Ernesto Read online

  From Oak Park, he wrote Scott Fitzgerald a few days after his father’s funeral to thank him for wiring the money: “My father shot himself as I suppose you may have read in the papers…Will send you the $100 as soon as I reach Key West. I was fond as hell of my father and feel too punk—also sick, etc.—to write a letter but wanted to thank you.”68 Having returned to Key West in the middle of December, Ernest, perhaps attempting to confront the pain or acquire an object that memorialized his old man, asked his mother to send him the gun once the police returned it to her. From Oak Park, she answered, “Les wants you to leave it to him, when you are thru with it—but you have first choice…Old Long John was the pistol I learned to shoot with when you were a baby in my arms. You always loved to cuddle into my neck when the gun fired.”69

  When the box arrived, he left it for months unopened. “For Heaven’s sake, Ernest, haven’t you opened your mother’s box yet?” asked childhood friend Katy Smith while visiting Key West in April.70 Opening the package, they found some of Grace’s paintings that she hoped Ernest would sell for her, cookies for Sunny (Ernest’s younger sister visiting in Key West), a cake for Pauline that by then had turned rancid, a book for Bumby, and the Smith & Wesson that had killed Grace’s husband of thirty-two years.

  Later Ernest told Leicester that their father had written him that he needed money and that Ernest had responded with a check that was delivered to the house, but he’d found the envelope amidst his father’s affairs unopened.71 This story was most likely a lie, the ever-resourceful echoes of a guilt-ridden conscience, an imagination that however clever could not find a way through.72 The writer’s perhaps most honest sentiments on the subject appeared on a scrap of paper among his papers three years later: “To commit suicide except as a means of ending unbearable pain may be compared to cheating at solitaire, but a man making such a comparison is a confident fool.”73 Every person must face eternity, or lack of it, alone.

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  For Thanksgiving, Ernest’s sister Madelaine, or “Sunny,” had come down to Key West for a visit and stayed to help with the children, Patrick and Bumby, and by January 1929 she was helping her brother to type the first draft of his nearly completed manuscript. He was still struggling with the ending and allegedly rewrote it forty-nine times to “get the words right.” When Ernest finished A Farewell to Arms in February, he invited his editor to Key West to receive the manuscript and to fish. On the train ride back to New York, Max Perkins finished reading it and elatedly declared it a triumph—he offered Ernest sixteen thousand dollars, an unprecedented sum, to serialize it in Scribner’s Magazine in May.74 During yet another fishing visit, from mid-February to mid-March, Ernest’s guests Mike Strater, Waldo Peirce, and Dos Passos also read it and pronounced their friend’s second novel a success.

  As newsmen and fans pursued him and threatened the privacy essential to his work, Ernest took flight to isolated and foreign places out of their reach: writing and hunting in the monastic wildernesses of North America, chasing corridas in Spain, and repairing to the cafés and avenues of Paris. Ernest, with Pauline, Patrick, Bumby, and his trusted and helpful sister Sunny, passed through Havana via steamship, again staying briefly at the Ambos Mundos, before departing for Europe aboard the Yorck on April 5, 1929, with another new car, a Ford Model T purchased by Pauline’s Uncle Gus.75 In Paris, they returned Bumby to his mother and checked back into the apartment at 6 rue Férou. At the end of September, A Farewell to Arms appeared in book form with a dedication to its generous benefactor, Uncle Gus.76 In spite of the stock market crash on October 24, 1929, and the Great Depression that followed, sales of Ernest’s novel reached thirty-six thousand copies that same month.77

  The shockwaves of “Black Thursday” were felt the world over, particularly back in Cuba, a nation still dependent upon trade with the United States. Foreign trade dropped to 10 percent of its former level; the price of sugar tumbled from 2.18 cents per pound in 1928 to its lowest point of 0.57 cents in 1932. As these effects rippled, businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and salary reductions went into effect across the island, creating conditions of scarcity for the majority of Cubans that rivaled the days of slavery.78 Suspending the purchase of Cuban bonds, creditors lending Cuba funds to keep operations afloat froze future lines of credit. As three-quarters of a million veterans from the War of Independence came of age, the island’s economy was collapsing, and they would find themselves without a way to enter the workforce—many of these young people joined militant groups.79 Many others were drawn to the lights of the Havana night where the yanqui dollars never seemed to disappear completely as long as there were music, mujeres, and rum. Since Prohibition in 1920, it had been illegal for a yanqui to have a drink, but with a little money, a yanqui could have all that his heart desired in the city belonging not to politicians or to religious moralists but to bootleggers, pimps, and the underworld that was Havana, Cuba, in her emergent glory.

