by Richard Owen
The soldier finds the sleeping mayor, his “fat sensual lips” apart and his paunch moving “with every drunken breath”, ties him to the bed and plants a hand grenade in the breast pocket of his pyjamas. When the mayor wakes up the soldier pulls the pin, telling the mayor it is time to face death “because of all the good men who have spilled out their guts along the Fossalta road while you have made love in Roncade”. The story ends with the soldier confessing to his commanding officer that he “assisted” the mayor’s death and asking to speak to a priest before returning to the frontline.
The magazines to which Hemingway sent his early stories replied with rejection slips, but he persisted, writing his first Nick Adams story, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, a memorable account of his own trout fishing expeditions in Michigan, where Nick feels at home. Hemingway later commented that although the war is not mentioned in the story, it was about a young man recovering from wartime stress in the woods of his boyhood.
He also turned to poetry, in one poem taking a swipe at Gabriele D’Annunzio, even though he had at first admired D’Annunzio as a war hero and praised his novel The Flame. According to Giovanni Cecchin, the two men had even met, with documents found in the Hemingway papers at the Kennedy Library in Boston showing that in 1918 Hemingway and other Red Cross volunteers attended a religious ceremony for Italy’s war dead at the Villa d’Orso (now the Hotel Selvatico) in Roncade at which D’Annunzio gave a patriotic address.
They may also have met at the officers mess at Ca’ Morelli, a white fronted eighteenth-century villa used during the war as a military hospital, and at the magnificent Castello di Roncade (or Villa Giustinian), which now offers fine wines, a luxury B&B and landscaped gardens decorated with sculptures, but which at the time was used as an Italian military command headquarters right on the frontline where D’Annunzio addressed the troops and their officers.
This, it seems, is the origin of a passage in Hemingway’s much later Venice novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, in which Hemingway’s alter ego, Colonel Cantwell, recalls seeing D’Annunzio giving troops a rousing speech at the Italian front in 1918 in pouring rain, one eye covered by a patch and his face “as white as the belly of a sole” and shouting “morire non e basta” (“to die is not enough” – though the Italian is not quite correct and D’Annunzio’s slogan was actually slightly different, morire non basta). He also describes D’Annunzio as Jewish, which he was not.
On the Grand Canal in Venice Cantwell points out D’Annunzio’s villa, saying “They loved him for his talent, and because he was bad, and he was brave ... He was a more miserable character than any that I know and as mean.” In his contemptuous brief lampoon Hemingway now wrote: “Half a million dead wops/And he got a kick out of it/The son of a bitch.” He again changed his mind a few years later however, writing in 1923 that D’Annunzio was an “old, bald-headed, perhaps a little insane but thoroughly sincere, divinely brave swashbuckler”.
But in 1920 Hemingway was still a budding journalist, and his break came when in January he was invited to Toronto by Harriet Connable, a wealthy Michigan-born friend of his mother who had attended a talk which Hemingway gave to a ladies charity in Petoskey about his wartime experiences. His job was to look after the Connables’ invalid son Ralph Junior while Mrs Connable and her businessman husband Ralph (head of Woolworths in Canada) were on holiday in Florida. Mr Connable introduced Hemingway to editors at The Toronto Star, and he began writing features for their weekly magazine in 1920, the start of a relationship which would shortly lead to him becoming a Toronto Star foreign correspondent.
He was also a “free man” after Agnes’ rejection, he told Jim Gamble, and therefore lucky – “tho of course I couldn’t see it at the time”. Back in Chicago he now met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, a vivacious red-haired girl from St Louis, Missouri, who – like Agnes before her – was older than Hemingway, 29 to his 21. When they met through mutual friends at a party, Hemingway said, he knew at once that this was the girl he was destined to marry. She too was taken with this tall, handsome and well-built young man who had survived the war, “rocked on the balls of his feet”, looked you straight in the eye while talking to you, and – like her – enjoyed a drink. They were married on 3 September 1921.
Hadley had income from a trust fund, which was useful since Hemingway was not at this stage making much money as a journalist. But he was writing and editing features for a monthly journal for Midwestern farmers called The Cooperative Commonwealth, and through this he met the well-known writer Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson suggested that the newly weds should live not in America but in Europe, which was cheaper.
Hemingway was all for going back to Italy with his new bride – Naples, Capri and the Abruzzo were mentioned – but Anderson instead suggested Paris, recommending a left bank hotel in Paris where he had himself lived for a time. He offered to give Hemingway introductions to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach, literary patroness and owner of the celebrated book store Shakespeare and Company.
The newly married Hemingways sailed for Paris shortly before Christmas 1921 on the steamship Leopoldina, and swiftly became part of the Parisian literary and artistic community. They met painters such as Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso, as well as writers such as Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, who coined the phrase “the lost generation” for those who, like Hemingway, had spent their youthful years in the war. Stein became Hemingway’s mentor (and later godmother to the Hemingways’ son John Hadley Nicanor), although they eventually fell out. Ezra Pound Hemingway met in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, and Pound introduced him to James Joyce, with whom Hemingway enjoyed many an “alcoholic spree”.
While in Paris Hemingway wrote features for the Toronto Star, and was not always complimentary about his fellow expats; an article on “American Bohemians in Paris” for example (25 March 1922) began “The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Cafe Rotonde”, which was “the leading Latin Quarter show place for tourists in search of atmosphere”.
But his career as a foreign correspondent really took off in April 1922, when the paper asked him to cover the post-war Genoa International Economic Conference of 34 nations, held in the great hall of the Palazzo San Giorgio. Its aim was to rebuild the global economy from the ruins of the First World War and negotiate both a return to the Gold Standard and some kind of economic understanding between the Western powers and the new Soviet government in Moscow.
He was back in Italy – indeed, in the very seaport from which he had sailed back to the US three years before. Genoa, once a city state rivalling Venice and known as “La Superba” because of its elegant sixteenth-century palazzos on the hill above the busy waterfront, would become something of a fixture later in his life as the port from which he regularly sailed to and from Havana. Hemingway is supposed to have described the monumental sculptures of Genoa’s Staglieno cemetery above the city as “one of the wonders of the world”, although no source has been found for this remark, and in A Farewell to Arms Genoa is described as “the place to see the bad marbles”.
On his 1922 visit Hemingway for the first time encountered experienced old hands in the journalistic trade, including Max Eastman, Lincoln Steffens and Guy Hickok, with whom he would make a memorable tour of Italy five years later. He filed over fifteen reports from Genoa for the Toronto Star, describing for his readers a scene in the historic hall (site of the Banco San Giorgio, the oldest bank in the world) familiar to any journalist who has covered international gatherings. The delegates, he wrote, stood talking at the long table covered in white pads and inkwells because “they cannot find their place”, while studying a quotation on the wall from Machiavelli, who had written “a book that could be used as a text book by all conferences”.
There was also an enormous chandelier which blinded everyone in the press gallery, and marble effigies of the “swashbuckling pirates a
nd traders that made Genoa a power in the old days when all the cities of Italy were at one another’s throats”. The official guests – white-moustachioed senators in top hats, women in Parisian hats and “wonderful, wealth reeking fur coats” – sat behind in rows of camp chairs. “The fur coats are the most beautiful things in the hall.”
Clearly more interested in people than economics, Hemingway spotted the Archbishop of Genoa in a red skull cap talking to an Italian general who looked like a “sunken-faced, kind-eyed Attila with his sweeps of moustaches”. The press gallery filled up with correspondents (750 in a space reserved for 200): they were joined by the editor of the French Communist paper L’Humanité, who could afford to be a Communist because he had “a very rich wife”.
The journalists identified the delegates for each other: the best-dressed were the British, headed by David Lloyd George, in his last months as Prime Minister. In the chair was the little-known Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta – the last to hold that office before the March on Rome in October 1922 and the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and the Fascists. Facta would try to stop Mussolini by declaring martial law, but King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the decree, appointing Mussolini Prime Minister when Facta resigned.
But that was still some six months away. At Genoa the main interest was in the four-man Soviet delegation, led by the “ham faced” Maxim Litvinov, Moscow’s roving ambassador (and later Foreign Minister). Their chairs were at first empty: “the four emptiest looking chairs I have ever seen”, Hemingway wrote.
They finally came in, followed by a mass of Russian secretaries, “far and away the best looking girls in the conference hall”, and Signor Facta started the inevitable “dreary round of speeches”. The Italian authorities meanwhile had mobilised 1500 military police to prevent violent clashes between Communists (“the Reds”) and Fascists (“a brood of dragon’s teeth that were sown in 1920”): none of the police drafted in were from Genoa itself, “so they can shoot either side without fear or favour”.
“I worked very hard at Genoa and wrote some very good stuff ”, Hemingway told his father, with some justification. Italy had claimed him again – and now that he was a married man he wanted to show Hadley his Italy, from Milan and the Dolomites to Rapallo. There was on the other hand the shadow of the “dragon’s teeth”, and in particular the rise of a fellow journalist, an Italian who, like Hemingway, had been wounded in the war but who – unlike Hemingway – had gone into politics: Benito Mussolini.
10
The Biggest Bluff in Europe
“Fascism is always made by disappointed people”
Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, March 1953
IN MAY 1922 Hemingway returned to Paris – but could not wait for Hadley to see Italy. The Hemingways headed first for the mountains of Switzerland, where they met up with his wartime friend Eric (Chink) Dorman-Smith, by now stationed in Germany, for some trout fishing.
They then – fuelled by brandy – planned to walk over the snow-covered St Bernard Pass into Italy. It was not perhaps the best way to introduce Hadley to il bel paese: they covered nearly sixty kilometres in two days, according to Hemingway, and by the time they reached Aosta his wife was hobbling badly, her feet covered in blisters because she was wearing fashionable Oxford shoes rather than boots. It was, according to Dorman-Smith, “something of a nightmare”.
Hadley later blamed herself for “vanity and ignorance”: the tan Oxfords, she said, were from Abercrombie and Fitch, and she had been showing off the shoes – and her legs – to Chink. Hemingway meanwhile had “bowel trouble” – a memory which stayed with him at least until 1954, when he wrote to Chink reminding him of their troubles crossing the St Bernard.
Hemingway was nonetheless undeterred. They took the train to Milan, and after Dorman-Smith had returned to Germany Hemingway proceeded to show Hadley the Milan he had got to know so well during his stay some four years earlier. “Wasn’t it lovely coming down the Italian side and what fun we had in Aosta and then in Milano in the old Galleria”, he wrote to Dorman-Smith. In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalls how Hadley later sought to put the painful memory of walking across the St Bernard in street shoes behind her (“My poor shoes”), preferring to remember Milan afterwards and “us having fruit cup at Biffi’s in the Galleria with Capri and fresh peaches and wild strawberries in a tall glass pitcher with ice”. The tour included not only Biffi’s but also the other places he had shared so intimately with Agnes: the Duomo, the San Siro racetrack, and the hospital where he had been operated on – though presumably he did not share with Hadley the memories of Agnes these conjured up.
He also wanted to show Hadley the spot where he had been wounded. They travelled first to Vicenza and Schio, up to Rovereto and Trento, then back down to Sirmione on Lake Garda, where they joined Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy for some agreeable lakeside relaxation, including swimming and sunbathing. Only then did they take the train to Verona and change for Mestre, on the mainland opposite Venice, hiring a car and driver to take them from there to Fossalta di Piave.
Fossalta proved a great disappointment, at least for Hemingway: its “shattered, tragic dignity”, he wrote, had been replaced by “a new, smug, hideous collection of plaster houses” in garish colours: the new “plaster church” was the worst. “A Veteran Visits The Old Front” was the headline on the piece he filed for the Toronto Star. “I had been in Fossalta perhaps fifty times and I would not have recognised it”.
He found a rusting shell fragment on the grassy slope leading down to the Piave, but the shell scars on the trees had healed over. A village shattered by war, he said, always had a kind of dignity, “as though it had died for something” and as though better was to come. It was all part of a “great sacrifice”. But now there was only the “new, ugly futility of it all”. Everything was “just as it was – except a little worse”, and a reconstructed town was much sadder than one that had been devastated.
It was altogether like going into an empty theatre after the audience and players had departed, with only the cleaners in the auditorium, Hemingway wrote. The trenches and shell holes had all been filled in, leaving the smooth green of the fields and “lonely, deadly dullness”. Schio too had been a letdown: this “little town in the Trentino under the shoulder of the Alps” had once been “one of the finest places on earth”, with “all the good cheer, amusement and relaxation a man could desire”, to the point where he and his fellow Red Cross volunteers had thought it would be a wonderful place to live in after the war.
But it seemed to have mysteriously shrunk. The Albergo Due Spade (which Hemingway misspelt Spadi) was revealed to be no more than a rather shabby small inn, serving greasy food; the room where Hemingway and Hadley spent the night there had a squeaky bed which gave them a sleepless night (or so Hadley later complained). The wool factory and warehouse where Hemingway and his fellow volunteers had been billeted was back in action, creating “a flow of black muck polluting the stream where we used to swim”.
The shop windows were full of fly-speckled pastries and cheap china dishes and postcards. Even the mountains appeared little more than mere hills compared to the great St Bernard Pass which he and Hadley had walked over the week before. When he told the girl serving at the local bar that he had been in Schio during the war, she replied with indifference: “So were many others”.
He remembered with nostalgia the garden in which he and his fellow American volunteers had drunk beer on hot nights, with a plane tree over head and wisteria on the walls, but after his afternoon walk decided not to try and find it after all. “Maybe there never was a garden. Perhaps there never was any war around Schio at all”. He would “give a lot not to have gone”. The train back to Venice, which he and Hadley could see “way off across the swamp” like “a fairy city”, was equally disillusioning, the carriage full of “evil-smelling Italian profiteers going to Venice for vacations”.
The drive from Mestre, where they hired a car and driver, was an
other let down, the route taking them past the “poisonous green Adriatic marshes”, where the car at one point broke down. “I had tried to recreate something for my wife and had failed utterly”, Hemingway wrote. The moral was: “don’t go back”. “For Christ’s sake don’t ever go back Horney”, he wrote later to his friend Bill Horne, who was also from Chicago and had shared his frontline experiences, including the nights at the silkworm warehouse at Monastier.
Hemingway recalled the days of lost innocence when they had first arrived at Schio on a hot day in June “and we didn’t know what it would be like except that they had a place to swim and all drove Fiats”. Now it was “all gone and Italy is all gone ... We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the old kick out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are very fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now”.
Back in Paris there were other tensions. When Hemingway was assigned by his paper to cover the Lausanne peace conference called in November 1922 to revise the harsh terms imposed on Turkey after the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Hadley travelled by train to join him – and at the Gare de Lyon lost a suitcase containing nearly all the manuscripts of the short stories he had begun to write.
Hemingway and his wife also fell out when the Toronto Star asked him to cover the Greco-Turkish war: she begged him not to go, but he went anyway. The plight of Greek refugees he witnessed in Thrace haunted him for years afterward. The war had begun with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, when Lloyd George and the Allies promised Greece territorial gains at Turkey’s expense.