by Richard Owen
Spain was to be one of the great loves of his life, and would produce The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was increasingly disillusioned with the Italy of Mussolini and his “government by lead pipe and castor oil”, a reference to the brutal methods used by Mussolini’s Blackshirts to intimidate opponents such as beating them and forcing several pints of castor oil down their throats to cause dehydration and severe diarrhoea. “I’ve buried Italy, and why dig it up when there’s a chance it still stinks?” he said at one point.
But several of the stories he was writing, such as ‘A Way You’ll Never Be’ and ‘In Another Country’ were set in the Italy of 1918, and he was beginning to draft ideas for what would become A Farewell to Arms. In March 1924 he admitted to Pound that even though he had “renounced Italy and all its works”, he remained nostalgic for it (he even wrote “homesick”, but crossed it out). And in 1927 he returned with his friend and fellow journalist Guy Hickok for one more “bachelor trip” as he divorced the long-suffering Hadley and prepared to marry his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
12
Che Ti Dice La Patria?
“Mussolini told me at Lausanne, you know, that I couldn’t ever live in Italy again”
Hemingway to Ezra Pound, 23 January 1923
THE TORONTO INTERLUDE did not last long: Hemingway found that the life of a journalist in Canada was not only boring but involved excessively long hours, and he resigned from the Star. He, Hadley and baby John (known as Jack, or ‘Bumby’) returned to Paris at the start of 1924, with Hemingway writing for The Transatlantic Review, a short-lived magazine backed by Ezra Pound and edited by Ford Madox Ford. The Hemingways made several more trips to Pamplona, resulting in The Sun Also Rises, (published in London under the title Fiesta) which Hemingway dedicated to Hadley and their son.
The fact was however that they were drifting apart, and Hemingway had started an affair with the wealthy Pauline Pfeiffer, known as Fife, a journalist for Vogue magazine in Paris who had got to know them both in Paris and Antibes, accompanied them to Pamplona and Austria, and set out to befriend Hadley – all while seducing Ernest. She invited them to expensive restaurants, knowing Hadley could not leave Bumby behind, and took Hemingway back to her apartment, with inevitable results.
Hemingway was not immediately attracted to Pauline: looking back on the affair much later, he told AE Hotchner that after first meeting Pauline over dinner at the Fitzgeralds’ flat in Paris he had not given her another thought. Hadley was “the only woman who mattered in my life”, with her “full body and full breasts”, wearing little or no jewellery or make up. Pauline by contrast was “small and flat-chested” with close cropped hair “like a boy’s”, bright red rouged lips and loops of pearls and costume jewellery. Where Hadley was straightforward, Pauline was a “schemer”.
She had, Hemingway told Hotchner, “the ‘I get what I want’ hubris of a very rich girl who won’t be denied”. “You’re being set up by a femme fatale”, Scott Fitzgerald warned Hemingway: Pauline was “shopping for a husband” and would “do anything” to get him. When Hemingway replied that he was in love with two women at the same time Fitzgerald replied that “a man torn between two women will eventually lose them both”. “She’s going to bust up your marriage if you don’t get rid of her”, he told Hemingway bluntly.
Hadley suspected what was going on. When she asked Pauline’s equally glamorous sister Virginia (known as Ginny, or Jinny) whether Hemingway and Pauline were in love, Ginny replied cautiously “I think they are very fond of each other”, which only confirmed Hadley’s fears. She came to regret that she had not told Pauline bluntly to “leave my husband alone” instead of tolerating what amounted to a menage a trois. “I should have said to her ‘No, you can’t have my husband’”, Hadley told her friend and first biographer Alice Sokoloff many years later. “But I didn’t.”
Hemingway also knew what was going on, and came to regret leaving “lovely Hadley” (who swiftly re-married) for Pauline. Looking back years later in his memoir A Moveable Feast he described Pauline’s behaviour as “the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.” It was a “trick” which Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, would use later on when she in turn replaced Pauline – in both cases the words “unknowingly” and “innocently” are perhaps misplaced.
