22

PAINTER LUIS QUINTANILLA, LIKE MANY OTHER POLITICALLY ACTIVE artists, found himself in trouble in his native Spain in the fall of 1934. A friend of Dos Passos and Hemingway since he had worked in Paris in the 1920s, Quintanilla permitted a group opposed to the conservative government to store weapons in his Madrid studio. As an anticipated general strike got underway in October, he and his friends passed the day making paella and awaiting instructions to deliver the guns. When none came, they went to bed. In the middle of the night the police, tipped off by a neighbor who had overheard indiscreet talk of revolution on the studio’s terrace, burst in and made what they considered highly prized arrests. Quintanilla was locked up, where he awaited sentencing, which might possibly be execution.

In Key West word of his arrest brought Hemingway and Dos Passos together in a common cause and calmed the roiled waters of their friendship. They convinced the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City to mount an exhibit of forty Quintanilla etchings of Madrid street scenes. Hemingway paid to pull prints from the etchings and provided funds to support the show. He and Dos Passos then set about writing the text for the catalog. It was like the days of Paris as the pair of authors wrote, drank, and shared their drafts.

While the men penned their pieces about Quintanilla, Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich arrived in Key West. Hemingway’s contributions to the magazine were an essential part of its success, and in turn, Hemingway had used his columns to enlarge his public persona as a hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman, and worldly figure. Dos Passos watched in fascination as Hemingway played the editor as if he were a marlin at the end of a fishing line. “Hem would reel in gently letting his prey have plenty of line. The editor was hooked,” said Dos Passos.

By then Dos Passos had sent his portion of the Quintanilla catalog copy to his friend Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic to run as an article. Hemingway used Gingrich’s visit to talk Dos Passos into changing his plans and, instead, publish it with Hemingway’s portion in Gingrich’s magazine. Dos Passos wired Cowley to retract his offer.

The January 1935 issue of Esquire carried Hemingway and Dos Passos’s commentaries along with six of Quintanilla’s sepia-toned stark etchings of everyday Spanish life. Dos Passos, as was his way, went further than the written page. He wrote letters to friends, circulated a petition, and organized a picket line in front of the New York City Spanish consulate. The consul, who was a friend of Quintanilla, sent telegrams to Madrid greatly exaggerating the turnout.

Sad news greeted Dos Passos and Hemingway after a day of fishing in early March 1935. Sixteen-year-old Baoth Murphy, the eldest child of Gerald and Sara Murphy, had died of meningitis. His death was a shock to his parents because it had been his young brother Patrick who had been battling tuberculosis for years. Dos Passos inarticulately conveyed his condolences in a note with meandering sentences. “Trying to think of some kind of cheerful word to end a letter with I can’t find any,” he confessed.

The next day Hemingway took his turn. He was surer of his words. “Remember,” he wrote to the Murphys, “that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place this world is.” Almost as if he were writing a riff in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway continued his meditation on death. We will all die by defeat when our bodies fail and our world is destroyed, he wrote, but Boath got over it while his world still remained intact. He vacillated between providing comfort—“No one you love is ever dead”—to ruminating on his sense of the future—“It seems as though we are all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know will never reach port.”

A few weeks later Dos Passos and Hemingway headed back out onto the Gulf waters in the Pilar in the company of a Key West fishing friend of Hemingway’s, Henry Strater, a painter whom they both knew from Paris. A Princeton classmate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Strater had been the model for the character Burne Holiday in This Side of Paradise.

They set course for Bimini, 260 miles northeast of Key West and along the rich fishing grounds of the Gulf Stream. They were trawling only a few hours from harbor when they spotted a green turtle and made plans to harpoon it for its meat. But before they could, a dolphin grabbed the bait on Dos Passos’s rod. Then another took Strater’s bait. In the ensuing battle to reel them in, both Strater and Dos Passos lost their fish.

Sharks appeared, and in an instant Hemingway and Strater had them on the end of their lines. Hemingway managed to reel in his shark to the side of the boat. The boat’s cook gaffed the shark, and Hemingway took out his .22-caliber Colt pistol. He shot at the thrashing shark’s head, using hollow-point bullets designed to expand and cause deadly damage.

