Ernesto Read online

  Alfred Kazin’s review, entitled “The Indignant Flesh,” appeared in the New Yorker. It concluded that Hemingway’s latest novel would “only distress anyone who admires Hemingway”: “It is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book—pity, embarrassment, that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvelously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar.” Kazin concluded that it was full of self-loathing rather than hope: “A rage that is deflected into one of the most confused and vituperatively revealing self-portrayals by an American I have ever seen.”60

  Right before his eyes, his imaginative mind, which had always served him so well, snowballed into obsessive delirium and caused him to commit the monumental blunder of his career. Unable to attain Adriana or to become a valiant Buck Lanham, he had imagined a story where protagonist Richard Cantwell would do both. What the author wished was occurring between him and Adriana appeared a bit too plainly on the page, such that readers found themselves suddenly voyeurs to the love games of an aging wolf and his latest little lamb, a sad prospect for most. Whatever he had attempted, the critics handed him his head, no longer excusing errors or indulgences, dismissing him and his novel as a total failure, and pronouncing his writing career complete. After all, who deserved it more than the man who had droned for years how important it was to be tough?

  “Oh well. It is all horse-shit anyway,” chuffed the writer in a letter to Buck Lanham; but then he defended himself, pointing out that although the novel had sold 130,000 from the first printing, after reading these first hostile reviews sellers had ordered only 25,000 more copies. What did they know anyway? They were old ladies, like Henry James, angleworms in a bottle, who had not seen a day of combat.61 When his novel hit number one on the bestseller list the following week, the writer took to the pulpit in the New York Times Book Review to emphasize his “combat experience” that his critics, weak-kneed as they were, clearly knew nothing about. They were incapable of comprehension. He was light-years ahead of them. They were expecting arithmetic while he was doing advanced trigonometry. Why would he need their approval? He needed only to write.62

  * * *

  —

  Upon being invited to Cuba, Dora Ivancich first responded cautiously that she would consider the matter. She then perplexed Mary by accepting the illogical invitation. Later her daughter would explain that in the face of greatness, the “Venetian tendency” was to float. Enjoying a drink on the terrace with a journalist from People magazine and basking in the afterglow of Hemingway fame, Adriana later allowed, “Being a Venetian is a psychological handicap. Nothing is ever good enough, and floating is one’s favorite way of facing life.”63

  At the age of nineteen Adriana had been herself unsure what lay in store. A trip to Cuba, and to America along the route, promised to increase the young italiana’s perspective and show her the way. Possibly she and Hemingway could help each other, she reasoned. While not “in love” with the aging and married man, she was genuinely in awe of his work and fond of him, and she expressed concern about him.64

  Facing the Ivanciches’ upcoming visit with the renewal of her own optimism (perhaps resembling insanity), Mary went shopping, as ordered, to pick up new guayaberas, shoes, and shorts for her husband at the department store El Encanto.65 Busying her staff to ensure their estate was prepared for the imminent arrival of these very important guests, she commanded workers to tear down and rebuild each room until she was certain that the Finca was in impeccable condition, and her husband was thoroughly annoyed with the disturbance.66 So thrilled was he that Dora and Adriana were arriving by the end of October that he would take the Pilar to meet their ship, the Luciano Manara, before it had even arrived. While Gregorio, Gianfranco, Roberto, and Mary waited outside Morro Castle for the ship to dock, they waved endlessly to all aboard, Adriana pretty in her lavender dress and her mother as usual in gray.67

  It had long been his practice to play the role of generous host, but for the Ivanciches, he would become triply so, for he said the Venetian family had shown him a great kindness and hospitality abroad, and Adriana’s affections might depend on it. As they boarded his ship, Ernest’s eyes misted over when he clasped Adriana finally in his arms. Paco Garay fast-tracked mother and daughter through customs and immigration. Loading their luggage into their yellow Buick, the Hemingways smiled as they showed their guests to the newly remodeled “Venetian room” (once belonging to the kitties, but now renamed). So that Ernest could show Adriana all that he loved about Cuba, the household subsequently embarked on a frenetic agenda of “social festivities, both given and received, such as they never undertook before or since”: they fished from the Pilar, lunched at Club Náutico, shot pigeons at the Cerro Hunting Club, and paraded the freshly picked Italian flower before his friends at the El Floridita.68

  As soon as his muse arrived in Cuba, Ernest presented her a copy of the novel she had inspired. One week later, he asked her for her opinion: “I hesitated but then I spoke up. ‘The girl is boring. How could your colonel love a girl who is so boring? A girl like that does not exist, if she is lovely and from a good family and goes to Mass every morning. Such a girl would not drink all day like a sponge and be in bed at the hotel.’” She did exist, he protested. Girls like her do exist; he had known many of them. Backing off, she said how much she had liked his other books, and he promised, “For you I will write a good book, better than I have ever written before. Wait and see.”69