In the 1920s Hemingway, as Naomi Wood puts it in Mrs Hemingway, her recent fictionalised account of the affair, was fit, bronzed and handsome – so much so that even his male friends were “bowled over by his looks”. He was changeable in mood, meek at one time and bullish, even violent at another. But it was “shocking what he can get away with”: women “snap their heads to watch him go and they don’t stop looking until he’s gone”. He nonetheless came to regret losing Hadley: he genuinely loved Pauline, he told his father in 1927, but if Hadley had said she wanted him back after their divorce, “I would have gone back to her”.
Hemingway and Hadley separated in the summer of 1926. Hadley told Hemingway she would agree to a divorce if he and Pauline kept apart for a hundred days and still felt the same way about each other, but in the end she gave in before the period was up. She and Hemingway were divorced in January 1927, with Hemingway offering Hadley the royalties from The Sun Also Rises as part of the divorce agreement. He then married Pauline in May.
But before doing so he set off with Guy Hickok, who was Paris bureau chief for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in Hickok’s battered old Ford coupe – known as Henry – with a cracked windscreen on a ten-day tour of Italy. On the surface it was a pre-wedding bachelor trip, or what Pauline called “an Italian tour for the promotion of masculine society”. But Hickok had told Hemingway in January that he wanted to go to Italy to “write some silly stuff about Fascism”.
A week later he urged Hemingway to pack a bag “and take the other seat in my Henry – assuming he hasn’t fallen apart by then”. He wanted to “splutter down to Rimini” and “sizzle”, and then “spit up to San Remo” on the way back. Hemingway replied that he thought he could remember enough Italian to get them petrol and oil, and beds at hotels along the way, and that Ezra Pound had written to say he was looking forward to seeing them both in Rapallo.
Hickok was mainly interested in San Marino – “We could do anything you please as long as San Marino was on the way” – and suggested they could also revisit the sites in the Veneto where Hemingway had been on the frontline. “I know how all the soldier boys love their old fronts.” But Hemingway had already made that pilgrimage with Hadley, and had other stops in mind during the trip, during which Hickok drove 3000 kilometres at 15–20 miles an hour in the old Ford while Hemingway navigated. He also interpreted for Hickok, who had good French (he had set up the Brooklyn Daily Eagle bureau in Paris in 1918) but no Italian.
They drove from Paris down the Rhone Valley to the French-Italian border on the Riviera, Hemingway related in ‘Italy 1927’, his account of the trip for The New Republic. From Ventimiglia they motored on 18 March to Rapallo, La Spezia, Pisa and Florence, and then across the Romagna to San Marino and Rimini, where Hemingway picked up letters from Pauline at the once luxurious Grand Hotel Aquila D’Oro (now municipal offices, with only the splendid facade remaining). Hemingway and Hickok then drove up the Adriatic coast to Forli and back in a loop through Imola, Bologna, Parma and Piacenza to Genoa and Ventimiglia.
The trip enabled Hemingway to take up the invitation to call once again on Ezra and Dorothy Pound at Rapallo: he and Hickok (whose name Hemingway consistently misspells as ‘Hickock’) were heading for Rimini and San Marino in March, he wrote to Pound in February 1927, and hoped to meet up either on the way there or on the way back. In fact they had dinner with the Pounds on the outward journey, on Friday 18 March, their first day in Italy, and no doubt discussed Pound�
��s new magazine Exile – both Hemingway and Hickok were among the contributors that year to the first edition, issued that very month. Hickok, who was 11 years older than the 27-year-old Hemingway and something of a mentor to the younger journalist, wrote a waspish portrait of Pound in the sketches of their trip he published the following month in The Brooklyn Eagle, mocking Pound’s patronage of “unknown writers” in his “queer little short-lived magazines” with “circulations numbering only a few hundreds”.
Pound, Hickok said, had a reputation as an eccentric because of his reddish beard and his velvet coats, although Pound claimed they had been given to him by “would-be Bohemian Americans who hadn’t the courage to wear them after they had bought them for their own use”. Pound had published his Malatesta cantos in expensive editions, writing them in a mixture of Italian, Latin and modern slang, and had staged concerts in Paris by “grand opera singers” of “forgotten songs of the medieval troubadours”.
