Ernesto Page 24
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Jack Hemingway was wounded and captured by the German army in the Vosges Mountains on October 28 and interned in a POW camp till the end of the war, where he would lose seventy pounds.19 By November 7, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president in a wheelchair, had been elected to an unprecedented fourth term. That same year, Fidel Castro was named Cuba’s best high school athlete. He had been born the illegitimate son of an immigrant from Galicia who owned a sugar plantation in Holguín of 23,000 acres.
During the war, Hemingway produced several articles for Collier’s that propagated his fame, such as “London Fights Robots,” “Voyage to Victory,” “Battle for Paris,” and “How We Came to Paris.” “Surfing” the highs and lows of undiagnosed mania and depression, Ernest was “by turns brave, gentle, obsessive, foolhardy, loving and brutal,” pushing his body to the limit to prove to his ex-wife, his mother, himself, and newspapers what he could do—despite being in his mid-forties and suffering from pneumonia, memory loss, and severe headaches in freezing temperatures, harsh conditions, and recurring accidents resulting in several concussions.20
After reattaching himself to the Twenty-Second Regiment, Ernest accompanied Colonel Lanham during the action called Hürtgenwald, which bore witness to some of the deadliest battles of war, such as the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, where Allied troops chased the German retreat, pounding heavily fortified defensive positions in the woods, and suffering heavy losses when Axis powers seized the element of surprise and launched the infamous counterattack at the end of December that drove a stake between the First and Third Armies, known as the Battle of the Bulge, in the Forest of the Ardennes. Approximately 140,000 Allied troops were killed during these operations. During these campaigns, it seems likely that Ernest again violated the Geneva Convention—on numerous occasions—by firing upon and killing enemy soldiers, though the exact number is a matter of controversy.21 In a letter to Charles Scribner, the author asserted that he killed 122, including “a very snotting SS kraut,” whom he first interrogated: “And how do you like it now, Gentlemen?”22
Ernest acquired several souvenirs from the German soldiers, such as his collection of Nazi daggers, on display at the Finca Vigía Museum today.23 One was a battle trophy appearing in many photographs afterward: a standard-issue leather belt whose buckle bore the inscription “Gott Mit Uns” (“God With Us”), referencing Isaiah 7:14 and the battle cry of the Roman Empire, taken up by the Teutonic Order, by Gustavus Adolphus, and made a part of Frederick I’s coat of arms in the Kingdom of Prussia, the bedrock of the German Empire.24 Though the dead German’s belt was too big for his waist, the writer wore it above his belt loops throughout his postwar years.
Evidencing Hemingway’s obsessive study of war are the shelves at the Finca Vigía, full of books on strategy and military history. He also had a 16 mm projector and would hold private screenings of movies and documentaries (mostly boxing). Once Hemingway managed to get the complete Victory at Sea series, which recorded the actions of the US Navy during the victories in the Pacific against the Japanese. He ran them repeatedly, telling the projectionist to stop the film at certain frames. “I doubt this scene will appear in all the prints of Victory at Sea,” Hemingway said.
“Boys,” asked Father Andrés once, “why do you keep stopping the film at that wretched scene?”
“Because we have sworn to kill that guy whenever we find him,” explained Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, “and Ernest wants to remember his face well.”25
In the favored scene, on one of the small barren islands of the Pacific the Marines have just won a victory and Japanese resistance is almost nil. The Japanese are forced to come out of their blockhouse. Outside, an American marine sergeant holding a flame thrower calmly waits for the Japanese soldiers. One by one as they come out he executes them, burning them alive. Their bodies swell as they burn. The film was shot behind the sergeant; every so often he turns around and smiles at the camera.
