Ernesto Read online

  At first she seemed little more than a casual friend. After all, she was good company for Hadley while Ernest was writing, and it was not unusual for them to be in the company of female friends.64 In the evenings, the three of them played bridge or conversed cozily indoors, but soon Pauline was spending more time with Ernest, reading from works in progress, complimenting him, and giving him editorial feedback.65 “The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both. Then the one who is relentless wins,” he later wrote. Yet when Pauline returned to Paris in January, he pursued, leaving wife and son behind in Schruns.66

  He had told Hadley the trip was necessary to advance his career. Emboldened by critics’ praise for his first story collection, In Our Time, but disappointed with his publisher’s promotional efforts, Ernest had been concocting a scheme to wriggle out of his first contract and fasttrack his career with the firm that represented F. Scott Fitzgerald.67 Fitzgerald had raved about Ernest’s writing to his editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, who then offered Ernest a deal. His current agreement with Boni and Liveright allowed him to publish elsewhere only if they rejected his work. Consequently, he created The Torrents of Spring, a parody of his former mentor, Sherwood Anderson, knowing that Boni and Liveright would refuse a work so damaging to their top author. Hadley remembered Anderson’s kindness to them, and she urged her husband not to betray a friend. But Pauline supported Ernest in the power move.68

  Receiving telegrams in Schruns from both publishers, Ernest insisted he had to go to New York to sign a new contract for The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises.69 His wife had always believed in putting his writing career first, and she agreed to stay behind in Austria with their son. However, passing through Paris on the way there and back he stayed with Pauline in her apartment on rue Picot even though he told his wife that he was staying at the Hôtel Venézia in Montparnasse.70 In one stroke, Ernest had betrayed both the family and the friends who had enabled him to attain his dream.71 When he came back to Schruns, he found his wife and son waiting for him there. As he held her close, he felt the pangs of regret and told himself that he would set himself straight.72 He would work well, love her and no one else. They would be happy, and he would forget Pauline. After coming out of the mountains in the spring, however, he and Pauline started up again.

  Likely not wanting to see, Hadley did not notice Ernest’s affair until the end of April when Virginia and Pauline invited her on a tour of the castles of the Loire in Virginia’s car.73 After a short time on the road, Pauline, perhaps pregnant with Ernest’s child at the time, snapped at Hadley over a trifle, then withdrew into a sullen silence.74

  Sensing that something was wrong, Hadley softly asked Virginia, “Don’t you think Pauline and Ernest get along awfully well with each other?”

  “Well,” Virginia announced, “I think they’re very fond of each other.”75

  From “the way she said it,” Hadley “seized the situation. Suddenly it was immediately clear.”76

  When she asked her husband if he was having an affair, he so insisted that she drop the subject that she felt ashamed for having brought it up.77 Afraid to lose him by pushing him about it, Hadley yielded, but when Kitty Cannell ran into her in the streets of Paris and asked after Ernest, Hadley blurted out: “Well, you know what’s happening, she’s taking my husband.”78 Meanwhile, Hadley and Ernest had been planning a trip to Madrid to attend the bullfights of San Isidro, then to travel to the south of France to meet the Fitzgeralds, the MacLeishes, and the Murphys as invited guests in a rented villa in Cap d’Antibes, the Mediterranean village where the Murphys anchored a sleek one-hundred-foot yacht, Weatherbird. When Bumby fell ill, Hadley went to the warmer weather of the Côte d’Azur while Ernest decided to go to Madrid alone.79

  It is likely that Ernest rendezvoused in Madrid with his mistress, “Pilar”—Pauline—to terminate a pregnancy.80 While it would have been a sin for her as a Catholic to abort, at that time it would have also been mortifying for a fashionable young lady in a prominent family from a tiny rural community to explain a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock.81 The story Ernest set to paper one year later takes the form of a tense conversation at a junction-station bar somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid: an unnamed man pressures a woman, Jig, to get a “simple operation,” just to “let the air in.”82 The title of the story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” refers to the hills of Spain’s Ebro valley that the couple watched during their suppressed argument and to the “white elephant” they had to dispose of.83 Just after Madrid and before rejoining his family on the Riviera, Ernest would write to his Protestant parents to confess that he had attended Catholic mass in Madrid (with Pauline, most likely after her upsetting operation), to inform them of his “shift” to another publisher, and to mention the name of a new woman with whom he planned to winter in Piggott.84

