Jumping Jim had many conquests under his belt by now— female as well as military conquests. But Martha was a different species entirely for him. He had been quick to forget the women he had slept with, but he would not forget Martha. Jumping Jim fell head over heels for her as he had never fallen before. In short order he was writing her long letters from the front dripping with passion, expressing his undying love for her. She was his “only rock in a great deal of quicksand. You are the purpose of my life. You have become my life itself. Darling, give. Write me a letter, goddamit, you are breaking my heart.”
But Martha was not ready to give as much as Jim wanted in return—indeed, she never would be with any man who wanted to possess her. She loved him too, she told him, but the prospect of spending her life on an army base, even with a General, was nothing short of horrifying for her. The more she resisted, the more passionate his ardor grew. “Darling, I love you, I love you, I love you,” he wrote. “It is a good love now. It is sturdy, dependable and solid, something that one can count on.”
It was something for Jim to count on, perhaps, but not Martha. She enjoyed their lovemaking and their conversations, but already her attention was drifting to other men, men who were less intense, men who were funny and knew how to make her laugh as Ernest had. Even when Ernest was misbehaving and she wanted to throttle him, he had always come up with a line that made her double over with laughter. As Jumping Jim felt Martha cooling toward him, he tried another tack. He decided he would make her jealous. Marlene Dietrich was working her way through the American literary and military establishment as the war wound down. She loved being with Ernest, and she also cast her eyes on Jumping Jim. When Martha was not available to him one night, Jim spent the night with Marlene in her hotel.
Now Martha was faced with the prospect of her lover making love to her husband’s favorite Kraut. It was all too incestuous for her, too ensnaring, too entangling, too damned complicated. She didn’t need to be sucked back into Ernest’s vortex by sexual osmosis, as it were. She was furious with Jumping Jim for thinking he could win her over with such a tawdry schoolboy trick.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The parallels between Martha and Mary became even more apparent after the war. Ernest returned to Cuba in March 1945 and made arrangements for Mary to join him there as soon as she returned from Europe. Martha’s only misgiving about the living arrangement was her proprietary interest in the Finca Vigia. Ernest had bought the house with his own money, but she was the one who found the place and fixed it up. The idea of another woman sharing her tropical refuge with Ernest was irritating to say the least, but all things considered, Martha was happy to be off by herself pursuing her own interests.
When Mary arrived for a trial visit in early May, she encountered a scene that had become all too familiar to Martha and driven her to the precipice of madness when she was living there. Ernest was once again in party mode, and Mary was rattled to the bones by the endless rounds of feasting and drunken rowdiness that made the walls vibrate almost without letup. The Finca was alive not only with Ernest’s literary guests from New York and elsewhere, but also with politicians, athletes, gamblers, and unsavory characters from every level of Cuban society. Mary was stunned that such a gifted man of letters would willingly turn his house into a den of boisterous, unrestrained, Saturnalian pleasures. She retreated to the bedroom and made an entry into her diary that could have been penned by Martha.
“Can only conclude I’d be an idiot to stay here and marry Papa. Our values, most of them, are antipodal. He puts a premium on bad manners, on violence, on killing (man, animals, birds, fish), on toughness, on death. I begin to realize how highly I value gentleness, conversation, non-violence. I’d better go while the going is possible and can be without too much bitterness.”
But she didn’t go when she might have. Ernest promised undying love and fidelity and vowed to change his ways, and Mary proceeded with her divorce from Noel Monks. Ernest drove her to the airport to catch a plane to Chicago for the hearing, and on the way he lost control of the car on a rain-slick road and crashed into a tree. Ernest suffered another split forehead and four broken ribs when he smashed into the steering wheel, and Mary’s cheek was flayed open with blood streaming down her left cheek. It was all so familiar—broken bones, stitches on the forehead, blood, trauma, the very taste of death itself. How many times had Martha been party to it? Ernest returned to the Finca where he turned himself into the model lover, nursing Mary back to health, cutting back on his drinking and partying while his bones healed, and agreeing to Mary’s needs for a more orderly life. Ernest’s charm worked its magic, as it had so many times in the past. Mary melted, her doubts vanished. A month later she wrote to a friend that life with Ernest at the Finca was “so idyllic, so lush, so leisured, with everything so plentiful. I can sun in the altogether with only the Finca dogs, cats, servants, and children to disturb my privacy.”
The truth was, Ernest needed to get back in writing shape for the task ahead. He had not written anything but journalism for five years now. He was anxious to begin work on another major opus, but he was also worried that he might not be able to equal the success of For Whom the Bell Tolls let alone surpass it. He knew it was his best book ever. It had taken so much out of him. It had drained him physically and emotionally. And yet he needed to cast his doubts aside and face the challenge. He was only forty-six years old, far too young to live on faded glory and coast as a professional celebrity for the rest of his life instead of acting like a serious novelist with his best work yet to come.
Mary’s divorce became final in August, and she returned in October to a much renovated Finca, with new furniture to replace Martha’s, new paint to cover the faded old paint, new rain gutters in place of the old sagging ones, and the whole place cleaned and shining inside and out. Ernest’s legion of cats—even the wimmies whose wommy cut their balls off—were no longer allowed to roam freely through the house, driving Mary batty. In her absence Ernest had inundated her daily with letters, professing his undying love and steadfastness, promising to be the supportive husband she craved. The written word was his artform, of course, and his letters were more persuasive than his words were in person. Mary was hooked, like a marlin on the end of Ernest’s line. When Time telegraphed her with an offer of a lucrative new assignment, she telegraphed back that she was “eager to continue current career of loafer fisherwoman housewife. So strike me off the rolls.”
She had decided to make a go of life at the Finca with Ernest, despite her continuing tredpidations about being alone five out of seven mornings when he was working on his new book, about learning to fish and shoot “which bore the shit out of me,” and about having so little company of her own that “I don’t know why the hell I try to stay here.” Ernest was on his best behavior while his courtship of Mary continued apace. He cut back on his drinking, stepped up his exercise routine to drop excess pounds, and “in bed he has certainly been better for me than any man I ever had,” Mary entered into her diary on December 19, 1945.
Martha’s divorce from Ernest became final just before Christmas, and they never set eyes on each other again. She never wanted to hear his name mentioned in her presence, she said, and she refused to grant interviews to anyone whose main goal was finding out what life with Ernest was like, rather than taking an interest in her literary efforts. And so it was that the paths of two great writers, two extraordinary and strong-willed human beings came together for a brief moment in eternity and then diverged and went their separate ways again.
Ernest and Mary married on March 13 of the following year, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ernest returned with a vengeance. He rewarded Mary a couple of years later by falling in love with a “beautiful, jolly, nice, and ungloomy” Italian girl named Adriana Ivancich, who was young enough to be his daughter. Yes, Ernest finally had the daughter he always wanted, but in a more intimate way than even he had anticipated. As he had done in the past, Ernest invited her to Cuba to me
et the wife. The pattern was unbroken, but Hadley, Pauline, or Martha no longer had to deal with it. It was Mary’s turn now. Lucky Mary!
* * *
Martha drifted away from Jumping Jim and took up with Ernest’s buddy, CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, who was funny and witty and made her laugh. She had an affair with another old crony of Ernest, Time correspondent Bill Walton, who fell much harder for her than she did for him. It was curious that a woman who couldn’t get away from her husband fast enough wound up having flings with such close friends of his. Then again, perhaps it was just her way of evening the score.
Martha embarked on the most productive phase of her life once she was free of her all-controlling husband. Her war novel, The Undefeated, was published in 1945. The books flew off her typewriter with great regularity. She spaced them out three to five years apart until her death, fiction and nonfiction, an impressive array of creative writing that bore her trademark stamps of wit, empathy, and cynicism—the cynicism growing stronger as she got older. She made the mistake of adopting the child she always thought she wanted, a boy from an Italian orphanage whom she called Sandy, but she grew impatient with being a fulltime mother and left him in the care of relatives in Englewood, New Jersey. Their relationship became bitter when she made it clear he disappointed her, and the breach grew wider with time. Martha got married again in 1954, to Time editor-in-chief Tom Matthews, and divorced him nine years later.
Ernest entered a period of slow and steady decline, creatively, mentally, and physically. His next novel out of the gate, his long-awaited war novel published ten years after the previous one, was arguably his worst book ever. Across the River and into the Trees told the story of an American army officer and his affair with, ahem, a beautiful, young Italian countess. Any similarities to people living or dead were strictly coincidental, as the saying goes. This would the last full-length novel Ernest would publish in his lifetime. It was not even the best of bad Hemingway; it read almost as though Ernest had decided to parody himself as he had done with Sherwood Anderson twenty-five years earlier. One noteworthy critic, novelist John O’Hara, saw it differently, however. He said the book established Ernest as “the most important author since
Shakespeare.” Perhaps John was concerned that Ernest would have been moved to break another walking stick over his head the next time they met if he wrote anything negative about the novel.
Ernest had been in line for the Nobel Prize for literature, awaiting only the arrival of another novel on the literary landscape that was the equal of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Alas, the new book was not it. It would take his magnificent long short story or novella, take your pick, to put Ernest back in the running. The Old Man and the Sea weighed in at only twenty-five thousand words and ran to a little more than one hundred pages. And receive the coveted prize he did, two years later in 1954. It was all downhill for Ernest after that. At fifty-five years of age he looked more like a man of seventy, with a full white beard and white thinning hair brushed forward in a Julius Caesar-style comb-over. He drank more. He gained weight. His health declined. He became more paranoid than ever when the mad demons in his bipolar nature took up permanent residence in his mind.
His posthumous works were a mixed bag; only the wonderful memoir/novel A Moveable Feast equaled the greatness of the best work published in his lifetime. The other manuscripts he left behind were unfinished and patched together with varying degrees of success by his literary executors. It’s hard to believe he would have been happy with Islands in the Stream and Garden of Eden, whose main characters were loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. The critics got it wrong when they said the characters were reflective of Ernest’s own sexual identity crisis. Zelda was the one who envied her husband’s literary talent and tried to undermine him, not Hadley, Pauline, Martha, or Mary.
Ernest and Martha would have agreed on one thing after he was gone. Ernest was definitely not the marrying kind. He was every inch a man’s man. Men who met him wanted to be just like him. Women were attracted to his earthy virility too, and he to them. He loved women, but usually more than one at a time, which made him less than reliable as a lifelong mate and partner. The women who got away were better off for not having married him. Martha would have been happier if she never had. When his women married Ernest for whatever reason—love, admiration, career advancement—they got the bad with the good, the depressive with the manic, the suicidal fatalist with the unbridled optimist. And they got his need to love more than one woman simultaneously. That was the package deal, as all his wives discovered sooner or later.
* * *
Ernest and Martha left this world the same way, on their own terms and by their own hand. Ernest, whose mind had been completely ruined by a series of electric shock treatments designed to “cure” his bipolar disorder, rose early on the morning of July 2, 1961, in his house in Ketchum, Idaho. He padded quietly down the stairs to the basement. He unlocked his gun cabinet and removed his favorite double-barreled shotgun. He walked up the flight of stairs to the foyer, placed the end of the barrel in his mouth, and tripped the trigger with his toe. The blast thundered through the house, waking Mary. She knew immediately what had happened. The clock on her night table read seven-thirty. She bolted down the stairs and found what was left of her husband lying there in the foyer in a pool of blood. He was less than three weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.
When Martha heard the news she said she did not blame Ernest for not wanting to “stay around for a long rotting finale.” She didn’t want to do that either. For her the end came later. On Saturday, February 14, 1998, at eighty-nine years of age, she found herself sick and groaning with unbearable pain in her flat in London. Ovarian cancer ravaged her body and she was nearly blind, no longer able to do anything that had given her pleasure all her life. She could no longer write, no longer travel, no longer read. Everything she loved was gone. “I think it takes some kind of desperate courage to commit suicide,” she had once written to a friend. “After all, it is the totally unknown risk.” Martha took the pills from the bottle next to her nightstand and swallowed them all. The light, such as it was, dimmed around her as the life drained from her body.
And so, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” the poet said.
It tolls for them, and it tolls for thee, and it tolls for me. Terminado! Finito! Fini!
Acknowledgements
While the concept for this book and its interpretation of historical events is my own, it would not have been possible without the work of many fine writers who came before me. I would like to acknowledge the following major sources, listed in alphabetical order by author:
Bibliography
Baker, Carlos: Hemingway (Princeton University Press, 4th edition, 1972)
Bellavance-Johnson, Martha with Bellavance, Lee: Ernest Hemingway in Key West (The Computer Lab, 2000)
Bennett, Michael J.: When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Brassey’s, 1996)
Bolloten, Burnett: The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) Brian, Denis: The True Gen: an Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him (Dell, 1988)
Burns, James MacGregor: Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970)
Dickson, Paul and Allen, Thomas B.: The Bonus Army: an American Epic (Walker, 2000)
Diliberto, Gioia: Hadley (Ticknor & Fields, 1992)
Dos Passos, John: Manhattan Transfer: a Novel (Mariner, 2003) Gellhorn, Martha: The Face of War (Hart Davis, 1959)
Gellhorn, Martha: Travels with Myself and Another (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1978)
Goodwin, Doris Kearns: No Ordinary Time (Simon & Schuster, 1994)
Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast (Scribner’s, 1964)
Hemingway, Ernest: The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (Jonathan Cape, 1939)
Hemingway, Ernest: To Have and Have Not (Scribner’s, 1937) Herbst, Josephine and Fr
ancis, Elizabeth: The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (Northeastern University Press, 1999) Humes, Edward: Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream(Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt, 2006)
Ickes, Harold L.: The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: the First Thousand Days, 1933-1936 (Simon & Schuster, 1953)
Kennedy, David M.: Freedom from Fear: the American People in Depression and War (Oxford University Press, 1999)
Koch, Stephen: The Breaking Point by Stephen Koch (Counterpoint, 2006)
Ludington, Towsend: John Dos Passos: a Twentieth-Century Odyssey (Da Capo, 1998)
Lynn, Kenneth: Hemingway (Harvard University Press, 1995) McIver, Stuart B.: Hemingway’s Key West (Pineapple Press, 1993, 2002)
Mettler, Susan: Soldiers to Citizens: the G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (Oxford University Press, 2007) Moorehead, Caroline: Gellhorn: a Twentieth-Century Life (Henry Holt, 2003)
Moreira, Peter: Hemingway on the China Front (Potomac Books, 2006)
Murphy, George: The Key West Reader: the Best of Key West’s Writers, 1830-1990 (Tortugas, 1989)
Olson, Keith W.: The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (University Press of Kentucky, 1974)
Orwell, George: Homage to Catalonia (Benediction Classics, 2010) Payne, Stanley G.: The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (Yale University Press, 2004)
Reynolds, Michael: Hemingway: the Paris Years (W.W. Norton, 1999)
Reynolds, Michael: Hemingway: the Homecoming (W.W. Norton, 1999)
Reynolds, Michael: Hemingway: the Final Years (W.W. Norton, 1999)
Reynolds, Michael: Hemingway: the 1930s (W.W. Norton, 1997) Rollyson, Carl E.: Beautiful Exile: the Life of Martha Gellhorn (Backinprint, 2007)
Ross, Davis R.B.: Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans during World War II(Columbia University Press, 1969) Schlesinger, Arthur M.: The Age of Roosevelt: the Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
Staten, Clifford L.: The History of Cuba (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 24