EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.
[Hemingway] has moved steadily toward mastery of his technique, though that is by no means the perfect instrument it has been praised for being. Technique, however, is not enough to make a great writer, and that is what we have been asked to believe Mr. Hemingway was in process of becoming. The indications of such a growth are absent from this book, as they have been absent from everything Mr. Hemingway has written since A Farewell to Arms. There is evidence of no mental growth whatever; there is no better understanding of life, no increase in his power to illuminate it or even to present it. Essentially, this new novel is an empty book . . . In spite of its frequent strength as narrative writing, To Have and Have Not is a novel distinctly inferior to A Farewell to Arms . . . Mr. Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.
J. Donald Adams, New York Times review.
BY THE mid-1930s, Hemingway was under increasing pressure from Scribner’s to produce a follow-up novel to A Farewell To Arms.
The publisher was disappointed with the sales of the non-fiction books, Death In The Afternoon (which some accounts suggest only just broke even) and Green Hills Of Africa, and even Hemingway’s third collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing, had not sold as well as hoped and expected.
To Hemingway’s immense irritation, he was also under pressure from a largely left-of-centre literary world still in thrall to its sanitised view of Soviet Russia to write more politically engaged fiction — the US was in the middle of its Great Depression. Hemingway had long resisted such political engagement and insisted a writer’s job was to write, not to indulge himself in politics.
As early as 1932 he had written to the Chicago bookseller, Paul Romaine, who was consistently urging him to become more politically engaged
The veterans were based on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys just over 70 miles towards the mainland from Key West and had been employed, at $30 a month ($592 in 2021) plus free bed and board, on a Federal Emergency Relief Administration (F.E.R.A.) scheme to build bridges and roads to link the Florida Keys.
In 1934, Monroe County, to which Key West belonged, had declared bankruptcy, and unemployment on the island had risen by 80% after the naval base and many of its factories were closed down. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, the his government planned to revitalise Key West by turning it into an attractive tourist destination, and to do that it needed to improve access.
By 1933, just under four years after the Wall Street crash, one in four of every American citizen able to work was unemployed, but the then President, Republican Herbert Hoover, stubbornly refused to spend government money on social welfare schemes. He insisted that in time the US economy would sort itself out, and for him the Great War veterans were an embarrassment.
In 1924, the vets had been promised a war service bonus, but it was not due to be paid until 1945; so in 1932, 17,000 veterans — calling themselves the ‘Bonus Expeditionary Force’ — petitioned the government to pay the bonus early. They gathered in Washington and were joined by another 27,000 hungry men, women and children, living in shanty camps in and around the capitol. Hoover’s government dismissed the vets’ request and told them to return home.
When the protesters ignored the order and police were sent in to evict them from government property they had occupied, a riot developed and two of them where shot dead. Hoover then ordered the army to
The publisher was disappointed with the sales of the non-fiction books, Death In The Afternoon (which some accounts suggest only just broke even) and Green Hills Of Africa, and even Hemingway’s third collection of short stories, Winner Take Nothing, had not sold as well as hoped and expected.
To Hemingway’s immense irritation, he was also under pressure from a largely left-of-centre literary world still in thrall to its sanitised view of Soviet Russia to write more politically engaged fiction — the US was in the middle of its Great Depression. Hemingway had long resisted such political engagement and insisted a writer’s job was to write, not to indulge himself in politics.
As early as 1932 he had written to the Chicago bookseller, Paul Romaine, who was consistently urging him to become more politically engaged
There is no left or right in writing. There is only good writing and bad writing.He did, though, make a notable exception after a great number of Great War veterans working on a government project in the Florida Keys died in the worst hurricane to hit the area in many years on September 2, 1935.
. . .
The veterans were based on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys just over 70 miles towards the mainland from Key West and had been employed, at $30 a month ($592 in 2021) plus free bed and board, on a Federal Emergency Relief Administration (F.E.R.A.) scheme to build bridges and roads to link the Florida Keys.
In 1934, Monroe County, to which Key West belonged, had declared bankruptcy, and unemployment on the island had risen by 80% after the naval base and many of its factories were closed down. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, the his government planned to revitalise Key West by turning it into an attractive tourist destination, and to do that it needed to improve access.
By 1933, just under four years after the Wall Street crash, one in four of every American citizen able to work was unemployed, but the then President, Republican Herbert Hoover, stubbornly refused to spend government money on social welfare schemes. He insisted that in time the US economy would sort itself out, and for him the Great War veterans were an embarrassment.
In 1924, the vets had been promised a war service bonus, but it was not due to be paid until 1945; so in 1932, 17,000 veterans — calling themselves the ‘Bonus Expeditionary Force’ — petitioned the government to pay the bonus early. They gathered in Washington and were joined by another 27,000 hungry men, women and children, living in shanty camps in and around the capitol. Hoover’s government dismissed the vets’ request and told them to return home.
When the protesters ignored the order and police were sent in to evict them from government property they had occupied, a riot developed and two of them where shot dead. Hoover then ordered the army to
drive the 44,000 protesters out of Washington at gunpoint. Unsurprisingly, in a landslide Democrat victory, he was voted out of office the following November by the Democrat Roosevelt, who, once inaugurated in March 1933, set about trying to get the US economy going again. F.E.R.A. was created as one of his measures.
. . .
Hurricanes were a seasonal hazard in the Florida Keys, but the September 2, 1935, Labor Day hurricane was particularly strong. Its force was badly underestimated and its position was not well-known by the then US Weather Bureau, which had initially warned of a ‘rainy windstorm’. By the time the danger from the storm was apparent and it was thought wise to evacuate the veterans, it was far too late.
