Ernesto Read online

  Taking this bruise to his manhood rather badly, the boy wonder recoiled to the woods to camp, hunt, fish, and write—alone or in the company of William Horne (a fellow ambulance driver) or Bill and Katy Smith (childhood friends) during the medicinal summer of 1919. Likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and certainly from a broken heart, Ernest now focused on writing various short stories.34 He enjoyed a brief but ultimately unsatisfying relationship with seventeen-year-old Marjorie Bump, a pudgy, red-headed, freckle-faced waitress and daughter of a hardware store dealer in the logging town of Petoskey. Then to write, he holed up in a lake cottage in Michigan throughout the summer, then stayed after its end. There, to ease his loneliness, he had a mechanical affair with Liz Dilworth, a waitress and neighbor.35

  By fall, Ernest escaped to a boardinghouse on Horton Bay to continue his writing in dogged yet fruitless attempts rejected by editors at the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Magazine.36 One day, he put on his uniform and delivered another “war lecture” at the local library, which produced lucrative results: in attendance were his mother’s wealthy friend Harriet Connable and her invalid son, Ralph Connable, Jr. They were so dazzled by the war hero and aspiring writer that they offered him a position in Toronto as Ralph Jr.’s caretaker at fifty dollars per month with all expenses paid.

  In mid-January, Ernest accepted and moved into their mansion. Ralph Sr., an influential businessman expanding the Woolworth department store chain into Canada, presented Ernest to his friends at the Toronto Star Daily, namely, to Gregory Clark, features editor.37 While Clark was not initially impressed with the lumbering boy-braggart, he warmed to him during a fishing and skiing trip and introduced him to the chief editor, J. H. Cranston, when they returned. Cranston could pay him only ten dollars per story, he said, but in February, Ernest became a regular contributor to the Star.38 By mid-May, he had published eleven stories in the newspaper.39

  Attempting to while away another summer on Walloon Lake in 1920, Ernest and buddies snuck his sisters out for a midnight picnic when his parents’ tolerance for his lack of direction was already wearing thin. When his sisters’ absence was discovered, it caused a scandal. Weary of his idleness, mother and father criticized their son’s joblessness, his spending habits, his vanity, his lust, his godlessness, and his corrosive influence on his sisters.40 In her “bankruptcy letter,” Grace tallied his numerous transgressions by which he had depleted the emotional account between mother and son: “There is nothing before you but bankruptcy: You have overdrawn.”41 In alliance with Ernest’s father, Grace insisted that her son get his act together. In his own letter, the father reiterated her marching orders: to vacate the family cabin and to make something of his life at once.42 Ernest and Bill Horne moved into a friend’s apartment at 100 East Chicago Avenue while they looked for work, but in 1920 and 1921, an economic recession took hold, accompanied by labor strikes with thousands of unemployed veterans marching for their “bonus.”

  Responding to an advertisement, Ernest found a job at forty dollars per week writing for Cooperative Commonwealth, a magazine for Midwestern farmers. After Christmas, Ernest’s living arrangement expired, so he moved into a seven-room apartment on 63 East Division Street with Bill and Katy Smith’s big brother, Y. K. By mid-January, Y. K. had introduced Ernest to his friend Sherwood Anderson, who was a well-known writer at the time.

  When the president of Cooperative Commonwealth defrauded the company of millions and left Ernest without employment, the twenty–year-old journalist wrote John Bone, managing editor of the Toronto Star Daily for a job, perhaps in Toronto or in Italy, and Bone offered him a spot at the Paris office of the Star at seventy-five dollars per week, plus expenses. Sherwood Anderson provided letters of introduction addressed to all his “Parisian” friends: Lewis Galantière, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Armed with these letters, Ernest and his first wife, Hadley, alias “Wemedge” and “Wicky Poo,” booked passage aboard SS Leopoldina and arrived just before the Christmas of 1921. As the Hemingways arrived in Paris, the US Marines’ occupation of Cuba, known as the “Sugar Intervention,” marked its fourth consecutive year, leaving a permanent guard in the east at Guantánamo Bay in 1922 to ensure that production continued unimpeded by revolt or popular protest.