Part of the “Pound enigma”, Hickok suggested, was that all this cost him money. He often turned out to be right on the other hand, and “a surprising number of persons whose things appeared in his little magazines and booklets when they were totally unknown have since gained international recognition” – writers such as DH Lawrence, James Joyce, TS Eliot, and a certain Ernest Hemingway. Besides, Pound had a “regular bathtub”, which was apparently not easy to find in Italy, a “very charming wife” in Dorothy, and he had paid for dinner, which Hickok concluded ironically meant that “we decided the stop might be called a pilgrimage. Had he not done so we would have merely said that we stumbled on him there while passing through on more important business”.
In his own account of the trip, published in May, a month after Hickok’s pieces appeared, Hemingway did not mention the visit to Pound in Rapallo, focusing instead on life under Fascism. There had been – he wrote rather defensively – no opportunity “in such a short trip” to “see how things were with the country or the people”. He did however offer a reportage which amounted to the same thing – although his vignettes did not perhaps give the negative impression of Fascism he was trying to convey.
En route to the port of La Spezia on a Sunday they came to Carrodano, a village of white-painted houses surrounded by vines where the men were playing bowls in their Sunday best. In the main piazza they were approached by a young man carrying a suitcase who “came up to the car and asked us to take him in to Spezia”. When Hemingway pointed out there were only two seats in the car, and both were occupied, the man explained that he was a Fascist and was used to travelling in discomfort. Without being asked he climbed onto the running board, “holding on inside, his right arm through the open window”. The air was frosty but “the young man projected from the side of the car like the figurehead of a ship. He had turned his coat collar up and pulled his hat down and his nose looked cold in the wind.”
As the car was descending towards La Spezia the young Fascist asked to be set down, explaining that if he went with them into the town they might get into trouble for carrying passengers. He offered to pay them for the lift, but when told it was free said “thanks” and “looked after us suspiciously as Guy started the car. I waved my hand at him. He was too dignified to reply. We went on into Spezia. ‘That’s a young man that will go a long way in Italy,’ I said to Guy. ‘Well,’ said Guy, ‘he went twenty kilometres with us.’”
The sketch does not quite come off however, since the Fascist appears in quite a good light. Hemingway notes that “thanks” was inadequate, since in Italy “thank you very much” or “thanks a thousand times” (grazie mille) is normal for even the smallest favour. On the other hand the young man must have seemed to some readers at least to be polite (he offered to pay), hardy (standing on the running board), and even considerate (not wanting them to be caught carrying a passenger). The same could be said of his second vignette, ‘A Meal in Spezia’, revealing that because Mussolini had closed down Italian brothels, prostitutes were doubling as waitresses and entertaining clients in the back rooms of restaurants instead.
Among the “high and yellow” houses of La Spezia, their walls stencilled with “eye-bugging portraits of Mussolini”, they found a modest restaurant near the harbour with a sailor and a smartly dressed young man in a blue suit sitting at tables and three girls and an old woman at another table. One of the girls, Hemingway tells us, took their order (spaghetti and red wine), putting her arm round Hickok’s neck, while another stood in the doorway, the light making clear that “she was wearing nothing under her house dress”.
The waitress who had taken their order “put her hands on her breasts and smiled” and asked Hickok if he liked her. The girl had taken them for Germans, and Hemingway played along, saying they were from Potsdam. He mocks the girl’s nose and general appearance – “she smiled better on one side than the other” – and after she has offered herself to an embarrassed Hickok (“Tell him he is mine ... Tell him he is a beautiful boy”) the two men leave, telling the disappointed girls that they have to get to Pisa and Florence. They pay the bill and leave a tip, but the general impression (presumably not intended by Hemingway) is that it is he who behaves badly, not the girls. They wave when the car starts, but the girl in the doorway – not surprisingly – does not wave back.
