Ernesto

  CHAPTER 4

  1 Hemingway, “The Sights of Whitehead Street,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 199.

  2 “‘My jaw’s broken,’ the cooled one said thickly. Blood was running out of his mouth and down over his chin. ‘You’re lucky you aren’t killed, that wallop he hit you,’ the thick-set young man said. ‘You run along now.’” Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 121.

  3 E. Stone Shiftlet and Kirk Curnutt, “Letters and Literary Tourism: Your Key West Correspondent in ‘The Sights of Whitehead Street,’” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 224.

  4 Hemingway, “The Sights of Whitehead Street,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 460.

  5 Picture from State Archives of Florida. Cited in Shiftlet and Curnutt, “Letters and Literary Tourism,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 237.

  6 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 174; Hemingway, “The Sights of Whitehead Street,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 460.

  7 Nonintervention was a misnomer. Intervention had produced destructive effects on Cuban solvency. “Program of Reform for Cuba Urged: Rockefeller-Financed Commission of Ten Releases Report,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1935, A4; “Hands Off Cuba U.S. Is Urged in Survey Report: Study of Conditions Finds Suspicion of Meddling by Washington,” Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 1935, 8.

  8 The Washington Post, January 27, 1935, B1.

  9 “Cuba Death Orgy Told: Former President, Escaping to Florida, Declares Hundreds Slain,” Associated Press, March 12, 1935, 1.

  10 “Cuba Death Orgy Told,” Associated Press.

  11 United Press, “Cuba Rounds up 20 Suspects in $300,000 Kidnaping Case,” The Washington Post, April 11, 1935, 1.

  12 Paul Vanorden Shaw, “Victory in Cuba? Death of Antonio Guiteras at the Hands of Batista Forces Marks Passing of Respected and Feared Liberal from Cuban Scene,” The Washington Post, March 13, 1935, 6.

  13 Hemingway, Gattorno, cited in Carr, Dos Passos, 33.

  14 Hemingway, Gattorno, quoted in Poole, Gattorno, 35–36.

  15 Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, 11; J. Beall, “Ernest Hemingway’s Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2016): 661–72.

  16 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 267.

  17 Arnold Samuelson, fragment, circa late 1950s–early 1960s, Arnold Samuelson Papers, cited in Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 140.

  18 Hendrickson also discovers a letter “buried in an archive” from Arnold to Ernest: “I let her on board. The rubber was irritating, a lousy brand sold downtown, and she asked me to throw it away…It was the first time I’d ever been involved in that sort of trouble, she was only seventeen and, not knowing a damned thing about what they can do to fellows who knock up young girls, I imagined the worst, I was afraid of having my folks find out about it and what bothered me the most was the fear there would be a scandal on your boat. The only thing I could give you was absolute loyalty and I hadn’t even given you that. I wanted to tell you about it but I didn’t have the courage. I knew I would have to quit and go up north.” Arnold Samuelson to Ernest Hemingway, cited in Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 581.

  19 As time went by Arnold kept in contact with Ernest, who threw him some encouragement and an infrequent favor, such as possibly brokering the sale of one of Arnold’s Esquire articles, “Mexico for Tramps,” behind the scenes. Arnold Samuelson to Ernest Hemingway, May 1936, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  20 Mice: “What do you mean by good writing as opposed to bad writing? Your correspondent: Good writing is true writing. Mice: How can a writer train himself? Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Hemingway, “Monologue to the Maestro,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 1967.

  21 Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Student, 137–39.

  22 Robert Lacy, “Icarus,” North Dakota Quarterly 70, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 214, cited in Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Student, 36.

  23 “The wind was coming very high and in gusts of great strength tearing down trees, branches, etc…. the wind was too high to get out and there was no communication with the keys. Telephone, cable, and telegraph all down, too rough for boats to leave. The next day we got across [to Lower Matecumbe Key] and found things in a terrible shape. Imagine you have read in the papers but nothing could give you an idea of the destruction. Between 700 and 1000 dead…Over thirty miles of railway washed and blown away…Saw more dead than I’d seen in one place since the lower Piave in June of 1918. Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked tossed up into the trees by the water, swollen and sinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. Then, by figuring, you locate where it is and recognize them as the two very nice girls who ran a sandwich place and a filling-station three miles from the ferry.” Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, September 7, 1935, in Selected Letters, 421.

  24 Ernest Hemingway, “Who Murdered the Vets?” New Masses, September 17, 1935, 9–10.

  25 During the Great Depression, the veterans were out of work and demonstrated for their war bonus, which was only redeemable after 1945. Responding to their first march, President Herbert Hoover had ordered the army commanded by General Douglas MacArthur to disperse the demonstrators’ camps in Washington, DC, in 1932. In 1933, President Roosevelt had defused a second march by promising the veterans jobs in the Civilian Conversation Corps. After this hurricane and widespread criticism, the Congress would finally override Roosevelt’s veto and grant the veterans their early bonus in 1936.

  26 “They are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have to lose is their lives. They are doing coolie labor for a top wage of $45 per month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they can’t make trouble. If it is hurricane months, sure, but if anything comes up, you can always evacuate them, can’t you?…when we reached Lower Matacumbe there were bodies floating in the ferry slip.” Ernest Hemingway, “Who Murdered the Vets?”