  During his first spring in Paris in 1922, Ernest Hemingway met the mentors and friends that would connect him and teach him what he needed to know: Stein, Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ford Madox Ford, with whom he edited the Transatlantic Review.43 Residing first in the Latin Quarter at 74 rue Cardinale Lemoine, he and Hadley borrowed books from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company library and bought others at the bookstalls along the quais of the river Seine: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Proust, Marryat, Thomas Mann, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T. S. Elliot, Fielding, Anderson, Kipling, Crane, Conrad, Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Donne, and Shakespeare.44 Ernest travelled extensively as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, covering the important European events such as the Lausanne peace conference, the burning of Smyrna, and the Greco-Turkish Wars, while also squeezing in skiing, fishing, bullfights, and swimming on holiday in Switzerland, Spain, and along the côte Atlantique.45

  After a brief return to Toronto for their first child’s birth in October 1923, Ernest and Hadley arrived back in Paris in January, relocating to the working-class neighborhood near Montparnasse in the apartment above a sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame des Champs. During their absence, Robert McAlmon’s small press, Contact Editions, had published just three hundred copies of Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway (containing “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man”) locally in Paris, putting it in the hands of fellow artists who were in the know. The Transatlantic Review published “Indian Camp” along with pieces of the unfinished manuscript of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.46

  From afar, Ernest read of the millions of US veterans struggling to make ends meet petition for “a compensation adjustment” for wages lost while serving overseas. The opposition was quick to label them as “bonus seekers,” and among members of Ernest’s generation, a sense of betrayal simmered. Insisting on fiscal integrity, President Warren Harding had first vetoed their “bonus bill” in September 1922. When Harding died suddenly of a heart attack halfway through his third year in office, President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the bonus bill again and chided veterans as he held the line again in May 1924: “Patriotism…bought and paid for is not patriotism.”47 A few days later, two-thirds of Congress overrode the president’s veto by agreeing to pay the veterans $1.00 for each day of service at home and $1.25 for each day of service abroad, but with a catch: they would not receive the money until the bonds matured twenty-one years later, in 1945. A provision of the bill required the government to pay vets immediately in the event of their untimely death, which earned it the nickname of the “tombstone bonus.” For a time, the vets seemed to be placated.

  Practicing the “discipline of hunger” in Paris, Ernest observed the paintings in the galleries of the Jardin du Luxembourg and Musée d’Orsay, and found a clean, well-lit space to write in the cafés of the Left Bank, where he filled his lined notebooks with the hard-boiled vignettes and stories of In Our Time, published first with Three Mountains Press in 1924, and later expanded and republished with Boni and Liveright in 1925. Its fragmented, brutal, and unrelenting style expressed itself in eighteen vignettes and stories, like “On the Quai at Smyrna,” “L’Envoi,” “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “A Very Short Story,” “Soldier’s Home,” “The Revolutionist,” “The Battler,” “Out of Season,” and “Big Two-Hearted River.”

  “Big Two-Hearted River”—the story of a young man’s fishing trip—was at once simple and profound. After much training and discipline, and many false starts, Ernest was grasping his craft, finding his rhythm, and making art lo
ok effortless—it was a magical period of artistic awakening when he discovered his astonishing talent. Reminiscing about his creative process for the story, Ernest wrote, “I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook…When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.”48 Drawing from what he had learned from the artists whom he respected, from scenes of war and nature, and from his powers of observation, Ernest created a new style and techniques. Through the “art of omission,” Ernest evoked and tapped into emotions running beneath the surface, connecting with readers in powerful ways.49 His stories had a unique quality about them in those early years and attracted a great deal of critical attention.

