Hemingway and Gellhorn
Page 18
“You’re a nutcase if you even think of washing yourself or brushing your teeth out here,” Ernest told her. “You need to control your mania for keeping clean.”
Martha ignored his advice and plunged her face into the fetid water, all the while complaining nonstop about the experience. “Cheer up,” Ernest said, laughing. “Who wanted to come to China?”
It was the first of many times he would ask her that question; it became his constant refrain every time she lamented their circumstances. After the third or fourth time it began to grate on her. Ernest was less amused, however, by the Chinese generals they met during their journey who developed an inordinate fondness for the whiskey he carried with him into the warzone. It tasted a hell of a lot better than the sour rice wine and battery acid whiskey they were used to consuming, and they downed it by the tumbler-full in their many toasts to one another and their American allies. Ernest observed his rapidly dwindling supply, which threw him into a greater panic than the threat of being blown up by Japanese artillery.
Under Mr. Ma’s and Mr. Ho’s guidance, Ernest and Martha spent a memorable night in Tintack, “the disease center of South China,” as Martha described it. She repeatedly asked Mr. Ma if the town was safe after listening to countless residents hacking and spitting up phlegm throughout the night.
“Oh yes. Is more safe. Maybe,” he answered. In the morning Martha and Ernest saw the black flag flying over the town, a sign that they had landed in the midst of a cholera epidemic. After a breakfast of rice and tea, their party set off on the next leg of their adventure into the heartland. Their hosts provided them with a pair of pathetic miniature ponies, which shivered from the biting cold worse than their riders did. Ernest’s horse was so small that the author’s feet dragged along the ground. When they came to a stream, Ernest took pity on the bedraggled beast, wrapped his arm around the animal’s belly, and carried him across to the other bank.
“Put that horse down,” Martha yelled at him.
“I will not,” Ernest said. “You’re insulting the Chinese. Put it down!”
“My first loyalty is to this horse,” Ernest answered.
“You must drop that horse! Please.”
“Okay,” Ernest finally relented. “Poor old horse. Walk by yourself if you can.”
When the whiskey supply ran dry, Mr. Ma commiserated with Ernest’s predicament and commandeered a large jug of Chinese wine. Ernest drank thirstily from the vessel and passed it over to Martha. She took a swig and asked him, “What’s in here?”
“It’s called spring wine. Considered very high class. The Chinese drink it as an aphrodisiac.”
Martha observed elongated objects at the bottom of the jug. “What’s in here?” she demanded.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Well, snakes. But dead. Martha, if you throw up, I swear I’ll hold it against you.”
Finally they arrived in Chunking, where they were escorted to a house up on the cliff populated with bedbugs and a coterie of lizard-eyed thugs, henchmen and bodyguards of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang. The well-armed hoodlums lounged around on the sofa and chairs, glaring insolently at the American guests while they waited for orders from the great leader himself. Ernest took in the sordid surroundings and laughed so hard he had to sit down to support himself. Martha glowered at him, unable to find anything amusing in the situation. When Ernest stopped howling, he stood up and said to her, “Well, I guess I’ll go out and see what the boys in the corner saloon are drinking. What’ll you do?”
“Stare at the wall,” she said.
At this point Martha realized that she had ignored her husband’s advice about bathing to her own peril. She gazed in horror at the skin peeling away between her fingers in a yellowish ooze laced with blood. She had fallen victim to a condition Westerners referred to as “China Rot.” She was exhausted, sick, distressed, and also suffering from dysentery. Ernest, on the other hand, seemed impervious to the filth as he drank with the locals and returned to the house, sprinkled lice powder around and chased bedbugs, wishing he had a pistol at his disposal to make quick work of the fleeing vermin.
“I’m going mad,” Martha told him.
“Honest to God, Martha, you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”
“I just want to die.” “Who wanted to come to China?”
Chapter Twenty-nine
April 14 was the day Ernest and Martha had been looking forward to for the past few weeks; it was the day they were invited to have lunch with Chiang and his wife in their well-guarded home. The two writers had expected to be wined and dined in a palace, and they were surprised by the modest middle-class tackiness of the Chiangs’ house when they arrived. Most likely the Chiangs had made a conscious decision to downplay their wealth to keep up the appearances of their “democratic” leanings. It’s unlikely that their tastes ran to nondescript furniture and doilies, judging by Madame Chiang’s appreciation of expensive clothes and jewelry.
Madame Chiang rushed in to greet them first, ahead of her servants. She was all smiles and practiced charm, with her lovely figure set off with a short-sleeved, body-hugging, ankle-length dress, diamond earrings, and just the right amount of perfume and lipstick. The women studied each other closely. A colleague had once described Martha as someone with a knack for romping through a warzone in “well-tailored slacks,” and Madame Chiang was quick to observe her attempt at elegance in such dire conditions. On her part, Martha had resolved not to be seduced by Madame Chiang’s polished veneer, and she focused instead on her ruthless love of power and her reputation for manipulating her public image.