  The critical reception for A Farewell to Arms was mostly favorable: Hutchinson in the New York Times Book Review said it was “a moving and beautiful book”; Hazlitt of the New York Sun called Hemingway’s description of the retreat from Caporetto “unforgettable,” and the novel “in depth, in range, drama…the finest thing Hemingway has yet done.” Malcolm Cowley thought it showed greater maturity and thoughtfulness than previous works, and even his mother’s local beacon of artistic appreciation, Fanny Butcher, approved of it, naming it “the most interesting novel of the year.” Grace clipped the article from the Chicago Tribune, sent it to her son, and told him she thought it deserved the high praise that it was receiving and that she was proud of him, too.80

  While Ernest’s élan vital was rising, Scott’s seemed to be waning, with Zelda suffering from a nervous breakdown, his own tensions and drinking on the rise, and his writing stalled. From New York, Max Perkins wrote Ernest to express his concern with Scott, who was “in a bad way, on account of Zelda,” who had been “desperately sick”: “In a very recent and brief letter, he says ‘Zelda is sick as hell’ and he speaks of himself as ‘somewhat harassed and anxious about life.’ I wouldn’t quote these phrases to anyone else but you, but you ought to know about it. He does not like to admit—at least to me—that he is worried, and when he does, there is no doubt of it. I sometimes even think of going over there.”81

  From a hunting ranch in Wyoming, Ernest responded to his editor concerning Fitzgerald, his frustrating friend, “Please if I speak rudely in letters never take it personally—I’m working damned hard and a letter about some bloody problem or other is only a damned Interuption [sic] and Curse…We’ll have a good time in March at Tortugas!”82 In another letter, three weeks later, Ernest explained to Max that he had to “stick to one thing” when he was writing a book and keep that in his head and nothing else. He stressed: “The Example of Scott ought to be evidence enough that a man has to stay in a book in his head until it’s finished—I don’t want excuses for not finishing my present book—I want to write it.”83 Rather than become distracted by Scott’s alcoholism, anxiety, and marital problems, Ernest would be determined to get his own writing done. Just before returning to Paris in 1929, Ernest wrote his editor to tell him not to give Scott his new address on the Left Bank.84

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  From April 21, 1929, until January 10, 1930, Ernest and Pauline resided in Paris in the sixth arrondissement apartment beside the Jardin du Luxembourg. They travelled in Spain throughout the year, made a side trip to Berlin in November for a six-day bicycle race, and paid their respects to Gerald and Sara Murphy in Switzerland in December. In January they boarded the ocean liner La Bourdonnais and returned to the States via New York and Havana, arriving in Key West in February. Amidst a torrent of houseguests staying in their large rented house at 1425 Pearl Street and innumerable fishing trips into the Gulf Stream, Ernest started a new project in March 1930, his most ambitious undertaking yet; having scored a commercial and critical victory w
ith A Farewell to Arms the previous year, he would now plunge into a nonfiction treatise on tauromachia (bullfighting), exploring the matador’s “dance with death” and titling it Death in the Afternoon.85 Just miles away from Ernest in Key West, two hundred thousand workers from the National Workers Confederation of Cuba, led by Rubén Martínez Villena, organized an illegal strike, the first one against Machado’s presidency, and many of them were killed.86 Before a union rally began in Artemisa in May, Cuban police appeared and fired shots to disperse the panic-stricken crowd, and summarily imprisoned all of the attendees that they could round up.87