  When Scribner’s published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in October 1926, Sylvia Beach—who had known Ernest from the early days, when he had come to Paris looking for a lucky break—threw him a party to celebrate and perhaps to cheer him up. It had upset Ernest to hear Gertrude Stein and others of his elders throwing around the phrase “Lost Generation” without any appreciation of what it was about. Ms. Stein lamented the youth of their time who appeared to be ruined by the war, a “génération perdue,” good for nothing, drinking themselves to death, and Ernest took umbrage with her assessment of his generation and her misreading of his book: “The hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.”50 His novel not only tried to reveal his generation truthfully, but it also underscored that he “thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be.”51 He added, “I thought of Miss. Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egoism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?”52

  Nevertheless, many understood Hemingway’s unique voice, his literary technique, and his attempt to strike at the core of a society. On October 31, 1926, the New York Times Book Review declared his victory:

  No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame…Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.53

  Building on the acclaim for In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises would establish Ernest’s reputation as a modernist writer who rocked the foundations of a society’s arrogance, who questioned the betrayal of youth and the mechanization of violence and deceit; but some critics, like the local paper and his own mother, would wonder if he was prostituting his talent by glorifying a degraded stratum of humanity.

  Responding to his mother’s criticism after a two-month silence, Ernest apologized for the delay, explaining that he preferred not to write in anger, particularly to his mother, but precised that he did not feel at all ashamed of the book except where he failed to represent the broken people he was trying to portray.54 Responding to his son and to rumors in the papers regarding his son’s divorce, his father answered this time, expressing both parents’ sincere concern, asking his son to take care of his family and to pray. Gored and bucking against the reins, Ernest in his later letters likewise betrayed a fear: he was letting his parents and himself down.55 Like his novel’s protagonist, he was wounded, unable to advance as cleanly as he had hoped, impotent, cut down, bleeding, bound to capitulate…flawed. In the next novel, he vowed that he would not make the same mistakes and would express himself with such clarity and simplicity that even readers from Oak Park could not fail to understand.

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  Back in the States, they commenced a whirlwind tour: Pauline’s prolonged and precarious childbirth in a Kansas City hospital, where they welcomed their son Patrick; numerous hunting trips near Sheridan, Wyoming; extended visits with family in Piggott and Oak Park; and rendezvous with friends like the MacLeishes in Massachusetts, the Fitzgeralds in Philadelphia and Delaware, and Max Perkins, Waldo Peirce, and Mike Strater in New York. The Hemingways returned to Key West in November 1928. They rented an apartment at 1100 South Street, which Charlie Thompson’s wife, Lorine, had procured on their behalf; Pauline attempted to settle in while Ernest had to depart three days later aboard a red-eye express train bound screaming for New York.

  Concerned about Bumby’s ongoing cough and flu in November 1928, Hadley decided to spare her son another gray winter in Paris by sending him to spend some time with his father. Hadley and Bumby had to cross the Atlantic aboard the Île de France to make the handoff in Manhattan, a midway point. She asked Ernest to take the train up from Key West and meet her there, and he agreed. Kissing Pauline goodbye at Key West Station, Ernest caught the train northbound.56 He carried in his leather haversack the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms to revise on the way.

  Thirty-seven hours and forty-five minutes later, he emerged dog tired on a winter morning, amidst the steaming grates, asphalt streets, and hustle and bustle at the entrance to New York City’s Penn Station. He met his ex-wife in the lobby of her hotel, Hotel Earle, near Washington Square, to retrieve their son.57 She was now with another man, Paul Mowrer, whom she had met in the spring, just after their divorce.58 Ernest and Hadley’s meeting, the first since their separation, was a strained and awkward reunion. But afterward a reunited father and son adventured happily in the green spaces of the parks, between towering buildings, stopping in to see whatever caught their interest in the shops, and then they gaily called upon Daddy’s editor, Max, at his building on Fifth Avenue. Then, crossing over Sixth and Seventh Avenues, father and son boarded the return train south.