The evacuation plan involved a train being sent south from the mainland, but first it had to be assembled — because of a misunderstanding the deputy administrator on duty thought it was on already standby and summoned it far too late — and it didn’t leave Miami until mid-afternoon on September 2 when the storm was well underway.
The train was then delayed by a steel cable that had been blown across its track in the high winds which had to be cleared. When it finally arrived in Upper Matecumbe, the whole train except the heavier locomotive was blown over and derailed.
The vets had been housed, despite warnings from locals when the vets and their families had arrived, in flimsy wooden shacks on the Matecumbe Keys beaches and had no protection whatsoever. Even many of
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The vets had been housed in flimsy wooden shacks on the Matecumbe Keys beaches, but the storm was so fierce, even solid brick buildings where many of them sheltered with the locals were badly damaged or destroyed. The train sent down from the mainland to evacuate the vets was blown of its track and only the heavier locomotive was left standing |
They were blown out to sea, struck by flying debris, drowned in towering waves, and many bodies were washed into the trees where they decomposed over the following days in the hot sun. Figures on how many veterans and locals died in the hurricane vary from between 300 to more than 1,000.
Hemingway visited the scene a few days later, and the appalling death and devastation the hurricane had caused moved him he write and publish in the left-wing journal New Masses — in response to a request
from the journal, a point that is rarely made — a polemical piece taking the authorities to task for sending the veterans to the Keys during hurricane season.
Hemingway entitled his piece Who Killed These Men?, but to his immense irritation and without his permission, the New Masses editor changed it to Who Murdered The Vets? It began by asking
Whom did [the veterans] annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger? Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths?He continued
[The writer of this article] does know that wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months. Hurricane months are August, September and October, and in those months you see no yachts along the Keys. You do not see them because yacht owners know there would be great danger, inescapable danger, to their property if a storm should come . . . But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans are not property, they are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have is to lose their lives.Describing the scene and the dead vets he saw, he wrote
. . . you found [the vets’ bodies] high in the trees where the water had swept them. You found them everywhere and in the sun all of them were beginning to be far too big for their blues jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.
. . .
It was an effective piece, but a distinct rarity among his writing. Hemingway, who strongly believed in ‘small government’ and the least possible official involvement, had previously been very sniffy about F.E.R.A. and its activities, and in Green Hills Of Africa had described it as some
. . . sort of YMCA show. Starry-eyed bastards spending money that somebody will have to pay. Everybody in our town quit work to go on relief. Fishermen all turned carpenters. Reverse of the Bible.Pertinently, though, the piece for New Masses was journalism not fiction, and he still believed that writers should steer clear of politics. He made that clear a few years later in his introduction Men At War, his selection of ‘war writings’. He insisted
The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. It’s too easy. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.Quite apart from his views about writers and politics, this observation is typical of Hemingway (as John Raeburn might have pointed out): yet again he implies — almost underlines without directly saying so — that he is the ‘expert’ and the one with the ‘real gen’, the ‘insider’. His subtext is clearly ‘but I, Ernest Hemingway, unlike many, am not only able to do the hardest thing in the world, but I both know about human beings and how to write’.
An irony is that Hemingway was still in his early forties when he wrote the above and had published just four novels and three collections of short stories: his boast that ‘writing takes a lifetime to learn’ would be a little more acceptable — and a little less self-regarding — from a writer who had at least come close to completing his three score and ten and had rather more published work to his name.
. . .
Halfway through the 1930s Hemingway suffered a severe and prolonged bout of depression, but it seems to have become particularly acute in 1936. Although he had experienced depressions throughout his life (with some biographers suggesting that he, like his father who shot himself in 1928, might have been bi-polar), this episode was worse than anything he had suffered for some time.
Whether or not this latest deep bout was the mooted bi-polar cycle at its lowest ebb, or whether there were definite causes would be impossible to establish; but enjoying success for several years, he was now having to accept that much was no longer going his way.
After the triumphant reception of his first two novels and his first two collections of short stories, the overwhelmingly negative reaction, both critical and public, to his recently published works of non-fiction upset him far more than he cared to admit.
At first the critics and the public did not know what to make of the new direction he had taken. In the Pull Of Politics, Milton Cohen observes
The reviews of Death In The Afternoon were more puzzled than disrespectful; this was, after all, Hemingway's first book after his acclaimed A Farewell To Arms, and in 1932 his reputation was still riding that wave of critical adulation.Then came his third volume of original short stories, and he was disappointed by its rather paler performance. Cohen writes
The collection of stories that followed in 1933, Winner Take Nothing, also received mixed reviews. Some were now edged with impatience since it was clear from the stories that Hemingway’s indifference to the times in Death In The Afternoon was not an anomaly and that the author had not at all changed his theme and focus from the 1920s – themes such as existential despair that did not speak to the Depression 30s.
Since the short story was a Hemingway specialty, the mixed reviews stung even more than those of the bullfight book, suggesting either that something was amiss with the fundamentals of Hemingway’s writing, or, as he preferred to believe, that the critics were just out to get him for not conforming to the times.
In The Nation William Troy’s scathing dismissal was simply that
In The Nation William Troy’s scathing dismissal was simply that
It is among Mr Hemingway’s admirers that the suspicion is being most strongly created that the champion is losing, if he has not already lost, his hold.
Troy’s own view of the collection of stories was that it was
. . . the poorest and least interesting writing [Hemingway] has ever placed in public view.
When Green Hills Of Africa, the work that followed his volume of stories, was also dismissed, quite brutally by some critics, Hemingway convinced himself that the critics hated him and made his view plain.
