Ernesto

  82 The scenes of their encounter arguably served as inspiration, not only for the story “Hills Like White Elephants” (presented to Pauline on their honeymoon) about an abortion, “a simple operation…all perfectly natural…just to let the air in” (Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 217), but also for the monologues of To Have and Have Not: “Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up,” uttered by a character resembling Pauline (110). Hemingway, To Have and Have Not.

  83 The term “white elephant” denotes a troublesome gift that is difficult to dispose of, and refers to the custom of the kings of Siam giving a white elephant, a holy animal that was expensive to maintain and could not be used for anything functional, to a courtier they despised, hoping the gift would lead to their ruin. “White Elephant,” Oxford Living Dictionaries, s.v. “white elephant,” accessed June 24, 2016, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/white_elephant; Hemingway, Selected Letters, 207.

  84 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 207.

  85 Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  86 “Pfeiffer is stopping off here Wednesday.” Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  87 Everyone. Together.

  88 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 171. See also Lynn, Hemingway, 345.

  89 Reviewing In Our Time, Paul Rosenfeld of The New Republic had written: “There is something of Sherwood Anderson, of his fine bare effects and values coined from simplest words, in Hemingway’s clear medium…There is Gertrude Stein equally obvious.” The Torrents of Spring, “My Own Life,” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “The Sun Also Sets,” “Men without Rabbits,” “A Farewell to Val,” “For Whom the Bull Flows,” “Bull in the Afternoon,” “The Shop-Happy Wife of Ernie Macomber,” “Death in the Rumble Seat,” “For Whom the Gong Sounds,” “Across the Potomac and Into Her Pants,” and, inevitably, “The Old Man and the Seafood.” Hemingway, Selected Letters, 62; Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “Swiping Stein: The Ambivalence of Hemingway Parodies,” The Hemingway Review 30, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 69–82.

  90 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 57.

  91 F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, June 1926, in Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, 142.

  92 Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, November 24, 1926, in Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 3, 1926–1929, 164.

  93 He said he would be cutting the first two chapters, yet insinuated that this was his idea rather than that of Scott: “I think it will move much faster from the start that way…Scott agrees with me.” Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, June 3, 1926, Ernest Hemingway Collection; Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, 178.

  94 “The only effect I ever had on Ernest was to get him in a receptive mood and say let’s cut out everything that goes before this. And so he published it without that and later we agreed that it was a very wise cut. This is not literally true and I don’t want it established as part of the Hemingway legend.” F. Scott Fitzgerald to John O’Hara, July 25, 1936, in Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, 303.

  95 Donnelly and Billings, Sara & Gerald, 25; Gerald Murphy to Ernest Hemingway, September 6, 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers; Miller, Letters from the Lost Generation, 21. The tense train ride back to Paris was depicted in Hemingway’s short story “A Canary for One,” which ends, “We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.” Hemingway, “Canary for One,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 261.

  96 In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway later criticizes the Murphys bitterly for their role in the breakup, but he was thankful at the time.

  97 Putnam and Moss reported after seeing Ernest during this year: “It did not take me long to discover that the somewhat shy and youthful reporter whom I had met in Chicago had vanished.” “In his place was a literary celebrity,” a “tarzan of [the] printed page.” Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress, 128; Arthur Moss, “Time of the Expatriates: A Reporter’s Recollections of the Lost Generation,” Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway.

  98 Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, October 16, 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  99 John Dos Passos to Ernest Hemingway, November 19, 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers; Diliberto, Hadley, 235.

  100 “I love you, Dad. Life is beautiful with Dad.” French was the only language Bumby spoke at the time. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, part 5.

  101 Hadley Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, November 16, 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers. See also her letter of November 19.

  102 THREE MONTHS TERMINATED AT HADLEY’S REQUEST SHE STARTING IMMEDIATELY OWN REASONS STOP COMMUNICATION RESUMED STOP SUGGEST YOU SAIL AFTER CHRISTMAS WHAT ABOUT ME. Virginia to Pauline Pfeiffer, November 17, 1926, Hemingway Personal Papers; Reynolds, Hemingway, 80.