Dos Passos, more than glad to be given a chance not to be holding a pole, watched from the command bridge above, where he had retreated with his eight-millimeter movie camera. Hemingway once again took aim at the shark. Suddenly it convulsed, breaking the gaffing pole that held the shark in place. A broken portion of the pole slammed into Hemingway’s right hand, which held the gun. It fired, but no one heard the shot over the loud crack from the breaking of the pole. The bullet struck the brass boat rail and broke into pieces that ricocheted. Looking down, Hemingway found where some of the fragments went. He had two holes just below one knee and lacerations on both legs where scars could still be seen from the battlefield shrapnel of 1918. He sat down.

“Get the iodine, Bread,” Hemingway told his pilot.

“What did it, Cap?”

“I got shot when the gaff broke.”

They boiled water, scrubbed the wounds with soap, and doused the two holes with the iodine as the Pilar made its way back to port and a doctor. Hemingway soon turned the incident into an article for Esquire, cleaning up his language so “asshole” became “the outlet of his colon” and “fuck the bastard” appeared as “Fornicate the illegitimate.”

One week later the Pilar set out for Bimini again with a patched-up Hemingway at the helm. Katy joined her husband this time. On the island the couple occupied an old beachside bungalow, leaving Hemingway to stay on his boat. As usual, the group went fishing. One day Hemingway hooked a large tuna, and sharks attacked, tearing twenty-five-to thirty- pound bits of flesh off the fish at the end of the line. Katy watched as Hemingway brought out a machine gun. “It’s terrific to see the bullets ripping into them,” she wrote to Gerald Murphy when safely back on land. “The sharks thrashing in blood and foam—the white bellies and fearful jaws—the pale cold eyes—I was really aghast but it’s very exciting.”

John and Katy Dos Passos walked the beach each day, collecting shells and watching the crabs dart about the fallen coconuts. Hemingway teased them for collecting shells and going out in a rowboat together—people did that before they were married, not after, he told them. Aside from momentary moments of crotchetiness, Hemingway appeared to his old friends as the more playful version of the olden days. “Life still seemed enormously comical to all of us,” Dos Passos recalled.

When Hemingway had earlier written his contribution to the Quintanilla exhibit catalog, he suggested that the artist got in trouble because of the Spanish tradition “that a man should be a man as well as an artist.” Until this moment Hemingway had chosen to remain exclusively the artist. Unlike Dos Passos, he had steadfastly kept out of politics. He had even refused to lend a hand or, indeed, a signature to Dos Passos in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti.

Hemingway grew defensive by the published—and unpublished—criticism of his preoccupation with hunting, fishing, bullfighting, and travel. He could not, he insisted, be a Communist because of his belief in Liberty. Everyone claims that if one does not become a Communist, one will have no friends and will be alone, Hemingway wrote to Ivan Kashkin in Moscow, who had translated much of Hemingway’s work into Russian. But being alone is not so dreadful, nor is a lack of friends, Hemingway concluded.

Hemingway gleefully noted that his books in Russia were outselling Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, but he forgot what Dos Passos told him when he had gone to the worker’s paradise. “The great joke about the USSR to foreign writers,” Dos Passos had written him when leaving Russia, “is that although you can get jack out of publishers, you can’t take it out of the country, but you have to drink it up in vodka and malt herring.”

Unbeknownst to Hemingway, the carping about his friend’s apolitical approach to writing also irritated Dos Passos. “I don’t think it’s entirely because he is a good friend of mine that I’m beginning to get thoroughly sick of every little inkshitter who can get his stuff in a pink magazine shying bricks at him,” he wrote privately to Cowley, using a dated term for flinging. “I suppose they are all sore at H. because they think he’s in on the big money.”

Rambling on, Dos Passos told Cowley that “when the little inkshitters are on your side that’s the time to start worrying and taking stock of your premises.” Dos Passos followed his own prescription.