Statements such as this from Granville Hicks in the left-wing New Masses in which he candidly queried whether Hemingway had simply lost it will not have helped one bit:
He is also likely to have read the sober assessment of his recent work by the poet John Peale Bishop, published towards the end of 1936 in The New Republic. Bishop had known Hemingway well in the Paris years, from when he was still unpublished until after A Farewell To Arms appeared, but he had then lost touch.
In his piece, entitled Homage To Hemingway, Bishop had nothing but praise for the unknown young writer he had met in Paris in 1922. The Hemingway he then knew, he wrote,
Like the other critics, Bishop was unimpressed by Green Hills Of Africa, which he described it as ‘hard-boiled’. He goes on to elaborate:
Milton Cohen alludes to another worry which might have been darkening Hemingway’s spirits — that less than ten years on from the ‘shocking’ impact of his novel The Sun Also Rises and the subsequent hi-falutin’ claims that it described the ‘despair’ of the younger generation, Hemingway was now out of touch.
The world had moved on and so had he, but in a different direction. Cohen writes that in the negative reviews of his works of non-fiction
They had been impressed by his polemic Who Killed The Vets? in New Masses and were convinced he could be persuaded to throw in his lot with them, so he would write the ‘socially-engaged’, political work they were demanding.
After the lack of success of Hemingway’s last three works — more a comparative lack in the case of his short stories — pressure, which he could no longer ignore, also came from the from his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s who increasingly urged to produce new fiction.
Perkins, who always indulged Hemingway a great deal and had agreed to publish Death In The Afternoon against his better judgment, had been dismayed by the poor sales of Hemingway’s non-fiction books and again urged him to write another novel.
Statements such as this from Granville Hicks in the left-wing New Masses in which he candidly queried whether Hemingway had simply lost it will not have helped one bit:
He is very bitter about the critics and very bold in asserting his independence of them, so bitter and so bold that one detects signs of a bad conscience . . . Would Hemingway write better books if he wrote on different themes? ‘Who Murdered The Vets?’ suggests he would . . . In six years Hemingway has not produced a book even remotely worthy of his talents.Hicks’s left-handed concession — that Hemingway still had ‘talents’ — will have done little to soften the blow. And though publicly Hemingway’s attitude was stout-hearted defiance, privately, it seems, he became ever more depressed.
He is also likely to have read the sober assessment of his recent work by the poet John Peale Bishop, published towards the end of 1936 in The New Republic. Bishop had known Hemingway well in the Paris years, from when he was still unpublished until after A Farewell To Arms appeared, but he had then lost touch.
In his piece, entitled Homage To Hemingway, Bishop had nothing but praise for the unknown young writer he had met in Paris in 1922. The Hemingway he then knew, he wrote,
had many of the faults of the artist, some, such as vanity, to an exaggerated degree . . . . [but these] were compensated for by extraordinary literary virtues.He added that Hemingway
was instinctively intelligent, disinterested, and not given to talking nonsense. Toward his craft he was humble, and had, moreover, the most completely literary integrity it has ever been my lot to encounter.This was high praise indeed, so Hemingway, in the depths of his depression and assailed, he believed, on all sides, must have been disheartened by Bishop’s observation that by 1936
he has become the legendary Hemingway. He appears to have turned into a composite of all those photographs he has been sending out for years: sunburned from snows, on skis; in fishing get-up, burned dark from the hot Caribbean; the handsome, stalwart hunter crouched smiling over the carcass of some dead beast. Such a man could have written most of Green Hills Of Africa.
Like the other critics, Bishop was unimpressed by Green Hills Of Africa, which he described it as ‘hard-boiled’. He goes on to elaborate:
If that word is to mean anything, it must mean indifference to suffering and, since we are what we are, can but signify a callousness to others’ pain. When I say that the young Hemingway was among the tenderest of mortals, I do not speak out of private knowledge, but from the evidence of his writings. He could be, as any artist must in this world, if he is to get his work done, ruthless. He wrote courageously, but out of pity; having been hurt, and badly hurt, he could understand the pain of others. His heart was worn, as was the fashion of the times, up his sleeve and not on it. It was always there and his best tricks were won with it. Now, according to the little preface to Green Hills of Africa, he seems to think that having discarded that half-concealed card, he plays more honestly. He does not. For with the heart the innate honesty of the artist is gone. And he loses the game.This will no have been easy reading for Hemingway who is more than likely to have been aware of it.
Milton Cohen alludes to another worry which might have been darkening Hemingway’s spirits — that less than ten years on from the ‘shocking’ impact of his novel The Sun Also Rises and the subsequent hi-falutin’ claims that it described the ‘despair’ of the younger generation, Hemingway was now out of touch.
The world had moved on and so had he, but in a different direction. Cohen writes that in the negative reviews of his works of non-fiction
one senses not merely disapproval but exasperation with Hemingway’s assumptions that the American public of 1935 – still staggering under a worldwide economic depression, and now confronting the rise of Nazism and the aggression of Italian fashion fascism – would thrill the expensive adventures of the sportsman in a far-off land and eagerly devour his most casually delivered pontifications on American literature and letters. To the economic and issues of the day the book is serenely indifferent — except to the leftist critics who have dared to criticize the author.Finally the penny dropped: despite Hemingway’s misgivings and his long-held conviction that writers should not be political, he capitulated to the pressure from his left-wing literary peers.
They had been impressed by his polemic Who Killed The Vets? in New Masses and were convinced he could be persuaded to throw in his lot with them, so he would write the ‘socially-engaged’, political work they were demanding.
. . .
