by Richard Owen
This reunion was not by chance. On the contrary, it was the real point of the 1927 Italian journey, at least for Hemingway. For Pauline was a Catholic, and to marry Pauline in a Roman Catholic church he needed to prove that by being given extreme unction at the frontline he had in effect been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith. He – and Pauline – evidently hoped that Don Giuseppe would provide a statement to this effect.
Hemingway’s religious life until this point – in so far as he had one – had been entirely Protestant. He had gone to Roman Catholic churches in Paris while Pauline prayed, Hemingway later told AE Hotchner, but his only connection to Catholicism was his love of images of the crucified Jesus such as Mantegna’s masterpiece of perspective Dead Christ, also known as The Lamentation of Christ, which shows the Virgin Mary and St John weeping over the supine body of Jesus.
Hemingway’s mother Grace was a devout Episcopalian, and he was christened at the Oak Park Third Congregational Church on 1 October 1899, his parents’ third wedding anniversary. While working for the Kansas City Star in 1918 he told his mother that although he did not “rave about religion” he was “as sincere a Christian as I can be”. If he failed to attend church on a Sunday it was because he had been up till the early hours helping to get the Sunday edition of the paper out.
“Don’t worry or cry or fret about my not being a good Christian. I am just as much as ever and pray every night and believe just as hard so cheer up!” he told her. On the way to the front in Italy the following year, he again wrote to his mother to assure her that he believed in God and Jesus Christ, and had “hopes for a hereafter”. His marriage to Hadley took place at the Methodist church at Horton Bay in Michigan, and their son John was christened at St Luke’s Episcopal Chapel in Paris.
But Pauline was from a Roman Catholic family: her mother Mary, the daughter of an Irish Catholic, was so devout that her initial reaction when told of her daughter’s involvement with Hemingway was to insist on the sanctity of his marriage to Hadley, though she later accepted that their divorce was inevitable. For all the superficial glamour of her life as a Vogue reporter in Paris, Pauline too was religious, telling Hemingway she prayed every night to St Joseph to give her “a good, kind, attractive Catholic husband”.
What she wanted, Pauline now wrote in one of the letters she sent to Hemingway during the Italian trip, was “conclusive proof ” of his baptism so that they could have a Roman Catholic wedding. “Maybe you could find the priest who baptized you”, she wrote, unaware – or so it would seem – that Hemingway had already thought of this and was on the case.
A brief mention by Hemingway in a recently discovered letter appears to indicate that his encounter with Don Giuseppe Bianchi took place in the tiny republic of San Marino. “Been up at the Republic of San Marino seeing a priest I knew during the war”, Hemingway wrote on Wednesday 23 March to Isidor Schneider, the New York poet and editor. But the “priest I knew during the war” was almost certainly not Don Giuseppe Bianchi but another Don Giuseppe, Don Giuseppe Guidi, who had been the wartime chaplain serving with the San Marino volunteers who ran the field hospital to which Hemingway was taken when he was wounded in 1918, the Villa Toso at Casier.
Guy Hickok had been particularly keen to see San Marino, and so too was Hemingway – not to meet a priest however, but to thank the San Marino doctor who had picked “180 pieces of shell” out of his body at the Villa Toso field hospital (or at least some of them) – the kind of act, Hemingway said, which made for “lasting acquaintances”. When they got to San Marino, they learned that the doctor (probably Dr Amadeo Kraus) had moved away. But they found the pharmacist who had served in the field hospital, Luigi Balsimelli, who Hemingway no doubt wanted to thank for saving him from septicemia and gangrene at the Villa Toso.
They evidently also called on another of Hemingway’s San Marino acquaintances, a man who had served as an Italian army officer during the war – despite the Republic’s neutral stance – and had since risen to be San Marino’s most powerful figure: Giuliano Gozi. “Visited San Marino today”, Hemingway wrote on a postcard to Ezra Pound from Rimini on Tuesday 22 March, adding that he had had tea with the “minister of foreign affairs”.
