While Grace was there on the island—with them, but not quite among them—Martha was vacationing with her own mother a hundred miles away as the crow flies, due north in Naples, Florida. Pauline would have been hysterical if she knew about that, so Ernest figured it was better not to inform her. One day after Grace left town, Ernest sauntered over to the P&O ferry bound for Havana. As far as Pauline was concerned, Ernest was just going off on another fishing excursion. In Ernest’s mind, this trip was going to be more permanent. He and Martha had made plans for her to join him in Cuba. Without telling Pauline in so many words, Ernest had left the house in Key West for good.
PART FOUR
HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN
Chapter Twenty-four
When he reached Havana Ernest rented rooms in two different hotels: one on the fourth floor of the Ambos Mundos, his favorite trysting place years earlier with Jane Mason, where he holed up to start his new book, and the second room in the SevillaBiltmore with a stock of provisions—a large ham, sausages, bread— where he slept. As he explained to Max Perkins a couple of months later, the only way he could get any privacy was to “tell everybody you live in one hotel and live in another. When they locate you, move to the country.”
Ernest spent the next five weeks there, cutting back on his drinking, writing furiously every day, exercising regularly, and trimming his weight back under two hundred pounds. Martha claimed that she joined him in Havana as early as February 18, while others said she didn’t get there until April. But it appears unlikely that both of them would have put up with such a lengthy separation. Each couldn’t wait to put their affair on a more permanent footing. More than likely, the earlier date is the correct one. In the mornings, they ambled together over to the Ambos Mundos to pick up their mail and then went about their business. Ernest quickly lost himself in his story about the Spanish Civil War. The book developed its own momentum. It fairly exploded out of him as he channeled it onto the reams of blank paper stacked in front of his typewriter. The novel flowed like a rushing river. Ernest hadn’t written with this kind of passion in years. He knew it was going to be good—far better than good, the best he had ever written. He worked surely and rapidly, a man possessed.
When the first flush of energy finally spent itself, Ernest took the ferry back to Key West by himself with several chapters in hand. He wired Max Perkins that the book was “flowing along beautifully.” Pretty soon Max would be getting the monumental novel that he knew Ernest could write, the one Max had so patiently been waiting for him to deliver. On April 5 Ernest boarded the one possession he cared about above all others in the world, the Pilar. When he motored back to Havana in his boat, Ernest’s life with Pauline had effectively come to a close.
While Ernest was away, Martha made a futile attempt to tidy up the slovenly room stacked with cured hams and sausages, alcohol, guns, and fishing gear that served as their homestead. The chaos and mess that grew like a fungus across the room was bad enough in Madrid during wartime conditions, but in peacetime Havana it was unacceptable as a domestic living arrangement.
“I am really not abnormally clean,” Martha said later. “I’m simply as clean as any normal person. But Ernest was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I’ve ever known.”
She was taking over the house-hunting, she told Ernest when he got back to Havana. Ernest had no problem with that as long as she left him alone to work on his book. Martha checked the local listings and found a one-story Spanish-style farmhouse set on fifteen acres on top of a hill overlooking San Francisco de Paula, fifteen miles outside of Havana. It was called the Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm.
The place was a train wreck when Martha set eyes on it, but the rent was cheap at one hundred U.S. dollars a month. The swimming pool was filled with green sludge, and out-of-control weeds had taken over the tennis court. Inside, the house was hideously furnished and in dire need of repair. The house was built in 1886 and looked as though it had been abandoned decades earlier. But Martha envisioned the possibilities. Colorful flowers and plants flourished throughout the property in the tropical heat and humidity. The central living room was spacious and there were enough rooms for both of them to have separate spaces to write in. Most important, local labor was cheap. Using money she saved from her Collier’s assignments, Martha hired painters, carpenters, electricians, and a couple of gardeners to get the place in shape. She ordered furniture to replace the nondescript items in the house.
It took the workmen a little more than a month to complete the restoration. Ernest and Martha moved into the Finca Vigia together on May 17, with Ernest barely breaking stride as he poured out several thousand words a week on his book. Martha began an autobiographical novel of her own, about a young journalist covering the spillover effects of the Spanish conflict in Eastern Europe. This marked the first time Ernest had set up housekeeping with a younger woman, the first time he would be living with someone without a trust fund to sustain him when the money dried up. Royalties from his earlier books had begun to flag, but a movie offer for To Have and Have Not—despite the poor reviews— reopened the money floodgates again.
Back in Key West, Pauline decided she could no longer live there without Ernest. News of their crumbling marriage was the talk of the town. Her friends commiserated with her, but she hated running into others on the Island of Bones who greeted her with pity in their eyes. The cruel irony of her situation was not lost on Pauline; once she had been the Other Woman in his life, and now she was the wife being replaced by someone new. She packed the boys up and made plans to rent an apartment in New York, and from there to travel to Europe to put her old life behind her if she could. It would be the first time since her marriage twelve years earlier that she would go there without her husband.
* * *
The two lovers established a mutually agreeable routine. Ernest rose at first light and began to write almost immediately. Martha adapted to his schedule since he preferred to work in their bedroom instead of his study. The bedroom was a large, comfortable room with white walls, yellow tiles on the floor, and windows facing south toward Havana that let in streaming rays of light and fresh, perfumed air when the breeze was right. Martha marveled at his selfimposed discipline. She wrote to a friend that he disappeared into a shell “exactly as if he were dead or visiting on the moon. He handles himself like a man who is ready to do the world’s championship boxing match. He has been I may say about as much use as a stuffed squirrel, but he is turning out a beautiful story. And nothing else on earth besides matters to him…I learn a lot as I go on.”
Martha’s book was not going nearly as well. She felt that her writing was flat, lacking color and passion. The words were dead on the page, filling her with dread about her own talent as a novelist. “The empty pages ahead frighten me as much as the typed pages behind,” she said. Only her “dogged determination and pride” kept her going, forcing her to churn out at least a thousand words a day like a soldier grinding out mile after mile on foot because he had to. She was aching to tell the story of the armies of refugees traipsing like zombies across the European landscape, but only passion and conviction could capture their true plight. She envied Ernest’s work, which was “magic, clear as water and carrying like the music of a flute.”
They kept to their routines until two or two-thirty in the afternoon, when both of them closed up shop for the day. It was an exhausting schedule; it had been years since Ernest worked so well for such a long stretch, and he was exhilarated by his output. Martha was frustrated, but she plugged on because she was a writer with a story to tell and a need to get it down. After lunch they played tennis together on the refurbished court, swam laps in the sanitized pool, or went out on the Pilar to fish for marlin. They both loved to swim; Ernest had once jumped into the shark-filled Gulf Stream with a knife between his teeth to free a line on the Pilar.
Then they went for drinks at the Floridita and walked along the Prado, the wide boulevard where small black birds called negritos
swarmed in the evenings and people sat on benches under the towering oak trees. Ernest was normally a gregarious man, a gracious host who welcomed crowds of visitors attracted to his magnetic personality. But he kept to a solitary agenda during these early months in Cuba with Martha, afraid to talk about his book in progress for fear of ruining it, and unwilling to let guests divert him from his daily flow of work. He knew he had to keep at it without letup until his reservoir of energy ran low and needed to be replenished.
By August it was time to take a break from their punishing routine. They took the Pilar back to Key West, where Ernest loaded up the new Buick he had bought after his accident there with rifles, shotguns, and enough gear for an extended stay at the Nordquist Ranch in Wyoming. He missed his sons and made arrangements for them to join him when he arrived. Ernest had maintained friendly relations with his first wife Hadley who had since remarried and was enjoying a fishing vacation with her husband in nearby Cody.
“Life is quite complicated,” Ernest had written to Hadley before he left Cuba. “Important thing for me to do is not get discouraged and take the easy way out like your and my noted ancestors. Because very bad example to children.” The easy way out that he mentioned was suicide, thoughts of which had plagued him even at this early stage of his life; indeed, they were rooted in his psychological makeup and had grown worse after his father shot himself years earlier. As manically exuberant as Ernest was about the progress on his latest novel, the depressive down slope was equally debilitating.
He had taken along with him the first seventy-six thousand words of the novel he would call For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he planned to work on in Wyoming. Martha had a rough first draft of her own novel, which she planned to call A Stricken Field, a title she got from a book about a fourteenth-century battle that Ernest had been reading. They drove north toward St. Louis, where he dropped Martha off to spend some time with her mother, and then he continued on the rest of the drive to Wyoming. If Ernest thought life was complicated, as he had written to Hadley, it would turn into an entanglement beyond all imagining when he got to the ranch. Ernest had picked up his firstborn son Jack, or “Bumby” as he was nicknamed, in Cody after a brief visit with Hadley and her husband, and Patrick and Gregory were flying in from New York after their European vacation with their mother. What Ernest didn’t know beforehand was that Pauline was planning to accompany them in a last-ditch effort to save the remnants of her tattered marriage.
Chapter Twenty-five
Ernest was in shock as he hugged his boys who ran into his open arms at the airport. Pauline followed behind them, smiling broadly as though nothing was amiss between them. She wanted to make the family reunion complete, she told him. Ernest was mute as he stared at her. He had taken the coward’s way out and never told her in so many words that their marriage was over, but surely she must have understood that by now. Yet here she was, smiling at him sweetly, greeting him as though the past two years with Martha were just a passing interlude in their lives. To make matters worse, she had caught a cold in New York and was running a fever, which required some tender love and care from him to get her through it.
At the ranch, Ernest found himself ministering to her, bringing her meals and making her rock and rye cocktails to relieve her misery. Ernest could not let the farce continue any longer. “It’s over,” he told her. He was going to marry Martha. Pauline stared at him blankly, unwilling or unable to absorb the impact of his statement. Then she crumbled as the reality of the situation set in. As their son Patrick said later, “the knock-out punch” that his father delivered unleashed a torrent of tears that gushed out of his mother without letup. She began to cry, and no amount of consoling could appease her. She cried uncontrollably. The tears kept coming, the sobs wracked her body. Her agony seemed endless. Patrick and Gregory flew to her side, but nothing they could say or do stanched the flow. It went on interminably, until finally there was nothing left inside, no more tears, no more pleading, nothing but hollow emptiness. Now she knew her marriage was over. There was no hope of saving it.
Their vacation plans ruined, Ernest made arrangements for Pauline and the boys to be driven back to New York. Then he called Martha and told her what had happened. He asked her to fly to Billings, Montana, where he would pick her up. A change of venue was in order. They would be going to Sun Valley instead, outside of Ketchum, Idaho. The location was a sportsman’s dream, set on an expansive rolling plain with trout streams surrounded by the Sawtooth Mountains. The land abounded with antelope, elk, deer, and smaller game including quail, partridges, and ducks. It had recently been developed by Union Pacific Railroad president Averill Harriman into a resort, complete with a hotel, chalets, restaurants, swimming pool, tennis courts, and nearby ski runs. In a promotional campaign to attract wealthier members of the public, Harriman invited movie stars and literary celebrities to stay there free of charge until the resort’s commercial prospects took hold. Ernest was the ideal guest, a literary rock star who was an avid outdoorsman.
Ernest and Martha arrived late at night in his black Buick stuffed with rifles, fishing rods, and stacks of books and luggage. They checked into suite 206 at the hotel, a spacious corner accommodation with stone fireplaces in both rooms and mesmerizing views of the mountains along the horizon. They planned to stay for about six weeks, working on their books in the morning and unwinding in the afternoon, playing tennis, fishing, hiking into the foothills, and hunting for game. Ernest taught all his women how to fish and hunt, sports they were well advised to take up enthusiastically if they wanted to see much of him when he finished working. Martha became a decent shot despite her core inclinations. Tillie Arnold, the wife of the resort’s official photographer, took an immediate liking to Martha and described her as a “barrel of fun and sharp as a tack.”
In October, the snow began to fall in the higher elevations, signaling that winter would soon be arriving. Martha received a telegram from Collier’s asking her to go over to Finland to cover the threat of a Russian invasion. It was an assignment that Martha felt she could not turn down. She was first and foremost a journalist, a war correspondent, and she needed to pursue her craft despite any misgivings from Ernest. Ernest was miffed that she would be going off on her own, but he used humor to put the best slant on it.
“What old Indian likes to lose his squaw with a hard winter coming on?” he asked her.
“Keep an eye on this big clown,” Martha told Tillie at a going-away party Ernest threw for her in the lodge. “See that he’s shaved and cleaned up when you go out on the town.” Ernest had a penchant for wearing the same clothes several days running and letting his beard get scruffy around his ever-present mustache.
On November 10 Martha set sail out of New York on a Dutch freighter, the Westenland, with forty-five other passengers. The ship was bound for Belgium carrying wheat and had to pass through heavily mined water in the English Channel. Martha could see the mines bobbing in the waves as she looked out from the deck, and she caught sight of bloated bodies from the wreckage of another Dutch ship that had been blown up the day before. She was not without trepidations of her own about this assignment. She wrote to her mother, lamenting this “dull assignment in the frozen north.” To Ernest she wrote that, after reporting about what was going on, her major goal was to “come home quick.”
No sooner was Martha off to cover the war than Ernest turned their suite into a replica of his room in Havana before Martha found their house. He loved to play poker, shoot crap, and drink with anyone he could round up when his women were not around, and he invited guests to his quarters, which he jokingly called “Hemingstein’s Mixed Vicing and Dicing Establishment.” But inwardly he was miserable. He told his newfound cronies that he was “stinko lonely” without Martha, and he wrote to Martha’s mother that he was having a “very lonely time” with her daughter gone. Ernest was particularly fond of Edna, who was a sixty-yearold version of her daughter, and she found his warmth and humor endearing. They bonded right from th
e start, an important issue for Martha who was devoted to Edna.
Martha made her way to Helsinki from Belgium after a stopover in Stockholm. Her hotel room was lined with blackout paper to hide the lights inside from Russian bombers. The day she arrived, at three in the afternoon, Russian planes zoomed in low over Helsinki through a heavy fog and destroyed a residential neighborhood with bombs that emitted poisonous gas. After they left, Martha walked through the broken streets to observe the “shapeless and headless” bodies strewn among the wreckage.
“It is going to be terrible,” she wrote to Ernest. “The people are marvelous, with a kind of frozen fortitude. They do not cry out and they do not run; they watch with loathing but without fear this nasty hidden business which they did nothing to bring on themselves.” She told him she loved him dearly and couldn’t wait to get back to the warmth of Cuba, to be there with him as his book progressed. “This book is what we have to base our lives on,” she wrote. “The book is what lasts after us and makes all this war intelligible. And as I love you I love your work and as you are me your work is mine. Let’s never never leave each other again.” When he got her letter, Ernest wrote to Max Perkins that Martha was as courageous as they come.
“She got out to that front when not a single correspondent had been there.”
Martha filed story after story about the Russian aggression and the brave Finnish civilians, some of them small boys and women, who volunteered unflinchingly to protect their homeland against their militaristic neighbors. She endured the cold, dread Nordic darkness as long as she could, and when an American military attaché asked her if she would like to hitch a ride back to the States, she answered simply, “Christ yes.” She sent a telegram to Ernest wishing him “Happy New Year and all of it together beloved,” and let him know when she would be back on native soil.
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