  In August, Scribner’s Magazine published “Wine of Wyoming,” and in September, Paramount Pictures purchased screen rights for A Farewell to Arms from Scribner’s for eighty thousand dollars, with twenty-four thousand of it going to the author.88 Increasingly accident prone, Ernest had a serious car accident in November, which kept him in the hospital until January 1931.89

  Back in Cuba tensions were on the rise after the police, following a tip, appeared at the University of Havana with batons raised, attacked students planning a protest, and fatally wounded one of them named Rafael Trejo on September 30, 1930. Suspecting universities and high schools as hotbeds of sedition, and responding to protests across the country that November, President Machado pushed a measure through congress suspending constitutional guarantees, arresting all members of the Directorio Estudiantíl Universitario (DEU), and shutting down educational institutions on December 15.90

  On December 30, Cuba inaugurated the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. The $4 million project, awarded in 1928 to New York construction company McKim, Mead, and White, created Havana’s iconic five-hundred-room hotel in two years, blending elements of classical Spanish, Moorish, and Art Deco architecture. It was what historian Rosalie Schwartz called “a fitting monument to the president’s surging self-importance, fed by bankers and businessmen who honored him with banquets and saluted him as he sat in the presidential box at Oriental Park.”91 While in exile in Mexico, Julio Antonio Mella, the founder of the Cuban Communist Party, was hunted down by the henchmen of President Machado and assassinated.

  In January 1931, President Machado stopped the presses of fifteen newspapers and magazines—those of his critics.92 Ultimately, these moves backfired, however, as unemployed journalists and energized students became full-time protesters and organizers of subversive activity. Drawing anti-imperialist ire and observing that nearly every civic leader on the island “was opposed to the government except those being paid by it,” Ambassador Harry F. Guggenheim in the American embassy advised President Machado to reconcile with the opposition, while Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson expressed concern about the large number of dissidents accumulating in Cuban prisons.93 The bodies of Machado’s enemies were washing up in Havana, fishermen were finding their limbs in the bellies of sharks, and in Cuba, his reputation as a man who fed his enemies to the sharks grew.94

  To keep itself afloat, the Cuban government by the end of January issued an emergency tax on monies sent out of Cuba, alcohol, tobacco, petroleum, radios, and numerous other items.95 Activating an army and a navy of twelve thousand men during the same month, Machado dug in for a fight: “Me resign? Never resign,” he declared to his countrymen and the watching world.96

  Other factions attempted to negotiate, such as Machado’s political rivals, insurgent conservatives like Mario García Menocal, dissident liberals such as Miguel Mariano Gómez, and moderate reformists like Carlos Mendieta, leader of the National Union party. But by 1931 other more radical factions were forming, such as the Students’ Left Wing, and the Abecedarios, or ABC, made up of the more “moderate” members of the DEU after its dissolution: young men and women, middle-class students, and professionals whose class-conscious manifesto expressed anti-imperialism and a need for the Cubanization of the island’s economy.97 Using an alphabetized cellular structure, the ABC responded to governmental acts of violence with bombings, armed struggle, and assassinations of elected officials to spread fear among them and influence reforms.98 One of their first attempted acts of violence was to dynamite the Havana aqueduct and cut off the city’s water supply.

  While the rest of the country indulged in violent acts in the name of progress, in Hershey, Cuba, the natives, hungry in their poverty, continued to work as “complacent as oxen in the cane fields,” according to the Chicago Tribune.99 The secret of Hershey Chocolate’s “prosper[ity] in spite of depressed general conditions,” concluded E. E. Allen, Jr., in Barron’s weekly financial newspaper five months later, was Milton Hershey’s capacity to secure steady “inventories of low-cost raw materials sufficient for quite some time.”100

  In the middle of February, eighty-five professors were dismissed from the University of Havana on grounds of conspiracy, including physics professor and future president Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín. On February 24, 1931, the Machado administration announced the completion of a major project of public works initiated in 1927: the National Highway, running 705.6 miles from Pinar del Río to Santiago, costing the country $74,870,000 dollars ($107,000 per mile) and constructed in record time, three years and nine months, at an average of 15.72 miles per month. The new highway subsequently guaranteed a cheaper rate of freight for the transport of sugar, tobacco, and fruit.101 Those investors with the closest ties to Machado received the construction contracts and the privilege to determine the route of the highway at every turn.102

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  While her husband was fishing in Dry Tortugas with the gang in March,103 Pauline Hemingway discovered that she was pregnant again.104 On April 29, Pauline’s wealthy Uncle Gus bought a belated wedding gift for his niece and her husband, paying eight thousand dollars cash for the property 907 Whitehead Street: it was the largest house in Key West and sure to keep the couple closer to home.105

  Ernest wrote his editor in April, asking Perkins to let him keep the money he owed and attempting to explain his difficult nature. He asked Max forgiveness in advance if he ever sounded rude in a letter. He was naturally “a rude bastard,” he said, and the only way to avoid that was to be always formally polite, but that had stopped between them long ago when Max asked him to un-mister him. “So please remember that when I am loud mouthed, bitter, rude, son-of-a-bitching and mistrustful I am really very reasonable and have great confidence and absolute trust in you. The thing is I get so damned tired of being careful in letters—Christ, here I am starting to loud mouth again.”106

  To follow corrida season in Spain with American bullfighter Sidney Franklin as “research” for Ernest’s book, the Hemingways sailed to Europe in May from Havana aboard the Volendam.107 Pauline packed up belongings from their rue Férou apartment in Paris and shipped all their antique furniture before they returned to the United States aboard the Île de France. On board, their friends Mr. and Mrs. Don Stewart introduced Ernest and Pauline to Mrs. Jane Mason, the bewitching twenty-one-year-old wife of Grant Mason. Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Hemingway, both pregnant, spent most of the trip resting in their rooms, leaving Don and Ernest free to “squire” Mrs. Mason, during what Ernest would later describe as a “drunken and merry” crossing.108 Discovering that the Masons lived across the water in Havana, the Hemingways promised to visit just as soon as they could.

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  In August, elder Cuban leadership organized by Menocal and Mandieta attempted an armed uprising from the interior of Cuba and were effortlessly and unceremoniously captured by Machado’s men in Pinar del Río; Mendieta was sent to prison on the Isle of Pines, while Menocal sought extradition in the Brazilian embassy.109 Their clumsiness and lack of popular support legitimized and energized the younger and more radicalized groups like the ABC, but obstinately Machado announced by the end of that year that he would leave office on May 20, 1935: “Not a minute more or a minute less.”110 By August, the Nation, reporting “Cuba Revolts Again,” appeared bored of Cuba’s revolutions.111

  After twelve hours of lab
or and another complicated caesarian operation at a hospital in Kansas City, on November 12, 1931, Gregory Hancock, Ernest’s third son, was born. His father would brag about the boy’s size, “9 lbs 7 ounces or 19 pounds 17 ounces. Heck of a big baby anyway with gigantic sexual equipment and deep bass voice.”112 The doctor’s warning that another pregnancy could be fatal to Pauline complicated their marital life. Pauline’s Catholic beliefs caused her to reject traditional forms of contraception, so the danger of pregnancy hindered their sex life, causing subsequent conflicts and estrangement.113 And baby Gregory, their second unplanned child of the wrong sex who nearly killed his mother during childbirth and for whom she had to care and provide, would frequently hinder Pauline’s ability to keep up with her husband’s adventures and cause her to feel a significant measure of resentment.114

  Just after Gregory was born, Ernest wrote his mother-in-law to explain why family had to take a back seat to his writing. “If this book [Death in the Afternoon] is punk it won’t do any good to take…readers…aside and say, ‘But you ought to see what a big boy Gregory is and just look at the big scar on my arm and you ought to see our wonderful water-work system and I go to church every Sunday and am a good father to my family or as good as I can be.’”115 He was in a “tough business,” and there were “no alibis.” Thus he declared his hatred against excuse makers, Paris café posers, and fakers of the mojo.116 Unrepentant, Ernest put ambition first.117