words, Loyalists were inconsolable, and Franco’s forces began executions. At the end of March, the Vatican, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, weary of the war, recognized Franco’s government, but the following week, Mussolini annexed Albania, and the world shuddered, for they knew that it was only the beginning.

  In Spain, Hemingway had become fluent in Spanish, had experiences, and developed friendships that opened his understanding of Latin American culture and events. He brought to Cuba a unique vantage point as an American who had been on the front lines of the war in Spain, and an appreciation not only for the complexities of Latin American politics but also for their language, literature, culture, and art.

  Betting on jai alai matches and fishing in the afternoons, he was writing by morning, making acquaintance of Basque jai alai players in exile (such as the Ibarlucea brothers, Félix Ermua, Salsamendi y Cazalis), and amassing the pages of a manuscript. Its sprawling cinematic passages reminded him of A Farewell to Arms, and the feeling he had while writing that novel returned. Ernest wrote Perkins that he was “down to 198 pounds” and feeling the good “hollowness” when the writing was going well.13 After a brief trip to Key West at the end of March to see his sons, Ernest returned at the end of the first week of April to Martha and to marlin season with both Carlos Gutierrez and Gregorio Fuentes now employed aboard the Pilar.14

  By the middle of May, Martha’s hired hands completed renovations, and vacating his room at the Ambos Mundos, Ernest began to pay his share of the rent at the Finca Vigía. When filmmaker Joris Ivens met with Ernest in Havana at the end of the month, two hundred pages of his novel about Spain had been completed. Leaving her boys at Camp Te Whanga in Connecticut, Pauline departed for a trip to Europe without her husband to consider her fate.

  At summer’s end Ernest and Martha stopped in Key West, while Pauline was away, to retrieve his Buick and drive it westward to deliver Martha to her mother in Saint Louis, and Ernest continued farther west in the car to meet Hadley and Paul Mowrer, who had been fishing in Cody, Wyoming, and retrieve his son Jack so that father and sons could hunt together at the L Bar T Ranch, the boy’s half brothers having been delivered by driver Tony Bruce from their Connecticut campgrounds.15 Having stepped out from behind a tree to surprise Hadley and Paul, Ernest wrote them afterward recalling how marvelous they looked at first sight as they returned along the trail from the woods to their lodge after a long hike: “You and Paul were certainly a swell looking pair of people on that trail. I was as proud of you guys as though I had invented you.” Not having seen him in years, happily married, and getting along well without him and his fame, the Mowrers on the other hand noticed that Ernest’s presence had deteriorated; he appeared anxious and fatigued.16 On the day that hunting began at the ranch, September 1, the Germans invaded Poland; Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany. World War II had begun, though two days later the United States declared its neutrality in what it considered to be Europe’s war.

  Pauline hurried to join the boys at the ranch, perhaps hopeful that the reunion of the family would resuscitate a marriage. After a series of flights and trains from Paris to London to New York to Wyoming, complicated by the grounding of airplanes and evacuations coinciding with the outbreak of war, Pauline arrived afflicted with a severe cold, and Ernest was obliged to care for her and wait for her recovery before breaking the bad news: he needed a divorce. Directing Toby Bruce to take the family home, and arranging for Martha to meet him in the Billings airport, Ernest left to join his mistress in the new Sun Valley Lodge resort in Idaho, where all their expenses would be paid by the owners hoping the writer’s visit would give their publicity a boost. There, they befriended Lloyd and Tillie, a resort photographer and his wife who became their longtime friends.

  When Virginia spilled the beans to the family that Ernest and Pauline’s marriage was ending because Ernest had changed, “Mother Pfeiffer” wrote her son-in-law to ask if it was true. In response, Ernest tried to defend himself, asserting that he had changed less than Pauline and her sister, Virginia, who had “spread” enough lies “at the right time to break up [his] home,” but apologized for having to write such a letter at Christmas nevertheless.17 In reply, his mother-in-law expressed regret: “This is the saddest Christmas I have ever known. A broken family is a tragic thing, particularly so when there are children,” but she promised to pray for him.18

