Ernesto

  41 When disenchanted-young-PTSD Hemingway holed up in the family cabin in Michigan without ambition or source of livelihood, his parents were not pleased. As evidence, there as the famous bankruptcy letter from Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway during the summer of 1920, “Interest in Mother’s ideas and affairs. Little Comforts provided for the home; a desire to favor any of Mother’s particular prejudices, on no account to outrage her ideals. Flowers, fruit, candy or something pretty to war, brought home to Mother, with a kiss and a squeeze. The unfailing desire to make much of her feeble efforts, to praise her cooking, back up her little schemes; a real interest in hearing her sing, or play the piano, or tell the stories that she loves to tell—A surreptitious paying of bills, just to get them off Mother’s mind; Thoughtful remembrances and celebration of her birthday and Mother’s day (the sweet letter accompanying the gift of flowers, she treasures most of all). These are merely a few of the deposits which keep the account in good standing.” Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, July 27, 1920, Hemingway Personal Papers. There was the story that resulted called “Soldier’s Home.” In the story, parents confront their son’s PTSD and apathetic attitude while returning from World War I. Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 130. See also Muriel Hemingway, Running from Crazy, dir. Barbara Kopple, New York: Virgil Films, (2014), DVD.

  42 Mellow, Hemingway, 118.

  43 In addition to his publishing company editors, these exceptional literary mentors provided Hemingway not only with examples but also with direct feedback, coaching, encouragement, and editing. Close friends and relatives provided the sort of dedication and patience required for such work.

  44 He also rented a room at 39 rue Descartes to escape the noise and get his writing done. His correspondence with Ezra Pound attests to his affinity for French and “Rooshians” writers during this period, and recollections of his sister, Hadley, and his subsequent declarations to the press substantiate his voracious and omnivorous reading habits. In addition to the books were the music and paintings that he and his circle consumed. In a 1958 interview, George Plimpton asked Hemingway to sum up his literary influences, and he replied: “Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember everyone.” Brasch and Sigman, Hemingway’s Library, 16. See also Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading 1910–1940.

  45 Later, they would vacation in Schruns, Austria, along the côte d’Azur, and at the Running of the Bulls of San Fermín.

  46 Incredibly, William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor as well as a poet, would also circumcise Ernest and Hadley’s son in the kitchen of their apartment in Paris.

  47 Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge, 78–79. Several songs were written in support of the campaign for the veterans Rus Collier and Ben Siegel, Give A Bonus to Our Men, 1922. One example, written by Lew Hatton, is “I’ve Got These Bonus Blues,” from 1922. “When I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord to keep that pay / comin’ in on its way to me / When I start to sing or hum/those blues get me / Better days are sure to come / That’s plain to see / Uncle Sam will surely send it / And I know just how I will spend it / That will cure those Bonus Blues.”

  48 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 69.

  49 By 1932, he was calling it the “iceberg technique” or “art of omission.” If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. He also shared his early struggles as a writer and the reason behind his morbid fascination with violence and death: “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced…I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.” He chalenged himself and his fellow writers to use words precisely and creatively: “All our words from loose using have lost their edge.” Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 6, 34, 83. The iceberg theory, or theory of omission, has often been cited by writers familiar with Hemingway’s work, such as George R. R. Martin in recent days, who has often spoken about the universe a fantasy writer like he or J.R.R. Tolkien creates as the underwater part of the “iceberg.” “Tolkien made more than a story or history in that book, Martin says: Tolkien’s ‘secondary world’ of languages, mythology and appendices was the bulk of the proverbial iceberg, and the Lord of the Rings just the tip. Martin admits he’s doing a bit of ‘a magician’s trick,’ saying that he enjoys the world-building as it comes rather than as a goal.” “George RR Martin: ‘Drogon could never beat Smaug in a fight,’” The Guardian, October 27, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/oct/27/george-rr-martin-world-ice-and-fire.

  50 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 62.

  51 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

  52 The Sun Also Rises illustrated the disillusioning effects of World War I on a group of cynical and rather self-indulgent young expatriates in Paris and Pamplona. American journalist, Jake Barnes, is the novel’s narrator. Lady Brett Ashley is the story’s enchantingly overripe heroine, a twice-divorced flapper whose sexual freedom embodies 1920s libertarianism. When their young group journeys to Spain to participate in the drunken festival of San Fermín, tension mounts between four men who desire Lady Brett. Even though Brett is engaged to Mike Campbell, she has a brief and sordid affair with Jake’s friend from college, Robert Cohn. Although Jake loves Brett, his war wound has left him impotent, such that he must bitterly accept becoming her confidant and friend. Taunted as an imposter and a Jew by several members of the group, Robert Cohn, a former Princeton boxing champion, challenges and brawls, like an enraged bull, with Brett’s numerous pretenders. Weary of Cohn and unfaithful to anyone, Brett sleeps instead with Pedro Romero, a bullfighter. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 247–51; Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 155; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Preface,” This Side of Paradise; Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 29–31, 38–39.

  53 He also received high praise for his dialogue and characters from Conrad Aiken of the New York Herald Tribune, Bruce Barton of The Atlantic, and Ernest Boyd of The Independent.

  54 Ernest Hemingway to Grace Hemingway, February 5, 1927, Selected Letters, 244–45.

  55 Hemingway’s father, Ed, shared similar concerns in the letters he and his son exchanged. He was annoyed to have learned about the divorce from newspaper clippings forwarded by his friends rather than from his own son. Was he merely depicting a Lost Generation, or as his personal life would seem to indicate, was he also “lost”? “Oh Ernest how could you leave Hadley and Bumby?…Our family has never had such an incident before and trust you may still make your get-away from that individual who split your home.” Clarence Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, August 8, 1927, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  56 Operated by Florida East Coast Railway, the Havana Special was the chef-d’œuvre of industrialist Henry Flagler, an eccentric whose dream was an oversea railway, running north to south, offering daily departures from Havana (via seaplane and train) to New York via Key West, and a trip duration of just forty-two hours.

  57 Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, 42.

  58 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 199.

  59 During his final months, Clarence’s daughters, Carol and Marceline, remember their father’s frequent headaches, his failing health and irritability, and his mou
nting paranoia from his financial problems. Clarence, who had been strong and intelligent in his youth, was a healer by profession. It came as a shock to this able-bodied doctor, patriarch, and provider to a large and prosperous family, to fall ill, to lose faculties, and face the fact that he was unable to cure himself. Cited in Mellow, Hemingway, 371.

  60 In his autobiographical novel, he remembers. Hemingway, The Sound of the Trumpet, 182–83.

  61 Cited in Meyers, Hemingway, 208–09.

  62 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, December 6, 1928, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  63 Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 9, 1928, Selected Letters, 291; Henry Strater to Ernest Hemingway, December 8, 1928, Hemingway Personal Papers; Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, December 6, 1928, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  64 Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 111.

  65 Berman, Surviving Literary Suicides, 110; Sanford, At the Hemingways, cited in Lynn, Hemingway, 379.

  66 Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, December 16, 1928, Selected Letters, 291.

  67 Concerning George, Ernest would write his mother, “He did more than anyone to kill Dad and he had better do something in reparation.” He would write Perkins concerning his mother’s financial situation: “There are my mother and two kids Boy 12 girl 16 still at home—$25,000 insurance—a $15,000 mortgage on the house (house should bring 10 to 15 thousand over the mortgage but sale difficult). Various worthless land in Michigan, Florida, etc. with taxes to pay on all of it. No other capital—all gone—my father carried a 20–20 yr. Endowment insurance which was paid and lost in Florida. He had angina pectoris and diabetes preventing him from getting any more insurance.” Hemingway, Selected Letters, 292.

  68 Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 9, 1928, Selected Letters, 291.

  69 Grace Hall Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, February 24, 1929, Hemingway Personal Papers, cited in Mellow, Hemingway, 375.

  70 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 200.

  71 Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 110–11.

  72 Reynolds, The American Homecoming, 211–13.

  73 Note found in the Baker files, dated October 1931. A sentiment that bears resemblance to Nobel Prize speech, delivered more than two decades later, every man faces his deliverance or his annihilation, his “eternity or the lack of it,” alone. Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway.

  74 Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, February 9, 1929, Museum Ernest Hemingway Collection, cited in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 86.

  75 Historical records at El Morro and Ambos Mundos, interview with Historian at Ambos Mundos Hotel, June 2010, interview with Finca Vigía historian and Gladys Rodríguez, June 2010. See also The New York Times, April 5, 1929, cited in Reynolds, The American Homecoming, 258.

  76 Wagner-Martin, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life, 86.

  77 McParland, Beyond Gatsby, 22.

  78 Palmié and Scarano, The Caribbean, 463.

  79 Pérez, Cuba, 257.

  80 Pérez, Cuba, 257.

  81 Max Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, August 1, 1930, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 144.

  82 Max Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, August 12, 1930, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 146.

  83 Max Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, September 3, 1930, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 147.

  84 “Please don’t under any circumstances give Scott our Paris home address—Last time he was in Paris he got us kicked out of one apt. and in trouble all the time. (Insulted the landlord—pee-ed on the front porch—tried to break down the door at 3–4 and 5 a.m. etc.) will meet him in public places but have this apt where we’re quiet and comfortable and found it with great difficulty and he would get us ousted by only one performance.” Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 96.

  85 Lawrence and Olive Nordquist, Henry Slater, Max Perkins, Arnold MacLeish, Josephine Herbst, John Herrmann, Gus, Louise, and Virginia Pfeiffer, and Carol Hemingway. Reynolds, An Annotated Chronology, 61. Mellow, Without Consequences, 390.

  86 Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC). August, Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections, 127.

  87 Pérez, Cuba, 255.

  88 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 323.

  89 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 333–34.

