18

BACK ONCE AGAIN IN PIGGOTT BY OCTOBER 1928, HEMINGWAY SECURELY locked his 652-page manuscript in a safe deposit box at the bank. In Paris he had learned his lesson about protecting manuscripts and was not going to take any chances. The following day he drove alone to Oak Park, Illinois, returning home for the first time in almost a decade. There he found a father whose faculties were failing and whose bouts of depression were worsening. Hemingway’s mother was unchanged, especially in her ability to irritate him.

Pauline caught up with her husband a few weeks later, and they eventually made their way back to Key West. Instead of returning to the cramped apartment above the car dealership, the couple and their newborn son, Patrick, moved into a two-story house, with plenty of room for guests.

At times it must have seemed as if family was an elaborate conspiracy to keep Ernest from his work. Hadley wanted their son, Bumby, to get a dose of the curative Florida sun to shake off a winter grippe, not to mention spend time with his father. So Ernest packed the manuscript into his bag and took the forty-hour-long train ride to New York City, where Hadley delivered their son over to his custody. When the train carrying Ernest and Bumby south stopped in Trenton, a porter delivered a telegram from Oak Park that his father had died.

Hemingway confined his son to the care of the porter—unwilling to expose Bumby to his grandmother. The man astonishingly agreed to accompany the five-year-old boy the remainder of the trip to Key West. Armed with money F. Scott Fitzgerald wired to the station’s telegraph office after receiving a telegram from his friend, Hemingway boarded a Chicago-bound train. When he reached the city he learned that his father had killed himself while sitting alone on the edge of his bed with the .32-caliber pistol Hemingway’s grandfather had carried in the Civil War.

To outsiders it seemed as if money troubles had led to the doctor’s death. The financial problems were real enough, as Hemingway learned when going through his father’s personal papers. But what drew him to pull the trigger were his depression, mounting health problems, and a growing paranoia.

Hemingway went to work putting family matters in order. “Have everything fixed up except they will have damned little money,” he wrote Perkins. “Realize of course that thing for me to do is not worry but get to work—finish my book properly so I can help out with the proceeds. What makes me feel the worst is that my father is the one I cared about.”

Hemingway didn’t wait to return to Key West or even for the long train ride to resume work. In his father’s office immediately following the funeral he began revising the manuscript he had brought with him.

Dos Passos returned to the United States in December 1928 after almost six months in Russia. “Drop me a line as to the life and habits of Key West, or thereabouts,” he wrote Hemingway on a postcard. “I don’t know where I’m going to live, if at all.” In New York City he received a reply from Hemingway. “Well kid how does it feel to be back?” he wrote, urging him to come south. “I want like hell to see you.”

“Every other day we shoot snipe for the day after,” Hemingway continued. “My old man shot himself on the other hand (not in the other hand. In the head) as you may have read in the paper.”

Dos Passos was glad for the invitation but had to put off a visit. He had come home brimming with ideas for the New Playwrights Theater, and the company planned to put on his play about a labor organizer who is framed for murder and put to death. When it did open, critics hated it, and it lasted for a few weeks—only because Dos Passos fronted almost $1,000 of his own money. His friend Edmund Wilson was the sole writer with a kind word for the work.

Dos Passos was “less expert as a dramatist than as a novelist,” Wilson wrote in the New Republic. But the play possessed an eloquence lacking in the novel and was perhaps the best thing Dos Passos had written. More to the point, Wilson continued, Dos Passos should be admired for his efforts to write about the social forces at work in America. “Most of the first-rate men of his age—Wilder, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald—cultivate their own little corners and do not confront the situation as a whole,” he said. “Only Dos Passos has attempted to confront it.”

Smarting from this latest costly theatrical failure and tired of the infighting among the company’s directors, Dos Passos resigned from the New Playwrights Theater and fled to Key West in late March 1929. “As soon as the drama has you on your ass or as you get the drama visa versa come down here,” Hemingway had said in his letter inviting him south. Dos Passos’s effort to add playwright to his biography had been an ordeal, and he was glad it had come to an end. “Am down here licking my wounds,” he wrote Wilson after reaching Key West, “fishing, eating wild herons and turtle steak, drinking Spanish wine and Cuban rum and generally remaking the inner man, somewhat shattered by the encounter.”

Over drinks and meals Dos Passos filled Hemingway in on his Russian adventures. It had been an opportune time to go. The power struggle between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, following Vladimir Lenin’s death, had abated for a brief moment. The country was savoring a respite from turmoil, and Americans were welcomed.

Dos Passos had begun his Soviet explorations in Leningrad, where he met playwrights, poets, and writers, even one who had translated one of his novels. But the men who interested Dos Passos the most were movie directors. Among them was Sergei Eisenstein, famous for his use of film montage in which he layered short shots, condensed time, and produced a third visual perception. Its use three years earlier in his film Battleship Potemkin had attracted wide attention.