  Leading Adriana into his writing tower, he encouraged her to work on her drawings while he wrote. Although she was terrified that her work showed little talent, he told her that in that tower they were anonymous, a secret society with the freedom to create and be, away from everyone else in the world who might pronounce judgment on their actions and on their works in progress. The name of their “private organization” was “White Tower Inc,” he said, or “WTI” for short. “Here we can work with discipline and honesty, independently yet united,” said Papa, setting her down at his desk in his room at the top of the tower, and setting up a desk for himself to work on the first floor.70 With Adriana inciting his imagination, a new story had begun to flow out of him: “Adriana is so lovely to dream of, and when I wake I’m stronger than the day before and the words pour out of me.”71

  Bursting and imploding during Adriana’s visit, Ernest struggled to rein in his emotions. After rejections, he fell into depression, then regrouped his forces for another attempt. Bearing the brunt of his frustrations, Mary did her best to ride out this difficult period in their marriage by sympathizing with her husband’s predicament, but she also eventually broke down. The lowest point came one evening when Dr. Herrera Sotolongo was dining with the Hemingways and the Ivanciches. In February, Adriana and Dora were planning to travel to the United States with Mary as their guide for part of the way so they could discover Key West, Miami (while she visited her parents in Gulfport), a night of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and on to the museums and Broadway shows of New York.

  In preparation for this trip, Mary had agreed, after dinner, to help Gianfranco type up a visa request to accompany them. “Taking umbrage with the scene” unfolding, Ernest seized her typewriter and chucked it onto the floor. A remark from Mary later upset Ernest and caused him to throw wine in her face and stain the whitewashed wall behind her. Mary, in shock, shouted that Ernest should take care to show some respect for their guests, and all sat without a word. Looking “grim-faced,” José Luis retreated to the other room while Dora and Adriana sat like monkeys on a branch on the sofa, seeing no evil, and Gianfranco stood nervously nearby.72

  Mary decided to approach her husband while he was peacefully working one day, typing on the bookshelf in his room, the moment when he should never be disturbed. Asking him to come into her room so they could talk, Mary told him she understood his feelings for this girl but that she loved him and their life in Cuba, and that she would not leave until the morning he came to her sober and a
sked her to, which he never did.73

  Meanwhile Adriana had begun to date a Cuban boy from a good family, attending several social gatherings with people her own age, and inspiring jealous outbreaks from the author during one of the grimmest New Year’s Eves that Mrs. Hemingway could remember.74

  “Before the holidays and again as we hurtled into 1951 none of us had time to squander brooding,” Mary wrote. “We were forever going places.”75 They went to Vedado to hear Rubinstein play Chopin, to the casino and nightclub Montmartre, with the palm tree growing up through the grandstand where they met all their friends and danced through the night, to the Barnum and Bailey Holiday Circus, to the Floridita for “Papa Dobles,” to Puerto Escondido aboard Pilar. Afterward, they organized a huge party at the Finca Vigía in honor of the Ivanciches, with signs and posters made by Adriana and Gianfranco, extra servants, live music, fresh flowers, and drinks. After their automobiles had been parked by Juan the driver, a small international crowd of eighty guests descended, following candles to the pool shimmering in the moonlight and to a bar under a pergola where bartenders from the Floridita filled their glasses with champagne and whiskey. A conjunto of guitars and maracas filled the air with music, and migrating to the house, they dined on a buffet on the terrace and admired the distant lights in the valley of Havana.

  The end of Ivanciches’ time in Cuba loomed with Juan Verano accompanying Mary, Adriana, and her mother on part of their return trip across the States. The fruitlessness of their visit made Ernest increasingly depressed and angry as he came face-to-face with his own delusions concerning not only Adriana but also the novel he had written, his own limitations, and the fool he had been.

  Whatever happened in the dance of their relationship, the myth that they invented, its mystery and mystique, outlasted them, for whether passionate or platonic, Ernest and Adriana had a connection, complex and evolving feelings. Inspiring and enraging the boy from Oak Park, Adriana gave Ernest reason to “float” when he was starting to drown.76 Like Ernest and his brother, Leicester, Adriana would later fail to live up to the grandeur of her own imaginings. After two troubled marriages and the book La torre bianca, which she published in 1980, Adriana hanged herself from a tree in her front yard in 1983, making her story as ill-fated as the one belonging to the talented writer who, through the strangest of circumstances, became her friend, and whom later she could not seem to forget.

  In her book, Adriana struggles and succeeds at describing these complex feelings and her relationship with Hemingway. Some believed her to have a father-figure relationship with him. It wasn’t that. Her father was morally correct, punctual, disciplined, comprehensive, and loving. Hemingway came from another culture, and although courageous like her father, he often behaved like a little child whom she wanted to protect. In his presence, she felt like the older one, she said.77

  CHAPTER 11

  A Citizen of Cojímar and a Cuban Nobel Prize (1951–1956)

  In January of the New Year, Hemingway’s first biographers—Carlos Baker and Charles Fenton, professors at Princeton and Yale—courted him by letter to ask for his cooperation in summarizing the story of his life. Resenting their prematurity and the absurdity of the request, Hemingway refused: “I am resolved not to aid, and to impede in every way, including legal, anyone who wishes to write a story of my life while I am alive. That would include my wife, my brother or my best friend.”1 When Baker adeptly kept in contact by shifting gears to what he suggested would be aggrandizing literary-study about Hemingway’s work rather than his life, the writer was pleased, softened, and assisted him in completing Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1952).2

