Hemingway and Gellhorn

by Jerome Tuccille

  “We had a rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in, an enthusiastic but unskilled admirer,” Ernest wrote afterward. Mrs. Roosevelt was “enormously tall, very charming, and almost stone deaf. She hears practically nothing that is said to her but is so charming that most people do not notice it.” President Roosevelt was “very Harvard charming and sexless and womanly, seems like a great Woman Secretary of Labor.” The three visitors sweltered through the showing in the airless White House, without so much as a ceiling fan to circulate the humid summer heat. Ernest was shocked to finally see what he and Joris had produced on the screen before such an exalted audience.

  “Afterwards when it is all over,” he wrote, “you have a picture. You see it on the screen; you hear the noises and the music; and your own voice, that you’ve never heard before, comes back to you saying things you’d scribbled in the dark in the projection room or on pieces of paper in a hot hotel bedroom. But what you see in motion on the screen is not what you remember.”

  * * *

  Ernest delivered the manuscript of To Have and Have Not to Max Perkins in time for an October 15, 1937, pub date. The novel that Ernest delivered was not his finest work, not really a cohesive novel so much as three novellas with a common theme strung together in single book. It was Ernest’s most political book, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression in Key West and the attempted revolution in Cuba. It had a cast of characters based on people he knew who were involved in gun-running, smuggling, and murder. It is an exciting story, somewhat experimental in style with its hard-bitten prose, later adapted into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

  And then Ernest was off to Spain again on August 14, sailing across on the Champlain and Martha following this time on the Normandie. On board with Martha were acid-penned writer Dorothy Parker and equally acerbic playwright Lillian Hellman. Parker wrote about Martha working out every day in the ship’s gym, where “all of Ernest’s ladies began their basic training for the life partnership.” Martha and Lillian disliked each other intensely from the start; perhaps the uniquely homely, slightly older woman was put off by Martha’s good looks. In any event, Lillian sized her up and later criticized her “well-tailored” appearance, which made her look as though she were going off to cover the war for Vogue. For her part, Martha took a liking to Dorothy but found Lillian to be a “sullen” hag “with her thin upper lip, and the lids flat over her eyes and the insulting darkened teeth and the expression of polite spite.” She had no right to inflict her misery on others, said Martha, “simply because one man left her.”

  Martha joined Ernest at the Hotel Foyot in Paris on August 23. Ernest was not in the best of moods when she arrived. He was poring through the page proofs for the British edition of his novel, but the more pressing concern was his doctor’s advice following a recent physical examination. The doctor told him he was suffering from some damage to his liver as a result of his heavy drinking. He needed to cut his alcohol intake by half at least, said the doctor, and give up the heavy, spicy sauces he favored. The doctor also prescribed a sleeping pill to cure Ernest’s chronic insomnia. Telling Ernest to cut back on alcohol and give up the food he liked was tantamount to telling him to stop breathing. He was an alcoholic and a sensualist. Booze and well-seasoned food were more than just fuel to him; they were the very elixir of life, along with sex and other earthly pleasures. He had recently turned thirty-eight, still a fairly young man, but many years of hard living were starting to take a nasty toll on his body.

  Soon they would be heading south to Spain again—a country brimming over with the best of what life had to offer, even in the midst of the country’s hellacious struggle for survival.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  On September 6 they crossed the border, first stopping off in Valencia. The news was not good for the republican cause, whose troops were in retreat throughout Spain, fighting a defensive battle against Franco’s nationalists. The nationalists were in control of the northern provinces, including Basque country. Rebel planes and submarines attacked virtually everything that sailed in the Mediterranean delivering supplies to the republicans. The Vatican had recognized Burgos as the seat of the new nationalist government. Many of Ernest’s and Martha’s republican friends had been slaughtered in the fighting.

  “I thought I knew everything about the war,” Martha said to Ernest. “But what I didn’t know is that your friends got killed.”