Some scholars have taken this to be a facetious reference to Mussolini, who at the time combined the foreign affairs portfolio with his role as Duce. It is almost certainly however an allusion not to the Italian dictator but to San Marino-born Gozi, who during the war had fought with Italian Alpini troops on the Austrian front with the rank of lieutenant, and when wounded had been treated by the San Marino hospital volunteers. After the war Gozi rose swiftly to become the tiny Republic’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, head of the San Marino Fascist party and eventually Captain-Regent, or head of state.
During their tour of San Marino, according to Hickok, they were approached by a “small, thin” priest calling out “Tenente!” (“Lieutenant!”) to Hemingway. The priest showed Hemingway and Hickok the high stone towers of San Marino’s fortress, commanding a view across the Adriatic to Yugoslavia, and in the town museum pointed out a “chunk” of the Austrian shell which had struck their field hospital at the front and had been brought back as a souvenir. Asked if he remembered this, Hemingway replied, “That was the day everybody who could got under the beds. My leg was in a big cast and I couldn’t get under the bed. I guess I remember.”
Don Bianchi may have retained his links to the San Marino volunteers, but would not have shown Hemingway and Hickok round the hilltop Republic with the pride of a local cleric. For he was by now not a parish priest but a monk at the Benedictine Olivetan monastery of San Prospero, in the fishing village of Camogli, five kilometres along the Riviera coast from Rapallo, founded in 1883 (and still welcoming guests today).
Don Giuseppe had joined the community of San Prospero after the war, taking the name Brother Gerardo Maria, and by the time of Hemingway’s 1927 visit to Italy had been its head for two years (he was made Prior on 30 June 1925). He died in June 1965, was buried at the order’s main monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in the countryside near Siena, and always refused to discuss his role in Hemingway’s life beyond saying that the writer had been “a very good man”.
The encounter between Hemingway and the priest who had “anointed” him almost certainly took place not at San Marino, nor at Rapallo (as some biographers have suggested) but at Camogli, while Hemingway and Hickok were visiting the Pounds. If Don Giuseppe did provide “conclusive proof ” in written form, it has never come to light however. It has in any case never been clear what action Don Giuseppe did take in 1918: most probably he gave the last rites, or “extreme unction”, to all dying soldiers, a ceremony which Hemingway was able to construe as baptism.
Born in the Florentine suburb of Solliciano, Don Giuseppe first became hospital chaplain at Sarzana, just inland from La Spezia on the main railway line to Pisa. When the First World War broke out he was made chaplain to the 70th Infantry Regiment, the ‘Ancona’ – hence his presence on the frontline when Hemingway was wounded. Arguably he not only “made Hemingway a Catholic”, he saved his life, since it was the priest who found him lying among the war dead and drew the attention of the doctors to the fact that he was still breathing.
The priest would become a character in A Farewell to Arms. In the novel Frederic Henry recalls that the chaplain was “young and blushed easily and wore a uniform like the rest of us but with a cross in dark red velvet above the left breast pocket of his gray tunic”. The real life Don Giuseppe was from Florence: the fictional priest comes from Abruzzo, a detail Hemingway took from another of the frontline priests, Don Giovanni Minozzi, the founder of the soldiers’ refuges. In a lapse of memory Hemingway later confused the two, telling Hotchner that to marry Pauline he had to “try to convince the church elders that when I had been wounded in Italy and transported to a dressing station, where I was lined up with other wounded, a priest from the Abruzzi anointed us while walking along the row of beds”.
In the 1957 film version of A Farewell to Arms the priest – who is not named – is played with panache and an ironic smile by a famous and much-loved Italian actor, Alberto Sordi. In the novel the priest is often mocked by the officers in the mess, who tease him for not joining them to enjoy the girls at the local brothel and accuse the Pope and the Vatican of backing the Austrian side in the war. But the priest befriends Frederic – Hemingway’s alter ego – and invites him to come and visit his family at Capracotta in the mountains of Abruzzo (now in Molise).
They later discuss the case of Archbishop John Ireland (who died in 1918), a former army chaplain who became Archbishop of St Paul, Minnesota and a controversial social reformer – though Frederic feigns more knowledge of the case than he actually has, confining his contributions to, “Yes father. That is true, father. Perhaps, father. No father, well maybe yes, father. You know more about it than I do, father.”
