Hemingway in Italy

by Richard Owen

  They spent the night in the bush above the river listening to the elephants and drinking Scotch and beer. The next morning they were rescued by a launch which happened to be passing and took them to Lake Albert. A bush pilot offered them a replacement plane at Butiaba, a De Havilland Rapide, but it caught fire on take off and crashed. Mary escaped through a window, hurting her knee and cracking two ribs, while Ernest forced his way through a jammed door, using his head as a battering ram and badly injuring his skull, shoulders, spine, liver and kidneys.

  After reaching Lake Victoria and then Nairobi the Hemingways sailed from Mombasa to Port Said, with Hemingway reading with interest the obituaries of him which newspapers had published in the belief that he was dead, several of which suggested he had “sought death all his life”. In fact he very nearly had died: he had sustained serious injuries to his head, kidneys, intestines and spine, with a ruptured liver, temporary loss of vision and hearing, and first-degree burns on his face and arms.

  Before leaving Africa he – amazingly – dictated an article for Look magazine (which had sponsored the trip), went fishing, and tried to help firefighters dealing with a bush fire only to stumble and sustain further burns on his body. It was time to leave Africa – and the only possible destination was Venice and the Gritti Palace.

  At Venice in April 1954 Hemingway underwent extensive examination of his damaged vertebrae and kidneys. The worst part was having a ruptured kidney (“much blood and pieces of kidney in urine”, he wrote to Bernard Berenson.) He boasted to Adriana – by now 24 – that unlike Henry James, who in Venice had merely looked out of a window and smoked a cigar, he was still active despite being ill, making trips to Torcello and Codroipo (which he did).

  In reality, however, he spent most of his time in his room at the Gritti Palace in pyjamas, an old sweater and carpet slippers, wearing an eyeshade. It was now that he invented the ideal Venetian ‘cure’ while recuperating – scampi and Valpolicella – although the hotel acknowledges that this was “not so much a medical cure as good for the soul”. The ‘Hemingway menu’ nowadays offered by the hotel is rather fuller, consisting of scampi risotto and shellfish consomme followed by duck cooked with ginger and honey in a port sauce, a chocolate dessert with Bourbon, and friandises or petits fours of preserved fruits, sweets and biscuits, all accompanied by Soave as well as Valpolicella. Hemingway wrote in the Gritti Palace guest book: “To our home in Venice”.

  Valpolicella, made in the Monti Lissini foothills near Verona and Lake Garda, is noted for its light-bodied fragrance. Wine, Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, was “one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range of enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased”. He loved “the honesty and delicacy” of wine, and “the light body of it on your tongue, cool in your mouth and warm when you have drunk it”. He was especially fond of Amarone, a ripe and fullbodied variety of Valpolicella.

  Even Valpolicella failed to do the trick after the African disaster however. His friend Aaron Hotchner was shocked when he saw Hemingway. Any hair which had not been burned had turned white, as had his beard, and “he appeared to have diminished somewhat – I don’t mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out him”.

  His tendency to confuse fact and fiction became worse. He gave Hotchner and other friends in Venice a graphic description of having been to bed with the glamorous exotic dancer and double agent Mata Hari, even though she was arrested and executed in 1917, the year before he arrived in Italy at the age of eighteen. It was shortly after this that he told Hotchner that his First World War affair with a Red Cross nurse had been in Turin rather than Milan, which may or may not have been a similar flight of fancy.

  But he was still able to enjoy a trip in April 1954 in the Lancia Aurelia with Federico Kechler and the Kechler driver Adamo De Simon to Udine, where he was feted by a gathering of local writers and artists at the Hotel Friuli. On 15 April the party headed for Latisana and one of Hemingway’s favourite restaurants, La Bella Venezia (still there, though in a different location) before driving (or being driven) 15 kilometres south to Lignano, a sandy beach at the mouth of the Tagliamento which Alberto Kechler was developing as a resort together with a consortium of like-minded entrepreneurs.

