Ernesto Read online

  The second act of Islands opens at the Finca Vigía, where Hudson lies on the floor of his living room where he has made a bed of straw mats to better recover from his forty-four days at sea with his cat Boise and his “desperate hopeless love” offering him his only company.61 Like Ernest, Thomas has grown a beard and is gaining weight. In his drunken moodiness, he has sent the other servants away, so there is not much food in the house except for some eggs and bananas, which his servant Mario (fictional equivalent of René Villarreal) frets superstitiously might be fatal when eaten with alcohol.62 “I know that you care a lot for me muchacho. Gracias,” Ernest assures the “Cuban son.”63 Having recently learned that firstborn son, Tom, was killed in combat, Hudson drinks whiskey and water and converses with his cat while he reads letters crossly from Tom’s mother, Ginny Watson, his first wife, whom he still deeply loves. Ginny is no longer with him, for she is at the war, volunteering for the USO. Recruited to hunt subs in a “Hooligan Navy,” Hudson is exhausted by his own obsessive pursuit of German U-boats during the interminable patrols he imposes upon himself, running with his crew as far as his failing body will allow, all along the Cuban coast. Between missions, Hudson collapses and convalesces at his Finca and in the Floridita bar, finding some consolation in his exchanges with cats, servants, and the other drunks who make jokes and pull pranks along the bar, and in the company of a courtesan whom everyone knew as “Honest Lil.”

  Still in uniform, Hudson’s first wife, Ginny, flies into Havana at the end of the second act of the novel and steals the thunder of Honesta and her man, or mark, for the evening. Though Hudson is quite drunk, he and his wife make love, and afterward, she drops a depth charge on his heart: his last remaining son has been killed in the war.

  * * *

  —

  At this time, the Finca Vigía was full of servants, a chauffeur, a butler, and a gardener, even though most of the Cubans occupying surrounding houses had trouble simply putting food on the table. As an affluent foreigner living in Cuba, Hemingway was also aware of the radical disparity between the island’s classes. In one excerpt of Islands in the Stream, the author, between sub patrols, describes his habitual drive from his house to the Cojímar port when he passed through Havana’s slums with Cuba “close on either side”:

  This was the part he did not like on the road into town. This was really the part he carried the drink for. I drink against poverty, dirt, four-hundred-year-old dust, the nose-snot of children, cracked palm fronts, roofs made from hammered tins, the shuffle of untreated syphilis, sewage in the old beds of brooks, lice on the bare necks of infested poultry, scale on the backs of old men’s necks, the smell of old women, and the full-blast radio, he thought. It is a hell of a thing to do. I ought to look at it closely and do something about it. Instead you have your drink the way they carried smelling salts in the old days.64

  Rather than do something about it, Hudson drinks to make it go away, and in a chapter of Hemingway à Cuba, French literary critic Gérard de Cortanze cites the passage above to emphasize the gap between Ernest’s luxury and une démi-siècle de la réalité de la misère cubaine.65 Citing Robert Harling’s 1950s London Sunday Times article that describes the squalor of Hemingway’s Cuba, Cortanze notes that fifty years later, nothing has changed about these neighborhoods below the Finca Vigía: the same distress, sadness, dirtiness, hammered tin roofs, sickness, emaciated dogs, lack of food and water, complete nakedness, stranded like one of Hemingway’s islands in the stream.

  During more than half of a century of US blockade, Democrats and Republicans alike supported the prohibition of basic materials, food, and medicine, for adults and for children. “But back to the Finca,” quips Cortanze. Tranquility reigned on the Finca…where there was no hint of this noise and unpleasantness, only palm trees, flowers, orchids, hibiscus, jasmine, lovingly chosen by American writers turned housewives.