  The long trip home to Key West gave Pauline some time to think, perhaps enough to notice that her husband Ernest, no longer dependent upon Pfeiffer funds and doing exactly as he pleased, was completely in control. When Collier’s magazine mobilized Martha into action—on a combat assignment to Finland to cover an impending invasion by the neighboring Soviet Union—Pauline asked Toby Bruce to relay a message to h
er soon-to-be-ex-husband: he was no longer welcome in Key West during the holidays if it be his intention to return to Martha after that.19 Ernest appeared bullheadedly at the house anyway only to find Pauline had left to spend the holidays in New York with her sister, Virginia, and had taken the boys with her. For good measure, she had gifted the house staff a paid vacation so that Ernest would find himself entirely alone at Christmas on an island unto himself. He inventoried and packed up all belongings (suitcases, books, boxes, and animal heads), leaving what he could not take with him in the storeroom of a building behind Sloppy Joe’s bar with the intention of taking it during a subsequent voyage. He loaded what he could into his Buick and boarded a P&O ferry to another life in Cuba, leaving a marriage in the churning wake, and his years with his second wife, Pauline, behind.20

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  Outnumbered 180 to 3 million, the Finns used guerrilla tactics to frustrate the Soviets’ attack, then retreated to the forest. Having beheld their heroic yet futile efforts in the field, Martha took refuge in a Helsinki hotel. Just as the Soviets threatened to bomb Helsinki into oblivion unless the Finns met their demands, Martha crossed paths with an American military attaché in her hotel restaurant. “Did she want to be evacuated to Sweden?” he asked. “Christ, yes!” she replied with the mouth that shocked many men of that era. Five minutes later, she returned in a pair of pajamas and with a bottle of whiskey in her hand—for it was not her first evacuation.21

  Though her reporting trip produced “Slow Boat to War,” “Bombs from a Low Sky,” “Blood on the Snow,” “Bombs on Helsinki,” and “Fear Comes to Sweden” for Collier’s, Hemingway waited for her night after night, believing her time away to be a betrayal of her commitment to him. She was pursuing a narrative with herself as a writing protagonist, a heroine bearing stubborn witness to expose this foul business of war. It was arguably a narrative that she had acquired from him. When air travel was suspended due to inclement weather, Martha got stuck in Lisbon with no option but to take a slow boat. Caught between her career and Ernest’s expectations, she wired her apologies across the ocean: “CLIPPERS STOPPED, NO CHOICE EXCEPT REX ARRIVING 11TH POSSIBLE TO KEEP PROMISE BE HOME FIRST STOP ASHAMED DISAPPOINT YOU STOP MISERABLY UNHAPPY.”22 Martha did not arrive in Havana until January 16.

  The Sunday before Martha’s return, the author wrote his editor, “Have a terrific hangover and can’t write this morning (won’t write rather as don’t want to turn out any hungover pages so write you instead). Make allowances for that in reading. Have been working steady and went on big drunk with some boys down here night before last…Am in the stretch on the book now.”23 He enclosed a large portion of it. The experiences and anger of the previous year, focused by a necessity for financial independence, expanded the Spanish epic to fifteen thousand words. Although they were soon to be divorced and not yet fully cured of their wounds, Ernest, who had always respected Pauline’s opinion about his writing, had shown her what he had written so far. She encouraged him by calling it some of the best fiction he had ever written.24

  From Cuba, Hemingway wrote Perkins about the fine hunting, his new home, his intention to stay there away from the war, and his desire to have a daughter.25 Perkins replied with a cable to the Ambos Mundos: He was “extremely impressed” with the “opening pages” that were “beautiful,” and chapter eight was “tremendous”; it “had the old magic.”26 It was all so “perfectly simple,” wrote Max, that one could make the mistake of thinking that anyone could do it that way, but, of course, only Ernest could.

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  When Martha returned, Ernest was hurt that she had made him wait, so he asked her to sign a humorous agreement. With Judge R. R. Rabbit and Judge P. O. Pig as their witnesses, he signed as Mr. Warm Dimpy Gellhorn Bongie Hemmy and she as Mrs. Warm Fathouse Pig D. Bongie Hemingstein, and in it, she promised never to leave him alone again. “I will not leave my present and future husband not for nothing no matter what or anything…I, the undersigned, further guaranty not to divorce my husband (previously named, see other page) not for nobody, only he has to be a good boy too and not love nobody but me. But he will not love nobody but me. This is an unnecessary guaranty.”27

  Laughs diffused the tension in this explosive relationship between two fiercely independent writers, but these represented the first shots fired in their personality war. Martha carefully navigated the ebbs and flows of Ernest’s moods, allowing him the freedom to romp, while attempting to pursue her career. His message was clear: He had missed her and did not wish to be left alone. He needed to be able to trust her. She must not put him through such a long separation again.