  The Kechlers had once ridden horses along the beach at Lignano, and could see its potential as post-war tourism began to develop. Lignano – now in effect three resorts: Lignano Pineta, Lignano Riviera and Lignano Sabbiadoro (meaning Golden Sand) – was designed by the celebrated Friuli architect and urban planner Marcello D’Olivo as a series of concentric circles hidden among the seaside pines, rather than the conventional grid system of streets. It was, Hemingway declared, the “Italian Florida”. He only stayed in Lignano for two hours, but it was enough for the resort to later inaugurate a ten-acre “Hemingway Park” planted with pine trees, orchids and roses, with a bust of the writer, unveiled in 1984 by his glamorous granddaughter, the actress Margaux Hemingway.

  It also offers a literary Hemingway Prize, awarded every year. Lignano is even twinned with Ketchum, Hemingway’s last home in Idaho, and offers trips by boat up the Tagliamento River to Latisana, the scene of his first encounter with Adriana Ivancich. Lignano, says Giorgio Ardito, who heads the resort’s management company, Lignano Pineta Spa, is thriving, with a winter population of 6000 which swells to 150,000 in summer.

  “Hemingway thought of buying a seaside house here”, he says. “He even put his signature on a plot of land on the development plan.” A charming photograph of the time shows Hemingway (in suit and tie) and Federico Kechler’s wife Maria Luisa on the beach shaking sand from their shoes. But he never came back.

  21

  Death in Ketchum

  “Tutti mi chiamano bionda”

  Popular gondoliers’ song

  THE FOLLOWING MONTH, May 1954, Hemingway left Venice for Milan, after a farewell party held for him at the Ivancich’s palazzo in Venice. The route was no longer the romantic landscape he had hoped for however, with its “vulgar and awful” billboards. At the Hotel Principe in Milan he called on Ingrid Bergman, who was performing as Joan of Arc at La Scala, but took a dislike to her lover, Roberto Rossellini, who he called “a 22-pound rat”.

  He then travelled to Turin and Cuneo with Hotchner, and down to Nice. Buying a bottle of Scotch at Cuneo, he was nearly crushed by admirers when recognised, and had to be rescued by a squad of soldiers. In Nice he wrote a letter to Adriana at five in the morning, as the sun was coming up: “Daughter you know how I miss you and leaving was like an amputation. Thank you for being so good and lovely to me.”

  From Nice he went to Spain, praying at Burgos cathedral on his knees despite his injuries, and then returned to Italy, to Genoa, to take the ship back to Havana. But first Hemingway and Mary went along the Riviera coast to the Italian resort of Alassio, which had an English colony and in the 1950s was much frequented by the newly emerging “jet set” of la dolce vita.

  Hemingway had visited Alassio several times before, starting in 1948. It was “the one nice town on the Italian Riviera”, he told his friend AE Hotchner. Hemingway and Mary had stayed several times at the Swiss-owned Hotel Savoia Beeler at Nervi, close to Genoa: the hotel is now apartments, but the local history society still preserves Mary’s notes thanking the management for its hospitality, dated 25 November 1948, New Year’s Day 1950 and 6 June 1954. He was also fond of the bars and restaurants of Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino.

  On his first trip in 1948 Hemingway had run out of whisky and searched the Riviera in vain for his favourite tipple, The Antiquary, a 12-year-old blended Scotch whisky named after Sir Walter Scott’s Gothic novel about buried treasure. He eventually found it at the Caffe Roma, a piano bar near the Alassio seafront run by a local painter named Mario Berrino, who later said, “We had a case of it, I have
no idea why.”

  Hemingway, according to Berrino, drank a bottle of The Antiquary “in a few hours”, and returned to Alassio several times to polish off the rest of the case, often sleeping off the effects on the beach. Berrino kept an autograph book for celebrities to sign, and had the idea of transferring the autographs instead onto coloured ceramic tiles on the wall (“Muretto”) of the nearby public gardens. Hemingway at first had doubts, suggesting it would look like “a collection of epitaphs”, but added “unless each one was different from the others” and eventually told Berrino (no doubt after a few more drinks) “Mario, you have to do it.”

