by Richard Owen
Greek forces occupied Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1919 and then much of Anatolia, which had a sizeable Greek Orthodox population. Greece was not making war on Islam, the Greek Prime Minister Eliftherios Venizelos insisted, only on the anachronistic Ottoman system. The Turks however – led by the charismatic Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) – counterattacked, and by 1922 had re-taken the territory, including Constantinople as well as Smyrna, where the Great Fire of September 1922 destroyed much of the historic port.
It was a bitter struggle in which both sides committed atrocities. Hemingway was particularly moved by the plight of Greek Christian refugees in Eastern Thrace as they moved slowly across the Maritza River at Adrianople (now Edirne) near the Bulgarian border in pouring rain, a twenty-mile column of “exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads” accompanied by bullocks, muddy - flanked water buffalo, chickens and all “their worldly goods”. It was a “ghastly, shambling procession of people being driven from their homes”, he reported for the Star in November 1922.
Sleeping on cold floors and bitten by mosquitoes in the “black, slippery, smelly offal-strewn streets of Constantinople” (the “magic of the East” described by Pierre Loti, he wrote, had to be balanced by the reality of poverty and mud), Hemingway contracted malaria, dosing himself with aspirin and quinine washed down with “sickly sweet Thracian wine”. Still feverish, he trudged along with the refugees, “dodging camels that swayed and grunted along, past flat-wheeled ox carts piled high with bedding, mirrors, furniture, pigs tied flat, mothers huddled under blankets with their babies, old men and women leaning on the back of the buffalo carts and just keeping their feet moving, their eyes on the road and their heads sunken”.
His mood of disillusionment was reinforced by the rise of Mussolini and Fascism in Italy. While showing Hadley round Milan he had requested an interview with Mussolini and been granted access to the Fascist leader at the offices of the newspaper Mussolini founded and edited, Il Popolo d’Italia. He was charmed, as many foreign correspondents were, by the future dictator. Possibly Hemingway was influenced by the fact that Mussolini, like himself, had been wounded at the front during the recent war, in his case on the Slovenian border not far from Gorizia. At 39, however, Mussolini was considerably older than Hemingway, who was still only 23 and perhaps over-impressed.
Mussolini, who fondled the ears of an enormous pet wolfhound during the interview, was a big man with a high forehead, a slow-smiling mouth and “expressive hands”. He was not the monster he had pictured but a patriot, Hemingway thought – though questions had been raised about how he would use his growing power as his Fascist party became a “military force” half a million strong. “We have force enough to destroy any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”, Mussolini declared to Hemingway.
If Hemingway had any illusions about Mussolini, however, he had lost them by the time he came to cover the Lausanne conference, held at the neo-Gothic Chateau de Ouchy (now a hotel), a venue “so ugly that it makes the Odd Fellows Hall of Petoskey, Michigan, look like the Parthenon”. Ouchy (pronounced Ooshy, Hemingway helpfully informed his readers) was no longer the lakeside fishing village it had been when Byron visited it but full of “enormous, empty hotels” with “lines of limousines” for the delegates.
Mustafa Kemal was impressive, with “a face that no one can forget”, although Ismet Pasha, head of the Turkish delegation, was “absolutely without magnetism”, with “a face no one can remember”. He interviewed Ismet – “we got along very well, as we both spoke such bad French” – and also observed him at a jazz club smiling delightedly at the dancers and eating “quantities of cakes” and telling the waitress “countless jokes in bad French”.
But at least Ismet was “genuine” whereas Mussolini, by now in power in Rome, was “the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff ”. Mussolini had a weakness of the mouth which gave him the famous scowl imitated by every 19-yearold Fascist in Italy; his propensity for duels was also a sign of weakness and cowardice, since “really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave”.
There was also “something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt”. The Fascist leader might, Hemingway conceded, become “a great and lasting force”, but it was “a very dangerous thing to organise the patriotism of a nation if you are not sincere”, especially if you ask people to donate money to the cause, as Mussolini had, because “once the Latin has sunk his money in a business he wants results”.
Ultimately, Hemingway believed, Mussolini was a fraud – and he had the proof. “The Fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room.” Mussolini was sitting at his desk reading a book, his face contorted in his famous frown: “he was registering Dictator”. As an ex-newspaper man, Hemingway suggested, Mussolini was aware how many readers would be reached by the accounts of the 200 or so correspondents in the room and was imagining their opening lines – something like “As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration”. Hemingway then tiptoed over behind the Duce (or so he claimed) “to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary – held upside down”.
Hemingway’s view of Mussolini darkened further in later years. He was appalled by the assassination in 1924 of the Socialist opposition deputy Giacomo Matteoti, “one of the most horrible crimes ever committed by any government”, as he wrote to Ernest Walsh, and by the dropping the following year of all charges against Matteoti’s Fascist killers. The Italians were “worse crooks than the French” and he could not go back to live in Italy “because the political situation makes me so furious”. It was “awfully discouraging to think that the country that produced Garibaldi should be ruled by that horrible gang”.
By the time he came to write his introduction to the anthology Men At War during the Second World War, he no longer believed the legend of Mussolini’s bravery when wounded on the Carso during the First World War. Instead (unlike, by implication, his own behaviour) Mussolini had used “martial bombast and desire for military glory” to cover up the fact that he had been frightened by the fighting and had made an “ignominious exit” from it “at the first opportunity”.
“Mussolini I knew fairly well”, he wrote to the art critic Bernard Berenson in 1953. “When you had known a wicked old man like Clemenceau, Mussolini was not very interesting”, he added dismissively. It was impossible not to remember the Duce “as a coward in the war and as a crooked journalist”.
11
Rapallo and Cortina
“After renouncing Italy and all its works I’ve gotten all nostalgique about it. I bet it’s swell now”
Hemingway to Ezra Pound, 17 March 1924
RAPALLO TODAY STILL conjures up a vision of seaside charm. It boasts a sixteenth-century sea fortress, the Castello sul Mare, built to defend the town against Turks and pirates when it was still part of the Republic of Genoa, and elegant villas set in the hillside above the promenade. Rapallo has inspired writers, thinkers and artists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound and Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, who lived there from 1910 onwards (and died in Rapallo in 1956), with the celebrated stage designer Gordon Craig in the villa next door from 1917 to 1928. After the war it was the scene of an international conference which drew up the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo, resolving frontier issues between Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.
Henry Villard, who had met Hemingway when they were both at the American Red Cross hospital in wartime Milan, later recalled having suggested Rapallo to him as a place to relax or convalesce. Its attractions, Villard said, included swimming off the rocks, an English-speaking contessa to dance with against “an unreal background of music, moonlight and roses”
, and cherry brandy and crème de menthe after dinner “to complement the miniature port and starboard lights of the vessels manoeuvring offshore”.
Hemingway had made his first visit to Rapallo during the 1922 Genoa conference, with other reporters, to interview the Russian delegates who were staying there. But he also went there as a welcome break from covering the talks to meet Max Beerbohm, driving past hillsides of vines and olive groves together with two other journalists, Max Eastman, the left-wing (at the time) editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, and George Slocombe of the London Daily Herald.
Beerbohm had left the bustle of literary and political London for Liguria, preferring the peace and quiet of the orange and lemon trees in his garden and the Mediterranean views he could see from the cane chair on his terrace at the Villino Chiaro. He received few guests, but agreed to meet the Genoa journalists, offering them Marsala and discussing the need for creative artists to “revolt against the evils of commercial journalism”.
The following year Hemingway had an even more pressing reason to go to Rapallo: Ezra and Dorothy Pound had moved there after Hemingway had sung its praises to them. Ernest and Hadley – who was by now pregnant – stayed at the Hotel Splendide in February and March 1923. The Hemingways had got to know Ezra and Dorothy Pound well in Paris, and had enjoyed a brief holiday with them on Lake Garda.
