TWENTY-SEVEN
Ernest liked animals and he liked cockfights—both of them quite a lot. His fondness for cats or “cotsies”—as he called them—is part of the legend, and, as such, frequently distorted. The story has it that Ernest had some kind of pod of cats in Key West that inbred unchecked, resulting in the tribe of six-toed cats that overrun the Hemingway house in Key West today. Patrick Hemingway has stated that the Hemingway family had no cats when they lived in Key West, and the cats there today have nothing to do with Ernest Hemingway or his family.
Cuba is where Ernest had the cats. As of 1947, there were twenty-two: Littless, Boise, Princesa, Uncle Willy, Bigotes, Uncle Wolfie, Spendy, Shopsky, Thrusty, and so on, each with its own distinct personality, the subject of countless conversations and speculations, always a feature of letters between Ernest and Mary—who also liked cats. Though she liked cats too, Martha took some male cats to be neutered to check the breeding, winning an outburst from Ernest. Mary designed the dedicated cat room on the ground floor of the Finca’s newly built tower, with shelves for the cats to sleep on and floors that slanted toward a drain and could be easily hosed down. Ernest worried that the move would make the cats feel rejected, but everyone soon adjusted.
Something of the complicated nature of Ernest’s feeling for animals is evident in a story he told to Bonte Durán, the wife of one of his Spanish Civil War heroes (Gustavo Durán would soon join the ranks of friends whom he turned on). A cat was missing, and Ernest feared a dog had killed it. This made him recall a bloody incident in which a local dog killed one of his cats, and Ernest “gut-shot” the dog, he told Bonte, so that the dog took three days to die. Ernest seemed to want approval, she told Carlos Baker, but instead she burst into tears.
Perhaps Ernest had been so angry about his cat’s death that he entertained a fantasy of killing a dog in this way, and then invented a story that made it “true.” It does not seem in character for him to have deliberately made a dog suffer. He owned dogs; in fact, a beloved black spaniel-like stray, Black Dog, was his constant companion; five other dogs, at Malcolm Cowley’s 1948 count, had their homes at the Finca. And he was well known to endorse good hunting procedures, which held that if you wounded an animal you had to kill it, even though stalking the wounded beast might endanger your life—an ethos reinforced on his African safari.
Peter Viertel later told a story about shooting at beer bottles with Ernest and John Huston on board the Pilar in the spring of 1948. While the boat was anchored in a cove for lunch, an enormous iguana appeared on shore, a little too far away to see clearly. With Peter coaching him through binoculars, Ernest hit the iguana with his third shot, upon which it leaped into the air and ran away. Ernest would not allow the boat to leave the cove without dispatching the iguana. Swimming ashore with his gun held over his head to keep it dry, Ernest eventually found blood spots and the three men were able to track the animal to a cave, where Ernest shot it dead. Conversely, Tommy Shevlin’s wife saw Ernest row a dinghy ashore from the Pilar when he saw two turtles mating. He parted them and took one for cat food. The other he flipped on his back, leaving it to die; she remembered it turning pink, then purple, and emitting a horrible smell before it died.
Still, he loved a good cockfight—a pastime with a venerable tradition in Cuba, dating to the indigenous Taino people, and in Ernest’s time both cockfights and gambling on them were legal. Ernest was introduced to the sport in 1943 by his gardener, Pichilo, who bred cocks for fighting, and cockfighting became a fixture of life at the Finca, one that it is said Gary Cooper especially enjoyed. For cockfights, two “gamecocks,” or male chickens bred for fighting, have their wattles, combs, and earlobes removed, as well as most of their feathers. The birds’ natural spurs are often removed as well, in some traditions replaced by miniature silver spurs, though in Cuba the natural spurs are usually taken off, sharpened, and reattached. Two gamecocks are let loose in what is called a cockpit and allowed to fight each other to the death, sometimes for fifteen, and sometimes for thirty minutes. More than half of the fights are said to be over in the first five minutes. Gambling is a fundamental part of the ritual.
Ernest looked at cockfighting—the alleged cruelty to animals involved—much as he did bullfighting. The two activities are hardly comparable, to be sure; a Death in the Afternoon for the cockfight is not likely. Ernest’s defense of the activity was forthright and simple, and has been quoted widely by fellow fans (aficiones?): “Some people put the arm on fighting cocks as cruel. But what the hell else does a fighting cock like to do?”
As Ernest pointed out in his defense of cockfighting, the same people who crusaded against fighting gamecocks also argued that pigeon hunting—another of Ernest’s favored activities in Cuba—was cruel to animals. In fact, Ernest did any number of things in the name of sport that would arouse indignation among many animal lovers: he used submachine guns on sharks and blew them up with grenades; he shot coyotes from the air; sometimes, despite all his protestations to the contrary, he hunted big game from a jeep; he once used a dead 514-pound tuna, rigged aloft on a dock, as a punching bag.
And yet. As René Villarreal, the Cuban boy who grew up at the Finca, stated simply, “[Ernest] was a great lover of nature. Even though he was a hunter, I never saw him harm an animal. He always told us, ‘Never even throw rocks at a bird.’ ” Ernest learned the rules for humans and the natural world at his father’s knee, and he venerated these rules, making them part of the famous Hemingway code, which never changed. He also told one of his daughters-in-law that the one point on which he parted company with the Catholic Church was that he believed animals had souls.
If Hemingway did not see any contradictions in or dilemmas about where he stood vis-à-vis animals, that does not mean that his apprehension of the animal world was simple. In fact, it was fraught with any number of conflicting emotions. Nowhere is this clearer than in his relation to wild animals in captivity—usually in circuses, though sometimes in zoos. Starting around 1949, and coinciding with a lot of odd developments in his life, Ernest became fascinated with handling circus animals.
No doubt Ernest had gone to circuses as a child, and perhaps he had taken his children to one in Key West, but circuses did not seem to engage his admiration until his time in Cuba. Mostly ragtag affairs, run by would-be entrepreneurs with Cuban companies, circuses often set up in towns like San Francisco de Paula. A vacant lot just outside the Finca’s gates became a frequent home to these traveling shows, and Ernest, with his omnipresent curiosity, became, after he visited the first of these, a habitué.