In a barrage of gushy, forlorn letters from the front of World War II, Papa courted his newest conquest, “beloved” Mary Welsh, promising to take her to a Cuban paradise when the fighting was through, and he returned intermittently to visit her in their room at the Ritz Hotel in Paris: “My Dearest Small Friend, I am just happy and purring like an old jungle beast because I love you and you love me…I loved you in the night when I was awake and early in the morning when I was not quite awake and remembered you and how lovely you are…and how much fun jokeing [sic] and being together. Pickle I miss you very much. I love you as you well know.”26
From the Netherlands, Martha had written in November petitioning him for a divorce: “We are honest people, Bug, and this is a no-good silly arrangement. It is not our style…I think it would be best for you to get this finished with me.”27 Before returning from the Siegfried Line to Mary at the Ritz, Ernest phoned Martha at the Lincoln Hotel to invite her to a “friendly” dinner on Christmas eve at the Twenty-Second command post in Rodenbourg—the opposite of neutral ground. Hoping that Ernest might finally confront the subject of their separation, Martha accepted but did not find her husband alone. Instead, they dined surrounded by buddies from “his” regiment, a band that melted quickly away when drunkenness led to heated scoldings and tears.28 Six days later, Ernest invited himself to a dinner Martha had planned with William Walton in Luxembourg. Returning from a poker game, Robert Capa found Martha crying. Capa comforted her, inquiring how Ernest could carry on so while in a relationship with another woman.
It was the first time she had heard of Mary Welsh, said Martha, “and I was overjoyed. It meant he had to give me a divorce.”29
“Phone the Ritz and ask for Mary Welsh,” Capa belted out while crouching on the floor to count his poker winnings. “I’ll tell you what to say.” When Ernest came to the phone and “began to vituperate,” Capa told Martha to hang up the receiver. “It will be alright now.”
To explain the sudden change of heart and his reasons for leaving the front, Ernest wrote his son Patrick to tell him he had been suffering from pneumonia and to complain that Martha had shown great selfishness and disregard for his well-being while he was in the hospital. He was sick and tired of her “Prima-Donna-ism.”30
In January 1945, the Soviets liberated Warsaw and Auschwitz. From a failed marriage and human atrocities witnessed firsthand, Martha expressed a growing sadness and dejection in her letters during this period, but she began a relationship with a dashing high-ranking officer, James Gavin, and took him to bed as she did several others throughout the war. At thirty-seven years of age, “Slim Jim” was the youngest general to ever command the Eighty-Second Airborne Regiment. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being,” wrote Martha to her mother about Ernest with bitterness: she did not wish to hear his name.31
Also feeling disappointed and betrayed by his lover was Mary Welsh Monk’s husband, Noel, who wrote his wife on February 8, 1945, to bid her farewell and congratulations in a sarcastic letter: “I don’t know whether to congratulate you or be sorry for you. I’m sure you must be one of the most envied women in the world. You threw a sprat into the sea and caught yourself a whale. I knew of course there was someone who had caused you to ‘lose confidence’ in our marriage. But Mister Hemingway…I couldn’t even match his beard.”32
From February 13 to 15, Royal and United States Air Forces bombed the city of Dresden, inflicting approximately 25,000 civilian casualties. Bidding farewell to his “Dearest beloved Pickle” in Paris, Ernest left Mary a note before he departed on March 6, 1945. In the letter, he told “Kitten” he loved her and “always will…now go to get our life started. Don’t let anything bother you. I’m sorry to be so sticky getting off. Will be wonderful when I see you and will be truly faithful to you every minute I am away. In my head and in my body. Your loving husband. Mountain.” Was he concerned that she, like Agnes von Kurowsky from the first war, would not follow him home? Or that she would discover he had b
een unfaithful in her absence? On February 23, following the fourth day of the Battle of Iwo Jima, six marines planted the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, causing Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to remark that “the raising of that flag…means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years,” but the battle raged on. By March 26, they had taken the tiny island at the cost of nearly 7,000 American casualties and nearly 20,000 wounded. The Japanese had lost approximately 19,000 of their original force of 21,000.
