Ernesto Page 27
While Hemingway and Hotchner “chain-drank” daiquiris, their conversation turned soon to the author’s selection of Cuba as a place to live and write. Ernest attempted to explain: “Character like me, the whole world to choose from, they naturally want to know why here. Usually don’t try to explain. Too complicated. The clear, cool mornings when you can work good with just Black Dog awake and the fighting cocks sending out their first bulletins.”19 During the conversation, Hemingway seemed to get “lost in a maze of diverse and contradictory reasons”—cockfights, lizards…black dog?—for as fellow Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez appreciated, “the reason for the choice of the place where one writes is one of the insoluble mysteries of literary creation.”20
Like previous articles about Cuba, “The Great Blue River,” written in 1949, paid tribute to both mentors Carlos Gutierrez and Gregorio Fuentes.21 In its careful sentences were water and weather, the other boats arriving and departing in an evangelical rhythm, the squids they used as baitfish, the reels, the lines, the other fishermen, the Spanish fort of the Morro, the background buildings of Old Havana, and all the people he knew walking along the Malecón.22
From the flying bridge of his boat we are made to experience Havana harbor and to feel the enjoyment doing what he loved most, the masterful descriptions becoming a dimension unto itself. As the sun sets upon Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, and “The Great Blue River,” first mate Gregorio sees, zigzagging amidst the lines, a wake slicing through the dark water, a gorgeous dark purple body, and wings spread wide like an aquatic bird.23 “Feesh, Papa! Feesh!” he shouts. Papa tells readers, “If you are ever flying across between Havana and Miami and looking down on the blue sea, and you see something making splashes such as a horse dropped off a cliff might make, and behind these splashes a black boat with green topside and decks is chasing, leaving white wake behind her—that will be us.”
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Departing out of Genoa, the Hemingways set sail again on the Jagiello at the end of April 1949, and after a brief stop at Cristóbal on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal, arrived at the Finca Vigía at the end of May.
Upon their return, Mary finished the labor of love, which she had been perfecting since construction had begun in 1947: her husband’s new workroom at the top of a writing tower. With the acquisition of a woven reed chaise longue as its final touch and a bell so that he could ring for René, Mary declared her masterpiece “ready for his inspection and occupancy.”24 At last, Ernest would have an airy workspace of his own where he could find solace to write, and Mary would not have to worry about the telephone’s ringing and disturbing him or have to hush “the more strident conversations in the kitchen.”25 A week later, Mary found her husband standing again before his typewriter propped atop the bookshelf of his bedroom, rather than in the white tower she had built for him. Caught in the act, he thanked her, but told her that it felt too lonely up there: he missed the sounds of the house.26 Though it had been intended to give him an office much like the one he had worked in in Key West, connected to the main house yet separated by a bridge, the white tower would stand mostly empty after that—except for its feline inhabitants.
Missing Adriana a few days following his return from Italy, Ernest “acquired a pretty, pleasant secretary to take dictation,” moonlighting after her day job at the American embassy.27 Her name was Juanita Jensen, though he preferred calling the shapely thirty-two-year-old with the peachy complexion “Miss Nita” or “daughter.”28 Miss Mary could be as prickly, high-strung, and territorial as her writer-husband, so the “acquisition” of a young secretary (on the heels of his flirtation with the Venetian girl) appeared quickly on Miss Mary’s radar, flared feathers, and provoked a discussion. After confirming Nita did not have plans to take her place, Mary classified her as a “non-threat,” and seeing that the secretary freed her from several tedious duties, she allowed her to settle in.
