Hemingway in Italy

by Richard Owen

  The day after the gondola ride Cantwell and Renata meet for breakfast at Florian’s, but the colonel finds St Mark’s square flooded and “sad”. They return to the Gritti, where Cantwell assures Renata that his last wife has been exorcised from his memory following their divorce – she was a journalist who had only married him to have better contacts, ambitious but talentless, he tells her (presumably an unkind dig at Pauline), using the line from Marlowe which haunted Hemingway all his life: “But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.”

  After they say goodbye, with Renata in tears, Cantwell takes her portrait with him on the road back to Trieste. But his final instruction to his driver Jackson, when he realises he is about to die, is to return the painting and the shotguns he has borrowed from Baron Alvarito for duck shooting back to the Gritti Palace hotel, “where they will be claimed by their rightful owner”.

  “Adriana was one of the most beautiful women in Italy, and Hemingway fell in love with her”, Gianfranco Ivancich once said. “That’s it. He called her ‘daughter’, though it was more like the relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter.” “For my sister it was a platonic friendship and nothing more”, Adriana and Gianfranco’s brother Giacomo told Il Giornale in 2014, his memory of Hemingway’s intimate involvement with his family still vivid at the age of 82.

  For Giacomo, who had a long and distinguished career as an Italian diplomat, the “notorious” love scene in the gondola was a scandal which his family had to endure for years. But it was “pure literary fantasy”, he insisted. Adriana’s relationship with Hemingway was romantic but above all “spiritual” and idealised. Gianfranco Ivancich also repeated many times that his sister’s relationship with Hemingway had been platonic.

  But then Renata is also a symbol of Venice, which is itself a symbol of feminine allure. Renata says she has “risen from the sea”. But Across the River is, in the end, a meditation on how to face death, with Venice as a labyrinthine Isle of the Dead. As John Paul Russo has pointed out, the novel begins and ends in the swamp on which Venice is built, a traditional Western symbol for “pollution, disease and death”. Cantwell looks back at what he has lost – his women, his youth, his health, his generalship – and defies death while at the same time longing for it, conceiving death as a process of watery decomposition.

  “Yesterday I died with my Colonel for the last time and said goodbye to the girl”, Hemingway wrote to Marlene Dietrich from the Hotel Gritti on 1 July 1950 after putting the final touches to the novel. The Colonel has – like Hemingway himself – revisited the place where he was wounded in the First World War. But if this is an attempt to ward off decay and decomposition it does not work in the novel, any more than it did in real life.

  At the start of the novel, as Cantwell and Jackson are entering Venice, they pass the boats and fishing nets on the canal carrying water from the Brenta, and he thinks of the “long stretch of the Brenta where the great villas were, with their lawns and their gardens and the plane trees and the cypresses. I’d like to be buried out there, he thought. I know the place very well.”

  19

  The White Tower

  “I simply uncorked the bottle”

  Adriana Ivancich

  IN APRIL 1949 the Hemingways returned to Cuba on the Jagiello from Genoa, where Fernanda Pivano found Mary packing an “enormous bag” with Venetian glass and lace as souvenirs of their trip.

  In Havana they were visited by Nanuk Franchetti, and by Adriana’s brother Gianfranco, who in return for help with his visa (and Martinis “made almost purely of gin”) corrected errors in Italian language and geography in the typescript of Across the River and Into the Trees. In the end Gianfranco became something of a permanent fixture at the Finca, staying there for three years before buying a farm with Hemingway’s help (the loan was repaid) and meeting a Cuban girl, Marquise Cristina Sandoval y de la Torriente, a descendant of the Spanish Conquistadores whom he married in 1956.

  On this occasion the Havana interlude did not last long however. In November 1949 Hemingway travelled to New York to make the sea journey across the Atlantic back to Europe, though not before holding a supper party where the guests included Marlene Dietrich in a full length mink coat. He sailed back to Le Havre with Mary on the Ile de France on 19 November and they headed for Paris and the Ritz, where he worked on Across the River. They then returned to Venice – this time in a Packard with a new driver, Georges – via Paris, Avignon, Nice, and Nervi on the Italian Riviera, where they spent New Year’s Eve.

  They again met up with the Franchettis and the Kechlers, and entertained their friends – including Adriana – at the Locanda Cipriani on Torcello. Hemingway, Arrigo Cipriani later recalled, would often write all night at the Locanda and then sleep late. Cipriani’s aunt Gabriella, who ran the restaurant, told the waiters to keep their voices down so as not to wake Hemingway, especially if there were more than three empty bottles of Amarone di Valpolicella outside his room. His favourite food at lunch or dinner was risotto and fried fish followed by crepes.

  Mary was tolerant of Hemingway’s platonic infatuation with Adriana, at whom he often gazed during the long meals with friends as if lovestruck. But she was rather more wary of “predatory females” such as Princess Aspasia, mother of King Peter of Yugoslavia, who offered to build Hemingway a “special house” in her garden if he would live there.

  In February 1950 Hemingway and Mary went back to Cortina, and stayed two weeks, this time at the Hotel Posta. Mary went skiing while Hemingway stayed in bed writing. In a spate of bad luck Ernest developed another skin infection, for which he was given penicillin, and Mary again broke her ankle (this time the left one) while skiing and spent three weeks in a cast.

  The Hemingways returned to Paris and then the US and Cuba from Le Havre on the Ile de France on 21 March 1950 – seen off, somewhat to Mary’s irritation, by Adriana, who made the long journey to Le Havre with a girlfriend. Back in Havana Hemingway published two childrens’ stories for Holiday magazine, illustrated by Adriana: ‘The Good Lion’, written for Adriana’s nephew Gherardo Scapinelli (the son of her sister Francesca), which features an African lion who eats pasta and scampi and has wings which enable him to fly to Venice; and ‘The Faithful Bull’, written for the daughter of Carlo di Robilant.

  Whilst helping Gianfranco get a job with a shipping company, Hemingway wrote to Adriana in June 1950, adding “Am prejudiced about you because I am in love with you ... I love you very much”. “I will always love you in my heart and I cannot help that”, he wrote the same month in a letter signed “Mister Papa”, which Adriana reproduced in her memoir. But he would try not to say it to her personally or even write it again in a letter. “All I will try to do is try to serve you well and be happy company when we meet ... I get terribly lonely for you sometimes so it is unbearable. But if there is nothing to be done about that there is nothing to be done.” Gianfranco, he told Buck Lanham, was “the brother of a girl I know in Venice (a town I left my heart in and haven’t been able to find the son of a bitch yet)”.

  But Hemingway was suffering from moods of depression and melancholy, aggravated by his irritation over negative reviews of Across the River, even though the TLS compared its “swan song mood” to Sophocles and Shakespeare and it was praised by old army buddies, including Buck Lanham. Always accident prone, he slipped on his boat, the Pilar, while on a fishing trip and suffered a deep scalp wound as well as pains in his swollen right leg: an X ray found fragments of the 1918 mortar shell.

  Adriana, who had designed the front cover for the US edition of Across the River, a drawing of a Venetian canal, arrived in Havana in October 1950 on the Luciano Manara, chaperoned as ever by her mother Dora. “If Ernest’s eyes misted over with emotion, I did not see it”, Mary wrote in her memoirs. She had been less than keen on the visit – “the idea of two Venetian ladies traipsing down to Cuba to visit us seemed utterly irrational to me” – and when Hemingway suggested it she insisted that the invitati
on come from both of them, “for propriety”.

  For Adriana the sight of the Cuban coastline that late October morning – “the new world” – was a moment of “great emotion”. Her happiness was tinged with sadness, however: “if it had not been for Gianfranco, Papa Hemingway and Mary, I would have been happy to sail on like that for years, perhaps – who knows – forever”.

  Hemingway was careful never to be alone with Adriana. Instead she stayed in the guesthouse, a tower, with her pencils and paints, and Hemingway told her they were equal partners in ‘White Tower Inc’. Her presence inspired him to take up The Old Man and the Sea – said to be based on Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of his fishing boat, the Pilar – after 16 years and complete it.

  It was now that Hemingway’s son Gregory found her lovely, according to his later account of his father, Papa. She was rather dull, he thought (Hemingway did not tell her that bit), but undoubtedly attractive with dark hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, a “thin but not too angular face”, and “a lovely smile that betrayed no conceit or over-awareness of her lineage”. Hemingway kept stroking her hand, gave a dinner dance in her honour, but went no further.

  Cubans found this rather pathetic. Mario Menocal, a friend in Havana, said Adriana was “very good-looking, super-sexy in a very Italian way” as well as bright and witty, and was able to “run rings” round her older admirer. The result, Menocal thought, according to Jeffrey Meyers, was that Hemingway was made to look a fool with his “fawning, self-deceiving attitude”: she accepted his hospitality and generosity but “gave nothing in return”.

  Mary meanwhile continued to put up with Hemingway’s infatuation, turning the other cheek even when in a fit of temper (made worse by the poor reviews for Across the River) he hurled Mary’s typewriter on the floor and threw wine in her face while Adriana and her mother were at the Finca.

  For Dora the last straw was a letter she received from a friend in Venice telling her that the talk of the town was Hemingway’s portrayal of Adriana as Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees, and in particular the love scene with the Colonel in the gondola. “We must leave here immediately”, Dora told her daughter. In vain Adriana protested that she had never been in a gondola with Hemingway: “You are still only a girl and I have to defend your reputation” was her mother’s firm reply.

  The two Ivancich women moved to an hotel, and returned to Italy in February 1951 after a stay in Cuba of some four months. “What happened when we met is a little more than a romance”, Adriana wrote later. “I broke down his defenses: he stopped drinking when I asked him to. I am proud to say that I led him to write The Old Man and The Sea ... He said words flowed out of him easily thanks to me. I simply uncorked the bottle.”

  It was a pity, Mary said as Adriana and Dora left Cuba, that Hemingway had not taken her advice and portrayed Renata as a red-haired girl from Trieste so as to avoid any possible identification with Adriana. Yes, Adriana concluded, but “a novel is a novel”, and if people insist on finding real life parallels “where the devil does that leave the freedom of the writer?”

  “A novel is a novel”. Yet the relationship with Adriana nonetheless caused scandalised gossip, which Adriana bore in silence. It was only many years later, in 1980, that she gave her side of the story in her Italian-language memoir entitled – appropriately enough – La Torre Bianca, or The White Tower. “Naturally he wrote it for me, thinking of me”, she said of Across the River, “but I didn’t like the book and told him so”.

  After an unsuccessful first marriage, Adriana married a German count named Rudolf von Rex and had two sons by him. They lived on a farm near Orbetello on the Tuscan coast, where in the distant 1920s Hemingway and his then wife Hadley had joined Ezra and Dorothy Pound on the trail of the Italian condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta. Maintaining a palazzo in Venice, Adriana said, was out of the question: “It is the general Venetian tragedy – pollution, foundations crumbling, walls falling to pieces”.

  She continued to maintain that she and Hemingway had only ever kissed: “He never did the slightest thing that might oblige me to be defensive”, she said, a denial uncannily reminiscent of Agnes von Kurowsky’s protests that she had not had sex with Hemingway back in 1918 (“I was not that kind of girl”). The love scene under the blanket in the gondola was pure invention, Adriana said. In La Torre Bianca Adriana admits she told a handsome young friend of her brother’s to whom she was attracted that although she was not Renata, the physical description of the character was based on her. But she had never considered marriage to Hemingway, who had once asked her to be his wife but was married already, and who was in any case “too old. It was unthinkable”. Hemingway however continued to write her effusive letters, writing at one point, “I love you more than the moon and the sky and for as long as I shall live.”

  Mary took it all philosophically, describing the idea that her husband had proposed to Adriana as “nonsense”. “Ernest was fond of her, as he was fond of quite a few young women. He certainly didn’t make this one a problem for me.” Although Venetian parents were strict, she wrote in her article about Harry’s Bar and its clientele, they allowed their daughters to go to the bar because “all Venice would know at once if they misbehaved”. In 1949, she recalled, Hemingway had flirted at Harry’s Bar with “a striking beauty” sipping orange juice. He was accosted by yet another of his aristocratic friends, Prince Tassilo Furstenberg, who remarked “I see you’ve made friends with my daughter Ira.” It turned out later that Ira was fourteen.

  Another of Hemingway’s teenage Venetian friends was Afdera Franchetti, the sister of Nanuk. Afdera claimed that she, together with Adriana, was the model for Renata, and that the character was a composite portrait of both of them. Hemingway, she said, was in love with her, she had visited him in Cuba, and they had spent a month together in Paris, winning millions of francs at the Auteuil racecourse. Hemingway found all this amusing, telling Adriana that Afdera (who later married the actor Henry Fonda) had to be allowed her fantasies.

  To spare Adriana embarrassment, Hemingway had forbidden the publication of Across the River and Into the Trees in Italian for at least two years: in the event it was not issued in Italy until 1965. He never saw Adriana again after their last meeting in June 1954 at the Hotel Savoia Beeler in Nervi on the Italian Riviera, where Hemingway and Mary spent the night before boarding a ship back to Havana. She published a volume of poetry, but her second marriage was no happier than her first. In 1983 she took her own life and is buried at Porto Ercole, in Tuscany.

  Thirty years earlier, in 1953, her volume of poetry was published by Mondadori – Hemingway’s own Italian publisher - entitled I Have Seen Heaven and Earth (Ho guardato il cielo e la terra). The setting of much of the verse is inevitably Venice, with sympathetic and perceptive portrayals of fishermen, soldiers and gypsies. But there are also intensely personal reflections: of the murder of her father, Carlo, she writes, “Per la prima volta/avevamo dovuto comprendere/il valore del tempo/e che le favole non esistono piu” – “For the first time we were made to understand the value of time/and that fairy tales no longer exist”.

  Despite her natural reserve Adriana’s verses, the Venetian literary critic Gian Antonio Cibotto wrote, reveal her sensations and states of mind with “open self-disclosure”. “Ti ringrazio, mio caro amico” runs one verse, “perche quando mi guardi negli occhi tu credi in me” – “I thank you, my dear friend, because when you look into my eyes, you believe in me”.

  20

  Scampi and Valpolicella

  “Since trip to Italy have been studying the life of Dante. Seems to be one of the worst jerks that ever lived, but how well he could write! This may be a lesson to us all”

  Hemingway to John Dos Passos, 17 September 1949

  ITALY WAS STILL ON HEMINGWAY’S mind in the 1950s. “We have lovely weather now and the sky is almost like Italy”, he wrote in October 1952 to Bernard Berenson, who had praised The Old Man and the Sea as “a short but not small masterpiec
e”. “I ought to be in Italy now”, Hemingway added, “but I have to try to run my life so that it does not ruin everyone else’s life. But this is when I miss Italy the most.”

  In 1953 he set off first for Spain, despite his fear that he might be detained because of the Republican sympathies he had displayed. Gianfranco and the Kechlers’ driver, Adamo De Simon, met the Hemingways at Le Havre on 30 June 1953 in a Lancia Aurelia, and after loading a “mountain of bags” on top of it they drove to Madrid by way of Chartres, Poitiers and the Loire Valley.

  In Madrid he stayed at the Hotel Florida – which had been the journalists’ bolt hole during the Spanish Civil War, and the scene of his affair with Martha Gellhorn – and admired the paintings at the Prado, especially Andrea del Sarto’s Portrait of a Woman, which reminded him of Adriana. In the Sierra de Guadarrama he showed Mary the bridge Robert Jordan and his fellow anti-Franco guerrillas blow up in For Whom the Bell Tolls, persuading himself that he had actually fought in the civil war instead of simply reporting it.

  He then returned to France, taking a ship in August 1953 from Marseilles via Genoa to Mombasa in Kenya. Hemingway’s son Patrick had used his inheritance from Pauline to buy a farm in East Africa, running safaris with the help of Philip Percival, a noted big game hunter (the ‘Pop’ of Green Hills of Africa). The safari went well, at least for Hemingway: he shot rhinos, lions and zebras, hunted leopards with a spear and enjoyed wild nights with a Masai girl called Debba while Mary was in Nairobi. He and Mary then flew in a Cessna to Mwanza on Lake Victoria and then to Bukavu in the Congo, and headed for the Murchison Falls on the Nile in Uganda.

  But the Cessna crashed three miles from the Falls when their pilot swerved to avoid a flock of ibis and struck an old telegraph wire. The pilot warned them they were going to crash: “I turned my face away from the windshield and covered my eyes with my arms”, Mary wrote later in her memoirs. “In rending, smashing, crashing noises we came to a stop among low trees and bushes.” Hemingway had hurt his right shoulder, and both were in shock.