Dos Passos set off to explore the country armed with a teach-yourself-Russian book published by the Hugo Institute of London and a pocket dictionary. Traveling by boat down rivers, by bus on rudimentary highways, and by foot across mountains, he saw a Russia few other outsiders got to see. The magnificence of the landscape enthralled him, but living conditions were harsh. “The towns are little stone villages and the country between is wild as hell,” he wrote Hemingway during a stop in Dagestan.

Sometimes Dos Passos went on his way alone, sometimes in the company of others. W. Horsley Gantt, a young American doctor whom Dos Passos met in Leningrad where Gantt was working with Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, joined the walking trip in the Caucasus Mountains. The travel was hard, and food was often difficult to obtain. “The Caucasus has been entirely neglected by Swiss hotelkeepers,” Dos Passos quipped to Hemingway. Spending the night in the home of a widow who was a relative of a guide they employed, the travelers asked for hot water to make tea. Their host said she couldn’t boil water because she could only afford to make a fire once a day.

In the months he traveled about, Dos Passos encountered a great deal more poverty. But he was struck by the generosity of the Russians who would share what little they had with a stranger. “People are so hospitable here and so nice that it is heartbreaking,” Dos Passos wrote to E. E. Cummings.

In Moscow, where he settled in for the fall, he fell again into the company of writers and intellectuals. But being in the capital, he also began to get the jitters like those that infected other Westerners who had been in the Soviet Union long enough to see the strong hand of the state. His passport, for instance, remained ominously in the custody of the government. When the bureaucrats finally returned it to him, he immediately obtained the necessary visa and train ticket west.

At the train station a friend Dos Passos had made during his stay came to say good-bye, bringing along with her the teenage cast of the Sanitary Propaganda Theater company, which acted out skits in factories about the danger of syphilis or the necessity to brush one’s teeth.

“They want to know,” said the woman pointing to the children. “They want to know where you stand politically. Are you with us?”

“Let me see,” Dos Passos replied, hedging for time to formulate an answer. The steam from the engines swirled around them in the twilight dimness of the day. His head throbbed. There had been too many men, too many women, and too many youngsters whom he had seen and talked with during his stay, too many foreign languages misunderstood for him to speak with confidence.

“But maybe I can explain,” he blurted. “But in so short a time… there’s no time.”

The train began to move, and Dos Passos jumped aboard. “How could I answer that question,” Dos Passos wrote years later. “I liked and admired the Russian people. I had enjoyed their enormous and varied country, but when next morning I crossed the Polish border… it was like being let out of jail.”

Early in his Key West reunion with Hemingway Dos Passos was handed a carbon copy of his compatriot’s new novel. It was now called A Farewell to Arms, a title Hemingway had taken from a sixteenth-century poem by George Peele. Months of revisions had resulted in a polished manuscript. The last time Hemingway had shared an unpublished work with Dos Passos was the evening in Schruns, Austria, when he had read aloud from The Sun Also Rises. He had regretted the experience but remained so eager for Dos Passos’s blessings that he was willing to chance it again.

Unlike The Sun Also Rises, which was written in a matter of weeks, A Farewell to Arms was the product of a long gestation. Each day Hemingway claimed he had reread the entire manuscript from the beginning until he reached the spot where he had left off and would then write new pages. As he repeated the process, the story developed, but the earlier pages grew tighter from the constant cutting and revisions. From its first page the tone of the writing was different from his previous work. Sentences were longer, and thoughts were connected loosely with a lavish use of the conjunction “and.”

The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

In reaching for dust to illustrate the bareness of the wartime landscape, Hemingway’s words were look-alikes for those in Dos Passos’s first novel One Man’s Initiation. In it Dos Passos had described fictionally the scene he had seen as an ambulance driver when near Verdun: dust raised by trucks and soldiers covered the flowers and the soldiers were so shrouded in white dust they looked dead.

Even as Hemingway held a typed and completed manuscript, he still tinkered with the ending, as he had with The Sun Also Rises. He knew the final words of his literary composition would hang in the air like the last chords of a symphony in a concert hall. It took Hemingway nearly fifty tries to produce a suitable coda for the moment when Henry is alone with his dead lover after telling the nurses to leave the room. In his efforts he chose to scrap such closings as:

That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.

or

When people die you have to bury them but you do not have to write about it. You meet undertakers but you do not have to write about them.

Until he finally settled on the one that pleased him most.

But after I got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Perkins let Hemingway know that Scribner’s Magazine was prepared to pay an unheard-of $16,000 for the serial rights, the largest amount it had ever paid. The news brought immense financial relief to Hemingway, as he now supported his widowed mother. When Perkins came in person to retrieve the final manuscript he told Hemingway the novel was magnificent. It pleased Hemingway, but he continued to anxiously await the judgment of his closest literary friend. It had been only a little more than two years since Dos Passos had severely criticized Hemingway’s first novel, deeming it a cock-and-bull story about a worthless group of drunken expatriates. “He’s always been my most bitterly severe critic,” Hemingway admitted to Perkins. To Hemingway’s relief, Dos Passos was quick in rendering a verdict. It was spectacular, he said. “Dos liking it is the best news I’ve had since you did because he’s always been hard as can be,” Hemingway told Perkins.