Convincing Miss Nita to dye her hair blond, then to cut it short, Ernest indulged erotic fantasies, despite Mary’s protests, and invited the girl to accompany him aboard the Pilar where he made a pass at her that she nervously refused.29 Under the pretext of visiting her parents, Mary departed at the end of the summer. Mollifying his wife in frequent letters, Ernest assured that his first mate Gregorio was his only company aboard his yacht.30
Enclosing checks, he swore Mary was the only one (who mattered) and announced the good news: Cosmopolitan was agreeing to serialize his new novel, “for a comfortable sum,” so she could “proceed with Operation Mink Coat.” Then from Charles Scribner he borrowed ten thousand dollars “to make up to [Mary] for how shitty I have been when jamming in the stretch.”31 Returning soon after by plane from Chicago, her “luggage bulging with presents,” Mary was feeling “enchanted” again with “the sweet smell” of flowers, with the warmth of Cuba, with her “new mink riding grandly on [her] arm,” and by her husband who so thoughtfully met her at the airport with frozen daiquiris from the Floridita for the couple to sip on the way to their home—when it pleased the missus, Ernest made it a tradition.32
In addition to Miss Nita, Adriana, and Leopoldina, Ernest conciliated the pangs of his aging appetite by contracting the services of a “younger, more beautiful new whore,” a seventeen-year-old whom Leopoldina had arranged and whom he jokingly nicknamed Xenophobia for her aversion to foreigners. Thus continued Papa’s viejo verde (“green old man”) period.33 In addition, two days before Mrs. Hemingway returned, Ernest bragged to Scribner about a date with Leopoldina, a reliable lover and a tolerant friend.34 According to her niece, Hemingway’s presence at Leopoldina’s apartment in central Havana, where he was paying the rent at that time, was routine.35
That month, The Viking Portable Hemingway, first edited by Malcolm Cowley in 1944, would go into its second printing. At the end of October, Gianfranco Ivancich arrived in Cuba without a visa, so Papa called Paco Garay to leverage his connections to help this likeable, nice-looking young man—an “unexpected guest” who appeared at the Finca like an orphan enticed by Mr. Hemingway’s welcoming invitation. At first, he told them that he planned to stay “a couple of weeks,” but his visit “would stretch, with intervals, to seven years.”36
In November, Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway flew to New York and rented a suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel (at the southernmost corner of Central Park, six blocks from the Museum of Modern Art, and ten blocks from Charles Scribner & Sons), where Ernest told journalist Lillian Ross that he wanted to avoid “news people” and “publicity.”37 In their suite, he feasted on caviar and champagne with actress Marlene Dietrich (who had just broken up with Martha Gellhorn’s post-Hemingway beau) and received Charles Scribner, boxing trainer George Brown, actress Virginia “Jigee” Viertel (the wife of screenwriter Peter Viertel), Lillian Ross, and son Patrick, who had come “down from Harvard” to see his father and to “look at pictures” at the Met while Papa drew long sips of whisky from his flask. From her close encounters and correspondence with Hemingway, Lillian Ross would sketch in a New Yorker article, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” a satirical portrait of the ill-groomed author in his taped-up glasses, with his battered briefcase in hand, hugging an unfortunate businessman whom he had forced to read his new manuscript on the plane, accompanied by his subservient wife and several other beautiful women to mollify his ego, and talking in his own peculiar terminology.38
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Hemingways stayed in Mary’s old war room at the Ritz in November and December, attended horseraces at Auteuil near Bois de Bologne with Peter, Jigee Viertel, and Hotchner (in town to retrieve the last three chapters of his master’s manuscript). There, the old man, unfulfilled by his wife alone, cultivated another “friendship,” flirtation, or affair with Peter Viertel’s wife, with whom he spent an hour and a half alone in her Ritz Hotel room while Mary waited angry and alone in their marital bed. Afterward, Jigee accepted a “strings-free” gift of two thousand dollars from Ernest, to spend on herself s
hopping in Paris—among other unusual goings-on that aroused both spouses’ suspicions and jealousies.39
Influenced by his “toe-curling” enthrallment with a girl thirty years younger than himself, Papa’s sappy prose was gracing the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine in the painful first installments of Across the River and into the Trees in February 1950, while Mary again broke her ankle—the left one this time—skiing.40 In New York, Mary met with a doctor and confirmed her fears: after her near-death experience in Casper, Wyoming, an “occluded” fallopian tube would make her chances of death during pregnancy nearly certain. Feeling like a “failed member of the human race,” she conveyed the news to her husband: she would never be able to give birth to human life or deliver the daughter he had hoped for.41