After the lack of success of Hemingway’s last three works — more a comparative lack in the case of his short stories — pressure, which he could no longer ignore, also came from the from his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s who increasingly urged to produce new fiction.
Perkins, who always indulged Hemingway a great deal and had agreed to publish Death In The Afternoon against his better judgment, had been dismayed by the poor sales of Hemingway’s non-fiction books and again urged him to write another novel.
To do as he was bidden as well as to assuage the literary left, Hemingway conceived of To Have And Have Not; and although he did not settle on that title until after the writing was well underway, it succinctly expressed what he hoped was the work’s left-wing theme.
But writing it took several years and was not easy, and his confused motivations, method and intentions might explain the literary hotch-potch he eventually delivered to Scribner’s.
There was possibly other pressure on Hemingway to write the novel, but it was pressure he imposed on himself: he is later said to confided in Hollywood director Howard Hawks that he wrote To Have And Have Not because he ‘needed money’.
On the face of it that is an odd admission. In Depression-era 1930s America the Hemingway Key West household income was stable and enviably high; and although he spent a great deal, Hemingway would not have been short of money.
The problem was more personal: his contribution to the household from what his pen earned him was rather smaller than what Pfeiffer contributed from her trust fund: he felt he was living off his wife, and this irked him a great deal, especially in his depressed state in 1936.
In the spring and summer he had written two of his better known short stories, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (which appeared in Esquire in August) and The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber (which Cosmopolitan published in September). Both were an oblique, probably unconscious, commentary on his marriage to Pfeiffer.
Both the stories’ protagonists — Harry, a writer dying of gangrene who feels he has squandered his talent, and Francis Macomber, a coward who redeems himself — resent their wives (who are both thought to have been based jointly on Pfeiffer and Jane Mason with whom he had an affair that ended badly).
Harry feels that by opting for the soft, good life his rich wife’s money provided he has betrayed his talent. Rich Francis Macomber knows that his wife, described by Hemingway as ‘an all-American bitch’, just wants him for his money.
He despises himself because he kow-tows to her and tolerates her infidelity, and he, too, feels he has been corrupted. From letters to, and in conversation with, friends, Hemingway also revealed he felt he had sold out to Pfeiffer’s money.
The claim that Hemingway wrote his novel because he ‘needed money’ was made in In Who The Devil Made It by the Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich in which he records conversations he had with several notable directors of the 1940s and 1950s.
He reports on Howard Hawks recalling the genesis of his film version of To Have And Have Not and telling Bogdanovich that
For his new novel, Hemingway decided to amalgamate two previously published short stories about a hard-done-by jobbing boat owner — One Trip Across, which had appeared in Cosmopolitan, and The Tradesman’s Return, which appeared in Esquire. To conclude the novel, he planned to add a longer novella.
A cynic might suggest that proceeding like that rather than producing original work suggested Hemingway was out of ideas. If he was, that, too, would have weighed on his mind and would not have lightened the dark mood that continued to plague him.
As usual in the autumn (and when the hurricane season precluded deep-sea fishing) in 1936 Hemingway and his family travelled from Key West to spend several months on the L Bar T dude ranch near the Montana and Wyoming border.
There he worked on his new novel in the morning and made good progress, but his depression did no lift. Tommy Shevlin, a young, wealthy fishing friend Hemingway had first met in Bimini and who had been invited to join the Hemingways at the L Bar T, later remembered of his time at the ranch
Hemingway’s planned to write a complex, multi-layered novel incorporating his main theme contrasting the lives of the ‘rich haves’ and the ‘poor have-nots’ as well as examining how revolutions come about.
Although his new work was intended to satisfy the demands from the literary left for a ‘politically engaged’ novel, once it was published in October 1937, many were bemused by the values of its hero.
The ‘have-not’ Harry Morgan was a man who stressed individuality and self-reliance — standard Hemingway themes — so how might he be thought to celebrate the idea of a community working together for the common good — a standard left-of-centre theme? It didn’t add up.
Nor did it help that Morgan turned to crime and then became a cold-blooded murderer. Had Morgan, arguably, been forced to go outside the law by economic circumstance — a rich man, a ‘have’, does not pay Morgan what he is owed — the left might have been assuaged.
But Hemingway’s ‘hero’ then murders a man in cold blood and abandons a boatload of would-be immigrants without a second thought. Such a man was not the paradigm of enlightened, brotherly and socialist behaviour the literary left hoped Hemingway would champion.
Such political quibbles aside, the novel was also deemed to be a mess. The various plots and sub-plots Hemingway planned to include but then abandoned, the shifts in narrative viewpoint (from first to third person, then back to first person), the often melodramatic descriptions and an overall narrative patchiness of a work almost arbitrarily shackled together added to confusion and did not win over the critics. Biographers claim the novel also served to settle scores.
One unpleasant character, the rich ‘have’ Helène Bradley, is believed to be intended to discredit Hemingway’s former lover, Jane Mason (whose supposed alter ego Margot Macomber he described as ‘an all-American bitch’).
Another less than admirable character, the left-wing, drunk, despised, cuckolded and impotent novelist Richard Gordon is thought to be an attack on Hemingway’s — by now nominal — ‘close friend’ John Dos Passos.
Dos Passos and his wife Katy had, independently, both known Hemingway before he became the very well-known ‘Papa’ Hemingway, and they were more than inclined to tease him about his airs and graces. Biographer Carlos Baker reports
The publication of To Have And Have Not did little to halt the downward course Hemingway’s literary reputation. Sales began well — they reached 36,000 in the first few months and Jeffrey Meyers suggests that a reading public that had waited eight years for a new ‘Hemingway novel’ were keen to buy it; but to Scribner’s continuing disappointment they then tailed off and did not match those of Hemingway’s previous two novels.