Growing doubts about his political beliefs, the ones whose certainty seemed unchallengeable a few years earlier, crept into Dos Passos’s mind. He became convinced that none of the Marxist groups offered viable solutions. This put him at odds with fellow travelers like his old friend John Lawson. Dos Passos’s change of mind surprised Cowley, who was at work establishing the leftish League of American Writers, and he flooded him with questions. “I’m through with writing these lousy statements,” Dos Passos replied. “I can’t make myself clear. What I meant to imply was that the issue right now is the classic liberties and that the fight had got to be made on them.”

“I don’t know why I should blurt all this out,” Dos Passos told Wilson about confessing his waning support for Communists, “except that since I’ve been laid up I’ve been clarifying my ideas about what I would be willing to be shot for and frankly I don’t find the Kremlin among the items.” He had become convinced that oppression creates more oppression, and the use of inappropriate means resulted in a bad end. “It’s the sort of thing you have to grow up and look around for a number of years to see—possibly it’s the beginning of adult ossification—but I don’t really think so.”

As Dos Passos moved to the center, a storm blew Hemingway to the left.

On Saturday, August 31, Hemingway sat on his porch in Key West with a drink and unfurled the evening newspaper. It reported that a tropical disturbance near the Bahamas was traveling toward the Keys and could likely become a hurricane. Hemingway immediately set about securing the Pilar, moving the cars out of his rickety garage, and nailing shutters on the house. The preparations turned out to be unnecessary. The storm mostly avoided Key West and caused minimal damage.

Two days later, as boats began to move again, Hemingway crossed over to Lower Matecumbe Key, an island to his north, to see whether he could help after hearing that the hurricane had caused devastating damage there. Of concern to him was the fate of nearly one thousand veterans who were working for the Civilian Conservation Corps and were camping on the island. Hemingway had met many of them at Sloppy Joe’s, the bar he favored in Key West.

When his boat reached Lower Matecumbe Key he began to get the answer. Bodies were floating in the ferry slip. Walking on the shore in the company of two men who accompanied him, Hemingway saw that Flagler’s railroad bed was gone and that the veterans who had taken cover behind it were lying dead in the mangroves. He and his compatriots became the first to reach the camp where the highway construction crew lived. Only 8 of the 187 had survived. There were more dead bodies than he had seen since working as a Red Cross volunteer along the Piave River in 1918.

Then he spotted the bodies of two women who ran a sandwich shop not far from the ferry. “Max,” Hemingway wrote to Perkins upon getting back to his house, “you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs.”

A cable came from the editor of the New Masses asking whether he would write an article about the death of the veterans. Hemingway took to his typewriter and pounded out an account of what he had witnessed. No one yet knows the number who died, he told readers, especially as many bodies had been swept out to sea, but it might exceed one thousand. The civilians had chosen of their free will to live there. The veterans had not. They had been sent there, given no chance to leave, no protection, and no chance to live. They were good men down on their luck and looking for a paycheck. “Who sent them there to die?” Hemingway asked.

“But I would like to make whoever sent them there carry just one out through the mangroves, or turn one over that lay in the sun along the fill, or tie five together so they won’t float out, or smell that smell again you thought you would never smell again, with luck,” he wrote. “But now you know there isn’t any luck when rich bastards make a war.”

Even Hemingway’s Esquire articles turned political. Penning what he called “A serious tropical letter,” he predicted another world war would erupt soon, describing the economic and political forces at play in Europe in the manner he once had as a Toronto Star correspondent.

“They wrote in the old days it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” he said. “But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“We were fools to be sucked in once on a European war and we should never be sucked in again,” wrote thirty-six-year-old Hemingway, eighteen years after begging his father to permit him to join in the fighting.

As 1935 closed, Hemingway sat at his desk in Key West and wrote a letter to Dos Passos beginning with an apology for his recent rudeness. Hemingway said he regretted having accused Dos Passos of having failed to visit their grieving friend Sara Murphy when he had a chance. It had been a typical and ill-thought-out complaint on his part. Indeed, Dos Passos had gone to see the Murphys, and Sara Murphy immediately rebuked Hemingway. The apology he sent Dos Passos, however, was meant only to clear the air. Hemingway was lonely. “It is gloomy as hell here without you,” he wrote.