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Hemingway hitched a ride on a bomber bound for New York so that he could do business with his editor and pick up his sons on the way home to Havana. When the plane stopped in London, he deboarded to drop in on Martha, who was laid up with the grippe at the Dorchester Hotel. He informed her that he would grant her divorce but sue her for desertion. Writing wistfully to first wife Hadley, who was now Mrs. Mowrer, he evoked times of old: “Always dearest Katherine Kat get through everything as well as you can and then go to Paris and have a fine life and we will all meet there and eat at some fine restaurant and laugh and make good jokes. All the things wrong with me are getting better.”33
CHAPTER 9
The Return to the Isle of Paradise with Mrs. Mary Welsh Hemingway (1945–1948)
When Ernest’s sons went back to school, their father fell into “black ass” depression and loneliness. With severe headaches continuing, speech slowed and slurred, and memory shot, the effects of the concussion and subsequent neglect of health in the execution of “duty” took their toll. Although he had returned to Cuba determined to get back into writing shape while awaiting Mary’s arrival, he was soon carousing with the boys to combat his lonesomeness as well as reigniting his relationship with Leopoldina. On April 28, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were captured and executed by Italian partisans in Duongo village (near Lake Duomo) while trying to escape to Spain via Switzerland—and strung up on display in Piazzale Loreto in Milan.1 Two days later, on May 1, 1945, Adolph Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, committed suicide in their bunker, as did Reich Minister of Propaganda Paul Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda, after distributing cyanide to their six darling children. “Hemingway’s Son Is Liberated,” the New York Times article would declare on May 2, 1945.
The day after Hitler died, Ernest rose early in his villa above Havana and looked over himself in the bathroom mirror. Looking somewhat worse for wear after two world wars, he shaved his sallowing visage as clean as could be, buttoned the fresh-pressed guayabera around a widening midsection, placed his thumb and index finger in his mouth corners, whistled for his driver, Juan, and in the Lincoln Continental convertible headed to the Rancho-Boyeros airport for the much-anticipated arrival of Mary Welsh, a fourth fiancée—pending divorces. He hoped he could succeed in getting her to settle in.2 Arriving as Ernest had instructed in a thick green press corps uniform, Mary noted the tropical heat, stronger than any summer in her home town of Walker, Minnesota, and, wilting as Ernest gathered her bags, she presented a smile to show her resolve. Mary described her arrival and reunion that day as sweaty, awkward, and out of sorts.3
“Sounding like a real-estate agent,” he stiffly showed her around the Finca Vigía, explaining how the recent hurricane had stripped the house of its foliage. When he came to one tree, he said, “That’s a tamarind” and began to relax. “Exotic tree. Romantic name, don’t you think?” But Mary was tense too.
“We could use a little romance,” she said brusquely, and “Ernest’s face stiffened as though I had slapped it. I could have bitten off my tongue.”4 The awkwardness of their recoupling was amplified when Mary encountered photographs and other mementos of Martha’s presence about the house, a reminder that she was number four. From the beginning, Mary expressed uncertainty about giving up her freedom and marrying a husband whose neediness could be oppressive, but she did her best to adapt to the many challenges of her new life in Cuba: new language, new climate, new world of trees, vines, shrubs, and stalks, a new manner of living, with new skills—like fishing and shooting—to learn, and a one leader boss of operations instead of a complex hierarchy like a Time magazine, a new focus and activity, yet with no office for herself. Curtailing all correspondence with her former friends and lovers, she decided to make a clean break—“a sharp break, but neat”—and to immerse herself in the universe of Hemingway sons, of aristocrats and insipid wives, and of territorial cats, like Boise.5
Though the Finca was expensive to maintain at three thousand dollars per month, battlefield articles and other escapades followed the enormous success of For Whom the Bell Tolls on the silver screen and had kept the Hemingway stock high. Ernest reassured his wife that the finances were good, for a producer named Mark Hellinger had just sealed a deal with his lawyer, Speiser, that paid him for the rights to film four short stories at seventy-five thousand dollars apiece and promised him a percentage of the profits.6 From the short story “The Killers,” Hellinger would create a fine film for Universal Pictures starring Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster, and director Zoltan Korda, who had directed The Macomber Affair, a film version of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” starring Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, and Robert Preston, and distributed by United Artists.7 Although he would not publish anything new until 1950, the war reports on Ernest Hemingway would seem to inspire not only Hollywood’s investment in his work but also biographical, scholarly, and literary interest. Several studies, such as Edmund Wilson’s “The Wound and the Bow,” would begin appearing and continue until the present day.
At the Hemingway estate, Mary’s first assignment was to learn Spanish, and insisting that she learn the proper continental, Castilian, kind so that she could be understood not only by their Cuban servants but also in other countries, Ernest “wasted no time” finding her a private tutor, named “Pilar.”8 To practice, Ernest introduced Mary to his swankiest friends, “Spanish grandees” like Peps Merito, the Marqués de Valparaíso, Cuban gentry like Mayito Menocal and Elicio Arguelles, and Dr. “Cuco” Kohly and his pretty blonde American wife, Joy.9 The lunch visits filled with vapid conversation backfired by making Mary miss the stimulating and engaging life of a reporter in the European theater.
Almost a week after her arrival, a celebration erupted in the neighborhood of San Francisco de Paula when the Germans signed an unconditional surrender. While the world declared victory and the war in Europe over, Mary felt nostalgia for her purposeful life in London and the financial independence she once knew there. Ernest’s well-intentioned promises to support Mary and her parents made her doubly indebted and dependent. To reciprocate, Mary took command of the author’s health and home. She surveyed the villa, noting all that necessitated her attention. In July she wrote enthusiastically to Buck and Pete Lanham: “Stomach flat, headaches gone, appetite healthy.”10
That summer, as was their custom, Hemingway’s sons soon dropped in, with Jack returning rather recently from a POW camp and the two younger half brothers coming shortly after. Though Mary made a gargantuan effort to pack lunches they would appreciate, cheer their exploits, shoot clay pigeons at the Cerro Hunting Club and live birds as they sailed across a bluff, enjoy cockfighting, catch marlin, and tag along on their frenzied adventures, the boys’ reactions to their new stepmother took a common theme: while Jack, old enough to drink, was a courteous, generous, and sociable companion at the Floridita and on the tennis court, he did not confuse his relationship with Mary with the affection he felt for Martha, Pauline, or his mother. Gregory confessed that Mary had displaced his “one true love,” Marty, and Patrick put it in perspective with the matter-of-fact observation that it was just becoming tiresome for them to adjust to yet another of their father’s wives.11 “They were a boys’ club and they did not need me,” Mary wrote, feeling estranged when Ernest’s sons and “men friends also appeared and turned the house into what seemed to me raucous, rowdy, affectionate boys’ dormitory.”12
“That Ernest was to blame for her troubles,” she never questioned, bu
t what made her pause and procrastinate about removing herself was the question of the gravity of her fits and revolt: Were they serious enough to warrant her “busting up a generally good alliance”? Before she could answer that question, there was Papa, “gentle, or thoughtful and loving, and a lilt in the breeze.”13 Into a journal she scribbled these feelings every day, an inner torment that Papa derided by calling them her “Horror Diary.”14 Though, unavoidably, Mary annoyed Ernest when, during her first fishing trip, she made a newbie’s mistake of breaking one of his irreplaceable wooden fishing rods; he kept his feelings in check as best he could, and she learned to make herself useful aboard in her auxiliary role.15
Relief to the mounting tension in their relationship seemed to come whenever the betrothed couple boarded the Pilar and chased their liberty and happiness in the velvety blue waters of a tropical Eden amidst coconut-shaded cayos, cool lagoons, and across the sparkling and splendidly untamable sea. The height and seclusion of the Pilar’s flying bridge provided Mary with her favorite spot. During one “joyous starlit night” while the sea was only “slightly ruffled, the east breeze cool and gentle,” she grabbed her blanket, dragged it up top, and held it there with her feet, standing with their skipper as he steered, murmuring a song that someone had been teaching her to sing along with the conjunto of guitars and maracas at the bar.16
Soon it would be decided that it was time for “Pickle” to return to Chicago to obtain her divorce from Noel Monks. In the poor weather, Ernest decided that it would be more prudent for him to drive, but on the old high road to the airport, many trucks had been carrying clay and spilling it onto the asphalt, which when combined with the new rain made the road “greasier than a pancake skillet,” such that their Lincoln slid off into an embankment face-first. That impact on June 20 smashed Ernest’s tender skull into the rearview mirror, his knee into the dashboard, and his midsection into the steering wheel, breaking four of his ribs. Mary on the other hand went right through the windshield, badly cutting her face. Horrified, the unhappy couple rushed themselves to a nearby clinic and later Dr. Cuco transferred Mary to the hospital where Ernest would finance plastic surgery to decrease her disfigurement. Remaining still under her bandages in an attempt to reduce her scars, she tried to be brave and hide her misery as Vedado mosquitos bred around the clinic that were not only immune to Mercurochrome but had seemingly also developed a taste for it, swarming in hungry schools to feast on her antiseptic.17 When she recovered, Mary flew home to see her parents and obtain her divorce.