Adriana happened to be staying in Paris with a school friend to study art. To celebrate the selection of Adriana’s drawings for the book cover of Across the River and into the Trees, the Hemingways held a luncheon in her honor a few days before their planned return to Cuba. Afterward, Ernest invited Adriana to escort him for a walk alone along the Seine, and, over gin and tonics at Les Deux Magots, he proposed. Averting his advances, Adriana reminded him about his wife, Mary, and maintained their friendship.42
After a transatlantic crossing, the Hemingways arrived back in Cuba, and Mary watched in dismay as Ernest staked his hopes in an intense correspondence with the Venetian girl, at last convincing her to come to Havana.43 Why did she accept? Did Adriana enjoy the power she held over this grand old man who had worked himself into a state of desperate frustration on her behalf?44 To Scribner, Ernest complained that he could buy a mink coat for his dependents but could not spend one dime on the girl he loved. Overcome by feelings, he had written a novel about a girl “loved more than anyone in the world,” and he was the “character with a broken heart.”45
Immersed frequently in a vapor of alcohol, Ernest’s “bad-boy behavior” intensified. When Mary’s cousin Bea came to visit in May, her husband invited the ladies to meet him for lunch at the yacht club, Club Náutico. After leaving the ladies to bake in the sun, he turned up very late and drunk in the company of the “young whore” he called Xenophobia. Angered and offended, Mary was unable to speak, but she wrote her husband a letter two days later: she had decided to leave him, for their marriage had failed. Receiving the news soberly that morning, he came into her room, read a couplet from Shakespeare, and stated, “Stick with me, kitten. I hope you will decide to stick with me.”46
Distracting her subsequently with encouragement to renovate the villa as she had often dreamed and with the announcement of his intention that he would soon be holding the first marlin fishing tournament bearing his name—an annual tradition that began that year, which continues in Havana till this day—Hemingway somehow made her stay. In her memoir, Mary explains that she felt closest to her husband when they were at sea, and during this competition, she said she took pride in competing from her own boat, the Tin Kid, which her husband had ordered made for her.
In June, while Ernest revised the galleys of Across the River and into the Trees, seventy-five thousand Northern troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and took Seoul by June 28, but the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, backed by the Soviet Union, found itself face-to-face with the US-backed Republic of Korea to the south in a gruesome war that would kill 2.5 million people, continue until July 1953, and remain unresolved even today, a Cold War consuming countless lives and resources.
Then as the author awaited the publication of his novel, and the arrival of Adriana, his drinking, meanness, and depravity picked up steam. In one dispute, he called his wife “a camp-follower and a scavenger,” and a couple of days later, “You have the face of Torquemada” (an evil priest and torturer during the Spanish Inquisition). Such pronouncements caused her to run to the rose garden, sit in the shade of the lychee tree, and have conversations with herself.47 That season, there were several ranting and raving letters, apparently written in a state of drunkenness, such as those where he chewed out Charlie Scribner for his disorganized publishing house that set a “new record” for delays in delivering his “fucking page proofs…Jesus Christ I’d like to put your [Publishing House] in order.”48 In May, he had challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy to come to Cuba and fight him man to man, rather than continue to waste his time with Communist witch hunts, which “bored the bejeesus out of the tax-payers.”49
References to Leopoldina and Xenophobia routinely seasoned his letters that summer, both while Mary was in Havana and when she took leave. On the anniversary of his 1918 wounding at Fossalta di Piave, he “commemorated” with a double-date with Gianfranco, Xenophobia, and Leopoldina, or so he told Charles Scribner in a letter: “Yesterday was the 8th July. Fossalta di Piave. So I told Gianfranco we ought to make an act of celebration. So we went into town and found Leopoldina and Xenophobia, after work done, and a couple or eight drinks and ran off The Killers, which is quite a good motion picture until the very last.”50
When he returned from Italy, said Dr. José Luis Herrera Sotolongo, “He started to drink heavily. If you keep on drinking this way, I told him, you won’t be able to write your own name,” but averaging four to six bottles of whiskey per week and two to three cases of wine, he was always drunk.51 “One day I said, ‘Look kid, you have turned into a drunkard and I hate that. If you don’t change, we’ll have to stop being friends. I’ve tried to help you the best way I know, but I have failed, so perhaps it is better that we go our own way!’”52 On the afternoon of November 17, 1955, José Luis went to meet with his friend Ernest and saw that his face and eyes had turned yellow.53 Calling in a specialist, they determined that Hemingway had contracted hepatitis. José Luis prescribed bedrest and firmly restricted his friend’s drinking. Hemingway obeyed his doctor’s orders. Over time, his condition improved, and the danger was averted.