  27 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 216.

  28 Later, Herbert Solo even wrote an article called “Substitution at Left Tackle: Hemingway for Dos Passos” in the Partisan Review that asserted that Dos Passos’s role at New Masses was diminishing while Hemingway’s favor with leftist critics like Gold, Hicks, and Cowley was gaining traction. Meyers, Ernest Hemingway, 213.

  29 Mike Gold, quoted in Dan Monroe, “Hemingway, the Left, and Key West,” 93, in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway.

  30 Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 211–13.

  31 Hemingway, “The Killers,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 215.

  32 Hemingway, “The Malady of Power,” By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 228.

  33 Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, 90.

  34 In 1928, Mike Gold called him “too bourgeois to accept the labor world.” In 1931 in The Nation, Isidor Schneider pointed out that Lenin was opposed to the “baby talk” of the “Hemingway school.” Meyers, Ernest Hemingway, 163, cited in Milton Cohen, “Beleaguered Modernists,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 78. In response to Green Hills of Africa, Green called the travelogue boring and suggested that he should abandon the trivial subjects of hunting, fishing, and bullfighting, and instead take up the more important issues in the “contemporary American scene”: “I would like to have Hemingway write a novel about a strike…because it would do something to Hemingway…He is very bitter about the critics and very bold in asserting his independence of them, so bitter and so bold that one detects a sign of bad conscience.” Grandville Hicks, quoted in Monroe, “Hemingway, the Left, and Key West,” 93.

  35 Cited in Lynn, Hemingway, 426.

  36 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, December 17, 1935, Ernest Hemingway Collection.

  37 “Cuba Seeks Reform Without Violence: The Republic, Now Tired of Revolution Wants to Solve Its Many Problems in a Peacef
ul Atmosphere,” The New York Times, August 24, 1936, SM5.

  38 Jeffrey Caffery to Sumner Welles, October 17, 1935, Welles Papers, “Major Correspondents, 1920–1950,” quoted in Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista, 187.

  39 Ernest Hemingway to Arnold Gingrich, December 8, 1935, quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 616.

  40 Hemingway, “Gattorno: Program Note,” Esquire, May 1936, 111.

  41 Poole, Gattorno, 34.

  42 “I’ve been working hard. Had a spell when I was pretty gloomy, that was why I didn’t write first, and didn’t sleep for about three weeks.” Ernest Hemingway to Pauline Pfeiffer, January 26, 1936, Selected Letters, 436. See also Michael Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Home: Depression and Suicide,” American Literature 57, no. 4 (1985), 600–10.

  43 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 230, 250; Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 178.

  44 “It was Papa’s idea to take the savings. Nobody to pay back and can bring along some more if you wish. Pay yourself a good salary. To hell with the bill. Can bring along some more if you wish. Have no end of this filthy money. Just leave me know [if you wish me to bring more money] and don’t get another woman, your loving Pauline. Poor Papa, rich papa.” Pauline to Ernest Hemingway, May 31, 1934, cited in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 263. “Happy birthdays have come again…Please accept our congratulations and the enclosed checks. Make merry with the latter and don’t forget to count your blessings. They are many and great. A happy union, lovely children, a fairy godfather, etc.” “As usual when I am writing a novel I am making nothing and am probably regarded by the family intelligence service as a loafer. On the other hand when I am all through with the novel I make plenty of money and then, when I am loafing, am regarded with respect as a Money maker.” Ernest Hemingway to Mary Pfeiffer, July 18, 1934, cited in Hawkins, Unbelievable Happines and Final Sorrow, 174.

  45 June–July 1935. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 274–75.

  46 The fight had been postponed due to a terrorist attack. “The fight is put off until Feb 2. So come on down then if that’s all right to leave Zelda. I’m terribly sorry she was so ill again. And you with a bad liver, lung, and heart. That’s damned awful. How are you doing now? We all get those livers. Mine was in a hell of a state about six or seven years ago but got it all cleared up. What is the matter with your heart? And your lung?” Ernest Hemingway to Scott Fitzgerald, December 21, 1935, in Selected Letters, 427–29.

  47 “I go to sleep wake and hear the clock strike either one or two then lie wide awake and hear three, four, and five. But since I have stopped giving a good goddamn about anything in the past it doesn’t bother much and I just lie there and keep perfectly still and rest through it and you seem together almost as much repose as though you slept. This may be no use to you but it works for me.” Hemingway, Selected Letters.

  48 Hemingway, Selected Letters.

  49 “He is too valuable a piece of property to risk so far away as Havana where there is shooting, etc. It’s damned strange the violence that is bred from violence and what a lot of those kids have turned into. Cuba is a hell of an interesting place now and has been for the last five years. Probably before too you say. But only know what I’ve seen. Anyway am writing a story about this next revolution. Come on down any time and I’ll take you over there in the boat and you’ve get a good story out of it anyway.” His instincts were right, for the fight was later canceled. Hemingway, Selected Letters.

  50 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 283.

