ALTHOUGH the United States grew in numbers and strength throughout the nineteenth century, and by the end of it had already become the world’s largest and richest industrial power, it was a long time before its society began to produce intellectuals of the kind I have been describing. For this there were several reasons. Independent America had never possessed an ancien régime, a privileged establishment based on prescriptive possession rather than natural justice, There was no irrational and inequitable existing order which the new breed of secular intellectual could scheme to replace by millenarian models based on reason and morality. On the contrary: the United States was itself the product of a revolution against the injustice of the old order. Its constitution was based on rational and ethical principles, and had been planned, written, enacted and, in the light of early experience, amended by men of the highest intelligence, of philosophical bent and moral stature. There was thus no cleavage between the ruling and the educated classes: they were one and the same. Then too, as de Tocqueville noted, there was in the United States no institutionalized clerical class, and therefore no anti-clericalism, the source of so much intellectual ferment in Europe. Religion in America was universal but under the control of the laity. It concerned itself with behaviour, not dogma. It was voluntary and multi-denominational, and thus expressed freedom rather than restricted it. Finally, America was a land of plenty and opportunity, where land was cheap and in ample supply, and no man need be poor. There was none of the ocular evidence of flagrant injustice which, in Europe, incited clever, well-educated men to embrace radical ideas. No sins cried out to heaven for vengeance-yet. Most men were too busy getting and spending, exploiting and consolidating, to question the fundamental assumptions of their society.
Early American intellectuals, like Washington Irving, took their tone and manners, their style and content, from Europe, where they spent much of their time; they were a living legacy of cultural colonialism. The emergence of a native and independent American intellectual spirit was itself a reaction to the cringing of Irving and his kind. The first and most representative exponent of this spirit-the archetypal American intellectual of the nineteenth century-was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who proclaimed that his object was to extract ‘the tape-worm of Europe’ from America’s body and brain, to ‘cast out the passion for Europe by the passion for America’.1 He too went to Europe but in a critical and rejecting mood. But his insistence on the Americanism of his mind led to a broad identification with the assumptions of his own society which became closer as he grew older, and which was the exact antithesis of the outlook of Europe’s intelligentsia. Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister. He became one himself but left the ministry because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord’s Supper. He travelled in Europe, discovered Kant, returned and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where he developed the first indigenous American philosophical movement, known as Transcendentalism, encapsulated in his first book, Nature, published in 1836. It is neo-Platonic, somewhat anti-rational, a little mystical, a touch Romantic, above all vague. Emerson noted in one of his many notebooks and journals:
For this was I born and came into the world to deliver the self of myself to the Universe from the Universe; to do a certain benefit which nature could not forgo, nor I be discharged from rendering, and then emerge again into the holy silence and eternity, out of which as a man I arose. God is rich and many more men than I he harbours in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and beauty of all. Or, when I wish, it is permitted to me to say, these hands, this body, this history of Waldo Emerson are profane and wearisome, but I, I descend not to mix myself with that or any man. Above his life, above all creatures I flow down forever a sea of benefit into races of individuals. Nor can the stream ever roll backwards or the sin or death of man taint the immutable energy which distributes itself into men as the sun into rays or the sea into drops.2
This does not make much sense, or, in so far as it does, constitutes a truism. But in an age which admired Hegelianism and the early Carlyle, many Americans were proud that their young country had produced an undoubted intellectual of their own. It was later observed that his appeal rested ‘not on the ground that people understand him, but that they think such men ought to be encouraged’.3 A year after he published Nature, he delivered a Harvard address, entitled ‘The American Scholar’, which Oliver Wendell Holmes was to call ‘our intellectual declaration of independence’.4 His themes were taken up by America’s burgeoning press. The paper which published Marx’s dispatches from Europe, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, by far the most influential in the country, promoted Emerson’s Transcendentalism in a sensational manner, as a kind of national public property, like Niagara Falls.
Emerson is worth examining because his career illustrates the difficulty experienced by American intellectuals in breaking away from their native consensus. In many ways he remained the product of his New England background, especially in his naive, puritanical and etiolated approach to sex. When he descended on the Carlyles at Craigenputtock in August 1833, he seemed to Jane Carlyle a bit etherial, coming ‘out of the clouds, as it were’; Carlyle himself noted he left ‘like an angel, with his beautiful, transparent soul’.5 On a subsequent visit, in 1848, Emerson described in his diary how he was obliged to defend American standards of morals at a dinner party at John Foster’s house, attended by Dickens, Carlyle and others:
I said that, when I came to Liverpool, I enquired whether the prostitution was always as gross in that city, as it then appeared, for to me it seemed to betoken a fatal rottenness in the state, and I saw not how any boy could grow up safe. But I had been told, it was not worse or better for years. Carlyle and Dickens replied that chastity in the male sex was as good as gone in our times, and in England was so rare that they could name all the exceptions. Carlyle evidently believed that the same things were true in America…I assured him it was not so with us; that, for the most part, young men of good standing and good education with us, go virgins to their nuptial bed, as truly as their brides.6
As Henry James later wrote of Emerson, ‘his ripe unconsciousness of evil…is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him’; though he adds, cruelly, ‘We get the impression of a conscience gasping in the void, panting for sensations, with something of the movements of the gills of a landed fish.’7 Evidently the sexual drive in Emerson was not powerful. His young first wife called him ‘Grandpa’. His second, who had to put up with Emerson’s much-adored mother living in the household until she died, occasionally gave vent to bitter remarks, which Emerson naively recorded in his journal: ‘Save me from magnificent souls. I like a small, common-sized one’; or again, ‘There is no love to restrain the course of, and never was, that poor God did all he could but selfishness fairly carried the day.’8 Emerson’s poem ‘Give All to Love’ was thought daring but there is no evidence he ever gave much himself. His one great extra-marital friendship with a woman was strictly platonic, or perhaps neo-platonic, and not by her choice. He remarked, cautiously: ‘I have organs also and delight in pleasure, but I have experience also that this pleasure is the bait of a trap.’9 His journal, which constantly tells us more about him than he evidently intended, records a dream, in 1840-41, in which he attends a debate on Marriage. One of the speakers suddenly turned on the audience ‘the spout of an Engine which was copiously supplied…with water, and whisking it vigorously about’, drove everyone out, finally turning it fully on Emerson ‘and drenched me as I gazed. I woke up relieved to find myself quite dry.’10
Emerson married both his wives for prudential reasons and thereby acquired a capital which gave him a measure of literary independence. Soundly invested, it also brought a growing measure of affinity with the fast-expanding entrepreneurial system. He made what eventually became an unrivalled national reputation as a sage and prophet not so much by his books as through the lecture circuit, which was part of that system. First came his course ‘Human Life’ in Boston (1838), then ‘The Times’ in New York, (1842), followed by his study of great minds, ‘Representative Men’ (1845). Emerson’s emergence as a highbrow, but popular, lecturer, whose discourses were widely reported in the local, regional and even national press, coincided with the development of the Lyceum movement, founded by Josiah Holbrook in 1829, to educate the expanding nation.11 Lyceums were opened in Cincinnati in 1830, in Cleveland in 1832, in Columbus in 1835, and then throughout the expanding Midwest and Mississippi Valley. By the end of the 1830s almost every considerable town had one. They were accompanied by Young Men’s Mercantile Libraries and lecture and debating societies especially aimed at young, unmarried men-bank clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers and so forth-who then made up an astonishingly high proportion of the population in the new towns.12 The idea was to keep them off the streets and out of the saloons, and to promote their commercial career and moral welfare.
Emerson’s views fitted neatly into this concept. He disapproved of cultural and intellectual elites. He thought America’s own culture must be truly national, universal and democratic. Self-help was vital. The first American who read Homer in a farmhouse, he said, performed a great service to the United States. He said that if he found a man out west, reading a good book in a train, he wanted to hug him. His personal economic and political philosophy was identical with the public philosophy pushing Americans across the continent to fulfill their manifest destiny:
The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make equal laws, secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.13
It would be difficult to think of anything more diametrically opposed to the doctrines Marx was developing and preaching at exactly the same time. And Emerson’s actual experience in the field repeatedly contradicted the way in which Marx said capitalism not only did but must behave. Far from opposing this quest for enlightenment, owners and managers positively promoted it. When Emerson came to Pittsburgh in 1851, firms closed early so the young clerks could go to hear him. His courses were not obviously designed to reinforce the entrepreneurial spirit: ‘Instinct and Inspiration’, ‘The Identity of Thought with Nature’, ‘The Natural History of Intellect’, and so on. But he tended to argue that knowledge, plus moral character, promoted business success. Many who came expecting to be bewildered by this eminent philosopher found he preached what they thought common sense. The Cincinnati Gazette reported him as ‘unpretending…as a good old grandfather over his Bible’. Many of his obiter dicta-‘Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer,’ ‘[Man] is by constitution expensive and ought to be rich.’ ‘Life is the search after power’-struck his listeners as true, and when simplified and taken out of context by the newspapers passed into the common stock of American popular wisdom. It did not seem odd that Emerson was often associated in the same lecture series with P.T. Barnum, whose subjects were ‘The Art of Money Getting’ and ‘Success in Life’. To listen to Emerson was a sign of cultural aspiration and elevated taste: he became the embodiment of Thinking Man. At his last lecture in Chicago in November 1871, the Chicago Tribune reported: ‘The applause…bespoke the culture of the audience.’ To a nation which pursued moral and mental improvement with the same enthusiasm as money, and regarded both as essential to the creation of its new civilization, Emerson was by the end of the 1870s a national hero and mentor, as Hugo was to France or Tolstoy to Russia. He had set an American pattern.
