by Richard Owen
Villard (the “nice thin boy from New York with malaria and jaundice” in A Farewell to Arms) recalls being welcomed at the hospital by Agnes – a “tall, slender, chestnut-haired girl with friendly blue-gray eyes, who seemed to combine brisk competence with exceptional charm” – and being offered a “very dry Martini” as she put a thermometer in his mouth. The drink contained a medicinal “joker” in the form of a glob of castor oil instead of an olive, but was otherwise a “clear, cold American-style cocktail”.
Hemingway always seemed to have a bottle of cognac “or some other spirituous liquor” hidden under his pillow. “‘Here, have a swig!’ he would say, wiping the neck of the bottle on a bedsheet”. Known to all as ‘Ernie’, Hemingway was the life and soul of the party, Villard reports, a “big bear of a fellow” and a “good-looking son of a gun” with a strong jaw and a wide, boyish grin who authoritatively held court on matters from sport to the conduct of the war. He had a remarkable memory for detail: “Nothing escaped his interest: names, places, dates.”
Hemingway underwent surgery for his injuries, with post-operative treatment and physiotherapy at the Ospedale Maggiore not far from the Porta Romana (now the Milan Polyclinic). He was soon able to get about on crutches. His was a “peach of a hospital”, he wrote to his father, with “one of the best surgeons in Italy” attending to him. There was no lack of female attention either, since there were only four patients at first and eighteen Red Cross nurses to look after them. One of these, a brisk but motherly Scottish nurse called Elsie Macdonald, inevitably known to all as “Mac” (“plump and warm-natured”, according to Villard) would become Catherine’s friend Helen Ferguson in A Farewell to Arms. During the day, decorum – and Nurse DeLong – reigned. But then there were the nights – and Agnes was Hemingway’s night nurse.
She was born in Pennsylvania: her father, Paul Moritz Julius von Kurowsky, was a naturalised American from a Polish-German family who taught languages in Washington DC, where young Agnes became a librarian before training as a nurse at the Bellevue Hospital in New York as a more exciting alternative. She applied for Red Cross service in January 1918, and sailed for Europe from New York in June together with other Bellevue-trained nurses.
According to her passport details she was 5’8 and a brunette, with a mole on her right cheek. Agnes “had a sparkle the others didn’t possess”, Villard remembered, “fresh and pert and lovely in her long-skirted white uniform”. She radiated “zest and energy”. She was seldom to be seen in the daytime, but when she did appear “the entire place seemed to brighten because of her presence”.
All the boys fell for Aggie, Villard recalled, but Hemingway was “smitten to a far greater extent” than the others. Villard was not aware at the time of the secret notes they exchanged, but “I knew that he had the inside track to her affections when I caught him holding her hand one afternoon in a manner that did not suggest she was taking his pulse”. Agnes later maintained that Catherine Barkley, who in the novel is blonde, was based on her colleague Elsie Jessup, who had blue eyes and blonde hair, and who – like Agnes – was 5'8.
Elsie Jessup, a 31-year-old Red Cross nurse who had served previously with the Red Cross in Serbia – where she contracted typhus – worked alongside Agnes in Florence as well as Milan. Elsie had been engaged to an English officer killed in the war, and is sometimes said to have been English herself: in fact, although she had English mannerisms, at least according to Agnes (she carried a short cane, or swagger stick), Elsie was American. She was born in Pennsylvania, like Agnes herself, attended St Mary’s School for Girls in Garden City in New York (later demolished), and trained as a nurse in New York, as Agnes had.
After six years overseas Elsie returned in April 1920 to her parents’ home in Forest Hills, an affluent area of New York, with tales of the Bolsheviks torturing captured White Russian troops in Serbia “by burning holes in their arms and legs with hot irons”, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported at the time. Elsie was awarded the Serbian Cross of St Sava – the first woman to be given the honour – as well as several other medals for her service in Italy and the Balkans.
There is no doubt however that Hemingway chiefly had in mind Agnes herself: “Miss Barkley was quite tall. She wore what seemed to me a nurse’s uniform, was blonde and had a tawny skin and gray eyes. I thought she was very beautiful.” Frederic is instantly smitten, and steals her from under the nose of his roommate and rival, the Italian army doctor Lieutenant Rinaldo Rinaldi. The character of Rinaldi was based on Hemingway’s real life companion at the Milan hospital, Captain Enrico Serena, an Italian officer who wore a patch over one eye and courted Agnes by singing to her and kissing her hand (he was, Agnes noted in her diary at the time, “attractive in spite of his disfigurement”.)
In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway sets the Frederic Catherine romance first at a British Red Cross hospital in the field: “At dinner I ate very quickly and left for the villa where the British had their hospital. It was really very large and beautiful and there were fine trees in the grounds.” According to the foremost Italian authority on Hemingway, the late Giovanni Cecchin, Hemingway almost certainly had in mind the three-storey, eighteenth-century aristocratic Villa Trento in Dolegnano del Collio, some ten miles from Gorizia in Friuli, just across the regional border from the Veneto.
The villa was the headquarters of a British ambulance unit which was headed by the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan and in which the future explorer and travel writer Freya Stark served as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse. It had at various times hosted Italian royals, Napoleon and Pope Pius X before being turned over to the Red Cross in the First World War. Hemingway did not reach Friuli during the First World War – he only got to know it well much later, in the 1950s – but he would have known of the Villa Trento from British Red Cross colleagues at the front, and from accounts by Trevelyan himself.
In the novel Catherine too is a VAD nurse; she explains to Frederic that she is not strictly speaking a fully-qualified nurse but a trained VAD volunteer, and is “on special behaviour” because “the Italians didn’t want women so near the front”. She slaps his face hard, a “sharp stinging flash”, when he tries to kiss her (“I just couldn’t stand the nurse’s-evening-off aspect of it”), but succumbs when he apologises and then tries again: “I held her close against me and could feel her heart beating and her lips opened and her head went back against my hand and then she was crying on my shoulder. ‘Oh darling’ she said. ‘You will be good to me, won’t you?’”
Like Hemingway himself, Frederic is transferred to the newly installed American hospital in Milan, as is Catherine Barkley. Their love affair starts to intensify after he has recovered from his operation, when they can spend more time together enjoying Milan’s cafes as well as midnight feasts back at the hospital with “anchovy sandwiches made of very tiny brown glazed rolls and only about as long as your finger ... Besides all the big times we had many small ways of making love”.
4
Love at La Scala
“Milan is a peach of a town”
Hemingway to his mother Grace
WHETHER THE REAL AGNES and the real Ernest consummated their affair remains uncertain. Hemingway liked to give that impression: “It took a trained nurse to make love to a man with one leg in a splint”, he told a friend. Much later in life he told AE Hotchner that when unable to sleep he focused on the events of his youth – trout fishing, camping in the woods, arguing with his mother, and “those nights when nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who I stupidly hoped to marry, came to my bed in the hospital”.
In a brief tale drawing on his hospital experiences called ‘A Very Short Story’, part of Hemingway’s 1924 collection In Our Time and a sketch for A Farewell to Arms, the nurse is named Luz and the setting is moved to Padua. The narrator tells us that he “thought of Luz in his bed” when returning to the front after being nursed by her. He had even taken other patient’s temperatures for Luz so that she would not have to leave his bed: “T
here were only a few patients, and they all knew about it”.
The couple go to pray in the Duomo before he leaves for the frontline. “They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates”. They agree to get married in the US when the war ends but quarrel when parting at Milan station because she is “not willing to come home at once” – a reflection of the real Agnes’ reluctance to return to the US, as Hemingway later admitted to his fellow ambulance driver Bill Horne (“She doesn’t want to come home at all”).
Luz subsequently falls for a major in the Italian Arditi forces, writing to the narrator that “theirs had been only a boy and girl affair”, though she “hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely”. The Italian major however “did not marry her in the spring, or any other time”, and the story ends with the narrator contracting gonorrhoea from a department store sales girl while riding in a taxi through Lincoln Park in Chicago.
Apart from the ending, this reflects Hemingway’s experiences with Agnes – at least as he remembered them, or would have liked them to be. A 1997 film, In Love and War, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Chris O’Donnell as Hemingway (‘Ernie’) and Sandra Bullock as Agnes, portrays the couple going to bed together at a run down hotel which has become a brothel near the frontline, called – inevitably – the Pensione Rosa. Ernie is embarrassed at not finding a more suitable venue for their love making, but Agnes accepts the inevitable and undresses. “Oh Aggie, it wasn’t supposed to be like this”, the Hemingway character says. “We were going to be in the most beautiful place on God’s earth”. “Then close your eyes”, Nurse Aggie whispers.
The film script takes other liberties too: the romance takes place not in Milan but at the field hospital at Bassano (where the film was shot) on the first floor above the Section I ambulance station. It is Agnes rather than the San Marino doctors who saves Ernie from having his leg amputated by administering antiseptic irrigation, presumably with sodium hypochlorite, to prevent gangrene, the method devised during the First World War by a British chemist, Henry Dakin, and a French surgeon, Alexis Carrel.
The Italian army doctor who wants to cut Ernie’s leg off (and also to seduce Agnes) is Domenico Caracciolo, an aristocrat who in real life was indeed Hemingway’s rival for Agnes’ affections, but only much later, when Hemingway was already back in the US, and who was in any case not a doctor but an artillery officer. At the time when Hemingway was being nursed by Agnes the other contender for her hand was Captain Serena, who like Caracciolo was an army officer, not a surgeon. The film imagines a final meeting on Lake Walloon in Michigan, at which Agnes declares her love but Ernie says they have both changed. In reality they parted in Italy, and never met again.
The film does however effectively convey the brash young Hemingway’s coming of age against the backdrop of war, and only claims to be “based on” a true story. The producer, Dimitri Villard, was the son of Henry Villard, Hemingway’s fellow patient in Milan, who after Hemingway’s death in 1961 was contacted for information by Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s biographer. This led to Villard tracking down Agnes, who was by then living in Key West, Florida (though curiously she never met Hemingway there). When she died in 1984 at the age of 92, Villard obtained permission for Agnes to be buried at the US Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery in Washington, and her grateful husband, William Stanfield, gave her letters and diaries to Villard, who published them five years later in his book Hemingway in Love and War (written with James Nagel of the University of Georgia).
The letters date from periods when they were apart because either Hemingway or Agnes had left Milan for other parts of Italy. ‘’Kid, my kid, I’ve just been in your room, and talk about chairs that whisper!” Agnes wrote to Hemingway on 25 September 1918, when he left for Stresa on Lake Maggiore. “That whole room haunted me so that I could not stay in it.’’ And on 17 October, when she had been temporarily transferred to a hospital in Florence, she admitted to him that every girl likes to have some man tell her he can’t do without her. “Anyway I am but human, and when you say these things I love it and can’t help but believe you so don’t be afraid I’ll get tired of you. I haven’t really started to worry yet over your forgetting to love me as you do now.’’
When he first gets to know Catherine in A Farewell to Arms Frederic dreams of taking her to the Cova cafe and bar (where later in the novel he buys her chocolates), and then “down the Via Manzoni in the hot evening” to a hotel where they would drink white wine from Capri (Capri Bianco, a blend of Falanghina and Greco) and make love naked with the windows open “and the swallows flying over the roofs”.
Hemingway also implied in his letters that he and Agnes had made love, referring to her in a letter to a friend in America as his “Missus”. Agnes herself later said however that she had not been “that kind of girl”, and insisted it had all merely been “a flirtation”. “Now Ernest Hemingway has a crush on me or thinks he has,’’ she wrote in her diary on 25 August. Ernest was “far too fond of me and speaks in such a desperate way every time I am cool, that I dare not damper his ardor as long as he is here in the hospital. Poor kid, I am sorry for him.’’
There is some evidence that she fought off not only Hemingway but also the dashing Captain Serena, who while Hemingway was being operated on took her out to dinner at the Sempioncino restaurant, noted for its orchestra and dancing, on Corso Sempione, near the Sforza Castle (Castello Sforzesco). It turned out however that the captain had reserved a table in a private room with a couch in it. Agnes left early, saying she was on night duty and could not linger.
But Hemingway’s passion was real enough: “I am in love again”, Hemingway wrote to his parents back in Chicago. The feeling seemed to be mutual: “He was talking last night of what might be if he was 26–28”, Agnes wrote in her diary in September. She wished in some ways that he was indeed her own age: “He is adorable, & we are congenial in every way.”
She was alarmed when ‘Mac’ found one of her yellow hairpins under Hemingway’s pillow. There were small intimacies: sitting on the balcony Agnes wiped his neck and chest with a moist towel when it was hot, and scratched the soles of his feet when they became itchy. He was “Ernie, my darling”, “tesoro mia” (tesoro is a masculine noun in Italian, but the sentiment is clear). “I sometimes wish we could marry over here, but since that is so foolish I must try & not think of it”, she told her diary on 1 December. In a wifely gesture at one point, albeit after “long persuasion”, she washed his shirt for him – it was “getting a bit whiffy”, he said – so he could go to the races properly dressed.
Although Red Cross nurses were barred from emotional involvement with patients, Agnes and Ernest exchanged love notes and even (despite ‘Gumshoe’) managed dinner dates at Biffi’s, an elegant restaurant in the arcaded, glass covered Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele near the Duomo. Famed for its risotto Milanese (and still today favoured by Milan’s fashionable society), Biffi’s was where Ernest and Agnes held hands and drank white wine with peaches in it.
No doubt they also frequented the Gran Italia, where in A Farewell to Arms Frederic and Catherine (against the advice of the head waiter) try sweet wines such as fresa (or freisa), deciding they prefer the dry whites of Capri after all. Milan, Hemingway wrote to his mother at the end of July 1918, was “the most modern and lively city in Europe”. “We used to stop at Bellagio on Como for week ends from Milan during the war”, he told the poet and editor Ernest Walsh in 1925, adding “but I don’t remember names of pubs”.
He enjoyed La Scala, which had been closed during the war but with the support of the Milan council (comune) now managed to stage some performances to support the war effort. Hemingway had seen Verdi’s Aida, Renzo Bianchi’s Ghismonda, two operas by Rossini, Moses in Egypt and Barber of Seville, and Arrigo Boito’s Mephistofele (in which the 28-year-old Beniamino Gigli starred as Faust) – or so he told his music-loving, opera-trained mother, th
ough he added that he would have preferred Bizet’s Carmen, Puccini’s La Boheme “or something interesting”.
He also got to know “lots of the singers who hang around the American Bar”. According to Agnes’ diary, as well as attending the opening night of Ghismonda they saw a ballet, Il Carillon Magico, “the most delightful I’ve ever seen” – though the evening was somewhat spoiled when “Mr Hem got sick in the middle and had to leave”. Hemingway also saw (or at least said he intended to see) Gabriele D’Annunzio’s patriotic drama La Nave (The Ship) set to music by the composer Italo Montemezzi.
Ernest and Agnes (again like Frederic and Catherine) even went to the San Siro race track together: the setting found its way into his story ‘My Old Man’, which is set in the racing world. “San Siro was the swellest course I’d ever seen”, the narrator tells us: back in Milan he describes how he “went out of the Galleria and walked over to in front of the Scala and bought a paper”.
Hemingway was especially fond of the elegant Cova bar and restaurant, at that time just round the corner from the La Scala opera house (it later moved to Via Montenapoleone), and famous for its rich pastries and panettone. The Cova, Hemingway wrote with obvious approval in his story ‘In Another Country’, was “rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on the wall”.
Hemingway was certainly attractive to women: he was admired as a wounded war hero by both women and men, and cut a romantic and stylish figure on crutches (later a cane) in his elegant officer’s tunic and cape with a silver clasp, made for him by the Milan military tailor Fratelli Spagnolini (conveniently located next to Red Cross headquarters on Via Manzoni) and his leather cordovan boots. Agnes later said she would always remember the sight of him stepping out of the fourth floor lift at the hospital in his cape, holding out his arms to embrace her.