  The real story is perhaps not Cortanze’s author-as-careless-gringo-tourist, or the counterpoint that Hemingway sought to lift up the common Cuban man, but a complex combination of the two. In navigating that situation for itself, Hemingway’s work from this time asks an important question: Are people bound by their roots, or can they venture to understand and connect with others, regardless of the mores and mandates stipulated by their origins, customs, governments, stereotypes, races, and creeds? Hemingway’s relevance today owes much to his attempts to answer that question through his innovatively empirical and intuitive writing, through intrepid and intriguing travels, and through his intoxicating spirit of curiosity and fraternité, which is just as fitting as it ever was.

  While wife Martha repeatedly and exasperatedly questioned the utility of expeditions resulting only in an absent husband, endless goose chases, bronzed faces, and rum hangovers, Fidel Castro seemed remarkably to have believed in the effort. At a surreal ceremony at the Finca Vigía in 2003, which included American senators and Cuban generals attempting to use Ernest Hemingway as the scissors that might cut the ribbon on Cold War itself, an aging Fidel surprised everyone by appearing out of nowhere and insisting that one “should not believe that the attempt to catch the submarine was fiction. Anyone who is familiar with the psychology of the writer, his history and his life knows that it is not fiction he writes.” Roberto Herrera Sotolongo provided another point of view: “Included in the crew, I was receiving seventy-eight dollars per month. There were no German submarines. We fished the straits but didn’t find anything. We fished, studied the coral reefs, played dominos and poker. Papa didn’t like playing. Instead he read, sometimes wrote, and told us about the stories he was working on.”66

  As the Germans were preparing to invade Hungary, Martha returned in March 1944 from the European theater, determined to “blast [Ernest] loose from Cuba” and persuade him to join her in covering the war. She discovered that he had put on weight and grown a long salt-and-pepper submariner’s beard, protruding like an anvil from his chin. Reunited at long last, they were ecstatic at first, but emotional wounds left too long unattended soon festered.

  A long-simmering bouillabaisse of injury and resentment bubbled over, resulting in numerous scoldings.67 During their reunion, there were public humiliations and occasional blows, such as the evening that Ernest attacked his wife for cutting corners with their servants’ Christmas presents and left her stranded on the side of the road. Another evening pickled with alcohol, Ernest backhanded Martha when she was trying to drive him home—so she responded to the affront by driving his Lincoln through a ditch and into a tree, leaving him to think about what he had done while she continued home on foot.68

  Soon after they arrived together in New York, and Ernest announced to his wife that he had indeed decided to cover the war—but rather than accompanying her so she could build her career, he would be serving as her replacement at Collier’s.69 Spite, said Martha later, had inspired him to steal her assignment and a job at a magazine that had been hers alone since 1937. Bumping her from the manifest of a Royal Air Force plane that would have taken her back across the Atlantic to the war, he had effectively blocked her from reporting on it in any capacity. He crossed the ocean on this airplane without her and arrived in London, leaping headlong back into his celebrity status. He produced a scene wherever he went, where hangers-on became his entourage, including would-be writers and adventurers, like kid brother Leicester, who on a crew that included Irvin Shaw had come to create a documentary on the war, trying to become a reporter just like brother Ernie.70

  During the transatlantic flight, Ernest discovered a new perspective concerning his marriage. In October, he wrote to Max: “I got sort of cured of Marty [by] flying. Everything sort of took on its proper proportion. Then after we were on the ground I never thought of her at all. Funny how it should take one war [Spanish Civil War] to start a woman in your damn heart and another to finish her. Bad luck. But you find good people in a war. Never fails.”71

  Furious with her husband for stealing her assignment with Collier’s and her means
of transport, Martha resolved to find a way across the Atlantic and return to the war as soon as she could. Two weeks later, she was able only to secure passage on a Norweigian freighter loaded with dynamite—a harrowing voyage in seas teeming with German U-boats—as her anger and humiliation attained new heights.