It is against this background, in which the nation’s economic development and its cultural and intellectual life were seen as in broad harmony, that we should place Ernest Hemingway. At first glance he is not easily recognized as an intellectual at all. On closer inspection he is not only seen to exhibit all the chief characteristics of the intellectual but to possess them to an unusual degree, and in a specifically American combination. He was, moreover, a writer of profound originality. He transformed the way in which his fellow Americans, and people throughout the English-speaking world, expressed themselves. He created a new, personal, secular and highly contemporary ethical style, which was intensely American in origin, but translated itself easily into many cultures. He fused a number of American attitudes together and made himself their archetypal personification, so that he came to embody America at a certain epoch rather as Voltaire embodied France in the 1750s or Byron England in the 1820s.
Hemingway was born in 1899 in the salubrious suburb of Oak Park near Chicago, which had applauded Emerson so heartily a quarter-century before. His parents, Grace and Edmunds (‘Ed’) Hemingway, and he himself were all outstanding products of the civilization which Emerson and his lectures, and the economic dynamism they upheld, had helped to bring into being. The parents were, or they certainly seemed to be, healthy, industrious, efficient, well-educated, many-talented and well adjusted to their society, grateful for their European cultural inheritance but proudly conscious of the way America had triumphantly improved upon it. They feared God and lived a full life, indoors and outdoors. Dr Hemingway was an excellent physician who also hunted, shot, fished, sailed, camped and pioneered; he possessed, and taught his son, all the wilderness skills of the woodsman. Grace Hemingway was a woman of strong intelligence, powerful will and many accomplishments. She was widely read, wrote excellent prose and skilful verse, painted, designed and made furniture, sang well, played various instruments and wrote and published original songs.14 Both did everything in their power to transmit to their children, of whom Ernest as the eldest son was the most favoured, all their cultural inheritance and add to it. In many ways they were model parents and Hemingway grew up well-read and highly literate, a skilled sportsman and an all-round athlete.
Both parents were strongly religious. They were Congregationalists, and Dr Hemingway was a strict Sabbatarian too. They not only went to church on Sunday and said grace at meals but, according to Hemingway’s sister Sunny, ‘We had morning family prayers accompanied by a Bible reading and a hymn or two.’15 The moral code of broad-stream Protestantism was minutely enforced by both parents and any infringements severely punished. Grace Hemingway spanked the children with a hairbrush, the Doctor with a razor-strop. Their mouths were washed out with bitter soap when they were detected lying or swearing. After punishment they were made to kneel down and beg God for forgiveness. Dr Hemingway made it clear at all times that he identified Christianity with male honour and gentlemanly conduct: ‘I want you to represent,’ he wrote to Hemingway, ‘all that is good and noble and brave and courteous in Manhood, and fear God and respect Woman.’16 His mother wanted him to be a conventional Protestant hero, non-smoking, non-drinking, chaste before marriage, faithful within it and at all times to honour and obey his parents, especially his mother.
Hemingway rejected his parents’ religion in toto and with it any desire to be the sort of son they wanted. In his teens he seems to have decided, quite firmly, that he was going to pursue his genius and his inclination in all things, and to create for himself a vision both of the man of honour and of the good life which was his reward. This was a Romantic, literary and to some extent an ethical concept, but it had no religious content at all. Indeed Hemingway seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit. He privately abandoned his faith at the age of seventeen when he met Bill and Katy Smith (the latter to become the wife of John Dos Passos), whose father, an atheist don, had written an ingenious book ‘proving’ Jesus Christ had never existed. Hemingway ceased to practise religion at the earliest possible moment, when he went to work at his first job on the Kansas City Star and moved into unsupervised lodgings. As late as 1918, when he was nearly 20, he assured his mother: ‘Don’t worry or cry or fret about my being a good Christian. I am just as much as ever, and pray every night and believe just as hard.’17 But this was a lie, told for the sake of peace. He not only did not believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness. His first wife, Hadley, said she only saw him on his knees twice, at their wedding and at the christening of their son. To please his second wife, Pauline, he became a Roman Catholic, but he had no more conception of what his new faith meant than did Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited. He was furious when Pauline tried to observe its rules (e.g. over birth control) in ways which inconvenienced him. He published blasphemous parodies of the Our Father in his story ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ and of the Crucifixion in Death in the Afternoon; there is a blasphemous spittoon-blessing in his play The Fifth Column. In so far as he did understand Roman Catholicism, he detested it. He raised not the slightest protest when, at the beginning of the Civil War in Spain, a place he knew and said he loved, hundreds of churches were burnt, altars and sacred vessels desecrated, and many thousands of priests, monks and nuns slaughtered. He abandoned even the formal pretence of being a Catholic after he left his second wife.18 All his adult life he lived, in effect, as a pagan, worshipping ideas of his own devising.
Hemingway’s rejection of religion was characteristic of the adolescent intellectual, and still more characteristic in that it was part of a rejection of his parents’ moral culture. He later sought to differentiate between his mother and father, in a way which exonerated the latter. When his father committed suicide, he tried to hold his mother responsible, though it was clearly a case of a doctor anticipating what he knew would be a painful, terminal illness. Dr Hemingway was the weaker of the two parents but he supported his wife entirely in their disputes with their son, whose quarrel was with both rather than the mother alone. But Grace was the person on whom Hemingway’s resistance concentrated, probably, in my view, because he recognized in her the chief source of his egotistical will and his literary power. She was a formidable woman as he was becoming a formidable man. There was not room in the same circle for both.
Their dispute came to a head in 1920 when Hemingway, who had spent the latter part of the Great War in an ambulance unit on the Italian front, and had returned something of a war hero, not only failed to find himself a job but offended his parents by his idle and (by their standards) vicious conduct. In July that year Grace wrote him a Grand Remonstrance. Every mother’s life, she said, was like a bank. ‘Every child that is born to her enters the world with a large and prosperous bank account, seemingly inexhaustible.’ The child draws and draws–‘no deposits during all the early years’. Then, up to adolescence, ‘while the bank is heavily drawn upon,’ there are ‘a few deposits of pennies, in the way of some services willingly done, some thoughtfulness and “thank yous”’. With manhood, while the bank goes on handing out love and sympathy:
The account needs some deposits by this time, some good-sized ones in the way of gratitude and appreciation, interest in Mother’s ideas and affairs. Little comforts provided for the home; a desire to favour any of Mother’s peculiar prejudices, on no account to outrage her ideas. Flowers, fruit or candy, or something pretty to wear, brought home to Mother with a kiss and a squeeze…A surreptitious paying of bills, just to get them off Mother’s mind…deposits which keep the account in good standing. Many mothers I know are receiving these and much more substantial gifts and returns from sons of less abilities than my son. Unless you, my son, Ernest, come to yourself, cease your lazy loafing and pleasure seeking…stop trading on your handsome face…and neglecting your duties to God and your Saviour, Jesus Christ…there is nothing before you but bankruptcy: You have overdrawn.19
She brooded on this document for three days, polishing it as carefully as Hemingway was ever to do his own prize passages, then presented it personally. It indicates whence he got the strong sense of moral outrage, not unmixed with self-righteousness, which is so important a part of his fiction.
Hemingway reacted as might have been expected, with slow, mounting and prolonged fury, and from then on he treated his mother as an enemy. Dos Passos said Hemingway was the only man he had ever come across who really hated his mother. Another old acquaintance, General Lanham, testified: ‘From my earliest days with Ernest Hemingway he always referred to his mother as “that bitch”. He must have told me a thousand times how much he hated her and in how many ways.’20 This hatred was reflected repeatedly, and variously, in the fiction. It spilled over into a related detestation of his elder sister, ‘my bitch sister Marcelline’, ‘a bitch complete with handles’. It broadened into a general hatred of families, often expressed in irrelevant contexts, as in the discussion of bad painters (his mother painted) in his autobiography, A Moveable Feast: ‘they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm, as families do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. But even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.’ His hatred of his mother was so intense that to a considerable extent it poisoned his life, not least because he always felt a residual guilt about it, which nagged at him and kept the hatred evergreen. He was still hating her in 1949 when she was nearly eighty, writing to his publisher from his house in Cuba: ‘I will not see her and she knows she can never come here.’21 His loathing for her exceeded the purely utilitarian dislike that Marx felt for his mother, and was emotionally akin to Marx’s attitude to the capitalist system itself. For Hemingway, mother-hatred attained the status of a philosophical system.
The family breakup drove Hemingway to the Toronto Star and thence to Europe as a foreign correspondent and novelist. He repudiated not merely his parents’ religion but his mother’s view of an optimistic, Christianized culture, expressed in her powerful but conventional-and to him detestable-prose. One of the forces which drove Hemingway towards the literary perfectionism which became his outstanding characteristic was the overwhelming urge not to write like his mother, using the stale rhetoric of an over-elaborate literary inheritance. (A sentence of hers which he particularly hated, as epitomizing her prose style, came from one of her letters to him: ‘You were named for the two finest and noblest gentlemen I have ever known.’)
From 1921 Hemingway led the life of a foreign correspondent, using Paris as his base. He covered warfare in the Middle East and international conferences, but the main focus of his attention was on the expatriate literati of the Left Bank. He wrote poetry. He was trying to write prose. He read ferociously. One of the many habits he inherited from his mother was carrying books around with him, shoved into his pockets, so that he could read at any time or place during a pause in the action. He read everything, and all his life he bought books, so that any Hemingway habitation had stacks running along the walls. At his house in Cuba he was to build up a working library of 7400 volumes, characterized by expert studies on all the subjects in which he was interested and by a wide range of literary texts, which he read and re-read. He arrived in Paris having read virtually all the English classics but determined to broaden his range. He was never chippy about having missed a university education, but he regretted it and was anxious to fill any gaps its absence might have left. So he settled down to Stendhal, Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant and Zola, the major Russian novelists, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, and the Americans, Henry James, Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. He read the moderns, too: Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Maxwell Anderson, James Joyce. His reading was wide but also dictated by a growing urge to write. Since the age of fifteen he had made a cult of Kipling, and continued to study him all his life. To this was now added close attention to Conrad, and Joyce’s brilliant collection, Dubliners. Like all really good writers, he not only devoured but analysed and learned from the second-rate, such as Marryat, Hugh Walpole and George Moore.
