* * *
She arrived in Cuba on January 19, 1940, happy to be back at the Finca Vigia despite the unusually cold Cuban winter. Ernest was overjoyed to have her with him again, and he howled out loud when she presented him with a mock contract stating that she promised “never to brutalize my present and future husband in any way whatsoever” and recognized “that a very fine and sensitive writer cannot be left alone for two months and sixteen days.” She signed her document, somewhat prematurely, “Martha Gellhorn Hemingway.”
Ernest normally wore his hair long, but when Martha saw him after their separation his hair hung in long strands over his ears and down the back of his neck. He wasn’t going to cut it, he said, until his book was finished. Ernest looked as disheveled as ever, and he had started to gain back some of the weight he had shed nine months earlier. The title was now set for the novel; from John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island,” Ernest was captivated by the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Max Perkins was ecstatic about the five hundred pages Ernest had already shown him. “All knocked out,” he cabled Ernest. The novel so far was “absolutely magnificent and new,” and the title was “beautiful.”
The cold snap broke in March, and Ernest asked his three sons to join them in Cuba to go fishing on the Pilar. This was the first time the boys saw their father living with a woman who was not their mother. Martha fell in love with them as soon as they landed in Havana. Bumby was the oldest at sixteen and had a “body like something the Greeks wished for,” she said. Patrick was an avid reader at eleven, and Gregory—Gigi, Ernest called him—liked to shoot craps with his father. They were all “as funny as their papa,” Martha wrote to a friend, and she was delighted to be “an instant mother of three.” The boys fell in love with Martha as well and nicknamed her “The Marty.” They were intrigued by her spicy language, and Bumby said she was the first “attractive lady I ever heard use the ‘f’ word.”
Martha’s novel was published first, in March 1940. Alas, the only positive review came from Eleanor Roosevelt who called A Stricken Field “a masterpiece.” The reviews that mattered were almost uniformly negative. One said the book read more like reporting than creative fiction. The Saturday Review wished that the main character, who was a fictionalized version of Martha, was “less noble and more real.” The most scathing review was not so much a review at all but, rather, a personal attack on Martha and Ernest and their so-called “indulgent” lifestyle in Cuba while the rest of the world was going to hell. Ernest was boiling mad after he read the diatribe and would undoubtedly have called on the author in person if he had been in New York. Martha was more upset about Ernest’s reaction than her own. He was “writing smoothly, with ease and magic and like an angel,” Martha wrote. He was producing the “finest novel any of us will read in this decade,” and it was a “stinking crime” and “barbarous” to try to derail him from his work.
But Ernest could not be derailed. He continued to work slavishly on the novel after the boys left, and he made good on his promise not to cut his hair, which began to resemble the foliage on their property. It was not long before his total self-absorption in his novel began to grate on Martha, whose own work was not moving along nearly as smoothly. She was despondent about the reception her novel had received and could have used a bit more attention to her battered ego. But Ernest pretended to have a hide as thick as an elephant, although he was as prickly as they come when the barbs were directed at him. He told her to get over it and get busy with her “five finger exercises”—his term for working on a new book.
Martha loved life in Cuba, but not to the exclusion of life beyond the island. It was fine for Ernest to barricade himself in their bedroom most of the day, lost in the world of his imagination, but Martha needed to be out there writing about the events shaping the world at large. She didn’t want to admit it, but her strength was in reporting about what was going on rather than in writing fiction— even fiction based on facts. She bought a radio to listen to news of the war in Europe, but Ernest banned it from the house, saying he didn’t wanted to be distracted from the story he was writing. He apologized for being “thoughtless, egotistic, mean-spirited and unhelpful,” but then he continued as before with his work.
Martha spent most of her day putting words without passion down on paper, while Ernest focused his passion on his latest novel to the exclusion of everything else, even her until he was done for the day. Then they went out to play—fishing, tennis, drinking in the Floridita with some Basque pelotaplayers Ernest had befriended, everything in short that struck a chord with him. When she began to complain a little about feeling confined, Ernest told her she was “like a racehorse with two speeds: running away and asleep.”
That was not the message Martha wanted to hear. Notwithstanding the mock contract she had drawn up after her return from Finland, Martha left the island alone in June on a trip to New York to visit some friends.
Chapter Twenty-six
In July For Whom the Bell Tolls was almost finished. Max Perkins was anxious—more than anxious; he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown—to get his hands on the final manuscript in time for a fall publication just three months away. He had ordered an initial first printing of seventy-five thousand copies—which was already sold out in pre-publication sales to bookstores—and he needed to get final copy to the printer as soon as possible to stay on schedule. Ernest went up alone to New York and checked into the Barclay Hotel to complete the final pages, which he fed in small batches to a courier who raced them over to Scribner’s. Max checked the pages for grammatical errors as they came in and sent them to the printer, with instructions to set them in galleys as quickly as possible. Ernest told Max that he felt like “a blind sardine in a processing factory.”
On July 31, 1940, the New York Times ran a story saying that “Ernest Hemingway up from Cuba where he has been rounding out his new novel For Whom the Bell Tolls has been in New York the last few days. The new novel, which Scribner’s will bring out in October, is a love story with the Spanish Civil War for a setting.”
Eleven days later, another New York Times reporter named Robert Van Gelder visited Ernest in his quarters at the Barclay. New York City was suffering through a classic summer heat wave, and the temperature inside the hotel room matched the sweltering conditions outside. Ernest had surrounded himself with a coterie of drinking and gaming companions to keep him company after he finished writing for the day. They included a New York lawyer, a Spanish Civil War veteran, and an anonymous claque of campfollowers, all of them sitting around an ice bucket filled with a fifth of scotch and a bottle of soda water.
“Hemingway looked elephant big, enormously healthy,” Van Gelder wrote in his August 11 article. “His talk is unevenly paced, a quick spate and then a slow search for a word. His chair keeps hitching across the floor toward the other chairs, and then as he reaches a point, a conclusion, he shoves the chair back to the edge of the group again.”
Elephant big! Ernest gave the appearance of being bigger than he actually was. His height topped out a shade above six feet, but he had a large frame capable of carrying two hundred pounds without too much effort. With an extra twenty pounds on it, he looked immense, as large as a man two or three inches taller. Latterday examples would include heavyweight fighters Rocky Marciano and Mike Tyson. Neither man stood taller than five feet ten or eleven, but their well-proportioned physiques layered with solid muscle gave off the aura of men who are not to be messed with.
Ernest sweated profusely in the company of his friends, his wire-rimmed glasses cutting into the bridge of his nose. His eyes were watery, blurred from focusing on typescript all day long, day in and day out. When the writing was done and the galleys were being prepared by the printer, Ernest boarded the train to Miami, and from there he got on the Pam Am Clipper to Havana. Martha and Edna were waiting for him when his plane set down. Ernest greeted Edna as effusively as he embraced Martha. Edna loved Ernest, but she obser
ved him with a more objective eye than her daughter did. Enjoy the moment, she told Martha. “But do not marry this man. He will break your heart like he did his other wives.” Yes, Edna loved Ernest. But she was wise enough to size him up as something other than son-in-law material.
* * *
Shortly after the galley proofs of For Whom the Bell Tolls arrived in Cuba for Ernest’s final approval, Martha dropped her bombshell on him. She loved him dearly, but she didn’t think it was a good idea for them to get married, she said. They both valued their freedom and independence too much. Ernest was devastated, unable to sleep through the night. At four in the morning he got out of bed and wrote her a long letter, saying she had given him “a good sound busted heart.”
“He knew that for the last eighteen months he had been no gift to live with,” Martha wrote later. But he put a guilt trip on her, reminding her how he had helped her get launched with her own writing. If she didn’t want to marry him, she should just tell him flat out so he could take the Pilar back to Key West and maybe take the easy way out—Ernest’s not-so-subtle hint that he was suicidal from time to time. “Mr. Scrooby,” his pet name for his penis, had started to think of itself as “us,” Ernest wrote.
There was no question that Martha loved the man she had idolized from the time she began to read his books, but she resented being sucked into his vortex to a point where she felt suffocated by his overwhelming presence. Yes, she loved him, and yes her career wouldn’t have progressed to the degree it had were it not for his support. But Ernest was a man who needed to be in control of everyone who passed in and out of his gravity field. Martha was as fiercely individualistic as he was. She had resisted being subsumed by all of her other lovers.
“I didn’t sign on to be a footnote in someone else’s life,” she said later.
Ernest’s final ploy was to dedicate his novel to her at the last minute, before it was in print. “This Book is for Martha Gellhorn,” his inscription read. It was the ultimate act of seduction. Martha relented. She was his “Mookie,” his “Chickie,” and he was her “Bongie.” “Mr. Scrooby” belonged to “us.” Martha caved in. Of course she would marry him, she said. To herself she thought, somehow or other she would make the marriage work.
For Whom the Bell Tolls was published to rapturous reviews on October 21, 1940. It was the Big Book the literary elite had been waiting for Ernest to write for the past ten years, and the one that would resonate with the reading public like no other book of the decade. “It’s one of the greatest things written about the war,” wrote George Seldes.
The New York Times thought it was “the best book Ernest Hemingway has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest.”
It “sets a new standard for Hemingway in characterization, dialogue, suspense, and compassion,” said The Nation.
The novel reached “a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books,” intoned The New Yorker.
The Saturday Review of Literature believed For Whom the Bell Tolls was “one of the finest and richest novels of the last decade.”
Even Edmund Wilson, who had been critical of some of Ernest’s earlier output, wrote “Hemingway the artist is with us again; and it is like having an old friend back.”
Only the far left-wing press found reason to complain about the novel and slammed Ernest for suggesting that republican atrocities were as repugnant as those committed by Franco and his nationalists. But the public agreed with the mainstream press. The novel flew out of bookstores like migrating birds. The Book of the Month Club ordered two hundred thousand copies. Within the first few months of publication, nearly half a million copies had been sold, and Paramount Pictures offered $110,000 for the film rights. There was no longer any doubt about who owned the title of the Heavyweight Champion of American Writers; Ernest had won it in a knockout. His novel was “selling like frozen Daiquiris in hell,” he wrote to Hadley, to whom he had given all the royalties from his novel The Sun Also Rises when he left her for Pauline.
Finally liberated from the daily grind of intense, selfimposed labor, Ernest and Martha returned to Sun Valley with Ernest’s boys. This time they were joined by an ever-expanding celebrity crowd, anxious to cash in on the free food and lodging provided by Harriman. Ernest’s divorce from Pauline was granted on grounds of desertion two weeks after his novel came out. One month after publication, on November 21, on their way to Idaho, forty-one-year-old Ernest and thirty-two-year-old Martha got married before a justice of the peace in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming. One reporter referred to the marriage as a “pairing of flint and steel.”
Exactly one month after that, December 21, Ernest’s old friend from their youthful days in Paris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, drank himself into an early grave. Pathetically, once Ernest’s most notable competitor, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to Ernest that his latest book was “better than anybody else writing could do…I envy you like hell.” On Scott’s bookshelf was a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, signed by Ernest with the inscription, “To Scott with affection and esteem, Ernest.” The circle was complete, measured in tight intervals through the fall and early winter of 1940—publication, divorce, remarriage, death, and a new life for the glamorous, honeymooning couple.
Sun Valley was alive with superstars when the newlyweds arrived. Tall, lean, handsome movie star Gary Cooper was there with his wife Veronica, affectionately known as “Rocky.” Cooper was a bona fide Montana cowboy who had made it big with several high-profile movies, including the 1932 adaptation of Ernest’s novel, A Farewell to Arms. He was slated to portray Ernest’s main character, Robert Jordan, in the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Also present among the celebrity set was writer Dorothy Parker, who had endeared herself to Hemingway with some glowing reviews of his books, and her bisexual husband Alan Campbell; Dorothy stated publicly that her husband was “as queer as a billy goat.”
Ernest and Martha fell into a pleasurable routine, playing tennis with Dorothy and Alan, hunting with Gary and Rocky, hiking into the mountains, and of course wining and dining without restraint in the evening and far into the night. Ernest loved to organize daily outings along the creeks that carved their way through the mountainous terrain. Before long everyone was calling him “the General,” a title he relished. His boys took to the region like birds to the air. Bumby fished “as if the whole fate of mankind depended on it,” Martha wrote, and the three of them were “rare boys” who were being raised “with genius” by their father who ignored “all of the rules.”
Martha was at first taken with the striking Gary Copper, with his thin, muscular build and glittering eyes, and she told Ernest that he should make an effort to dress more neatly like he did. Gary dressed casually in western gear, a style Ernest loved, but the movie star changed his clothes every day and didn’t walk around with food stains on them. Ernest ignored her. Martha quickly became bored with Gary’s conversation, though, and lamented in a letter to Max Perkins that “the famous folk were…a pain in the ass.” All they talked about was “box office returns,” and she was getting “angrier and angrier about such idiocies.”
Flush now with royalties from his latest novel and a lucrative offer for the movie rights, Ernest bought the Finca Vigia for $12,500 on December 28, just after he and Martha returned to Cuba for the holidays. While they were there basking in the Cuban sun, with Ernest settling in for an extended period of relaxation after finishing his book, Martha dropped another bombshell on him. She wanted to go to China to cover the Japanese invasion of the country for Collier’s.
Chapter Twenty-seven
China was about the last place on earth Ernest wanted to go. He had just published what promised to be his most successful book, and a few months at home enjoying the accolades of his peers and the enthusiasm of the reading public seemed more than reasonable to him. But Martha was insistent. Collier’s wanted to send her to the China front to report on what was going on, and she came close to begging her husband to
go with her. If Ernest wanted to see much of his wife during the next few months, he had little choice but to acquiesce. But the tipping point for him, the challenge that promised to make the trip more exciting than a mere adventure as Martha’s traveling companion, was the opportunity for Ernest to go there as a spy for the Roosevelt administration.
Before they left the U.S., Martha and Ernest went to New York to visit their editors. Ostensibly, Ernest would be going to China as a war correspondent for PM magazine, and he told New York Post columnist Earl Wilson that he planned to travel light with “binoculars, two pairs of boots (one high, one low), a leather jacket, a sheep-lined vest, an old tweed shooting coat with leather patches on the elbow, a few shirts, and socks.” After suffering through an exhausting round of inoculations, he and Martha made an important stop in Washington, D.C., where they were briefed by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his right-hand man, Harry Dexter White.
The situation in China was complicated. The country was divided into three parts at the time. The Japanese occupied the coastline and the northeast quadrant—about two-thirds of the country; the Kuomintang or nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek controlled the southwest interior away from the sea; and the communists held sway in the northwest. Chiang presented himself as the only democratic alternative to either a Japanese or communist takeover of the entire country, and in doing so he had earned the tacit support of the Roosevelt administration. No one knew too much about China’s internal affairs; much of the information people thought they knew was supplied by Henry Luce, the publisher of Timewho was known as “Father Time.” He was the son of a missionary, married to his second wife Clare Booth Luce, and he had a soft spot for Chiang Kai-shek while remaining blind to Chiang’s dictatorial ambitions.
But Roosevelt wanted to know more about the “real” China, the conditions in the villages and on the farms, and Morgenthau asked Ernest if he was willing to be his country’s eyes and ears there. It seemed odd that such a directive would come from the treasury secretary rather than from the state department, but Morgenthau was more than a financial strategist. He was Roosevelt’s banker who had lined up much of the financing for the New Deal, and he understood the power money wielded in global politics. His main foreign policy goals were checking Japan’s imperialist designs in Asia and defeating fascism. He was also worried about Soviet expansion beyond its borders. Through Morgenthau’s influence, the administration had been funneling money into Chiang’s coffers to bolster his position, but the secretary was incensed by Chiang’s financial demands and wanted to know where all the money was ending up—in support of Chiang’s war effort or in his personal bank account. When he asked the famous author if he was willing to assume the role of spy, it was like asking a growing boy if he wanted to play King of the Hill. Ernest was taken by all things clandestine and military; had he not been a writer, the rank of General would have suited him fine. His friends in Idaho had nicknamed him well.
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 16