  When Fenton insisted on pursuing the biographical study, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, The Early Years (1954), the writer got gruff and told him to “cease and desist” immediately: “Nobody likes to be tailed…I think you ought to drop the entire project.”3

  What kind of business was it to pick at a man’s bones while he was still alive? His career and his life were not over, and he would show literature’s bean-counters, vultures “making quick-moving shadows as they sailed overhead,” and Adriana just how much life he had left.4

  From Mrs. Hemingway’s memoir, an incident just before Adriana’s departure illustrates the power of Ernest’s imagination, his superstitious nature in interpreting the signs, and a fear of death’s proximity:

  Ernest’s enthrallment with his house guests did not appear to redeem me [Mary] from whatever sins I was supposed to be committing. His internal turbulence continued to explode, mostly in my direction, for unsuspected, unexpected reasons. Soon after the Ivancich mother and daughter arrived he disapproved of a dark dress I had chosen to wear for dinner at home and to a film to which we were all going, a dress of which he had never before proclaimed dislike. Now he regarded it with distaste and commented, “Your hangman’s suit. Your executioner’s suit.” As we were embarking in the car for the film, he announced, “You’ve sabotaged it.”5

  The proximity of Adriana and Mary in her dark dress appeared to spook the writer, for it sharpened his already acute sensibility, and heightening his awareness of his passion for living, his steep decline, and his approaching demise.

  While Adriana’s visit had caused frustration, marital strife, and pain, it also ignited creative fires and spurred artistic growth, evidenced on the fifth day of the new year of 1951 when Ernest Hemingway wrote Hotch to announce the good news: he had been writing steadily during the last two months, such that he had finished the Sea part of his envisioned “Land, Sea, and Air” trilogy on “Xmas Eve.”6 Having returned from World War II in 1945, Hemingway had begun an ambitious “Proustian Land, Sea and Air Trilogy” and, drawing upon a lifetime of experiences spent fishing the Gulf Stream, had worked on the Sea part sporadically since then. In his lifetime, he never published the whole Sea book, which was over one thousand pages long, but nine years after her husband’s death, Mary, controlling the Hemingway estate, would edit and publish parts of it as Islands in the Stream. Ernest had never published this part because he was not satisfied with his results, but the final chapter, or coda, was very promising indeed.

  Making forward progress on this last chapter, he had written Mary that he was plowing through a black-ass mood by exceeding his projected word count on the story of a Cuban fisherman.7 As he was reading it back to himself before writing new prose each morning, he was realizing that the third part was so well written that it had to become the end, so he made it the fourth part and began to rewrite the middle, expanding part three to improve the whole. He told himself that he would use the story about the Cuban fishermen as a coda at the end of the larger book even if the character and plot of this story were unique. When he showed it to family, friends, and editors, they responded with the same enthusiasm, for he had been saving this story—about “an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabañas hooked a great marlin”—for more than fifteen years.8

  After Mardi Gras, Dora, Adriana, and Juan picked up Mary in Gulfport heading toward Jacksonville. In another letter to Mary, Ernest, purified by the prose he was achieving, wrote these romantic words to his legal wife, “Christ how I miss you being here to read it. Also miss you for several other reasons…”9 By February 14, the Ivanciches departed Jacksonville bound for New York while Mary returned to Cuba. By the time she unpacked, Ernest had completed the first draft of a 26,531-word manuscript that would be titled first “The Sea in Being,” then “The Dignity of Man,” then The Old Man and the Sea.

  Why had he failed so miserably with Across the River and into the Trees and throughout much of the Sea book, yet was now succeeding in the coda? As he would admit to a half-dozen interviewers afterward, this time he was writing honestly about something he knew well. He knew about fishing the Gulf because he had been doing it for twenty years in the company of Cuban fishermen. Thus details like the flying fish, the terns, and the robber birds, flowed naturally into his prose and made his narration authentic. He had written it true. He knew h
is characters, basing them on real people he had spent years with, admired, and respected. He knew about Cuba and about the village of Cojímar where he kept his boat. On mining material in the Spanish language, he had noted in Green Hills of Africa: “You can only really follow anything in places where you speak the language. That limits you of course. That’s why I would never go to Russia. When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and sightseeing…You get your good dope always from the people and when you can’t talk with people and can’t overhear you don’t get anything that’s of anything but journalistic value.”10 The linguistic and cultural proficiency allowed him to bring messages from another world—writing convincingly about a Cuban setting and characters for English-speaking readers.

  His new Cojímar hero committed himself humbly, earnestly, and to the present task rather than reposing disingenuously on past achievements or complaining bitterly about the odds or the forces conspiring against him: “The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”11 As Mary read the fruits of each day’s work, he could see goose-pimples on her arms, difficult to manufacture and a sign that the story was good: “I did okay today, mmmm?” Mary, sensing that Ernest was about to kill his protagonist, campaigned and begged him not to: “Everybody would be happier if you let him live.” A few nights later she would read a more ambiguous ending: “Up the road, in the shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.”12