He had a particular affinity for the bear. Over the years he described several dreams of bears: once, he even dreamed he made love to a bear, as he wrote Mary in 1944, shaking hands with the bear afterward, noting the beautiful silver of its fur. As a boy, he said, bears always got along with him, to the point where he wondered if he smelled like a bear to another bear. A bear he “worked with” at a circus, which was not friends with anyone, once licked his hand and kissed him on the face, he said; he companionably put his hand in the bear’s paw. He joked that given a couple more days this bear would leave the circus and go drinking with him at the Floridita. At another time he said it was wrong to kill black bears because they like to drink and to dance, and because they understood him better than other kinds of bears did. On the other hand, he told Ed Hotchner about an incident with an agitated, pacing polar bear on one of his visits to the circus between performances: the bear’s keeper told Ernest he was mean, and Ernest admitted, “I should get through to him, but I haven’t talked bear talk for some time and may be rusty.” He moved as close to the bear as he could get through the bars and began murmuring to him “in a soft, musical breath.” The bear stopped pacing, sat down and looked at Ernest, and made a number of sounds through its nose. “I’ll be goddamned,” said the keeper. “Bears like me,” explained Ernest. “Always have.”
But when the circus came to town in September 1949—a modest outfit, its tent pitched in a lot just to the right of the driveway leading up to the Finca—it was, not surprisingly, the big cats, or cotsies, that enchanted him. He made friends with Gonzalo, the lion tamer, and his co-workers. He was delighted to hear the lions’ roaring at night, he told a friend. Tigers, he wrote to Mary, then in Chicago, were mean, while nobody had been able to train a leopard at all.
Ernest charmed and impressed Gonzalo enough that he allowed Ernest to come into the large performance cage with the lions. Ernest reported that he “gentled” them with a rolled-up newspaper, which he tapped on their noses if they misbehaved. He decried the fact that it was necessary to irritate the cats to provoke performance-level threatening and roaring; otherwise, he said, they were gentle creatures—though he learned never to turn his back on them. Moralito, the owner of the circus, whom Ernest also befriended, complained that the lions were his biggest draw but cost a lot to keep. He relied on a lion-taming team who worked cheap, and he constantly feared they would find out what more established circuses paid. Ernest joked that he would gladly work as Moralito’s lion tamer if his employees deserted him. Ernest also told Mary and Ed Hotchner that he was planning such an act, and that Moralito was actually going to announce it, billing Ernest as the legendary North American lion tamer.
What happened next became a legend in Cuba. René Villarreal has given a fine account of the story: he says that he heard the circus owner announcing throughout the neighborhood that Mr. Ernest Hemingway, the American writer, would be appearing that evening as the lion tamer. René found Ernest in his bedroom rubbing some viscous potion from a whiskey bottle on his torso and arms. The potion was lion lard, rendered from the lions he had shot in Africa, Ernest told the boy, and he was rubbing it on himself so that he would smell like a lion to the circus beast. He was actually planning to appear that night with the circus. He refused to consider canceling his performance because it would look like he was backing out, he said. He put on his safari clothes and made his way to the circus tent, where he found Gonzalo and told him about the deal he had made with Moralito.
At this point, René said, both Moralito and Gonzalo urged Ernest not to go into the ring, but he insisted. The audience and the circus workers, somewhat astounded by this turn of events, wondered how far this was going to go. Even Ernest acknowledged to Moralito, before the event, that the crowds had come “to see how the lions maul Hemingway, not to see Hemingway tame the lions.” What followed was a bit of an anticlimax. Gonzalo urged Ernest to stay right beside him when they went before the crowd. The tamer picked up a chair and a whip, and Ernest picked up another chair. Together they entered the ring. The lion lifted his paw and took a swipe at Gonzalo’s chair, knocking it from the man’s hand. Gonzalo, concentrating on the lion, told Ernest to walk quietly but quickly to the cage door and let himself out. Ernest complied. René’s account ends here—but in another telling, Ernest demanded, and received, payment for his part in the performance.
After this escapade, Hotch noticed long, deep scratches on Ernest’s forearms, which Ernest admitted had been made when he was “gentling” the cotsies—and which he also disclosed to Mary and Charlie Scribner. If they found this behavior peculiar, they did not say, Hotchner and Scribner confining themselves to protesting that he was endangering his livelihood and ought to stop. Mary extracted a promise from him, he sheepishly told Hotch and Charlie, that he would not work with the big cats again, and for the time being he kept it. But when the circus came to town the following year, Ernest, though he did not perform, again hung about the tent until he was allowed to talk to the bears and “gentle” the cats. He told a friend that he hoped to work before long with an elephant.
A number of factors seem to have been at work in Ernest’s attempt at greater intimacy with dangerous animals. First was his belief in his own invincibility, fostered by years of accidents and close calls. Second was a kind of magical thinking at work; Ernest was a big believer in superstitions and also in some sorts of psychic phenomena. This was partly what drew him to bullfighting; like many aficionados, he believed the bullfighter must “understand” the bull if he was to be successful. Looked at in another way, Ernest’s quest for intimacy with the circus animals was simply a natural outgrowth of the intimacy he had learned to feel with nature since boyhood, a kind of silent communion that is at work in several of the Nick Adams stories.
Perhaps the intimacy grew out of another tendency in his thought that was coming to the fore the summer that he turned fifty. Surrounded by yea-sayers who applauded all his actions at the same time as they depended on him financially and emotionally, Ernest had come to view the Finca as a sort of feudal domain, with himself as a local potentate with the very highest status in the local community. It is not surprising that, seeing himself as a quasi-patriarch, Ernest came to feel he was a sort of Lord of the Jungle.
In fact, this last element in his foolhardy attempt at intimacy with circus animals in the summer of 1949 suggests the grandiosity that was increasingly coming to dominate his thinking—which was becoming less and less rational as he grew more and more unhinged.
While mental illness had been lurking in Ernest’s genes since birth, it had not previously predominated in his emotional life. In fact, he does not seem to have suffered earlier from full-blown mania, though his characteristic quickness, high self-regard, and sheer exuberance all might be seen as manic symptoms, responsible for, as in many talented and highly functional sufferers of the disease, his great productivity and, in a different aspect, even his charisma. The concomitant depressive episodes are a little easier to track; Ernest seems to have sunk into a major depression during, for example, the hundred-day separation from Pauline in 1926, when he threatened suicide.
