Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  In early 1949, before he left for a trip to Venice, Ernest telephoned me in New York from the finca. He began by discussing the triumph of Mr. Truman over Mr. Dewey, but finally got to the point: "About the two stories, agreement is—deadline end of December and I deliver two stories or give back the dough, right? Wrote one story after you left but think it is too rough for Cosmopolitan so I better save it for the book."

  "What book?"

  "New book of short stories. Or book of new short stories— take your pick. Don't think I'll have time in Venice, but plan to get back to Cuba in early May, take the kids on a trip, then write two good stories for you. I may have to let them lay awhile and then go over them, but think if I have no bad luck, I should surely have two before the deadline. The story I just finished is about forty-five hundred words and much better than that Waugh crap they just ran. But I can beat it for you."

  All through the spring of 1949 I received letters from Ernest from the Gritti Palace hotel in Venice and from the Villa Aprile in Cortina d'Ampezzo, which is magnificent ski country to the north. He wrote about Mary breaking her leg in a ski accident and about a serious eye infection for which he was hospitalized, but did not mention the stories. It was during this period that Ernest instigated my first meeting with Charles Scribner, Sr.; and afterward he said, "Hope you liked Charlie. He liked you very much and he likes almost nobody. Hates authors." Scribner was a silver-haired, gentle-featured man of charm, wit and good humor, and he loved Ernest as a proud father loves a gloried son. Ernest once said of Scribner: "Now that Max Perkins is gone, Charlie is all I've got left to help keep the franchise."

  The first time Mr. Scribner and I met, it was to discuss Ernest's medical statement which he had sent to Scribner from Italy for release to the press. Ernest suggested that this statement might take the pressure off. "Especially off me, here in the hospital, making my fight and under siege of news hawks like Hector was be-Greeked at Troy."

  The statement was: "It certainly is odd, though not particularly I suppose, for people to think you are a phony. I would not let the photographers nor any reporters in because I was too tired and was making my fight and because face was incrusted like after a flash burn. Had streptococcus infection, straphilo-coccus (probably misspelled) infection plus erysipelas, thirteen and one half million units of Penicillium, plus three and one half million when it started to relapse. The doctors in Cortina thought it might go into the brain and make a menengitis since the left eye was completely involved and closed completely tight so that every time I opened it with boric solution a big part of the eye-lashes would pull out.

  "It could have been from the dust on the secondary roads as well as from fragments from the wad.

  "Still can't shave. Have tried it twice and up come the welts and patches and then the skin peels like postage stamps. So run a clippers over face every week. That way it looks unshaven but not as though you were sporting a beard. All above is true and accurate and you can release it to anybody, including the press."

  Ernest was back in Cuba by the summer of 1949, and in late July he telephoned to report that the Cosmopolitan two-story project had taken another turn and suggested I visit him in September. I said that this time I would take a cottage at the Kawama Club at Varadero Beach and not inconvenience them.

  "No inconvenience," Ernest said, "but Varadero beauty place. When you come down I will knock off work for two or three days and bring the boat to Varadero and we can have some fun. Will work hard for balance of July and August so that will rate the vacation."

  "Arthur wants to know," I said, referring to Cosmo's editor, Arthur Gordon, "if you want the additional ten thousand."

  "No. Tell Arthur thanks very much, but am okay on dough. Our fighting chickens won thirty-eight out of forty-two fights. The joint is producing what we need to eat. The Deep-Freeze is full. I'm shooting hot on pigeons and should be able to pick up three to four G's. The kids are all suited, Italian moneyed, and leave on Tuesday. My oldest boy, Jack, is back as a captain of infantry in Berlin and self-supporting—so far. If Kid Gavilan wins over Robinson, am okay through Christmas. He'll probably lose, though, and am covering."

  I asked if I could bring him anything. "Well, yes." he said. "If you can manage it, bring a tin of beluga caviar from Maison Glass and a Smith-Corona portable, pica type. About the stories, believe I have a pretty nice surprise for you. Have been hotter— working—than the grill they roasted San Lorenzo on."

  The surprise was that Ernest had started one of the Cosmopolitan-promised stories, originally titled "A Short Story," when he was hospitalized in Italy; he said he had started it to pay for his imminent funeral expenses. As he improved, however, the story grew until now it gave every indication of becoming a novel. Ernest was calling it Across the River and into the Trees. "All of my books started as short stories," he said. "I never sat down to write a novel."

  We were on the Pilar when he gave me the first chapters to read, sitting beside me, reading over my shoulder. (It was impossible with him breathing in my ear, and I was only vaguely aware of what I was reading. In years ahead I was to learn that all works-in-progress would be shown to me in this manner; although it wasn't easy, I eventually learned to detach myself from the author at my shoulder.) Now, however, Ernest completely distracted me with his reactions to the manuscript-laughing at places, commenting at others, as if it were someone else's book. He started to put it away (Ernest always treated the pages of a manuscript-in-progress as Crown Jewels), but I asked whether I could go through it a second time; and so later I succeeded in really reading it.

