Hemingway in Italy

by Richard Owen

  They took a tourist boat trip across the lagoon from the Fondamente Nuove (still the point of departure for lagoon vaporettos today), past Murano, the glass-blowing island, and Burano, the lace island, to lunch at the inn on Torcello, which like Harry’s Bar was owned by the Ciprianis. On Torcello he was much taken by the magnificent mosaics at the former Cathedral (or Basilica) of Santa Maria Assunta, especially those depicting the Last Judgement and the Virgin Mary, and by the so-called Throne of Attila, the fifth-century stone which stands in front of the cathedral, and which although it was probably never used by the leader of the Huns certainly dates to the earliest Torcello settlement.

  “Venice is more beautiful, and more mixed up, than I could have imagined”, Mary told her diary in October 1948. “There is not only the Cafe Florian, rather like Maxim’s in Paris, where Casanova used to eat and drink. There are the thirteenth-century mosaics, Byzantine, in St Mark’s along with the mosaics copied from modern eighteenth-century painters showing all of Noah’s story, the ark and afterwards, also the whole story, in precise lines, of Adam and Eve.” There was also the Ducal (Doge’s) Palace, and the mellow sound of the bells.

  To his delight Hemingway was made a Knight of the Order of Malta (Cavaliere di Gran Croce al Merito), and despite the fact that he had only been a Red Cross ambulance driver up in the Dolomites somehow persuaded himself he had defended Venice itself in his youth by standing chest deep in the salt marshes of the lagoon at Capo Sile.

  But he did also once again revisit the real site of his youthful heroism at Fossalta di Piave, which as on his previous sentimental journey in the 1920s he found had been rebuilt, this time after another world war. The crater where the Austrian mortar had exploded next to him on that now distant night was now covered with grass.

  He wanted to defecate symbolically at the spot, but instead settled for digging a hole with a stick and inserting a 1000 lire note to symbolise having left blood and money in Italian soil. He now began to develop the idea of a story which would take as its theme the impact on a man of fifty – himself – both of Venice and of the re-visited scenes of his youthful wartime exploits in the Veneto over thirty years before: Across The River and Into the Trees.

  16

  Adriana and Renata

  “I hope you will like this book. Do you know Venice? It is about Venice and it seems very simple unless you know what it is all about. It is really about bitterness, soldiering, honour, love and death”

  Hemingway to General Eric Dorman O’Gowan (‘Chink’), 2 May 1950

  HEMINGWAY SPENT THE REST of October at the Locanda Cipriani on Torcello, writing in the morning and duck shooting in the afternoon. He had thought of moving on to Portofino, but settled for Torcello the moment he saw the quarters – a sitting room with a fireplace and French windows overlooking the gardens and the Cathedral, not to mention a bedroom with two big beds and an adjoining yellow bathroom. According to Mary, at Torcello Hemingway told her stories of his boyhood in Oak Park – though “in such precise detail that I could never detect when he skidded off fact into fiction”.

  Mary went off for a few days to Florence in the Buick (Riccardo again at the wheel) to stay with Alan Moorehead, the Australian-born war correspondent and author, and his wife Lucy (Milner), who had rented the Villa Diana at Fiesole, once the home of the Medici poet Angelo Ambrogini, or Poliziano. The Mooreheads had rented the villa in September 1948, moving in with their children, John and Caroline, later the distinguished author and biographer of Martha Gellhorn.

  Moorehead, who admired A Farewell to Arms and was attempting to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps with action novels such as The Rage of the Vulture, had visited the Hemingways at Cortina with Lucy. He found Hemingway “a walking myth of himself ”, his layers of clothing festooned with duck shooting cartridges and teals and mallards, his beard flecked with snow – though Moorehead also saw the serious and dedicated writer beneath the layers, a man who “writes and re-writes for as long as his brain will work, knowing that it is only by a miracle that he will ever achieve a phrase, or even a word, that will correspond to the vision in his mind”.

  Nonetheless Hemingway did not accompany Mary to Fiesole, preferring to stay behind in Venice and write. At the Villa Diana the Mooreheads’ guests included JB Priestley who – apparently forgetting he had once threatened to sue Mary for a waspish Time magazine piece about him – offered to introduce Mary to the art historian and critic Bernard Berenson, now aged 83, at his palatial home in Fiesole, the Villa I Tatti.

