* * *
Ernest and Martha sailed across to Europe on the Queen Mary on March 19, 1938. Back in Paris once more, Ernest once again functioned as more than a war correspondent. He operated on a quasi-official level as well, contacting the American ambassador to France, Claude Bowers, to arrange an evacuation plan for Americans in the event of a total collapse of the republican government. Paramount on the agenda, he told Bowers, was dispatching ships to Spanish ports to evacuate American citizens who were sure to be executed by Franco’s troops if they were captured. Bowers agreed and forwarded Ernest’s recommendations to Washington.
“I heard from reliable sources that Hemingway acted as a liaison between the Spaniards and the British navy in the last days in terms of evacuating people,” said Milton Wolff. “So he did have influence, though he was certainly not on the general staff.”
Ernest helped raised money for the crippled and wounded streaming across the border into Marseilles to escape the hellhole that was Spain. Then he and Gellhorn boarded the night train to Perpignan with fellow journalists Vincent Sheean and Jim Lardner, the son of humorist Ring Lardner whom Ernest admired. In Perpignan near the Spanish border, they all observed the ragtag hordes of war refugees staggering along the roads, crouching in ditches, begging everyone they met for scraps of food to alleviate their hunger. Most had abandoned their villages before they were overrun by the enemy.
“There were those who came with only a bundle,” Martha wrote, “pink or yellow or blue or dirty grey, and all strange shapes, clutched under their arms or balanced on their heads, some walking fast and others warily.”
Ernest, Martha, and the others crossed the border into Spain, where they watched nationalist bombers dropping their loads and strafing everything that moved with machineguns mounted on the fuselage. They reached Barcelona, now leveled and strewn with debris in the aftermath of the bombing attacks. It was all very much like the “last days of Pompei,” Martha observed. Martha wanted to stay there and send more details of the devastation to her editor at Collier’s, but he wired her back immediately that he was not interested in the Barcelona story. “Stale by the time we publish,” he said. Instead, he instructed her to go back into France, and then to Czechoslovakia and England to report on how the war was affecting the rest of Europe.
Martha had observed Ernest at his finest during the past few weeks. Years later, after their love had turned to spite and bitterness, she was able to fairly assess his courage and coolness in the midst of danger. “There was plenty wrong with Hemingway,” she wrote, “but nothing wrong with his honest commitment to the Republic of Spain and nothing wrong with his admiration and care for men in the Brigades and in the Spanish divisions and nothing wrong with his respect for the Spanish people. He proved it by his actions.”
Others agreed. Ernest remained in Spain after Martha left for France, and continued his efforts to help those around him, including other journalists. “Because Ernest was always a good man in a tight spot,” wrote Denis Brian, “fellow correspondents were glad to have him along, especially those with him in a boat on the dangerous Ebro River. The boat was out of control and heading for a wrecked bridge when Hemingway grabbed an oar and used his great strength and skill to row them to the river bank.”
Martha rented a car in Perpignan and drove slowly north toward Paris, stopping along the way to interview locals about the war. She took her time, gathering material for her next article, and when she arrived in Paris on May 26, Ernest was already there waiting for her. They discussed the war, of course, but Ernest had other things on his mind as well, most important among them Pauline’s increasingly urgent telegrams from home. He had to return to the States and deal with his marital situation once and for all. Martha was anxious about his departure. How many men had professed undying love for “the other woman,” only to return to their wives when faced with the stark reality of their predicament? That, after all, was the path of least resistance with fewer complications for all concerned.
She was trying to be “reasonable,” Martha wrote to her mother. “I believe he loves me, and he believes he loves me, but I do not believe much in the way one’s personal destiny works out.”
Martha completed her assignment in Europe for Collier’s after Ernest left on the Normandie for New York. Pauline was waiting for him at the Key West airport on May 31 when his plane touched ground on the flight from Miami. She was livid, unsmiling, trembling with rage. She herself had just returned from New York after spending some time with her sister Virginia in Connecticut. Virginia had always liked Ernest; in fact, at one point she had developed a crush on him herself but backed away when his relationship with Pauline took a serious turn. But now she couldn’t stand him because of the way he treated her sister. Don’t let him off the hook too easily, she advised Pauline. Make sure he agrees to a substantial financial settlement if you get a divorce.
Ernest, too, was miserable as he confronted his wife at the airport. Summer had already arrived in Key West, and the blistering sun beat down hard from the pale-blue canopy of sky. Pauline had brought their sons Patrick and Gregory along with her, perhaps as an appeal to his paternal instincts and his obligations as a father. Ernest’s homecoming did not get off to an auspicious start. With their handyman and general factotum behind the steering wheel, their Ford convertible with a dented fender approached the intersection of Simonton and United Streets. Suddenly, a WPA worker driving a busted-out jalopy lost control of his car, rolled over, and skidded sideways into Ernest’s Ford. Ernest jumped out immediately, ready for combat. He stood toe to toe with the other driver, both men cursing each other out. A local cop appeared before either antagonist could throw a punch and arrested the two of them.
“I will not pay damages!” Ernest yelled. “I’ll counter-suit any suit he brings up! I was struck!”
With no injuries to anyone, only further damage to the already battered cars, the presiding magistrate washed his hands of the matter, Pontius Pilate-style, and dismissed the case. The matter ended there. Ernest and the other party cooled down, and both of them laughed it off. The next day Ernest made a joke of the incident and told a reporter, with some exaggeration, “It’s much more dangerous to be in Key West and have an old jalopy without brakes crash into you than it is to be under fire from airplane bombs, artillery fire, and machineguns as I was twenty-four hours a day.”
The accident was a temporary diversion from his problems at home. Ernest had left the war in Spain behind, but the battle of Key West was just beginning.
Chapter Twenty-three
Josie Russell was the only friend in Key West Ernest could count on. Some of the regulars at Sloppy Joe’s had cooled to him now, many unhappy with his portrayal of them and people they knew in To Have and Have Not. Everyone else who knew Ernest and Pauline, including Charlie and Lorine Thompson, sympathized with Pauline in the escalating war on Whitehead Street. Ernest retreated to his office across the catwalk in the other building on the property for longer and longer stretches. He and Pauline argued constantly about everything except the main issue between them: Martha Gellhorn and her continuing presence in his life. In distancing himself from Pauline, Ernest was pushing away more than his wife and the mother of two of his boys. Pauline, who had been a writer for Vogue in Paris before she met Ernest, had also been his primary editor during the past ten years—a period in which Ernest had written most of his major books. She had functioned first and foremost as his bullshit detector, telling him what to tone down and what to leave out when he exaggerated too transparently. Ernest always ran his work before Pauline first before he shipped it off to Max Perkins in New York.
“I don’t think any of the books written about Ernest have given Pauline the credit for the part she played in his life,” said Lorine Thompson years later. “You see, most of his best books were written while he was living in Key West. I feel that Pauline kept Ernest’s nose a little bit to the grindstone…I think she did everything to keep Ernest at work, to make condition
s favorable for him to work. Pauline’s Uncle Gus, Gus Pfeiffer—there’s no getting around it—with the money he gave Pauline made it possible for Ernest to spend a great deal more time writing than working on other things, and to take his time doing it.”
Ernest began to feel more and more like an outcast in his own town, and like a stranger in his house. He drank even more heavily, some days pounding down a dozen or more drinks a day. He spent his days and nights with Pauline and the boys, but he ached for the latest woman in his life and couldn’t wait to be with her again. He didn’t want to admit it yet, but he was growing tired of Key West. His innate paranoia led him to believe that the situation had reversed: the town had turned on him rather than he on the town. With the Overseas Highway now completed, linking the Keys to the mainland, new hordes of tourists poured into Key West, many of them trying to get a glimpse of the famous writer behind the brick wall that barricaded Ernest from life outside. He had to get away, and the easiest way to do that was to take the Pilar down to Cuba, leave his frustration and his worries behind and escape into his greatest passion outside of writing, fishing for marlin.
He and Josie Russell departed for a brief outing in the Gulf Stream near Havana, but Ernest’s heart was not completely in it. When he returned to Key West, he was more agitated than ever, more erratic than before. Pauline and some of their guests thought he was bordering on insanity. When he couldn’t immediately lay his hands on the key to his writing lair, he flew into a rage, grabbed one of his sidearms and blasted the lock off, shattering the doorjamb into splinters.
“He was like a crazy man waving the pistol around,” said Lorine Thompson. “I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
Pauline sent the children away with the Thompsons to stay with them for the night. Pauline left Ernest home and went by herself to a costume party she had planned at the Havana-Madrid Club. At home alone with his family and friends gone, Ernest downed several whiskeys and stormed down to the club. Pauline watched him stagger in and cringed when he let a drunken guest prod him into a fight, asking Ernest why he thought he was so tough. Ernest unleashed a powerful right, clipped the man on the point of his chin and left him lying unconscious on the floor. Pauline retreated in tears, humiliated to the bone by her husband’s behavior.
All this may have been a reflection of Ernest’s worsening alcoholism and, perhaps, of the sickness gnawing away at his soul. He was deeply in love, no longer with Pauline but with Martha who had returned to her own family nest in St. Louis. They wrote to each other every day, professing their love in letters that became progressively passionate. Ernest was living a lie at home and it was eating him alive. He and Martha wanted to be together, yet Ernest had yet to take the next logical step and sever the umbilical cord that linked him to Pauline. He and his wife were separated in every way but actual fact. They went through the pretense of celebrating their birthdays together in July when Ernest turned thirty-nine and Pauline forty-three. Then they packed their car full of gear—rifles, shotguns, pistols, stacks of ammunition in addition to their clothes and other paraphernalia—for a hunting trip out west at the L-Bar-T ranch in Wyoming, near the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park.
As they passed through Florida, Gregory accidently scratched Ernest’s eye, which required stopping off at a hospital to have it tended to. By the time they arrived at the ranch, Ernest was wearing an eye patch and dark glasses to cover the salve leaking out of his aching eye. His mood had grown stormier than ever, matching the deluge they had driven into. The skies opened up and kept them cabin-bound for a solid week under low dark clouds and pounding rain without letup. Ernest, Pauline, and the boys were confined within four close walls with scarcely an opportunity to ramble through the woods to relieve the tension. Escape came in the form of a telegram from NANA, asking Ernest to return to Spain to report on the war, which now looked all but hopeless for the republicans. Martha had already gone over by herself on assignment from Collier’s.
Their plans for a family vacation now ruined beyond repair, Ernest left for New York alone, and Pauline made arrangements to rent an apartment on East 50thStreet for her and the boys. She could no longer bear to spend her days in the small-town atmosphere of Key West without Ernest, with rumors multiplying daily about the battles taking place on Whitehead Street. She told Ernest that she would wait there until he got back from Europe. She maintained some glimmer of optimism that her marriage could still be saved, that Ernest would outgrow this infatuation with Martha—as he did other infatuations in the past—and come home to her. On August 31, the Normandie sailed out of New York Harbor with Ernest on board, carrying him across the Atlantic on his fourth and final visit to the war in Spain.
* * *
Franco and his forces occupied almost all of the country, and the republican government existed now in name only. The international brigades had abandoned the battlefield, leaving the republican remnants to suffer the wrath of the nationalists by themselves. Every day the battered legions crossed on foot across the border into France, bloodied, hungry, tired beyond description, clothed in rags, their eyes dulled by hopelessness and defeat. Ernest traveled back and forth between Paris and the Spanish border, describing the aftermath of the fighting for NANA and working on short stories as a warm-up for the big novel he planned to write about Spain—the one that would turn out to be the greatest and most ambitious novel he would ever write, by most accounts. Martha traveled throughout Europe, covering the preparations for all-out war that appeared increasingly inevitable each day.
In New York, Scribner’s published Ernest’s play along with a selection of his short stories in a single volume; The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories was launched on October 14, 1938. Max Perkins had been less than enthusiastic about the play but agreed to publish a limited edition in deference to his celebrated author. The reviewers were equally disappointed by Ernest’s latest effort, ignoring the stories while pummeling the play. The New York Times found it monotonous. The Nation said it was “almost as bad” as To Have and Have Not, which was “by far the worst book” Ernest had ever written. Time found the play “ragged and confused.” Influential critic Malcolm Cowley called the character Dorothy Bridges a “Junior Leaguer” and said that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of it.” Ernest responded in typical fashion, blaming Max Perkins and Scribner’s for not coming to his defense with a series of well-placed—and expensive—ads to counter the critics.
The lovers crossed back over the Atlantic on November 24, with plans for Ernest to spend Christmas with Pauline and the boys in Key West and for Martha to be with her mother and her own family in St. Louis for the holidays. Martha had become even more anxious during the past few months. Ernest had not yet made the final break from his wife, even though he told Martha it was just a question of time before he did. Martha could almost see him vacillating from day to day, professing his deep love for her and telling her he wanted to marry her, while simultaneously believing he could keep his double life going indefinitely. If he didn’t end it with Pauline soon, she would have to break up with him. It was a miserable Christmas for both of them. The fights resumed on Whitehead Street, and Martha languished in the bosom of her family, questioning whether she and Ernest had a future together. Ernest flew up to New York as soon as the new year began to work on the stage production of his play, and Martha traveled there on January 14, 1939, to join him. But before she so much as had a chance to say “Hello, darling, how are you?” she picked up the Daily Mirror on the morning of January 15 and read the following article:
“Hemingway was accosted in the Stork Club by a man who insisted on rubbing his hand over the writer’s face while muttering, ‘Tough, eh?’ Quintin Reynolds, magazine writer, advised Hemingway to ‘give him a poke, but don’t hit him too hard.’ The author of Death in the Afternoon arose and clipped the unwelcome visitor on the chin. When he was lifted off the
floor he gave his name as Edward Chapman, a lawyer. Hemingway previously proved his claim to a hairy chest in a scrap with Max Eastman in the fall of 1937.” Eastman had attacked Ernest in one of his articles, and the two men grappled with each other afterward in Max Perkins’s office.
Two days later, syndicated columnist Walter Winchell put a different slant on the story in the same newspaper. According to Winchell, the lawyer “fell from his chair from too much wooflewater.” Ernest never laid a hand on him, reported Winchell. “It just didn’t happen.” No matter though. The public believed what it wanted to believe. Ernest’s reputation as a man of letters and a battling man of action was further inflated.
Martha told Ernest that his indecision about their relationship had become unendurable for her, and he assured her that he would end things as soon as he got back to Key West. But even then he procrastinated. His plane left New York in a heavy snowstorm on January 24, and when he got back to Key West he and Pauline got ready for a visit from Ernest’s mother, who had yet to set eyes on her youngest grandson, Gregory. Ernest had been alienated from his mother for years, unreasonably blaming her for his father’s suicide, and he detested her so much that he rented a room for her in the Casa Marina Hotel rather than have her stay at his house. Grace Hemingway arrived on February 7 for an awkward week-long reunion and departed for home on February 14.
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 14