by Richard Owen
Hemingway’s suicide in Idaho in 1961 raised difficult issues for the Catholic church (as did his four marriages). The compromise solution was a brief funeral service rather than a Mass, held not in the church but at the graveside, with three Ave Marias and three Paternosters. Gianfranco Ivancich, learning of Hemingway’s suicide from Il Gazzettino, the Venice paper, immediately flew without baggage to Sun Valley via London, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, sleeping still fully-clothed on Hemingway’s bed, where he felt “as if the spirit or soul of Ernest was physically, bodily present”.
According to Pauline’s biographer Ruth Hawkins, although Hemingway had “embraced Catholicism when it suited him”, he “showed his true feelings when he blamed the breakup of his marriage to Pauline on the church”, claiming that it was Pauline’s insistence on practicing coitus interruptus because of the church’s stance on birth control which had pushed him into the arms of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. Pauline evidently thought so too, telling Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s fourth wife (the two got on surprisingly well), “If I hadn’t been such a bloody fool practicing Catholic, I wouldn’t have lost my husband.” In her memoir How It Was Mary suggests this was a reference to birth control, adding “I wondered but never asked and never heard.”
Whatever proof Don Giuseppe did or did not provide for them in 1927, Hemingway and Pauline were married in Paris on 10 May at the Roman Catholic Church of St Honore d’Eylau, following a civil ceremony in the town hall of the 14th arrondissement. He took a course of instruction with local Catholic clergy beforehand, no doubt assuring them that his conversion during the war had been sincere. Pauline’s parents did not travel to Paris for the wedding. But Mary Pfeiffer evidently reconciled herself to the match – and to Hemingway: “For many months I have been asking Our Heavenly Father to make the crooked ways straight and your life’s pathway one of peace and happiness, and this morning I feel a quiet assurance that my prayers have not been in vain”, she wrote to him after the Paris ceremony.
The following year he started to write A Farewell to Arms, at first called In Another Country, a quotation from Christopher Marlowe: “But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead”. Instead he used that title for his Nick Adams story, and turned to the Oxford Book of English Verse for his tale of the doomed love affair of Frederic and Catherine, settling on George Peele’s poem. Frederic Henry is not overtly Christian, but then he is not an atheist either: as Catherine lies dying in childbirth he begs God not to let her die.
But then A Farewell to Arms was a form of catharsis, a working through – together with the Nick Adams stories – of all his Italian dramas, spiritual, physical and emotional. After his encounter with Don Giuseppe in 1927 and his marriage to Pauline, Hemingway turned his back on Italy. He did not return for twenty years. When he did, it was not Milan or Sicily he took to his heart: it was Venice.
15
Harry’s Bar
“Every time I hear someone say Hemingway sure gave you a lot of free promotion, I say it was me and my bar that promoted him”
Giuseppe Cipriani
ERNEST HEMINGWAY and his wife docked at Genoa in the Polish steamer Jagiello, had his Buick Roadmaster convertible unloaded, hired a chauffeur called Riccardo and set off for Stresa. He was back. The year was 1948, and Hemingway’s wife this time was Mary Welsh – his fourth and last. “Christ, this is a wonderful country”, Hemingway wrote to his friend Colonel Charles Trueman Lanham (known as Buck), a US army officer he had become close to while covering the battles in Normandy during the Second World War.
Hemingway was no longer the strapping youngster who had been wounded on the frontline in 1918, had fallen in love with his nurse but had then married Hadley, taking her to Italy in the 1920s to show her the haunts of his youth. Hemingway – now universally known as Papa – was here fifty years old, bulkier, portlier, and certainly drinking too much, as he did throughout his life. But he was now famous, and looking for inspiration for his next novel – in Italy.
It had been a busy twenty years. In 1928 Hemingway and his second wife Pauline had moved from Paris to Key West in Florida, and Pauline gave birth successively to two sons, Patrick and Gregory, with difficult labours in both cases. Hemingway’s father Ed, dogged by worries over finances and poor health, had shot himself that same year with the pistol his father Anson had carried during the American Civil War. Hemingway became estranged from his mother, who he resented as domineering. His relations with Pauline became strained and he had affairs, notably with Jane Mason, a married woman, while ostensibly on fishing expeditions to Cuba and Bimini.