The novel was not the only thing to Dos Passos’s liking. As planned, Katy Smith timed her visit to Key West so they could be together. However, it was hard be alone. Also visiting was painter Waldo Peirce. The tall, barrel-chested handsome man with an enormous beard—“looked like a Neptune out of a baroque Roman fountain,” thought Dos Passos—was also attracted to Smith. Some in Provincetown, where they both lived, presumed the two had been occasional lovers. If not, they certainly projected an intimacy when together that was off-putting to the shy Dos Passos.

But when together with Dos Passos, Smith reciprocated his growing affection. They took long walks, swam, and picnicked, leaving the Hemingway crowd to fend for itself. As a writer herself, Smith understood—as Crystal Ross had—the things central to Dos Passos’s life. But unlike Ross, she was not hesitant about a romantic commitment. After less than a month together under the Caribbean sun, they pledged to meet up in Provincetown in the summer.

Before Dos Passos took his leave of Key West a wooden crate arrived from Chicago. It was from Hemingway’s mother. The crate sat unopened for days among the trunks and suitcases they were packing for a trip to France. “For heaven’s sake, Ernest,” Smith said one day, “haven’t you opened your mother’s box yet?” Pauline got a hammer and pried it open. Inside they found canvas rolls that, when unrolled, revealed landscape paintings of the Garden of Gods in Colorado; they had been painted by Hemingway’s mother. They were stained in places, as chocolate cake his mother packed in the crate had gone to mold and leaked. The box also held the .32-caliber pistol with which Hemingway’s father had ended his life. Ernest had asked for it. Smith, who had met Grace Hemingway on many occasions, explained to Dos Passos “that Mrs. Hemingway was a very odd lady, indeed.” Dos Passos, who had never met her, certainly knew Hemingway’s feelings toward her. “Hem was the only man I ever knew who really hated his mother,” he said.

Soon everyone was off. Dos Passos had a manuscript to finish, and Hemingway had galleys to proof. It had been a little more than a decade since the end of the war, six years since the two began plotting their literary plans in a Paris café. Dos Passos had eight books in print and Hemingway five. Along with their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, they had become the voice of the war generation—the Lost Generation.

Dos Passos took up an old friend’s offer to stay in their Bucks County Pennsylvania farmhouse where he could work undisturbed. With a draft of the The 42nd Parallel almost complete, he went next to North Carolina to cover a textile workers strike for the New Republic. Finally, in June Dos Passos arrived in Provincetown where Smith lived.

Katy and her brother Bill had moved to Provincetown in 1924, sharing a succession of rentals in the resort town with two women. Using bits of the group’s last names, town residents dubbed whatever house they rented “Smooley Hall.” The housemates all held writing aspirations but also played together. “The group at Smooley Hall were at that time the essence of joyous freedom in life and booze,” recalled novelist Hutchins Hapgood, “but never did they forget their first job was to think and do.”

Smith had carved out a life of considerable freedom, and nothing up to this moment had enticed her to give it up. “Katy never encouraged anyone to speak of marriage back then,” said one of her neighbors. “Katy loved the single, carefree life of Smooley Hall, but when Dos Passos visited we wondered what was in the making.”

Smith gave a party to introduce to her friends John Dos Passos, the man who had broken down her barriers. The two decided to get married but not before Dos Passos had finished a draft of The 42nd Parallel. Smith also wanted to return to northern Michigan, where she had summered with Hemingway years earlier, to check up on the farmhouse that her recently deceased aunt, who had raised her and her brother, had owned.

Dos Passos hid in a friend’s lake house near Syracuse, New York. There he worked steadily on the manuscript, interrupting his writing and revisions only for dips in cold spring water, long walks, or meals. The mail soon carried passionate missives between Smith and Dos Passos.

Needing to conduct research for his newsreel and camera eye sections of his book, Dos Passos next moved to Chicago, bringing him closer to Michigan where Smith was. She implored him to come to her. “Mutton-fish my deary,” she wrote. “It’s damn beautiful and I’d love to show you where we all grew to vigorous manhood and womanhood depending on sex and age.… This place reminds me a lot of Wemedge.”

Dos Passos came quickly and toured the summertime paradise of his friend Ernest Hemingway with Katy Smith as his guide. Then, in the company of her brother, the couple headed back east via Canada, which was beyond the reach of Prohibition, and crossed back into the United States at the border with Maine. On Monday, August 19, 1929, John Roderigo Dos Passos and Katharine Smith stood before E. E. Gorielus, a Unitarian minister, in Ellsworth, Maine. Dos Passos wore a raincoat Bill Smith had urgently draped around him when it was discovered the groom had split open his pants. With marriage vows said and bourbon taken out from its hiding spot in a lobster pot, the small gathering celebrated the moment.

“I feel so swell I don’t like to mention it,” Dos Passos wrote Hemingway a few days later.

“Damned glad to hear you men are married,” replied Hemingway from Madrid. “I’m happy as hell about it!”

As if torn from the pages of the romance stories Smith penned, the girl of Hemingway’s teenage summer dreams was now the wife of his best friend.