  103 They refused to play a part in such hypocrisy. Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 74; Reynolds, Hemingway, 124.

  104 The mayor’s office. Pauline’s sister, Virginia, and Ernest’s banker, Mike Ward, witnessed the ceremony.

  105 Fashionable hairdo. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, 79.

  106 Imagining her daughter and new son-in-law on the day of their marriage across the sea, she wrote them from Piggott: “My dear Children: God bless you and keep you always in his care. I hope your wedding garments this morning are bright and shining as the sun, befitting those who have come through great tribulations. For many months I have been asking our Heavenly Father to make the crooked ways straight and your life’s pathway one of peace and happiness, and this morning I feel a quiet assurance that my prayers have not been in vain.” Mary Pfeiffer to Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, May 10, 1927, Patrick Hemingway Papers.

  107 Mellow, Hemingway, 346.

  108 “I think that perhaps the luckiest thing Bumby will ever have is to have you for a mother.” Hemingway, Selected Letters, 228. “I complimented her brave and generous reaction and told her I was now informing Scribner that all of my royalties from The Sun Also Rises should go to her. I admitted that if I hadn’t married her I would never have written this book, helped as I was by her loyal and loving backing and her actual cash support. I told her that Bumby was certainly lucky to have her as his mother. That I had great admiration for her head, her heart and lovely hands, and prayed that God would take care of her to make up for the hurt I had inflicted on her. That she was the best and honest and loveliest person I had ever known. I folded the letter, put it in an envelope that had Murphy’s return address, consciously ran the glue of the envelope’s flap across my tongue and carefully sealed the flap. I had achieved the moment I had tenaciously sought, but I wasn’t elated, nor did I send a cable to Pauline. What I felt was the sorrow of loss. I had contrived this moment, but I felt like the victim.” Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, 28, 47, 74.

  109 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 228.

  110 Without a fixed residence.

  111 “Dos Passos had first mentioned Key West to the Hemingways as a place to live.” Carol Hemingway, “907 Whitehead Street,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 37. “Ernest’s attention was drawn to Key West, Florida, by Dos Passos, who described it as tropical, maritime, and unspoiled.” Kert, The Hemingway Women, 207; Dos Passos, The Best Times, 198–99.

  112 John Dos Passos, directed by Knapp Hubert (Éditions Montparnasse, 2000), DVD.

  113 Carr, Dos Passos, 231, quoted in Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 87.

  114 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 191. In the 1920s, tobacco dominated the island’s industry, bringing the Cuban companies and workers, making the island seem much more Creole than American. In the streets one found a mix of Creoles, Cubans, black Bahamians, and white Bahamian “Conchs.” Dos Passos, The Best Times, 198–99; Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 97.

  115 “We were truly poor.” Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 102. Hemingway later described the influence of money as degrading and cancerous to his character; later, in �
��The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he would compare it to gangrene (Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 58).

  116 Gott, Cuba, 32.

  117 The British returned Havana to Spain in the Treaty of Paris. The cannon blast was only suspended once, during World War II, for fear of German U-boats; the tradition continues every evening at nine o’clock.

  118 A national hero.

  119 Historians estimate that approximately 2 million of the 10–15 million slaves that were taken from Africa died en route. Approximately 779,000 of those landed in Cuba while others came from other sources such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic (also known as Hispaniola), and Jamaica. The number of slaves increased steadily with the demands of the agricultural economy, which included fruit, tobacco, and, predominantly, sugar. Estimated number of Africans landing alive in Cuba per year: from 1521 to 1762, about 500; 1763 to 1789, 600; 1790 to 1820, 8,300; 1821 to the 1870s, 16,700. The origins of these slaves changed over the years, but we know that they came from four major groups: approximately 400,000 Bantu (from northern Angola, southern Zaire, and southern Congo); 275,000 Yoruba (from southwestern Nigeria); 200,000 Ibo/Ibibio/Ijaw (from southeastern Nigeria); 200,000 Ewe/Fon (from Benin); and approximately 185,000 from other areas. As early as 1526, royal decrees permitted slaves to purchase their freedom. They brought their religions, which mixed with one another and with Catholicism. The most prevalent African religion practiced in Cuba today is Santería, which is mainly the assimilation of Yoruba and Catholic rituals and beliefs as well as the some of the traditions from the Regla Arará and Palo Monte religions. In Cuba, the slaves reorganized themselves into cabildos, ethnic associations of Abakuá, Mandinga, Ganga, Mina, Lucumí, Carabal’í, Macaua, and Congo, which partially resisted Spanish hegemony and preserved their religions and culture. Gott, Cuba, 47–48; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Lopes Valdez, “Slavery in Cuba” (lecture), Cuban Academy of Sciences, May 1992. See also Aimes, A History of Slavery in Cuba; Ortíz, Hampa Africana; Bergad, García, and del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market; Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, David Eltis, & W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University, Transatlantic Slave Trade (database); Gates and Appiah, Africana.

