Ernesto Page 29
Though he had employed a stream of consciousness technique in other novels, it had perhaps not yet permitted readers to empathize to the same degree. For the first time in his career, Hemingway’s novel had nothing to do with “the war.” Instead he had written about an old man, a boy, their village, a fish, and the sea. A far cry from impotent Jake Barnes, disillusioned Frederic Henry, self-serving Harry Morgan, martyrish Robert Jordan, or embittered Colonel Cantwell, his hero Santiago, “with eyes the color of the sea,” was unassuming and undaunted despite his age, his poverty, and his terrible luck. The narrative was compelling, credible, and simple. It assimilated details from decades spent fishing the Gulf to create a character, ethos, and universe.13
While reading it, Americans could forget that on the other side of the world their nation was engaged in the fourth bloodiest conflict in its history, later known as “the Forgotten War,” locked in a stalemate as the Chinese and North Koreans continued their offensive, pushing United Nations troops back and retaking Seoul while General MacArthur considered the use of nuclear weapons.14
Visitors, sister Ursula and Charles Scribner, read the “coda” manuscript about an old man and the sea. With bronchitis and a fever, Ernest fell ill during Scribner’s stay and missed a lot of the fishing, and afterward Ernest wrote Charlie, “I was very happy you liked what you read of the book. (The end.) But I would have thought you a certifiable fool if you had not (he says cheerfully). There is never any doubt when something is right. But it makes you very happy to have someone you like and respect say so. I had been getting good opinions only from my family.”15 In the same letter and in subsequent letters, Ernest revealed his cagey inner core by launching into vehement attacks of James Jones, a fellow Scribner’s author for whom Charlie had asked Ernest for a blurb in anticipation of the publication of his novel, From Here to Eternity. He could not offer his support for a book he despised: he and Colonel Jones were a “different breed of cats,” for Jones was a “psycho and not a real soldier” like him.16
In March, Holiday magazine published two Hemingway fables, “The Good Lion” and “The Faithful Bull,” and in April True magazine published “The Shot,” a nonfiction story about an antelope hunt. In April, he finished a first draft of the final section of the Sea book—the sub-chasing part, and dissatisfied with it, he spent April to October revising and chopping down Islands in the Stream. When he had done so, he wrote Scribner about the final section that was “exactly 26,531 words”: “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit. It is as good prose as I can write now.”17 He had to be patient, he told his editor, as the entire trilogy was 182,231 words counted to date: “The same people are in books 1, 2, 3. In the end, there is only the old man and the boy = (Book 4). I have many titles for it. But will get one finally.”
A week after his fiftieth birthday, Ernest’s mother Grace died. In the final years of their relationship, Ernest and his mother had settled into ceasefire whereby he provided and exchanged polite letters in a slow boil of anger beneath the veneer of their civility. “I hate her guts, and she hates mine,” he told Charlie Scribner in a letter. “She forced my father to suicide.” He would not attend the funeral.
* * *
—
In round reading glasses and disheveled necktie, Eduardo “Eddy” Chibás was working himself into a sweat while denouncing corruption in Cuban politics. His “Vergüenza Contra Dinero” (“Shame Against Money”) campaign resonated with the general public, as did his integrity, reasoned argument, and facts. Insisting on a peaceful revolution through honest and legal means, Chibás stood as one of the few alternatives to the gangsterism epidemic in Cuban politics. Forming the Orthodox Party in 1947 and critiquing former president Grau San Martín and President Prío, Chibás used his popular radio show as a platform and had gained an unprecedented degree of notoriety and support as an Independent, but amidst controversy he lost to Prío during the 1948 presidential elections.
Bidding his followers farewell, apologizing to them for failing to produce evidence that the Minister of Education had been misappropriating public funds, and warning of an impending coup attempt by Batista, Eddy Chibás shot himself in the stomach with a .38 caliber pistol at the end of his radio show on August 5, 1951.18 Though he had intended to kill himself on the air, he did not succeed, for the shot was muffled by an advertisement for Café Pilón, and he was rushed to intensive care at a hospital nearby where he lay for eleven days while the whole country awaited bulletins on his condition. When he died, hundreds of thousands of people came to Colón Cemetery to mourn him at his funeral. He became a martyr, justifying outright rejection of the government. Many of his admirers speculated that he had been well positioned for the election of 1952—among them was the outspoken twenty-five-year-old activist Fidel Castro.
Receiving a call at the end of September that her son Gregory had been incarcerated for entering a woman’s bathroom in Los Angeles, Pauline flew down from San Francisco to post his bail. From the home of her sister, Virginia, Pauline telephoned Ernest to report the incident; accusations and embittered shouting ensued. Later that evening, Pauline had to be rushed to the hospital where she abruptly died of shock before doctors could operate. Ernest wrote Charles Scribner, “The first wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead of my heart. And I have full sorrow of Pauline’s death with all the habour scum that caused it. I loved her very much for many years and the hell with her faults.”19
During the following month while Gregory and his wife, Jane, were visiting the Finca Vigía, Gregory would comment a bit too casually on his arrest, “It wasn’t so bad, really, Papa.”
“No?” his father responded. “Well, it killed Mother.”20 The relationship with his third son was deteriorating into resentment, anger, and threatening letters, but it would infuse new purpose into his creation of a manuscript of new fiction, the following year, exploring the source of evil, The Garden of Eden.
“People are dying that never died before,” mumbled Ernest as he read in the newspaper in December 1951 that his longtime friend Harold Ross, co-founder of the New Yorker magazine, had died.21 In November, his dear friend and outwardly indestructible ship captain Juan Duñabeitia had suffered a third heart attack while returning from sea and been taken in and cared for at the Finca while he recovered.22 Death looming, losing loved ones, clashing with family, and at odds with his critics, Ernest Hemingway had been having trouble sleeping and was taking sedatives. At the beginning of the New Year, the Hemingways, wanting very much to get away, departed for a few days to the Mariel Coast.
Ernest and Mary asked Gregorio and Felipe to prepare the Pilar and Mary’s auxiliary, the Tin Kid, departing west along the coast toward Pinar del Río and Paraíso Key and secluding themselves, to fish outside the reef, out beyond Punta Purgatorio, between sea and sky, and in the shadows of the mangroves, from January 10 to February 20. Aboard, he had the manuscript that he tinkered with from time to time: “The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.”23
For ice and other provisions, the Hemingways came ashore at La Mulatta on February 16. When they called the Finca to check in, René read a telegraph informing them that Charlie Scribner had died of a heart attack. Heartbroken himself, Ernest wrote with his condolences to Mrs. Scribner two days later, “Now my dear and good friend is gone and there is no one to confide in nor trust nor make rough jokes with and I feel so terribly about Charlie being gone that I can’t write anymore.”24
The Hemingways made a brief stop back in Cuba to meet the Haywards who, hopeful that they could collaborate with Ernest on a script, had taken leave of Tinseltown. Then, with their bags packed, they settled into the front seat of the Buick and began driving down their “hibiscus-splas
hed driveway” toward the front gate. Juan asked “¿Has oído qué pasa en la Habana?” (“Have you heard what’s happening in Havana?”) No, they had not heard anything on Radio Reloj, the Cuban news that announced itself punctually with the ticking of a clock. Had they not heard about the company of Cuban soldiers that had surrounded the presidential palace and a crowd amassing in the streets? “Let us go as usual to the Club Náutico,” insisted Ernest.25
After the Haywards’ visit, the Hemingways again exiled themselves on an extended cruise past Purgatory Point, where the Gulf Stream hit the end of a wide reef and offered a secret alcove; they were “living in a world of twenty shades of blue,” alone except for their steward and the dolphins they saw playing in the waves.26 With his manuscript in the Haywards’ hands, Ernest began new fiction during that Edenic spring. By revisiting past lives and describing present utopia, the writer employed a favorite technique of creating immediacy and depth in his fiction. In scenes as utopic as those he was experiencing in Cayo Paraíso, Ernest Hemingway explored memories from his early adolescence in upper Michigan, from his twenties in Hendaye and Le Grau-du-Roi, and the root of evil in incest and androgyny. He would never allow this fiction to be published during his lifetime, but it did appear posthumously as “The Last Good Country” and The Garden of Eden.
