“He writes me sometimes, still,” she said.
I sat on the trunk I’d just jammed closed and pushed back my hair, frizzy from the humid Italian air, or from the white heat of writing all day, or from both. I had a new book coming out from Doubleday that summer, a collection of stories titled The Honeyed Peace. The only way I knew to hold the dragons of dread at bay, still, was to write like hell.
Matie said, “Well, I sent it back, of course I did.”
“You sent it back!” Feeling all shredded inside at the words, despite everything. “Mother, you can’t have.”
“I already have a copy of the book itself, and the manuscript was all marked up. I did tell him how much I enjoyed it.”
“Matie, he didn’t mean for you to read it, for pity’s sake. He meant to . . .”
“‘Saddle me with the burden’ is, I believe, the phrase you’re looking for,” Matie said.
“Grace you with it. Honor you.”
“But then I’d have responsibility for the thing, and who could I leave it to when I pass but you, sweetheart?” Leaving me to wonder if Ernest had thought that through, if he’d wanted to saddle me or honor me or grace me, ultimately, with the manuscript he’d started at the Finca Vigía when we’d lived there together, the novel that had won him not just the Pulitzer but also “that thing.”
I did cry when I heard that news—that Ernest had finally won the Nobel. October of 1954. I was married to Tom Matthews by then. I wasn’t in love with him, precisely. I didn’t pretend to be, not even to him. But he was such a good man, and I’d known him most of my life, and his wife had died, leaving him with three grown sons and a teenaged boy, and my own son needed a father and a stable home at that point more than I needed to be husband-free and able to roam. We bought a six-story house in Chester Square, in London, next door to my dear old “Harry Virgin” companion in crime, Ginny Cowles. I was as consumed with chintz patterns and carpeting as I had been at the Finca Vigía, with Ginny to shop with as we had in Spain but no more help from Tom than I’d gotten from Ernest. Still, I was writing, pieces for the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly, which I sometimes composed as I stretched out in the hot sun on some terrace, wearing nothing but a straw hat.
Ernest didn’t go to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize. He was recovering from injuries sustained in two separate plane crashes and a bushfire accident, or so the newspapers said. But he’d been reported dead in one of those crashes too, so you couldn’t always believe what you read when it came to Ernest Hemingway. The American ambassador accepted the prize on Ernest’s behalf, and read aloud a speech Ernest had sent. It made me think of Max Perkins failing to send a stenographer to record the Sinclair Lewis speech Ernest had forever moaned about. Perkins himself had been dead for years by then, of pneumonia in June of 1947.
Ernest’s luck still held—that’s what he said in response to those rumors of his death. And maybe it did, but it seemed to me that all he’d written in the years since the war was the postwar romance Across the River and into the Trees, which the critics roundly cited as the last gasp of a formerly great writer, and the tiny, little The Old Man and the Sea, which, while hailed as Ernest Hemingway’s triumphant rebirth and printed in its entirety in a single issue of Life magazine, was the story he’d described to me even before we first went to Cuba—the old fisherman who fights a swordfish all alone on his boat for four days and nights only to have a shark eat the thing because he can’t get it into the boat. Like with For Whom the Bell Tolls, what had started as a story had grown into a book.
I wondered if Ernest still called the Nobel “that thing,” or if he would now that he had it. I wondered if winning it might finally bring him the peace I never could. I thought of writing him, sending my congratulations, but I was afraid of what might spill out if I opened that wound. Maybe he was right that I was too small and selfish to be married to such a big talent. Maybe he and my father were both right, that I was too selfish ever to be a proper wife, no matter how good the man.
I thought of writing him again in 1959, after Fidel Castro took over Cuba and Ernest and Mary were left scrambling to get out. I wondered what Reeves would do without my beautiful Finca Vigía to care for, and whether the neighbor boy, who would be grown by then, still tended the pool pump. I’d always hoped to see again my flamboyantes and my ceiba tree, to swim in my pool to the sound of the negritos. I hadn’t realized I’d held on to that hope until I saw with the fall of Cuba that I never would dive into that cooling water again.
Ernest and Mary moved to Ketchum, Idaho, a place that for me would always bring memories of that copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls dedicated to me, and Matie trying to persuade us to live in sin, and Ernest and I dancing at the Trail Creek Cabin with friends just before the justice of the peace declined to pronounce us writer and writer. I heard from friends that Ernest had grown paranoid with imagining that federal agents were following him, poring over his bank accounts, bugging his home and his car and reading his mail all on account of his ties with the now-communist Cuba. Years later, a 127-page FBI file started in the 1940s would show his fears to be more justified than any of us imagined, but at the time he was committed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for psychiatric care. He attempted suicide several times while there. He received electric shock treatment. When he returned home, he couldn’t remember anything well enough to write.
I wished I had sent those letters, of course, when I heard the news that Ernest had shot himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. July 2, 1961. I suppose it’s what I might do as well if ever I found myself unable to write; I suppose that was the little bit of common ground on which Bug and I had built our love, or whatever it was that we shared all those years. He hadn’t used the Smith & Wesson his father had, the same gun Robert Jordan’s father in For Whom the Bell Tolls had used; that particular gun had been locked up in a safe-deposit box somewhere, well out of reach. Instead, he’d used his own favorite gun, a shotgun like he’d given me for a wedding present back in Ketchum, that Robert Capa had photographed me shooting for that spread in Life: “The Hemingways in Sun Valley: The Novelist takes a Wife.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As might be expected for a story that begins with one clandestine relationship and ends with another—and involving people as famous as Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway—the many sources I turned to in the writing of this novel often differed on even the simplest of things, including who was where when. I sorted through those discrepancies as best I could, with the intent of being as true to the facts of their relationship as possible. I have long been an admirer of Martha Gellhorn and her work. I became, in the course of writing about Ernest Hemingway and despite his flaws, a great admirer of him as well.
Sources I relied heavily upon in writing this book include Travels with Myself and Another, The View from the Ground, The Trouble I’ve Seen, A Stricken Field, and The Face of War, all by Martha Gellhorn, as well as the extraordinary reporting Gellhorn did for Collier’s (some of which is reprinted in her books). Also essential were Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life and Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, both by Caroline Moorehead, and Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson. Gellhorn’s letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauline Hemingway informed the early chapters in Key West. Specifically, for Gellhorn’s time in Spain, I turned to her “Only the Shells Whine,” “Men without Medals,” and “City at War”; Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles; The Starched Blue Sky of Spain by Josephine Herbst; notes from the period written by Ted Allan and posted online by his son at normanallan.com, and The Spanish Earth film. Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida, which became available only late in the process of this novel, was a great resource for helping me sort out this complicated period; I wish it had been available earlier. I read “Come Ahead, Adolf!” and “Obituary of a Democracy” for Gellhorn’s time in Czechoslovakia; “Slow Boat to War” and “What Bores Whom?” for her crossing in the dynamite boat; “Blood on the Snow,” “
Death in the Present Tense,” and “Bombs from a Low Sky” for her time in Finland. For their “honeymoon” in China and the Far East, I turned to Gellhorn’s Collier’s pieces “Fight into Peril,” “Her Day,” and “Fire Guards the Indies,” as well as “Mr. Ma’s Tiger” in Travels with Myself and Another and Peter Moreira’s Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn. The latter was also helpful for the scenes of Hemingway and Gellhorn’s wedding, as was “The Hemingways in Sun Valley: The Novelist takes a Wife” with photos by Robert Capa from Life’s January 6, 1941, issue. “Messing around in Boats,” also from Travels with Myself and Another, helped me understand her time exploring the Mediterranean during World War II. For her time in Europe during that war, The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel was an additional great source, along with Gellhorn’s “Visit Italy,” “The Bomber Boys,” “Three Poles,” “The First Hospital Ship,” and “Hangdog Herrenvolk.” The story of how Gellhorn first meets Eleanor Roosevelt draws from her introduction to her writing from the 1930s in The View from the Ground.
Michael Reynolds’s Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years, Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway, and James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life without Consequences were my starting points for Hemingway, along with Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker, Hemingway in Cuba by Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennen, George Plimpton’s “The Art of Fiction” interview of Hemingway in the Spring 1958 issue of The Paris Review, “Hemingway in Cuba” in the Atlantic, and of course his novels and stories, particularly For Whom the Bell Tolls. “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches” by William Braasch Watson in Hemingway Review illuminated the background of his writing from Spain, including the NANA cable, and was another great source for the time Hemingway and Gellhorn spent in Spain. For the scene with Jack Hemingway in New York, I drew from A Life Worth Living: The Adventures of a Passionate Sportsman, by Jack Hemingway and Geoffrey Norman. Michael Parkinson’s 1974 interview with Orson Welles was very helpful in constructing the scene of Hemingway’s fight with him.
I am, as so often when I’m writing, incredibly grateful for the New York Times online archives, which I turn to again and again for precise details about historical events. For this novel, I turned to “Hemingway Slaps Eastman in Face” from August 14, 1937, for the scene in Max Perkins’s office. The Hemingway dispatches from Spain in the archives were a godsend, including the April 25, 1937, Raven piece titled “War Is Vividly Reflected in Madrid,” which Gellhorn suggests in a 1950 letter to David Gurewitsch (included in Selected Letters) drove her, finally, to fall in love with Hemingway.
Other sources I relied on include Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: The Defining Years (1933–1938) by Blanche Wiesen Cook; Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips; Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson; Hemingway and Fitzgerald by Matthew Bruccoli; Hemingway in Cuba by Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennen; The Hemingway Women by Bernice Kert; “The ‘Survivor’: Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway” from Lesley McDowell’s Between the Sheets; An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman; and Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade. Two pdfs I found online, L. Hartmann’s Spanish Civil War thesis and H. L. Salmon’s thesis, “Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway: A literary relationship,” were also helpful.
I am blessed to have Marly Rusoff as my literary champion, and thankful she put this manuscript in the kind and capable hands of Danielle Marshall. Thanks also to Dawn Stewart for her help with speaking engagements, and everyone at Lake Union who chipped in here.
So many friends and neighbors held my hand in so many ways in the course of this one, including my Wednesday Sisters neighborhood book group, and Amy and Borge, Eric and Elaine, Debbie and Curtis, Dave and Camilla, John and Sherry, Brenda, Darby, Sheri, Liza, and Ellie, but none more than Jennifer Belt DuChene, whose friendship is one of the very best bits of my life.
I’m thankful for the continued support of the entire extended Waite-Clayton gang (including the Levy wing), especially my parents, Don and Anna Waite, and my sons, Chris and Nick Clayton; I am in this case extra grateful to Chris, whose own reading opened my eyes to the good of Ernest Hemingway.
And last but never least, Mac Clayton is amazing, unceasingly and in every respect.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2015 Adrienne Defendi
Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times bestselling author of five previous novels, including The Race for Paris, which received the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Honorary Mention; The Wednesday Sisters; and The Language of Light, which was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. She’s written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Writer’s Digest, Runner’s World, and public radio. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she lives in Palo Alto, California. She can be found online at www.megwaiteclayton.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/novelistmeg, and @megwclayton on Twitter.
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