Since the romp on Bimini the days had been glum for both men. The Dos Passoses were more broke than ever, having to borrow money from friends just to pay expenses. Gerald Murphy, who had taken over the operations of Mark Cross, his family’s company, provided a partial rescue when he gave Katy a job. Sara sent several hundred dollars, claiming it came from a recent settlement of her mother’s estate that left her with more than she needed. To avoid any sense of charity, she did the same with Hemingway, who hardly needed an infusion of cash.

Whereas Hemingway could write himself out of any financial shortfall, it certainly was not the case for Dos Passos. When his agent sent work to the New Yorker the magazine was uninterested. “The Dos Passos doesn’t seem at all in his usual powerful and effective manner,” wrote back an editor. “Are these old things that have recently come to light, or what?” His hopes for a remunerative revival of his career rested with completing the wishfully titled The Big Money, the third volume of the trilogy. Dos Passos was making progress, though slower than he hoped. By this point he was nearing a decade’s work on the trilogy, consuming more than one-third of his professional life so far. “This novel business is an awful business,” he told Hemingway. “Why the hell did I ever get mixed up in it?”

Ten thousand copies of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa were offered up to readers in October. As with his bullfighting book, his new book about hunting big game puzzled charitable critics and provided fodder to those who had been disappointed with Hemingway since A Farewell to Arms. John Chamberlain at the New York Times couldn’t resist a dig at the author in the first line of his review. “Ernest Hemingway went to Africa to shoot the bounding kudu and the ungainly rhinoceros and to reply to his critics,” he wrote.

“Not that one objects to Mr. Hemingway’s diversions. He has just as much right to his hunting and fishing as New Yorkers have to dancing and ping pong,” Chamberlain continued. “But to offer Green Hills of Africa as a profound philosophical experience is something else again. It is simply an overextended book about hunting, with a few incidental felicities and a number of literary wisecracks thrown in.”

The fall and winter had not been a good one for either writer. So when John and Katy Dos Passos got into their car on May 10, 1936, to head south for a reunion with the Hemingways, it was with great anticipation of an escape from their woes. Also traveling with them was Sara Murphy.

Dos Passos packed the galleys of The Big Money. The book included only four of the dozen or so characters that had inhabited The 42nd Parallel and 1919. The others disappear, almost as how in life one loses contact with acquaintances, never to learn what happened to them. Dos Passos put his character Charley Anderson center stage. Anderson’s experience as a flyer in the war convinced him that there was money to be made in manufacturing planes. He is right and makes vast sums of money, only to be done in by women and liquor. Mary Dowling barely survives a violent marriage to a Cuban but goes to Hollywood, where her luscious qualities soon make her a movie star. Mary French uses her Vassar education to work in settlement houses and the labor movement. A series of lovers betray her, leaving French with only the cause as a loyal companion. Richard Ellsworth Savage, whom readers met in 1919 as a young poet on his way to the Paris peace conference, ends up slaving for J. Ward Moore-house, the agile but unscrupulous public relations pioneer.

Dos Passos treats the women more sympathetically than the men, who seem to design their own fate rather than suffer from one imposed by others. In either case the ending for all his characters is bad. Dos Passos was offering a wide-ranging satire of life in the United States. With each page the story grows darker. Change is constant, but progress of the kind Dos Passos valued is stalled. In his conception those who pursue their dreams are battered senseless, and the survivors sell out. Channeling his two decades of novelistic observation, Dos Passos produced a grim tale in which the war’s effects were like a cancer on society, worsened by the myopic pursuit of money, fame, and success.

In Miami John and Katy Dos Passos and Sara Murphy took a Pan American Sikorsky seaplane to Havana, where Hemingway awaited their arrival looking forward to days filled with literary talk and gossip. He didn’t get it. Dos Passos hardly looked up from his galleys, even when on the Pilar. When he did grab a fishing rod, it was without sufficient skill to keep a marlin on the line. “Dos blew,” is how Hemingway recorded the moment in his ship’s log. Hemingway was unsympathetic. To Dos Passos the manuscript represented a literary hope; to Hemingway it was robbing him of the pleasures of the old days.

