by Richard Owen
In reality she had liked rather than loved Hemingway, Agnes told Henry Villard many years later, finding him an impulsive and impetuous young man who “didn’t really know what he wanted”. Caracciolo, by contrast, she judged to be “completely sincere” as well as irresistibly attractive. Agnes was later rejected however as a suitable wife for Domenico by the Caracciolo family, above all his mother, who saw Agnes as an “American adventuress”.
She tried to keep on good terms with Hemingway by letter, writing to him in 1922 to say how proud she would be some day to say, “Oh, yes, Ernest Hemingway. Used to know him quite well during the war.” She continued to serve in the Red Cross in Romania and Haiti, and went on to marry twice. She and Hemingway never met again. But at the time Hemingway, who had “forgotten all about religion and everything else because I had Ag to worship”, was “smashed” by her rejection of him, taking to his bed in his parents’ home at Oak Park in a fit of despair. “She doesn’t love me Bill”, he wrote to his friend Bill Horne at the end of March 1919. “She takes it all back”. He had hoped to marry her, and still loved her “so damned much”, but “now the bottom has dropped out of the whole world”.
Agnes had been Hemingway’s first love, and her decision to break with him evidently lay behind his life-long preoccupation in his novels with romances which end in loss or failure. It may also have influenced his tendency in real life to break off a relationship before the woman could do so. After being “gypped” by Agnes, he wrote to Howell Jenkins, a former fellow Red Cross volunteer, in June 1919, he had “set out to cauterize out her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone”.
His attitude to women was a mixture of tenderness and violence. According to the distinguished journalist Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, “Ernest had a theory that brutality was all women understood” – though in her profile of him for the New Yorker Lilian Ross, who got to know Hemingway well in the 1950s, found him “generous” and “warm-hearted”.
Hemingway would return to his traumatic teenage wartime experiences throughout his life. It was now that he began to think more deeply about love – and death. “Dying is a very simple thing”, he wrote to his family in October 1918. “I’ve looked at death, and really I know”. How much better to die in youth and “go out in a blaze of light”, he thought, than to die in old age when your body was worn out and your illusions had all been shattered.
But at the end of 1918 he still had a life ahead of him, and after a series of post-Armistice parties in Milan he was ready to return to America – though not before an interlude in another enchanting part of Italy, this time far from the mountains of the North East: the island of Sicily.
7
Taormina
“I’m so homesick for Italy that when I write about it it has that something about it that you only get in a love letter”
Hemingway to James Gamble, 3 March 1919
HEMINGWAY ONCE CLAIMED that when he travelled to Taormina after his experiences on the Italian front and his recuperation in the Milan hospital, he spent the entire week in bed with a beautiful Sicilian woman.
He had seen nothing of the island except the view from his bedroom window, he told his friend Eric Dorman-Smith (later Dorman-O’Gowan), an Irish-born British officer known as ‘Chink’ who had fought on the Italian front and had got to know Hemingway at the Anglo-American club in Milan, close to La Scala. The reason he had only seen the view from his bedroom, Hemingway told Chink, was that the landlady in the first small hotel he stayed in had hidden his clothes and “kept him to herself ” for a week.
The claim reflects Hemingway’s love of exaggeration and tall stories, but it also reflects his tendency to confuse his life and his fiction to the extent that he himself probably did not know the difference. Sometimes he blamed his publishers, telling his friend Bill Smith in July 1927 that the “blurb and publicity writers” had dreamed up the myth that he had been a bullfighter while serving in the French and Italian armies. The “invented and legendary crap” was “formidable”, he said, adding “I have made it a point not to ever furnish a paragraph of biographical material”.
Hemingway was however not beyond inventing the biographical myths himself: he once told Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, that he had left home at the age of fourteen rather than eighteen. During and even after the war he wore an Italian army uniform to which he was not entitled, though some Italian scholars suggest he may indeed at some point have “crossed the line” and taken part in some form of military action at the front instead of just distributing food and cigarettes.