Moments later Chiang Kai-Shek appeared by his wife’s side, smiling, bowing slightly, extending his hand in greeting. Both Ernest and Martha were surprised by how slight the man was. For such a powerful leader, a military tactician and virtual dictator in his sphere of China, he presented anything but an imposing figure. He was neatly dressed in a tight military tunic and Sam Browne belt. His head was shaved and he wore a clipped British-style mustache that made him look like a caricature of the man Ernest and Martha expected to meet. Behind his back, his aides referred to him as “Peanut.” Yet his smile was an immobile slash across his face. It appeared as though the man was made of frozen steel. The smile revealed his toothless mouth, which shocked the visitors. Later they learned that for him to greet anyone without his false teeth was considered the highest compliment, the privilege of letting others see him as he actually was. Ernest and Martha absorbed every detail of this slow-motion drama playing out in front of their eyes.
The two couples sat down to lunch, served by a small platoon of fawning servants who deposited one course after another in front of the guests. Chiang spoke first about the communist menace threatening his country, a plight he seemed more alarmed about than the prospect of a Japanese takeover. The communists were master propagandists and manipulators of public opinion, Chiang said. Ernest listened intently, offering little. He was a skilled collector of intelligence who knew how to listen and how to respond to get the information he wanted. Martha, on the other hand, grew increasingly restless. She would meet Chou En-Lai within days of their lunch with the Chiangs and come away impressed by him and his vision for China. Chou was second in command of the communists behind Mao Tse-Tung.
Chou was the only decent man she met in China, Martha wrote. “If he had said, ‘take my hand and I will lead you to the pleasure dome of Xanadu,’ I would have…asked for a minute to pick up my toothbrush and been ready to leave.”
Martha was not interested in being blindsided by Chiang and his wife, whose manipulation of journalists often made the communists look like amateurs. Chiang claimed to be concerned about the communist threat, but he was not beyond lunching with the Soviet ambassador in an effort to stalemate the communists in his own country. Both Ernest and Martha understood that the rivalry in China between Chiang and Mao was more of a power play than an ideological spat. Martha’s tem
per got the best of her, and she directed her ire at Madame Chiang.
“Why do you not take care of your lepers rather than make them beg in the street?” Martha asked her. Martha underestimated exactly whom she was dealing with. The loveliest Soong sister of all was as ferocious as she was beautiful. Madame Chiang’s eyes flashed, beaming hatred at her presumptuous interlocutor.
The Chinese were humane and civilized, unlike Westerners, Madame Chiang snarled. “China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue.”
Her remark took Martha by surprise, but Ernest suppressed a laugh as he stared back and forth at the two women. In a flash, Madame Chiang took a different tack entirely and was smiling again. She had one of her servants bring her a straw hat and a jade brooch set in silver, which she presented to Martha as gifts, as though nothing had transpired between them. The Generalissimo continued with his evisceration of Mao and his band of communists and the threat they posed to Western civilization, apparently unfazed by his wife’s behavior. When lunch came to an end, the Chiangs sent Ernest and Martha on their way in a blizzard of smiles and good cheer. As they left, Ernest’s laughter erupted out of him like a volcano that could no longer be contained.
“I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China,” he bellowed.
* * *
Astonishingly, Martha wrote an article for Collier’s describing their lunch date with the Chiangs in the most adoring terms possible. We know how she really felt about them because she wrote in a memoir many years later that “these two stony rulers could care nothing for the miserable hordes of their people and in turn their people had no reason to love them.” Separately, she wrote to a former boyfriend, “Madame Chiang, that great woman and savior of China. Well, balls.”
But in her piece for the magazine, she said Madame Chiang was “as beautifully constructed as the newest and brightest movie star.” She was “entrancing” and an “executive of great talent” who worked eighteen hours a day. “No coolie has a longer day.” Putting her article in perspective, most American publications considered it unpatriotic to attack a U.S. ally during wartime, particularly one so closely linked to the Roosevelt administration. Collier’s could well have instructed Martha to tone down her remarks if she expected to see them in print. The celebrated historian Barbara Tuchman explained the situation in one of her books:
“As America’s ally, China could not be admitted to be anything other than a democratic power. It was impossible to acknowledge that Chiang Kai-Shek’s government was what the historian Whitney Griswold, future president of Yale, named it in 1938, ‘a Fascist dictatorship,’ though a slovenly and ineffectual one. Correspondents, even when outside the country and free of censorship, refrained from reporting the worst of the Kuomintang on the theory that to do so would be to help the Japanese, and besides it would ensure that the correspondent could not return. It became an established tradition that no journalist ‘wishing well to China,’ as one of them wrote, could visit Chungking without going into ecstasies over the beauties of Madame, the heroic determination of the Generalissimo, the prowess of the Chinese armies and the general nobility of all hands.”
Martha merely fit into the mold formed by the rest of her colleagues, while Ernest wrote little about the political orientation of the Chiangs and reserved his observations for the scrutiny of his contacts in Washington.
* * *
Martha’s experience with China Rot grew more and more perplexing, to the point where she was forced to don thick white gloves over a foul-smelling unguent that was supposed to cure the malady. “I was about as alluring as a leper,” she admitted. Ernest kept his distance the best he could. But the tipping point for both of them occurred during a flight to Rangoon when Ernest’s few remaining drops of gin, which he had been nursing to last out the journey, flew out of his paper cup when turbulence rocked the plane over the Burma Road. Ernest cursed viciously while their fellow passengers wailed and screamed, terrified that the aircraft would be rent in half. Martha experienced spasms of guilt as the airplane shook violently. “I regretted bitterly having nagged him into this horror journey,” Martha wrote, “and would never forgive myself for causing his death, cut off in his prime, his work unfinished, his children fatherless; my heart was breaking with sorrow.”
They landed safely with Ernest in as black a mood as Martha had ever seen him while she was “racked by guilt.” The heat was unbearable when they exited the plane. As Martha described it, “you felt you could cut the heat and hold it like chunks of wet blotting paper.” They checked into a stifling hotel with nothing but a lethargic ceiling fan to move the air in slow motion across their bodies. Ernest resembled a beached whale as he stripped off his clothes and lay down on the marble floor, the coolest surface in the room. Martha laid beside him, naked herself except for the heavy, malodorous gloves. She was moved to tears over what she had put her husband through during the past few months and turned toward him, touched his shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Thank you.”
Ernest jumped. He stared at her and howled, “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!”
Martha was crushed. She had tried to comfort the man she loved, a man who had appeared to be all but indestructible under the worst conditions imaginable, and this is what it all had come down to. They stared at each other in silence, and then they simultaneously rolled onto their sides screaming with laughter as the sweat cascaded off their bodies and pooled onto the marble floor. They had lost their dignity piecemeal during their sojourn in China, but they had not lost their sense of humor.
Chapter Thirty
Back home in the United States at the end of May, safely removed from the horrible stench and relentless filth of China, Ernest and Martha stopped first at the White House where they were debriefed by their intelligence contacts. Ernest filled them in on China’s lack of resources to mount a sustained counterattack against the Japanese, Russia’s involvement in China’s internal affairs, the escalating rivalry between Chiang and Mao, and his own assessment of battle conditions throughout the country. Ernest believed that America would be drawn into the war when the Japanese attacked the Philippines or Malaysia in an attempt to gain “control of the world’s supply of rubber.” Chiang Kai-Shek was hardly a reliable ally, but the U.S. had little choice but to continue to back him in the hope of tying the Japanese up in a protracted land war in China. That strategy would be less costly if it succeeded, Ernest said, than building more battleships to engage the Japanese directly. Ernest also advocated partitioning China between the communists and nationalists to forestall a civil war.
Then Ernest and Martha were off to Cuba, stopping first in Key West to pick up his sons Patrick and Gregory, Josie Russell, and the Pilar. The plan was for the two men to make a night passage across the Gulf Stream on Ernest’s boat and for Martha and the boys to fly down from Miami on the Pan Am Clipper. Josie was in effect the older brother Ernest always wanted, a bosom buddy, a two-fisted drinking companion, and the type of salty fisherman and bootlegger Ernest relished. Ernest, Josie, Martha, and the boys fished and enjoyed their long days in the sun. The men arranged to take a break and go to New York for the Joe Louis—Billy Conn heavyweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden. Alas, Josie never made it. The story in the August 8 Key West Citizen understated the sad details:
“Joe Russell died at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon in a Havana hospital. Ernest Hemingway…telephoned Joe Russell, Jr. here last night to tell him of his father’s death. The elder Russell had gone into the hospital for a minor operation and was said to be recovering only a few hours before death came, apparently from a stroke.”
Ernest’s longtime friend had been seemingly indestructible. Josie was only fifty-one, and his death hit Ernest like a mortar blast on the battlefield. The man of letters was left without adequate words to describe his grief. “Mr. Josie died,” was all he could say about it as he made arrangements to ship Josie’s body back to Key West.
Ernest was adrift as well after his months in China, and he was anxious to get on with a new writing project. The most frustrating time for any writer—and the most dangerous time for one who liked to drink—was the period between books. A writer with no book to write is no fun to be around. Ernest was an autobiographical writer whose fiction and nonfiction came directly from his own life, and he had already used up his best experiences of the past two decades. China was fertile ground for any writer searching for a subject for his next book, but for some reason it failed to come together for him.
Ernest’s discontent put further pressure on his sometimes strained relationship with Martha whose own work was flowing more smoothly now. His mood soured further when the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced that it would not be granting a fiction award for 1940. Ernest and much of the literary world believed that the award would be granted to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ernest’s thinly disguised disappointment was transparent.
“If I’d won that prize,” he said, “I’d think I was slipping. I’ve been writing for twenty years and never have won a prize. I’ve gotten along all right.”