Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  Barney asked how Ernest got along with his sons now that they were grown. "Pretty gcod, I think. We see each other when we can and we like each other pretty good. The boys haven't developed, though, the way I thought they were headed. The number-one son, Bumby, who was O.S.S. and parachuted behind the German lines and who I had pegged as career Army, is now a West Coast stockbroker. Gigi, who was the adventurer, crack shot, rider, roper and hell-raiser, is pre-med and set on doctoring.

  "Patrick, who has the nickname Mousy, is the one I told you about, Harvard cum laude, married a Baltimore socialite. Figured to be the Thinking Man's Hemingway, but he's the one set himself up in Africa, licensed White Hunter and a damn good one, and is conducting a big experiment in plantation corn."

  "Do they consult you about their work and plans?"

  "Yes, we all keep in touch. Just answered Bumby, who asked advice on salary arrangements with new firm. Wanted to know about a drawing account. Told him drawing account was the enemy of man, and expense account was its evil little brother."

  The next morning arrived in a shroud of wet fog. We delayed leaving and when we finally did leave we traveled cautiously along the partially obscured road to Toulouse; Ernest refused to stop in Toulouse, even for coffee. "This town has the ugliest people in the world," he said. "As a matter of fact, you can drive all the way from Nimes to Paris and never see a pretty girl."

  Twenty kilometers south of Toulouse, where apparently pulchritude took a sudden surge upward, Ernest said it was okay to stop for lunch in the little town of Muret, where we dined very well on champignon de bourgogne and a bottle of Sancerre. The bar was cheerful; the kitchen aromas were good. "One good thing about France," Ernest said, "you don't get any rummies around." His eyes had lost some of their ominous yellow color and I could tell that his pain had lessened somewhat. Our waitress was blessed with non-Toulousian features, and breasts that bubbled over the top of the circular cut of her dress. Ernest asked her to have a glass of wine with us, which she did, and she would have driven with us to Biarritz if her boy friend, who was the local mailman, hadn't bicycled up as we were paying the check.

  We arrived in Biarritz, which is just north of the Spanish border on the Bay of Biscay, toward evening, the mist solid all the way and the beauties of the Pyrenees to our left totally obscured. We checked into the Hotel Palais, which had once been the summer palace of Napoleon III, and as far as I was concerned still was. My room was high-ceilinged sumptuous splendor with a balcony that seemed to touch the spray of the ocean as it cascaded against a formidable stand of offshore black rock. Ernest said he was so moved by his accommodations that he had changed his shirt.

  We went across the street to Sonny's Bar, which Ernest had often talked about as one of his favorite places in the days when he and Charley MacArthur and Fitzgerald and the others were first discovering the joys of the Riviera. In those days Sonny's Bar handled Ernest's mail, extended him credit, served him his favorite dishes at his favorite corner table, and covered for him with girls and creditors. It had a proper, leather air about it, with a mahogany bar and padded-leather bar stools and chairs. This was early season for Biarritz and there were only a few customers. The barman handed Ernest a letter which had been there for three years.

  After Sonny's Bar we drove to the contiguous town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where we visited another of Ernest's old haunts, the Bar Basque. We had a drink, standing up at the bar. Beside the bar were tables and chairs. Ernest stood with his back to the bar, sipping his drink and studying one of the empty tables.

  "This is where I was standing," he said, "the day Charley Wertenbaker came in with the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on. They sat here,, at this table. Bar was crowded, so don't think Charley saw me; anyway, he was too concentrated on girl. Was not eavesdropping but Charley began to raise his voice and I heard him say, 'I'll kill her,' so naturally from then on I strained my ears to listen. Girl said, 'Does it do any good to say I'm sorry?' Charley said, 'No, did no damn good.' Girl said she loved him very much. Charley said, 'If only it was a man,' and that let me in on the whole thing."

  " 'The Sea Change,'" I said, "so this is where it happened." It had never occurred to me that the short story was anything but fiction.

  "In the story I called the man Phil, but it was Charley and the girl was some beauty."

  "Did he really tell her to go?"

  "Actually he begged her not to, but the way it is in the story it amounts to the same thing."

  "And she said she loved him and would come back to him?"

  "Yes."

  "Did it happen that way? Did Charley take her back?"

  "I don't know. But one afternoon I saw Charley's girl walking along the beach with the girl she had gone to. Had expected other girl to be a typical bull-dyke: pompadour hair, tweed suit, low oxfords. But she was as pretty as Charley's girl. Those two beauties walking hand in hand on the beach."

  Chapter Seven

  Madrid ♦ 1954

  In San Sebastian, our first stop in Spain on our way to Madrid, Ernest hunted for a certain cafe, the name of which he had forgotten (this was one of the few times that I had known Ernest's memory to fail him on such a detail; he kept no notebooks or journals but his phenomenal recall kept places, names, dates, events, colors, clothes, smells and who won the 1925 six-day bicycle race at the Hippodrome, on orderly file).

  Ernest was anxious to find the cafe because it was the only way he knew to get in touch with his old friend Juanito Quin-tana, whom he describes in Death in the Afternoon as one of the most knowledgeable aficionados in Spain. Quintana had been an impresario of means in Pamplona before the Civil War, when he ran the bull ring and owned a hotel. But Franco had stripped him of both and left him to scrounge, which is a very overcrowded occupation in Spain. As an old comrade-inarms, Ernest was loyal to him and sent him a monthly stipend, as he did to several other of his old Spanish friends.

  We finally found Juanito, a short smiling man in need of dentistry, who had an overruddy complexion; he quickly packed a few belongings and joined us for the trip south.

  In the northern town of Burgos, Ernest asked Adamo to stop at the cathedral, which is one of the grandest in Spain. "Wherever you see a big cathedral," Ernest said, "it's grain country." With my help Ernest pulled himself torturously from the car and went slowly up the cathedral steps, bringing both feet together on each step. He touched the holy water and crossed the murky deserted interior, his moccasins barely audible on the stone floor. He stood for a moment at a side altar, looking up at the candles, his gray trench coat, white whiskers and steel-rimmed glasses giving him a monkish quality. Then, holding tightly, he lowered his knees onto a prayer bench and bent his forehead onto his overlapped hands. He stayed that way for several minutes.

  Afterward, descending the cathedral steps, he said, "Sometimes I wish I were a better Catholic."

  We spent the night in an albergue near Logrono on the Madrid road. When Ernest and I entered the bar of the albergue, which was crowded, we could hear an Englishman saying to his two companions, "You know, this is where Fiesta took place [the title for The Sun Also Rises when it was published in England]. Wouldn't it be a scream if old Hemingway was in here having a drink?"

  Ernest walked up to the men and said, "What will you have, gentlemen?" I think he enjoyed that moment more than anything else on the trip, and he referred to it many times over the following years. While Ernest was talking to the men, a tall, fleshy Pinocchio-nosed man approached me and introduced himself as John Kobler of Westport, Connecticut. He said he had been stranded at the motel for two days because mosquitoes had clogged the radiator of his Buick, which was in the local garage for declogging. He asked whether I thought it would be all right for him to take pictures of Mr. Hemingway with his movie camera. I told him to ask Ernest.

  Kobler went over and broke in on Ernest's conversation, which is a maneuver Ernest liked about as much as breaking into his house. Kobler started to ask him about posing for his camera, but Ern
est interrupted to ask Kobler where he got the jacket he was wearing, saying he thought it was the most sensational jacket he ever saw; and then he checked out the Englishmen's opinions on its cut and color, wanted to know if it shed, and on and on; Kobler preened and answered dutifully and felt very proud of his jacket. (This form of relentless attack upon the plumage of an interloper was one of Ernest's commonly used weapons. I especially recall such an assault at the Ritz upon a pair of chandelier earrings worn by an overbearing, overbreasted autograph-seeking matron from Steubenville, Ohio.)

  "Jacket made by Johnson and Johnson from reject Band-aids," Ernest confided to me when he saw Kobler later that evening in the dining room. "What's he doing here?"

  "Mosquitoes have clogged his Buick."

  "It figures," Ernest said.

  As we approached Madrid, Ernest pointed out the mountain top where Pablo's band had hid out in For Whom the Bell Tolls. "We'll drive up there one day with Mary," he said, "and have a picnic by the bridge."

  Ernest checked into the Palace Hotel (le Capitaine Cook and the other comestibles filled a closet), which, like all Madrid, was very crowded because the Festival of San Isidro, Spain's num-ber-one bullfight spectacle, was to start the following day, May 15th. Mary was driving up from Seville with Rupert Belville, who was an old and valued English friend, although he had been a pilot on Franco's side during the Civil War.

  We went to have a drink at the Cerveceria Alemana on the Plaza Santa Ana, a favorite hangout for matadors and bullfight impresarios, and many of the men came over to greet Ernest. We drank beer and ate delicious shrimp and langosta. Then Ernest ordered an absinthe; his eyes were yellow again. He began to talk about Madrid events during the Civil War, and I asked him how much of For Whom the Bell Tolls had come from actual events.

  "Not as much as you may think. There was the bridge that was blown, and I had seen that. The blowing of the train as described in the book was also a true event. And I used to slip through the enemy lines into Segovia, where I learned a lot about Fascist activity which I carried back to our command. But the people and events were invented out of my total knowledge, feeling and hopes. When Pilar remembers back to what happened in their village when the Fascists came, that's Ronda, and the details of the town are exact.

  "All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappi-ness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you're a writer. That's what I was trying to give them in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  "Toward the end of the war, when things were going very badly for the Loyalists, I took time out to return to the States to try to raise money; when I got back to the front I sought out the Polish general who was then in command, a man I respected very much, and asked him how things were going.

  " 'And how is Mrs. Hemingway?' was his answer.

  "A French colonel came running into the command post. We've got to do something!' he shouted. 'We've got to do something! The Fascist planes are coming! Tell me what my men and I can do!'

  "The general said, 'You can go out and build a very high tower that you can climb up so you can see them better.'

  "It was along about this time that Dos Passos finally came to Spain. He had been in Paris the whole time, writing me notes heatedly in favor of our cause, but now he announced he was actually coming down to join us and we eagerly awaited his arrival because we were all starving and he had been instructed to bring food. He arrived with four chocolate bars and four oranges. We damn near killed him.

  "He had left his wife in Paris and on arrival he gave Sidney Franklin a telegram for her and asked him to take it to censorship. The censor called me. Wanted to know if the message was in code. I asked him to read it. It was, 'Baby, see you soon.' I said to the censor, 'No, it isn't code. It just means Mr. Dos Passos won't be with us very long.'

  "Dos spent his whole time in Madrid looking for his translator. We all knew he had been shot but no one had the heart to tell Dos, who thought the translator was in prison and went all around checking lists. Finally, I told him. I had never met the translator, nor had I seen him shot, but that was the word on him; well, Dos turned on me like I had shot him myself. I couldn't believe the change in the man from the last time I had seen him in Paris! The very first time his hotel was bombed, Dos packed up and hurried back to France. Of course, we were all damned scared during the war, but not over a chicken-shit thing like a few bombs on the hotel. Only a couple of rooms ever got hit anyway. I finally figured it out that Dos's problem was that he had come into some money, and for the first time his body had become valuable. Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying."

  We both ordered absinthe, and Ernest continued to talk about the Civil War: "General Modesto was in love with Miss Martha, made three passes at her in my presence, so I invited him to step into the men's can. 'All right, General,' I said, 'let's have it out. We hold handkerchiefs in our mouths and keep firing till one of us drops.' We got out our handkerchiefs and our guns, but a pal of mine came in and talked me out of it because money was scarce and our side could not afford a monument, which all Spanish generals get automatically."

  Still talking about Martha, Ernest was reminded of the night they were asleep in bed when an earthquake struck and the bed was thrown around. He recalled that Martha gave him a shove and said, "Ernest, will you please stop tossing!" At that moment, Ernest said, a pitcher slid off the table and broke and the roof caved in on them and he was finally absolved.

  "Martha was the most ambitious woman who ever lived, was always off to cover a tax-free war for Collier's. She liked everything sanitary. Her father was a doctor, so she made our house look as much like a hospital as possible. No animal heads, no matter how beautiful, because they were unsanitary. Her Time friends all came down to the finca, dressed in pressed flannels, to play impeccable, pitty-pat tennis. My pelota pals also played, but they played rough. They would jump into the pool all sweated and without showering because they said only fairies took showers. They would often show up with a wagon full of ice blocks and dump them into the pool and then play water polo. That began the friction between Miss Martha and me— my pelota pals dirtying up her Time pals.

  "God knows I do not have a definitive reading on womenies, but I do know that little things count much more than big things. And it's all a question of balance. Too little sex, neglected; too much, you're oversexed; Christ, man should get changing readings on a woman's mood like he gets the cote jaunes before each race. But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone."

  We left the cafe and went to look for Mary, whom we found waiting at the hotel with Rupert, a tall, well-groomed, ruddy-faced perfectly dictioned constituent of the leisured, nonwork-ing, White's-Clubbed upperest class. Mary and Ernest were very glad to see each other and Ernest hugged her against his stomach bulwark and she kissed his lips through his partially restored beard.

  It rained so hard the first day of the feria that the bullfights had to be called off. As a substitute we had drinks and tapas in the Palace Bar, the nerve center of Madrid social intrigue, where every woman looks like a successful spy.

  We saw several good bullfights (in Ernest's judgment) on the succeeding days, but most of the afternoons were cloudy and windy and Ernest was unhappy about this aspect of the performances. "Sun is the best bullfighter," he said. "When the day is overcast it is like a stage show without lights. The matador's worst enemy is wind." He was delighted with the performance of a short, very courageous matador named Chicuelo II ("although it is no longer stylish to tap the bull on the nose to start him"), and had great admiration for the way a matador named Cortega killed. "He goes in cleanly over the horns, h
olding back nothing. But he has been gored so often he is nothing but steel and nylon inside."

  Ernest was still suffering from his injuries, and although he had stopped complaining, I could tell he was in considerable pain. He finally went to see Dr. Madinoveitia, an old friend and one of Madrid's leading practitioners, who told him, "You should have died immediately after the airplane accidents. Since you did not, you should have died when you got those brush-fire burns. You also should have died in Venice. However, since you are still alive, you won't die any more if you will be a good fellow and do as I tell you." He put Ernest on a strict diet and cut him down to two drinks a day and two glasses of wine per meal.

  On the way back from the doctor's, an overpoweringly putrid smell suddenly invaded the car; Ernest identified it as the smell of the Madrid slaughterhouse. "This is where the old women come early in the morning to drink the supposedly nutritious blood of the freshly killed cattle. Many a morning I'd get up at dawn and come down here to watch the novilleros, and sometimes even the matadors themselves, coming in to practice killing, and there would be the old women standing in line for the blood. Practice-killing in the slaughterhouse was prohibited by law, then as now, but if you were friends with the slaughterhouse foreman, he would slip you in with your killing sword hidden under your coat and you could practice sighting and coming in over the horns to find the target in back of the neck, which is the size of a quarter. There is no way to practice killing except in the slaughterhouse. No one can afford to buy animals just to kill them, and although you can practice the cape and the muleta with dummy horns on wheels or at tientas, and even practice placing the banderillas, there is no way to simulate killing."

  Ernest said that by watching the matadors in the slaughterhouse, he really learned about killing, so that when he wrote about it in "The Undefeated," he wrote it for keeps. And, incidental to that, he learned about the old women, whom he put into For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then Ernest reminded me of an account in Death in the Afternoon of a gypsy brother and sister who avenged the death of their older brother who had been gored by a bull that toured the capeas. They went to the slaughterhouse on the morning the bull was to be slaughtered for beef, and got permission to kill him by gouging out his eyes, spitting in the sockets, and severing his spinal marrow. They then cut off his testicles, which they roasted over a fire they made in the street opposite the slaughterhouse, and ate them. Ernest said he had been there the morning it happened. It happened in Madrid but Ernest changed it to Valencia. "Sometime read about the old women in For Whom the Bell Tolls," Ernest said. "Many, many cold mornings went into that one paragraph."