But he did not – as he told his father – “hold rank” in both the American Red Cross and the Italian army: a photograph of him on a bicycle in front of the destroyed church at Fossalta di Piave, before he was wounded, shows him wearing what appears to be an Italian army uniform and carrying a rifle and grenades. Hemingway had left the Red Cross to “get a little action” and had held the rank of Second Lieutenant “in the Italian army”, he misinformed a friend back home shortly before he was wounded.
He sometimes claimed not only that he had “fought” with the Arditi at the Piave front, when he had only served in a support role, but also that he had fought in campaigns which in reality occurred after he had been hospitalised. “Born in Oak Park, Illinois, served in war on Italian front, wounded, profession newspaper correspondent” were the opening lines of the potted autobiography he sent to the magazine editor Ernest Walsh in January 1925, neglecting to add that his war service on the Italian front had involved ambulances and mobile canteens.
Henry Villard later recalled that for many years the “publisher’s blurb” on Hemingway’s book covers stated – quite wrongly – that he had “served as an ambulance driver and infantryman with the Italian army”. Much later, during the Second World War, he implied that he had landed with US troops on D Day (which he had not), writing to his son Patrick in September 1944 that “it has been about 2 months since Papa came back to France after landing on D Day on Omaha beach”.
Hemingway was well aware of his tendency to exaggerate, and rather disarmingly even made fun of it in his story ‘Soldier’s Home’, in which Harold Krebs, a Methodist from Kansas and a former Marine, comes back from the First World War in 1919 only to find that people at home are already weary of returning soldiers’ tales. As a result he starts to lie in order to be “listened to at all”: “His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers.” When the first film version of A Farewell to Arms came out in 1932, Hemingway issued a statement disclaiming “the romantic and false military and personal career imputed to him” in the publicity material. He had only driven an ambulance “and was never involved in heroic actions of any sort”.
So while in Taormina Hemingway did not, as far as we know, spend an entire week in bed with a woman – but he did conceive a story about an American soldier’s affair with a Sicilian woman with “eyes like inkwells” and “full red lips”. Called ‘The Mercenaries’, the idea for the story came to Hemingway while he was staying near Mount Etna overlooking the Bay of Naxos, where he enjoyed the bougainvillea, the lemon and orange groves, the sea changing from sky blue in the morning to purple in the evening, and Sicilian wine, which had “the fire of the volcano and the sun of Sicily in it”.
It must have been a welcome change from war-weary Milan. With the war now officially over Captain James Gamble, the officer who had been in charge of the mobile canteens at the front and therefore Hemingway’s superior officer, had rented “a little house and garden belonging to an English artist” for a few months at Taormina, or so he wrote to Hemingway. An amateur painter, Gamble had accompanied Hemingway on the train to Milan after he was wounded, and visited him often in hospital. The only thing lacking in Taormina was company, he wrote, “and I only hope you will take ca
re of that. There is plenty of room in the house, two studios, lots of atmosphere, and I should think plenty about which to write.”
In fact according to the late Sicilian writer Gaetano Saglimbeni, who reconstructed the Taormina episode, Hemingway, Gamble and Colonel Tom Bartley, another American who had served at the front, were the guests of the 65-year-old Duke of Bronte, Alexander Nelson-Hood, great grandson of Admiral Nelson. Alexander – known as Alec – had been Duke since 1904: this was Italian high society, and quite a contrast with dark, cold, wartime Milan.
Although he was never to go there, Nelson had been rewarded with the estate at Maniace, a former Benedictine abbey, on the slopes of Mount Etna, and the title of Duke of Bronte by a grateful Ferdinand of Bourbon, King of the Two Sicilies. Nelson had rescued Ferdinand, his wife Maria Carolina and their entourage in Naples during the French-backed uprising of January 1799 by taking them to Palermo aboard his flagship, HMS Vanguard.
The rebellion was short lived. In June the King was able to return to Naples under British protection and thousands of the rebels were executed – including Ferdinando Caracciolo, former head of the rebel naval forces (and a forebear of the Domenico Caracciolo who over a century later was to play a role in the Hemingway story by capturing the heart of Agnes von Kurowsky.)
On Nelson’s death the Bronte estate passed not to Horatia, his daughter by Emma Hamilton, but to his brother William. It then passed to Charlotte, William’s daughter, and her husband Samuel Hood, Viscount Bridport; to their son Alexander Nelson-Hood; and then to his son of the same name, the fifth Duke of Bronte, who by the time of Hemingway’s visit was the author of a book entitled Sicilian Studies and a noted literary host and man of letters. Known as Castello Nelson, it is now a tourist attraction an hour’s drive from Taormina.
Hemingway however almost certainly stayed – or at least, spent much of his time – not on the Bronte estate but at the equally luxurious clifftop villa owned by the Dukes of Bronte at Taormina itself, the eighteenth-century Villa La Falconara, with a ten-acre garden overlooking the stunning Bay of Naxos. Possibly the house with two studios mentioned by Gamble was in the extensive grounds, or nearby: Gamble’s reference to an “English artist” may have been to the artist Robert Hawthorn Kitson, whose visitors at the celebrated Casa Cuseni (later restored by Kitson’s niece Daphne Phelps and now an upmarket B&B) included DH Lawrence and Bertrand Russell.
Jim Gamble was not, as some Hemingway biographers have supposed, a wealthy member of the Cincinatti Procter and Gamble soap dynasty. As Gerry Brenner pointed out in The Hemingway Review in 2000, he was from Pennsylvania, not Cincinatti, and his family had made its money in the timber business. He was, however, a well-off Yale graduate in his mid-thirties, and as the officer in charge of the operation supplying Italian troops at the Piave front with chocolate and cigarettes he became so fond of young Hemingway that he apparently offered to pay for him to remain in Italy, all expenses paid, and to go with him to Madeira, gestures which Hemingway refused. Agnes for one strongly advised him against it, later explaining that Hemingway was “very fascinating to older men”.
This has given rise to speculation that Gamble was sexually attracted to Hemingway: there is no evidence that he was gay (he married in 1926), but there is no doubt that Taormina (like Capri) was something of a homosexual expatriate Anglo-American colony at the time, and that many of its aristocratic and artistic community (including Kitson) were gay.
Hemingway later distanced himself from Gamble, but they nonetheless remained friends. “Every minute of every day I kick myself for not being at Taormina with you”, Hemingway wrote to Gamble in March 1919 when he was back in Oak Park. “It makes me so damned homesick for Italy and whenever I think that I might be there and with you.” He still remembered strolling with Gamble through old Taormina by moonlight, with “the moon path on the sea and Aetna fuming away and the black shadows and the moonlight cutting down the stairway back of the villa”.
The fifth duke was a social celebrity with Royal connections (he had been gentleman usher to Queen Victoria and private secretary to her daughter) and held not just conservative but far-right views (he later supported Mussolini and Fascism). But he saw Italy, in Lucy Riall’s words, as a place of “warmth, beauty and imagination” to which Northerners could escape and indulge their “secret desires”. He also improved agriculture, irrigation, orange groves and wine making on the Bronte estate.
Hemingway found the duke to be a “charming and generous” host who enjoyed the company of writers, from TS Eliot, Somerset Maugham and Gabriele d’Annunzio to DH Lawrence – although Lawrence (who visited Bronte not long after Hemingway, in 1920, while living in the Villa Fontana Vecchia at Taormina) was less than complimentary, writing to Lady Cynthia Asquith that the estate was a “rather wonderful place” but adding “Mais mon Dieu, M. le Duc...”, and describing the duke to another correspondent as “gaga”.
Hemingway by contrast enjoyed the company of the duke and the table talk of his fellow Americans during his stay, not to mention the “robust and fragrant” Sicilian wine and the “strong flavours” of local cuisine. Years later, in 1950, he told General Charles ‘Buck’ Langham that when he was 19 years old two men aged over 90, Count Greppi at Stresa and “the Duke of Bronte who was a descendant of Nelson”, had tried to “bring me up so I would have the beautiful manners a Gentleman should have”. “My salutations to the Duke of Bronte”, he wrote to Jim Gamble a few months after the Taormina episode, in March 1919, when he was back in the United States.
He took long walks in the mornings down “picturesque lanes, between old houses with stone walls semi-covered by bougainvillea”, avenues that opened onto lemon and orange groves and hills covered by the dark green of the olive trees. At night he could admire the light of the moon over Mount Etna.
And he started writing again. Set in Taormina, the story of ‘The Mercenaries’ is told in a bar in Chicago by Perry Graves, an American soldier turned mercenary. Perry tells his audience that he was once challenged to a duel while enjoying a candlelit dinner with a bewitching Sicilian lady he met by chance on the train from Rome to Taormina. The train took them past the scenery of lemon and orange groves, “so pretty that it hurts to look at it”, and through the terraced hills of olive trees, yellow fruit and streams “with wide dry pebbly beds cutting down to the sea and old stone houses”.
After dinner – antipasto, soup, flat fish, roast young turkey “with a funny dressing” and pasticceria, all washed down by “Bronte wine that’s like melted up rubies” – he and the lady repaired to the garden of the hotel under the orange trees, “jasmine matted on the walls, and the moon making all the shadows blue-black and her hair dusky and her lips red”. After admiring the moon on the water and the snow on Mount Etna they went to bed together – or so Perry implies. The lady was married to an Italian pilot, but “it seemed she and her husband didn’t get along so well... she was pleased and happy that I had come to cheer her up for a few days. And I was too”.
But at breakfast the next day (“or what they call breakfast, rolls, coffee and oranges”) who should appear but the husband, an Italian Air Force ace of “irresistible charm” but also “callous and brazen”, nicknamed Il Lupo (The Wolf). This character calls to mind Gabriele D’Annunzio – though Hemingway was almost certainly thinking of another well-known dare devil pilot, Fulco Ruffo di Calabria. Il Lupo, whose face is familiar to Perry from illustrated magazines, is “a good-looking fellow with a scar across his cheek and a beautiful blue theatrical-looking cape and shining black boots and a sword”. He goes white when he sees his wife with her lover, demanding “Who are you, son of a dog?”
Il Lupo challenges Perry to a duel, and since the American does not have a sword they settle for handguns. The two men are supposed to fire their pistols in the restaurant garden on a count of three given by the waiter, but the Italian cheats by trying to fire before three is reached, and Graves shoots the pistol out of his hand. He then leaves, calmly drinking hi
s by now cold cup of coffee before leaving. The lady puts her arms round Il Lupo, whose face is red with shame and whose hand is wounded, and her eyes flicker at the departing Perry over her injured husband’s shoulder. “Maybe it was a wink, maybe not.”
Before long Hemingway, back in the United States, was telling the story to friends in Petoskey – with himself in the role of the courageous mercenary challenged to a duel over a beautiful woman, although in this version he was able to escape because his mistress distracted his rival. The fantasy, Hemingway’s biographer Michael Reynolds has suggested, carries echoes of D’Annunzio, who was himself given to flights of fancy and had fictionalised his affair with the actress Eleanora Duse in his novel Il Fuoco (The Flame), copies of which (in translation) Hemingway gave to several of the women he pursued after the war.
Much later, and after another world war, Hemingway would write Across the River and Into the Trees, about the love of the ageing American Colonel Cantwell for Renata, a young and beautiful Italian girl. “On the Venetian canals where D’Annunzio’s poet and actress played out their romantic tryst in The Flame”, Reynolds comments, “Cantwell and Renata romance in a gondola ... The fantasies of young men are difficult to keep down; from the bubbling pot they rise up in various guises.”
Hemingway did not tell Agnes about his Taormina adventure. He sent ‘The Mercenaries’ to Red Book magazine, but it was rejected because it lacked female reader appeal or “heart interest”, or so Hemingway claimed. It was only published in 1985, in The New York Times Magazine, after it had been found by Peter Griffin, a Hemingway biographer, among documents donated by Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth and last wife, to the US National Archives in Boston.