Ernesto Page 5
To attend to the boom in Cuban sugar, seasonal workers poured in from all over the Caribbean to collect the Cuban harvest, or zafra. Perversely, many Cuban farmers no longer owning land found themselves working the colonias of foreign owners and competing for jobs with migrants from Haiti, Jamaica, and Barbados.154 During the period from 1900 to 1930, sugar mills proliferated in the east of the island and railroads expanded to transport the cane, and Cuba became the world’s premier sugar producer with American investors owning 40 to 50 percent.155
A common Cuban expression laments, “Sin azúcar no hay país” (“Without sugar, there is no country”), but Cuban sugar often made promises it could not keep. Cuban agriculture’s focus on a single crop and a single customer made for a roller-coaster economy when the price of sugar rose and fell in the mid-1920s from 4.2 cents per pound in 1924 to 2.6 in 1926.156 When the people protested that they were not benefiting from the resources extracted from their country’s soil, governors begged and borrowed money from American banks to launch projects of public works, laying roads and inaugurating buildings—while taking advantage of the large disbursements by dipping hands in the cookie jar in varied and creative ways.
After the War of Independence ended, Americans and Spaniards still owned much of the land and resources in Cuba, but Cuban leaders demonstrated resourcefulness: it has often been said by Cuban historians that the second zafra in Cuba during the early twentieth century was politics. Gerardo Machado, the son of a tobacco and cattle farmer, had distinguished himself in combat during the War of Independence. Riding waves of protest in 1925 to include the founding of the Cuban Communist Party during that year, Machado ran for president as a member of the Liberal Party, promising “Water, Roads, and Schools” and depicting himself “on foot, with the people,” in contrast to the conservative candidate, General Mario García Menocal, who was often seen on horseback. The campaign won him the presidency.157 Having sworn he would fix everything from the crumbling infrastructure to the injustices of the Platt Amendment, Machado insisted on presidential term limits, pledged to eliminate corruption, and barnstormed for fair trade and autonomy from the United States. With a gleam in his eye, he proclaimed that he would soon make Cuba the “Switzerland of the Americas,” but instead he soon became one of the worst dictators in Cuban history.158
Restoring order to angry people would present a significant challenge. While Cuba’s president Machado’s commitment to law and order was laudable, uncompromising tactics revealed the dictatorial inclinations in the school of recent rulers like Miguel Primo de Rivera, António de Oliveira Salazar, or Benito Mussolini, during an era where fascism was on the rise. Ushering in the new era, Mussolini cynically announced in 1928, the same year Hemingway arrived in Cuba: “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice, it’s a fallacy. You in America will see that someday.”159 The first two years of Machado’s presidency fulfilled many hopes by passing laws to protect Cuban architecture; regulating the sugar industry; and commissioning projects to build roads (like the new National Highway), railroads, bridges, and discernable buildings like the Capitol dome and the Hotel Nacional. Initially at least, Machado walked a line by encouraging foreign investment while advocating Cuban autonomy and development.
As public works deals proliferated and public funds evaporated, the public’s suspicions piqued concerning money siphoned behind the scenes. When a pro-Machado “Constitutional Assembly” broke his key campaign promise by passing a new law extending presidential term length from four to six years, officials at the American embassy suspected that he had used public funds to bribe members of the opposing parties. Diverse factions unified against him, including the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario in 1927 that organized protests on the steps of the University of Havana.160 Students demanded democratic processes be reinstated and the president, whom they considered a “tropical Mussolini,” removed.161 The university administration, taking orders from Machado’s cabinet, convened a tribunal and permanently expelled several students for speaking out.162 The students responded by organizing workers and intellectuals all over the island to put pressure on what they now considered to be an illegitimate government. With a pregnant bride in tow and eager to return home, Ernest may not have read about the students’ expulsion in the local newspaper, but the attentive writer and his wife would have noted the ambition, corruption, insurgence, and suppression in Havana, in conversation at the street corners, in the strides of passersby, and in their eyes.