José Luis was a man he respected, a doctor like his father, and a longtime friend whom Ernest could not lose. Limiting his consumption of alcohol, he tried and failed to maintain a strict regimen and get back on the right track. On the first of July, attempting to anchor the Pilar behind the reef at Rincón, he misjudged the distance, cracked his head open, and severed an artery. Dr. José Luis administered several stitches, sewn with a silk thread while the author braced himself in Mary’s leather office chair with only gin for anesthetic, causing his headaches to reappear. When Miss Nita walked into the room the following week, she found her boss without any pants on: “Forgive me for exposing myself, but I wanted you to see what happened to me. Look here at my right thigh…”54
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“With the final galley proofs of Across the River corrected and sent north and the pressure of work lifted,” wrote Mary, then “Ernest floundered in the void and the need to wait for the arrival of Adriana and her mother.”55 Rather than allow herself to be sucked into the tornado of “fluctuating tempters,” Mary, returning to the “warm Cuban earth and the grasses beneath the liche tree,” resolved to stabilize her marriage with understanding and patience as best she could.56
On September 7, Scribner published Across the River and into the Trees. Incongruously he had dedicated his novel about his infatuation with the young girl to his wife, Mary, who had had doubts early on about the plot and structure that she did not dare articulate.57 The day the reviews were to appear, Mary departed Cuba to help her parents resettle in Gulfport, Mississippi. After finding them a suitable residence, she returned to Chicago to move them down.
Left alone on Finca Vigía, Hemingway had read an advance copy of one review of his novel by John O’Hara that would appear in the New York Times Book Review and in Time. It was a full-page spread with an illustrated caricature of Hemingway looking like a worn-out boxer titled “On the Ropes.” Taking his lead from the writer’s bragging and boxing talk recently appearing in Lillian Ross’s “How Do You Like Me Now, Gentlemen?” O’Hara wrote, “Hemingway was the champ all right. He was past 50, but still the cham
p, and he was ready to take on all comers,” but in his new novel he “never wins a round” and was merely a “bore who forfits the reader’s sympathy.”58 These jabs were tough to take, even with the distraction of the whores and the booze to dull the blows, particularly for an exacting writer who believed he knew his craft and a thing or two about the world he was writing about.
Blame and denial rose like black bile in his throat as he read this. He fired back at O’Hara, “A man without education nor culture nor military experience naturally can’t understand the book nor the girl, nor the Colonel, nor Venice.”59 He sent Juan the driver to town to pick up reviews from Newsweek, Times Daily, and Times Sunday. Confounded as O’Hara’s words sank in, he attempted to let it go: “I’m going to take a dry martini now and the hell with it,” his mind drifting to Venice and to Adriana’s visit.
On the following day, the battle at Inchon began. Supported by advisors from the Soviet Union, the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea drove UN forces back as far south as the Pusan perimeter where they held their position from August 4 until mid-September. Launching a risky counteroffensive, Douglas MacArthur landed an amphibious assault at Inchon, and UN forces seized control of the Korean capital two days later. Cutting the North Korean force in half, UN forces swept the peninsula, capturing all enemies, pushing north, and forcing their retreat.