  Fearing that Bumby’s whooping cough would infect her children, Sara Murphy ordered Hadley and her boy quarantined in a villa separate from the beautiful people. In a letter Hadley informed Ernest that the Murphys had been keeping “a grand distance from us poisonous ones.”85 In her mounting anxiety and isolation, Hadley employed radical measures to get her husband to appear, even demeaning herself by inviting his lover, who she said was immune to whooping cough, to assist her with their son.86 While his mistress’s presence was unpleasant to Hadley, Pauline and Ernest running off together was much worse. “Fife,” Pauline, could stop off here if she wanted to, wrote Hadley, then rued that it would be a “swell joke on tout le monde” if she, Ernest, and Pauline spent the summer ensemble.87

  Soon Ernest and Pauline showed their faces in Antibes. When Bumby stopped whooping and the jet set’s lease on their villa ran out, Ernest rented basic rooms for himself, his wife, and his mistress at the Hôtel de la Pinède in Juan-les-Pins. Then there were three breakfast trays, three wet bathing suits on the line, three bicycles, and a mistress who tried to teach a wife how to dive, but the wife would not be a success. Ernest wanted them to play bridge together, but Hadley found it hard to concentrate, so they spent mornings on the beach, sunning or swimming, and lunched in their little garden. After siestas, they took long bicycle rides along the Golfe-Juan; descriptions of the not-so-utopic sun-soaked threesome would later reappear in his wicked posthumous novel The Garden of Eden.88

  When the reviews of his early works, like the In Our Time collection, appeared, their comparisons irritated Ernest to such an extent that he felt compelled to distance himself by firing off shots in the form of lengthy parodies written about former mentors Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. In 1926 Scribner’s released the Anderson parody, The Torrents of Spring, and by February 1927, the New Yorker published the Steinesque story, “My Own Life.” These works advanced his career, but ultimately derailed friendships by ridiculing two writers who had arguably helped him the most, and resulted in return fire, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.89 In his novel The Sun Also Rises, which was in progress at that time, Hemingway’s character Pedro Romero, the matador, declares, “The bulls are my best friends.” Pedro’s lover, the debauched heroine Lady Brett, asks him, “You kill your friends?” The matador answers, “Always. So they don’t kill me.”90 The moral is clear: one has to seize the upper hand before others have a chance.

  Still an ally in June 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald sent Ernest a four-page letter full of encouragement and detailed feedback for his first novel’s first draft: “The novel [was] damned good…a proof of brilliance”; but he suggested that Ernest cut all wordy descriptions, backstories, ineffectual bits (which he specified), snobbery, sneers, glibness, nose-thumbings, and style for style’s sake. He advised him to reduce the word count from seventy-five thousand to fifty thousand.91 Although the criticism might have at first been difficult to stomach, Ernest wrote Scott later that year to thank him and joke that he should dedicate the book to him. The dedication page would read “The Sun Also Rises (Like
Your Cock if You Have One), A Greater Gatsby (Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald) (Prophet of the Jazz Age).”92 Following Scott’s advice, Ernest wrote Perkins in June that he would be making some cuts that “Scott agreed with.”93 Whatever Fitzgerald’s faults, he attempted to be Ernest’s friend, offering his time, editing, and counsel, and later graciously downplayed his influence on Ernest’s novelistic debut.94