When he heads for the front, Catherine gives him a St Anthony pendant on a gold chain to wear as protection, even though she is not a Catholic. After he is wounded he finds it is missing (“Someone probably got it at one of the dressing stations”). In real life it was in fact Hemingway who had given Agnes a St Anthony pendant, not the other way round. He had no doubt seen, or even prayed at, the shrine to St Anthony which stood at a crossroads at Fossalta, which miraculously survived the shelling which destroyed so much else, and which – although it has since been moved – stilloffers roadside comfort and reassurance to local Italians.
14
Extreme Unction
“Pauline was worth a Mass”
Patrick Hemingway
THE QUESTION REMAINS: how much of a Catholic was Hemingway? According to AE Hotchner, Hemingway told him his task in going to Italy in 1927 was to “prove I was what I wasn’t”. In A Farewell to Arms the priest visits Frederic at the field hospital bearing gifts – mosquito netting, a bottle of vermouth (which they share) and the English newspapers, which he has bought in Mestre. The talk turns to the war, and to faith: asked if he loves God, Frederic replies that he is “afraid of him in the night sometimes”, but cannot love anyone. “You do”, the priest answers, reminding him however that passion and lust for women are not the same as love in the sense of “sacrifice and service”.
They do not pray together, let alone take Communion, though the priest obviously would like to (“‘You do not want me for anything ?’, he asked hopefully”). In the real rather than fictional world however, Hemingway had come to regard the blessing or anointing he received at the hands of Don Giuseppe while lying seriously wounded as his formal entry into the Roman Catholic church. He said in 1926 that he had been given “extreme unction” at the front, that Catholicism was “the most comfortable religion for anyone soldiering” and that while there was a lot of “nonsense” in Catholic doctrine he “could not imagine taking any other religion seriously”.
He spelled Catholicism with a lower case ‘c’, but clearly meant Roman Catholic rather than “catholic” in the broader, Anglican sense. There was, he wrote to Ernest Walsh on 2 January 1926, a lot of “rot” in Catholicism, such as “Holy Years etc”, and he was not what was called a “good” Catholic. But “if anything I am a catholic. Had extreme unction administered to me as such in July 1918 and recovered. So guess I’m a super-catholic.” Shortly afterwards he raised the issue of sainthood with Walsh, saying “Although I am catholic have never had much admiration for martyrs or saints.”
According to his son Patrick, who wrote an introduction to the restored version of A Moveable Feast, “When my father was free to marry my mother, Pauline, he agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism and undergo a course of religious instruction in Paris. Hemingway, of course, as a boy had received quite a bit of religious instruction as a properly brought-up Protestant, but he had received the sacrament of last rites from a Catholic chaplain in the battlefield dressing station during the night after his mortar wound on the Italian front, and like the famous French king whose statue he mentions in the Paris memoir, he knew that Pauline was worth a Mass.”
Not long after the trip to Italy with Hickok, Hemingway admitted to Father Vincent Donovan, a Dominican priest in New York who had questioned him about his faith, that he had not been a good Catholic after his ‘baptism’ by Don Giuseppe during the war. He had failed to attend Communion regularly, he wrote, but had gone to Mass often in the course of 1926 and had finally “put my house in order” in 1927 after meeting Don Giuseppe again. He was, he said, a “very dumb Catholic” who was trying to lead “a good life”. “I have been a Catholic for many years”, he told Father Donovan. Hemingway claimed he had not publicised his faith because he did not wish to be seen as “a Catholic writer”, not least because he could not claim to have “set a good example”.
Much later, in the 1950s, he was visited at his home in Cuba by an American academic, Fraser Drew, who asked if he was a Catholic. “I like to think that I am, insofar as I can be”, Hemingway replied. “I can still go to Mass, although many things have happened about divorces and remarriages.” He told Drew that a Basque priest he had got to know in Spain prayed for him every day, “as I do for him. I can’t pray for myself any more. Perhaps it is because in some way I have become hardened.”
This is reminiscent of Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, who when asked by Count Greffi if he is a believer replies that he is – “at night”. In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes – yet another alter ego – claims he is “pretty religious”: he regrets that he has been “such a rotten Catholic” but says there was nothing he could do about it, “at least for a while, and maybe never”, adding that “anyway it was a grand religion and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would next time”.
Jake prays in the cathedral at Pamplona – “It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows” – but the prayers are for himself, his friends, bullfighting, fishing, a good fiesta and making money, so that he feels ashamed after “kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me”. Hemingway certainly claimed he went to church regularly while in Spain: “Having been to mass this morning I am now due at the bull fight this afternoon”, he wrote to his father from Madrid in May 1926, adding “Wish you were along” (though whether he meant for mass or the bull fight – or both – is not clear).
When he moved from Havana to Idaho at the end of his life, Hemingway could be seen crossing himself every time the news bulletins on the car radio mentioned the impending death of Pope Pius XII. One of his visitors in Idaho was the actor Gary Cooper, the star of the 1932 film version of A Farewell to Arms, who told Hemingway he had converted to Catholicism at his wife’s urging. Hemingway replied that he had done the same thing, adding that he still “believed in belief ”.
For Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway’s Catholicism was his way of distancing himself from – and even “expressing contempt for” – his family’s Protestantism and the moral values of Oak Park. It was also “a means of identifying himself with the Latin ritual, customs and culture of Italy, France and Spain” and nourishing the “medieval superstition” he had developed in place of religion, as well as being “a convenient accommodation which pleased Pauline”. His friend AE Hotchner was blunter, once declaring that while Pauline was a devout Catholic, Hemingway was “a devout nothing”.
According to Hotchner, Hemingway once told him that after marrying Pauline he had suffered a period of impotence, and at Pauline’s urging he had got down on his knees and prayed for potency. After getting back into bed they had made love “as if they invented it”. “That is why I became a Catholic”, Hemingway told Hotchner. Hemingway’s son Gregory said his father believed in Catholicism “the way he believed in a glass of whisky on a cold day”.
In his book Hemingway’s Dark Night however, Matthew Nickel argues that Hemingway was much more than a “nominal Catholic”: over a period of forty years he attended Mass regularly, celebrated saint’s da
ys, and donated thousands of dollars to Catholic churches in Key West and Idaho. He was uncomfortable with the Spanish Church’s support for the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It was not very Catholic or Christian “to kill the wounded in the hospital in Toledo with hand grenades or to bomb the working quarter of Madrid for no military reason except to kill poor people”, he wrote to fellow novelist Harry Sylvester in February 1937. Priests and bishops had also been killed in Spain, Hemingway acknowledged, but he could not understand why the church was “on the side of the oppressors instead of for the people”.
There can be little doubt that facing death when he was struck by an Austrian mortar at the front in July 1918 gave him a private revelation of faith in extremis. In a fragment published in the collection In Our Time he – or the unnamed narrator – calls on “sweet Jesus” for help during a bombardment at Fossalta: “Dear Jesus please get me out. Christ please please please Christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear Jesus. The shelling moved further up the line ... The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
Hemingway was furious when in 1949 Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York – a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Hemingway despised – recruited seminarians to break a strike by “Communist” gravediggers in Queens. Hemingway wrote – though apparently did not send – a scathing letter to the cardinal from Havana accusing him of “arrogance, indolence and fatness”, and ending “You will never be Pope as long as I am alive.”
Yet he still had Masses said for friends and family, ate fish on Fridays, and “visited and revisited important pilgrimage sites and cathedrals”. In Paris, Nickel suggests, Hemingway was also profoundly influenced by the “equally idiosyncratic Catholicism” of the poet Baudelaire, and his own fiction is imbued with a sense of original sin and repentance. When torn between Hadley and Pauline he found comfort in Paris in the church of Saint-Sulpice in the Luxembourg Quarter, he later told Hotchner – “twin towers, three tiers of elegant columns, massively delicate” – which had a faded inscription over the entrance celebrating the immortality of the soul, in which he “devoutly believed”.