  120 This figure does exclude increased mortality rates among subsequent generations. Owen ‘Alik Shahadah, “African Holocaust: Dark Voyage” (audio CD), http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/african%20holocaust.htm; Meltzer, Slavery.

  121 Yes!

  122 “¡Al combate, corred, Bayameses!, Que la patria os contempla orgullosa. No temáis una muerte gloriosa, Que morir por la patria es vivir. En cadenas vivir es vivir. En afrenta y oprobio sumidos. Del clarín escuchad el sonido; ¡A las armas, valientes, corred!”

  123 García and Alberto, quoted in Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 18.

  124 Miller, Voice of the Leopard, 172.

  125 Desperate to influence a war that he was losing, the Spanish king proclaimed all slaves fighting on the side of Spain to be free, but it was already too late. By 1873, the last known slave ship had already arrived in Cuba, and by that time, 83 percent of Cuba’s exports, such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee, were going to the United States, with only 6 percent going to Spain. Exiled in the United States, José Martí organized the Cuban War of Independence from abroad and founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892. In 1895, the Cuban sugar industry had produced a million long tons of sugar, valued at $62 million.

  126 Ernest Hemingway to Janet Flanner, April 8, 1933, in Hemingway, Selected Letters, 386.

  127 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house,” says the tenth commandment.

  128 Jefferson’s ambassador, General Wilkinson, communicated the offer to Spain. Carmen Diana Deere, “Here Come the Yankees! The Rise and Decline of United States Colonies in Cuba, 1898–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (November 1998): 729–65.

  129 Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History, 150.

  130 “These islands (Cuba and Puerto Rico) are natural appendages of the North American continent, and one of them (Cuba) almost within sight of our shores, from a multitude of considerations has become an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union…But there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.” John Quincy Adams, quoted in Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination, 30.

  131 Deere, “Here Come the Yankees!”

  132 Jones, Crucible of Power, 195.

  133 Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 423–46. With “Remember the Maine” as its battle cry, along with other imaginative headlines, the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World enjoyed commercial success as it whipped the American public into a fervor and rallied public opinion in favor of military intervention in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Popular songs and newspaper narratives of the “Cuba Libre” movement described a vigorous, Protestant, democratic, and hard-working America that had the chance to come to the aid of a fledgling democracy to stop the aristocratic, tyrannical, and enslaving corruption of a colonial monarchy, which had accumulated its riches from the gold it had stolen and extracted from the Americas.

  134 “Viví en el monstruo y le conozco las entrañas, y mi honda es la de David.” José Martí, “An unfinished letter to Manuel Mercado,” in Abel and Torrents ed., José Martí, 14.

  135 Retiring at the age of forty-nine, Irénée du Pont had architects Covarrocas and Govantes design the four-story, eleven-bedroom mansion for him in July 1927 and later added a golf course designed by architects Herbert Strong and Sim Cuthrie, which was completed in September 1931. The $1.3 million estate, comprising five miles of pristine private beach, was named Xanadú after the legendary palace of Kublai Khan. The estate eventually expanded to 1,328 acres in the municipality of Cárdenas, purchased at a bargain rate of four cents per acre. In 1932 he installed an 11,000-pipe organ, the largest in Latin America.

  136 The USS Maine monument was inaugurated in 1925 by President Zayas, with American general Pershing in attendance.

  137 Much like Havana’s Capitol Dome, the USS Maine memorial had a sister shrine that preceded it in the United States, in New York’s Central Park, a decade before.

  138 “Protected” nations like Cuba and the Philippines, seized during the Spanish-American War, did not take well to American occupation, and resisted neocolonial intervention as they had resisted colonial rule until real independence from the United States was finally achieved.

  139 “Cuba cannot have true moral peace, which is what the people need for their happiness and good fortune—under the transitional government. This transitional government was imposed by force by a foreign power and, therefore, is illegitimate and incompatible with the principles that the entire country has been upholding for so long and in the defense of which half of its sons have given their lives and all of its wealth has been consumed.” Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, 246.

  140 “A century ago, the United States jumped into the world by going to war with Spain. The Americas, and the world, are still feeling the consequences.” “The War of 1898: Forget the Maine!” The Economist, January 1, 1998, https://www.economist.com/special/1998/01/01/forget-the-maine.

  141 Leonard Wood to William McKinley, April 12, 1900, Wood Papers, Library of Congress, cited in Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 158.

  142 “The Spaniards, we are told, are to go by December 1, or soon after. Then is to come an American “army of o
ccupation,” some saying it is to be 50,000 strong. It is but natural that we should ask, Why is this great army sent to Cuba? When the Spaniards are gone, who is it going to fight?” Bartolomé Masó, San Francisco Call 84, no. 159 (November 1898).

  143 New York Journal, August 16, 1898, 2; Hyatt and Hyatt, Cuba, 115–16; The New York Times, August 3, 1898, 10; “Developing Oriente,” Cuba Magazine, September 1909, 4–7; George Reno, “Oriente, the California of Cuba,” Cuba Review (August 1927): 14–20; George Fortune, “What’s Doing in Cuba for the Younger American,” Cuba Magazine, February 1912, 336–40; Vivian and Smith, Everything about Our New Possessions, 112–19; Forbes-Lindsay, “Cuba Land of Promise,” World To-Day, February 1908, 141–50, in Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 190.

  144 McClure’s Magazine, April 1899, 66.

  145 A Latin term, for the they were similar to the ranches of Ancient Rome that colonized Magna Graecia and Sicily, Egypt, Northwest Africa, and Hispania Baetica for the production of grain, wine, and olive oil.

  146 In 1906, Commercial and Financial World called it both “a poor man’s paradise and the rich man’s mecca.” Commercial and Financial World, April 7, 1906, 10. Writer George Reno called eastern Cuba “the new frontier,” declaring that “Oriente [Province] is the California of Cuba.” Reno, “Oriente,” Cuba Review, August 1927, in Perez, On Becoming Cuban, 191.

  147 “For almost four years contending forces had laid siege to the largesse of the land, preying upon the bounty of its resources, and practicing pillage of every kind as the normal method of warfare. And when it was over, in 1898, the toll of Cuban independence reached frightful proportions. The fields were blighted; the pastures, barren; and the fruit trees, bare. Agriculture was in desperate crisis in an economy predominantly agricultural. The rich sugar provinces of Havana and Matanzas were each cultivating fully less than one-half of the area in 1899 than they had before the war. Of the 1,400,000 total acres under cultivation in 1895, only some 900,000 acres returned to production after the war…Foreign lenders in particular and especially United States creditors, were anxious to claim Cuban properties.” After the passage of Military Order 139 granting debt collectors the authority to seize holdings, investors like United Fruit were able to purchase land at rock-bottom prices: 200,000 acres at $1 per acre in 1902 and another 180,000 acres in 1904. They were financed at high interest rates by banks like Chase National Bank of New York, the First National City Bank of New York, and the Royal Bank of Canada, using the mills as collateral and with rates closely connected to the sugar market. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Insurrection, Intervention, and the Transformation of Land Tenure Systems in Cuba, 1895–1902,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1985): 229–54.