In “The Last Good Country,” game wardens pursue Nick Adams for poaching as he escapes to the northern forests of upper Michigan in the company of his admiring kid sister, “Littless,” whom Nick calls a “Devil” when she toys with gender by cutting her hair like a boy to please him.27 The story appeared to draw inspiration from a real-life incident when he was seventeen, impulsively shot a blue heron, and fled with his sister Ursula.28 Then when they are alone together in the virgin forests where the trees rose sixty feet, making it seem like a sacred place, like a cathedral, where “no sun came through…His sister put her hand in his and walked close to him,” and though they both felt “strange,” they were not afraid because they were together. Later when his sister woke, she would tell her brother that she wanted to become his “Common-law wife,” to go with him to Europe, and to have his children.
In The Garden of Eden, an American writer, David Bourne, and his wife, Catherine, are happily honeymooning on the French Riviera and travelling to Spain and back again while David is attempting to work. The trouble arises when Catherine begins to change at the same age as Gregory Hemingway was that summer: twenty-one.29 The transgender experiments between David and Catherine are the beginning of evil in the garden, leading them to allow Marita, an intruder, into their Edenic existence. Trying to cure their sickness, both husband and wife made love to her, but the destruction was already done.
Mary and her “sweet and happy” husband were alone on the sea, yielding to a world of physical pleasure, while Ernest created new fictional tales of David, Catherine, Marita, Littless, and Nick Adams: “As I had noticed other times when we were alone together on the sea, my husband did not often invite me into his bigger bed, and I thought I understood why. In our mutual sensory delights, we were smoothly interlocking parts of a single entity, the big cogwheel and the smaller cogwheel, I felt, with no need for asserting togetherness. Maybe we were androgynous.”30 The unsavory threesome of Catherine, David, and Marita travelling together in the French Riviera and Spain found clear inspiration in the ménage-à-trois between Hadley, Ernest, and Pauline, which had broken up his first Eden in Paris. These works were the first to explore this time where paradise had been lost. Later, he would write about it again in A Moveable Feast.
* * *
—
At the same time, paradise was being lost in Cuba. “It is my destiny to make bloodless revolutions,” announced Colonel Batista on the television and on radio. “The only blood spilled will be that of those who oppose us. We are the law.”31 During his six years in exile in Daytona, Florida, Batista had remained active in Cuban politics, surveying the situation from a distance, until his election to the Senate in absentia demonstrated that the time might be right for him to return to the forefront. The Prío administration had become exceedingly corrupt, and the opposition had been clamoring for change. Returning to Cuba, Batista entered the presidential election of 1952. When an opinion poll in Bohemia (Cuba’s leading national magazine) showed him far behind the other two candidates—Roberto Agramonte from the Orthodox Party and Carlos Hevia from the Authentic Party—Batista returned to his previous ways.32 Three months before the presidential election in June, he staged on March 10, 1952, a bloodless coup, like the Sergeant’s Revolt of 1933, this time recruiting disaffected junior officers to organize and turn against their superiors.33
The facility with which Batista returned evidenced the excesses of his Partido Auténtico-Revolucionario; it was said that President Prío fled in such a hurry that he forgot his cocaine stash in the presidential palace while his brother continued to dance the night away in the Sans Souci.34 In the words of historian Hugh Thomas, “The Auténtico-Revolutionary Movement was neither authentic nor revolutionary. It was a democratic party but most of the leaders were anxious to enjoy the fruits of power more than to press through such reforms as needed by Cuban society. Their program turned out to be words.”35 Prío went into exile in Miami and Puerto Rico where he worked as a developer and an entrepreneur, met with Carlos Ochoa in Montreal, and attempted to rally opposition to return to Cuba, but he killed himself in Miami in 1977, a week after the US House Select Committee on Assassinations had called him for questioning. “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba,” Prío had once pointed out. “That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”36