Pound – who was 14 years older than Hemingway – had encouraged the younger man’s attempts to write fiction, while Hemingway greatly admired the American poet’s work. He also tried to teach Pound how to box, but found – as he told Sherwood Anderson – that the poet “led with his chin” and had “the grace of a crayfish”. “I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook”, he recalled later in his memoir A Moveable Feast.
At one stage Pound annoyed Hemingway by disappearing to Rome during the Hemingways’ visit. There were complications in Pound’s private life: he had just met the American violinist Olga Rudge, who would be his mistress for half a century. Olga followed him to Rapallo, and in 1925 had his daughter Mary (now Mary de Rachewitz, for many years curator of the Ezra Pound Archives at Yale University). Dorothy at this stage was trying to turn a blind eye to Ezra’s affair.
Perhaps because of Pound’s erratic behaviour, Hemingway was in a jaundiced mood, and – even though he had himself recommended it to Ezra and Dorothy – refused to be impressed by Rapallo. “The place ain’t much”, he wrote to Gertrude Stein in Paris on 23 February 1923. The weather was muggy and humid, and the Mediterranean “weak and dull”. It was a quiet place, according to WB Yeats, another writer who sought the sun there, with no great casino or ballroom and no great harbour full of yachts.
Hemingway wrote a sketch called ‘Rapallo’ in which he said he and his wife were happy “sometimes”, and were “happiest in bed”. He also wrote ‘Cat in the Rain’, a sketch about an American couple in a room on the second floor of a hotel facing the sea, the public garden and the war memorial, where they “did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room ... In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea.”
The wife – who is not named, but is presumably based on Hadley – wants a stable rather than transient life: she yearns for “a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her”, a sign perhaps of her longing for a baby. She wants “to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.” The wife sees a cat sheltering from the rain under a green table in the garden, and goes downstairs to rescue it, but it has disappeared. The husband, George, is indifferent, telling her at one point to “shut up and get something to read”.
This is a fairly bleak portrait of a marriage, and while it need not be read as a literal account of Hemingway’s relationship with Hadley, it almost certainly reflects tensions below the surface – an early example of Hemingway’s “iceberg” theory of fiction, in which more is going on than the spare details at first seem to indicate. He used the same technique in his 1927 story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, in which an American and his girlfriend waiting at a Spanish railway station discuss whether or not she should have an “operation” – without mentioning the word abortion.
No doubt Hemingway was still smarting from the loss of his suitcase of stories. But he was determined to start making a living from fiction rather than journalism, and was cheered up when Pound introduced him to Edward O’Brien, the Boston-based anthologist and compiler of short stories, who at the time was staying – as Hemingway recalls in A Moveable Feast – “as a boarder in a monastery up above Rapallo”.
O’Brien was actually staying at a hostel next door to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montallegro, where the Virgin Mary had appeared to a local peasant in the sixteenth century. Two kilometres north of Rapallo and 600 metres above sea level, and nowadays reached by a cable car (funivia), the sanctuary offers spectacular views of the Gulf of Tigullio on the Mediterranean below. Here Hemingway showed O’Brien his story ‘My Old Man’, which had escaped Hadley’s disaster at the Gare de Lyon. O’Brien, who normally only accepted already published stories for his anthologies, made an exception and included it in Best American Short Stories of 1923.
To cheer him further Pound, who was composing his cantos on Sigismondo Malatesta, the fifteenth-century nobleman and condottiere known as ‘the Wolf of Rimini’, suggested a walking tour of places linked to Malatesta’s turbulent life as a warlord and military commander. Hemingway hesitated, saying he had little idea who Malatesta was and “no wish to eat bad food and sleep in poor inns in Italy in February”.