  90 University Student Directorate.

  91 Cited in Moruzzi, Havana Before Castro, 44.

  92 Maurer, The Empire Trap, 224, 223; “Two Cuban Editors Protest Government Ban on Nine Papers,” Chicago Daily Tribune (January 23, 1931), 8.

  93 Henry Guggenheim and Henry Stimson, cited in Maurer, The Empire Trap, 224.

  94 Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista, 38.

  95 “Havana Unrest Fails to Disturb Sugarfield Calm. Cane Being Burned? Just a Spanish Custom,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1931, 8.

  96 “Cuba’s Mussolini,” Time Magazine, January 19, 1931.

  97 Jules Benjamin, “The ‘Machadato’ and Cuban Nationalism, 1928–1932,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55 (February 1975): 78. See also Bonachea and Martín, The Cuban Insurrection, 9.

  98 Its founder was Joaquín Martínez Saenz. Pérez, Cuba, 257.

  99 On January 22, 1931, a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune described the scene in Matanzas where Milton Hershey owned a sugar mill and his own railroad leading to a northern port. “This old Cuban City, capital of a province which is given over almost exclusively to the production of sugar, does not appear to be much worried over the complexities of government that are so upsetting the calm of Havana. The natives are as complacent as the oxen in the cane fields. Many are very, very poor and there is evidence of financial distress along each other narrow streets. The natives are hungry but they are too tired to get stirred up over the political unrest that is a source of conversation every place in Havana.” “Havana Unrest Fails to Disturb Sugarfield Calm. Cane Being Burned? Just a Spanish Custom,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1931, 8.

  100 E. E. Allen, Jr., “Hershey Chocolate’s Success: Turning Smaller Volume into Increasing Profits,” Barron’s, May 9, 1932, 22.

  101 The contractors of Associated Cuban Contractors and Warren Brothers of Boston were awarded the contract by the Cuban government. The country’s length from east to west is 780 miles. Edwin J. Foscue, “The Central Highway of Cuba,” Economic Geography 9, no. 4 (October 1933): 406–12.

  102 Benjamin, The United States and Cuba, 41; Maurer, The Empire Trap, 189.

  103 With Max Perkins, John Herrmann, Gus Pfeiffer, Charles Thompson, Chub Weaver, Happy, W. D. Sidley, Bra Saunders, Berge Saunders, and Albert Pinder.

  104 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 232; Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 130.

  105 McIver, Hemingway’s Key West, 106.

  106 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, April 27, 1931, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 156–57.

  107 Mellow, Hemingway, 404.

  108 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 222.

  109 Luís E. Aguilar, “Cuba, c.1860–c.1930,” in Bethell, Cuba, 21–55; “Cuban Leader Gets Refuge in Legation: Ex. President Menocal Obtains Protection of Brazil After Arrest of Associated. Police Surroud Building Mendieza, Mendez Penate and Other Oppositionists Are Sent to Isle of Pines. Cuba Leader Gets Legation Asylum,” The New York Times, May 25, 1932, 1; “Cuba Seizes Chiefs of 1931 Rebellion,” The New York Times, May 24, 1932, 9.

  110 Pérez, Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934, 289; Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Republics, 1921–1933, 366.

  111 “Cuba Revolts Again,” The Nation, August 26, 1931.

  112 Ernest Hemingway to Guy Hickok, October 14, 1932, Selected Letters, 372.

  113 Meyers, Hemingway, 224.

  114 The saga of Gregory Hemingway’s neglect and psychological breakdown is well explored/documented in Valerie Hemingway’s Running with the Bulls, John Hemingway’s Strange Tribe, and Lorian Hemingway’s Walk on Water.

  115 Ernest Hemingway to Mrs. Paul Pfeif
fer, January 5, 1932, Selected Letters, 350.

  116 Ernest Hemingway, “Paris Is a Mecca of Fakers,” Toronto Star, March 25, 1922. “It was never enough to simply bask in the wonders of Paris and become part of the scenery…God help any well-wisher who ‘bitched’ his writing sessions on the terrace of his home café, La Closerie des Lilas. He reviled creative poseurs who squandered hours drinking and gossiping at cafés like La Rotonde. He appeared to prioritize writing above all else—including Hadley and the little son they had two years into their Paris adventure.” Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, xiii.

  117 Eighty-two years later, middle son, Patrick, would recall the sentiment he had often heard his father repeat: “Family life [was] the enemy of accomplishment…on several occasions he said being a good husband, a good father…all of [these things were] not recognized by a reviewer when he reviewed your book,” yet when not writing, there might have been little left of him for his family who could often play third fiddle to other pursuits: “he really loved the mountains and getting away and fishing. There’s no question about which he preferred.” Patrick Hemingway, interview on July 30, 2014, cited in Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly, 11–12.

  118 “Default on public debt cannot be postponed much longer.” Harry F. Guggenheim to Henry L, Stimson, January 25, 1932, Nuermberfer et al., eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, The American Republics vol. 5, 1932, 536, cited in Maurer, The Empire Trap, 190.