  "Did Papa tell you," Mary asked, "that he's back at the cotsies again?"

  "I thought you swore off," I said, surprised.

  "Momentary relapse. This was a big cat, five years old. Worked him when the trainer quit on account of the cat was getting bad and I think I did okay. Takes your mind off things."

  "Papa, I really think it's foolish to go in with cats when you're not training them and yourself every day," I said.

  "You're right. For me to work cotsies is foolish, of course. I only do it to show off in front of some woman or for straight fun. The fun is to see how they react to discipline without provocation. But you can't work more than two at once because it is dangerous to let them get behind you. Same thing applies to some people I know."

  Great black cumulus puffs were forming in the sky to the west, and the sea was getting choppy. The four lines trolled efficiently but there were no takers. The black sky began to infect the north and the water took on a luminous sheen.

  "What month Gerry in?" Ernest asked.

  "Fourth."

  "Then not a good idea to risk hurricane or even all-out storm. If it weren't for being pregnant, we would head up into this and ride it out. Can be wonderful fun." He told Gregorio to turn the Pilar around, and I suggested that we all have lunch at the Kawama Club. During the two hours it took us to get there we did not have a single strike.

  Gregorio anchored the boat several hundred yards from the beach. The water was very turbulent now, but the Kawama Club had no launch facilities, so we had to swim ashore. Mary could borrow clothes from Geraldine, but Ernest looked me up and down with narrowed eyes and shook his head. "Hotchner, an exchange of pawnts is hopeless. I'll carry mine." I thought he meant he would put a pair in a watertight bag and tow it in—but that was the easy way.

  The women dived off and started to swim. Ernest had taken a pair of shorts and a shirt, rolled them up tightly, with a bottle of good claret inside because he didn't trust the Kawama wine, and secured the roll with his gott mit uns leather belt. He descended the boat's ladder and lowered himself carefully into the water. He had the roll in his left hand, which he held straight up over his head to keep it dry, and began to swim powerfully against the tossing sea, keeping the upper part of his torso out of the water, using only his right arm and kick for locomotion. It was a remarkable exhibition of balance and strength; I swam alongside him and even with two arms found it ar
duous going.

  I arrived on the beach a few moments in advance of Ernest, and as I stood and watched him negotiating the last few yards, his left arm relentlessly aloft, holding the dry pants-roll like a tubular pennant on the top of a muscled mast, he was an immortal sea god, not from Oak Park, Illinois, at all, but Poseidon, emerging from his aquatic kingdom. He came out of the sea dripping, smiling happily at his dry pants, not even short of breath.

  Ernest phoned frequently about Across the River. "Been jamming hard," he said on one occasion. "Black Dog is tired too. He'll be glad when the book is over and so will I. But, by Christ, I'll miss it for a while. Just wrote a goddamn wonder chapter, the man says modestly. Got it all, to break your heart, into two pages. Yesterday Roberto counted. He hates to count but counts accurately, and through this morning it is 43,745. This is so you know what you have as effectives. Think it should go sixty or just under.

  "About the monies, please advise me. We ought to make a contract before it is finished. It is really the best book that I have written, I think, but I am prejudiced, of course. Have only two more innings to pitch and I plan to turn their caps around."

  Cosmo's reply about the contract was that Ernest was such an old and valued friend of the Hearst organization that he was to name his own price; when I telegramed him that remarkable information he phoned me about it. He wanted to know the most Cosmopolitan had ever paid for a serialized novel. I told him seventy-five thousand dollars. "Okay," he said, "I figure I ought to top that by ten. Please tell them I've been throwing in my armor worse that Georgie Patton ever did and there isn't a plane on the ground that can fly. Brooklyn Tolstoys, grab your laurels and get out of that slip stream. I even throw in the taking of Paris for free. Will probably never live to finish the long book anyway. So what the hell?" Irwin Shaw, Brooklyn-born—an enduring target for Ernest's shafts—had just published The Young Lions.

  Although I did not know it at the time, since I had not known him for long, this rather frequent use of the telephone was highly unusual for Ernest. He later explained to me that there were only a few people he felt comfortable with on the telephone. Marlene Dietrich was one. Toots Shor was another. Ordinarily Ernest advanced upon a telephone with dark suspicion, virtually stalking it from behind. He picked it up gingerly and placed it to his ear as if to determine whether something inside was ticking. When he spoke into it his voice became constricted and the rhythm of his speech changed, the way an American's speech changes when he talks with a foreigner. Ernest would invariably come away from a telephone conversation physically exhausted, sweated, and driven to stiff drink. But he liked to phone Toots Shor from Paris or Malaga or Venice and throw a few lefts at him before placing a bet, through Toots' auspices, on an impending fight or a World Series. Ernest liked to phone Dietrich because, as he said, they had loved each other for a long time and they always told each other everything that happened and they never lied to each other except when very necessary, and then only on a temporary basis.

  Later on, when I got to know Marlene quite well, she told me: "I never ask Ernest for advice as such but he is always there to talk to, to get letters from, and in conversation and letters I find the things I can use for whatever problems I may have; he has often helped me without even knowing my problems. He says remarkable things that seem to automatically adjust to problems of all sizes.

