Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  At this time I was at the Pentagon researching an article I was writing on the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I had been following the chaotic course of events in Cuba, and sympathizing with Ernest about the inroads I knew it was making on his work and disposition. When I got back to my Washington hotel late one afternoon—in fact it was New Year's Day, 1955— there was a message to call the overseas operator in Havana for an urgent call. It took four hours to get through. Ernest's voice was thick and he spoke faster than usual, sometimes almost running his words together. There was a steady hum of background noise similar to what you hear when someone calls you from a corner telephone booth. I couldn't imagine why he was calling.

  "Hotch, I called to apologize about all the damn confusion," he said.

  "What confusion?"

  "You can't know what it's been like. But I wanted to lay it out in detail for you. We're too good friends to let a thing like this cause any trouble."

  "What trouble, Papa? I'm not aware—"

  "It wasn't till September that I could crank myself up; then I started writing maybe better than I ever have and had thirty-five thousand words done, after two months of trying and failing every day, and was truly going wonderfully. Then the Prize thing began to build up and I still kept working until the day they sprung. Had no chance to enjoy it, if any of it is supposed to be enjoyable; just photographers, people misquoting you and yammer, yammer, yack, yack—and my book, all I gave a damn about, and which I had been living in day and night, being knocked out of my head like clubbing a fish.

  "Well, for two to three days there are these photographers and all the rest and then I say there won't be any more and I get back into the book. Then characters come down anyway, no matter what you say. That you are writing a book means nothing. Bob Manning of Time phoned Mary and said he had to write a cover story and that he would write it whether I saw him or not. He said he wanted to make it good instead of bad and would I call back. Of course, when they pull that on you, it's nothing but blackmail, but effective. I talked to him on the phone and said I would give anything if Time would not write a cover story on me, but he said they were going to do it anyway. So I agreed to see him if he did not bring a researcher nor a tape-recorder and if all questions on wars, religion, personal life, wives and so forth were barred. I said that I was working hard and it was murder to interrupt and that to interrupt a man while he was writing a book and going well was as bad as to interrupt a man when he was in bed making love. He agreed on this but said the thing had to be done and they were going to do it anyway and he wanted it to be a good piece rather than a bad one."

  "Papa, why are you telling me—"

  "Because I wanted you to get the background on the True thing."

  "What True thing?"

  "So I said I'd give him two days, and he came down and stayed in the Little House and that's all he got, two days. We talked about writing, which after all is the trade a writer is supposed to know something about. I do not regard all this as disloyalty to True, which is not, after all, my alma mater. I would rather say 'For God, For Country and For Keeps' than 'For Yale and For True: "

  "Papa, listen, let me get this straight about True—''

  "Listen to the rest of it. So you know. Manning no sooner clears out than a London Times man shows up without giving me any address where I could tell him not to come, and a Swede with a Magnum photographer who interrogated (and probably got all the answers wrong) and photographed for six hours and fifty minutes, and the Japanese charge d'affaires, who speaks a little basic English, plus an elderly Japanese journalist who he is the interpreter for, along with a delegation from the Rotary Club of Guanabacoa, then more Swedes flown from Sweden, and 1 won't try to fill you in on all of it. I am still trying to write through this but am going nuts fast. And while all this is going on, some problems have come up about reinvesting for the children's estates, and I have to check on the five percent debentures offered in exchange for six percent preferred.

  "When I finally got the children's end straightened out, I thought I had better get the hell out before I blew up. So Mary and I went out on Pilar, but I forgot how sound you have to be to handle a rod, especially to fish in 'The Tin Kid.' So I don't fish, can't swim, don't get any exercise. Hotch, this all sounds like one long blab of crybabyismo, but when I get interrupted when I'm working good it really ruins me. Now I've got so sick of myself, of answering questions, of photographers, of making goddamn pronouncements, of pieces for and against me, I don't want to ever hear about or think about myself so I can get writing clean and fine the way I was going. But how can I do that when we no sooner get back from the boat yesterday than Mary takes a call from Mr. Douglas Kennedy, editor, who says that he had planned the whole April issue of True around the story you were going to write about me, that he had reservations to come down to consult with me on the technical fishing part, that now all this had to be canceled, and that you were losing a chance to earn a sizable fee. Mary told me that he said, 'I know your husband is fed up, that he wants to get back to work. But I have just one question: if your husband will submit to the Bob Mannings and the Swedes and the Japs and whatnot, why won't he sit still for a magazine that has published him and that he likes?' We have no tape recorder on our phone but this is what Mary told me and what I have just gone into her room to have her confirm. She only told me about it this morning."

  "But, Papa, this whole thing is unbelievable!"