Suspending the constitution to reestablish provisory martial law, Batista canceled elections, suspended congress, deployed tanks into the streets, and published a new constitutional code to support a more “disciplined democracy.”37 In a radio broadcast, the Cuban strongman announced that he had returned and taken these measures “to save the country from chaotic conditions.” The 275 articles would conserve the constitution’s “democratic essence” while taking certain measures to ensure order and progress.38 Demonstrating vision and his skills as a tactician during the escalation of the Cold War, Batista upheld a discourse that was anti-Communist and pro-investment. Consequently, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote President Truman that the State Department “naturally deplores the way that the Batista coup was brought about…” yet offered his support for a Cuban presidential administration that promised to stabilize the country, “curtail international communist activities in Cuba,” and support the American investment of “private capital.”39 A friend against “the Reds” in Latin America, Batista would become one of the Eisenhower administration’s closest allies in weeding out “subversive communist elements.” Seventeen days after Batista’s coup, the United States recognized his government arriving to the seat of power by military coup. Preparing a campaign to run for the Cuban Congress during the June elections was young lawyer Fidel Castro, graduate of the Law School of the University of Havana. When Batista illegally seized power in Cuba for the second time, Fidel brought several lawsuits against him that produced zero results.
Escaping the turnover of power in Cuba and people once again, Mary and Ernest Hemingway departed and, enjoying an idyll in their marriage, did not return from Médano de Casigua, a secluded alcove of Cayo Paraíso, protected by the barrier reef, amidst turquoise waters, white sand beaches, and green lagoons, until the end of March. There, Gregorio dropped anchor, prepared cocktails, and cooked, while they fished, drank, bathed naked, and walked along the shore with Ernest finding moments in the shade and putting the finishing touches on his coda story.
* * *
—
When they returned, they received a visit from Walter Houk and Miss Rita who announced their engagement. Upon Mary and Ernest’s insistence, they held the reception at the Finca Vigía on April 20 with Ernest in the absurd position of giving the bride away. On the marriage certificate Ernest�
�s profession was listed correctly: “ocupación escritor.” In June, Alfred Eisenstaedt arrived to take color photographs of the author and eighty-year old Anselmo, a model for Santiago in Cojímar, in the exhausting heat until Ernest called for them to stop.
On Labor Day, September 1, 1952, 5,318,650 million copies of a special issue of Life featuring The Old Man and the Sea hit the stands…and sold within the first forty-eight hours.40 A week later Scribner’s released 57,700 copies, sold out in advance. It was picked up for the Book of the Month Club the following day. Along with a “whispering campaign” that preceded its release, the three-pronged publishing assault gave the book unprecedented momentum as it leaped into view.41 Just after in October, Carlos Baker released his own volume, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, a literary exaltation of his works that clearly benefited his cause. In America, Scribner’s sold 3,000 per week after the first 50,000, and in the United Kingdom, advanced sales reached 20,000, then continued afterward at 2,000 per week. From Life, the author brought in $137,000, and $38,000 from Scribner and Sons.
Several of the critics and competitors who had condemned him for Colonel Cantwell and Across the River and into the Trees were now jumping over one another to be first in line to praise him for Santiago and The Old Man and the Sea. Nearly all the same voices who had called his career kaput were again singing his praises while admiring the simple and sad story of an elderly Cojímar fisherman, catching the fish of his life, and losing it to sharks.
In a short advance review for Shenandoah magazine in August, his literary nemesis William Faulkner hailed it as one of literature’s highest achievements.42 In the New York Times, Orville Prescott praised his discipline and skill as a “master technician once more at the top of his form.”43 In the New York Herald Tribune Review of Books, Malcolm Cowley called the novella “nearly faultless…the essence of classical prose.”44 Across the pond in London, Cyril Connolly smothered him with praise in the Sunday Times: “I believe this is the best story Hemingway has ever written. Get at it at once, read it, wait a few days, read it again, and you will find…that no page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently.”45