Ernesto

  79 In the end of it, he was “coming out of a blind squall [and] had Sand Key dead ahead.” He had the “recurrence of the old difficulty of keeping voice sounding somewhere between your ankles and your balls. My balls felt very small. When the Capt. of the Cuba heard we’d left to cross that night he told Sully they’d have to give us up.” Key West Citizen, May 23–28, 1936; Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos, June 10, 1936, Ernest Hemingway Collection; Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, May 30, 1936, Archibald Macleish Personal Papers, cited in Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, 229–30.

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

  81 Russell Porter, “Gomez Promises Freedom in Cuba: A Constitutional Government with Civil Guarantees for All Assured by President,” The New York Times, July 4, 1936, 1.

  82 Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960, 81–82.

  83 Carlos Gutierrez, quoted in Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 192–93.

  84 Bernice Kert, “First Perspectives on Safari,” Hemingway Review 21, no 2 (Spring 2002): 21.

  85 Antony Mason, quoted in Meyers, Hemingway, 256.

  86 “Dynamiters Destroy Havana Paper, Killing Four; Truck of explosives discovered at nearby plant. Church wrecked and 500 buildings damaged in blast. 20 are wounded. Loss placed at $1,000,000. Guards stationed at other papers. Traffic is barred near them. Twenty leftists nabbed by police. Rased El País is strong supporter of Spanish rebels. Other backs Col. Fulgencio Batista.” The Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1936, 1.

  87 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, September 26, 1936, in Selected Letters, 454.

  88 The Times-Picayune, November 15, 1936, 1.

  89 Hargrove, Fulgencio Batista, 53–54; Elections and Events 1935–1951, Latin American Election Statistics, University of San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/research-and-collections/collections/notable-collections/latin-american-elections-statistics/Cuba/elections-and-events-19351951.html.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 289.

  2 “Pauline always tried to be very tolerant of Ernest and any of the girls that sort of made a play for him, or that he seemed entranced with. I don’t think he fell in love with other women. He was nice and maybe a lot of women thought he was giving them more attention than what there was; his was in a kidding way.” Lorine Thompson, quoted in Bryan, The True Gen, 101–02.

  3 Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 5.

  4 Moorehead, Gellhorn, 98.

  5 Of Wells, a former lover had said that “he smelled of walnuts and that frisked like a nice animal.” Moorehead, Gellhorn, 113.

  6 “Who is this Martha Gellhorn?…her writing burns…Hemingway does not write more authentic American speech. Nor can Ernest Hemingway teach Gellhorn anything about the economy of language.” Louis Gannett, “Who Is This Martha?” New York Herald Tribune, September 25, 1936, quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 289.

  7 If her review of The Sun Also Rises, written on December 8, 1926, in College News during her freshman year at Bryn Mawr is any indication. Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 23; Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 45.

  8 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 82.

  9 Moorehead, Gellhorn, 124.

  10 “It’s hot falling to pieces and people seem happy. Nothing much goes on languidly a sponge or a turtle gets fished, people live on relief cozily, steal coconuts off the municipal streets, amble out and catch a foul local fish called the grunt, gossip, maunder, sunburn and wait for the lazy easy years to pass. Me, I think all that is very fine indeed and if all the world were sunny I daresay there’d be much less trouble as well as much less of that deplorable thing called officially progress.” Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 44–45.

  11 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn.

  12 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn.

  13 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 45.

  14 Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 61.

  15 Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 221.

  16 Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 62.

  17 Rollyson, Beautiful Exile.

  18 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 290.

  19 Martha Gellhorn to Pauline Hemingway, January 14, 1937, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  20 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 45.

  21 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn.

  22 Jack Latimer, interview with Bernice Kert, April 5, 1937, in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 293.

  23 Pauline Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 15, April 20, and April 27, 1937, Hemingway Personal Papers, cited in Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 199–200.

  24 Steve Paul, “Tropical Iceberg: Cuban Turmoil in the 1930s and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 129; Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will, 94.

  25 Paul, “Tropical Iceberg,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 142.

  26 Cited in Theodore M. O’Leary, “Hemingway-Esquire Controversy Involves Rights of Republication,” Kansas City Star, August 26, 1958; Paul, “Tropical Iceberg” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 141–42.

  27 “Sugar, the Great White Specter That Fills Cuba with Idleness and Unrest,” Kansas City Star (September 19, 1933), cited in Paul, “Tropical Iceberg,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 131.

  28 Donaldson, By Force of Will, 121–22, cited in Paul, “Tropical Iceberg,” in Curnutt and Sinclair, Key West Hemingway, 141–42.

  29 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 102.

  30 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 111.

  31 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, 108.

  32 “You wouldn’t marry me in the church and it broke my mother’s heart.” Hemingway, To Have and Have Not.

  33 “Pauline, who had everything she wanted in her husband, sacrificed all else for love. She loved him after seven years of marriage as much as when they first fell in love in Paris. For Ernest, however, both love and truth seemed secondary to his art, and often he appeared to need neither.” Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 173.

  34 Arnold Gingrich, “Scott, Ernest, and Whoever,” Esquire, October 1973, 374.

  35 As scholars Rena Sanderson and Frank Ryan affirmed, the “two loosely interwoven plots” of To Have and Have Not (1937) were not well received. “Almost all of the critics thought it signaled a decline. There was scattered applause for some features: the style, dialogue, and some of the narrative action; and concerted cheering for others: the bar-room scene; the main character, Harry Morgan; the bedroom scene involving Harry and his wife. However, the most serious and extensive concern of the critics was with two elements in the novel which were inter-related, the social theme and the structure…On the whole, the adverse criticism was accurate in pinpointing the faults of the novel: the confusing shifts in point of view, the eagerness to destroy the rich and the powerful, the irrelevant attacks on literature through Richard Gordon, the writer in the novel.” Ryan, The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway, 25, 27. See also Grimes and Bickford, Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works.

  36 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 133.

  37 Larry Grimes, “Introduction,” Armstrong, The State of Things in Cuba, xi. See also Ernest Hemingway, “Outline of To Have and Have Not,” item 212, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  38 Larry Grimes, “Introduction,” Armstrong, The State of Things in Cuba, xi. See also Hemingway, “Outline of To Have and Have Not,” item 212, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  39 Moorehead, Gellhorn, 128.

  40 Ernest Hemingway to Mr. and Mrs. Pfeiffer, cited in Moorehead, Gellhorn, 126.

  41 Quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 236.

  42 Berg, Max Perkins, 326.

  43 “Hemingway Slaps Eastman in Face,” The New York Times, August 14, 1937, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.c
om/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-slaps.html.

  44 Martha Gellhorn to Bill and Annie Davis (Hemingway’s old friends with a house near Málaga, Spain), June 1942, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 125.

  45 Martha Gellhorn to Bill and Annie Davis, June 1942, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 130.

  46 Koch, The Breaking Point, 283.

  47 “I want to speak to you about something that seems to me to be serious. A war is still being fought in Spain between people whose side you used to be on and the fascists. If with your hatred of communists you feel justified in attacking for money, the people who are still fighting that war I think you should at least get your facts straight…So this is the end of the letter if you ever make any money and want to pay me any on what you owe (not the Uncle Gus money when you were ill. I mean others, just small ones, afterwards) why not send thirty dollars if you make three hundred or twenty or ten or any damn thing, I’ve got uses for it now. Now I won’t send the letter because of why. Because of old friends. Good old friends you know. Knife you in the back for a quarter. Anybody else charge fifty cents. So long, Dos. Hope you’re always happy. I imagine you always will be. Must be a dandy life. Used to be happy myself. Will be again. Good old friends. Always happy with the good old friends.” Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos, circa March 26, 1938, in Selected Letters, 463–64.

  48 Bookish, balding, tall and ungainly, sunny in temperament, too trusting of others’ good will, Dos Passos was the sort of man who aroused Hemingway’s sadistic appetite. “White as the under half of an unsold flounder at 11 o’clock in the morning just before the fish market shuts” was one of Hemingway’s fictionalized descriptions of his old friend. Hemingway seems to have needed to destroy a friendship or a marriage every few years just to keep functioning. In Madrid he did both.” George Packer, “The Spanish Prisoner,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2005, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/31/the-spanish-prisoner; Ernest Hemingway, “Treachery at Aragon,” Ken, June 1938.

  49 Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 204.

  50 Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow.

  51 Kert, The Hemingway Women, 312.

  52 Kert, The Hemingway Women.

  53 “Probably feel cheerful as hell tomorrow. Mr. H. has great elasticity. Excuse lousy gloomy letter. Look at beautiful checks and rejoice. Much love to you and all my best to Paul. I admire you both very much.” Ernest Hemingway to Hadley Mowrer, January 31, 1938, in Selected Letters, 462.

  54 Martha Gellhorn, “Spain and Her Lesson of War,” speaking tour, Oak Park’s Ninetieth Century Club, Oak Leaves (February 3, 1938) on meeting taking place January 31; Grace Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, February 3, 1938, quoted in Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, 283.

  55 Dan Brennean, quoted in Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 87.

  56 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, mid-February 1938, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 256.

  57 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: Life Story 324; Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 213.

  58 Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, April 19, 1938, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  59 Martha Gellhorn to Edna Gellhorn, May 26, 1938, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 62.

  60 Quoted in Poole, Gattorno, 35, 41.

  61 Poole, Gattorno, 40.

  62 The author.

  63 Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 209.

  64 Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, July 12, 1938, in Selected Letters, 471.

  65 Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, September 2, 1938, Hemingway Personal Papers, quoted in Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 211.

  66 Pauline to Ernest Hemingway, September 17, 1938, Hemingway Personal Papers, quoted in Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 211.

  67 Martha Gellhorn to David Gurewitsch, 1950, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 222.

  68 Verna Kale, “The Fifth Column: A Play by Ernest Hemingway (Review),” The Hemingway Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 131–34.

  69 Pauline Pfeiffer to Ernest Hemingway, October 18, 1938, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  70 Hemingway, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman, 30–31.

  71 Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 66.

  72 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 132.

  73 “The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against tyranny. The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems of tyranny. Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”

  74 Bernice Kert, quoted in Aaron Latham, “Papa’s Mother and Wives,” Book Review Desk, The New York Times, July 17, 1983, 8.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, 318, Moorehead, Gellhorn, 157.

  2 Martha Gellhorn to Eleanor Roosevelt, March 18, 1939, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 87–88.

  3 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 479.

  4 What began as the short story “Under the Ridge” later expanded to become For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, March 25, 1939, and Max Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, November 21, 1939, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 274–75.

  5 Ernest Hemingway to Tommy Shevlin, April 4, 1939, in Selected Letters, 484.

  6 R. Ybarra, “Influence of U.S. Strongest in Cuba,” The New York Times, March 7, 1939, 10.

  7 Fans.

  8 In the San Francisco de Paula neighborhood.

  9 While visiting San Francisco de Paula, I first heard the story of Hemingway befriending the neighborhood children during an interview with Óscar Blas Fernández, who was seven years old when Hemingway arrived that first day, but was seventy-seven at the time of the interview. Villarreal and Villarreal, Hemingway’s Cuban Son, 24; Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 26.

  10 Some fresh water with lemon. When Miguel Oasua Pascual y Berguer, a Catalan from Gerona whose wife, Teresa Serra, was a Cuban of Catalonian origin, purchased “Lookout Hill” in 1886, he was hopeful that the change of scenery some distance from the city would help his wife to recover from the loss of two children. It was the same year that the Spanish, under pressure from Creole landowners and slaves of mixed blood, abolished slavery on the island. Once they had built the villa, the Catalan couple moved in the following year, and lived there for sixteen years with their surviving son, Pedro, abiding the Spanish soldiers who came to occupy that strategic hill during the unending War of Independence. When the Americans intervened and the Spanish lost the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Spaniards set fire to the hill, forcing the Pascual family to rebuild. Luckily, much of the original structure remained intact, and so the home could be restored. When Pedro married in 1903, he left the bitterness of the Finca behind him, moving his wife and aging parents, los viejos, into the city center, looking for opportunity. Though they originally intended to maintain the villa as a retreat, postwar necessity dictated that they sell it to a foreigner named D’Orn two years later, whose business was real estate. Joseph D’Orn Duchamp de Castaigne had lived in the property, but unable to maintain it, he moved into the city and advertised it in a newspaper. Interview with Sara Pascual Canosa, conducted by Maximo Gomez Noda, Havana, October 1, 1985, quoted in G. R. Ferrero, “Museo Finca Vigía Celebrates Its 45th Birthday,” The Hemingway Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 16–34.

  11 Ferrero, “Museo Finca Vigía Celebrates Its 45th Birthday.”

  12 “I have taken possession of my Finca. I had a moment of acute depression bordering on despair yesterday, which was produced by protracted housecleaning and shopping at the ten cent store for kitchen ware. I’m not much of a house woman (femme d’intérieur, as the French so sweetly say) and the week’s work of getting a place habitable seems to me far more trying than a week at the front line, or a week working myself t
o the bone getting an article in shape. I got very gloomy, thinking now I am caught, now at last I have possessions (and I have feared them and fled them all my life), and what in God’s name shall I do with this place now that I have it. So I felt that the world was at an end, I had a house and would never write again but would spend the remainder of my life telling servants to scrub the bathroom floors and buy fresh paper for the shelves…When I was living in a $4 per week room in Albany, just after I left Bryn Mawr, working as a cub reporter on the Times Union, I never dreamed I would write myself into a grove of palms and bamboos and flamboyant trees, nor a terrace covered with bougainvillea, nor a swimming pool: and I can’t believe it yet.” Martha Gellhorn to Eleanor Roosevelt, March 18, 1939, in Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, 74.

  13 “Am down to 198 pounds. Have place where can play tennis and win and happy and healthy although always that hollow in the middle of yourself daily emptied out feeling you get when working well on a long book. Wish me luck Max. I find I know a lot more than when I used to write and think that is maybe what makes it easier in the end but it is still a very tough business, but working the way I do now I feel as happy and as good as when I was going good on A Farewell to Arms.” Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, March 25, 1939, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 274.

  14 Pilar Logs, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  15 Hemingway, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman, 35.

  16 Diliberto, Hadley, 264,

  17 Ernest Hemingway to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, December 12, 1939, Selected Letters, 499.

  18 Hemingway, Selected Letters, 500.

  19 Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 222.

  20 He would not bring the Pilar down until the end of March. Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, circa February 4–11, 1940, “Will have the boat over here at the end of March,” Selected Letters, 502.

  21 Rollyson, Beautiful Exile, 108–09.

  22 Martha Gellhorn to Ernest Hemingway, January 2, 1940, quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 334.

  23 Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, January 14, 1940, in Bruccoli, The Only Thing That Counts, 277. “Well here is your regular Sunday hangover letter. We won again at the pelota last night and stayed up till three a.m. So today will have to take Marty to the movies as a present for being drunk Saturday night I guess. Started on absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town before pelota game and then battened it down with whiskys and sodas until 3 a.m. Feel good today. But not like working.” Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, circa February 4–11, 1940, Selected Letters, 502.