Hemingway moved right to the centre of the Paris intelligentsia in 1922 with the arrival there of Ford Madox Ford. Ford was a great unearther of literary talent, helping to bring out Lawrence, Norman Douglas, Wyndham Lewis, Arthur Ransome and many others. In 1923 he published the first issue of Transatlantic Review and, on the recommendation of Ezra Pound, hired Hemingway as a part-time assistant. Hemingway admired Ford as a literary entrepreneur but had many complaints about him: he ignored most of the younger writers, he was not sufficiently interested in new styles and literary forms, his taste was too close to that of the mainstream magazines, above all he assumed most good literary things came from France and England, and largely ignored America’s output, rapidly growing in quantity and quality. Hemingway saw himself as the impresario of the American avant-garde. ‘Ford,’ he grumbled, ‘is running [the] whole damn thing as a compromise.’22 Once installed in the tiny Ile St Louis offices over the Three Mountain Press, Hemingway began to tilt the Review in an adventurous, American direction, so that in addition to sixty British and forty French pieces it carried ninety by Americans, among others Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Lincoln Steffens, Natalie Barnard, William Carlos Williams and Nathan Asch. When Ford left Paris for a trip to the United States, Hemingway ruthlessly turned the July and August issues into a triumphant parade of young American talent, so that Ford, on his return, felt he had to apologize for the ‘unusually large sample of the work of that Young America whose claims we have so insistently-but not with such efficiency-forced upon our readers’.23
But Hemingway had his own intense drive for literary fame and power, and in the long run was less concerned with the parties and intrigues of the Left Bank intelligentsia than in developing his own talent. Pound had introduced Hemingway to Ford with words: ‘He writes very good verse and he’s the finest prose stylist in the world.’24 Made in 1922, the remark is highly perceptive, for Hemingway had by no means developed his mature method. But he was working on it, as his early notebooks, with their infinite erasures and amendments, testify. Probably no writer of fiction has ever struggled so hard and so long to fashion a personal manner of writing exactly suited to the work he wished to do. A study of Hemingway during these years is a model of how a writer should acquire his professional skills. It is comparable, in nobility of aim and persistence of effort, with Ibsen’s arduous efforts to become a playwright. It also had the same revolutionary impact on the craft.
It was Hemingway’s belief that he had inherited a false world, symbolized by his parents’ religion and moral culture, and that it must be replaced by a truthful one. What did he mean by truth? Not the inherited, revealed truth of his parents’ Christianity-that he rejected as irrelevant-or the truth of any other creed or ideology derived from the past and reflecting the minds of others, however great, but the truth as he himself saw it, felt it, heard, smelt and tasted it. He admired Conrad’s literary philosophy and the way he summed up his aim-‘scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations’. That was his starting point. But how do you convey that truth? Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits. This is particularly true of journalists, covering at speed occasions which are often repetitive and banal. But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.25 In 1922, covering the Genoa Conference, he was taught the ruthless art of cablese by Lincoln Steffens, which he acquired with rapidity and growing delight. He showed Steffens his first successful effort, exclaiming: ‘Steffens, look at this cable: no fat, no adjectives, no adverbs-nothing but blood and bones and muscle…It’s a new language.’26
On this journalistic basis, Hemingway built his own method, which was both theory and practice. At one time or another he put down a lot about how to write-in A Moveable Feast, in The Green Hills of Africa, in Death in the Afternoon, and in By-line and elsewhere.27 The ‘basic principles of writing’ he set down for himself are well worth study.28 He once defined the art of fiction, following Conrad, as ‘find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too.’29 All had to be done with brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs, short sentences, nothing superfluous or for effect. ‘Prose is architecture,’ he wrote, ‘not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.’30 Hemingway paid particular attention to exactitude of expression and ransacked dictionaries for words. It is important to remember that, during the formative period of his prose style, he was also a poet, and strongly under the influence of Ezra Pound, who he said taught him more than anyone else. Pound was ‘the man who believed in the mot juste-the one and only correct word to use-the man who taught me to distrust adjectives’. He also closely studied Joyce, another writer whose nose for verbal precision he respected and imitated. Indeed, in so far as Hemingway had literary progenitors, it might be said he was the offspring of a marriage between Kipling and Joyce.
But the truth is Hemingway’s writing is sui generis. His impact on the way people not only wrote but saw, in the quarter-century 1925-50, was so overwhelming and conclusive, and his continuing influence since so pervasive, that it is now impossible for us to subtract the Hemingway factor from our prose, especially in fiction. But in the early 1920s he found it difficult to win approval, or even to get published at all. His first work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was a typical avant-garde venture, locally published in Paris. The big magazines would not look at his fiction, and as late as 1925, The Dial, itself regarded as adventurous, was still rejecting his stories, including that superb tale ‘The Undefeated’. What Hemingway did is what all really original great writers do-he created his own market, he infected readers with his own taste. The method, which brilliantly combined bare, exact depiction of events with subtle hints of the emotional response to them, emerged in the years 1923-25, and it was in 1925 that the breakthrough came with the publication of In Our Time. Ford felt able to hail him as America’s leading writer: ‘the most conscientious, the most master of his craft, the most consummate’. To Edmund Wilson the book revealed prose ‘of the first distinction’, which was ‘strikingly original’ and of impressive ‘artistic dignity’. This first success was quickly followed by two vivid and tragic novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), the latter perhaps the best thing he ever wrote. These books sold hundreds of thousands of copies and were read and re-read, digested, regurgitated, envied and quarried by writers of every kind. As early as 1927, Dorothy Parker, reviewing his collection Men Without Women in the New Yorker, referred to his influence as ‘dangerous’-‘the simplest thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.’31
The Hemingway manner could be parodied but not successfully imitated because it was inseparable from the subject matter of the books and especially their moral posture. Hemingway’s aim was to avoid explicit didacticism of any kind, and he denounced it in others, even the greatest. ‘I love War and Peace,’ he wrote, ‘for the wonderful, penetrating and true descriptions of war and of people, but I have never believed in the great count’s thinking…He could invent more and with more insight and truth than anyone who ever lived. But his ponderous and messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital ‘I and to try to write as truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible.’32 In his best work he always avoided preaching at the reader, or even nudging his elbow by drawing attention to the way his characters behaved. Nevertheless, his books are suffused throughout with a new secular ethic, and this springs directly from the way Hemingway describes events and actions.
It is the subtle universality of the Hemingway ethic which makes him so archetypically an intellectual, and the nature of the ethic which reflects his Americanism. Hemingway saw the Americans as a vigorous, active, forceful, even violent people, doers, achievers, creators, conquerors and pacifiers, hunters and builders. He was a vigorous, active, forceful, even violent person himself. Talking to Pound and Ford about literature, he would break off from time to time to shadow-box round Ford’s studio. He was a big, strong man, skilled in a vast range of physical activities. It was natural for him, as an American and a writer, to lead a life of action, and to describe it. Action was his theme.
There was nothing new in that, of course. Action had been the theme of Kipling, whose heroes, or subjects, had been soldiers, dacoits, engineers, sea-captains and rulers big and small-anyone or thing, indeed, periodically subject to the strain and motion of violent activity, even animals and machinery. But Kipling was not an intellectual. He was a genius, he had a ‘daemon’ but he did not believe he could refashion the world by his own unaided intelligence, he did not reject the vast corpus of its inherited wisdom. On the contrary, he fiercely upheld its laws and customs as unalterable by puny man and depicted with relish the nemesis of those who defied them. Hemingway is much closer to Byron, another writer who longed for action and described it with enthusiastic skill. Byron did not believe in the Utopian and revolutionary schemes of his friend Shelley, which seemed to him abstract ideals rather than workable concepts-his point is made for him by Shelley himself in Julian and Maddalo-but he had fashioned for himself a system of ethics, devised in reaction to the traditional code he had rejected when he left his wife and England for good. In this sense, and only in this sense, he was an intellectual. He never set down his system formally, though it was coherent enough, but it emerges strongly in his letters and it saturates every page of his great narrative poems, Childe Harold and Don Juan. It is a system of honour and duty, not codified but illustrated in action. No one can read these poems without being quite clear how Byron saw good and evil and especially how he measured heroism.
Hemingway worked in a similar manner, by illustration. He once specified his ideal as the ability to exhibit ‘grace under pressure’ (a curious phrase in view of his mother’s name) but he went no further in definition. Probably his ethic was incapable of a precise definition and would have been injured and reduced by attempts to construct one. But it was infinitely capable of illustration and that is the driving force behind Hemingway’s entire work. His novels are novels of action and that makes them novels of ideology because to Hemingway there was no such thing as a morally neutral action. To him even a description of a meal is a moral statement since there are the right and the wrong things to eat and drink, and right and wrong ways to eat and drink them. Almost any action can be performed correctly or incorrectly, or to be precise nobly or ignobly. The author himself does not point the moral but he presents everything within an implicit moral framework so that the actions speak for themselves. The framework is personal and pagan; certainly not Christian. His parents, especially his mother, found his stories immoral; often outrageously so, because she at any rate could recognize their strong ethical tone, to her a false and blasphemous one. What Hemingway was saying, or rather implying, was that there were right and wrong ways to commit adultery, to steal and to kill. The essence of Hemingway’s fiction is observing boxers, fishermen, bullfighters, soldiers, writers, sportsmen, or almost anyone who has definite and skilled actions to perform, trying to live a good and honest life, according to the values of each, and usually failing. Tragedy occurs because the values themselves turn out to be illusory or mistaken, or because they are betrayed by weakness within or external malice or the intractability of objective facts. But even failure is redeemed by truth-seeing, by having the ability to perceive the truth and the courage to stare it in the face. Hemingway’s characters stand or fall by whether they are truthful or not. Truth is the essential ingredient of his prose and is the one thread that runs right through his ethical system, its principle of coherence.
