148 The loan started at $10 from Chase Manhattan, owned by the Rockefeller Family, but grew due to their fear that not loaning greater and greater sums might cause the dictator to slip from power and consequently to default. Benjamin, The United States and Cuba, 41.
149 Gabriel García Márquez, “Hemingway—Our Own” (Introduction), Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 8.
150 A Cuban solar is a single-room tenement residence, often with a dirt floor, where an entire family would live. A barrio marginal is a marginal neighborhood, or a slum.
151 “The bank that underwrites the cutting of the cane is foreign, the cutting of the cane is foreign, the consumers’ market is foreign, the administrative staff set up in Cuba, the machinery that is installed, the capital that is invested, the very land of Cuba held by foreign ownership…all are foreign, as are, logically enough, the profits that flow out of the country to enrich others.” Ortíz, Cuban Counterpoint, 63.
152 The destruction of beet sugar farms in Belgium and France during World War I caused a boom for Cuban sugar as the European market shrank, the supply fell, and the price of sugar leaped from 2.11 cents to 4 cents per pound. The European sugar market shrank from 9,088,000 tons in 1913 to 1,801,000 in 1920. This deficit created a great opportunity for Cuban producers, and output increased from 2,719,961 tons in 1913 to 4,448,389 tons in 1919. Wright, The Cuban Situation and Our Treaty Relations, 8.
153 Cited in Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 281.
154 Zafra, or harvest; colonia, or colony (a large unit of land). From 1900 to 1959, Cuban sugar production increased dramatically: 700,000 tons in 1900 to 6 million tons in 1930, or a quarter of the world’s total. By the 1960s, Cuba was nearing a production output of 10 million tons. By 1910, 75 percent of Cuban lands belonged to American or Spanish residents, with only 25 percent belonging to Cubans. The increase of American investment from $204 million in 1914 to $1.360 billion by 1924, and the expansion of the central railroad system, shifted the center of Cuban sugar production from the West to the East where American mills were rapidly expanding. Instead of diversifying its agriculture and developing its industry for the long term, Cuba focused on sugar production in the short term and became dependent on satisfying this demand. US control of sugar production surged from twenty-nine mills in 1905 (21 percent of the total production) to sixty-four mills in 1916 (53 percent) to seventy-five mills in 1926 (63 percent). Juan Carlos Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and Eastern Cuba’s Economic Development, 1900–1959,” Essays in Business and Economic History (Spring 2001), http://ebhsoc.org/journal/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/134/129; Jenks, Our Cuban Colony, 183.
155 Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 81, 201; Palmié and Scarano, The Caribbean, 463.
156 Palmié and Scarano, The Caribbean, 463.
157 Discurso leído, el 31 de mayo de 1926 (Havana: Rambla Press, 1926); Declarations of General Gerardo Machado y Morales regarding his electoral platform as presidential candidate in the elections which will take place on this first of November 1928 (Havana: Rambla Press, 1928); McGillivray, Blazing Cane, 152.
158 Machado, Ocho años de lucha; Machado, Por la patria libre; Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution, 81.
159 Benito Mussolini to Edwin L. James, The New York Times, 1928.
160 Maurer, The Empire Trap, 224.
161 Jules Benjamin, “The ‘Machadato’ and Cuban Nationalism, 1928–1932,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55 (February 1975): 66–91.
162 Benjamin, “The ‘Machadato’ and Cuban Nationalism.”
163 The child whose name was destined to become Patrick instead of Pilar would later state: “There are two versions of life: one is to turn the other cheek, the other is to destroy the enemy,” his was from the latter camp while Hadley had been from the former. As a Harvard grad and a professional game hunter, Patrick would attempt to follow in the footsteps of both mother and father spending most of his life in Tanganyika shooting animals and running his safari expedition company. His younger brother, Gregory, later known as “Gloria,” finished medical school, but spent much of his life battling with alcoholism, drug addition, manic depression, grief, dishonesty, and transgender issues. Patrick Hemingway, interview on September 26, 2014, in Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, 331.
CHAPTER 2
1 Reynolds, Hemingway, 167.
2 They were staying in a modest apartment above the Trevor and Morris Ford agency. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 192.
3 Volunteering as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross at the age of seventeen, Hemingway witnessed horrifying scenes of war that destroyed his romantic notions regarding the “adventure of combat.” During the Battle of Caporetto, Italian forces suffered one of the worst defeats during World War I. Exploring and exploiting his war wound experiences along the Italian Front in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway depicted the humiliating defeat that they suffered as well as their retreat to neutral ground that came to define the attitude of his generation, lost and coming of age in an ideal-shattering modernist age. At Caporetto, the Italians suffered a brutal loss to Austrian forces, perhaps the greatest defeat in Italian history. Still today, the word Caporetto in Italian denotes a humiliating loss. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
4 He began a manuscript titled “A New Slain Knight” in September 1927 and abandoned it in March 1928 to begin a short story that grew into A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway Personal Papers.
5 In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry’s story of betrayal by love and war has intimate roots in the writer’s biography. Eager to get closer to the action on the Italian front, young Ernest volunteered to deliver chocolate and cigarettes by bicycle to the men in the trenches. He was struck by a mortar and machine gun bullet at Fossalta di Piave then transported to a hospital in Milan. Recovering, he initiated a romantic relationship with an American nurse Agnes von Krurowsky. At 26 years old, Agnes was seven years older than Ernest. When he returned home to North America, he asked Agnes to join him and to marry him, but Agnes rejected him for his immaturity. Agnes encouraged Hemingway when he was young, injured, and vulnerable to accept a woman’s protection and love, then betrayed him with another man. Freshly wounded and perhaps still traumatized by his wartime experiences, Hemingway took his first major love story and rejection rather badly and remained in the bed of his childhood home for several weeks thereafter. Meyers, Hemingway, 41; Kert, The Hemingway Women, 70. The trauma of Agnes von Kurowsky, and perhaps his deteriorating relationship with his mother, seemed to have lasting consequences on his subsequent relationships. Lynn, Hemingway, 99. He returned to the injury in four separate works, including “Soldier’s Home,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A Very Short Story,” and A Farewell to Arms. Lynn, Hemingway, 98–99. For the rest of his life, he left women before they could leave him; he established the security of a new relationship before ending a previous one, and created the conditions for a new marriage before ending a previous one. As late as 1936, he wrote of Agnes’ traumatic rejection in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: “He had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it…How everyone he had slept with only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he known he could not cure himself of loving her.” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 71. Writing also appeared to provide significant refuge from the fear that seemed to accompany loving and depending upon others. In 1919, just after Agnes and the war, Ernest purchased a new typewriter and withdrew to the northern wilderness of Michigan to isolate himself and commit himself to writing. Wounded at war and at love, he would now bet on himself instead; alone in the silence of the woods, he was again autonomous and free. Whatever would subsequently occur in his life, he could create and control what appeared on the empty pages of his Royal Portable Corona. Thereafter, the story he created would depend upon no one else. Ernest Hemingway to Clarence Hemingway, October 28, 1919, 209; Ernest Hemingway to
Grace Hemingway, November 11, 1919, 211; Ernest Hemingway to Ursula Hemingway, mid-December, in Hemingway, Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922, 219. Copping a callous attitude, young Hemingway would write his male friend about Agnes, whose letter he was clearly working over in his mind. “Had a very sad letter from Ag from Rome yesterday. She has fallen out with her Major. She is in a hell of a way mentally and says I should feel revenged for what she did to me. Poor damned kid I’m sorry as hell for her. But there’s nothing I can do. I loved her once and then she gyped me. And I don’t blame her. But I set out to cauterize out her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone. She’s all broken up and I wish there was something I could do for her thou. But that’s all shut behind me—Long ago and far away. And there aint no busses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay.” Ernest Hemingway to Howell G. Jenkins, June 15, 1919, in Hemingway, Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922, 193. Hemingway cites a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay,” about a British soldier in London who was beckoned to return to Mandalay by a Burmese girl.
6 As Reynolds puts beautifully, “Hemingway was making a war up in his head more real than any war he had known. It was all there, the country, the people, the weather always…Every day went like that, the snow falling in his fiction and the sweat running from his brow.” Reynolds, Homecoming, 170.
7 “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.” Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1934, in Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 407.
8 Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 139.
9 As fate would have it, Carlos Gutierrez eventually became the first first-mate of Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar, and years later, Gregorio Fuentes became the second.
10 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 99.
11 McLendon, Papa, 52, quoted in Michael J. Crowley, “Reexamining the Origins of ‘After the Storm,’” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 196; Mark P. Ott, “The Anita Logs and To Have and Have Not,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway.
12 McLendon, Papa, 52, quoted in Crowley, “Reexamining the Origins of ‘After the Storm,’” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 196; Ott, “The Anita Logs and To Have and Have Not” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 228.
13 McLendon, Papa, 52, quoted in Crowley, “Reexamining the Origins of ‘After the Storm,’” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 196; Ott, “The Anita Logs and To Have and Have Not” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 228.
14 Hemingway, “Marlin off the Morro,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 180.
15 Hemingway, “On the Blue Water,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.
16 Clarence Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, April 11 and 13, 1928, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers; Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 11, 1928, Hemingway Personal Papers; Sanford, At the Hemingways, 227, cited in Reynolds, Hemingway, 171. See also Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 94–95.
17 Hemingway, “Fathers and Sons,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 372.
18 Clarence Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, April 27, June 4, and June 17, 1928, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers, in Reynolds, Hemingway, 104, 171.
19 Lynn, Hemingway, 25. In addition to the abundant comic books and dime store adventure stories that he read, stories from his Uncle Willoughby, a missionary who had travelled to the Far East and met the Dalai Lama in Mongolia, nourished this young man’s appetite for adventure and his opened worldview. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 13.
20 Crime rose steadily as the town lamented the risqué dances of its youth. Horse and buggies disappeared as many more families obtained an automobile. At one point, Oak Park boasted more automobiles per capita than any other village in the United States. It is significant that Hemingway’s conservative father held on to his horse and buggy much longer than was necessary. Reynolds, Young Hemingway, 6.
21 Griffin, Along with Youth, 25.
22 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 35.
23 The Kansas City Style Book, 1, Miscellaneous Publications, Other Materials, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library.
24 George Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction XXI: Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review, Spring 1958, Newspaper Clippings, Hemingway Reference Collection.
25 Mellow, Hemingway, 7. As he came of age and Oak Park veterans of the Civil War died, young Hemingway would have heard their glories sung at community gatherings and inscribed in the obituaries of local newspapers. Michael Reynolds, “The Hemingway’s Revisited: Back to the Future” (forward), Sanford, At the Hemingways, xiv. See also Meyers, Hemingway, 17.
26 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 9, Meyers, Hemingway, 17.
27 Villard and Nagel, Hemingway in Love and War, 1, cited in Megan Floyd Desnoyers, Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller’s Legacy, JFK Exhibit, accessed May 18, 2016, https://jfklibrary.org/Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection/Online-Resources/Storytellers-Legacy.
28 There is a controversy surrounding Hemingway’s attempt to join the regular Army. He led his family to believe that he had attempted to enlist but had been rejected for poor eyesight in his left eye, yet there exists no record of his rejection. “We all have that bad eye like Mothers, but I’ll make it to Europe some way in spite of this optic,” he told his sister Marcelline. Biographer Kenneth Lynn asserts that he never attempted to enlist, for he wished to take part in the event of the war, but did not necessarily wish to serve and die in the trenches. Lynn, Hemingway, 73.
29 Mellow, Hemingway, 56–57; Reynolds, Young Hemingway, 14.
30 The Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the bulk of American troops would return in January 1919. The Nineteenth Amendment for women’s suffrage passed on May 20, 1919.
31 “First Lieutenant Hemingway Comes Back Riddled with Bullets and Decorated with Two Medals,” Oak Parker; “Newspaper Man Survives 200 Battle Wounds,” “Wounded 227 Times,” “Oak Park Boy Shot to Pieces Jokes about It,” “Yankee Punctured by 227 pieces of Austrian Shrapnel,” and “Hero Back Loaded with Medals,” Grandparents’ Scrapbook, Hemingway Personal Papers. He did not disclose that he was merely an ambulance driver on a bicycle, delivering mail, chocolate, and cigarettes to the regular infantry troops when he was wounded.
32 Roselle Dean, “First Lieutenant Hemingway,” The Oak Parker, February 1, 1991, Newspaper Clippings, Hemingway Reference Collection. Later, Hemingway would give insight into how he felt about exaggerating his combat role in the story “A Soldier’s Home”: “Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told.” Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 125.
33 “I am writing this late at night after a long think by myself, & I am afraid it is going to hurt you, but, I’m sure it won’t harm you permanently…I realize it was my fault in the beginning that you cared for me, & regret it from the bottom of my heart. But, I am now & always will be too old, & that’s the truth, & I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy—a kid…I expect to be married soon. And I hope & pray that after you have thought things out, you’ll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are.” Agnes von Kurowsky to Ernest Hemingway, March 7, 1919, Hemingway Personal Papers.
34 He did not publish any stories from this period, but the experiences later became the material for “Out of Season,” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man,” “The Big Two-Hearted River, Parts I and II,” “The Undefeated,” “Indian Camp,” “The Killers,” “Cat in the Rain,” “The Battler,” and “Three Day Blow” and for magazines and collections like Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time.
35 Meyers, Hemingway, 49.
37 Meyers, Hemingway, 50–51.
38 In a subsequent article, Clark gave this colorful one-line assessment of Ernest: “A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth.” Gregory Clark, “Hemingway Slept Here,” Montreal Standard, November 4, 1950, 13.
39 The style was dynamic, humorous, and instructive from an insider’s point of view, and concerned such subjects as painting rentals, free shaves, critiques of the major, store thieves, fox ranching, whiskey smuggling, and wedding gifts. Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, cited in Meyers, Hemingway, 52.
40 “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, 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.” Cited in Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 57.
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