After two days in Cuba, Pauline and Ernest boarded another steamer, Peninsular and Occidental’s SS Cuba, carrying them over the last ninety-mile stretch to Key West, Florida. Cleaving north, the ship left a streak of wake like a white scar across the purple belly of the sea. Holding her husband’s hand and leaning into his shoulder, Pauline placed the other hand on her abdomen to feel the movements of a child she would have now with the man she had desired and won.163 They turned a moment later toward the horizon and crossed it in pursuit of ever-elusive happiness.
CHAPTER 2
Oak Park and the War, Fathers and Sons (1899–1932)
Arriving in Key West, the couple was advised that the Model T roadster that Pauline’s Uncle Gus had bought them had not yet arrived. No matter. What could bother “a writer writing” when he was on the water and on a roll—with a new story already taking hold?1 While they waited for the automobile, the Ford Motor Company accommodated them at an agency apartment at 314 Simonton Street.2 There, Ernest sunk himself into scenes familiar to him from the Great War and combined them with others imagined from a humbling retreat after the Battle of Caporetto.3 Struggling with a previous manuscript, he had failed to produce a book, but he had the feeling now that he was onto something big.4
After being wounded on the Italian front, Frederic Henry from A Farewell to Arms finds himself in a hospital in Milan and falls in love with an American nurse, Catherine Barkley. Deserting his unit and “the War,” Henry seeks a separate peace, and he finds a brief idyll in Switzerland with Catherine before death returns and steals his wife and child during birth. Ernest, determined to make his story and characters more vivid than those in The Sun Also Rises, would employ a favorite technique of returning to experiences that he had lived firsthand—the war wound and recovery at the hospital in Milan, the rejection by the twenty-seven-year-old American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, and moments with Hadley in Chamby during their matrimonial bliss—then combining them with recent events that were still unfolding, such as the retreat from Paris with Pauline and the upcoming and complicated birth of his second son.5
As the dawn faded in humid Key West, he scribbled and sweated to convey the scenes of love and war that had affected him in the snowy Italian mountains and everything he had lost since then.6 In the afternoons exhausted, he recuperated by fishing beneath an offshore breeze in the turquoise waters of the Gulf.
Approaching delivery, Pauline longed to finish the journey home to Piggott, Arkansas, but she also loved seeing her husband this way: truly happy only when he was writing well. When she looked in on him each morning, she dared not disturb his rhythm, for she could see it in his eyes and in his forward-lean in his chair while rereading the day’s results. Soon the Ford arrived, but Ernest could not risk leaving this place where his story was at last unfolding. So they lingered in Key West, the scanty island town where he and his story were coming alive.7
While fishing in Key West in 1928, Ernest had met several people who became influential and longtime friends, like rumrunner and speakeasy-owner Joe Russell, and bait-and-tackle-shop owner Charles Thompson. When Ernest received a visit from friends from Paris, writer John Dos Passos and painter Waldo Peirce, the Bahamian captain Bra Saunders took “the Mob” charter fishing on his boat. When a tropical storm appeared without warning, they had to seek shelter at Fort Jefferson.8 Stranded for seventeen days, they survived on canned goods and whatever fish they could catch.
There, Ernest encountered two Cuban fishing captains, also marooned on the islan
d, named Carlos Gutierrez and Gregorio Fuentes.9 When Ernest’s party ran out of supplies, Gregorio gave them food and rum. Gregorio also took him in his broken-down boat, the Joaquín Cisto, across unsafe waters through a storm to a neighboring cay where Gregorio knew the lighthouse operators so that Ernest could use the telephone.10 Carlos, captain of the schooner Paco, also insisted on giving Ernest’s party some food, and on their last night in Dry Tortugas, Ernest invited Carlos and his crew over to share some rum.11 A night of jug passing and tall tales ensued. Carlos, a commercial fisherman who had been going to sea with his father since 1884 when he was six years old, told his own tales of 120-foot whale sharks, of a fight between a shark and a dolphin, of 20-foot rattlesnakes that swam off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and of the crocodiles floating lazily there many miles out at sea.12
Respected among Havana fishermen, Carlos held the record for the highest number of marlin caught in a single season, bettering hundreds of others, even other commercial fishermen working out of Casablanca docks.13 That evening, Carlos told Ernest about the marlin that swam off the coast of Cuba every summer season, rising from the depths of the sea, leaping into the air, and crashing into the waves.14 If Ernest ever wanted to return to Cuba, Carlos agreed to teach him all he knew about these noble creatures, out “on the blue water.”15
On April 10, Ernest’s parents unexpectedly arrived in Key West by ferry, returning from a vacation in Havana and accompanied by Uncle Willoughby on hiatus from missionary duties in the Far East. Neither son nor parents had communicated their plans to the other: their meeting was unexpected.16 Dr. Clarence “Ed” Hemingway and his wife Grace had not seen their son in four years, and they had never met Pauline. The five of them hurriedly toured the island together that day.
The afternoon’s photographs offer glimpses of Pauline heavy with child and Ernest leaning across his new bright yellow automobile. The writer is wearing a casual sweater vest, and his father a three-piece suit. In the photograph, his “hawk-nosed” father gapes at his son with admiration and concern, while Ernest smiles, red faced, and crosses his arms conspicuously in front of his crotch.17 His father’s diminishing weight, vacant stare, and graying complexion depict a man in sharp decline, but too close-lipped or proud to say it to his son. Before the parents continued that evening to Saint Petersburg as planned, they said choked-up farewells on the docks.
The visit, however brief, had done them all some good. Despite differences, they were family. In the letters that followed this visit, Dr. Hemingway said that they had gone much too long without seeing each other and that he was eager to see Ernest and his family again in Oak Park in a few months. He did not mention his worsening health, financial difficulties, and unpaid taxes on bad investments in Florida.18 These were problems that his son, a successful writer married to a wealthy family, might have done something about. From a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, Ed wrote his son, “Ernest, How I wish you and Leicester [Ernest’s brother] were here with me in this wonderful trout country.”
* * *
—
Ernest grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the heartland of the United States, a country town that took pleasure both in its increasing affluence and its separation from the “big city.”
All over America during the early twentieth century, farms, homesteads, and open country were rapidly industrializing and assuming the frenzied, mechanized paces of the new epoch they were calling the Modern Age. The family’s passion was a cabin in the Michigan woods, which offered wide spaces and “wild, open country” for their lionhearted children to explore and overcome.19
As the boy grew, more and more of his town’s members had electricity, automobiles, and telephones, surrendering provincial insulation and attaining the amenities and vices of a modern world.20 While the eldest members of Ernest’s community had pursued Sioux Indians across the plains and shot real bison along the outer reaches of the American frontier, neither Ernest nor his father would do so. Within commuting distance of the urban jungle of Chicago, the conservative, affluent, and genteel community of Oak Park, Illinois, looked forward pragmatically, offered one of the best school systems in the nation, awarded cultural achievements, and provided numerous examples for its children to emulate. Thus Ernest re-created the frontier in his imagination and his weapon of choice became a Corona typewriter.
Oak Park employed competent teachers, like Fannie Biggs, and supported parents as they required that children apply themselves. In her journalism class, structured “as though the classroom were a newspaper office,” and in extracurriculars like The Trapeze, the school paper, Biggs applauded Ernest’s stories, no matter how amateurish they might have been.21 Ernest’s mother, Grace, the parent primarily responsible for her children’s upbringing, was as quick to praise her children’s achievements as she was to criticize the weakening of their resolve.22
Just before Ernest entered Oak Park High School, the American military returned to Cuba to suppress an uprising of ten thousand Afro-Cubans, members of the Independent Party of Color who had revolted, and to slay more than two thousand of the same. Back home, Ernest benefited not only from a first-rate education but also from his family’s connections. Henry Haskell, Uncle Tyler Hemingway’s classmate at Oberlin College, was chief editorial writer at the Kansas City Star. When Ernest graduated, Ed Hemingway asked his brother, Tyler, to contact Haskell to give Ernest a chance. The Star agreed to employ him on a thirty-day trial period as a cub reporter from eight to five, six days per week, at fifteen dollars per week.