In fact, it is possible that Scribner’s were pessimistic from the outset, and fearing low sales after the poor reception of Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa, the house ordered an initial print run for To Have And Have Not of just 10,000 copies — for A Farewell To Arms the initial print run was 30,000.
Nor is it the title of Hemingway’s novel which still resonates with the public today: when we hear of To Have And Have Not, we are more likely to recall the Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
In fact, the only thing the film has in common with Hemingway’s novel is its title, the names of several protagonists and details from its opening chapter. (In his conversation with Bogdanovich, Hawks admits that the only element he valued in Hemingway’s ‘bunch of junk’ was the passionate relationship between Harry Morgan and his wife Marie and he used it as the core of his film.)
If the left-wing was unimpressed with Hemingway’s new novel, the critics were also underwhelmed. One New York Times reviewer chose to look on the bright side and wrote that
Hemingway’s affair with Martha Gellhorn began at some point after they first met in Sloppy Joe’s Key West bar in December 1936. Gellhorn, her mother Edna and brother Alfred had decided on a break off the beaten track after her father Dr George Gellhorn died, and somehow ended up in Key West.
Gellhorn meeting Hemingway is usually portrayed and accepted as a chance encounter, but one of Hemingway’s more recent biographers, Mary Dearborn, has suggested it was engineered by Gellhorn because she wanted to meet Hemingway.
One wonders why a respectable, newly-widowed upper middle-class St Louis woman and her two adult children would not just choose to travel to a then out-of-the-way island which was not yet a tourist destination, but decide to have a drink in a down-at-heel bar such as Sloppy Joe’s.
In short, Dearborn might have a point. Gellhorn had long been a fan of Hemingway’s writing and was then still an aspiring writer with a novel and a volume of short stories to her name (although it has rather cattily been claimed that her ambitions were greater than her talent).
She will have known Hemingway lived in Key West and might have heard he drank at Sloppy Joe’s, but whether she suggested visiting Key West or that meeting him really was just happenstance can now never be known.
The affair was not Hemingway’s first since marrying Pauline Pfeiffer seven years earlier, although despite his juvenile macho boasting of ‘whoring’, he is unlikely to have had any others in the 1930s except with Jane Kendall Mason.
He met Jane Mason (left) when sailing back to the US from Europe in the autumn of 1931. He and Pfeiffer, heavily pregnant with their third son Gregory, came to know fellow passengers Grant Mason and his young, very good-looking and — Hemingway’s later description — uninhibited wife Jane.
The Masons lived in Cuba, in a very grand style, and both were rich in their own right. Grant Mason had co-founded Pan American Airways four years earlier and ran its central American and Caribbean operations; his wife, just 22 when she met Hemingway, had modelled for a Pond’s Cold Cream ad (which was, it seems, the sum total of her modelling career).
She was said, much to Hemingway’s later appreciation, to have been an excellent shot, a marvellous fisherwoman, excelled at most sports and could certainly match Hemingway for hard drinking.
She also partied hard, and the festivities the Masons organised at their mansion in Jaimanitas to the west of Havana were said sometimes to have lasted for over 24 hours.
Hemingway first visited Cuba after he had completed Death In The Afternoon in January 1932 and in April, alerted to the marlin that swam off the Cuban coast, he decided on a short trip to the island.
The trip was soon extended and lasted several months, and until he moved to Cuba in 1939, he spent months on end in Cuba away from Key West, for the fishing and the bar-life. He and Pfeiffer, who regularly took the ferry from Key West to visit her husband, became friends and socialised with the Masons.
At first Jane Mason accompanied Hemingway fishing for marlin and pigeon shooting, but as some point their affair began, and they are believed to have met for sex in room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana where Hemingway always stayed.
Biographers report that after the birth of Hemingway’s third child, Gregory, in late 1931, doctors had again warned Pfeiffer against another pregnancy, and to avoid another conception she again insisted that the only intercourse she would have with her husband should involve coitus interruptus; thus their sex life came to an end.
Many years later, divorced from Hemingway and having lost her strong Roman Catholic faith, this seems to have been confirmed by Pfeiffer who reportedly told a friend
How long the affair between Hemingway and Mason lasted is uncertain. Jeffery Meyers says it was on and off for four years. Another account describes it as just a short ‘two-month’ affair, and Michael Reynolds doubts there even was a liaison.
He argues that Pfeiffer was often in Havana and continuing an affair would have been impossible. He doesn’t, though, seem to have considered what Hemingway and Jane might have got up to when Pfeiffer was safely back in Key West 90 miles away.
At one point Jane, who was said to have been emotionally unstable, jumped off a second-floor balcony at her Jaimanitas mansion in an apparent suicide attempt and broke her back.
The incident came two days after the car she was driving, with Jack and Patrick Hemingway and her son Anthony as passengers, was forced off the road and rolled down an embankment.
No one was hurt, but whether jumping from the balcony had anything to do with her subsequent state of mind after the crash or the state of her affair with Hemingway (or possibly for some other reason) is not known. It did, though, lead Hemingway to make the tacky quip that Jane had literally ‘fallen for him’.
Some biographers have speculated that Hemingway was lining up Jane to be the third Mrs Hemingway, but that after she jumped from the balcony, he decided that she was too unstable. They also suggest he still wanted to father a daughter and Mason’s infertility also had a bearing on his reluctance.
In the wake of the incident, her husband had her treated for psychological problems and she had to spend a whole year in a brace.