  Mary found Berenson – in “faultless blue suit, gray fedora and gray suede gloves” – in the garden, introducing herself as Mrs Hemingway. When Berenson asked her “What number?” she was baffled, thinking he perhaps numbered his guests. He explained that he wished to know which number wife she was, and when she answered “number four” Berenson expressed wonder at Hemingway’s ability to “get through so many wives”.

  Mary explained that Ernest was “a man of tremendous energy and exuberance”, leading Berenson to ask bluntly whether he “demonstrated these characteristics in bed”. They arrived at the villa before she could think of a reply, but “Lucy, noticing my strawberry-red face, giggled knowingly”. Hemingway evidently later regretted not having gone to Fiesole with Mary: he much admired Berenson, he wrote to the art connoisseur later, but did not much care for Florence, being “an old Veneto boy myself ”.

  The Hemingways then returned to Cortina, where on a rainy Saturday afternoon in December Hemingway went partridge and duck shooting with Carlo Kechler, Count Federico’s brother, and another Veneto aristocrat he had got to know well, Baron Nanuk Franchetti, on the Franchetti estate at San Gaetano near Caorle. And it was here that Hemingway became acquainted with the young woman who would capture his heart: Adriana Ivancich, better known as Renata, the beguiling heroine of Across the River and Into the Trees.

  Adriana was the only woman present that day at the duck shoot. She was eighteen, Hemingway forty-nine. She had never been on a shoot before; bedraggled and fed up at being whacked on the head by ejected cartridge cases, she was drying her hair before an open fire in the kitchen of the hunting lodge when Hemingway saw her. When Adriana told him she could do with a comb, Hemingway gave her some whisky to warm her up and broke his own comb in two for her to use, a gesture he came to see as offering a love token.

  Adriana was a slender, dark beauty with a narrow, pale face and hazel eyes. Softly spoken, she was always drawing small cartoons and sketches. Adriana had been educated in Switzerland and at a Catholic girls’ day school in Venice, and at the time she met Hemingway was still leading a chaperoned life under the eye of her widowed mother, Dora, who Hemingway had met at Cortina in the 1920s, together with Dora’s sister in law, Emma Ivancich.

  Adriana’s illustrious and wealthy family had originally come from the island of Lussino (Mali Losinj) off the coast of Dalmatia, now in Croatia but at the time a Venetian possession. The Ivancichs established themselves in Venice itself at the beginning of the 1800s in a sixteenth-century canalside palazzo in the Calle del Rimedio just off the Piazza San Marco, the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich. It is still owned by the family and still has its sixteenth-century Sansovino ceiling decorations and the family crest, but is used for exhibitions and cultural events such as the Venice Biennale.

  The Ivancichs also had a magnificent villa and estate at San Michele al Tagliamento, the Villa Mocenigo (or Villa Biaggini) on the Tagliamento River opposite the ancient Roman river port of Latisana. The great villa was designed by Baldassare Longhena, the seventeenth-century architect of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, which Hemingway could see to the left from his window at the Gritti Palace on the other side of the Grand Canal. Originally built at the end of the sixteenth century for the aristocratic Mocenigo family, which provided a series of Venetian Doges, the villa was bought in the nineteenth century by Vincenzo Biaggini, a businessman from Padua who modernised the farm and estate.

  It then passed to the Ivancichs when Biaggin
i’s daughter, Elina, married Giacomo Ivancich, Adriana’s grandfather. During the First World War the villa was used as an Italian and then an Austro-Hungarian army field hospital, but in the Second World War it was destroyed by American bombers aiming at a nearby bridge. The Ivancich family were left with the chapel and the typically Venetian colonnaded barns and stables (barchesse) which were designed – like the villa itself – by Longhena, and which are still preserved, together with the cantina or winery.