  "No, it's damn believable—at least from my end of it. Now it is a fact that I like True as a magazine and have it sent to Patrick in Tanganyika, but I thought I had made it clear to you, and you to him, that there was to be no article now. I have been writing my closest and oldest friends, asking them to please omit visits they had planned because I was working and not in shape to see people. Right after I spoke to you about True, for instance, I wrote Alfred Vanderbilt asking him not to come down on a visit he had planned, and I have known him since 1933."

  "Papa, I phoned Kennedy right after you spoke to me and explained it all to him, and he said would I mind if he wrote you, asking you to reconsider. I said that was up to him but that I wouldn't write anything without your permission and as far as I was concerned he was wasting his time. I had no idea that he . . ."

  "Well, in case Mr. Kennedy still thinks I am seeking publicity while pretending that it is harmful to me and an interruption to me, please tell him that this week, so far, I have turned down the chance of a piece by J.P. McEvoy in the Reader's Digest, some six different journalists who have wanted to come out to the house, a man from Argosy who, according to the Air Attache at the Embassy, would pay a thousand dollars if I would let him come out and take some pictures, and just this morning I wrote a letter to Bob Edge turning down a proposition that would have been very attractive to anyone who wished publicity.

  "Every day there are letters, phone calls and brutal interruptions. It is getting on Mary's nerves and it hit mine a long time ago. I do not want to be driven out of here in the good working months. It is my home and my work place and I love it. But I am not a public performer, nor am I running for office. I am a writer and I have a right to work and also a right to make a fight to stay alive. I like True and have always had good relations with them. But I should think that they could understand how it is to write under really bad handicaps when you have something and are going good and have to stay in it for the whole twenty-four hours and not be interrupted. Should a guy be asked to throw away and lose a book that is as much a part of his life as anything can be to help any magazine get out any given issue?"

  I realized by now that Ernest was not just venting his angry annoyance at True—because True was certainly of no importance to him—but that he was assailing the whole bloody force that had been crushing him since the day he survived the African crash. Although this force took the form of journalists and photographers and broadcasters and magazine editors, the real force was the world's insatiable curiosity about him, and there was no way to assuage
it. I found it almost unbearable to listen to him crying out for respite, pleading for the isolation that is a writer's blood, but knowing in his heart that he had been put to rout.

  "Nobody takes the excuse that you want to work or that you don't want any piece or that you've gotten pathological about pieces about you and one goddamn more and you'd never write another bloody line. Hotch, if you can, forgive me for being so difficult and know it comes from being beat up and also from being spooked about destroying what I write with through all this publicity. It really makes me sick."

  "I understand, Papa. I understand everything. Honestly I do. I'll take care of True so they understand. Kennedy's a good guy—he's just made a mistake."

  "Hotch, I explained to you privately that my nerves are shot to hell with the pain, and that is not a thing I would tell anybody. You know that a first-rate writer has to have a delicate writing mechanism. You don't write with a club or a hatchet. You can't use junk. You have to take it cold turkey. You look awful and the lousy pain shows on your face. So they take photographs of you. During that hell time after the Prize somebody told me that one photographer boasted at the Floridita after he left the house that he got four hundred twenty-five shots of me. The guy shooting all of the time, even crowding into the pantry when I was talking private on the long-distance. Then the outfit that made them sent them all to me as a present, thinking I'd like to have them. Some four hundred fourteen of them looked more or less like Chinese-torture shots. They had even thought of taking a picture of Blackie lying in front of my empty chair, just in case.

  "Well, a cable just arrived this morning, New Year's Day, addressed to Robert Ruark, care of Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigia, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. I guess Mr. Kennedy will never be convinced I didn't invite Mr. Ruark down. Felt pretty cheerful this morning until I saw the cable. Then Mary remembered to tell me about Kennedy's call. Went to bed at ten on New Year's Eve, didn't eat supper, didn't drink anything, washed and scrubbed, put the new stuff the skin specialist gave me yesterday on the chest and on the face—had clipped off the damn beard for Christmas—and in four days my face broke out with something a little handsomer than jungle rot. The face makes impetigo look like The Skin You Love to Touch. It is sort of comic to have this all outside while you are making your main fight inside. Don't know whether it's the antibiotics' revenge cr whether somebody is sticking pins into a piece of wax in Africa."

  "I'm sorry about all this, Papa. It's a lousy way to start the New Year."

  "Want to hear my New Year's resolution? Not to pay any attention to any physical troubles, but just follow doctor's orders and try to train good and get my work done."

  "I'll second that. You're probably going to have one hell of a year to make up for the last one."

  "Don't need a big year. Just need to be left alone to write. Good luck, Hotch."

  "You too, Papa." I hung up and looked at the clock; he had been on the phone for over an hour.

  The following day Ernest phoned again. His voice sounded clearer, and his speech was less hurried. After some general talk about Washington and the Pentagon, and badinage over whether Batista or Eisenhower shot a better game of golf, he returned to the previous day's discussion. "Been thinking some of it's my fault for not having written sooner and more completely on the rejection to True. But I was forty-five thousand words into the new book, writing nothing else but checks, pouring out my stuff in some sort of race against I cannot tell you exactly what. You could call it trying to keep from going nuts, I guess. Think of it this way: injuries to the brain and the spinal cord, the kidneys, and the liver, which is the seat of valor, don't clear up by snapping your fingers and saying, 'Clear up.' You have to take it slow and easy and you can do only so much a day. I opted for writing, which cheers me up and takes me out of whatever hell I happen to be in.

  "So now we have poor True bitched by me. I said I could not interrupt my writing but then I prove myself a liar, if not much worse, by seeing Bob Manning of Time, obviously seeking publicity for myself. But actually laying it on the line in the interview for poor bloody Ezra Pound and knowing all the trouble I will get into for it. No doubt about it—the editor of True is dealing with a first-class heel. So now we should seek a solution. Tell True to publish anything that has been written about my sports exploits. The only sports I was ever outstanding in were fishing and shooting. You would have to get that from people who have seen me do it. I do not know who could give you the true gen on those. It certainly should not come from me. I have had long strings of shooting in the field and on big game was hotter than Willie Mays in baseball. But am I the son-of-a-bitch to describe them? The guys who know about these things are inarticulate, reserved, and would think someone was trying to frame Ernie.

  "What True can do is publish whatever has been written, and I'll mail you a statement that can run in a box accompanying the piece, and True''s troubles will be over. A visit by Kennedy is out; repeat out. Don't break it to him too gently."

  The statement arrived in the mail a few days later. I never gave it to True; they eventually published a symposium of previously published biography and anecdotes about Ernest, almost none of them about sports.

  I did not hear from Ernest for a couple of months after that. I began to worry about his physical condition, but he finally wrote that his health was much better all the way around since the weather had warmed enough for him to swim. He said he had been taking a lot of exercise and had been out in the boat twice, which loosened him up and made him feel better. He thought his back would be absolutely okay within a few weeks. His work was going good, too, averaging over four thousand words a week, which he said was too much for him. I thought that despite its attempt to sound positive, the letter had a sad and subdued ring.

  It was a time when I myself was not running as a cheerful, and I guess my letters must have reflected it because in June of 1955 Ernest accused us of being "tandem morbids."

  "I have a suggestion for alleviation of morbidity," he said. "Mary and I are going over to the Key West house—the small house with the pool. The pool is sixty-foot regulation, fills and empties overnight, semisalt wonderful water. House really lovely and charming place. Why don't you meet us there and we can sun and swim and discuss the play you want to do? We can use it as a consolation for not having got to Europe. The only negative satisfaction is that I don't think Europe would have been any fun last year. They never had a day of spring and it was wet, cold, overcrowded and expensive as hell, and summer never came at all. Not just a bad British summer. Everywhere.

  "This winter has been miserable with floods, and in the spring it will be overrun with tourists. When you get homesick for it, remember the Autobahn with the signs on both sides from Mestre to Milano and Milano to Torino. You can remember that lovely day and how the Alps looked to have something to hold on to. That stretch below Turin to the border. But I can get Black-Ass about going anywhere when I remember those autograph people in a remote town like Cuneo. You'll like Key West —its the Saint Tropez of the poor."

  Chapter Nine

  Key West ♦ 1955

  On the morning of July 3rd I flew to Miami, where I caught the small afternoon plane to Key West and took a taxi to 414 Olivia Street, the address Ernest had given me.

  When the taxi stopped, I was sure the driver had taken me to the wrong place. It was a street of grimy, run-down houses with ramshackle sidewalk fences that contained yards of high weeds. When Ernest had bought his place in the ig3o's, the neighborhood was sparsely settled and the few houses that were there were of a quality that matched his. (Actually Ernest had two houses: a large main house and a small, more modern house that had been constructed beside the pool.) But the years had been unkind to the neighborhood, which was now crowded and seedy, and the Hemingway property was an oasis amid the squalor. Ernest had not lived there since 1940, when he was divorced from Pauline; it had become her property as part of the divorce settlement and she had continued to reside there with their children u
ntil her recent death, when the property had passed to the children. But the children did not want to live there, nor were they around to look after it. So it fell to Ernest to try to keep it rented for them and to attend to its problems. The pool house was unrented at the moment, and in addition to his desire to get away, Ernest had come over to attend to maintenance problems and to arrange for a real estate agent to rent it.