What was happening to Ernest around 1949, when he turned fifty, was something more than a midlife crisis (though it partook of that quality as well). Rather, it seems to have marked the beginning of a manic cycle in his life on an order he had not before experienced. To many onlookers and those who loved him, the symptoms were not immediately recognizable, particularly as they seemed consonant with his generally excitable, voluble nature. In fact, Carlos Baker uses the term “rough exuberance” to describe the aspect his letters took on in this period. It was more than that, however.
Acknowledged symptoms of mania include any of the following: generalized excitement and happiness; racing thought and pressured speech; confusion; irritability; restlessness and insomnia; grandiosity or inflated view of self; poor judgment; reckless behavior; increased sex drive; overspending; self-destructive behavior; and, sometimes, hallucinations, paranoia, and catatonic behavior. In conditions like Ernest’s, cycles of depression follow cycles of mania, but many sufferers cycle rapidly in and out of these conditions.
It is important to note, however, that what was wrong with Ernest would not necessarily have been recognized as a mental illness. His symptoms would be attributed not only to his personality—his “exuberance”—but also, perhaps, to drunkenness. They could effectively be explained away. Many competent physicians would probably not have classified his behavior as manic depression; the disorder was not diagnosed often in those years, and not widely recognized until 1970, at the same time (strangely enough) lithium was found to treat the disease. Ernest’s behavior would not definitively indicate mental illness—though some doctors took note that it increasingly found psychotic expression.
Ernest’s midlife mania may have been triggered by any number of factors: Jack’s marriage in June, which may have reminded him unpleasantly of the passage of time; he responded badly when Patrick subsequently announced his engagement to Henrietta Broyles, writing to Henny’s parents, falsely, that his grandfather was a Son of the American Revolution and a member of the Order of the Cincinnati. Both his sons’ marriages seemed to bring out a heretofore buried, clannish snobbery, learned from his mother and perhaps activated by his exposure to the Venetian aristocracy in 1949 and 1950.
At about the same time, Ernest received a letter that excited quite different emotions. It was from Arthur Mizener, asking him for information about Scott Fitzgerald. Now that the Fitzgerald revival was in full swing, Mizener, undertaking a major biography, was contacting friends and associates who knew Scott. Ernest answered Mizener’s letter immediately, and would bombard him with letters about his old friend for the next year—some vitriolic.
The timing of Arthur Mizener’s biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, which was published in early 1951, occasioned some of Ernest’s most baroque remarks and some of his worst perfidy—though also some indications of his tender feelings toward his old friend. Mizener originally contacted Ernest just before his fiftieth birthday in July 1949, right at the onset of Ernest’s crisis. Ernest told Mizener of his willingness to help him in gathering information and bemoaned the loss of his letters from Scott, destroyed by bugs in storage in Key West. His initial letter to the biographer established the parameters of his relationship with Scott for Mizener: Ernest really loved Scott, but he was impossible. “He had a very steep trajectory and was almost like a guided missile with no one guiding him,” Ernest wrote, perceptively. Ernest did not say anything about his own large professional debt to Scott: the essential help Scott gave him early in his career—namely, touting his work at Scribner’s and other places and making the much needed cut of the first twenty pages of The Sun Also Rises, and the edits he made in the rest of the manuscript. (Ernest did mention the suggestions Scott made about A Farewell to Arms, which he completely ignored, and which he frequently misrepresented so as to make Scott look stupid.) In the picture Ernest painted for Mizener, he was always the dominant one in the relationship—thus the emphasis on Scott’s case of hero worship of him. He was trying to imprint this on the permanent record.
Ernest wrote seven letters to Mizener over the next year and a half, in almost every one offering his help freely. “I never had any respect for [Scott] ever,” Ernest wrote in an April 1950 letter, “except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent.” In the same letter he passed on what he thought was useful information, for instance, the story of Zelda asking Ernest if he didn’t think Al Jolson was greater than Jesus. Yet he closed the letter with a touching and insightful paragraph that ended with a wish that Scott were there. “He was romantic, ambitious, and Christ, Jesus, God knows how talented.” He was a “charming cheerful companion” except for “his tendency to hero-worship”—especially difficult, Ernest said, when you were one of his heroes. “He was fragile Irish instead of tough Irish,” he wrote.
A month later he explained the relevance of Scott’s sexual inexperience: “I think Scott in his strange mixed-up Irish catholic monogamy wrote for Zelda and when he lost all hope in her and she destroyed his confidence in himself he was through.” He trotted out another favorite canard: that Scott was hoping to live on advances for The Last Tycoon, never intending to complete the novel. He offered his reading of Fitzgerald’s output, observing, for instance, that he found Gatsby “OK with reservations.”
Ernest wrote two back-to-back letters to Mizener in early June. The first was mostly incoherent rambling about himself as a writer and contemporary of Scott, with observations about Joyce, Pound, Stein, and some critics. Edmund Wilson was on his mind—especially Wilson’s theory about Ernest’s work, which was that Ernest wrote from a psychic wound (as much as his physical wound in World War I) that shaped his entire sensibility and his writing. In the second letter to Mizener he told one of his more gruesome stories of killing a German, one of 122 “sures,” but Ernest added a postscript that said the letter was never sent.
There was nothing of use about Scott in either of these letters. A week later Ernest was explaining to Harvey Breit, a faithful correspondent, that one of his activities was helping out Mizener with his biography: “I try to give him the straight dope on Scott because he, Scott, was crazy about immortality etc. and I was very fond of him even though he was a horses ass.”
The novel that came out of Ernest’s long manic period was Across the River and into the Trees, born, without a doubt, from Ernest’s deep fears about his writing future and his reputation. For Whom the Bell Tolls had appeared almost ten years before; he had not published a book since. Word had leaked out that he was writing the “Big Book,” the one he envisioned as the Land, Air, and Sea book—or, alternately, a trilogy. So far, however, he had produced only a desultory series of sketches about the sea, using an autobiographical stand-in, Roger Hudson, Hudson’s adventures in Bimini, and his relationship with his sons. Ernest had broken off the Sea novel to begin The Garden of Eden, the gender-bending story of an idyll (the main character had been a pilot during World War I, so perhaps the project grew out of a larger Air piece), and he was floundering with this one as well. He also believed it was unpublishable for its sexual content and, presumably, what it revealed about his own inner landscape. As Robert Trogdon has pointed out, two other factors relating to Ernest’s writing life were in play: one was the fact that he owed Cosmopolitan the money Ed Hotchner had gotten as an advance for two short stories. He could fulfill his obligations to the magazine by letting them serialize what had taken shape as a novel. Furthermore, he may have felt the heat of competition from new sources: a wave of young postwar writers, including Norman Mailer.
Many of these concerns came together around Ernest’s birthday on July 21, 1949, when he turned fifty. Before and after that date he very often referred to himself as “half a hundred”; so too does the fifty-year-old protagonist in Across the River and into the Trees. The new book was all about the colonel’s mortality, clearly a projection of Ernest’s very real fears—fears that were not unfounded, given his medical history. Across the River presents a chilling, if off-putting, portrait of a man at the end of his rope, clear even in the bonhomie of sections set in the Gritti and with Renata. The colonel bears a close resemblance to characters in earlier stories like “The Battler,” “The Undefeated,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” moving inexorably toward their rendezvous with death, although only the last has a protagonist as self-aware as Colonel Cantwell. What was new was Ernest’s willingness to present his character at such an extreme of emotional vulnerability. Yet Ernest seems to have had little artistic control over his portrait of the colonel; the sureness of his earlier work is not there. The novel presents the death throes of a character deeply identified with his creator—but his creator may have had no idea how autobiographical his portrait was.
In this sense, Ernest plunged into mania to cheat death. Over the next year or so he told enormous lies; he spent outrageous amounts of money; he got into terrible fights, some physical; he displayed outsize egotism and delusions of grandeur; his moods fluctuated wildly, commented on by almost everyone who knew him; he made bad decisions; he fell in love with an inappropriate woman; he seemed to have inexhaustible supplies of energy that fueled all sorts of complicated schemes and projects. By the time those around him were able to tell something was wrong, his mania was full-blown and there was no reasoning with him. It is not clear how he would have responded were someone to have intervened. The idea of psychiatry, it seems, was not broached until the last year of his life. Shock treatments were familiar to him through Patrick’s illness, and Gregory would undergo many such treatments in future. Lithium would not be available in the United States until 1970, nine years after Ernest’s suicide. Finally, it is not entirely clear that these options were not discussed by Ernest and those around him; in his last illness great care was taken to ensure secrecy, and similar concerns may have been operative long before.
Those in the grip of mania often lose a sense of proportion, becoming grandiose and making poor choices. Perhaps worst of all, Ernest lost all critical judgment when it came to his writing. And he was writing poorly, his words powered by his manic delusions rather than any real inspiration or even storytelling impulse. Across the River and into the Trees is riddled with flaws, from the colonel’s fundamental unlikability to the unreality of a young, lovely, nobly born woman having fallen in love with a cantankerous and garrulous fifty-year-old whose only subjects are war, food, and their very dubious love affair. Mostly, the writing is repetitious and indulgent: the colonel asks “Daughter” repeatedly if she loves him, and she tells him she does. Everything is done “ably,” “truly,” or by way of some other adverb applied with thudding “significance”: Renata “chewed well and solidly on her steak” (ARIT, 127). The book is sloppy, unedited, or unpruned, or all three: Hemingway describes the Grand Canal in a cold wind, “with the houses as clear and sharp as on a winter day, which, of course, it was” (ARIT, 48).
What the book shows most starkly is the extent of Hemingway’s self-delusion. To take just one example: the colonel really believes that the eighteen-year-old countess loves him, just as Ernest believed the eighteen-year-old Adriana Ivancich loved him. When Ernest did the bulk of the writing, he had seen Adriana several times but had probably not declared his love, except playfully, and had included Mary and an Ivancich family member at each meeting. It is clear he wanted more, and a second visit to Venice by Ernest and Mary the following year seems to have been planned with his escalated courtship of Adriana in mind. In an explicit love scene in Across the River and into the Trees the colonel masturbates Renata in a gondola and later makes love to her in his room in the Gritti Palace, scenarios Ernest on some level believed plausible for himself and his real-life Venetian paramour.
In a manic phase, people believe their thoughts are brilliant and want only to get others to listen; there is no mistaking this quality in Ernest’s statements about the manuscript during the writing of the novel, its editing, and even throughout its poor reception. He told Charlie Scribner, in a moment of relative calm, “It is a very fine novel, written to beat all comers, and written as well or better as I can write.” He went on a little more defensively, “It is a better novel than any other son of a bitch, alive or dead, can write….It is a beauty of a novel.” He enjoyed describing his accomplishment in inflated sports metaphors, comparing, for instance, his talent at this point in his career to a racehorse: “It was not until I was half one hundred years old that I realized had never turned the horse loose and let him run.” At the same time, he began claiming imaginary sporting feats: he told Scribner he had gone foxhunting, riding on an English saddle for the first time; in another letter he said he had ridden through the “chutes” in a “bear trap saddle,” for $100, presumably in a rodeo; extending sports prowess to Greg, he said the boy could ride anything bareback expertly enough to keep a postcard between his ass and the horse. Ernest claimed that as a young man he had hit a home run out of the park in the largest ballpark in the “upper Michigan league,” and had the photo to prove it. All of this fed into his increasingly grandiose expectations for his new book: as he told an interviewer, he was not trying for a no-hitter with Across the River and into the Trees: “Going to win maybe twelve to nothing or twelve to eleven.”
Sports—especially boxing—and writing, for Ernest, had somehow become one and the same. In a letter to Charlie Scribner shortly after his fiftieth birthday, he imagined himself in the ring with other writers; he knew he could never beat “Mr. Shakespeare” or “Mr. Anonymous,” but he had beaten Mr. Turgenev and Mr. Maupassant, and thought he had a chance against Mr. Tolstoy. He continued in this vein the next month in his Sherry-Netherland suite in New York where Lillian Ross interviewed him for a New Yorker profile. He had refined the analogy in the intervening month, telling Ross, “I started out very quiet and beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one.” He was still uncertain about Tolstoy, this time saying he was not yet ready to get in the ring with the quintessential war novelist.
In a similar vein, Ernest began to rewrite his military history, implying he had fought in both world wars, when he had fought in neither in any official capacity. In one sense, this was nothing new—in the immediate aftermath of his wounding as an ambulance driver in Italy in 1918 he claimed that he had fought not only with the Italian army but with the Arditi. In spite of the fact that he had gotten into some trouble for arming himself when a war correspondent in World War II, he now bragged freely about his experiences with the Free French. He began to boast of the number of German soldiers he had killed.
In one such letter written in 1948 he told Archie MacLeish that he had been a captain with the Free French; that Buck Lanham had appointed him a second lieutenant at Hürtgenwald; that he had seen 104 days of combat; that he had got twenty-six “Krauts,” all armed, “sures.” He described killing a seventeen-year-old German in some detail (in other letters to different recipients he recounted other such individual killings, sometimes described in quite gruesome fashion).
Ernest made several other distortions of history in these months, many of them inexplicable and vaguely malevolent: he said, for instance, that his sister Carol was assaulted, knocked out, and raped by a sexual “pervert”; that he had a Cheyenne great-grandmother and that he had ancestors in the Crusades; that he had “read” law one winter, and that he and his brothers and sisters learned German as children. Ernest was seldom a sexual braggart, in part because his actual experience was less than his legend claimed, but in 1949–50 he told Scribner that on his birthday he had “fucked three times”; and in another letter he said he could “fuck better” now than at the age of twenty-five, and that he had, in addition to three countesses in Venice, a “lovely” new whore in Cuba. (This was one of the few periods in his life when Ernest patronized, or claimed to patronize, prostitutes.)
His letters were full of threats, some indirect but others more forthright and disturbing. He told Cardinal Spellman, in an unsent June 1949 letter, that the cardinal would not become pope as long as he, Ernest, was around. He challenged Senator Joe McCarthy to come down to Cuba and fight him “for free, without any publicity…would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived.” In a letter to Ingrid Bergman, a member of his chaste harem, he promised to kill Roberto Rossellini, presumably for impregnating Bergman and then not marrying her, swearing he would shoot Rossellini in various organs and in his face. When Ernest received a form letter from a committee set up to honor FDR’s birthday in 1949, signed by Averell Harriman, whom he knew from Sun Valley days, Ernest wrote a polite letter declining the invitation. But he also dictated a bombastic letter to Harriman by way of his new secretary, Nita Jensen, in which he declared his unwillingness to honor “a rich and spoiled paralytic,” whom he had personally found to be a “bore.” (He directed Nita to keep this one in his files.)
Those around Ernest at this time noted other kinds of strange behavior as well. He was spending large amounts of money. He borrowed $10,000 from Charlie Scribner, half of it to buy a mink coat for Mary. She noted in her autobiography that they had installed a new electric stove and refrigerator in the Finca in 1949. More worryingly, however, was the fact that Ernest apparently discovered mail order shopping, possibly in the face of the difficulty of finding much that was desirable in Havana stores. Scribner had recently sent Ernest a “talk machine,” which enabled him to dictate letters (and orders) through Nita. Perhaps in a nod to his new secretary’s Mexican background, he ordered cases of El Paso enchilada dinners, pinto beans with red sauce, and Mexican tortillas. As his fiftieth birthday approached, be bought presents for the Finca or the Pilar, spending $15.95 for an alphabet’s worth of marine signal flags from a Topeka, Kansas, company; an inexpensive sextant and books on celestial navigation; two quarts of an anti-mildew cleaner; a Navy ship’s clock; and a waterproof floating flashlight for 98 cents. He evidently did not want to create the impression that he was buying things only for himself, having Nita send off an order to Hammacher Schlemmer for eight Currier & Ives dinner plates. At another point, however, Mary noted, in a record she showed Ernest to warn him of his excessive expenditures, that he had spent $258.90 on shirts—not a small sum in 1950 (about $2,500 today). Mary also noted another odd, house-related purchase that other observers of the Finca in those years remember as well: two miniature iron cannons that shot off good imitations of real shells, which coated operator and bystanders with black soot and made an impressive din. Firing the cannons became a ritual, according to Mary, staged for esteemed visitors.
Onlookers were noting some other elements of Ernest’s behavior with alarm or concern. Mary noted some strange moods, in which Ernest appeared to make little sense: “At table Papa was ebullient, said he would marry me, even if I didn’t go to bed with him.” (They had married in 1946.) In her diary on October 5 she observed that Ernest was “nervous and tired” on finishing Across the River; soon after, she wrote, “His weariness blurred his personality.” She noted behavior that Ross would observe in her New Yorker profile: “He was making constant repetitions of his philosophies and catchphrases and jokes, and omitting his customary beguiling grace notes….I had heard him say ‘truly’ in solemn voice too often, and ‘daughter,’ voice benign, and ‘when the chips are down’ and ‘how do you like it now, gentlemen?’ ” Ernest was drinking too much as well, Mary observed, and he was talking about his will. This is the one point at which the idea of seeing a psychiatrist was introduced: Mary wrote that, because in the fall of 1950 he seemed “restless and unhappy,” she tried to persuade him to talk to the psychiatrist whom they consulted in Patrick’s case, whom the boy had liked—to no avail.
Other health issues had arisen by this time: in February 1949, while in Venice, he developed a serious skin infection, erysipelas, his face swelling up and an ugly red. Erysipelas on the face can sometimes spread into the eye, which it evidently did in Ernest’s case, as the infection was attributed to a scratch on the eye from road dust or wadded remnants of a shotgun shell. From the eye it can travel to the brain; it is a serious disease, often leading to blood poisoning. Indeed, Ernest was hospitalized in Padua for ten days for blood poisoning and received massive doses of penicillin. He was not exaggerating when he said that his life was in danger. The New York Times ran an article that said the infection had spread “so rapidly and virulently” that his doctors “despaired,” and gave him “only a short time to live.”
But these episodes perhaps obscure the point that his general health was not good. Peter Viertel, commenting on Ernest’s condition in the fall of 1949, would remark, “Alcohol was obviously responsible for the deterioration of his health,” though Viertel was perhaps underestimating the recovery time after the blood poisoning episode. He noted that Ernest had begun what was to be an ongoing habit of collecting and saving urine samples, urinating in a glass in the early morning and later in the day holding the urine up to the light. He kept ten or twenty such glasses in his bathroom at the Finca.
Ernest’s medical records include his drug regimen in 1949, cited by Dr. Cucu Kohly. They included mannitol hexanitrate (an early drug to lower blood pressure, also used in explosives); Wychol, which prevents fat buildup in the liver; Seconal (a barbiturate); Combex (vitamin B complex); and ataxin, drops for the eyes that contain vitamin A. The regimen did not include any medication for his manic states.
All the while, however, most of Ernest’s odd behavior, his inflated claims, and his hyperbolic language surrounded the novel he was writing. Those who had a glimpse of it, or more, were beginning to suspect that he was setting himself up for a big disappointment, and that his assessment of the novel as the best he’d ever written was misguided—if not deluded. Mary wrote in her autobiography that she was unhappy with the love story at the heart of the novel. “It made me feel disloyal,” she wrote, “but I was finding Colonel Cantwell’s and his girl’s conversations banal beyond reason and their obsession with food and the ploy of the emeralds a mysterious lapse in judgment.” But she kept quiet, she said, hoping that “someone at Scribner’s” would help him with the manuscript.
Meanwhile, Charlie Scribner and his editors were hoping that Ernest would somehow wake up and see how bad the work was. Ed Hotchner had edited the manuscript for serialization in Cosmopolitan, where it began to appear in February 1950. Scribner’s was getting a second, revised, manuscript from Hotchner, and what they were reading was not encouraging. Wallace Meyer was working closely with Ernest because he had gained the writer’s trust, having handled advertising for The Sun Also Rises and copyedited For Whom the Bell Tolls. When he received the last Cosmopolitan installment, Meyer wrote Charlie Scribner that he could not be encouraging: “The basic trouble is that the book hasn’t the idea of a novel.” It should have been a short story, the operative word being “short.” He hoped, he said, the same thing Charlie did, “that Ernest, when the manuscript has grown cold for him, as it must have done by now, would see the passages and aspects as padding, and would manage somehow to rework and rewrite to give the whole depth a reality.”
Yet no one at the firm seems to have said anything critical to Ernest; Charlie Scribner wired him in February, “TRULY DELIGHTED WITH WHAT I HAVE READ OF REVISED VERSION OF NOVEL STOP IT IS NOW BECOMING YOU AT YOUR BEST.” Despite this message, Ernest picked up on Meyer’s and Scribner’s doubts and wrote that Charlie should tell him what scenes he had trouble with so he could “fix” them. He admitted that the scene between the colonel and the Gritti headwaiter needed to be cut, but that he had gone on at such length “because it was fun.” When Meyer saw the final version of the novel, however, he was dismayed anew. As he wrote Scribner, “The manuscript is not changed in any fundamental respect,” though Ernest had “cleaned it up,” taking out four-letter words and personal allusions—mostly scabrous comments about the colonel’s ex-wife, clearly based on Martha Gellhorn. He also softened—but not by much—a thinly disguised take-down of Sinclair Lewis, whom Ernest and Mary had encountered at the Gritti.
Nobody was to do anything to his work except to fix his punctuation and spelling—at anything much more he balked, as Charlie Scribner found out when he discovered a technical error: Cantwell had addressed his driver as Sergeant, when elsewhere he identified him as having the rank of T5, which, “if you will go back to your manuals of marching,” he told Ernest, was the rank of a corporal. Charlie was positively gleeful about this, feeling sure that Ernest would laugh about his technical “boner” and the publisher’s diligence in catching it. He had miscalculated, however; Ernest wrote him a blistering letter in response. Scribner and his crew backed off once they saw the kind of reaction even the mildest criticism would provoke. Still, it is hard not to believe that Max would have intervened before publication if it became clear that Ernest was making no further changes to improve the novel. Instead, the new regime pushed through the book, determined to make it a best seller regardless of the critical response.
Concurrently with the publication of Across the River and into the Trees, Scribner’s was trying to finesse another area of Ernest’s poor judgment: his inability to see that a spate of poems written in 1949 were unfit for publication—though Wallace Meyer did say he found them, at first glance, “strange and individual and deeply moving,” noting that he guessed Ernest was in some kind of “transition phase.” Ernest, giving some thought to his reputation at the time of publication of his Venice novel, advised Scribner to bring out a volume of his stories and poems. The latter included recent poems like “Poetry” (1944) and “Defense of Luxembourg” (1945); the passive-aggressive “Poem to Mary” (1944); and a 1946 poem to one of the Finca’s cats, “To Crazy Christian.” It is not clear just what stories Ernest was recommending that Scribner’s publish, but they no doubt included “The Good Lion” and “The Faithful Bull,” two very brief fablelike stories published in Holiday in January 1950. In October Ernest told Charlie Scribner he thought he was making a mistake in not bringing out a collection. He wrote Charlie again in December saying that Charlie was just “wrong” in assessing the stories.
One letter to Ed Hotchner written in the run-up to publication of Across the River and into the Trees suggests that in more sober moments Ernest was having some doubts about his writing future—or at least that he was picking up on Hotch’s anxieties. Ernest wrote, “Please don’t think any chance of this being a secondary or not top-drawer book.” He had been “throwing in [his] armour,” he said, adding, “Brooklyn Tolstois grab your laurels.” The reference to “Brooklyn Tolstois” was to Norman Mailer, who had been called the “Brooklyn Tolstoy” after the publication of his 1948 war novel, The Naked and the Dead. The recent spate of war novels was making Ernest anxious indeed; he, after all, was the war novelist par excellence, he believed (even including Stendhal, as his boxing ring fantasies make clear). Pretenders like Mailer, all of them younger, included, by now, John Horne Burns (The Gallery, 1947), Gore Vidal (Williwaw, 1946), and Vance Bourjaily (The End of My Life, 1947); Martha Gellhorn also published a war novel in 1948, The Wine of Astonishment. Another contender, closer to Ernest’s age, was Irwin Shaw, who as Mary’s erstwhile boyfriend was already suspect, and whose The Young Lions drew critical praise in 1948; that it contained characters based on Ernest, Mary, and Ernest’s brother Leicester made Shaw’s success even more galling. In his own time Ernest had seen contemporaries like E.E. Cummings and Dos Passos make their reputations on their novels about World War I and knew well what might lie ahead for the chroniclers of the next war. Perhaps his competitive anxieties fueled the inclusion of the colonel’s war experiences as a plot element in Across the River; Ernest too felt he had to weigh in with a World War II novel—no matter that his account was an afterthought, and that the war was only incidental to the plot.
Across the River and into the Trees appeared first in Cosmopolitan in the winter and spring of 1950, then in book form in September. Beyond the editorial staff at Scribner’s and Ernest’s family and closest friends, those around him had few indications of what was on the horizon. One major exception was Martha Gellhorn’s response after reading the novel in serialization: “I feel quite sick….Shivering sick,” she told Time-Life correspondent William Walton, then her lover, just as he had once been Mary Welsh’s (though Ernest probably never knew this). “To me, it has a loud sound of madness and a terrible smell as of decay,” she added. Another exception was John Dos Passos, who wrote to Edmund Wilson, after Cosmopolitan’s last installment, “Across the River and into the Trees brought out the goose pimples….How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?”
This is not to say that those around him weren’t having doubts on the eve of the novel’s publication. On May 13, Lillian Ross’s disturbing profile, “Portrait of Hemingway: ‘How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?’ ” appeared in The New Yorker. The writer had first met Ernest in the winter of 1947–48, when she was working on a profile of matador Sidney Franklin. Undertaking her piece about Ernest, Ross did the bulk of her interviewing in New York in November 1949, when Ernest and Mary were on their way to Venice for a second visit, this time for a six-month stay. Ross met them at the airport with their fourteen pieces of luggage; once in the Hemingways’ room at the Sherry-Netherland, Ernest ordered caviar and champagne, declaring that he meant to celebrate the completion of his novel.
Ross’s profile followed Ernest for two days in New York, describing Ernest and Mary in their hotel room, entertaining Marlene Dietrich (“the Kraut”) and Patrick Hemingway, visiting from Harvard. Ross accompanied Ernest on a shopping expedition to Abercrombie & Fitch, where he had a joyful reunion with Winston Guest. She joined a party of Ernest, Patrick, and Mary in a trip to the Metropolitan Museum, where they viewed El Greco’s View of Toledo and paintings by Cézanne and Degas. Ross also reported on the Hemingways’ room service lunch with Charlie Scribner, where Ernest told Charlie he had been “jamming, like a rider in a six-day bike race” (Ross, 53). Ross’s profile captured the manic quality of Ernest’s activity—most notably, in his statements about the novel. He reminisced about his pitching days, when he needed to conserve his arm for throwing fast balls (Ross, 17); he told Ross about having once lived with a bear in Montana and gotten drunk with him (Ross, 9). He forced an Abercrombie & Fitch salesclerk’s hand into a fist and struck his own tensed belly with it, then punched himself, twice, as well (Ross, 40). Seeing Cézanne’s work prompted him to say he wrote not only like Cézanne but also like “Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach,” a new claim (Ross, 51). Moreover, Ross quoted long swaths of Ernest’s speech in what she called “joke ‘Indian’ talk he had invented with his wife and friends,” dropping his articles and pronouns in “a kind of shorthand” that she thought he employed because time was short, philosophically speaking (Ross, 60). And she showed him drinking, virtually without cease: two double bourbons before leaving the airport; champagne in the Sherry-Netherland between meals and Tavel rosé with lunch; something unnamed from a flask in the museum.
After the story appeared, Ross later wrote, disingenuously, it came to the “complete surprise of Hemingway, the New Yorker’s editors, and herself, [that] her profile had been very controversial.” She had thought that readers would see the profile as a “sympathetic piece,” as she and Ernest did (Ross, xix), and when some said they had found the piece “devastating,” she said they evidently disapproved of him having a good time (Ross, xx–xxi).
Ernest, indeed, when sent the page proofs, worried mildly to Ross that she had made him sound “conceited,” but then seems to have made up his mind to what he believed were Ross’s good intentions, and went on to enjoy a long friendship with her. Others, however, were horrified—by the brutal forthrightness of the piece and by what it revealed about its subject. Selden Rodman, a critic who thought highly of Hemingway, flatly called the profile “a lethal exposure of posturing vanity,” although he left aside Ross’s motivations in so presenting Ernest. Ernest’s old friend Alice B. Toklas wrote to Fernanda Pivano, Gertrude Stein’s Italian translator (also Ernest’s), that she was dismayed to read the profile: “It has strange revelations and exposures by himself and his wife—which were partially explained by Janet Flanner’s telling me that he was mortally ill.” The news had affected her “strangely,” she told Pivano: “It is painful to know the present situation and the horror it must hold for him.” As one of those who had known him longest, and a godmother of his eldest son, she had no doubt that Ross’s dire portrait was accurate.
The Hemingways, meanwhile, were eager to escape the New York literary scene. They crossed the Atlantic with Jigee Viertel, who was joined in Paris by her husband; they also met Hotch there, sent by Cosmopolitan to collect the manuscript of the novel, whose closing pages Ernest wrote in Paris. Afterward, Ernest showed more profligate generosity, twice dividing piles of French francs among his friends—first some unexpected French royalties and next some winnings from the horse racing at Auteuil. Both Peter and Mary detected a relationship between their spouses that went beyond flirtation, but after traveling through Avignon, Nîmes, Aix-en-Provence, Arles, and Nice, the Viertels and Hotch left the Hemingways on their own. Mary observed that “missing his cortege,” Ernest was “miserable.”
As they had the previous winter, Mary and Ernest split their time between Venice and Cortina. Mary, who had broken her right ankle the previous year on the ski slopes, this season broke her left one. Ernest’s confidence in his forthcoming book remained unshakable, and was given a boost when the Italian publisher Mondadori reported that he was a favorite for the Nobel Prize. He also returned to spending as much time as he could in the company of Adriana. His chivalry was alive; he could at least see that readers might “mistake” Renata, the colonel’s lover in Across the River, for his young friend, so he enjoined publication of the novel in Italy for two years. But because the hoped-for romance did not seem to progress, he decided that Adriana and her mother should pay a visit to the Finca in order to see how Gianfranco, who had been installed in the guest bedroom there, was managing in his job with the shipping company. Mary decided that etiquette dictated she issue the formal invitation; she asked Dora Ivancich over lunch at Harry’s Bar, and Dora later accepted.
Leaving Venice for Paris in March, Ernest, already ecstatic that Adriana would be coming to Cuba, was further delighted to learn that she would be in Paris when he and Mary were there, furthering her studies in art. She had somewhat fancifully drawn up a cover illustration for Ernest’s novel, a small sketch in watercolor of a Venice canal, complete with gondola. Charlie Scribner and his wife, traveling in Europe, met the Hemingways in Paris, and confirmed that Adriana’s drawing would be used on the dust jacket—which, of course, excited Ernest further. He took the occasion to find a time and place where he and Adriana could be alone to talk. He began by telling her that, like many men—men who were not stupid—who wanted to marry her, he, himself not stupid, wanted to marry her as well. Adriana protested that he already had a wife. Ernest said, “Ah, yes, Mary. She is nice of course, and solid and courageous.” But two people can sometimes come to a crossroads where one will go one way, and the other a different way, he said. “I love you in my heart,” he went on, “and I cannot do anything about it.” Finally, seeing Adriana’s dismay, he concluded his pitch: “I would ask you to marry me, if I didn’t know that you would say no.” When she did not respond, Ernest smiled and said, “Now let us take a walk along the Seine.” On March 21, Adriana accompanied Ernest and Mary to Le Havre and saw them off on the Île de France, headed for Havana.
Meanwhile, as an act in Ernest’s drama with Adriana was ending, Scribner’s set about planning the launch of Ernest’s new novel, apparently having put aside their doubts. The previous fall they had written a press release, which announced Ernest’s infection and subsequent blood poisoning in the winter of 1949, which they described as life-threatening: “Expecting the present novel to be his final work, Mr. Hemingway determined to make it the finest of his writing career. Those who have read the manuscript feel that this novel will rank above anything he has ever written.” Yet they kept pushing back the publication date, which had originally been given as March 1. Just before the installments began to run in Cosmopolitan, Scribner’s told Ernest they expected to publish the first week of August. In May they said they would publish September 7; Ernest said this was all right with him, but he warned them to make sure they had not changed the date “because there was something wrong with the book.” Ernest was enough of a publishing veteran to know that for a publication date to be pushed back this often was unusual. Moreover, he was preternaturally adept at reading meanings in the behavior and words of others; he “had an unfailing instinct,” observed Peter Viertel, “about what was going through the minds of people around him.” But his momentary doubts were lost in the roar inside his head.
No amount of delays, however, and no amount of money—Scribner’s spent $35,000 on promotion—could forestall the novel’s calamitous critical reception. Though many reviewers were but mildly disapproving—Malcolm Cowley felt it was “below the level of his earlier novels,” and Richard Rovere in Harper’s called it “a disappointing novel”—others went to extremes. Maxwell Geismar, in The Saturday Review of Literature, wrote, “It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and it throws a doubtful light on the future.” Alfred Kazin, in The New Yorker, noted his own “embarrassment, even pity, that so important a writer can make such a travesty of himself.” Cyril Connolly conceded that every writer can write “one thoroughly bad book,” but criticized the colonel as “a drink-sodden and maundering old bore.” Morton Dauwen Zabel gave a nod to the disastrous Ross profile in titling his review, “A Good Day for Mr. Tolstoy,” and went on to say Across the River and into the Trees was “the poorest thing its author has ever done.” Time called it a “parody” of Hemingway.
One significant exception was as effusive as other reviews were vitriolic: John O’Hara, who was a great admirer of Ernest’s work, and may have wanted to signal Ernest he would like them to be better friends, wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, “The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel.” Even Ernest knew this was bombast. Other reviewers were milder in their praise, and a handful pronounced themselves mystified by the barrage of negative reviews. Evelyn Waugh, for instance, accused reviewers of “high supercilious caddishness,” and asked, “Why do they all hate him so?” Ben Redman, writing two months after the book appeared, similarly tried to find a reason for the critics’ heated response: “Perhaps we really do know too much about Hemingway, or at least his public poses, to judge his work impartially.”
Another set of positive remarks was more interesting and insightful, if somewhat idiosyncratically so. Tennessee Williams wrote a travel piece called “A Writer’s Quest for Parnassus,” which appeared in The New York Times in August, suggesting that he had seen a prepublication copy of the book. He was writing about Italy as a new destination for expatriate American writers and his own preference for Rome. On Venice he had this to say: “I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway’s new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy.” He predicted (rightly) that while Across the River would be poorly received critically, it would be popular with readers. “But its hauntingly tired cadences,” he went on, “are the direct speech of a man’s heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done.”
Ernest never referred to this praise and perhaps never knew of it. He was surprised by all the negative reviews—hardly unexpectedly, given his outsize admiration for his own novel. The day the review in Time appeared, he lashed out at Charlie Scribner: “Isn’t it sort of customary to tell an author about how things go and what people say when a book comes out that he has bet his shirt on and worked his heart out on nor missed a deadline nor failed to keep a promise?” As the other reviews came in, he sent some off to Buck Lanham and told him what O’Hara had written, which sent him off on a rant, saying O’Hara could not have understood the novel as “he had not known the kind of people I have known….I do know fighting people of all kinds, painters, diplomats, thieves, gangsters, politicians, jockeys, trainers, bull fighters, many beautiful women, great ladies, the beau monde” and so forth. He went on for several pages, no doubt mystifying Buck:
Also have more than a battalion of bartenders and at least a platoon of priests and both the B.T.s and the Priests have loaned me money and been repaid….When I was 19 Count Greppi who was a contemporary of Metternich and the Duke of Bronte who was a descendant of Nelson, both over ninety, were trying to bring me up.
With this jumbled flight of fancy, Ernest confirmed that the mania that had held him in its grip since his fiftieth birthday in the previous year had in no way abated.