His iconic editor, “Pete” Wellington, ordered him to memorize the 110 items of his style sheet, transforming the high schooler’s clumsy sentences into vigorous prose. Among the items were maxims such as “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”23 Hemingway later remembered Wellington as a “stern disciplinarian, very just and very harsh,” and that those were “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them.”24
Every year, Ernest’s grandfathers, who had fought for the Union during the Civil War, donned their uniforms, marched with the Military Order of the Loyal Legion or the Grand Army of the Republic, and were honored by their community.25 Their sacrifice and their moral duty composed a mythology, an ethos for Oak Park, shared by President Woodrow Wilson and by Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, preaching and practicing a “strenuous life,” “manly virtue,” and “service to the common good.”26 During the Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt and his band of Rough Riders had taken San Juan Hill, the year before the writer was born, and brought his country’s ethics to the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific.
* * *
—
Ernest’s generation had heard the stories. When they came of age, it was their turn.
Extra, extra, read all about it: “Archduke Assassinated,” “Lusitania Sunk,” “Germany Declares War,” “All Europe is in Arms,” “Germany Invades France,” “French Resist at Marne,” “Austria Has Chosen War,” “Italy Declares War,” “US Declares War,” “Wilson Signs War Decree,” “War Declared by All.” Daily newspapers and weekly newsreels bombarded an entire generation of young people with fabulous stories and movie-screen-sized scenes from “the Great War.” It was all larger-than-life, the most magnificent occurrence in their tender lives; none need be told to respond to the call of duty in the next great American “adventure,” but their elders did encourage and recruit them to participate as soldiers, sailors, airmen, corpsmen, nurses, and ambulance drivers.
Every young fella whom Ernest knew would be volunteering just as soon as he could. Those who “shirked their duty” or did not wish to follow would be branded “yellow,” weaklings, cowards to the core. Henry Serrano Villard, who had responded to Red Cross recruitment with Ernest, recalls they were both “fired by patriotic fervor, bent on helping to make the world safe for democracy,” and that they saw the war as an event that nobody dare miss: “Not for anything wo
uld I have missed the opportunity for a ringside view of the greatest spectacle to unfold in our time. To many of us the war in Europe resembled a gigantic stage on which the most exciting drama ever produced was being played out.” As the poet Archibald MacLeish described the war, “It was something you ‘went to’ from a place called Paris.”27 Along with 4.8 million other men, Ernest put his career on hold and shipped out.28
At the front, these young men would discover firsthand just how strenuous the “strenuous life” could be: artillery bombardments, mustard gas, modern fighter planes, machine guns, the first tanks, and trench warfare. If they survived to see the armistice on November 11, 1918, they then discovered on January 6, 1919, that Roosevelt, an indestructible model of manly virtue, had died. Six months later, they watched as a flawed peace process at Versailles sowed the seeds of a second world war, and it became more difficult to understand why hundreds of thousands of young men and women, family and friends, had been lost.29 As a “Lost Generation” of shell-shocked fighters returned home, financial booms and busts complicated their employment, “flappers” confounded their sensibilities, Prohibition obstructed their anesthetization, and other upheavals emerged throughout the “Roaring Twenties.”30
Hobbling in uniform in his hometown once again, a young Hemingway had survived, was greeted as a hero, and asked to speak at several functions. At his high school, he took the stage and imparted the wisdom he had acquired in the war.31 To the Oak Parker newspaper, he declared, “I went because I wanted to go…I was big and strong, my country needed me, and I went and did whatever I was told—and anything I did outside of that was simply my duty.”32 Just after that, however, his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who had left nineteen-year-old “Ernie” smitten at the l’opspedale della croce rossa in Milan, dropped another bombshell in a letter notifying him that she had decided to marry another man, a real one rather than a kid like him.33