But he became a celebrity. Hemingway’s fame as a writer began with A Farewell to Arms in 1929 and Death in the Afternoon in 1933. The 1930s took him to Spain and to Africa for safaris in the Serengeti, the latter producing Green Hills of Africa, and his experiences as a reporter in the Spanish Civil War inspiring For Whom the Bell Tolls, perhaps his finest novel. In Spain he also helped to produce a film about the anti-Franco struggle, The Spanish Earth, raising $20,000 in Hollywood for the Republican cause.
Spain brought Hemingway closer to the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who he had first met at Key West when she walked into Sloppy Joe’s bar and found Hemingway drinking there (as he often did), a large man “in untidy, somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt”. In a replay of Pauline’s behaviour in forming a menage a trois with Hemingway and Hadley, Martha became a fixture in the Key West home, becoming Hemingway’s third wife in 1940.
The new couple set up house in Cuba (which Hemingway already knew well from his fishing trips from Florida), renting and then buying Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), a Spanish colonial farmstead twelve miles from Havana. Together they also discovered Sun Valley in Idaho as a holiday getaway, where in the 1950s Hemingway would get to know the actor Gary Cooper, star of the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
This was the shortest of his marriages however, and the Hemingway-Gellhorn union fell apart under the strain of professional rivalry as competing reporters during the Second World War. Hemingway flew on bombing missions with the RAF, but never forgave Martha for the fact that although both took part in the D-Day landings as war correspondents, she managed to get ashore with the troops while he stayed on a hospital ship (though he did later witness the Allied liberation of Normandy and Paris).
There was also Martha’s growing irritation– as Carlos Baker puts it – with the fact that Hemingway’s “egotism often carried him far beyond the call of genius”, as well as with his tendency for “self-dramatisation” and his conviction that “life was stale and weary without manufactured glamour”. During the war in France and the Rhineland, he was accused of often going far beyond his role as a reporter and acting as a combatant, taking command of troops, keeping bazookas and other weapons in his room and at one point throwing grenades into a cellar where SS officers were thought to be hiding.
In 1946 Martha gave way to Mary Welsh, a petite, married Time magazine writer in her thirties whom Hemingway had met in wartime London and again in liberated Paris, where he had taken a room at the Ritz. Mary must have had doubts, not least when Hemingway placed a photograph of her husband, Noel Monks, an Australian reporter for the Daily Mail, on a toilet bowl at the Ritz and fired at it with a pistol.
Hemingway claimed he had personally ‘liberated’ Paris – though in reality he only ‘liberated’ the bar at the Ritz, distributing (and drinking) quantities of champagne. Nonetheless Mary divorced Monks (they had drifted apart in the war) and married Hemingway in Havana. Bizarrely she and two of the other Mrs Hemingways, Hadley and Pauline, all got on well with each other – Pauline at one point even came to live with Hemingway and Mary in Cuba.
But Italy beckoned. Hemingway’s memory of his 1918 Red Cross experiences had stayed with him all his life. While in Cuba he had written the preface to an anthology called Men at War, recalling his trauma, but then observing that “nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me”. It was h
ere that he recorded how the Fossalta di Piave experience had destroyed all “illusion of immortality” for him.
Now he resolved to show Mary, who had never visited the country, the scene of his early brush with death, just as he had shown it to Hadley over twenty years before. If he remembered the disappointment of that trip, he did not share it with Mary, who was enchanted by Italy as they set off in the Buick – royal blue with bright red lining and seats.
Hemingway had at first suggested a break in Provence after admiring a book of Cezanne reproductions. “Why not?” Mary had replied. “Let’s take the Buick. And hire a chauffeur there, so you can look instead of always driving.” Mary (who thought her husband enjoyed martinis rather too much to drive safely) had noticed a smartly painted Polish ship, the Jagiello, which plied from Havana to Genoa via Cannes with an Italian crew and which – “maybe” – could have a car lashed to its forward deck.
And so in September 1948 the Hemingways set off, enjoying stops on the way at Madeira and Lisbon. They had intended to disembark at Cannes for the tour of Provence, but there was a storm, and so they sailed on instead to Genoa, where the warm welcome, the shouts of “che bella macchina” (“what a beautiful car!”) and the sound of “friendly sing song” Italian so entranced Hemingway that he decided to return to Stresa and Lake Maggiore and forget about Provence altogether.
They headed first to Milan, where the publisher Alberto Mondadori told Hemingway he was the most widely read author in Italy, “from common sailors to the nobility”. He had his Italian royalties deposited in a Milan bank to finance his future trips. They then drove (or rather Riccardo drove) to Stresa, where the hotel doorman, to Mary’s astonishment, emerged after a gap of several decades to greet them with “Welcome back, Signor Hemingway”. The tour continued to Como and Bergamo, and then up to Cortina d’Ampezzo, which was much as it had been in 1923 when Hemingway, Hadley and Renata Borgatti had spent the winter there enjoying the fine dining and stunning mountain views.
This time he and Mary stayed not at the Hotel Bellevue but at the equally grand Hotel Concordia, which was officially closed for the autumn but offered to open up just for Hemingway and Mary. Hemingway – apparently forgetting his visits in the 1920s, or choosing to forget them – said he was enjoying the chance to “rediscover” Northern Italy, which he had previously seen only from crowded military trucks or through the dust goggles he had worn while driving his Fiat ambulance.
He now met his Italian translator, Fernanda Pivano, who had been arrested during the Second World War for translating A Farewell to Arms, which the Mussolini regime considered a “defeatist” work. She later said Hemingway had sent her a postcard reading “I’m in Cortina and I would like to meet you”, but she threw it away, thinking it was a joke in poor taste. It was only when Hemingway wrote to her again, saying he would come to Turin (her home town) if she did not come to Cortina, that she realised he really was there and really did want to see her. He wrote to her after their first meeting that she was pretty but also had a good brain, signing himself “Mr Papa”.
He also met Fernanda’s soon to be husband, the noted architect Ettore Sottsass, who would later become an internationally recognised designer for Olivetti, among others. Fernanda and Ettore (who was born in Innsbruck) took Hemingway and Mary on a local tour by car of the Austrian border, past the spectacular Three Peaks of Lavaredo high in the Dolomites to Toblach (Dobbiaco), not far from Bolzano.
They stopped to eat in the town of Bruneck (Brunico) in the Puster Valley, where Mary bought local ceramics, and returned to Cortina late at night via the Campolungo Pass and the ski resort of Arabba. Fernanda’s memories of the trip included a scolding from Hemingway over her refusal to drink: he was convinced that not drinking was “a wretched vice”. “To tell the truth, I was a little bit convinced of it too.”
At Cortina Hemingway got up early, breakfasting on caffe latte and crisp freshly-baked bread with lashings of butter before heading for the bar at the Hotel Posta or La Genzianella cafe. As usual he was taken up by local aristocrats, in this case Count Federico Kechler and his wife Maria Luisa. Hemingway went trout fishing at their private reserve in the Anterselva Valley (or Antholzertal) of South Tyrol high in the Dolomites, and also met Federico’s brothers Alberto and Carlo at other Kechler estates, Fraforeano and San Martino di Codroipo in nearby Friuli. At the Kechler villa at Fraforeano the guest book still has Hemingway’s inscription thanking Alberto and his wife Costanza “for a lovely visit and a good shoot” on 24 October 1948, to which Mary added in French “et sa femme Mary”.
Hemingway, sometimes accused of cultivating aristocrats, had in this case at least not gone out of his way to seek high society – he had simply asked Luigi Zambelli, the owner of a local sports equipment shop, for advice on trout fishing, and had been put in touch with Federico Kechler. They met up in the bar of the Hotel Posta, and got on famously, with Kechler speaking English with “a pure Mayfair accent”. “I think it was simply that Hemingway found in our families people with the means to provide him with hunting and fishing”, Alberto’s daughter Ciccinella Kechler told me at the Fraforeano villa. “It was not snobbery, it was rather that we could help him lead the kind of life he wanted to lead.”
In October 1948 Hemingway and Mary decided to rent a house in Cortina for the winter, choosing the Villa Aprile in the suburb of Donea on the outskirts of the town, with views across gently sloping hills. The rent was paid by Mondadori. Fernanda Pivano, who stayed there, reports that it had a main bedroom, a guest bedroom, a sitting room and a study for Hemingway, who wrote at the villa on his Corona typewriter, a bottle of Valpolicella always on the table. He and Mary ate at a nearby rural trattoria with just two tables in a single room, where his favourite dish was baccala all veneta (dried and salted cod Venetian style), cooked in oil and served with polenta.
It was now that Venice entered his life as much as the Veneto had done. From Cortina they drove down through Belluno and Treviso to La Serenissima, which Hemingway found was “absolutely god-damned wonderful”, especially for those who cared about history. After all, the Grand Canal, he wrote to Fernanda Pivano, had inspired Byron, Browning and D’Annunzio. Mary too was smitten: she describes in her memoir How It Was a city of “exquisite bridges, the moon just after full, coming up grandly over the Grand Canal”.
Indeed, Venice and the Veneto have always held a fatal fascination for writers, from Lord Byron and Henry James to Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde – and now Ernest Hemingway. All of them were enchanted and exhilarated by the lagoon city – yet it also (sometimes later, sometimes at the same moment) aroused in them feelings of sadness and melancholy. As Henry James remarked, Venice has been painted and described so many times that of all the cities of the world it is “the easiest to visit without going there”.
Their favourite places during this first post-war trip would become Hemingway’s Venetian haunts, notably the Hotel Gritti Palace on the Grand Canal. Housed in a Gothic fifteenth-century palazzo, the Gritti was not the home of the Doge, Andrea Gritti, but was commissioned by him and used by ambassadors to the Venetian Republic from the Holy See in Rome. It later became the property of his descendants, the Gritti family, who bought it from an equally prominent Venetian ducal family, the Pisanis, in the nineteenth century and turned it into a hotel. Previous guests had included John Ruskin, author of the three-volume The Stones of Venice, his influential study of Venetian architecture.
The Hemingways, Mary wrote in her diary, were lodged in “a huge inconvenient room just opposite the church of Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal”, with a Venetian chandelier. The location was – and is – stunning : following a meticulous restoration of the hotel in 2012–2013, the Hemingways’ room on the first floor is now the Hemingway Suite, complete with his favourite club chair and – inevitably – a well stocked bar. It was, AE Hotchner recalled, “a large room with high, arching windows facing the Grand Canal, beautifully furnished with Venetian antique furniture”.
&n
bsp; There were few things more pleasant in life, wrote Somerset Maugham, than “to sit on the terrace of the Gritti when the sun about to set bathes in lovely colour the Salute, which almost faces you”. From the terrace today you can admire the Salute to your left and the Guggenheim Museum to your right, housed since 1951 in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which Peggy Guggenheim had bought three years earlier to house her art collection.
The terrace of the Gritti now became Hemingway’s home from home in Venice. So, too, did Harry’s Bar, owned by the Cipriani family; the Rialto fish market; and the Café Florian. As a journalist Mary later wrote a brief history of Harry’s Bar, explaining how Giuseppe Cipriani, the barman at the Europa Hotel on the Grand Canal, had lent money to a hard-up American from Boston called Harry Pickering, who in 1931 not only repaid the loan but helped Cipriani establish the chic and cosy bar named after him.
It soon became the haunt of the rich and famous: “When you push open the narrow glass front door, frosted for the privacy of the guests”, Mary wrote, “you step up onto a slightly heated floor of Roman travertine marble which is twenty nine feet long, shorter than a gondola, and fourteen feet wide ... Anybody who is anybody – as well as anybodies who aren’t anybody – has been a customer at Harry’s.”
Hemingway was particularly fond of martinis at Harry’s Bar. According to Arrigo Cipriani, the son of the founder, the secret lay not only in keeping the bottles in the freezer but also in the 15–1 proportion of gin to vermouth, a cocktail Hemingway took to calling ‘Montgomerys’, an allusion to his assertion that during the Second World War the British field marshal – the victor of El Alamein – had only taken on the enemy if he could be sure of a 15–1 advantage in troop numbers.