But they set off anyway, and Hemingway duly enjoyed hiking with a rucksack through vineyards and olive groves toward Pisa and Siena, discussing Malatesta’s campaigns at Piombino and Orbetello with Pound during picnics of cheese, figs and wine. “Ezra’s knowledge of Italian and Italian people and Italian history shone brilliantly amongst those gorgeous old ruins”, Hadley remarked – though she was irritated that Pound seemed interested only in Hemingway and paid no attention to her.
The trip remained in Hemingway’s memory over twenty years later, when his fourth wife Mary was considering a visit to Orbetello, though in his mind it was by now he and not Pound who had displayed knowledge of Italian history: “I walked all over that country with Ezra explaining him how and why Sigismundo Malatesta would have fought where and for what reasons and how would have worked”, he wrote to her in November 1948 from the Locanda Cipriani on Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, somewhat ungrammatically (due no doubt to having lunched “outdoors in the sun”.) He added: “Probably mis-led him badly. Would like to do it better now.”
After the Orbetello trip the Pounds returned to Rapallo while the Hemingways travelled by train to Milan and then up to the mountain resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo in Hemingway’s beloved Veneto, staying for nearly three weeks, from 10–30 March 1923. Cortina d’Ampezzo, nowadays known simply as Cortina, was at that time – and still is – a fashionable and chic ski resort favoured by the rich and aristocratic, set 4000 feet above sea level in an Alpine valley of the Dolomites.
It had been Austrian until the First World War, when it passed to Italy. “Cortina d’Ampezzo is the swellest country on earth”, Hemingway wrote to Ernest Walsh in 1925. “It is the loveliest country I’ve ever known.” The Hemingways stayed in the elegant Hotel Bellevue, and frequented the bar at the Hotel Posta (now the Hotel de la Poste). Hemingway began to get to know local society – including Dora Ivancich, the future mother of Adriana, the teenage girl he would fall in love with over twenty years later and the inspiration for Across the River and Into the Trees, and Dora’s sister-in-law Emma.
The holiday was once again interrupted by journalism however, this time an urgent request from the Toronto Star to cover Franco-German tensions in the Ruhr valley, centre of
the German coal and steel industries, which French and Belgian troops had occupied as retaliation for the failure of the Weimar Republic to honour reparations agreed after the First World War. It was not an easy assignment: as he reported to readers, he first had to obtain a visa to enter Germany, which was reluctantly granted by the German consul in Paris after Hemingway had provided a letter from the US Embassy “printed on stiff crackling paper and bearing an enormous red seal”.
Hadley (who by now had proper mountain boots) stayed on at Cortina with her new friend Renata Borgatti, the pianist and Lesbian lover of Faith Mackenzie, the bisexual wife of the novelist Compton Mackenzie. She was amusing company, and at concerts often accompanied Olga Rudge, Pound’s mistress. Hadley and Renata became close friends, though not anything more intimate: when Hadley suggested to Renata that she should try men rather than women as lovers, remarking “You don’t know what you’re missing”, Renata replied, “But Hadley, you don’t know what you’re missing.”
Hemingway returned from the Ruhr in April, telling his father in a letter that he was getting tired of so much travelling. He was also getting tired of Italy: it was now that he warned Bill Horne, the Chicago friend who had served with him in the American Red Cross at Schio, not to go back, saying Italy was “all gone”. His mood was probably darkened by an unpleasant episode in Cortina: since the snow was melting Hemingway hired a guide to go fishing, but the guide – who was drunk – failed to inform him that fishing was illegal. Hemingway transformed this experience into the story ‘Out Of Season’, later published in the collection In Our Time, in which a husband and wife fall out over a disastrous fishing expedition.
After Cortina, Hemingway and Hadley went first to Spain to witness the running of the bulls at Pamplona, and then in August they sailed to Quebec from Cherbourg on the Cunard line Andania. From Quebec they headed for Toronto, where Hemingway resumed his career as a reporter for the Star and where in October 1923 their son John Hadley Nicanor was born, named after his mother and a Spanish bullfighter Hemingway had admired.