  CHAPTER 8

  Hemingway Liberates the Ritz Hotel Bar and Pursues the Third Reich (1944)

  Like Martha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh Monks was a lady as well as a war correspondent who wore her femininity and good looks conspicuously in the male-dominated profession. The daughter of a lumberjack from Minnesota, Mary was based in London, reporting regularly for the Daily Mail and writing features for Time magazine. One day in the press cafeteria, she appeared in a skintight sweater that accentuated her breasts and aroused the boys. It had gotten so hot in there, she explained in her tell-all memoir, How It Was, that she had been obliged to remove the jacket of her press uniform.1 Ever since her mother had tried to “harness” her into one at the age of twelve or thirteen, she had not owned a bra.2 “God Bless the machine that knit that sweater,” announced friend Irvin Shaw when he saw Mary’s nipples protruding, and he predicted that she would soon attract a swarm of admirers. Sure enough, as the fellows trickled into lunch, they complimented, “Nice sweater!” “The warmth does bring things out, doesn’t it?” and so on, as they passed their table. Amidst this herd of horny stags appeared bright-eyed Ernest Hemingway, nudging Shaw to introduce him to his lady friend.

  “Above the great, bushy, brindled beard, his eyes were beautiful,” Mary thought, “lively and perceiving and friendly.” His voice struck her as “younger and more eager than he looked,” yet she sensed an “air of solitude about him, loneliness perhaps.”3 The pair made a date for lunch. Later inviting himself into the room Welsh shared with Connie Ernst, Ernest subsequently disenchanted Mary when he demonstrated to them that he was not nearly as interesting to converse with as he was to read or read about. Though Welsh hinted that he take leave by indicating that she had to get up early the next day, Ernest sprawled across their twin beds and whined about his overbearing mother who had never forgiven him for not getting killed during World War I, had never cooked, had bought fifty-dollar hats at Marshall Field’s, and had forced him to accompany his prudish sister, Marcelline, when she could not had get a date to the prom on her own.4

  Although she was still married to her second husband, Noel Monks, an Australian reporter, inspiredly following conflicts to Ethiopia, Spain, France, England, Italy, Egypt, Papua New Guinea, Korea, and Malaysia, their marriage was perhaps already on the rocks as she seemed to be dating several other men. During their third encounter, Ernest shocked her with the declaration of his intention to marry her, and Welsh was repelled initially by his personality and his premature declarations of matrimony.5 Mary’s roommate wondered how she could be so “tough on him” and encouraged Mary to give him a chance: he seemed so lonely, she said, and after all, a gal did not get a chance to marry a guy like that every day. “He’s too big,” replied Mary, “thinking both stature and status.”6

  * * *

  —

  When the photographer Robert Capa heard that his buddy from the Spanish Civil War was in London, he decided to celebrate with a party at his flat in Belgrave Square: “I bought a fish bowl, a case of champagne, some brandy, and a half-dozen fresh peaches. I soaked the peaches in the brandy, poured the champagne over them, and everything was ready. At four in the morning, we reached the peaches. The bottles were empty, the fish bowl dry.”7 Returning from Capa’s party, Ernest’s automobile hit a water tank. When the call came just before dawn, Capa and his girlfriend rushed to the hospital.

  “After forty-eight little stitches, Papa’s head looked better than new,” Capa remembered fondly, years later.8 When Papa turned his back to the merry couple to submit to a weigh-in from an attendant nurse, Capa’s girlfriend, Pinkie, lifted his surgical gown while Capa snapped a photograph and snickered at the writer’s glorious buttocks.9 Receiving visits from his gang, he disobeyed doctor’s orders, drinking in the hospital and hiding bottles beneath his bed. Papa would be required, all kidding aside, to stay in the Saint George’s hospital for several days and would complain of severe headaches for months after. Sensationalizing the event, the news mistakenly reported him dead.

  When at last Martha arrived distressed but alive in London, she checked into the Dorchester Hotel where her husband was staying. Hearing that he had been in an accident, she tracked him to his hospital room where she found him with his stitched head wrapped in a turban and emptied bottles of whiskey and champagne beneath his bed. Infuriated by his enjoyment and indifference to her ordeal, Martha informed him that they were “through, absolutely finished” and walked out.10 Walking out on Ernest Hemingway was the one thing that a woman, particularly a wife, should not do. Spurred by his feud with Martha, Ernest neglected his health and put himself in harm’s way, following the war with frenzied energy while pursuing his romance with Mary Welsh from June to December of 1944.