  During the first week of March, Sidney Glazer’s adaptation of Ernest’s play, The Fifth Column, opened in New York, but the critics were not amused. Finding inspiration in her experiences in Czechoslovakia, Martha’s novel A Stricken Field was published by Deull, Sloan, and Pearce during the same month; afterward, Ernest wrote Max that he had not pitched the book to Scribner’s because he did not think that it was good policy for writers in the same family to share publishers. While reviewers spoke of the novel respectfully, it did not garner quite the same enthusiasm as The Trouble I’ve Seen.

  As a boon to the author’s happiness, Ernest was finally visited by his three estranged sons, whose mothers insisted that they spend time in the summer with their father: Jack, “Bumby,” age sixteen; Patrick, “Mouse,” age eleven; and Gregory, “Gigi,” age eight. Making up for lost time, the boys inhaled their Bunyanesque father’s life force, imagination, and healthy appetite for playful adventures. They were handsome and intelligent boys who had missed their father; he loved and missed them dearly in return. Ernest took them fishing aboard his boat, to the frontón for jai alai matches, to baseball games in a Havana arena, and to the Cerro Hunting Club to shoot clay pigeons. As Hemingway had promised, they became playmates with the baseball-playing children of San Francisco de Paula.28

  Their father’s new girlfriend was blonde, tall, young, and attractive. All too aware of her awkward juxtaposition as stepmother to three boys, Martha focused on winning them over one by one. As a testament to her charisma, she succeeded, and they spoke fondly of her thereafter, particularly the eldest. Jack seemed to have a crush on his stepmother, or at least fondness for the woman he later referred to as his “favorite other mother.”29 In a letter to Jack’s mother Hadley, Martha wrote that she had “talked and talked” with Bumby about “any number of things,” listened dutifully to his stories about school and trout fishing, felt “unbelievably lucky” to have him as her friend, and concluded, “I don’t see how a woman could produce a better or more beautiful boy than you did…I think they will accept me as a part of their gang. Ernest’s gang, another one of the large families that dashes about obeying Poppa and having a fine time.”30

  By the end of April, Ernest had sent Perkins thirty-two more chapters of his manuscript, was working on the thirty-fifth chapter, was combing the Bible, Shakespeare, and more literary sources for a title, and had worked up a list of more than twenty-four possibilities. None were quite right, but by the end of the following month, he had sent Max a 512-page manuscript and had found his title: “Dear Max: How about this for a title For Whom the Bell Tolls. A Novel By Ernest Hemingway?”

  While suffering from an illness that nearly killed him, John Donne reflected in “Meditation XVII,” from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, on the toll of a funeral bell, a passage Ernest quoted in its entirety in the same letter to Max:

  No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.31

  The phrase borrowed from Donne suggested that fascism’s sinister rise was not just a Spanish prob
lem but one that concerned humanity. The events that followed seemed to prove this title to be right, yet for the foreseeable future, Ernest intended to stay far from that struggle.

  Congratulating him on the title, Perkins gushed over the book. It was absolutely “magnificent, strange, new…I think this book has greater power, and larger dimensions, greater emotional force, than anything you have done, and I would not have supposed you could exceed what you had done before. It is a surprising book.”32 Ernest explained, “I am so damned happy with Marty that everything has gone better.”33 The passages he was writing seemed to express a character who was one part Spanish and another part American: “Every time Robert Jordan looked at her he could feel a thickness in his throat…She had high cheekbones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field…Her legs slanted long and clean from the open cuffs of the trousers…She moved awkwardly as a colt moved, but with that same grace as of a young animal.”34

  Ernest’s mother, Grace, returned to Key West in late April 1940, within ninety miles of her son, but she did not visit him at his Finca Vigía retreat—and he would not have wanted her to.35 Though Grace appeared to be an extremely influential and significant woman in Ernest’s life, the ill feelings he harbored against her snowballed after his father’s suicide.36 In the decades that followed this traumatic event, the ties between Ernest and Grace were a complex net entangled and knotted with hurt and blame, or as Ernest wrote a biographer in the late forties, “I hated my mother as soon as I knew the score and loved my father until he embarrassed me with his cowardice. My mother is an all-time all-American bitch and she would make a pack mule shoot himself; let alone my poor bloody father.”37