  51 “Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man…So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing [sic] just said, I learned later, ‘By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.’ So who should show up but poor old Papa and Mr. Stevens swung that same fabled punch but fertunatly [sic] missed and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating.” Ernest Hemingway to Sara Murphy, February 27, 1936, in Selected Letters, 438–39.

  52 Ernest Hemingway to Mary Pfeiffer, January 26, 1936, in Selected Letters, 435.

  53 Ernest Hemingway to Sara Murphy, February 11, 1936, cited in Miller, Letters from the Lost Generation, 156.

  54 Sara Murphy to Pauline Hemingway, May 11, 1936, cited in Miller, Letters from the Lost Generation, 164–65; Brian, The True Gen, 98, cited in Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, 228.

  55 Jane Mason to the Hemingways, May 17, 1935, quoted in A. S. Mason, “An Introduction to Jane Mason’s Safari,” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 2 (2002): 13–21; Kert, The Hemingway Women, 270. The term “White Hunter” refers to the professional big game hunters of American or European origin who made their living hosting African safaris for affluent clientel during the first half of the twentieth century.

  56 Translation from Spanish: matrimonio.

  57 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 186.

  58 When Scribners republished it in 1938 in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, he renamed it “The Capital of the World.”

  59 Their plan was to publish a collection of his best short stories called The First Forty-Nine, which would ultimately appear, along with The Fifth Column, in 1938. Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, April 9, 1936, Selected Letters, 442.

  60 A Cojímar native and village historian, Joaquín Hernandez Mora authored Cojímar, pueblo de pescadores (Cojímar, village of fishermen), which contains interviews with many of the fishermen Hemingway knew and reports that Hemingway went out of his way to build friendships with the fishermen of Cojímar: towing them to port as they rowed to shore, buying them a drink at La Terraza, and interrogating them about every detail of their existence. Osvaldo Osvaldo Cernero Piña, “Ova,” quoted in Mora, Cojímar, pueblo de pescadores, 53.

  61 “I decided to write a story. After that, I understood that I wasn’t ready. Not because I didn’t know everything I needed to know about fishing. I was already an experienced fisherman. I needed another kind of knowledge. So I started studying a village…Thirteen years later, when I sat down to write the book, I knew everything there was to know about its people: how they made their living, what they loved, what they hated, what they didn’t give a damn about. I knew each family and the life story of each of its members.” Conversation with Genrij Borovik, 1960, cited in Páporov, Hemingway en Cuba, 121. Borovik is a Russian journalist who accompanied Vice Minister of the Soviet Union Anastase Mikoyan during his visit with Hemingway at the Finca Vigía on February 8, 1960.

  62 “Preguntaba de todo! [He asked about everything!] We had many stories to share. He came often, weekends, during the week. Often he was there with Chago, Comema, Mario, ‘el bobito,’ [lil’ dizzy] Billín, Figurín, El Sordo, Anselmo, Arsenio, and Paco.” One day he said to us, ‘Estoy escribiendo una novella. Se llamará El viejo y el mar. El protagonist es Anselmo.’ [I am writing a novel. It will be called The Old Man and the Sea. The protagonist is Anselmo.] He also told us that he would be making a movie and that all the Cojímar fishermen could work in it. They paid us twenty dollars a day. We first fished in the sea. Then we did the land scenes. After we finished the movie, they had a party for us at the Hatuey beer company.” Mora, Cojímar, pueblo de pescadores, 53.

  63 Hemingway, “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 24.

  64 “‘Clear cut as a cameo is her Botticelli beauty of pale gold hair and wide set eyes like purple pansies. Her flawless skin is delicate as a wood anemone,’ gushed an advertisement for Pond’s Extract creams that featured photos of the celebrated beauty.” Alane Salierno Mason, “To Love and Love Not,” Vanity Fair, July 1999.

  65 Hemingway, “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” in The Complete Short Stori
es of Ernest Hemingway, 34.

  66 Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 57.

  67 Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 39.

  68 Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.

  69 “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Esquire. See also “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Manuscript, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  70 Susan J. Wolfe, “The Poor Are Different from You and Me, Masculinity and Class in To Have and Have Not,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 158–71.

  71 Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, July 16, 1936, in Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, 302.

  72 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 62.

  73 On this trip, Hemingway spent nearly six weeks in Cuba, returning on May 27. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 285; Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 188.

  74 “If I hadn’t been such a bloody fool practicing Catholic, I wouldn’t have lost my husband…‘Coitus interruptus? I wondered but never asked.’” Pauline Pfeiffer to Mary Welsh, cited in Hemingway, How It Was, 266.

  75 Havana Post, May 10, 1936.

  76 Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos, April 12, 1936, in Selected Letters, 446; Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 285–86.

  77 “Cuba Orders Inquiry into Wave of Killings: Army Officials Will Investigate Mysterious Deaths of Several Persons in Police Custody,” The New York Times, May 3, 1936, 38.

  78 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 274; Ernest Hemingway to Mike Strater, August 11, 1936, Hemingway Personal Papers. See also Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 192–93; Ernest Hemingway to Margaret and Nonie Briggs, July 7, 1936, Hemingway Personal Papers.