  Back in Oak Park, Bumby’s grandfather, Ernest’s father, having spent the morning fretting over finances in his office, returned home at noon, incinerated some papers in the basement, went upstairs, drew the shades, and sat down in semidarkness at the edge of his bed. Amidst frequent headaches, diabetes, and hypertension, he could not sleep and had been pursued by dark feelings at every turn. As a doctor, he might have diagnosed his own condition or seen that these obstacles were surmountable and that these feelings would soon pass.59 Instead, he placed the muzzle of his .32 caliber Smith & Wesson pistol behind his ear, seeing no possibility of a way through. The difficulties had become overwhelming and unbearable. As emotion and frustration overcame his mind, he pulled the trigger, and its explosion echoed throughout the rooms of Ernest’s childhood home.

  Ernest’s thirteen-year-old brother, Leicester, at home sick from school, heard the noise, rushed to his parents’ bedroom, and forced his way in.

  “It sounded like a shot!”

  He knocked at the door. “Daddy!” He tried the door. It opened, and in the darkened room all shades were drawn except one; there on the bed lay his father, making hoarse breathing noises. His eyes were closed, and in that first instant as Leicester saw him there in the half dark, nothing looked wrong. He put his hand under his father’s head. His hand slipped under easily and when he brought it out again, it was wet-warm with blood.60

  Their mother, Grace, sent a panicked telegram to Scribner’s: “TRY TO LOCATE ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN NEW YORK ADVISE HIM OF DEATH OF HIS FATHER TODAY ASK HIM TO COMMUNICATE WITH HOME IMMEDIATELY.”61 He had already left, so his sister Carol sent another message to his train en route. The train porter hurried to hand him the news: “father died this morning arrange to stop here if possible.”62

  The shock of the news washed over him as he struggled to keep his composure in front of young Bumby and to focus on the business at hand: getting off the train at the next stop in Philadelphia, wiring for enough money to make it to Chicago, and finding a suitable escort for the
boy to continue to Key West. Entrusting his son to a porter named McIntyre, Ernest waved goodbye through the window of the departing train, and, once inside the Philadelphia station, telegrammed Max Perkins: “PLEASE WIRE $100 IMMEDIATELY WESTERN UNION NORTH PHILADELPHIA STATION. MY FATHER IS DEAD. MUST GET FIRST TRAIN TO CHICAGO.”63 Unsure the message would reach his editor, he called Mike Strater in New York, left a message, and hung up. Then he dialed his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald at his home in Delaware. Scott answered immediately and sent him the money, which Ernest received via Western Union minutes before his train departed.

  In Oak Park, Ernest assumed the role of the “man of the family,” coaching his little brother: “At the funeral, I want no crying. You understand, kid? There will be some others who will weep, and let them. But not in our family. We’re here to honor him for the kind of life he lived, and the people he taught and helped. And, if you will, really pray as hard as you can, to help get his soul out of purgatory.”64 Then at the funeral, he informed his sister Marcelline that their father’s soul was condemned to burn in everlasting hellfire.65 Returning to Key West, he wrote Perkins en route: “What makes me feel the worst is my father is the one I cared about.”66

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  Ernest took charge of his father’s messy financial affairs and paid six hundred dollars in taxes on his properties. He combined a monthly contribution from his income with a sizeable donation from Pauline’s family to assure his mother, sister, and brother an income of one hundred dollars per month. He ordered his mother to move into a smaller place at River Forest and to enlist Uncle George to help her to sell their large family home at a profit. Haunted by the thought that he had contributed to his father’s death by refusing to help him in his time of need, Ernest wrote that it was the least Uncle George could do; Grace, suddenly dependent upon her son and still grieving, acquiesced to her son’s command.67 Of the mother who had once thrown him out of the house after he had returned from war, who had once criticized his first novel’s success, and who had judged him for divorcing his first wife, he was now in full control, asserting his manhood.