Having created his style and his ethic, Hemingway necessarily found himself living both. He became, as it were, the victim, the prisoner, the slave of his own imagination, forced to enact it in real life. Here again he was not unique. Once Byron had published the first canto of Childe Harold, he found himself treading the path it indicated. He might vary the direction a little by writing Don Juan but he left himself no real choice but to live as he had sung. But then with Byron it was a matter of taste as well as compulsion: he enjoyed the womanizing, the heroics, the liberator role. It was the same with Hemingway’s contemporary, André Malraux, another action-intellectual and novelist, revolutionary, explorer, buccaneering questor of art treasures, resistance hero, who ended his career as a senior Cabinet Minister sitting at President de Gaulle’s right hand. With Hemingway one is not so sure. His pursuit of ‘real’ life, the life of action, was an intellectual activity in the sense that it was vital to his kind of fiction. As the hero Robert Jordan says in the Spanish War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he ‘liked to know how it really was; not how it was supposed to be’. Hemingway, the intellectual obsessed by violent action, was a real person. A perceptive colleague on the Toronto Star summed him up at twenty: ‘A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth.’ He enjoyed all his father’s outdoor pursuits and more-skiing, deep-sea fishing, big-game hunting and, not least, war. There was no doubt about his courage, on occasion. The New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews described how Hemingway, during the Ebro river battle in 1938, saved him from drowning in the rapids, by an extraordinary exhibition of strength: ‘He was a good man in a pinch.’33 The white hunters who took him on safari in East Africa, often a good test, bore similar witness. Moreover Hemingway’s courage was not unthinking and instinctive but cerebral. He had an acute sense of danger, as many anecdotes testify. He knew what it was to feel afraid and conquer his fear-no writer ever described cowardice more vividly. He made the reader sense his willingness to live his fiction.
This was why Hemingway’s action-man image grew as quickly as his fame. Like many other intellectuals, from Rousseau onwards, he had a striking talent for self-publicity. He created the physical, ocular Hemingway persona, reversing the old, soft-velvet, relaxed image of the Romantics, which had done such yeoman service in its time, in favour of a new he-man appeal: safari suits, bandoliers, guns, peaked cap, a whiff of powder, tobacco, whisky. One of his obsessions was adding a few years to his age. In the 1920s, he quickly promoted himself to ‘Papa’; the latest girl became ‘daughter’. By the early 1940s ‘Papa’ Hemingway was already a familiar figure in the picture magazines, as famous as the leading Hollywood males. No writer in history ever gave more interviews and photo-calls. In time his white-bearded face became better known than Tolstoy’s.
But in trying to personify his ethic and live up to the legend he created, Hemingway was also mounting a treadmill, from which he would not allow himself to descend till death. Rather as his mother saw maternal love in the shape of a bank account, Hemingway was constantly depositing experience of action to his credit, then drawing on it for his fiction. His Italian War, 1917-18, was his initial capital. During the 1920s he used up most of it, balancing the drain by frenzied sportmanship and bullfighting. In the 1930s he made valuable deposits of big game hunting, and the huge windfall of the Spanish Civil War. But he was slothful at exploiting the opportunities of the Second World War and his belated involvement in it added little to his writing capital. Thereafter his chief deposits were hunting and fishing; his attempts to retrace his steps on the big-game shooting and bullfighting circuits bore more farce than fruit. Edmund Wilson noted the contrast, both in the writing and the activity: ‘the young master and the old impostor’. The truth is, Hemingway continued to enjoy some of his violent pursuits, but not quite as much as he claimed. There was a perceptible decline in zest for the wilderness, as though he would willingly, if only he dared, hang up his rifle and settle down in his library. A false, forced, boastful note crept into his situation reports to his publisher, Charles Scribner. Thus in 1949 he wrote to him: ‘To celebrate my fiftieth birthday…I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.’34
True? False? An exaggeration? One does not know. None of Hemingway’s statements about himself, and very few he made about other people, can ever be accepted as fact without corroboration. Despite the central importance of truth in his fictional ethic he had the characteristic intellectual’s belief that, in his own case, truth must be the willing servant of his ego. He thought, and sometimes boasted, that lying was part of his training as a writer. He lied both consciously and without thinking. He certainly knew he was lying on occasion as he makes clear in his fascinating tale, ‘Soldier’s Home’, with its character of Krebs. ‘It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars,’ he wrote. ‘A major part of their trade is to lie or invent…They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse.’35 But the evidence shows that Hemingway habitually lied long before he worked out a professional apologia for it. He lied when he was five, claiming to have stopped a bolting horse unaided. He told his parents he had become engaged to the movie actress Mae Marsh, though he had never set eyes on her except in Birth of a Nation; he repeated this lie to his Kansas City colleagues, down to the detail of a $150 engagement ring. Many of these blatant lies were transparent and embarrassing as when, aged eighteen, he told friends he had caught a fish he had obviously bought in the market. He told an elaborate story about being a professional boxer in Chicago, having his nose broken but nonetheless going on fighting. He invented Indian blood for himself and even claimed he had Indian daughters. His autobiography, A Moveable Feast, is quite unreliable and, like Rousseau’s Confessions, most dangerous when it appears to be frank. He was usually mendacious about his parents and sisters, sometimes for no apparent reason. Thus he said his sister Carol had been raped, aged twelve, by a sex-pervert (quite untrue) and later claimed she was divorced or even dead (she was happily married to a Mr Gardiner, whom Hemingway disliked).36
Many of Hemingway’s most complicated and reiterated lies concern his First World War service. Of course most soldiers, even brave ones, lie about their wars, and the degree of detailed investigation Hemingway’s life has been subjected to was bound to turn up some malpractice with the truth.37 All the same, Hemingway’s inventions about what happened in Italy are unusually brazen. In the first place he said he volunteered for the army but was rejected because of poor eyesight. This does not appear in the records and is most unlikely. He was in fact a non-combatant, and by choice. On many occasions, including newspaper interviews, he said he had served in the Italian 69th Infantry Regiment and had fought in three major battles. He also claimed he had belonged to the crack Arditi regiment, and he told his British military friend, ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, that he had led an Arditi charge on Mount Grappa and had been badly wounded during it. He told his Spanish Civil War friend, General Gustavo Duran, that he had commanded first a company, then a battalion, when he was only nineteen. He had indeed been wounded-there was no doubt about that-but he lied repeatedly about the occasion and nature of the injury. He invented a story about being shot in the scrotum, not once but twice, and said he had had to rest his testicles on a pillow. He said he had been knocked down twice by machine-gun fire and hit thirty-two times by .45 bullets. And, as a bonus, he said he had been baptised a Catholic on what the nurses believed was his deathbed. All these statements were untrue.
War brought out the liar in Hemingway. In Spain, jealous of Matthews’s superior skills as a correspondent, he reported home in a letter a tissue of lies about the Teruel front: ‘got first story of the battle to New York ten hours ahead of Matthews even, went back, made the whole attack with the infantry, entered town behind one company of dynamiters and three of infantry, filed that, went back and had most godwonderful house-to-house fighting story ready to put on wire…’38 He also lied about being the first into liberated Paris in 1944. Sex brought out the liar in him too. One of his choicest Italian tales, often repeated, was being held sexual prisoner by a Sicilian woman hotel owner who hid his clothes so he was forced to fornicate with her for a week. He told Bernard Berenson (the recipient of many mendacious letters) that when he finished The Sun Also Rises, he got in a girl, his wife came back suddenly and he was forced to smuggle the girl out through the roof; no truth in it at all. He lied about his famous jealous fight with ‘that kike [Harry] Loeb’ in Pamplona in 1925, saying that Loeb had a gun and threatened to shoot him (the incident was transfigured in The Sun Also Rises). He lied about all his marriages, divorces and settlements, both to the women concerned and to his mother. His lies to, and about, his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, were particularly audacious. She, in turn, dismissed him as ‘the biggest liar since Munchausen’. As with some other novelist-liars, Hemingway left false trails: some of his most striking stories, seemingly autobiographical by overwhelming internal evidence, may be pure inventions. All one can say is that Hemingway had little respect for truth.
In consequence he was apt and ready for that ‘low, dishonest decade’, the 1930s. Hemingway never held any set of political convictions with consistency; his ethic was really about personal loyalties. His one-time friend Dos Passos thought that, as a young man, Hemingway ‘had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into’.39 But it is hard to find much evidence for this assertion. In the 1932 election Hemingway supported the Socialist, Eugene Debs. But by 1935 he had become a willing exponent of the Communist Party line on most issues. In the 17 September 1935 issue of the CP paper New Masses, he contributed a violent article, ‘Who Killed the Vets?’, blaming the government for the deaths, in a Florida hurricane, of 450 ex-servicemen railway workers employed on federal projects-a typical exercise in CP agitprop. Hemingway’s view, throughout the decade, seems to have been that the CP was the only legitimate and trustworthy conductor of the anti-fascist crusade, and that criticism of it, or participation in activities outside its control, was treachery. He said that anyone who took an anti-CP line was ‘either a fool or a knave’, and he would not allow his name to appear on the masthead of the new left-wing magazine Ken, launched by Esquire, when he discovered it was not a CP vehicle.