Reynolds’s doubts notwithstanding, Pfeiffer is believed to have been quite aware of her husband’s affair with Jane, as was Jane’s husband Grant; but whereas Grant apparently simply did not care, Pfeiffer took the view that it would eventually burn itself out, as ironically Hadley Richardson had when Pfeiffer was having her liaison with Hemingway in Paris.
The affair eventually did end, but it did so badly, although the details are obscure. Despite Hemingway’s tacky joke, he would seem it was he who had fallen for Mason and he most certainly could not abide rivals.
‘Uninhibited’ Jane refused to restrict herself to just one lover and began an affair with a white hunter she had met on safari in East Africa.
When the man arrived in the US to see her, their sexual relationship continued, and Jane made no effort to conceal it from Hemingway; the situation became too much for him and he called it a day.
But never one to settle for being bested, he had his revenge: biographers agree that the femme fatale Margot Macomber, who shoots her husband in the back of the head — an accident or murder? — and he rich and nasty Helène Bradley in his novel To Have And Have Not, and were based on Jane Mason.
Both are portrayed as distinctly unpleasant women. Hemingway’s description of Margot in The Short Happy Live Of Francis Macomber quite possibly reflects how he felt about her once their affair had ended: Margot was
But writing it took several years and was not easy, and his confused motivations, method and intentions might explain the literary hotch-potch he eventually delivered to Scribner’s.
There was possibly other pressure on Hemingway to write the novel, but it was pressure he imposed on himself: he is later said to confided in Hollywood director Howard Hawks that he wrote To Have And Have Not because he ‘needed money’.
On the face of it that is an odd admission. In Depression-era 1930s America the Hemingway Key West household income was stable and enviably high; and although he spent a great deal, Hemingway would not have been short of money.
The problem was more personal: his contribution to the household from what his pen earned him was rather smaller than what Pfeiffer contributed from her trust fund: he felt he was living off his wife, and this irked him a great deal, especially in his depressed state in 1936.
In the spring and summer he had written two of his better known short stories, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (which appeared in Esquire in August) and The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber (which Cosmopolitan published in September). Both were an oblique, probably unconscious, commentary on his marriage to Pfeiffer.
Both the stories’ protagonists — Harry, a writer dying of gangrene who feels he has squandered his talent, and Francis Macomber, a coward who redeems himself — resent their wives (who are both thought to have been based jointly on Pfeiffer and Jane Mason with whom he had an affair that ended badly).
Harry feels that by opting for the soft, good life his rich wife’s money provided he has betrayed his talent. Rich Francis Macomber knows that his wife, described by Hemingway as ‘an all-American bitch’, just wants him for his money.
He despises himself because he kow-tows to her and tolerates her infidelity, and he, too, feels he has been corrupted. From letters to, and in conversation with, friends, Hemingway also revealed he felt he had sold out to Pfeiffer’s money.
The claim that Hemingway wrote his novel because he ‘needed money’ was made in In Who The Devil Made It by the Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich in which he records conversations he had with several notable directors of the 1940s and 1950s.
He reports on Howard Hawks recalling the genesis of his film version of To Have And Have Not and telling Bogdanovich that
[when] I told Hemingway I could make a picture out of his worst book, he said, rather grumpily, ‘What’s my worst book?’ I said, ‘That bunch of junk called ‘To Have and Have Not.’Hemingway then justified writing ‘that bunch of junk’ because he ‘needed money’ according to Hawks.
For his new novel, Hemingway decided to amalgamate two previously published short stories about a hard-done-by jobbing boat owner — One Trip Across, which had appeared in Cosmopolitan, and The Tradesman’s Return, which appeared in Esquire. To conclude the novel, he planned to add a longer novella.
A cynic might suggest that proceeding like that rather than producing original work suggested Hemingway was out of ideas. If he was, that, too, would have weighed on his mind and would not have lightened the dark mood that continued to plague him.
As usual in the autumn (and when the hurricane season precluded deep-sea fishing) in 1936 Hemingway and his family travelled from Key West to spend several months on the L Bar T dude ranch near the Montana and Wyoming border.
There he worked on his new novel in the morning and made good progress, but his depression did no lift. Tommy Shevlin, a young, wealthy fishing friend Hemingway had first met in Bimini and who had been invited to join the Hemingways at the L Bar T, later remembered of his time at the ranch
It’s extraordinary the number of times [Hemingway] mentioned suicide.Michael Reynolds writes
For a thirty-seven-year-old man at the height of his physical and mental powers, Hemingway was inordinately drawn to the contemplation of his own demiseHe says that
he had written Pauline’s mother that the Pfeiffer bloodline was what his children needed ‘to try to breed some of the suicide streak’ out of them.At about the same time Hemingway told his friend Archibald MacLeish
Me I like life very much. So much it will be a big disgust when I have to shoot myself.His talk of a family ‘suicide streak’ is rather lurid, but arguably there was one: Hemingway’s father, Ed, killed himself in 1928, Hemingway blew his head of in 1961, his sister Ursula took her life five years after Hemingway’s death, his brother Leicester killed himself 15 years later and his granddaughter Margaux taking a barbiturate overdose in 1996.
. . .
Hemingway’s planned to write a complex, multi-layered novel incorporating his main theme contrasting the lives of the ‘rich haves’ and the ‘poor have-nots’ as well as examining how revolutions come about.
Although his new work was intended to satisfy the demands from the literary left for a ‘politically engaged’ novel, once it was published in October 1937, many were bemused by the values of its hero.
The ‘have-not’ Harry Morgan was a man who stressed individuality and self-reliance — standard Hemingway themes — so how might he be thought to celebrate the idea of a community working together for the common good — a standard left-of-centre theme? It didn’t add up.