Only at dinner in the restaurant at the Ambos Mundos Hotel did the men talk—that is, until Dos Passos took his leave to work on the galleys in his room. Then Katy, Sara, and Hemingway would remain to listen to rumba-playing Cubans and down drinks, often resulting the next morning in breakfasts of Bromo-Seltzer. Displeased, Hemingway became sullen, especially at having to entertain Sara and Katy while Pauline, who could have helped, was in Arkansas with the children.

Hemingway could not be as he was when he had Dos Passos all to himself. The presence of a friend in grief placed the onerous demand of civility on Hemingway, and this was made worse by seeing Katy, a woman whom he had once wanted and might still. At this point in Hemingway’s life she and her brother Bill were his longest-lasting set of stead-fast friends, except for a lengthy period when he and Bill had not spoken after a dispute. In short, no one knew Hemingway the way Katy did. But her best friend and lover was now another writer, the one in the room upstairs proofing his next book, not the young Hemingway who had pined for her in the days of Michigan summers. Even in the company of this remarkable group, Hemingway felt alone. He hated being alone.

“Gosh, Hem,” Dos Passos wrote immediately after leaving Havana, “it was a tough proposition for you, me bringing all the women folk to Havana, but the trip really did Sara a great deal of good.” Hemingway reciprocated with his own apology for his “bellyaching.”

He also told him after reading a copy of the galleys Dos Passos had left behind for him, “It’s as long as the Bible but I can see why you couldn’t cut it more.” Hemingway remained mum, however, on what he thought of Dos Passos’s book. The silence was telling.

On August 6, 1936, The Big Money was published. For the first time in two years and for only the twelfth time in the nearly seven hundred issues Time had published since its launch in 1923, the magazine put a writer on the cover. Wearing an open shirt, without his glasses, and tugging on a cigar stub clamped in his teeth, was John Dos Passos striking a pose as a writer on top of his game.

Almost all reviewers joined Time in its praise. The trilogy, despite its faults, had come closer than any other book so far in the pursuit of the Great American Novel, said Time, which compared the work to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Balzac’s Comedie Humaine, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—heady company indeed. This list, however, did not include Hemingway’s name. Edmund Wilson, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other writers sent their congratulations to Provincetown.

In Key West Hemingway brooded. Melancholic and lacking in sleep, he was in a touchy, explosive mood. Over the years he had liked to convey the impression he could easily resort to fisticuffs. From the fistfights in his fiction to his entry into a boxing ring in Paris and Bimini, Hemingway exuded the impression of being a fighter. And earlier in the year he had pummeled poet Wallace Stevens who, while in Key West, had disparaged the author before Hemingway’s visiting sister. Both victor and loser promised to tell no one about the fight, but Hemingway, of course, had dashed off letters to Murphy and Dos Passos.

Ever since Paris, when he had savaged Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein in The Torrents of Spring or later taken revenge on Harold Loeb in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway used his writing to strike back at those who had failed him. It was the way he placed them in his personal ninth circle of hell, the one reserved for treachery. He began with Sara Murphy, who recently had the temerity to suggest he should stick with Pauline now that it became apparent to his friends that his affections for her were growing cold. Hemingway created a character of a wealthy man with the attributes of her husband Gerald. Dying of gangrene on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, he laments how his relationship with a rich woman robbed him of other possible loves.

In a moment when he might have been writing about himself, Hemingway penned, “He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarreled when he was feeling best?”

Sara Murphy, toughened by the loss of one son and watching another die of tuberculosis, could charitably ignore Hemingway’s tempestuousness. She had stuck with F. Scott Fitzgerald and others through their dark periods. To her mind Hemingway’s moods came with the job of being a patron of the arts.

But for others Hemingway’s method of seeking revenge with the written word was worrisome. “Difference which, when men and women were still in their twenties, were the subject of cheerful and affectionate arguments brew recrimination and bitterness when they reach their thirties,” Dos Passos wrote years later.

By 1936 Hemingway’s list of lost friends was lengthy. Dos Passos wondered whether he might soon be on it.