  Just over the Tagliamento River in Friuli was the Kechler estate at San Martino di Codroipo, and almost on the lagoon itself was the Franchetti estate at San Gaetano, near the lagoon port of Caorle. Raimondo Franchetti, a noted Italian explorer, had given his children exotic names – including his son Nanuk, from the Inuit for polar bear. It was a close-knit world of Venetian aristocrats: Gianfranco Ivancich’s wife Cristina, herself from a distinguished Cuban family, later married Nanuk Franchetti after she and Gianfranco had separated in the 1960s.

  Hemingway also got to know the di Robilants. Carlo di Robilant would become the model for Count Andrea in Across the River (“a very tall man with a ravaged face of great breeding”), while Franchetti was Baron Alvarito, a shy man “beautifully built in his town clothes”. Their estates now became an essential part of Hemingway’s life, as did the Kechlers, the Franchettis, the di Robilants and the Ivancichs – above all Adriana.

  It was not a romantic first encounter. Adriana had agreed to meet them at the crossroads at Latisana, close to her home at the Villa Mocenigo. But she was left standing in the rain after Hemingway stayed much too long with Carlo Kechler at Codroipo and then with Alberto Kechler at Fraforeano – also in nearby Friuli – before making the drive to the Franchetti estate. Hemingway apologised, saying to her (in a remark which curiously foreshadowed his novel about her), “I understand you live across the river”.

  Hemingway, she wrote later in her memoir La Torre Bianca (The White Tower), was not as old as she first thought, and had a friendly manner and penetrating eyes. She recalled almost giving up as she waited in the rain, crossing over the bridge several times to look in the Latisana shop windows but then returning. When the blue Buick eventually arrived Hemingway apologised – “terribly sorry Adriana, it’s all my fault” – and she forgave him. “So this was Hemingway, the man all Venice was talking about.”

  As they got to know each other better Adriana found him gentle and understanding in manner, “tall and big, sweet and sometimes almost timid”. She instinctively understood him, and often finished his sentences for him. He, for his part, was entranced, not to say infatuated – he later wrote to Adriana to say that his son Gregory thought she was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, a sentiment with which Hemingway wholeheartedly agreed.

  But he treated Adriana with paternalism, calling her “Daughter”, a term of endearment he had begun using toward all young women. It was in his fiction rather than real life that he – or at least Richard Cantwell, yet another of his alter egos – would have a sexual encounter with Adriana, in a gondola, giving her the name ‘Renata’ – literally ‘reborn’ in Italian, symbolising the spirit of Venice and the lagoon as well as the innocence, idealism and courage he felt he had lost because of war and the subsequent embitterments of life.

  Cantwell meets Renata/Adriana at Harry’s Bar in Across the River: “Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had a pale, almost olive-coloured skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s, heart, and her dark hair, of an alive texture, hung down over her shoulders.” Her musical voice reminds him of Pablo Casals playing the cello. “I had so much life, so much enthusiasm that I transmitted it to him”, the real Adriana said later. “He had begun writing again and suddenly everything seemed easy”.

  For Irina Ivancich, Adriana’s niece, there is no doubt that despite the obvious mutual attraction, “Adriana was much more than just an amica for Hemingway, she was a literary and artistic figure in her own right.” Adriana and her older brother Gianfranco (Irina’s father), she says, were “well read, cultured and outward looking – they were people Hemingway could relate to and in whose company he felt comfortable”. Hemingway held an undoubted fascination for both Adriana and Gianfranco, but “he was part of the tapestry of the Ivancich family, not the other way round. The Ivancichs were associated with many writers and artists – D’Annunzio, Pound, Marinetti”. As Carlos Baker notes in the introduction to Hemingway’s Selected Letters, in the final decade of his life Hemingway “wrote often to Adriana and Gianfranco Ivancich, the sister and brother who formed the nucleus of what he called the ‘Venetian branch’ of his family”.

  On that fateful rainy winter’s day on the Franchetti estate Hemingway asked Adriana to meet Mary over lunch: she brought with her her scrapbook, to which Hemingway added his autograph. He and Mary then spent a quiet 1948 Christmas at Cortina, drinking lots of Bloody Marys. He read the English version of Elio Vittorini’s anti-Fascist novel Conversations in Sicily in galley proof, and wrote an introduction praising the way Vittorini (who modelled his narrative style on Hemingway’s) had captured the essence of Sicily, from its “wine, bread, salt and vinegar” to the sea, hills and valleys, porcupines, grouse and “the smell of sweet grass and fresh-smoked leather”.

  Early in 1949 Mary had a skiing accident, breaking her right anklebone, and a few months later, in March, Ernest suffered both a severe chest cold and an eye infection, erisypelas, going to Padua for treatment. He also found time to visit Verona, where he admired the Roman amphitheatre and enjoyed the 12 Apostoli restaurant, founded in the eighteenth century by twelve Verona merchants. The owner, Giorgio Gioco, was surprised to see a “big man in shirtsleeves” fetching a bottle of Amarone from the cellar but good naturedly cooked him a meal of steak and “risotto all’Amarone” to go with it.

  Mary stayed in Venice, where at the Gritti Palace she encountered the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the celebrated author of Main Street, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. Hemingway had first got to know Lewis in his Paris years with Hadley in the 1920s, but disliked both the man and his work.

  Lewis informed Mary that although he loved Hemingway, he had not written enough, was a snob, and moreover had never thanked Lewis properly for his praise of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Lewis suggested it must be dreadful for Mary to be married to a genius, and left her to pay the bill. “Mary ended up paying for all his drinks”, Hemingway told his publisher Charles Scribner in July 1949. “I told the bartender that if he ever showed again to give him a Mickey Finn which he promised to do.”

  17

  Across the River

  “Hemingway was not much of a hunter”

  Fiorindo Silotto, 1950s boatman at San Gaetano

  THE EYE INFECTION and treatment in Padua had interrupted Hemingway’s befriending of Adriana. But on his return from hospital in Padua Hemingway had lunch at the Gritti with both her and her older brother Gianfranco, 28, who had fought in an Italian tank regiment at the battle of El Alamein but had joined the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) and become an anti-Nazi partisan in the Veneto. Gianfranco would enjoy Hemingway’s company, Adriana assured her brother, adding “He is truly intelligent, and he amuses me.”

  The two men did indeed hit it off at once. Gianfranco, who was evacuated from Africa by the Red Cross, had been wounded in the leg, just as Hemingway himself had been in the First World War – a coincidence, Gianfranco says in his memoir, which made them “comrades in arms”.

  After the war Gianfranco had returned to the family estate at San Michele al Tagliamento, the Villa Mocenigo, to find not only that it had been bombed by mistake by American warplanes but also that his and Adriana’s father, Count Carlo Ivancich, had been murdered in an alleyway in the town during the chaos of war. One theory is that he was killed by local criminals who had stolen provisions and money Carlo had given to partisans fighting the Fascists – though th
e family is convinced he was a victim of infighting among the partisans themselves, with Communist partisans targeting him for supporting their more democratic rivals.

  Hemingway helped Gianfranco both financially and with his career. The younger man, by coincidence, had been offered a job with the Venetian Sidarma shipping agency in Cuba, and was amazed to find that Hemingway lived there. “I had not the faintest idea that the celebrated author had a house at Havana”, he writes in his memoir. “In fact I knew very little about him, though I had read his books.” Hemingway invited Gianfranco to Cuba, and eventually helped him to buy a farm there. It was behaviour which showed the generous side of his character – but was clearly also a way of staying close to Adriana.

  Hemingway became something of a regular at the Franchetti estate. Giovanni Simoncin, who carved decoy ducks to entice real ducks for hunters to shoot, once recalled the day when Baron Franchetti came to his house at Trepalade with a tall, bearded man and introduced him as “my friend Ernest”. “But I already know your mother”, Hemingway told Simoncin, explaining that he was writing at Torcello, where Simoncin’s mother, a lace embroiderer, also sold Torcello souvenirs. “They often used to hunt in the Baron’s estate at San Gaetano near Caorle”, Simoncin told local historian Camillo Pavan.

  He also hunted hares and pheasants at the eighteenth-century villa and riverside estate of Alberto Kechler (known as Titi) in the medieval village of Fraforeano, where Alberto’s daughters Ciccinella and Donatella told me they remember the flagon of red wine which staff were instructed to leave outside Hemingway’s bedroom door, and which was invariably empty by the morning.