“Trilogies are undoubtedly the thing,” he wrote. “You can write so damned well it spooks me that something might happen to you.” It was an odd way to phrase his comment. Perhaps Ernest was already thinking of a way to keep Dos from leaping too far ahead of him.
Literary rivals that they were, there was one thing that Ernest excelled at beyond Dos’s wildest hopes—indeed, beyond the dreams of any other writer of his generation. Ernest was not only a gifted stylist, he also had a natural genius for being a celebrity. He had a world-class talent for fame that was a function of his natural charisma. Strangers who saw him in a crowd singled him out and remembered him for the rest of their lives. He dominated every gathering with his presence. Dos, on the other hand, could stand on his head in the middle of a room without anyone noticing. He blended into his environment, like an armchair in the corner. In that regard, Dos and Ernest were polar opposites. Women swarmed around Ernest, moths drawn to a flame, while Dos set no one’s heart fluttering. Ernest picked up on his friend’s loneliness and vowed to do something about it. He introduced Dos to his sister Madeline, who had come down to Key West to recuperate after their father’s suicide. But Madeline was less than impressed.
“I was shocked to see a bald man with nervous, jumpy movements,” she said. “Ernest had neglected to give me a physical picture of his friend.”
There was another woman visiting Key West who saw Dos differently, however. Katy Smith was there as well, Madeline’s friend and Ernest’s high school girlfriend. She saw in Dos a husky intellectual and brilliant writer who suited her just fine. They were all there together when a box arrived in the mail from Ernest’s mother. It was big and nailed shut with a tight row of nails. For some instinctual reason, Ernest didn’t want to open it. Pauline was curious, though, and took a hammer to it, clawed off the top, and started to pull out the contents. Oddly enough, the box contained an assortment of Grace Hemingway’s paintings and a mess of crushed and moldy brown stuff that had once been a chocolate cake. On the bottom of the gunk was one more item. Pauline pulled it out and laid it on the floor. They all stared at it, speechless. It was the .32 caliber pistol that Clarence Hemingway had used to blow his brains out. Nobody said a word. Ernest just stared at it, horrified.
“Mrs. Hemingway,” Dos wrote later, “was a very odd lady indeed. Ernest was terribly upset. Hem was the only man I ever knew who really hated his mother.”
Dos and Katy got married in the fall of 1929, and no one was more thrilled about their wedding than Ernest. His best friend marrying his old girlfriend, a friend of his sister, cemented their relationship further. Ernest took them out fishing off Bimini with Charlie Thompson and a few others. There was plenty to eat and drink on board, as there always was on any of Ernest’s excursions, including a few bottles of champagne that Ernest set down in the ice that kept the mullet fresh in the bait bucket. They fished into the night, with the silver sheen of tarpon visible in the moonglow on the water when the fished jumped high. When the fish stopped striking, they drank the champagne and ate some conch chowder. Charlie finally yawned and said that he had to open his store at seven in the morning, so he headed back to the dock in Key West.
Shortly afterward, Ernest took Dos and Katy out fishing again in the Gulf Stream. Ernest hooked a tarpon and was attempting to gaff it and haul it on board when he saw the sharks in the water heading for his fish. He cursed at them as they circled around and got closer to his tarpon. Ernest grabbed his rifle and aimed it at the sharks, but just as he pulled the trigger the boat rocked, throwing him off balance. Two rounds from the rifle struck him in the fleshy part of his calf.
“I’m shot!” Ernest yelled out. “Christ! Can you believe I shot myself.”
“We had to turn back to take him to the sawbones at the hospital,” Dos wrote. “Katy was so mad she would hardly speak to him.” She was furious at Ernest for ruining a perfectly good outing for her. Damned Ernest! He always had to be the center of attention. He always did something stupid like trying to shoot a shark and spoil everyone else’s fun.
* * *
It seemed inevitable that something would come along and roil the waters for Ernest and Dos. Very few of Ernest’s friendships lasted throughout his lifetime. At one point or another, Ernest found a reason to turn on his rivals, particularly those whose success was equal to his own. The turning point for Ernest and Dos was the political drama unfolding in Spain. Dos was thrilled when the Popular Front overthrew the monarchists, and he tried to get his friend to whip up as much enthusiasm for the cause as he had. But Ernest continued to observe Spain with his usual detachment. Everything was fine, he thought, as long as they didn’t mess with the feria, the bullfights he loved to follow from one season to the next.
“Hem had no stake in any of it,” Dos wrote. “His partisanship was in various toreros.”
Ernest’s lack of involvement weighed on their friendship. Dos invited Ernest to lunch several times to discuss the issue, but Ernest refused to budge. “Those lunches,” Dos wrote, “were the last time Hem and I were able to talk about things Spanish without losing our tempers.”
Dos had a friend, Jose Robles Pazos, whom he had known since 1916 when Dos was in Spain studying art and architecture at the Centro de Estudios Historicos. Robles’s nickname was Pepe, and he and Dos shared many interests in common, including a taste for radical politics and a desire to overthrow the monarchist government of Spain despite Pepe’s aristocratic background. Dos and Pepe stayed in touch over the years. Pepe translated Dos’s books into Spanish, and they visited each other on frequent trips back and forth across the Atlantic. When the republicans eventually succeeded in ousting the monarchy, Pepe’s and Dos’s political dream was finally realized. Pepe returned to his native country to serve the government he had helped bring to power. He was immediately made a lieutenant colonel in the republican army, and within weeks after that he was ensconced at the very heart of the government that was fighting for its life against Franco and his nationalists. Pepe was privy to the secret maneuvering taking place behind the scenes, including Stalin’s interest not only in supporting the republican government, but in installing a communist regime that would be a puppet of the Soviet Union. Pepe Robles knew a lot about what was going on. Some say he knew too much.
In the spring of 1937, a group of armed men knocked on the door of Pepe’s apartment in Valencia. The men refused to identify themselves, but it was apparent that they were connected in some way to the government that Robles served. They pushed their way inside, and without so much as a con su permiso they started ripping the place apart. At first they couldn’t find what they were looking for, so they demanded that Pepe tell them where his notebook was. What notebook are you looking for? You know very well what notebook we want: the one containing the information you’ve been compiling about Stalin’s plans for republican Spain after the war is over. When the men found what they were looking for, they slapped handcuffs on Pepe and dragged him off while his wife looked on in shock. The armed men held Pepe captive for a short period in Valencia, while their higher-ups assessed the information Pepe had written down in his notebook and its potential damage to the government.
Then they blindfolded Pepe and drove him away to a secret location. The men did not make any inquiries of Pepe, put him on trial, or give him an opportunity to defend himself in any legal proceeding. He was obviously a traitor, a spy, an aristocrat from birth. He had relatives loyal to Franco fighting against republican Spain. No, the men did not try him. Instead they sat him in a chair, raised a rifle to his head, and splashed his brain against the wall.
Chapter Eighteen
Dos had sailed to France with Katy shortly after Ernest did, on the three-funnel Cunard liner the Berengaria. Aboard ship with him were financier Bernard Baruch and Joseph Kennedy, who was crossing with his sons. Dos introduced himself to the dignitaries and engaged them in conversation about his support for republican Spain. Baruch was reasonably cordial, but Kennedy glowered at the novelist who
se left-wing sympathies he loathed. He looked Dos up and down and then delivered the most withering putdown he could think of.
“Well you’ve got some top-notch publicity with Hemingway there. My boys read everything he writes.”
Dos resented the remark but he tried not to show it. He had already achieved a landmark victory over Ernest when, in the summer of 1936 after the completion of his U.S.A. trilogy, Time magazine honored Dos with a glowing story featuring his photograph on its cover. The caption on the cover read: “Writes to Be Damned, not Saved.” Now Ernest had reason to hate Dos even more than he already did. The article about Dos pulled out all the stops, saying Dos deserved a place among the supreme figures in the history of American literature, comparing him to Joyce and Tolstoy—whom Ernest once said he would not get in the ring with. Ernest had seen Dos’s uncharacteristically virile image staring out at him, puffing away on a cigar clenched between his teeth. Ernest seethed with unmitigated envy. It would take Ernest more than another year to make Time’s cover, after the publication of To Have and Have Not in the fall of 1937. Dos was no longer Ernest’s closest friend; he was now a “one-eyed Portuguese bastard.”
When Dos reached Madrid, he saw that his old buddy was well entrenched at the Florida Hotel with a lovely blonde, a woman he had heard of but had yet to meet. Where was Pauline? What was going on? Ernest was the center of attention, well plugged into the people who were running things and the action in the field. Ernest and Martha, that’s all anyone talked about. Dos’s arrival was virtually unnoticed. The other journalists knew who he was, but Ernest was their focal point, the man who could get things done. He knew all the generals, the politicians who mattered. Dos knew none of them. And they didn’t seem anxious to bring him into their inner circle.
* * *
A fidgety, birdlike, tired-looking writer named Josephine Herbst entered Madrid around the same time. She walked into the lobby of the Florida Hotel and dropped her bags on the floor. She wondered who was in charge here. She was told there would be a room for her, but no one was available at the front desk. She had achieved a measure of success so far as a minor novelist, but she was best known for her polemical articles published in obscure leftwing journals that only True Believers had ever heard of. She knew both Ernest and Dos, and both men were genuinely fond of her. Josie and her husband, now deceased, had visited Ernest and Pauline in Key West several times. But when Ernest walked into the lobby of the Florida Hotel, he had another woman by his side, an attractive and energetic blonde named Martha Gellhorn. Josie was just as shocked as Dos was to see Ernest there without Pauline.
Ernest greeted Josie warmly, introduced her to Martha, and helped Josie up to her room with her bags. He wondered aloud what Josie was doing in Madrid. She had no money of her own. It didn’t take him long to figure out that Josie was there as a paid agent for the Soviet propaganda machine. Josie was so well connected to Stalin’s man in Spain, as it turned out, that she was the first one to learn what happened to Pepe Robles. He was a fascist spy, her handlers told her. He had to be executed. Josie said that Dos had come to Madrid to find out what happened to Pepe.
“Don’t say anything to him,” she was told. “Some of the Spanish were beginning to be worried about Dos Passos’s zeal and, fearing that he might turn against their cause if he discovered the truth, hoped to keep him from finding out anything while he was in Spain.”
And Ernest? It was all right to tell Ernest, her handlers told her. Ernest and Martha could be trusted. Let Ernest decide how to deal with Dos. In what amounted to an ironic twist of political fate, Ernest and Dos Passos were in the midst of a political role reversal. The apolitical Ernest, who wanted to write about nothing except hunting, fishing, and war as a disinterested observer, was now committed to the republican cause in Spain. Dos Passos, the dedicated leftist who slammed capitalism and bourgeois culture in his books, was now suspected by the republicans of veering to the right. If politics made strange bedfellows, Ernest and Dos were nonpareil living examples of it.
* * *
Dos went off on his own to see what he could find out about Pepe. The building Pepe lived in at 25 Fonseca was located in a grimy slum jammed with rundown stone houses. Dos climbed up the dirty stairs, slippery with a coating of grease. He found the right door and knocked. No one answered. Dos knocked again, this time as loudly as he could. He heard someone fumbling with the locks on the other side of the door. First one click and then another. The door had to be double- or triple-bolted. The door opened an inch, and Dos could see an eyeball peering out at him through the crack.
“Dos,” the woman called out. “Que maravilla!”
“Margara?”
Pepe’s wife opened the door wide enough for Dos to slip in, and then she bolted it again with the complicated array of locks. Dos studied her carefully. What happened to the pretty, carefree young woman he had known before the war? Margara was painfully thin, her skin drawn down around her cheekbones like a skull. Her reddish hair was soiled and unkempt. The apartment smelled dank, airless, musty, as though the windows had not been opened in a month. Margara sat down on a cot in the middle of the room and stared at the floor. She clamped her hands around her knees. Dos asked her if everything was all right.
“We can speak freely now,” she said. “The children are at school.” She asked Dos if he heard what happened to Pepe. Dos didn’t have a clue. “What’s wrong with Pepe?” he asked her. Margara told him the whole story, about the men who came in the dark of night and dragged Pepe off for questioning. All she knew was that they took him to a police station and asked him about the contents of his notebook. That’s all she knew. So far they hadn’t charged him with anything, at least nothing she had heard of.
“Charged him! With what?”
Pepe’s brother was fighting on the side of the nationalists. He had been captured and was also a prisoner now. Dos knew that Pepe and his brother had never gotten along. They didn’t agree on anything, especially politics. Margara told Dos that she knew Pepe had been suspicious of the Russians, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. It was too dangerous for her to know, he said.
“He turned off my questions, but I could see he was worried and harassed.”
Dos was outraged. There had to be some mistake. If Pepe needed legal counsel, Dos would see that he was well represented. Dos knew lots of Spanish lawyers from his many trips to Spain. Margara told Dos that no one she contacted wanted to help. She knew some high-ranking officials in the republican government, but all they did was put her off, telling her they would see what they could do. But she never heard from them again. They all appeared to be skeptical about Pepe’s loyalty to the cause.
“It’s ridiculous,” Dos said. “There must be some way of appealing to the law.”
Margara just stared at him as one would observe a naïve child. “Law! You don’t know the Spain of today!” Dos shook his head. This was a government that believed in democratic principles and justice for everybody, he was convinced. He would not rest until he had gotten some answers for himself. He told Margara he was leaving.
“I’ll be back,” he said, then vanished into the bowels of the dark stairwell.
* * *
Josie Herbst disliked Martha intensely from the time she first set eyes on her. For one thing, Martha was not Pauline, a woman whom Josie cared for a great deal, almost like a sister. What the hell was Ernest doing over here with this woman anyway? If that weren’t bad enough, Martha said she was a journalist who was sympathetic to the republicans, but she looked like the enemy. In one of her dispatches, Josie described Martha “sailing in and out in beautiful Saks Fifth Avenue pants, with a green scarf wound round her head.”
A few nights after Josie arrived, the Florida Hotel suffered a direct hit from a rebel shell that shook the walls and sent plaster cascading onto the heads of its inhabitants. Dozens of prostitutes came running out of the rooms of various correspondents onto the landing that overlooked the inner courtyard. As they passed, the d
ashing French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, elegantly attired in a blue satin dressing gown, handed each of them a grapefruit from his private stash. Josie and Dos dashed out of their respective rooms, looking frightened in the midst of all the chaos. Then out came Ernest and Martha, smiling, somewhat acclimated to the routine violence by now.
Martha described the scene later: the scurrying prostitutes made her think of beetles emerging in the dark, “crying in high voices like birds.” She also found Dos Passos amusing, clothed in his “pyjamas, uncombed, with his coat on.”
More often than not, Martha referred to Ernest as “Scrooby” now, a shortened version of “Screwball.” Ernest preferred to think of it as a nickname for his penis, and he called her “Daughter” or “Mooky,” or sometimes just “M.” The others laughed at their curious intimacies but admired their calmness in the face of so much danger. “Hemingway had the calming effect of a buffalo straying shaggily over the tundra, knowing its water holes and its pastures,” said a military advisor to the republicans. “Because of this he invigorated our company.” And they agreed with Ernest when he told them Martha was the bravest woman he had ever met.
They could not say the same of movie actor Errol Flynn, who descended on Madrid with a retinue of flunkies and cameras to record his every action in the warzone. Martha, herself, was uniquely unimpressed by the screen idol. “At lunch there was no more room at the table,” she wrote, “due to the influx of shits now that all is quiet. Herbst and two Seldes and a nice handsome dumb [bastard] named Errol Flynn who looks like white fire on the screen but is only very, very average off.”
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