Ernesto

  44 Adriana Ivancich, quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 457.

  45 He complained to Charles Scribner in a letter that he would have to begin another book to keep his wife in a mink coat yet he was not able to give a dime to the woman he adored. Two weeks later he described himself to Lillian Ross as a “character with a broken heart” and told Harvey Breit in June that his novel was about someone he “loved more than anyone in the world.” Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 455.

  46 “I think we must now both admit that this marriage is a failure. Therefore let us end it.” Hemingway, How It Was, 264.

  47 Hemingway, How It Was, 276.

  48 “I would never go with any other publishing house; but Jesus Christ I’d like to put yours in order.” “My Dear Charlie, Your fucking page proofs (first series) turned up yesterday. That ought to be almost a record…The hell with it all…I am a bad boy, Charlie, and not proud of it. You are older than me and I should be respectful.” Ernest Hemingway to Charlie Scribner, July 10 and 16, 1950, Hemingway Personal Papers.

  49 Ernest Hemingway to Senator Joseph McCarthy, May 8, 1950, Selected Letters, 693.

  50 Hemingway’s “running off” or showing the movie, himself, suggests a home projector, and that he and Gianfranco may have brought Leopoldina and Xenophobia to the Finca. Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, July 9, 1950, Selected Letters, 703.

  51 Rising consumption confirmed by ledger detailing expenditures on alcohol maintained in archives at the Finca Vigía. Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 63.

  52 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba.

  53 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 65.

  54 Juanita Jansen, quoted in Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 365.

  55 Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 270.

  56 Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 277.

  57 Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 246.

  58 “After reading Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, Across the River and into the Trees, only the most sentimental referee could raise Hemingway’s arm with the old chant: ‘The winner and still champion!’ Hemingway likes to discuss his writing in prize-ring talk but the fact is that a writer can be licked only by himself. Colonel Cantwell, like his creator, addresses women he likes as ‘daughter,’ was divorced from a war-correspondent wife, loves art and hunting, talks a carefully arranged language of tough-guy sentimentality.” John O’Hara, “On the Ropes,” Time, September 11, 1950.

  59 Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, September 9, 1950, Hemingway, Selected Letters, 713–14.

  60 “The Colonel is all the Hemingway prizefighters, hunters, drinkers, and soldiers in one. Yet this book is different, for it is held together by blind anger rather than lyric emotion that gives Hemingway’s best work its unforgettable poignance. The thing most deeply felt in the book is the Colonel’s rage at having to die.” Alfred Kazin, “The Indignant Flesh,” The New Yorker, September 19, 1950, 113–18.

  61 “Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.” Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 18.

  62 “Sure, they can say anything about nothing happening in Across the River, but all that happens is the defense of the Lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris and the destruction of the 22d Inf. Reg. in Hurtgen forest plus a man who loves a girl and dies…In writing I have moved past through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them. I won’t be sad and I will not read what they say. They say? What do they say? Let them say. Who the hell wants fame over a week-end? All I want is to write well.” Ernest Hemingway in Harvey Breit, “Talk with Mr. Hemingway,” The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1950, 14.

  63 Olhina Ivan Di Robilant, “Ernest Hemingway’s Long-Ago Crush on a Venetian Girl Is Once Again the Talk of Italy,” People, December 1, 1980, https://people.com/archive/ernest-hemingways-long-ago-crush-on-a-venetian-girl-is-once-again-the-talk-of-italy-vol-14-no-22. See also Ivancich, La torre bianca.

  64 “Certainly she was not in love with him.” Hemingway, Papa, 113.

  65 Villarreal and Villarreal, Hemingway’s Cuban Son, 98.

  66 Hemingway, How It Was, 271.

  67 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 488.

  68 Hemingway, How It Was, 282.

  69 Ivancich, La torre bianca, 31, 136–40, quoted in Kert, The Hemingway Women, 456–57.

  70 Ivancich, La torre bianca, 180.

  71 Hemingway, Papa, 111.

  72 Hemingway, How It Was, 280.

  73 Hemingway, How It Was, 280–81.

  74 Hemingway, How It Was, 282.

  75 Hemingway, How It Was.

  76 Ivancich, La torre bianca, 141.

  77 “Perhaps some think that I liked Hemingway like a father. It is not like that…Often I have the impression of being next to a big child. Sometimes I feel the desire to protect him against himself. Sometimes I have the impression that he is looking for a solution to his inner restlessness in me. If one would say that between us, sometimes, I am the older person, everybody would laugh. But it is true.” Ivancich, La torre bianca.

  CHAPTER 11

  1 Ernest Hemingway to Carlos Baker, February 17, 1951, Carlos Baker Collection of Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, 570.

  2 When Hemingway died, Carlos Baker began the first full-length biography, and after eight years’ preparation and Mary’s initial resistance and eventual support, published it in 1969. Needless to say Philip Young’s unauthorized biography Ernest Hemingway (1952), theorizing that all of Hemingway’s fiction had been the result of a need for self-analysis subsequent to the trauma of a war wound in 1918, had not been well received by the writer himself.

  3 During his lifetime, Hemingway discouraged biographers like Charles Fenton, Carlos Baker, and Malcolm Cowley. Ernest Hemingway to Charles Fenton, January 12, 1951, and June 18, 1952, quoted in Joan Didion, “Last Words,” The New Yorker, November 9, 1998, newyorker.com/magazine/1998/11/09/last-words-6; Donaldson, The Death of a Rebel; Ernest Hemingway to Malcolm Cowley, June 10 and March 9, 1949, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, 565.

  4 Paraphrased from Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.

  5 Hemingway, How It Was, 279.

  6 He wrote A. E. Hotchner: “Jamming on the [land sea and air] book…finished the first volume Xhmas Eve. The sea part. But will do other parts before I publish it. It’s a property already. Not just a piece of un-finished business.” Ernest Hemingway to A. E. Hotchner, January 5, 1951, in De Fazio, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch, 111. It seemed the author intended to write a land, sea, and air trilogy. The sea portion became Islands in the Stream. The Old Man and the Sea was originally intended to be a part of the sea portion, but it was later published as its own entity. See also Burwell, Hemingway, 51–52.

  7 “Couldn’t work the first day and had black-ass the second but worked anyway and did 874. [Big for him.] Day before yesterday did 665 and yesterday 62…Don Andrés came out to lunch Thursday and to spend the afternoon because he had black-ass and José Luis had it terribly last night. So maybe it is a seasonal complaint. I can cheer up everybody except me. You better come home and do that…Am in the very toughest part of the story to write. He has the fish now and is on the way in and the first shark has shown up.” Quoted in Hemingway, How It Was, 285.

  8 Hemingway, “On the Blue Water,” in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 492.

  9 Ernest Hemingway to Mary Hemingway, quoted in Hemingway, How It Was, 285.

  10 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 115.

  11 Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 36.

  12 Hemingway, How It Was, 286.

  13 A fine example: “In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and t
he hissing that their stiff wings made as they soard away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, the birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.” Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 20.

  14 The Korean conflict that was raging on the other side of the globe would later be known as “The Forgotten War”; despite the draft, it did not demand the full mobilization, or enter the American psyche of American youth quite as subversively as Vietnam.

  15 Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, March 5, 1951, Selected Letters, 720.

  16 Ibid, and Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, April 11–12, 1951, Selected Letters, 722–23.

  17 Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, October 5, 1951, Selected Letters, 738.

  18 Martín, Eduardo Chibás in the Time of Orthodoxy.

  19 Ernest Hemingway to Charles Scribner, October 2, 1951, Selected Letters, 737, quoted in Hawkins, Unbelieveable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 271.

  20 Hemingway, Papa, 8. See also Robert Clark, “Papa y el tirador: Biographical Parallels in Hemingway’s ‘I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,’” The Hemingway Review 27, no. 1 (September 22, 2007): 89.

  21 Hemingway, How It Was, 290.

  22 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 497.

  23 Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 20.

  24 Ernest Hemingway to Vera Scribner, February 18, 1952, Selected Letters, 748–49.

  25 Hemingway, How It Was, 295.

  26 Hemingway, How It Was, 294.

  27 Hemingway, “The Last Good Country,” 525.

  28 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 32. See also Godfrey, Hemingway’s Geographies, 71–73.

  29 Hemingway, The Garden of Eden, 16–17.

  30 Hemingway, How It Was, 294.

  31 Hemingway, How It Was, 296.

  32 Bohemia, December 16, 1951, 127, 146.

  33 Brenner and Eisner, Cuba Libre, 62.

  34 Calhoun, Gangsterismo, 40.

  35 Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, quoted in Calhoun, Gangsterismo, 35.

  36 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 216.

  37 “Batista: He’s Got Past Democracy’s Sentries.” Time, April 21, 1952.

  38 Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 13.

  39 “Under these circumstances, I believe it would be detrimental to the special relations that this country has with Cuba to hold up [diplomatic] recognition any longer [given] our very special position in Cuba which includes heavy capital investment, enormous international trade, the Nicaro nickel plant operation, the Guantánamo Naval Base, three armed services missions and the recent signing of a bilateral military assistance agreement which requires implementation.” Quoted in Calhoun, Gangsterismo, 41.

  40 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 504.

  41 Baker, Ernest Hemingway.

  42 “His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator.” William Faulkner, Shenandoah, August 1952, quoted in Wagner-Martin, Ernest Hemingway:, 5.

  43 Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” The New York Times, August 28, 1952, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-oldman.html.

  44 Malcom Cowley, “Hemingway’s Novel Has the Rich Simplicity of a Classic,” The New York Herald Tribune Review of Books, September 7, 1952. In The New York Times Book Review, Robert Davis, a professor of English from Smith College, observed, “It is a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him.” Like the young man in “Big Two-Hearted River,” with The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway had gotten back to something good and true in himself that had always been there, and in it, there were new indications of humility and maturity, and a deeper sense of being at home in life—which promised well for the novel in the making. “Hemingway is still a great writer,” Davis said, “with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones.” Robert Gorham Davis, “Hemingway’s Tragic Fisherman,” The New York Times, September 7, 1952, 20.

  45 Connolly continued that a long physical struggle was described with the dynamic right words even as the changing qualities of the static sea were portrayed in their true colours, and the soul of the old man—humble, fearless, aromatic—was described perfectly too. Cyril Connelly, “Review of The Old Man and the Sea,” London Sunday Times, September 7, 1952, 5.

  46 Ernest Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, September 26 and October 2, 1952, Selected Letters, 782–83.

  47 Hemingway, How It Was, 308.

  48 “Everywhere the book is being called a classic…[It] is not only a moral fable, but a parable…Hemingway’s art, when it is art is absolutely incomparable, and that he is unquestionably the greatest craftsman in the American novel in this century.” In December in The New York Times Book Review, Joyce Cary upheld that it was his favorite book of the year: “Hemingway’s old man is profoundly original. It deals with the fundamentals, the origins. Its form, so elaborately contrived, is yet perfectly suited to the massive shape of a folk theme.” Mark Schroer, “Grace Under Pressure (Review),” The New Republic, October 6, 1952, 19, quoted in Meyers, Ernest Hemingway. In Harper’s, Gilbert Highet offered, “A hero undertakes a hard task. He is scarcely equal to it because of ill luck, wounds, treachery, hesitation, or age. With a tremendous effort, he succeeds. But in his success he loses the prize itself, or final victory, or his life.” Gilbert Highet, Harper’s, “Review of The Old Man and the Sea,” October 6, 1952.

  49 Phillip Rahv, “The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway; and East of Eden, by John Steinbeck,” Image and Idea, October 1, 1952, 194–95, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, 582.

  50 Ernest Hemingway to Edmund Wilson, November 8, 1952, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, 580.

  51 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 505.

  52 “Do you think it would be wrong if I asked you if you wanted, or wished to, or would be pleased to, write 2 or 3 sentences or 1 sentence about this book that could be quoted by Scribner’s?” Ernest Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, September 13, 1952, Selected Letters, 780–81.

  53 Quoted in Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 505; Mellow, Hemingway, 580.

  54 Insinuating The Old Man and the Sea recycled themes in previous works (“The Undefeated”), poet Delmore Schwartz responded two months later in Partisan Review that the praise for Hemingway’s latest had gotten out of hand: “There was a note of insistence in the praise and a note of relief, the relief because his previous book was extremely bad in an ominous way, and the insistence, I think, because this new work is not so much good in itself as a virtuoso performance which reminds one of Hemingway at his best.” Delmore Schwartz, “Review of The Old Man and the Sea,” Partisan Review, November 1952. Roughly and somewhat unfairly, Schwartz suggested that the novella in itself was not great, but only reminded readers of what Hemingway had once been. But by the spring of 1953, even baby sharks like John Aldridge in the Virginia Quarterly Review were daring enough to question the overwrought and sentimental prose: “I confess that I am unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm for…The Old Man and the Sea,” which was “strictly minor Hemingway fiction.” John W. Alridge, Virginia Quarterly (Spring 1953): 311–20, quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, 651. By the spring of 1953, in Hudson Review, R.W.B. Lewis praised Hemingway for depicting “the stimulating and fatal relation between integrity of character and the churning abundance of experience,” and noted that “his style catches this perception with a good deal of its old power,” but doubted “if the book can bear the amount of criti
cal weight already piled on up on it…[It] is not absolutely persuasive…Our assent has to be partially withheld.” R.W.B. Lewis, “Review of The Old Man and the Sea,” Hudson Review (Spring 1953). Three years later in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, John Aldrige’s criticism, supported by other mutineers, grew braver: “The action of the novel is…to my mind, a façade, a classic parable in stone, terribly picturesque and meaningful, but quite dead. One must question the vitality of a story that becomes a myth too quickly, that is accepted as universal before it has been felt as particular.” John W. Alridge, “Two Poor Fish on One Line,” The New York Herald Tribune Book Weekly, June 20, 1965, 16, 19, quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, 651.

  55 Gregory Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, July 3, 1952, quoted in Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 471.

  56 “Little goody-goody Mary, for instance, who’s taken more shit from you than they dump in Havana Harbor. But we know better, don’t we, you’ll never write that great novel because you are a sick man—sick in the head and too fucking proud to admit it. In spite of the critics, that last one was as sickly a bucket of sentimental slop as was ever scrubbed off a barroom floor. There’s nothing I’d rather see than you write a beauty and there’s nothing I’d rather see than you act intelligently, but until you do I’m going to give you just what you deserve, and in extra large handfuls to make up for the trouble you’ve caused me.” Gregory Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, November 13–14, 1952, in Hemingway, Strange Tribe, 116–17.

  57 Ernest Hemingway to Gregory Hemingway, November 17, 1952, in Hemingway, Strange Tribe, 119–20.