  The tension with Hadley grew throughout the summer and peaked in July in Pamplona where they were accompanied by the Murphys and Pauline, and in Valencia where they were alone while Ernest was revising The Sun Also Rises. Returning to Antibes, the Hemingways informed the Murphys, their sponsors, that they could accompany them no farther. Their marriage was over. After a final, strained train ride in a closed compartment with a woman and her caged canary, Hadley and Ernest returned to Paris to set up separate residences.95 Making it easier, well-heeled Gerald Murphy told Ernest that he and Pauline might make a better match, and he deposited four hundred dollars into Ernest’s account and offered his pied-à-terre at 69 rue de Froidevaux, overlooking Montparnasse cemetery, as an alternate residence for Ernest while Hadley and Bumby sought refuge in Hôtel Beauvoir.96 In August in Gerald Murphy’s apartment, Ernest continued reworking The Sun Also Rises, a manuscript scandalizing former friends, personages immortalized in the name of a noble cause. Meeting him in Deux Margots that summer, Samuel Putnam, who knew Ernest in Chicago, reported that his ego had swollen since the early days: he was behaving much less like the humble reporter he had known and more like a “literary celebrity,” “tarzan of the printed page.”97

  Unable to comprehend her husband’s callousness and still hoping his feelings for Pauline were a passing infatuation, Hadley made one last attempt to save her marriage by promising a divorce on one condition: he must agree to separate from his lover for one hundred days. If they still desired each other afterward, Hadley would not stand in the way. Hearing this, Pauline set course directly, via steamship departing from Boulogne on September 24, for a self-imposed exile in Piggott. Was it remorse? Penance? A last rite out of respect for Hadley’s dying marriage? Or her merger with Ernest as sure as a profit margin, patiently accrued like the rent collected from one of her father’s tenant farms?

  By October, Hadley was sounding somewhat suicidal and rather brokenhearted in her letters and asking Ernest not to see her.

  Dearest Tatie, I think it will be the very best thing for you and me to keep apart and I am sure you feel so too…[In] case anything should happen to me Marie and the concierge could get hold of you for Umpster. Not trying to suggest disasters but you are responsible for Umpster after me. Anyway my awfully tender, sorry love, dear Chickie and I don’t think Pauline is a rotter and I’m sure some day—if let alone—my old trusting affection will come back…I promise to try for it. But to forget you both in the meanwhile. You see, I can’t afford to think about you two for a while, or I’m going to break down completely. Your loving, oh so sorry we talked again. Cat.98

  By November 16, she saw the futility in her demands and took back control of her life. Yes, she cared deeply for Ernest, but she could no longer bear the back and forth, the ups and downs. Frostily, she inventoried her belongings and requested that Ernest move everything on the list from their old apartment at rue Notre-Dame des Champs to her new one at rue de Fleurus. In a letter to Ernest that month, John Dos Passos comforted and teased his friend that “Pauline was an awfully nice girl. Why don’t you [become] a Mormon?”99

  While Ernest was moving Hadley’s possessions one by one by handcart through the bumpy streets of Paris, it dawned on him what he was losing, and he began to weep. When he saw his father in such a state, Bumby asked what the matter was. Papa pointed to a cut on his hand, so Bumby brought a bandage, spoke to him in the only language that he knew, “Je t’aime, Papa…la vie est beau avec Papa,” and caused his father to feel much worse.100 Just after, Hadley cancelled all conditions and asked Ernest to initiate divorce proceedings immediately.101 Declaring fin to the hundred-day siege, Ernest dispatched Virginia to send a telegram to her sister.102 His divorce, which he filed in December, was granted in April 1927 by the court. As the divorce was pronounced final, Hadley and Bumby fled from Paris on a steamer to America.

  In gold-embossed invitations from Cartier, Pauline invited a few guests to a reception at the MacLeishes’ apartment at 44 rue de Bac. Friends Ada and Archibald MacLeish agreed to host the luncheon, but declined to attend the ceremony, for they found Ernest’s conversion to Catholicism, which annulled his first marriage and made his son a bastard in the eyes of the church, to be distasteful.103 After their civil ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville and a small service in the side chapel of l’Église de Saint-Honoré d’Eylau, a large Catholic church in Paris’s well-heeled sixteenth arrondissement, Ernest and Pauline became husband and wife on May 10.104 The bride appeared in an off-white chemise designed for her by Lanvin, a strand of Cartier pearls, and her close-cropped coiffure en rigueur, while the groom wore a frowzy tweed suit dressed up with a new necktie.105 Unable to travel to Paris, Mary Pfeiffer, Pauline’s mother, struggled to accept the “crooked circumstances” through which her daughter had come to be married, but she sent her best wishes, prayers, and a check, hoping that the Lord’s guidance would straighten their pathway to peace and happiness.106 At the end of May, Hadley took Bumby to visit the Hemingway grandparents, whom he had never met, in Oak Park.

  Eager to make a new life work amidst Parisian ghosts, Pauline had also bid Ernest to pray and rented a sumptuous apartment “to suit their tastes” at 6 rue Férou, with a large master bedroom, maid’s room, writer’s study, and expensive antiques.107 Like a genie from a lamp, Uncle Gus appeared at the end of March to check in on the happy couple and to furnish another check to pay for all desired. Ernest could never have written The Sun Also Rises, as well as In Our Time and The Torrents of Spring, without Hadley, he said, so he dedicated the book to her and Bumby and gave them all the royalties.108 His every need would also be thereafter assured by the Pfeiffer clan, so it was the right thing to do.

  After a dazzling honeymoon on France’s Mediterranean coast, in the Basque Country, and in Galicia, the Hemingways returned to their new apartment in Paris in mid-September. Hadley also returned to Paris, in October, renting an apartment for Bumby and herself at 98 boulevard Auguste Blanqui.109 While Pauline did her best to make their life there work, Paris had been poisoned for her and could never be quite the same. Haunted, Ernest had never intended to lose a family, Paris, or to betray someone so close to him, Hadley, his most trusted friend. By mid-March 1928, Pauline and Ernest, retaining the rented apartment at rue Férou, had decided to depart for America. Adrift in pursuit of Ernest’s writing and in flight from another life, they nomadically visited family and friends, and rented rooms, sans domicile fixe during the next three years.110

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  On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Ernest walked along the Malecón of the harbor of Havana and gazed at the water that now separated him from it all: the painful divorce, the turbulent affair, his first family, the enchanted postwar period that he had known with Hadley, the trenches of World War I, the drunken dissolution of the artist class. He had taken his licks, come through it, and extracted all he could, from Stein, Pound, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and the rest of them, and at last the critics were hailing him as the new talent. He was a literary conqueror arriving home.

  Returning along the walkway that separated the Old Town from the port, he looked over turquoise waters and really could not believe his luck; he wondered if he could put the bad part behind him. The scene of the Caribbean crossroads embodied origins and terminus. Like Ernest, Cuba’s capital was “ambos mundos,” the best of both worlds, old and new. At that time tinny announcements over black-and-white newsreels lured would-be visitors with descriptions of the contrast in her cityscapes: the thrilling rebirth of a new capital amidst antique cultures, sophistication, and charm. But it had been Do
s Passos’s gushing descriptions of a “tropical, maritime, and unspoiled” paradise that had really primed his appetite.111

  The two writers met as ambulance drivers in Italy during the war and became friends in Paris.112 Dos Passos decided to hitchhike to Key West and returned to Paris to sing the glories of his “dreamlike crossing of the keys” and the tarpon fishing there he had seen. “A vacation paradise like no other in Florida. You ought to try it.”113 “The air smelt of the Gulf Stream” and there was “an island…Cayo Hueso, as half the people called it…linked by car-ferries with Havana,” where “cigar factories had attracted a part Cuban, part Spanish population.”114 When Dos Passos told him about it, he had to see it for himself.

  Turning his back on the sea, he looked toward the city of Havana. Her buildings, avenues, the faces of her people, the way they breathed and talked—details of an island at the edge of progress, caught between contending worlds. Her walls along the sea, Art Deco skyscrapers rising into the clouds, iron-railed balconies wrapping around the aging buildings of Old Havana, bells resounding on the hour, stone arches framing window displays, and the movements of people on promenade and between the shops—yes, here, he thought, he might really make a fresh start.

  A phase of awakening in Paris was ending. His career was finally taking off, but not without considerable costs. Although now free from poverty, the financial security offered by his second marriage would not guarantee his independence.115 The island of Cuba found itself in a similar knot as she emerged from colonial past to neocolonial present. As a long war for autonomy ended, she had become dependent upon the United States. Following a divorce from Spain, a prickly affair with a powerful northern neighbor would complicate Cuba’s struggle for identity and independence.