This approach governed his response to the Spanish Civil War, which he welcomed on professional grounds as a source of material-‘Civil war is the best war for a writer, the most complete.’40 But, curiously in view of his ethical code, which made elaborate provision for conflicts of loyalties, the power of tradition and different concepts of justice, he accepted, from start to finish, the CP line on the war in all its crudity. He paid four visits to the front (spring and autumn 1937, spring and autumn 1938) but even before he left New York he had decided what the Civil War was all about and was already signed up for a propaganda film, Spain in Flames, with Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and Archibald MacLeish. ‘My sympathies,’ he wrote, ‘are always for exploited working people against absentee landlords even if I drink around with the landlords and shoot pigeons with them.’ The CP were ‘the people of this country’ and the war was a struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the absentee landlords, the Moors, the Italians and the Germans’. He said he liked and respected the Spanish CP, who were ‘the best people’ in the war.41
It was Hemingway’s line, in accordance with CP policy, to play down the role of the Soviet Union, especially in directing the Spanish CP’s ferocious conduct in the bloodstained internal politics of Republican Spain. This led him into a shameful breach with Dos Passos. Passos’s interpreter was José Robles, a former Johns Hopkins University don who had joined the Republican forces on the outbreak of war and was a friend of Andres Nin, head of the anarchist POUM. He had also been interpreter to General Jan Antonovic Berzin, head of the Soviet military mission in Spain, and therefore knew some of the secrets of Moscow’s dealings with the Madrid Defence Ministry. Berzin had been murdered by Stalin, who later gave orders to the Spanish CP to liquidate the POUM too. Nin was tortured to death, hundreds of others were arrested, accused of fascist activities, and executed. It was thought prudent to accuse Robles of spying, and he was secretly shot. Dos Passos became worried about his disappearance. Hemingway, who saw himself as an ultra-sophisticate in political matters and Dos Passos as a naive newcomer, pooh-poohed his anxieties. Hemingway was staying at Gaylord’s Hotel in Madrid, then the haunt of the CP bosses, and asked his crony Pepe Quintanilla (who, it later emerged, was responsible for most CP executions) what had happened. He was assured Robles was alive and well, under arrest to be sure, but certain to get a fair trial. Hemingway believed this and told Dos Passos. In fact Robles was already dead, and when Hemingway belatedly found this out-from a journalist who had only just arrived in Madrid-he told Dos Passos that it was clear he had been as guilty as hell and only a fool could think otherwise. Dos Passos, greatly distressed, refused to accept Robles’ guilt and publicly attacked the Communists. This brought from Hemingway the rebuke: ‘A war is being fought in Spain between the people whose side you used to be on and the fascists. If with your hatred of the Communists you feel justified in attacking, for money, the people who are still fighting that war, I think you should at least try to get your facts right.’ But Dos Passos, as it turned out, had got his facts right: Hemingway was the naif, the innocent, the dupe.42
As such he remained, until the end of the war and for some time afterwards. His work for the Communists reached its climax on 4 June 1937 when he spoke at the Second Writers Congress, which the American CP, through a front organization, held in New York at Carnegie Hall. Hemingway’s point was that writers had to fight fascism because it was the only regime which would not allow them to tell the truth; intellectuals had a duty to go to Spain and do something there themselves-they should stop arguing doctrinal points in their armchairs and start fighting: ‘There is now, and there will be for a long time, war for any writer to go to who wants to study it.’43
Hemingway was certainly a dupe. But he was also consciously participating in a lie, since it is clear from his novel about the Spanish war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that he was aware of the dark side of the Republican cause, and had probably known some of the truth about the Spanish CP all along. But he did not publish the book until 1940, when it was all over. So long as the Civil War lasted, Hemingway took the same line as those who tried to suppress George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, that truth came a long way behind political and military expediency. His speech to the Writers Congress was thus completely fraudulent.
It was odd in another way too, since Hemingway showed no inclination to follow his own advice and ‘study war’. When America’s involvement in the crusade against Nazism began in earnest in 1941, he did not join it. By now he had acquired for himself a home, the Finca Vigia, outside Havana in Cuba, which remained his chief residence for most of his remaining years. The success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which became one of the great best-sellers of the century, brought him an enormous income and he wanted to enjoy it, notably in what was now his preferred sport, deep-sea fishing. The result was another discreditable episode in his life, known as ‘The Crook Factory’.44
Hemingway had a strong propensity to make friends in the urban underworld, especially in Spanish-speaking countries. He loved the dubious characters who made up the caudrillos (squads) of bullfighters, and the waterfront café habitués, pimps, prostitutes, part-time fishermen, police informers and the like, who responded warmly to his free drinks and tips. In 1942 in wartime Havana he became obsessed by what he considered the imminent danger of a fascist takeover. There were, he argued, 300,000 Spanish-born inhabitants of Cuba, of whom 15-30,000 were ‘violent Falangists’. They might stage an uprising and turn Cuba into a Nazi outpost on America’s doorstep. Moreover he was, he said, reliably informed that German submarines were cruising in Cuban waters, and he produced the calculation that a force of 1000 subs could land a 30,000-strong Nazi army in Cuba to assist the insurgents, Whether he believed these fantastic notions is hard to say: throughout his life Hemingway was a mixture of superficial sophistication concealing an abyss of credulity on almost any subject. He may have been influenced by Erskine Childers’s spy-mania novel, The Riddle of the Sands. He certainly convinced the US Ambassador, a rich drinking and sporting pal of his called Spruille Braden, that something ought to be done.
What Hemingway proposed was that he should recruit and command a group of agents from among his Loyalist underworld friends. They would keep a watch on fascist suspects and at the same time he would use his deep-sea motor-cruiser, suitably armed, to patrol areas likely to be infested with U-boats in an attempt to lure one to the surface. Braden approved the plan and later claimed credit for it.45 As a result, Hemingway got $1000 a month to pay six full-time agents and twenty undercover ones, chosen from among his café-caudrillos. More important, at a time of acute rationing, he got 122 gallons of gasoline a month to run his boat, which was fitted with a heavy machine gun and loaded with hand grenades.
The existence of his ‘Crook Factory’, as he called it, raised Hemingway’s prestige in Havana drinking circles but there is no evidence it turned up a single fascist spy. For one thing, Hemingway made the elementary mistake of paying more for exciting reports. The FBI, which treated this rival venture with the greatest possible disapproval, told Washington that all Hemingway’s gang produced were ‘vague and unfounded reports of a sensational character…His data were almost without fail valueless.’ Hemingway, aware of FBI hostility, retorted that all its agents were of Irish origin, Roman Catholics, Franco supporters and ‘draft-dodgers’. There were some absurd incidents, too improbable for any spy story, including a report by one of Hemingway’s agents of a ‘sinister parcel’ in the Bar Basque, which turned out to contain a cheap Life of St Teresa of Avila. As for the anti-U-boat patrol, it confirmed the views of Hemingway’s critics that he needed the gas for his fishing. An eye witness recorded: ‘They didn’t do a godamned thing-nothing. Just cruise around and have a good time.’
The episode led to one of Hemingway’s brutal quarrels. Among the men he most admired in Spain was General Duran, who (as ‘Manuel’) inspired his hero Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Duran was everything Hemingway wanted to be-the intellectual turned master-strategist. He was a musician, a friend of De Falla and Segovia and a member of Spain’s pre-war intellectual elite. But he held the view, which Hemingway endorsed, that ‘modern war’ demands ‘intelligence, it is an intellectual’s job…War is also poetry, tragic poetry.’46 He got a reserve commission in the Spanish Army in 1934, was called up at the beginning of the Civil War and rapidly became an outstanding general, eventually commanding XX Army Corps. After the Republic collapsed, Duran volunteered in vain for both the British and the US Army. When Hemingway conceived the idea of the Crook Factory he used his influence to get Duran attached to the US Embassy and put him in charge of the scheme. At the same time the general and his English wife Bonté were his guests at the Finca. But Duran quickly realized that the whole thing was a farce and that he was wasting his time. He applied for different work and at the same time there was a bitter personal quarrel, involving Bonté and Hemingway’s then-wife Martha, culminating in an explosion at an Embassy lunch. Hemingway never spoke to Duran again, except in May 1945 when the two met by chance and Hemingway sneered: ‘You managed quite well to keep out of the war, didn’t you?’
That was characteristic of the tone which Hemingway’s disputes with former friends tended to take. For a man whose code and whose fiction exalted the virtues of friendships, he found it curiously difficult to sustain any for long. As with so many intellectuals-Rousseau and Ibsen for instance-his quarrels with fellow writers were particularly vicious. Hemingway was unusually jealous, even by the standards of literary life, of the talent and success of others. By 1937 he had quarrelled with every writer he knew. There was one notable exception, which reflects highly on him. The only writer he did not attack in his autobiography was Ezra Pound, and from first to last he wrote approvingly of him. From their first acquaintance he admired Pound’s unselfish kindness to other writers. He took from Pound the sharp criticism he would accept from no one, including the shrewd advice in 1926 that he should get down to a novel rather than publish another volume of stories, expressed characteristically: ‘Wotter yer think yer are, a bloomink DILLYtante?’ He seems to have admired in Pound a virtue he knew he himself conspicuously lacked, a complete absence of professional jealousy.47 When Pound was in danger of execution for treason in 1945, having made over three-hundred wartime broadcasts for the Axis, Hemingway effectively saved his life. Two years before, when Pound was formally charged, Hemingway had argued: ‘He is obviously crazy. I think you might prove he was crazy as far back as the later Cantos…He has a long history of generosity and unselfish aid to other artists and he is one of the greatest of living poets.’ In the event it was Hemingway who was responsible for the successful insanity defence which got Pound incarcerated in hospital and saved him from the gas-chamber.48
Hemingway also avoided a quarrel with Joyce, perhaps because of lack of opportunity or perhaps because he continued to admire his work, once calling him ‘the only alive writer that I ever respected’. For the rest it was a sad tale. He quarrelled with Ford Madox Ford, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Max Eastman, Dorothy Parker, Harold Loeb, Archibald MacLeish and many others. His literary quarrels brought out a peculiar streak of brutal malice as well as his propensity to lie. Indeed many of his worst lies concerned other writers. There is a monstrously false portrait of Wyndham Lewis in the autobiography (‘Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty…The eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist’), apparently in revenge for some criticism Lewis had once made of him.49 In the same book he told a string of lies about Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Zelda had punctured Hemingway’s ego, but Fitzgerald had admired and liked him and done him no harm; Hemingway’s repeated assaults on this fragile and bruised spirit are difficult to understand, except in terms of an unappeasable jealousy. According to Hemingway, Fitzgerald told him: ‘You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda…Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her.’ The two then went into a men’s room and Fitzgerald took out his penis for inspection; Hemingway generously reassured him: ‘You’re perfectly fine.’ This episode seems to be a piece of fiction.