A restaurant also features in ‘After the Rain’, the third sketch of ‘Italy 1927’, when Hemingway and Hickok reach the suburbs of Genoa in pouring rain, with the trucks splashing “liquid mud” onto pedestrians on the pavements. “On our left was the Mediterranean. There was a big sea running and waves broke and the wind blew the spray against the car”.
They stop for lunch at Sestri – pasta asciutta (pasta with a meat and basil sauce, the meal Frederic Henry is eating at the battlefront with cheese and wine when he is wounded in A Farewell to Arms) – followed by steak and fried potatoes, but “there was no heat in the restaurant and we kept our hats and coats on.” The pasta was good, we are told, but “the wine tasted of alum, and we poured water in it.”
After the meal Hickok is taken to a nearby house to use the toilet, there being none in the restaurant, but “the people in the house were suspicious and the waiter had remained with Guy to see nothing was stolen”. Back on the road Hemingway remarks that the poet Shelley was drowned “somewhere along here”, only to be reminded by Hickok that Shelley drowned further down the coast at Viareggio. In the final incident of the narrative, they pass “a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back” who joins them as they wait at a railway level crossing and offers to clean their dirty licence plate for them.
Hemingway points out that he had cleaned the plate himself back at Sestri, and insists it is readable. “It’s only dirty from the state of the roads”, he tells the Fascist. “You don’t like Italian roads?” “They are dirty.” “Fifty lire.” He spat in the road. “Your car is dirty and you are dirty, too.” “Good. And give me a receipt with your name.”
The Fascist – presumably a policeman – fines them fifty lire for having a dirty licence plate, at first handing them a receipt for only twenty-five lire, which Hemingway spots. The policeman “smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see. “Go on,” he said, “before your number gets dirty again.”
In his own sketches of the trip Hickok reports another row with a Fascist official, this time a militiaman who fined them for failing to stop at a railway crossing and nearly colliding with a train. Hickok was baffled by the variety of police, militia and army uniforms, but Hemingway, who had “fought the war in some of them”, put him straight. In fact Hemingway, Hickok adds – perhaps slightly irritated by his companion’s know it all manner – “used to know Mussolini” and had predicted the Duce’s March on Rome a year and half before it happened, “but then nobody believed him”.
In contrast to Mussolini’s Italy, France, after they had crossed back over the border and reached Menton, seemed “very cheerful and clean and sane and lov
ely”, Hemingway wrote. The Ford eventually broke down, as Hickok had predicted, but by then they were near Dijon, and Hemingway could take the train back to Paris. When his account of the Italian tour was later included in his collection Men Without Women, he re-titled it ‘Che Ti Dice La Patria?’, a patriotic slogan of D’Annunzio’s – best translated in this context perhaps as ‘What Does Your Country Mean To You?’, though Hemingway himself suggested ‘What Do You Hear From Home?’ or ‘What Doth the Fatherland Say To Thee?’ in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins. The phrase was used in leaflets dropped to Italian troops by air, together with the answer “Tiene Duro” – “Hold Fast”.
But the trip had another purpose, and its most interesting aspects were the ones Hemingway did not include: he spent much of the trip “praying and weeping” over his divorce from Hadley, and at one stage stopped at a roadside shrine near La Spezia to atone for the end of his marriage, returning to the car with tears in his eyes. That he should have prayed at a roadside shrine was a sign of an aspect of his life in Italy which he rarely discussed: it had – supposedly – made him a Roman Catholic.
13
A Grand Religion
“‘I’m going to sleep’ Bill said. He put a newspaper over his face. ‘Listen, Jake’ he said, ‘are you really a Catholic?’ ‘Technically’. ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don’t know’.”
The Sun Also Rises
THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ENCOUNTER of Hemingway’s return to Italy in 1927 was not one of his brushes with Fascist officialdom, or with restaurant owners and prostitutes, but his reunion with a priest: Don Giuseppe Bianchi, the Florentine army chaplain who Hemingway claimed had “baptised” him nearly a decade earlier while he was lying in the field hospital near Treviso after being wounded at the Piave front.