  "For example, I spoke to him on the telephone just a few weeks ago. Ernest was alone in the finca; he had finished writing for the day, and he wanted to talk. At one point he asked me what work plans I had—if any—and I told him that

  I had just had a very lucrative offer from a Miami night club but I was undecided about whether to take it.

  " 'Why the indecision?' he asked.

  " 'Well,' I answered, 'I feel I should work. I should not waste my time. It's wrong. I think one appearance in London and one a year in Vegas is quite enough. However, I'm probably just pampering myself, so I've been trying to convince myself to take the offer.'

  "There was silence for a moment and I could visualize Ernest's beautiful face poised in thought. He finally said, 'Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action.' In those five words he gave me a whole philosophy.

  "That's the wonderful thing about him—he kneels himself into his friends' problems. He is like a huge rock, off somewhere, a constant and steady thing, that certain someone whom everybody should have and nobody has.

  "I suppose the most remarkable thing about Ernest is that he has found time to do the things most men only dream about. He has had the courage, the initiative, the time, the enjoyment to travel, to digest it all, to write, to create it, in a sense. There is in him a sort of quiet rotation of seasons, with each of them passing overland and then going underground and re-emerging in a kind of rhythm, refreshed and full of renewed vigor.

  "He is gentle, as all real men are gentle; without tenderness, a man is uninteresting."

  "The thing about the Kraut and me," Ernest said after I told him what Marlene had said about him, "is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the lie de France, but we've never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of un-synchronized passion. Those times when I was out of love, the Kraut was deep in some romantic tribulation, and on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes of hers, I was submerged. There was another crossing on the lie, years after that first one, when something could have happened, the only time, but I had too recently made love to that worthless M––, and the Kraut was still somewhat in love with the equally worthless R––. We were like two young cavalry officers who had lost all their money gambling and were determined to go straight."

  Chapter Two

  New York ♦ 1949

  Ernest came up to New York at the end of October, 1949, with the manuscript of Across the River and into the Trees. New York City was just a way station for Ernest, a place to stay for a week or so on the move to or from some serious place. There was a small core of New York regulars whom he invariably contacted on arrival and a large peripheral group who contacted him. For years his favorite hotel was the Sherry-Netherland (he liked their "good protection"—no name on the register, phone calls all screened, newsmen and photographers thrown off the scent); but in 1959 he gave up the Sherry-Netherland for a three-room pied a terre at 1 East Sixty-Second, a once-fabulous town house which had been divided into not-especially-fabulous apartments.

  Ernest was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented. Mary loved it, and I suspect that he came as often as he did as a favor to her. He did not like theater, opera or ballet, and although he liked to listen to music he rarely, to my knowledge, attended a concert or any other musical presentation, longhair or jazz. He would only go to a prize fight that paired really good boys, and sometimes he made a special trip for a first-rate championship fight. Otherwise not. He avidly followed professional football on television when he was in the States (there was no

  United States television in Cuba), but he did not go to the games. He loved baseball and would go to any game; and occasionally he came to New York just to see a World Series.

  The only bars Ernest liked were Toots Shor's, the Old Seidel-burg, and Tim Costello's. I asked him about the story I had heard of the time that he got into a dispute with John O'Hara about their respective hardnesses of head, the dispute having been put to an abrupt end by Ernest's taking a shillelagh which Costello kept behind the bar, raising it up with an end in each hand, and cracking it neatly in two over his own head. I asked Ernest whether the story was apocryphal. He laughed. "Good story not to deny," he answered.

  One of the few things about New York that Ernest unreservedly enjoyed was the visits of the Ringling Brothers Circus. He felt that circus animals were not like other animals, that they were more intelligent and, because of their constant working alliance with man, had much more highly developed personalities.

 
The first time I went to the circus with him, he was so eager to see the animals he went to Madison Square Garden an hour before the doors were scheduled to open. We went around to a side entrance on Fiftieth Street and Ernest banged on the door until an attendant appeared. He tried to turn us away but Ernest had a card signed by his old friend John Ringling North, which stated that the bearer was to be admitted to the circus any time, any place. We went below, as he always did before the circus began, and made a tour of the cages. Emest became fascinated with the gorilla; although the keeper was nervous as hell and warned him not to stand too close, Ernest wanted to make friends with the animal. He stood close to the cage and talked to the gorilla in a staccato cadence and kept talking, and finally the gorilla, who appeared to be listening, was so moved he picked up his plate of carrots and dumped it on top of his head; then he started to whimper; sure signs, the keeper said, of his affection.

  By now, all the keepers had assembled around Ernest, anxious that he try a few words with their charges, but he said that the only wild animal with whom he had any true talking rapport was the bear, whereupon the bear keeper cleared a path for him.

  Ernest stopped in front of the polar-bear cage and closely watched its occupant swing back and forth across the small area. "He's very nasty, Mr. Hemingway," the bear keeper said. "I think you're better off talking to this brown bear, who has a good sense of humor."