  They put the tiles up at dawn, since they had no official approval at the time. Hemingway’s signature was one of the first to be displayed, together with tiles commemorating the musicians who provided the soundtrack of the time, the vocal group Quartetto Cetra and the jazz guitarist Cosimo di Ceglie. The tile featuring Hemingway’s signature is undated: a portrait of him with his much-loved parrot Pedrito on his arm bears the date 2 July 1951, when he was in Cuba, not Italy, but was presumably placed on the wall when the scheme was sanctioned by the mayor.

  The first tiles are still there, together with those of Anita Ekberg, Jean Cocteau, Vittorio De Sica, Dario Fo and over five hundred others. In the summer of 1953, after Hemingway had commented on the attractiveness of the local girls, Berrino followed up his “wall of autographs” by launching a Miss Muretto beauty contest. He also inherited Pedrito, whose fortieth birthday in 1988 was also immortalised in a ceramic tile. Remarkably the parrot survived for nearly half a century, until 1994.

  The 1954 trip to Alassio was to be Hemingway’s last. “I remember he had his arm in a sling after the aircraft accident in Africa”, Berrino told La Stampa in 1999. Asked for his abiding memories of Hemingway, Berrino replied that the writer, far from being a braggart, “listened a lot and said little”. Neither was he a “miser or stingy”: on the contrary he was generous, and had once given a poor fisherman who hung around the bar but could not afford a drink a handful of dollars, much to the puzzlement of the fisherman, who had never seen US money before.

  Hemingway was fifty-five, and about to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he accepted “with humility”. The citation praised his “manly love of danger and adventure”, his admiration for any individual who “fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death”, and above all his pioneering “mastery of the art of modern narration”. Writing, he responded from Havana, was a “lonely life”; each book was a “new beginning”, with the writer having to “face eternity, or the lack of it, each day”.

  Hemingway’s final stories in the fifties include ‘Get Yourself a Seeing Eyed Dog’, the sentimental tale of an American going blind in Venice, probably inspired by his own erysipelas in 1949. He returned several times to Paris and to Spain, but growing ill health – coupled with heavy drinking – ruled out a final trip to Africa. Back in Havana, he wrote sketches of his time in Paris in the 1920s with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald, based on several trunks of his youthful notes and other papers which had been found stored at the Ritz. This would become A Moveable Feast.

  But Cuba was becoming politically unstable and heading for civil war – “both sides atrocious”, Hemingway wrote – and he longed for the wide open spaces of the American mid-West. He moved with Mary to the mining town of Ketchum in the hunting and fishing resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, which he had first come to know with Martha Gellhorn.

  He divided his time between Ketchum and Havana, where he at first welcomed the Castro revolution, even kissing the Cuban flag and handing Fidel Castro the prize when El Comandante won a fishing competition in 1960. The Finca, however, was expropriated by the new regime, and eventually became a state museum to Hemingway, though Mary was allowed to remove many of their possessions, including his archive and valuable paintings.

  He indulged in one final fling – which, as with Adriana, was almost certainly platonic – with a young girl, this time 19-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith, an Irish would-be reporter he first met in Madrid when she was an inexperienced stringer for a news agency and was sent to interview him. He coached her in journalism and made her his secretary, her obvious devotion to him leading to gossip that they were lovers. Relations between Hemingway and Mary were often strained, and their quarrels were fuelled by drink. Valerie certainly offered Hemingway devotion in his decline, and after his death married his son Gregory, having four children by him.

  Hemingway may also have made one final trip to Venice, this time without the watchful Mary’s knowledge. In August 1960 he went to Spain on his own for just over two months, while Mary remained in New York. At the end of May, he had written to Gianfranco Ivancich from Havana about what to do with the Lancia and “the funds” he had left in Venice. He was suffering from growing mental illness and depression: did he perhaps secretly head for the lagoon city of love and death one last time? Intriguingly Baron Alberto Franchetti, who would have been 13 at the time, told me he clearly remembered as a young adolescent running into the shambling figure of Hemingway, the worse for wear, in Calle Vallaresso, near Harry’s Bar. Gianfranco’s daughter Irina doubts that Hemingway made a final trip to Venice: “After all my father would have known about it, and so would my aunt Adriana. Neither of them ever mentioned it.” But then Adriana did not include everything in her memoirs – for example she omitted her meeting with Hemingway at Nervi before he sailed back to Cuba in June 1954, giving the impression that their final encounter was in Venice itself when in fact Hemingway wrote to her from the ship to say she had given him a wonderful surprise by seeing him off. So quite possibly he did make that final trip, perhaps to collect his Italian bank funds and royalties, or even to contemplate ending it all in one of Venice’s many canals, drawn – as many suicides have been, and still are – to the city’s dream-like beauty combined with an atmosphere of decay, the backdrop to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

  But at the end Hemingway became a recluse at Ketchum, staring across the river through the cottonwoods to the local cemetery. He was by now, according to Gregory, a “paranoid schizophrenic”: his conviction that the FBI was spying on him, or at least keeping an eye on him, had some basis in fact, but it now became an obsession. His drinking, always heavy, had become that of a severe alcoholic.

  At one point Mary found him standing by the gun rack with a shotgun and two shells: he was persuaded to put them back, and was flown to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester for electro-shock treatment, which only made matters worse. When he returned to the clinic a second time he had to be restrained from committing suicide by walking into a plane’s propellers during a stopover in South Dakota.

  There had been (and was to be again) a history of suicide in the Hemingway family; he never forgot that his own father had shot himself in 1928. “He was going through that time of a man’s life when things are liable to seem the very blackest and most out of proportion too”, he wrote at the time to Pauline’s mother. Perhaps that was how he himself now felt. When Hemingway returned to Ketchum he was determined to end it: Mary had locked the guns in the basement, but he knew where the keys were, on a ledge above the kitchen sink.

  He chose the shotgun he had often used to shoot pigeons, placed the twin barrels against his head, and pulled the trigger. Mary, when the news got out, claimed it had been an accident. It was not, as she admitted five years later to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. The man who had defied death at the Austrian front in Italy in 1918, and many times since then, from Spain to Africa, had killed himself.

  The night before Hemingway shot himself he and Mary – according to her diary – began singing a gondoliers’ song as they were preparing to go to bed. It was a song they had been taught by Hemingway’s Italian translator Fernanda Pivano at Cortina d’Ampezzo: “Tutti mi chiamano bionda, ma bionda io non sono” – “Everyone calls me a blonde, but blonde I am not”. Hemingway sang the last line – “Porto i capelli neri” �
�� “I have black hair.”

  And so Italy stayed with him to the end. If the Italian landscape, from the Venetian lagoons and marshes to the Dolomites as well as Liguria and Sicily, had a profound effect on him, so too did the Italian people – not just the aristocrats he came to know so well in Venetian high society, but also the ordinary Italians he came across, from soldiers, drivers and waiters to lace makers and hunters. He was a larger than life character, and Italy was his equal, stimulating his imagination not only with its elegance, history and beauty but also with its resilience and its love of life. His Italian writings, Hemingway concluded, had “that special something you only get in a love letter”. It was a love affair which has left us with enduring masterpieces of literature.

  Bibliography

  Ackerman, Rich, Colletto, Roberto, Davanzo Dino, Fasan, Marco, and Marcuzzo, Bruno (eds): Through Harvey’s Eyes. Edizioni Saisera, Udine 2009.

  Baker, Carlos: Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1969.

  Baker, Carlos (ed): Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917–1961. Scribner, New York 1981.

  Baker, Carlos: Hemingway, The Writer as Artist. Princeton University Press 1952.

  Beaumont, John: The Mississippi Flows into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church. Fidelity Press 2014.

  Benson, Jackson J (ed): New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press 1990.

  Burgess, Anthony: Ernest Hemingway. Thames and Hudson, London 1978.

  Burwell, Rose Marie: Hemingway: The Post-war Years and The Posthumous Novels. Cambridge University Press 1996.