Nor did it help that Morgan turned to crime and then became a cold-blooded murderer. Had Morgan, arguably, been forced to go outside the law by economic circumstance — a rich man, a ‘have’, does not pay Morgan what he is owed — the left might have been assuaged.
But Hemingway’s ‘hero’ then murders a man in cold blood and abandons a boatload of would-be immigrants without a second thought. Such a man was not the paradigm of enlightened, brotherly and socialist behaviour the literary left hoped Hemingway would champion.
Such political quibbles aside, the novel was also deemed to be a mess. The various plots and sub-plots Hemingway planned to include but then abandoned, the shifts in narrative viewpoint (from first to third person, then back to first person), the often melodramatic descriptions and an overall narrative patchiness of a work almost arbitrarily shackled together added to confusion and did not win over the critics. Biographers claim the novel also served to settle scores.
One unpleasant character, the rich ‘have’ Helène Bradley, is believed to be intended to discredit Hemingway’s former lover, Jane Mason (whose supposed alter ego Margot Macomber he described as ‘an all-American bitch’).
Another less than admirable character, the left-wing, drunk, despised, cuckolded and impotent novelist Richard Gordon is thought to be an attack on Hemingway’s — by now nominal — ‘close friend’ John Dos Passos.
Dos Passos and his wife Katy had, independently, both known Hemingway before he became the very well-known ‘Papa’ Hemingway, and they were more than inclined to tease him about his airs and graces. Biographer Carlos Baker reports
As old and easygoing friends Dos and Katy did their best to keep him “kidded down to size”. In their eyes he had become a shade to conspicuously ‘the famous author the great sports-fisherman, the mighty African hunter’.Ever prickly and sensitive to criticism, it is unlikely that Hemingway took kindly to such ribbing and is thought to have taken his revenge. The character of he based on Katy Dos Passos, nee Smith, he wrote
likes to steal as much as a monkey does.It was an open secret that Katy Smith suffered from kleptomania. His Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (with whom Hemingway also eventually fell out) persuaded him to delete or tone down some of the more libellous passages.
The publication of To Have And Have Not did little to halt the downward course Hemingway’s literary reputation. Sales began well — they reached 36,000 in the first few months and Jeffrey Meyers suggests that a reading public that had waited eight years for a new ‘Hemingway novel’ were keen to buy it; but to Scribner’s continuing disappointment they then tailed off and did not match those of Hemingway’s previous two novels.
In fact, it is possible that Scribner’s were pessimistic from the outset, and fearing low sales after the poor reception of Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa, the house ordered an initial print run for To Have And Have Not of just 10,000 copies — for A Farewell To Arms the initial print run was 30,000.
Nor is it the title of Hemingway’s novel which still resonates with the public today: when we hear of To Have And Have Not, we are more likely to recall the Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
In fact, the only thing the film has in common with Hemingway’s novel is its title, the names of several protagonists and details from its opening chapter. (In his conversation with Bogdanovich, Hawks admits that the only element he valued in Hemingway’s ‘bunch of junk’ was the passionate relationship between Harry Morgan and his wife Marie and he used it as the core of his film.)
If the left-wing was unimpressed with Hemingway’s new novel, the critics were also underwhelmed. One New York Times reviewer chose to look on the bright side and wrote that
Like an inventor without a patent, [Hemingway] has lived to see other men make more money out of the way of writing he developed. But no one else can use it with his integrity, force and precision.But he did note in the novel ‘the disjointedness of an expanded short story’. Another Times reviewer, J. Donald Adams, commented that
The famous Hemingway dialogue reveals itself as never before in its true nature. It is false to life, cut to a purely mechanized formula. You cannot separate the speech of one character from another and tell who is speaking. They all talk alike.And pre-dating Bruccoli’s later observation on the gradual decline in the quality of Hemingway’s work, he observed
‘[Hemingway] has moved steadily toward mastery of his technique, though that is by no means the perfect instrument it has been praised for being. Technique, however, is not enough to make a great writer, and that is what we have been asked to believe Mr Hemingway was in process of becoming. The indications of such a growth are absent from this book, as they have been absent from everything Mr. Hemingway has written since A Farewell to Arms. There is evidence of no mental growth whatever; there is no better understanding of life, no increase in his power to illuminate it or even to present it. Essentially, this new novel is an empty book.’He concluded
In spite of its frequent strength as narrative writing, To Have and Have Not is a novel distinctly inferior to A Farewell to Arms . . . Mr. Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.
. . .
Hemingway’s affair with Martha Gellhorn began at some point after they first met in Sloppy Joe’s Key West bar in December 1936. Gellhorn, her mother Edna and brother Alfred had decided on a break off the beaten track after her father Dr George Gellhorn died, and somehow ended up in Key West.
Gellhorn meeting Hemingway is usually portrayed and accepted as a chance encounter, but one of Hemingway’s more recent biographers, Mary Dearborn, has suggested it was engineered by Gellhorn because she wanted to meet Hemingway.
One wonders why a respectable, newly-widowed upper middle-class St Louis woman and her two adult children would not just choose to travel to a then out-of-the-way island which was not yet a tourist destination, but decide to have a drink in a down-at-heel bar such as Sloppy Joe’s.
In short, Dearborn might have a point. Gellhorn had long been a fan of Hemingway’s writing and was then still an aspiring writer with a novel and a volume of short stories to her name (although it has rather cattily been claimed that her ambitions were greater than her talent).
She will have known Hemingway lived in Key West and might have heard he drank at Sloppy Joe’s, but whether she suggested visiting Key West or that meeting him really was just happenstance can now never be known.
The affair was not Hemingway’s first since marrying Pauline Pfeiffer seven years earlier, although despite his juvenile macho boasting of ‘whoring’, he is unlikely to have had any others in the 1930s except with Jane Kendall Mason.
The Masons lived in Cuba, in a very grand style, and both were rich in their own right. Grant Mason had co-founded Pan American Airways four years earlier and ran its central American and Caribbean operations; his wife, just 22 when she met Hemingway, had modelled for a Pond’s Cold Cream ad (which was, it seems, the sum total of her modelling career).
She was said, much to Hemingway’s later appreciation, to have been an excellent shot, a marvellous fisherwoman, excelled at most sports and could certainly match Hemingway for hard drinking.
She also partied hard, and the festivities the Masons organised at their mansion in Jaimanitas to the west of Havana were said sometimes to have lasted for over 24 hours.
Hemingway first visited Cuba after he had completed Death In The Afternoon in January 1932 and in April, alerted to the marlin that swam off the Cuban coast, he decided on a short trip to the island.
The trip was soon extended and lasted several months, and until he moved to Cuba in 1939, he spent months on end in Cuba away from Key West, for the fishing and the bar-life. He and Pfeiffer, who regularly took the ferry from Key West to visit her husband, became friends and socialised with the Masons.
At first Jane Mason accompanied Hemingway fishing for marlin and pigeon shooting, but as some point their affair began, and they are believed to have met for sex in room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana where Hemingway always stayed.
Biographers report that after the birth of Hemingway’s third child, Gregory, in late 1931, doctors had again warned Pfeiffer against another pregnancy, and to avoid another conception she again insisted that the only intercourse she would have with her husband should involve coitus interruptus; thus their sex life came to an end.
Many years later, divorced from Hemingway and having lost her strong Roman Catholic faith, this seems to have been confirmed by Pfeiffer who reportedly told a friend
If I hadn’t been such a bloody fool practicing [US spelling] Catholic, I wouldn’t have lost my husband.One of the many attractions Jane Mason is said to have held for Hemingway was that she was unable to conceive and there was no need to use contraception. (She and her husband adopted two boys, but their sons’ upbringing was largely left to staff.)
How long the affair between Hemingway and Mason lasted is uncertain. Jeffery Meyers says it was on and off for four years. Another account describes it as just a short ‘two-month’ affair, and Michael Reynolds doubts there even was a liaison.
He argues that Pfeiffer was often in Havana and continuing an affair would have been impossible. He doesn’t, though, seem to have considered what Hemingway and Jane might have got up to when Pfeiffer was safely back in Key West 90 miles away.
At one point Jane, who was said to have been emotionally unstable, jumped off a second-floor balcony at her Jaimanitas mansion in an apparent suicide attempt and broke her back.
The incident came two days after the car she was driving, with Jack and Patrick Hemingway and her son Anthony as passengers, was forced off the road and rolled down an embankment.
No one was hurt, but whether jumping from the balcony had anything to do with her subsequent state of mind after the crash or the state of her affair with Hemingway (or possibly for some other reason) is not known. It did, though, lead Hemingway to make the tacky quip that Jane had literally ‘fallen for him’.
Some biographers have speculated that Hemingway was lining up Jane to be the third Mrs Hemingway, but that after she jumped from the balcony, he decided that she was too unstable. They also suggest he still wanted to father a daughter and Mason’s infertility also had a bearing on his reluctance.
In the wake of the incident, her husband had her treated for psychological problems and she had to spend a whole year in a brace.
Reynolds’s doubts notwithstanding, Pfeiffer is believed to have been quite aware of her husband’s affair with Jane, as was Jane’s husband Grant; but whereas Grant apparently simply did not care, Pfeiffer took the view that it would eventually burn itself out, as ironically Hadley Richardson had when Pfeiffer was having her liaison with Hemingway in Paris.
The affair eventually did end, but it did so badly, although the details are obscure. Despite Hemingway’s tacky joke, he would seem it was he who had fallen for Mason and he most certainly could not abide rivals.
‘Uninhibited’ Jane refused to restrict herself to just one lover and began an affair with a white hunter she had met on safari in East Africa.
When the man arrived in the US to see her, their sexual relationship continued, and Jane made no effort to conceal it from Hemingway; the situation became too much for him and he called it a day.
But never one to settle for being bested, he had his revenge: biographers agree that the femme fatale Margot Macomber, who shoots her husband in the back of the head — an accident or murder? — and he rich and nasty Helène Bradley in his novel To Have And Have Not, and were based on Jane Mason.
Both are portrayed as distinctly unpleasant women. Hemingway’s description of Margot in The Short Happy Live Of Francis Macomber quite possibly reflects how he felt about her once their affair had ended: Margot was
enamelled [sic] in that American female cruelty.According to biographer Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway confirms that he chose Jane as his model for Margo Macomber in an essay he wrote in 1959 (but which was not published for another 22 years) called The Art Of The Short Story. He wrote
I invented her complete with handles from the worst bitch I knew (then) and when I first knew her she’d been lovely. Not my dish, not my pigeon, not my cup of tea, but lovely for what she was, and I was her all of the above, which is whatever you make of it.
An irony is that despite Hemingway’s subsequent disingenuous claim she was not his ‘dish, pigeon or cup of tea’, he did all the running in the affair, not Jane, who knew she was very attractive and was never short of admirers; and it was undoubtedly Jane who added the anonymous, jokey and teasing entry in the log of his 35ft-cruiser Pilar that ‘Ernest loves Jane’.
As for Grant Mason, he is believed to have been Hemingway’s model for Helène Bradley’s playboy husband Tommy. The two men did not get on, but did not fall out, either, but are said simply to have been indifferent one another.
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