Ernesto

  15 Habaneros are people from Havana. Their full names are El Castillo San Felipe del Morro and La Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña.

  16 The ramparts of El Castillo de Tres Reyes Magos del Morro and El Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta.

  17 “I’ll have little Pilar kick for them (if they don’t mind playing with a girl),” Pauline had written her husband in a note while in transit over the Atlantic Ocean. Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, March 21, 1928, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers. During Hemingway’s separation from Pauline that Hadley had requested as a condition for a consensual divorce, Ernest took a bachelor trip with Archibald MacLeish to see a late season bullfight and feria in Saragossa, Spain. Originally, “the name Pilar refers to the image of the Blessed Virgin on a pillar or porphyry in the shrine and church at Saragossa held on 12 or 13 October.” Raymond S. Willis, quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 177, 593.

  18 Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism, 18. For Hemingwayesque descriptions that suggest the author’s strong attraction to this hairstyle, see Hemingway, “Cat in the Rain,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 131, and Hemingway, The Garden of Eden, 45. See also Bennett, “The Poor Kitty and the Padrone and the Tortoise-shell Cat in ‘Cat in the Rain,” in Benson, ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 248.

  19 Leaving a love note for Ernest in their cabin, on ship’s stationery during the trip, Pauline would lament, “Cher Ami, No one would think from the magnificence of this paper that I was writing this note in squallar [sic]…but here I am four days out on an English boat and not yet even the offer of a bath.” On return trips, the ship was routinely loaded to capacity with sugar, and her frequent stops combined with tropical heat would often cause the cane to rot along the way. As the Hemingways exited, passing once more through those foul-smelling passageways, they felt grateful to be arriving in Havana and leaving Orita behind. Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, March 21, 1928, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers.

  20 For date and location of arrival see Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 191. For ship’s manifest and route see “The Pacific Steam Navigation Company: R.M.S. Orita,” The British Presence in Southern Patagonia, accessed June 4, 2012, https://patbrit.org/bil/social/orita.htm.

  21 “She reminded me more than anything of Helen Hayes,” said Jack Latimer in an interview with Bernice Kert in April 1979. Kert, The Hemingway Women, 293.

  22 Havana residents, Pigeons’ Square, Lions’ Fountain, and bathtub.

  23 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 10, 21; Author interview with historian at Ambos Mundos Hotel, June 2010; Author interview with Finca Vigía historian Gladys Rodríguez, June 2010.

  24 Hemingway, “Marlin off the Morro,” By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.

  25 In her “bankruptcy letter,” Hemingway’s mother, Grace, tallied his numerous transgressions through which he had depleted the emotional account between mother and son: “There is nothing before you but bankruptcy: You have overdrawn…Come to yourself; cease your lazy loafing and pleasure seeking…stop trying to graft a living off anybody and everybody; spending all your earnings lavishly and wastefully on luxuries for yourself; stop trading your handsome face to fool little gullible girls, and neglecting your duties to God and your Savior…there is nothing before you but [moral] bankruptcy…Do not come back until your tongue has learned not to insult and shame your mother. Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, July 24, 1920, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers. His father, Clarence Hemingway, supported his mother and seconded that his son was to stay away from the lake house until they invited him to return. If he did not get a job and start behaving responsibly, “the Great Creator will cause him to suffer a whole lot more than he ever has so far.” Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 57. When disenchanted young Hemingway holed up with PTSD in the family cabin in Michigan but without ambition or source of livelihood, his parents were not pleased. Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, July 27, 1920, Hemingway Personal Papers. This experience resulted in the story “Soldier’s Home.” In the story, parents confront their son’s PTSD and apathetic attitude after returning from World War I.

  26 “It was, in fact the Ryerson Collection of Homer that drew Ernest and Hadley to the Art Institute that week. There, for the first time, he saw Homer’s brilliant watercolors from his Gulf Stream period: ‘Tornado, Bahamas,’ ‘Breaking Storm,’ ‘Gulf Stream’ and ‘Stowing Sail,’ among others.” Reynolds, Young Hemingway, 187. In 1928, Hemingway would write his painter friend Waldo Peirce about the exhibition, “But by Christ they have some Winslow Homers that give me the same feeling I get from the Monsters or a faena de Belmonte.” His son Patrick, who had oft been praised by his father for his interest in painting, would suggest that To Have and Have Not strongly resembled Winslow’s painting The Gulf Stream. Charlene M. Murphy, “A Shared Palette: Hemingway and Winslow Homer, Painters of the Gulf Stream,” in Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works, ed. Grimes and Sylvester, 123–32.

  27 “Your head, your heart, and your very lovely hands.” Ernest Hemingway to Hadley Hemingway, November 18, 1926, in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 228.

  28 “The moment she entered the room an intense feeling came over me. I knew she was the girl I was going to marry.” Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 71.

  29 After the death of her second husband, Hadley remembered, “[Ernest] was a beautiful physical specimen.” Ruth Bradfield described him at that time: “You wouldn’t believe what a beautiful youth Ernest was. He was slender and moved well. His face had the symmetry of fine bony structure and he had a small elastic mouth that stretched from ear to ear when he laughed. He laughed aloud a lot from quick humor and from sheer joy in being alive. I have never been able to see him in photographs of ‘Papa.’” Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 78. See also Hadley Richardson in conversation Alice Sokoloff, in Diliberto, Hadley, 37, 52.

  30 “He was the best looking one in the room and his disarming smile stretched from ear to ear…His flattering habit of focusing his entire attention on a person, gazing out from watchful brown eyes, was not a pose for he was an alert listener. And on this particular night he concentrated on Hadley…he gave no sign that he was interested in anyone but her.” Kert, The Hemingway Women, 86. A good listener was how many, like Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Ross, Valerie Hemingway, and A. E. Hotchner, would later describe him: extremely charming when he wanted to be. Joseph Dyer: “It was also the way he listened to you, attentively, smiling encouragingly, asking questions…If you knew all about roses, he would talk to you about roses until he knew everything you knew…it was very flattering to be listened to like that.” Valerie Hemingway: “When he met those people, it wasn’t that they took [his] writing in isolation; they took the writing in combination with this person himself. Hemingway was a charmer, [but] he wasn’t an idle charmer. He was a charmer when he had a goal.” Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, xiii, xiv; Reynolds, Hemingway: The American Homecoming, 172; Larsen, Stein and Hemingway, 28.

  31 Diliberto, Hadley, 42.

  32 Nesto, Hemingstein, Oinbones, Tattie, Tiny, Hemmy, Wemedge, Wax Puppy, Binny, Hash, Hasovich, Feather Kitty, and Wicky Poo were aided by the postal service, offering two daily deliveries between Saint Louis and Chicago. Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers.

  33 Hadley Richardson to Ernest Hemingway, May 6–7, 1921, in Diliberto, Hadley, 41.

  34 Donning her overcoat and slippers to walk to the corner of Cates and Goodfellow avenues, she dropped the letters in a mailbox hanging on a lamppost and spent an extra ten cents to have them delivered special delivery. “She had poured so much feeling into the pages, she told Ernest, ‘It’s so hard to mail them—like putting myself in the box.’” Hadley Richardson, in Diliberto, Hadley, 42.

  35 She had $30,000 and was about to inherit another $20,000. Sokoloff, The First Mrs. Hemingway, 32–33; Kert, The Hemingway Women, 95; Diliberto, Hadley, 42.

  36 Hadley Richardson to E
rnest Hemingway, April 30, 1921. Sokoloff, The First Mrs. Hemingway, 26–27, cited in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 93–94.

  37 Bumby’s babysitters had been F. Puss the Cat, Marie Cocotte, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, 145.

  38 Quoted in Diliberto, Hadley, 159, 161.

  39 “You—who are the best and truest and loveliest person that I have ever known.” Hemingway, “To Hadley Hemingway, Paris, 18 November 1926,” in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 228.

  40 Coffee with bread and butter and jam.

  41 Ernest Hemingway to Hadley Hemingway, March 26, 1928, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  42 Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, 31; Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 44.

  43 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 129.

  44 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 133.

  45 Ernest developed a competitive relationship with Harold Loeb, a Jewish Princeton graduate, a fellow writer, and a boxer. Ernest later challenged Loeb to a fight when the two locked horns over Duff Twysden’s affections during San Fermín. Later, he would depict the incident and Loeb as Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 43.

  46 Cline, Zelda Fitzgerald, 174; Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, 33.

  47 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 180.

  48 Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 146.

  49 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 4.

  50 Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” in Sarason, Hemingway and the Sun Set, 146. Based on her interviews with Pfeiffer family friends, Kenneth Wells, Ayleene Spence, and Pauline’s sister-in-law Matilda Hawkins, Pauline’s biographer suggests that Ernest was attracted to Virginia for her family’s money.

  51 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 144.

  52 Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, 31.

  53 Not only was Pauline younger, better dressed, and quicker-witted than Hadley, she also had a $60,000 trust fund, which would have guaranteed Ernest the sort of financial security that was indispensable to his literary production. While Ernest’s perspective is developed in A Moveable Feast, Pauline’s is not. Translated from Latin: fertile ground. Item 845, Hemingway Personal Papers; Bruccoli, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, ix.

  54 “‘Pauline was nice to me. She wanted to be friends. She didn’t go straight for my husband. But once she made up her mind that he was what she wanted, she was very aggressive and [brave]. She had the guts to spend a lot of violent energy on Ernest. He couldn’t help himself…Pauline fell madly in love with him. And Ernest was weak in the sense that if someone wanted him very much, he was tremendously touched by it.’ More importantly, Pauline worshipped Ernest and seemed oblivious to his faults.” Hadley Hemingway, in Diliberto, Hadley, 204–06.

  55 From Norberto Fuentes’s interviews with Francisco Castro, cabinetmaker at the Ambos Mundos Hotel who became Hemingway’s carpenter at Finca Vigía, and Manuel Asper, the owner of the Ambos Mundos Hotel during Hemingway’s stays. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 7. See also Rodríguez, Hemingway, 23, 26.

  56 Taxi drivers.

  57 Beegel, “Eye and Heart,” in Wagner-Martin, ed., A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. As his fellow Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez perceptively appreciated later, it is not likely that a man like that would have remained indifferent to the details he observed or unaware of the upheavals and transformations occurring in Havana at that time. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 7.

  58 Martí had been endangering his life by speaking out for Cuban independence since the age of sixteen, when he had created his newspaper Patria Libre, and by seventeen he had already been sentenced to six years of hard labor by the Spanish government. For his resistance during the first and second wars for independence, Martí was twice banished from his homeland and compelled to live most of his life abroad, in Spain, in Latin America, and in the United States, where he studied law, worked as a teacher and a journalist, and became a determined advocate and key organizer of the third war for Cuban independence.

  59 Hemingway “saved” four books of Conrad, then “used up” the four books in two months in Toronto, reading them when he “needed them badly, when the disgust with writing, writers and everything written of and to write would be too much.” Ernest Hemingway, “Conrad: Optimist and Moralist,” Transatlantic Review (October 1924): 134.

  60 “As if it were too great, too mighty for common virtues, the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory.” Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 372.

  61 “Remorse was a fine good thing and with a little luck and if I’d been a better man it might have saved me for something worse probably instead of being my true and constant companion for the next three years.” Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 176.

  62 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 211.

  63 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 174.

  64 Diliberto, Hadley, 203. “When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work on a book so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out.” Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 174.

  65 Although A Moveable Feast depicts Pauline as a predator, Ernest was perhaps not quite innocent in the affair. “El amor y la guerra son una misma cosa, y así como en la guerra es cosa lícita y acostumbrada usar de ardides y estratagemas para vencer al enemigo, así en las contiendas y competencias amorosas se tienen por buenos los embustes y marañas que se hacen para conseguir el fin que se desea.” Translation: “All is fair in love and war. In love as in war, it is lawful to use strategy to attain the desired end.” Miguel Cervantes, part 2, chap. 21 in Don Quixote. While biographers often depict Pauline negatively, for a traditionally Catholic girl of good upbringing and a family of high reputation, a married man seems the least likely choice. It is very possible that due to Pauline’s considerable abilities as an editor as well as her financial resources, Ernest was much more pursuer than pursued. Hawkins underlines that Ernest’s affections for Pauline developed not coincidentally at the time that Hadley’s trust fund was diminishing to nothing and that Uncle Gus increased Pauline’s trust fund to $60,000 with a yield of $250 per month. Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 46–47.

  66 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 174.

  67 The incongruence of high praise and low sales caused Ernest later to question Boni and Liveright’s mismanagement of the marketing of his book. By writing the parody of his mentor Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring, which Boni and Liveright would not publish as it criticized their much-esteemed author, he hatched a scheme to wiggle out of his contract and move to Fitzgerald’s publishing house, Scribner and Sons. Mellow, Hemingway, 314, 317–18. The New York Times called Torrents “fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean, his prose seems to have an organic being of its own.” Time wrote: “Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new honest un-‘literary’ transcriber of life—a Writer.” Comparing his war and bullfighting scenes to those of Francisco Goya, critic Edmund Wilson specified in “Mr. Hemingway’s Dry Points” in the literary magazine The Dial: “I am inclined to think that this little book has more artistic dignity than anything else about the period of the war that has yet been written by an American. His prose is of the first distinction…he is…strikingly original, and in the dry compressed little vignettes of In Our Time [sic], has almost invented a form of his own.” Dial 77, October 1924, 340–41.

  68 Diliberto, Hadley, 159.

  69 Meyers, Hemingway, 168; Hemingway, Selected Letters, 495.

  70 “It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to straighten out who I was publishing with after the first book of stories. It was a bitter winter on the North Atlantic and there was snow knee deep in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de l’Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris now, still writing to my wife, and where we went an
d what we did and the unbelievable wrenching, kicking happiness, selfishness and treachery of everything we did, gave me such happiness and un-killable dreadful happiness so that the black remorse came and hatred of the sin and no contrition, only a terrible remorse.” From Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, excerpted in The New York Times, June 26, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/excerpt-moveable-feast-restored-edition.html.

  71 Both Stein and Anderson were offended and appalled by the attacks coming from the upstart that they had so cordially mentored. Later, Anderson wrote his friend to express his disbelief and disappointment: “Damn it, man, you are so final—so patronizing. You always speak to me like a master to a pupil. It must be Paris—the literary life. You didn’t seem like that when I knew you…Come out of it, man. I pack a little wallop myself.” Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Hemingway, June 14, 1926, in Anderson, Selected Letters, 80. See also Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608711.txt.

  72 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 176.

  73 Diliberto, Hadley, 205; Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 64.

  74 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 66.

  75 Diliberto, Hadley, 86. See also Mellow, Hemingway, 329.

  76 Diliberto, Hadley, 216. See also Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 52.

  77 “What he seemed to be saying to me was that it was my fault for forcing the issue.” Hadley, in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 178–79.

  78 Cannell, “Scenes with a Hero,” 146.

  79 Reynolds, Hemingway, 31.

  80 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 66.

  81 Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, 170. Because both having a baby out of wedlock and having an abortion would have been disgraceful alternatives for Pauline, discreetly having the abortion in another country might well have proven the lesser of two evils. Later, during a “self-imposed exile,” Pauline would write Ernest: “I thought very hard and what I think is four months…is a lot tighter than nine.” Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, October 2, 1926, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers.