by Richard Owen
He was widely reported to be the first American to be wounded in Italy. This was not in fact the case, but the Chicago newspapers carried fulsome reports of his courage in carrying an Italian to safety despite his severe leg and knee injuries. His sister Marcelline later recalled that he had even featured in a newsreel shown in Chicago cinemas, sitting in a wheelchair on the hospital porch with a “pretty nurse”, and their father had gone to see it repeatedly.
The “pretty nurse” may have been Agnes – but there is intriguing evidence that as he discovered the land of Italian opera, wine and beauty, young Ernest had other women in his sights as well.
5
The Torino Girl
“I almost married a girl here”
Hemingway to AE Hotchner
AT THE END of September 1918, two months after being injured, Hemingway obtained a ten-day convalescence pass and headed for Stresa on Lake Maggiore, staying – in typical Hemingway style – not at some modest pensione but at the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees, where the room he occupied (106) is now The Hemingway Suite. He was waved off by Agnes – formally at first, Agnes wrote in her diary, since the stern Miss DeLong was “close at hand”, but then “I slipped into the elevator with him & we had a more real farewell”. She missed him terribly, she told her diary: there was a thunderstorm, “the mice ran back and forth”, and it was “very dark and spooky ... the most dismal night I ever spent on night duty”.
Hemingway by contrast was having a whale of a time. His companion at Stresa was a fellow injured Red Cross ambulance driver from Minnesota called Johnny Miller, attached to Section II of the ARC at Roncade. They played billiards with an elderly Italian aristocrat and former diplomat, Count Giuseppe Greppi (slightly altered to Count Greffi in A Farewell to Arms) who Hemingway boasted had “taken me under his wing”. “Convalescing with some awfully nice Italian People”, he wrote to his father on 26 September on a postcard from Mount Mottarone, with a view of the Italian-Swiss border.
The count, who claimed he was nearly 100 and had had affairs with “all the historical women of the last century”, bought him champagne whether he won or lost at billiards, Hemingway said. He made boating trips to the island of Pescatori on the lake (“the most beautiful in Italy”) and enjoyed dry martinis in the hotel bar. “I’m up here at Stresa, a little resort on Lake Maggiore”, he wrote to his parents in distant Chicago, “One of the most beautiful Italian lakes”. He had also learned “polite” Italian, he told his family (though in fact his Italian remained fairly patchy, with frequent mistakes).
At Stresa Hemingway also became acquainted with a family from Turin, Pier Vincenzo Bellia and his three daughters – Elda, 23, Dionisia, 20 and Bianca Maria, 17. Count Bellia, Hemingway wrote to his family back in Chicago, was “one of the richest men in Italy”, and he and his wife “have adopted me and call themselves my Italian mother and father”. Their three daughters were all “beautiful”: Hemingway however seems to have fallen immediately in love with Bianca rather than her older sisters, and according to Giovanni Cecchin, who tracked down Bianca in Turin in 1981, over sixty years later, he even talked of marriage.
It came to nothing: her father ruled she was too young to get engaged, and Bianca agreed, telling Cecchin that although Hemingway had been undoubtedly handsome and likeable, “we knew almost nothing about him ... In any case I did not want to go and live in America”. When Count Bellia visited Hemingway at the hospital in Milan, he took his middle daughter Dionisia with him rather than Bianca. Nonetheless the Bellias invited Hemingway to visit them in Turin, and he may have done so. “They have invited me to spend Christmas and my two weeks leave with them at Torino and I think I shall probably go”, he wrote from Stresa on 29 September.
According to Johnny Miller, Pier Vincenzo Bellia, who Hemingway referred to as “My Italian Father”, more closely resembled the cynical and worldly “Count Greffi” in A Farewell to Arms than Count Greppi did. Bianca agreed, “with the difference that my father was not an unbeliever, and the wine we drank was not champagne but Asti Spumante”. “The Count Bellia wants me to spend a couple of weeks with them at Turino (sic)”, Hemingway told his father in mid- November. “He has an awful lot of dough and is a peach of an old scout. The whole family are great and they treat me just like a son or like a prodigal son!”
Did he go? He had a rival invitation to go shooting in Abruzzo, and was dreaming of a trip to the South – Naples or Sicily. In the first half of December, as we shall see, he went to Treviso to see Agnes, and at the end of December he went to Taormina. Yet Hemingway once remarked to his friend AE Hotchner when they passed through Turin in 1954 while en route to Cuneo that he had “almost married a girl here”.
According to Hotchner in his memoir Papa Hemingway, Hemingway then added “Red Cross Nurse. I was laid up here in the base hospital because of the leg”. Asked by Hotchner if “the Torino girl you nearly married” went into A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway replied “Sure. Everything that happened to me in Italy went into it, one way or another. The Torino girl was Catherine Barkley, and so were some others ... The way Lieutenant Henry felt when Catherine Barkley let down her hair and slipped into his hospital bed was invented from that girl in Torino – not copied, invented. The real Torino girl was a Red Cross nurse. She was beautiful and we had a wonderful love affair while I was hospitalized during the summer and fall of 1918.”
What had happened between them, Hemingway said, was “pretty much as I wrote in ‘A Very Short Story’”. Unlike Catherine the Turin nurse had not become pregnant, let alone had a Caesarean: those details in A Farewell to Arms had come from the pregnancy of his second wife Pauline. But the Turin Red Cross nurse was “most of Catherine, plus some things that were of no woman I had ever known”.
At first sight Hemingway, who in 1954 was recovering from plane crash injuries and suffering from both ill health and excessive drinking, seems to be confusing Turin with Milan: ‘A Very Short Story’ undoubtedly reflects his relationship with Agnes. In the original version the nurse was called ‘Ag’ rather than ‘Luz’: he only changed the name to Luz, Hemingway told his editor Maxwell Perkins, because Ag was “short for Agnes” and therefore “libellous”.
But did he in fact have an affair in Turin as well as in Milan? On 14 November he wrote to his father that his “Italian father”, Count Bellia, had sent him a “wonderful big box of chocolates”, adding that “he and the family are very good to me”. The next known letter is nine days later, to his sister Marcelline – though in that letter Hemingway tells her he is in love with Ag and she with him, adding “I’m not foolish and think I can get married now but when I do marry I know who I’m going to marry and if the family don’t like it they can lump it and I never will come home”.
In a letter to his family on 28 November, Thanksgiving Day, Hemingway outlined all the invitations he had received to “various parts of Italy”, adding, again, “The Bellias want me to stay a couple of weeks at Turino”. Cecchin concluded that Hemingway may indeed have visited the Bellias, and had perhaps been laid up in a Turin hospital with a relapse of his injuries or an after-effect of surgery sometime in November or December 1918.
In January 1978 the Italian author and film director Mario Soldati, who had published an article on the mystery of Hemingway’s ‘Torino girl’, received a letter from a former head nurse at the Mauriziano Umberto I hospital in Turin, which is still on Corso Filippo Turati (formerly Corso Stupinigi), between the Olympic Stadium and the Egyptian Museum, although the original nineteenth-century building was badly bombed during the Second World War.
The head nurse, who was by this time elderly, unwell and wished to remain anonymous, told Soldati that she had been at the Mauriziano hospital in 1918 when one of her nurses, a blonde girl called Maria, had become pregnant by an American writer called “Ernesto”, who had been admitted to the Turin hospital with bronchial pneumonia and had written Maria love poems. The pregnancy had caused difficulties for Maria with her family, but she went ahea
d with it, and the resulting baby boy had become a local lawyer who bore “an extraordinary resemblance to Ernest Hemingway”.
All efforts by Soldati and Cecchin to establish the truth of this assertion met with a discreet silence: Soldati tried to follow the claim up but the elderly head nurse – who said in her letter to him that she had photographs of both the nurse and her little boy – did not reply. Soldati had at first thought that her letter was perhaps a hoax, but became convinced that it was genuine. On the other hand, according to the Italian historian Sergio Perosa, when Hemingway took his first wife Hadley to see “his” Italy in 1922, he included Turin in their itinerary and took her to meet the Bellia family, which he would seem unlikely to have done if he had a guilty secret to hide.
A further complication is that Hemingway appears to have had yet another girlfriend known to his fellow volunteers as ‘La Turini’, though in Milan rather than Turin. One of Hemingway’s pals in Milan, a First Lieutenant in the 332nd Infantry Regiment from Philadelphia called Carl Hugo Trik, had acquired an Italian girlfriend called Pia; he and Hemingway went to a dance at the Cova on Christmas Day 1918, he told Carlos Baker. Hemingway’s date for the evening was a pretty, dark-haired nurse who “stood on a chair and made an impassioned speech about cabbages and kings” (from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) and played charades in Italian with them.
In his account of Hemingway and Dos Passos at the Italian front, Cecchin identifies this playful nurse as “Miss Turini”, who, however, was not the mystery nurse from Turin but rather Mercedes Turrini, a vivacious, smiling, darkhaired Italian auxiliary nurse listed in Charles Bakewell’s The Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (1920) as an Italian “nurses’ aid” in Milan, and who appears in a photograph of Red Cross nurses in Milan together with the rather more motherly figures of Elsie MacDonald, Agnes Conway and Loretta Cavanaugh. Her youth, dark looks and bright smile do indeed make her the most likely candidate. Possibly Mercedes and Maria the Turin nurse were as much Luz in ‘A Very Short Story’ as Agnes was. Luz after all is a veiled reference to the Virgin Mary (Maria), or in Spanish Nuestra Senora de la Luz, ‘The Lady of Light’, and so for that matter is Mercedes – Maria de las Mercedes, or ‘Mary of Mercies’.
Hemingway, in other words, fell for at least four young women in Italy while still in his late teens, and seems to have contemplated marriage to most if not all of them. He had form in this respect. While in New York en route to Italy he told his sister Marcelline and a number of chums that he had met and fallen in love with the silent film actress Mae Marsh, star of DW Griffiths’ 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation (which he had seen with his grandfather Anson), and that they were engaged to be married. This was a complete invention, but deeply alarmed Hemingway’s parents. When Hemingway finally admitted it was untrue his father wrote to him in fury, saying the “joke” had cost them sleepless nights.
6
Bassano del Grappa
“We were billeted in an old villa in Bassano...”
Hemingway, ‘The Passing of Pickles McCarty’
EVEN IF THE YOUNG Hemingway had other flirtations, there is no doubt that Agnes was the girl who truly captured his heart. There were, however, signs from the start that the romance would not last. She and Hemingway continued to write effusive letters to each other when she was transferred by the Red Cross first to Florence, working at the American Red Cross hospital for wounded Italians on Via di Camerata (still today an Italian Red Cross clinic), and then to a US field hospital near Treviso. He was, she wrote, the light of her existence, her hero. But they spent longer periods apart as the war neared its end and both Ernest and Agnes were assigned to frontline duties again.
Having recuperated from his operation Hemingway returned to duty on 18 October, heading first to Schio but then to the historic town of Bassano del Grappa in the foothills of the Dolomites, where Section I of the American Red Cross ambulance units was housed in the fifteenth-century Ca’ Erizzo, alongside the Brenta River. Part of the Republic of Venice in the fifteenth century, the town was originally known as Bassana Veneto: the name was changed after the First World War in honour of the battles on Mount Grappa above rather than after the drink, though locals are also justifiably fond – and proud – of grappa, which is made from the pressings of discarded grape seeds and stalks (known as pomace).
Despite its batterings during both world wars – the price of its strategic location in the foothills of the Dolomites – Bassano today is much as it was, a charming walled town whose ultra-modern civic museum features a reminder of past glories in the works of a celebrated local painter, the sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Bassano. The Brenta once provided a vital trade and communication link with Venice; the famous covered wooden bridge over the Brenta River, originally designed by Palladio, was repeatedly destroyed by war but restored after the Second World War by the Alpini.
The long three-storey Ca’ Erizzo Luca stretches along the Brenta riverbank on what is now Lungobrenta Hemingway, and a church with a striking hexagonal tower stands to the left of the entrance gates to the park behind the villa. From the old town above the villa you can see Mount Grappa and the Dolomites looming just beyond – the frontline in 1918 as the four-year war neared its end.
Renato Luca, the present owner and a keen hunter, opened a Wildlife Museum in the villa in the 1990s. The main attraction now however is the fascinating museum (open to the public at weekends and during the week by arrangement) devoted to Hemingway and the First World War. Inspired in part by the researches of the late historian Giovanni Cecchini, and run by a team headed by Luca’s son Alberto, it offers meticulously researched photographs and documents, a collection of first editions of Hemingway in English and Italian, and even a tableau of the writer at his desk with a zebra skin spread on the floor and a stuffed lion and cheetah by his side.
“We were billeted in an old villa in Bassano on the Brenta, on the east bank of the river, up beyond the covered bridge”, Hemingway wrote in his story ‘The Passing of Pickles McCarty’. “Big marble thing it was, cypress trees as you come up the drive, statues on either side and all the trimmings. We were the usual flat-footed, cock-eyed bunch of adventurers who couldn’t make the army and had taken the ambulance.”
From Bassano he watched a massive Italian artillery barrage which lasted all night and lit up the mountains above them. It was the start of what would become the Vittorio Veneto offensive against the Austrian forces, the beginning of the end. Hemingway later gave the impression that he had himself taken part in the attacks on Mount Grappa together with the special forces IX assault unit, the Arditi (the Daring), which was based at Bassano at the time.
He certainly later informed the Oak Park Memorial Committee that he had “participated” in the Mount Grappa offensive when it asked returning war veterans to “fill out a data sheet” so that the records of their war service would be “accurate and complete”. This is widely regarded as another of his empty boasts – though some Italian historians, such as Cecchini, believe it is possible that he did get somewhere near the battlefront. What is undoubtedly true is that he contracted jaundice, and after just a week at Bassano went back to Milan to be treated.
He had a brief reunion with Agnes at the US field hospital at Dosson near Treviso, the Villa De Reali, named after the De Reali family which built the villa and extensive park in the nineteenth century on the site of a Benedictine abbey (it is now owned by the Canossa family, and used for conferences and weddings as well as cultural and garden events). Hemingway made the 200-mile trip there in early December 1918 in a convoy of army trucks and staff cars via Padua, Verona and Torreglia, where he was “treated royally” by British officers of the Royal Garrison Artillery, even taking part in a hunt on horseback.
The Villa De Reali at Dosson was the base of the 332nd Ohio Regiment. The base hospital’s main job at this stage was not to deal with war wounds so much as to treat outbreaks of the equally dangerous ‘Spanish flu’, the 19
18 epidemic which killed more people than the war itself. At Dosson those who died of it were accompanied to the local cemetery by a military band playing funeral marches on the way there but Dixieland tunes on the way back, stopping at an inn for wine and chestnuts, presumably to celebrate survival.
This may explain why Hemingway told a friend in marine aviation, Bill Smith, that Agnes had on this occasion refrained from “lecturing” him about alcohol, saying “Kid we’re going to be partners. So if you are going to drink I am too. Just the same amount”. “Bill this is some girl”, Hemingway wrote. Together they made the first of several return visits Hemingway would make throughout his life to Fossalta di Piave and the riverbank where he had been wounded.
It was to be their last meeting however, and although they did not know it – or at least, Hemingway did not – their farewell at the villa gates was final. Agnes had told her diary when Hemingway returned from the Stresa trip that it was “wonderful to be together again”, and while she was in Florence they exchanged numerous letters. In September she had even given ‘the Kid’ a ring: she told him she dreamed of him, and signed herself in at least one Florence letter as ‘Mrs Kid’. Miss Jessup considered that he was just an “infatuated youth”, Agnes said, but she knew he loved her, and sometimes wanted to “blurt it all out”. “I love you Ernie”, she declared at one point when she was in Florence. “In spite of the sunshine, I am lost without you. I thought it was the dismal rain that made me miss you so.”
Hemingway and Agnes exchanged love letters for a while after the war ended and Hemingway returned to the United States. But in March 1919 Agnes wrote to Hemingway that she had met and fallen in love with Domenico Caracciolo. She was still “very fond” of “the Kid”, but “more as a mother than a sweetheart”.