  To cover the invasion of Normandy, Ernest boarded a transport ship, Dorothea L. Dix, on June 6, then a landing craft, Empire Anvil, but awash amidst the waves while artillery blasts shook the smoldering earth, he was not permitted to go ashore, allegedly, so he returned instead to Mary Welsh’s bed in the Dorchester Hotel, causing Martha to fume as she left for the front: “I’m leaving for Italy…I came to see the war, not live at the Dorchester.”11 In contrast with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Martha came ashore with the troops to cover the Allied invasion of occupied France as well as report on the liberation of concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. Not to be outdone, Ernest exploited his celebrity status at the end of June to procure invitations from Royal Air Force crews flying missions over the English Channel to repel German V-1s, the “buzz bombs” that had been attacking Portsmouth and London since the middle of the month; he also appeared in boxing gear, shirtless, and with a full beard, shadow boxing in a feature for Look magazine.

  Meanwhile, the Polish Resistance was putting up an inspiring fight against Hitler’s forces and calling for Soviet and American intervention. While Allied forces air-dropped supplies during house-to-house fighting, the Soviet army (only twenty miles away from the battle) abandoned the Poles in their hour of need. It was to become one of the great ignominies of the war. During the uprising, Hitler ordered the complete destruction of Warsaw: thus 80–90 percent of its buildings, artworks, and books were destroyed or stolen by German troops. By the beginning of September, the last of the resistance fighters were killed or captured and sent to concentration camps.

  During the liberation of France, Ernest took command of a ragtag band of ten resistance fighters from the village of Rambouillet (just outside of Paris). Present on August 19 during the liberation of Paris, he had “liberated” a German motorcycle and sidecar for his personal use (and reopened his still-healing skull by crashing it into an anti-tank gun) and also “liberated” the Ritz Hotel—and bar—where he requisitioned a large room and proceeded to faire la fête, allegedly ordering sixty dry martinis for his rowdy company of adventurers.12 One reviewer, David Hendricks, put it well: “During the war, Hemingway was good at being Hemingway.”13

  For violating the Geneva Convention’s rules for noncombatant journalists, Ernest would have to face a military tribunal in October.14 Lying under oath, he “beat the rap” to protect himself and Colonel David Bruce by swearing to Colonel Park, who convened the hearing, that he only acted in an advisory capacity.15 In August, Ernest arranged a transfer from General Patton’s Third Army to the First and attached to the Fourth Infantry Division’s Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles “Buck” Lanham, who became a lifetime friend. In September the Germans began to launch their long-range missile, the V-2, at targets in London, continuing bombardments there, in Liège, and in Antwerp until March 27, 1945.

  * * *

  —

  On October 17 and 18, a category-four hurricane, with
gusts up to 160 miles per hour, struck Pinar del Río, Havana, and Miami, killing three hundred people and causing $10 million in damage. Luckily, René Villarreal was on hand at the Finca Vigía to protect valuable works of art, to place empty buckets about the house when the roof sprang leaks, and to attend to the clean-up after the storm. Miraculously, Gregorio Fuentes defended the Pilar in Cojímar harbor, though the hurricane had thrown many from the Cuban navy, merchant marine, and private ships into the streets of Havana, or to the bottom of the harbor.16

  Prevented by the constitution from running for reelection, Batista emptied the coffers of the treasury when his party lost and went into self-imposed exile. So friendly was the general with American interests that he was welcomed in the United States and spent eight years between his home in Daytona Beach, Florida, and his room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Divorcing his first wife, Elisa, in 1945, he married his mistress, Marta Fernández, in another changing of the guard.17 His political career was far from finished: not only would his influence continue behind the scenes, but he would also return to Cuba and the forefront of its politics, running again in the general election and staging a coup in 1952. When a reporter asked him as he returned to power why he had spent so much time in the United States, Batista would respond: “I just felt safer there.”18