  Perhaps the major problem for the republicans was the withdrawal of military support by Stalin in the face of ongoing nationalist attacks. Stalin was rethinking his strategy, and while he had not yet signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler and would not do so for two more years, his crusade to purge the Russian military of dissidents at home required a greater concentration of energy there. He recalled his best field tacticians from Spain to deal with his internal strife and left the republican ranks in shambles after cleansing them of non-Marxist elements. The republicans attempted an offensive to take control of Madrid and succeeded briefly in splitting the rebel army in Brunete. But their depleted reserves suffered horrendous losses and fell short of the goal.

  “You could pass a high pile of rubbish,” Martha wrote, “and smell suddenly the sharp rotting smell of the dead. Further on would be the half-decayed carcass of a mule, with flies thick on it. And then a sewing machine, by itself, blown out into the street.”

  Ernest and Martha surveyed the wreckage through field glasses and observed Franco’s soldiers wandering through deserted buildings, while off in the distance beyond them republican soldiers washed in a stream. The nationalists counterattacked and overran Santander. Shortly afterward, Franco commanded the entire Atlantic Coast and the middle of Spain—roughly two-thirds of the country. His next goal was to drive a corridor to the Mediterranean coast and split the nation in half.

  “Now we learned to know the wounded, the various ways of broken flesh,” wrote John Sommerfield, a volunteer in the republican army, “the limbs sliced off clean and left whole on the ground, or blown into a red pulp stuck with white fragments of bone and still hanging by throbbing veins to living bodies…we learned the faces of men dying and not knowing it, greenish, livid, with impersonal, gaping mouths.”

  Ernest grew annoyed with Martha when she said she wanted to return home to earn some money speaking about the war in Spain. He accused her of money-grubbing when the republicans were suffering mounting losses; Ernest had enough money for both of them. But in reality he was becoming irritated with her inchoate independence now that she had learned what she needed to know about her craft from him. She was like a star student striving to break free of her mentor. While Ernest had encouraged her writing ambitions and did all he could do to bring her along, he was also concerned that the day would come when she would no longer need him as much. His first two wives had been compliant and lacked career ambitions of their own. Martha was a different species altogether. For one thing she was nine years younger than he was, while Hadley was eight years older and Pauline four years older. Martha was also more glamorous and self-assertive. She had a strong will that was starting to clash more frequently with his. Ernest retaliated by depicting Martha in a less-thancomplimentary light in the play he was writing. Now that the novel was done, Ernest turned his attention back to The Fifth Column. The original storyline for the play required no female lead, but Ernest wrote one in anyway, portraying himself as a counterspy in Spain named Philip Rawlings and Martha as his attractive blonde lover, Dorothy Bridges. Philip is an amusing fellow whose main fault is that he drinks too much. In one scene, which Ernest eventually expunged, Philip complains about Dorothy putting him off his stroke by pressuring him to marry her when he would rather return home to his wife. Ernest described Dorothy/Martha in Philip’s words, saying “Granted she’s lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still she’s very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocent—and quite brave.”r />
  Lazy! Spoiled! Stupid! On the make! These were hardly words designed to turn up the heat on their love affair, despite the inclusion of “beautiful,” “charming,” and “brave” among Dorothy’s personal traits. At the end of the play, Philip leaves Dorothy, telling her “You’re useless really. You’re uneducated, you’re useless, you’re a fool and you’re lazy.” But Ernest did give Dorothy some of the best lines in the play. “Oh don’t be kind,” Dorothy answers Philip. “You’re frightful when you’re kind. Only kind people should be kind.” Ernest, undoubtedly, was suffering from guilt pangs over his treatment of Pauline. Years earlier he had blamed Pauline for breaking up his marriage to Hadley, and now he was finding reasons to blame Martha for his all-but-doomed second marriage. Someone had to be the scapegoat, as long as it wasn’t Ernest.

  Martha decided to stay on in Madrid with Ernest a bit longer instead of sailing back across the Atlantic immediately. Once again their rooms, numbers 113 and 114 this time around, were amply stocked with—well not exactly with the spoils of war, but with the best that war-torn Spain had to offer. The bed, the chairs, every square inch of floor space in one room was weighed down with tins of corned beef, cheese, coffee, soup, chocolate bars, and of course alcoholic beverages of every variety. No one knew for sure exactly where Ernest laid claim to these provisions, which led to more speculation that perhaps he was doing triple duty as a war correspondent, combatant, and a spy. With the galley proofs of To Have and Have Not corrected and the novel due out in a month, Ernest barricaded himself in the Hotel Florida to work on his play, while Dorothy—er, Martha—pecked away beside him on her own typewriter, generating articles about the war for her publisher in New York.

  * * *

  Now it was Ernest’s turn to grace the cover of Time. The October 18, 1937, issue of the magazine featured a stylized painting of him in profile, fishing in the Gulf Stream. He was depicted as a man of action who was also a man of letters—the man of the moment—in a pose familiar to his wide readership. Now he had evened the score with Dos. The cover story was timed to coincide with the publication of To Have and Have Not, and on that score Ernest was less than pleased with many of the reviews. Time’s review was glowing, calling Harry Morgan, his main character, Ernest’s “most thoroughly consistent, deeply understandable character.” With the novel, said the reviewer, Ernest reestablished his position in the top rank of American writers. The left-wing press loved the novel, with New Masses hailing the author’s “increasing awareness of the economic system and the social order it dominates.”

  But the literary fictionistas were less impressed. “Please quit saving Spain and start saving Ernest Hemingway,” implored fellow novelist Sinclair Lewis. The Nation dismissed the work as a mere “transition to the kind of book that Ernest will write in the future.” But the naysayers could not restrain the sale of the novel, which quickly climbed to thirty-eight thousand copies in the midst of the grinding depression. People needed diversion to take their minds off their penurious condition, and Ernest was one of their favorite sources of entertainment. So what if his latest book was not his best; it was a damned good story that captured the spirit of the era.

  In mid-December the snow began to fall heavily across northern Spain. Martha wanted to return home in time for Christmas, so she traveled to Barcelona while Ernest lingered a bit longer to observe the action from a hill in Teruel. He met up with her in Barcelona at the Hotel Majestic, where they had dinner together before Martha boarded the train to Paris. Back in the States, news of their affair was now appearing in gossip columns throughout the nation. Pauline read about it in Key West and grew frantic. Of course she had known all along that Ernest was off on another fling, but she believed he would get over it in short order and put it behind him, as he had done with that business with Jane Mason. But the gossip now was that he and Martha were more than just lovers; they were serious partners who might have been married by now were it not for Ernest’s existing marriage to Pauline. Pauline could take it no longer. She flew to New York and crossed the Atlantic on December 20 aboard the Europa, while Martha was sailing the other way on the Normandie. Their ships were in view of each other in mid-passage. Pauline checked into the Hotel ElyseePark on the right bank in the midst of a howling snowstorm, in time to greet Ernest when he arrived from Barcelona.

  Pauline was in a red hot fury when Ernest set eyes on her. “Don’t you see that Martha is a childish, egotistical, self-centered phony?” she demanded of him. She is “almost without talent.” Pauline told Ernest she would jump off the balcony outside their hotel room—ala Jane Mason—if he didn’t come to his senses. And look at you, she said. You’re bloated and suffering with liver problems because of your drinking. Ernest couldn’t deny her accusations. He felt like hell and didn’t argue with her assessment of Martha. Hadn’t he said as much about her through the mouth of Philip Rawlings in his play? But he couldn’t be without her. He wrote to Max Perkins that he was in a “gigantic jam.” Yes, life does get complicated when you venture onto the thin ice of infidelity.

  They remained together in Paris for twelve days to wait out the weather, while Martha spent Christmas with Edna and her siblings in St. Louis. On January 12, 1938, Ernest and Pauline sailed westward across the turbulent Atlantic on the Gripsholm, with one storm after another roiling the ocean and pounding their vessel. Their destination was Nassau in the Bahamas, a conscious decision they made to avoid reporters in New York who were clamoring to know about their ruptured marriage. From Nassau they flew to Miami. Pauline caught a puddle-jumper down to Key West, and Ernest boarded the Pilar and headed to No Name Key. Pauline met him there with their car and drove him the remaining distance to their home.

  During the past thirteen months, Ernest had spent less than three weeks in their house on Whitehead Street. The new year had just begun, and it was off to a less-than-auspicious start.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Ernest put the best face that he could on his precarious situation. As the Key West Citizen reported following an interview with him, “Expressing concern at the local criticism of his latest novel, To Have and Have Not, Mr. Hemingway regretted that this is so and said, ‘I am delighted to be back in Key West. It is my home and where my family is. My best friends are here. No one has more admiration for the town, and appreciation for its people, their friendliness, the fine life and wonderful fishing here than I have.’”

  At the same time, Martha was coming into her own as a celebrated lecturer and expert on the civil war in Spain. “With a short black dress setting off her taffy-colored hair hanging childishly about her face in a long bob, Miss Gellhorn looked sixteen but spoke in a luscious, deep, free-flowing voice with words of maturity and an emphasis of authority,” wrote a reporter in Oak Leaves, a newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois—Ernest’s hometown no less. Martha’s hometown newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, was equally ebullient, talking about her “voice, the culture, the art of pose, the poise, gesture, diction which succeed upon the stage at its best.”

  She drew a crowd of three thousand people at the University of Minnesota— students, professors, and concerned members of the public who were anxious for news about the course of the war in Spain. Her fame was growing, thanks to her war dispatches and now her widely reported speeches. The New York Times called Martha one of the few popular female lecturers of 1938. She warned of a widening war that would inevitably involve the United States more deeply in European affairs, but her attempts to get the Roosevelt administration to abandon its neutral position in favor of the republicans went unheeded. Her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, though sympathetic, was being attacked by the Catholic Church and felt pressured to adopt a low profile out of fear of hurting her husband, who was adamant about keeping his distance from the conflict. When Martha became ill after delivering twenty-two lectures in a single month, Eleanor Roosevelt advised her to take a vacation and “stop thinking for a little while.”

  But Martha was incapable of closing her mind to the violence in S
pain. “The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me,” she wrote back to the president’s wife, “is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice…The young men will die. The best ones will die first, and the old powerful men will survive to mishandle the peace…I have gone angry to the bone.”

  Martha and Ernest were both itching to get back to Spain. In their absence, Franco’s forces had sent the republicans into full retreat. On the night of March 16, with a full moon illuminating the cold dark sky over Barcelona, German bombers mounted a devastating attack on the city, eighteen raids in all over forty-eight hours, raining bombs down on the most populated neighborhoods, killing thousands of residents and maiming many more who were trapped beneath falling ceilings, roof beams, tumbling bricks and mortar. When the bombers had completed their deadly mission and flown off into the distance, the blood literally ran like flowing streams along the gutters. Reporters wrote of witnessing horrifying sights “which Dante could not have imagined.” The hospitals overflowed with the sick and dying, those with broken bodies, and the streets outside were filled with screaming men, women, and children. Those who had survived the attacks roamed through the gutted city mindlessly, most of them delirious with hunger. There was no food to be found anywhere.

  The two lovers could no longer stand to be away from each other. Twelve pounds lighter after her arduous speaking tour, Martha traveled to Florida, to Miami where Ernest flew up to meet her. She wanted to be with the man who comforted her when she needed it and strengthened her resolve to keep on going when her spirits were flagging. Their match was not perfect. An element of competition had seeped into their relationship. But they were both determined to see it through. There was tension there. But there was love there as well. Their affection for each other had grown deeper, and never were they more aware of that than when they were apart. Pauline was incensed, and hurt to the core. She had worked hard since his return to get her husband back. And now his lover was back—almost literally in her own backyard. Martha had come to take him away again. And Ernest was champing at the bit to go away with her.