Hemingway’s most malevolent quarrel was with Dos Passos, particularly painful in view of their long acquaintance. Jealousy was clearly the original motive-Dos Passos made the cover of Time magazine in 1936 (Hemingway had to wait another year). Then came the Robles incident in Spain, followed by a row in New York with both Dos Passos and his wife Katie, an even older friend. Hemingway called Dos Passos a bum who borrowed money and never repaid it, and his wife a kleptomaniac; and there was a lot of sneering about his Portuguese ancestry and supposed illegitimate birth. Hemingway tried to insert these libels into To Have and Have Not (1937) but was obliged by his publishers, on legal advice, to cut them. He told William Faulkner in 1947 that Dos Passos was ‘a terrible snob (on account of being a bastard)’. In retaliation Dos Passos portrayed Hemingway as the odious George Elbert Warner in Chosen Country (1951), which led Hemingway to inform Dos Passos’s brother-in-law, Bill Smith, that in Cuba he kept ‘a pack of fierce dogs and cats trained to attack Portuguese bastards who wrote lies about their friends’. He unleashed a last quiver of darts at Dos Passos in A Moveable Feast-he was a vicious pilot-fish who led sharks like Gerald Murphy to their prey and he had succeeded in destroying Hemingway’s first marriage.50
The last assertion was palpably false since Hemingway needed no help in destroying his marriages. In his fiction he often wrote about women with remarkable understanding. He shared with Kipling a gift of varying his habitual masculine approach with unexpected and highly effective presentation of a female viewpoint. There have been all kind of speculations about a feminine, even a transvestite or transsexual streak in Hemingway, arising from his apparent obsession with hair, especially short hair in women, and attributed to the fact that his mother declined to dress him in boy’s clothes and kept his hair uncut for an unusually long time.51 What is clear, however, is that Hemingway found it difficult to form any kind of civilized relationship with a woman, at any rate for long, except one based on her complete subservience. The only female in his own family he liked was his younger sister Ursula, ‘my lovely sister Ura’ as he called her, because she adored him. He told a friend in 1950 that when he came back from the war in 1919, Ursula, then seventeen, ‘always used to wait, sleeping, on the stairway of the third-floor staircase to my room. She wanted to wake when I came in because she had been told it was bad for a man to drink alone. She would drink something light with me until I went to sleep and then she would sleep with me so I would not be lonely in the night. We always slept with the light on except she would sometimes turn it off if she saw I was asleep and stay awake and turn it on if she saw I was waking.’52
This may have been an invention, reflecting Hemingway’s idealized notion of how a woman should behave towards him; but, true or false, he was not going to find such submission in real, adult life. As it happens, three out of his four wives were unusually servile by twentieth-century American standards, but that was not enough for him. He wanted variety, change, drama as well. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, was eight years older and quite well off; he lived off her money until his books began to sell in large quantities. She was an agreeable, accommodating woman, and attractive until she put on weight while pregnant with Hemingway’s first child, Jack (‘Bumby’), and failed to get it off afterwards.53 Hemingway had no scruples about fondling other women in her presence-as, for instance, the notorious Lady Twysden, born Dorothy Smurthwaite, who figures as Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, a Montparnasse flirt and the source of his row with Harold Loeb. Hadley put up with this humiliation and later with Hemingway’s affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a sexy, slender girl, much richer than Hadley, whose father was one of the biggest landowners and grain-operators in Arkansas. Pauline fell heavily for Hemingway and in effect seduced him. The loving pair then persuaded Hadley to permit the setting up of a ménage à trois-‘three breakfast trays’, she wrote bitterly from Juan-les-Pins in 1926, ‘three wet bathing suits on the line, three bicycles’. When this did not content them, they pushed her out into a trial separation, then into a divorce. She accepted, writing to Hemingway: ‘I took you for better, for worse (and meant it).’ The settlement was generous on her part, and a delighted Hemingway wrote to her in fulsome terms: ‘perhaps the luckiest thing Bumby will ever have is to have you as a mother…how I admire your straight thinking, your head, your heart and your very lovely hands and I pray God always that he will make up to you the very great hurt that I have done to you-who are the best and truest and loveliest person I have ever known.’54
There was a small element of sincerity in this letter in that Hemingway did think Hadley had behaved nobly. On this proposition he began, almost before he married Pauline, to erect a legend of Hadley’s sanctity. Pauline, for her part, noted Hadley’s unbusinesslike approach to the divorce and determined Hemingway would not be so lucky the next time. She used her money to make their life more ample, buying and embellishing a fine house in Key West, Florida, which introduced Hemingway to the deep-sea fishing he came to love. She gave him a son, Patrick, but when in 1931 she announced she was having another child (Gregory), the marriage went into decline. By now Hemingway had acquired his taste for Havana and there he took up with a strawberry blonde, Jane Mason, wife of the head of Pan-American Airways in Cuba, fourteen years his junior. She was slim, pretty, hard-drinking, a first-class sportwoman who enjoyed hanging around with Hemingway’s barroom chums, then driving sports cars at reckless speed. She was in many ways an ideal Hemingway heroine, but she was also a depressive who could not handle her complicated life. She tried to commit suicide and succeeded in breaking her back, at which point Hemingway lost interest.
In the meantime Pauline had taken desperate steps to win back her husband. Her father, she wrote to Hemingway, had just given her a vast sum of money-did he want some? ‘Have no end of this filthy money…Just let me know and don’t get another woman, your loving Pauline.’ She built him a swimming pool at Key West and wrote: ‘I wish you were here sleeping in my bed and using my bathroom and drinking my whisky…Dear Papa please come home as soon as you can.’ She went to a plastic surgeon: ‘Am having large nose, imperfect lips, protruding ears and warts and moles all taken off before coming to Cuba’. She also dyed her dark hair gold-colour, which turned out disastrously. But her trip to Cuba did not work. Hemingway called his boat after her but he would not take her out in it. He had issued a warning in To Have and Have Not: ‘The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him, the quicker he gets tired of you.’ He meant it. Moreover, being a man who felt guilt but who responded by shifting it onto other people, he now held her responsible for breaking up his first marriage and therefore felt she deserved anything that was coming to her.
What came was Martha Gellhorn, a passionately keen reporter and writer, Bryn Mawr educated (like Hadley) and, as with most of Hemingway’s women, from a secure, upper-middle-class Midwest background. She was tall, with spectacular long legs, a blue-eyed blonde, nearly ten years his junior. Hemingway first met her in Sloppy Joe’s Bar, Key West, in December 1936, and the next year invited her to join him in Spain. She did so, and the experience was an eye-opener, not least because he greeted her with a lie: ‘I knew you’d get here, Daughter, because I fixed it up so you could’-this was quite untrue, as she was aware. He also insisted on locking her room from the outside, ‘so that no man could bother her’.55 His own room at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, she discovered, was in a disgusting mess: ‘Ernest,’ she wrote later, ‘was extremely dirty…one of the most unfastidious men I have ever known.’ Hemingway had inherited from his father a fondness for onion sandwiches, and in Spain delighted in making them from the powerful local variety, munching them with periodic swigs from his silver hip-flask of whisky, a memorable combination. Martha was inclined to be squeamish and it is unlikely she was ever in love with him physically. She always refused to have a child by him, and later adopted one (‘There’s no need to have a child when you can buy one. That’s what I did’). She married Hemingway primarily because he was a famous writer, something she was passionately keen to become herself: she hoped his literary charisma would rub off on her. But Pauline fought bitterly to keep her husband, and when she felt she was losing remembered Hadley’s easy settlement and insisted on a tough one, which delayed the divorce. By the time it was through Hemingway was already inclined to blame Martha for breaking up his marriage; friends testify to their blazing public rows at an early stage.
Martha was easily the cleverest and most determined of his wives, and there was never any chance of the marriage lasting. For one thing, she objected strongly to his drinking and the brutality it engendered. When, at the end of 1942, she insisted on driving the car home because he had been drinking at a party, and they had an argument on the way, he slapped her with the back of his hand. She slowed down his much-prized Lincoln, drove it straight into a tree then left him in it.56 Then there was the dirt: she objected strongly to the pack of fierce tomcats he kept in Cuba, which smelled fearfully and were allowed to march all over the dining table. While he was away in 1943 she had them castrated, and thereafter he would mutter fiercely: ‘She cut my cats.’57 She corrected his French pronunciation, challenged his expertise on French wines, ridiculed his Crook Factory and hinted broadly that he ought to be closer to the fighting in Europe. He finally decided to go, cunningly arranging an assignment with Collier’s, which had been employing her and now, to her fury, dropped her. She followed him to London nonetheless and found him, in 1944, living in his customary squalor at the Dorchester, empty whisky bottles rolling about under his bed.
From then on it was downhill all the way. Back in Cuba, he would wake her in the middle of the night when he came to bed after drinking: ‘He woke me when I was trying to sleep to bully, snarl, mock-my crime really was to have been at war when he had not, but that was not how he put it. I was supposedly insane, I only wanted excitement and danger, I had no responsibility to anyone, I was selfish beyond belief. It never stopped and believe me it was fierce and ugly.’58 He threatened: ‘Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family.’59 He wrote an obscene poem, ‘To Martha Gellhorn’s Vagina’, which he compared to the wrinkled neck of an old hot-water bottle, and which he read to any woman he could get into bed with him. He became, she complained, ‘progressively more insane each year’. She was leading ‘a slave’s life with a brute for a slave-owner’, and she walked out. His son Gregory commented: ‘He just tortured Marty, and when he had finally destroyed all her love for him and she had left him, he claimed she had deserted him.’60 They broke up at the end of 1944, and under Cuban law, since she had deserted, Hemingway kept all her property there. He said his marriage to her was ‘the greatest mistake of my life’ and in a long letter to Berenson, he listed her vices, accused her of adultery (‘a rabbit’), said she had never seen a man die but had nonetheless made more money out of writing about atrocities than any woman since Harriet Beecher Stowe-all untrue.
Hemingway’s fourth and final marriage endured to his death mainly because his protagonist this time, Mary Welsh, was determined to hang on whatever happened. She came from a different class to the earlier wives, a logger’s daughter from Minnesota. She can have had no illusions about the man she was marrying, since right at the start of their relationship, at the Paris Ritz in February 1945, he got drunk, came across a photo of her Australian journalist husband, Noel Monks, hurled it down the lavatory, fired at it with his sub-machine-gun, smashed the entire apparatus and flooded the room.61 Mary was a journalist on Time, not an ambitious high-flyer like Martha, but hard-working and shrewd. Realizing that Hemingway wanted a wife-servant rather than a competitor, she gave up her journalism completely to marry him, though she continued to have to endure sneers such as I haven’t fucked generals in order to get a story for Time magazine.’62 He called her ‘Papa’s Pocket Venus’ and boasted of the number of times he had intercourse with her: he told General Charles (‘Buck’) Lanham that, after a period of neglect, it was easy to pacify Mary as he had ‘irrigated her four times the night before’ (when Lanham asked her about this after Hemingway’s death she sighed, ‘If only it were true’).63
Mary was a determined woman, a manager; there was something of Countess Tolstoy about her. By this time, of course, Hemingway was as world-famous as Tolstoy, a seer of manliness, a prophet of the outdoors, with drinks, guns, safari clothes, camping gear of all kinds named after him. Wherever he went, in Spain, in Africa, above all in Cuba, he was attended by a court of cronies and freeloaders, sometimes a travelling circus, in Havana usually static. The courtiers were often as eccentric as Tolstoy’s, rather lower-grade morally, but equally devoted in their way. Before she made off, Martha Gellhorn recorded what she called ‘a very funny sweet scene in Cuba’, with Hemingway ‘reading aloud from the Bell to a bunch of grown-up, well-off, semi-literate pigeon-shooting and fishing pals, they sitting on the floor spellbound’.64 However, the reality of Hemingway’s life, thanks to his appalling habits, was less decorative, let alone decorous, than Yasnaya Polyana. Durie Shevlin, wife of one of Hemingway’s many millionaire friends, left a description of the Cuban set-up in 1947: the boat uncomfortable, small and squalid, the Finca roamed by foul cats and bereft of hot water, Hemingway himself stinking of alcohol and sweat, unshaven, muttering in the weird pidgin English he adopted and addicted to the word ‘chicken-shit’. Mary had a lot of managing to do.
There were, too, the repetitive, often deliberate, humiliations, Hemingway loved the attentions of women, particularly if they were glamorous, famous and flattering. There was Marlene ‘The Kraut’ Dietrich, who sang to him in his bathroom while he shaved, Lauren Bacall (‘You’re even bigger than I’d imagined’), Nancy ‘Slim’ Hayward (‘Darling, you’re so thin and beautiful’). There was Virginia ‘Jigee’ Viertel, part of Hemingway’s Paris circus at the Ritz: ‘It is now one and a half hours,’ Mary recorded grimly, ‘since I left Jigee Viertel’s room and Ernest said “I’ll come in a minute.”’ In Madrid there were Hemingway’s ‘whores de combat’ as he called them, in Havana the waterfront tarts; he liked to fondle them in Mary’s presence, as he had once fondled Dorothy Twysden under Hadley’s worried gaze. As he grew older, the girls he wanted grew younger. Hemingway once told Malcolm Cowley, ‘I have fucked every woman I wanted to fuck and many I did not, and fucked them all well I hope.’65 This was never true, and became less true after the Second War. In Venice he became infatuated with a young woman, both dreadful and pathetic, called Adriana Ivancich, whom he made the heroine of his disastrous post-war novel, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). She was a chilly piece, snobbish and unresponsive, who wanted marriage or nothing, and had (as Hemingway’s son Gregory put it) ‘a hook-nosed mother in constant attendance’. Hemingway lavished hospitality on what must have been one of the most gruesome couples in literary history and, since Adriana had artistic ambitions, forced his reluctant publisher to accept her jacket designs for both Across the River and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the book which to some degree restored his reputation and won him the Nobel Prize. Both jackets had to be redrawn. Adriana sneered at Mary as ‘uncultured’, a judgment echoed by Hemingway himself, who praised the young woman’s breeding and civilized ways, drawing the contrast with Mary whom he termed a ‘camp-follower’ and a ‘scavenger’.66
There were further humiliations on Hemingway’s last big safari, in the winter of 1953-54. He became dirty even by his standards, his tent a muddle of discarded clothes and empty whisky bottles. For mysterious reasons connected with his personal ethic, he took up native dress, shaved his head, dyed some of his clothes orange-pink like the Masai, and even carried a spear. Worse, he took up with a local Wakamba girl called Debba, described by the safari’s gamewarden, Denis Zaphina, as ‘an evil-smelling bit of camp trash’. She, her girlfriends and Hemingway held celebrations in his tent, during one of which his cot collapsed. Always, according to the diary Mary kept, there was his ‘pounding, repetitive conversation that droned on day and night’.67 Then there was the last big expedition to Spain in 1959, the Hemingway circus travelling with its eighty or ninety pieces of luggage for a summer of bullfights. A nineteen-year-old teenager called Valerie Danby-Smith, daughter of a Dublin builder, came to interview Hemingway for a Belgian news agency, for which she was a stringer. He fell for her, and may even have wished to marry her, but recognized Mary was a better wife to look after an old man, a natural last wife, ‘one for the road’. But Valerie was hired for $250 a month, joined the circus and rode in the front seat of the car, for Hemingway’s fondling hand, while Mary was put in the back. She endured this, recognizing that Valerie was harmless and by cheering up Hemingway made him less violent-indeed, after he died, continued her employment (she eventually married Gregory Hemingway). But at the time it helped to make the summer ‘horrible and hideous and miserable’.68
Did Mary have more to endure than Countess Tolstoy? Probably not, in the sense that Hemingway, unlike Tolstoy, was a homebird, with no intention of pushing off into the wilderness. Mary learned Spanish, ran his home well and took part in most of his sporting jaunts. Hemingway wrote a ‘situation report’ on her at one stage which listed her qualities: ‘an excellent fisherwoman, a fair wing-shot, a strong swimmer, a really good cook, a good judge of wine, an excellent gardener…can run a boat or a household in Spanish.’69 But he had no sympathy when, as often happened, she injured herself in his wilderness expeditions. She records a characteristic exchange after a painful injury: ‘You could keep it quiet.’ ‘I’m trying.’ ‘Soldiers don’t do that.’ ‘I’m not a soldier.’70 There were shattering rows in public, scenes of frightening violence in private. On one occasion he hurled her typewriter to the ground, broke an ashtray she prized, threw wine in her face and called her a slut. She replied that, if he was trying to get rid of her, she was not going to leave the house: ‘So try as you may to goad me to leave it and you, you’re not going to succeed…No matter what you say or do, short of killing me, which would be messy, I’m going to stay here and run your house and your Finca until the day when you come here, sober, in the morning and tell me truthfully and straight out that you want me to leave.’71 It was an offer he was too prudent to take up.
The children of Hemingway’s marriages were usually silent, sometimes fearful, witnesses of his marital life. When young, they were much foisted on nannies and servants as the Hemingway circus trundled the world. We hear of one nanny, Ada Stern, described as a lesbian. Bumby, the eldest, bribed her with stolen drinks, Patrick prayed she would be sent to hell, while Gregory, the youngest, was terrified she would leave.72 Gregory eventually wrote a revealing and rather bitter book about his father. As a young man he got into some petty trouble with the California police. His mother Pauline, long divorced, phoned Hemingway (30 September 1951) to tell him the news and seek comfort and guidance. He replied that she was to blame-‘See how you brought him up’-and they had a frantic argument, Pauline ‘shouting into the phone and sobbing uncontrollably’. That night she woke with a grievous internal pain, and the following day she died, aged fifty-six, on the operating table, from a tumour of the adrenal gland. It might have been aggravated by emotional stress. Hemingway blamed his son’s delinquency; the son blamed the father’s rage. ‘It was not my minor troubles that had upset Mother but his brutal phone conversation with her eight hours before she died.’ Gregory noted in his book: ‘It’s fine to be under the influence of a dominating personality as long as he’s healthy, but when he gets dry rot of the soul, how do you bring yourself to tell him he stinks?’73
The truth, of course, is that Hemingway did not suffer from dry rot of the soul. He was an alcoholic. His alcoholism was as important, indeed central, to his life and work as drug addiction was to Coleridge. Hemingway was a classic textbook case of progressive alcoholism, provoked by deep-seated, chronic and probably inherited depression, and aggravating it in turn. He once told MacLeish: ‘Trouble was, all my life when things were really bad I could take a drink and right away they were much better.’74 He began to drink as a teenager, the local blacksmith, Jim Dilworth, secretly supplying him with strong cider. His mother noted his habit and always feared he would become an alcoholic (there is a theory that his heavy drinking started with his first big row with Grace). In Italy he progressed to wine, then had his first hard liquor at the officers’ club in Milan. His wound and an unhappy love affair provoked heavy drinking: in the hospital, his wardrobe was found to be full of empty cognac bottles, an ominous sign. In Paris in the 1920s, he bought Beaune by the gallon at a wine cooperative, and would and did drink five or six bottles of red at a meal. He taught Scott Fitzgerald to drink wine direct from the bottle which, he said, was like ‘a girl going swimming without her swimming suit’. In New York he was ‘cockeyed’ he said for ‘several days’ after signing his contract for The Sun Also Rises, probably his first prolonged bout. He was popularly supposed to have invented the Twenties’ phrase ‘Have a drink’; though some, such as Virgil Thomson, accused him of being mean about offering one and Hemingway, in turn, was always liable to accuse acquaintances of free-loading, as he did Ken Tynan in Cuba in the 1950s.75
Hemingway particularly like to drink with women, as this seemed to him, vicariously, to signify his mother’s approval. Hadley drank a lot with him, and wrote: ‘I still cherish, you know, the remark you made that you almost worshipped me as a drinker.’76 The same disastrous role was played by his pretty Thirties’ companion in Havana, Jane Mason, with whom he drank gin followed by champagne chasers and huge jars of iced daiquiris; it was indeed in Cuba in this decade that his drinking first got completely out of hand. One bartender there said he could ‘drink more martinis than any man I have ever seen’. At the house of his friend Thorwald Sanchez he became fighting drunk, threw his clothes out of the window and broke a set of precious Baccarat glasses; Sanchez’s wife was so frightened she screamed and begged the butler to lock him up. On safari, he was seen sneaking out of his tent at 5 am to get a drink. His brother Leicester said that, by the end of the 1930s, at Key West, he was drinking seventeen scotch-and-sodas a day, and often taking a bottle of champagne to bed with him at night.
At this period, his liver for the first time began to cause him acute pain. He was told by his doctor to give up alcohol completely, and indeed tried to limit his consumption to three whiskies before dinner. But that did not last. During the Second World War his drinking mounted steadily and by the mid-1940s he was reported pouring gin into his tea at breakfast. A.E. Hotchner, interviewing him for Cosmopolitan in 1948, said he dispatched seven double-size Papa Doubles (the Havana drink named after him, a mixture of rum, grapefruit and maraschino), and when he left for dinner took an eighth with him for the car drive. He claimed: ‘Made a run of sixteen here one night.’ He boasted to his publisher that he had begun an evening with absinthe, dispatched a bottle of wine at dinner, switched to a vodka session, then ‘battened it down with whiskys and soda till 3 am’. His pre-dinner drinks in Cuba were usually rum-based, in Europe martinis, at fifteen-to-one strength. Once, in the early 1950s, I watched him dispatch six of these in quick succession-there was a strong element of public bravado in his drinking-on the terrace outside the Dôme in Montparnasse. His breakfast drinks might be gin, champagne, Scotch or ‘Death in the Gulf Stream’, a big glass of Hollands gin and lime, another of his inventions. And, on top of all, there was constant whisky: his son Patrick said his father got through a quart of whisky a day for the last twenty years of his life.
Hemingway’s ability to hold his liquor was remarkable. Lillian Ross, who wrote his profile for the New Yorker, does not seem to have noticed he was drunk a lot of the time he talked to her. Denis Zaphiro said of his last safari: ‘I suppose he was drunk the whole time but seldom showed it.’ He also demonstrated an unusual ability to cut down his drinking or even to eliminate it altogether for brief periods, and this, in addition to his strong physique, enabled him to survive. But the effects of his chronic alcoholism were nonetheless inexorable. Drinking was also one of the factors in his extraordinary number of accidents. Walter Benjamin once defined an intellectual (himself) as a man ‘with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart’. Hemingway certainly had autumn in his heart-often midwinter, indeed-but he kept the spectacles off his nose as long as he dared, despite the fact that he had inherited poor sight in his left eye from his mother (who also refused to wear glasses from vanity).
As a result, and perhaps also because of the awkward shape of his big body, Hemingway was prone to accidents all his life. The list of them is dauntingly long.77 As a child he fell with a stick in his mouth and gouged his tonsils; caught a fishhook in his back; sustained injuries at football and boxing. The year 1918 saw him blown up in the war and smash his fist through a glass showcase. Two years later, he cut his feet walking on broken glass and started internal bleeding by falling on a boat-cleat. He burned himself badly smashing up a water-heater (1922), tore a foot ligament (1925) and had the pupil of his good eye cut by his son (1927). In spring 1928 came the first of his major drinking accidents when, returning home, he mistook the skylight cord for the lavatory chain and pulled the whole heavy glass structure down on his head, sustaining concussion and needing nine stitches. He tore his groin muscle (1929), damaged an index finger with a punch bag, was hurt by a bolting horse and broke his arm in a car smash (1930), shot himself in the leg while drunk and trying to gaff a shark (1935), broke his big toe kicking a locked gate, smashed his foot through a mirror and damaged the pupil of his bad eye (1938) and got two more concussions in 1944, by driving his car into a water tank in the blackout and jumping off a motorcycle into a ditch. In 1945, he insisted on taking over from the driver to take Mary to Chicago airport, skidded and hit a bank of earth, breaking three ribs and a knee and denting his forehead (Mary went through the windscreen). In 1949 he was badly clawed playing with a lion. In 1950 he fell on his boat, gashing his head and leg, severing an artery and concussing himself for the fifth time. In 1953 he sprained his shoulder falling out of his car, and that winter there was a series of accidents in Africa: bad burns while drunkenly trying to put out a bush fire, and two plane accidents, which produced yet another concussion, a fractured skull, two cracked spinal discs, internal injuries, a ruptured liver, spleen and kidneys, burns, a dislocated shoulder and arm, and paralysed sphincter muscles. The accidents, which usually followed drinking, continued almost to his death: torn ligaments, sprained ankle climbing a fence (1958), another car crash (1959).
Despite his physique, his alcoholism also had a direct impact on his health beginning with his damaged liver in the late 1930s. In 1949, while skiing at Contino d’Ampezzo, he got a speck of dust in his eye, and this, combined with drinking, developed into a very serious case of erysipelas, from which he was still suffering ten years later, with a livid, flaking red scar from the bridge of his nose to his mouth. By this time, following his last big drinking bout in Spain (1959), he was experiencing both kidney and liver trouble and possibly haemochromatosis (cirrhosis, bronzed skin, diabetes), oedema of the ankles, cramps, chronic insomnia, blood-clotting and high blood urema, as well as his skin complaints.78 He was impotent and prematurely aged; the last, sad photograph taken of him, walking near a house he had bought in Idaho, tells its own tale. Even so, he was still on his feet, still alive; and the thought had become unbearable to him. His father committed suicide because of his fear of mortal illness. Hemingway feared that his illnesses were not mortal: on 2 July 1961, after various unsuccessful treatments for depression and paranoia, he got hold of his best English double-barrelled shotgun, put two canisters in it and blew away his entire cranial vault.
Why did Hemingway long for death? It is by no means unusual among writers. His contemporary Evelyn Waugh, a writer in English of comparable stature during this period, likewise longed for death. But Waugh was not an intellectual: he did not think he could refashion the rules of life out of his own head but submitted to the traditional discipline of his church, dying of natural causes five years later. Hemingway created his own code, based on honour, truth, loyalty. He failed it on all three counts, and it failed him. More seriously, perhaps, he felt he was failing his art. Hemingway had many grievous faults but there was one thing he did not lack: artistic integrity. It shines like a beacon through his whole life. He set himself the task of creating a new way of writing English, and fiction, and he succeeded. It was one of the salient events in the history of our language and is now an inescapable part of it. He devoted to this task immense resources of creative skill, energy and patience. That in itself was difficult. But far more difficult, as he discovered, was to maintain the high creative standards he had set himself. This became apparent to him in the mid-1930s, and added to his habitual depression. From then on his few successful stories were aberrations in a long downward slide. If Hemingway had been less of an artist, it might not have mattered to him as a man; he would simply have written and published inferior novels, as many writers do. But he knew when he wrote below his best, and the knowledge was intolerable to him. He sought the help of alcohol, even in working hours. He was first observed with a drink, a ‘Rum St James’, in front of him while writing in the 1920s. This custom, rare at first, became intermittent, then invariable. By the 1940s, he was said to wake at 4.30 am, ‘usually starts drinking right away and writes standing up, with a pencil in one hand and a drink in another’.79 The effect on his work was exactly as might be expected, disastrous. An experienced editor can always tell when a piece of writing has been produced with the aid of alcohol, however gifted the author may be. Hemingway began to produce large quantities of unpublishable material, or material he felt did not reach the minimum standard he set himself. Some was published nonetheless, and was seen to be inferior, even a parody of his earlier work. There were one or two exceptions, notably The Old Man and the Sea, though there was an element of self-parody in that too. But the general level was low, and falling, and Hemingway’s awareness of his inability to recapture his genius, let alone develop it, accelerated the spinning circle of depression and drink. He was a man killed by his art, and his life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough.