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.
Yet, details, the perjuries of personal recollection, the innocent or dishonest lies of friends, may not really constitute the life. If one knew everything there was to know about a writer’s at some phase of his or her career (the moments say of Hemingway’s brooding observations on life and writing and the Gulf Stream), would one know everything that might be known about the writing, its banal origins, its hidden motivations? Or, as in a photograph, is the angle of the light, etched in certainty, simply a matter of the moment and misleading?James R Mellow, Hemingway — A Life Without Consequences.In spite of Ernest’s high hopes and preliminary vauntings Across The River was received that September with boredom and dismay. The American reviews bristled with such adjectives as disappointing, embarrassing, distressing, trivial, tawdry, garrulous and tired. Many said that the book read like a parody of his former style.Carlos Baker, official biographer.How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?John Dos Passos in a letter to a friend.IN THE years after returning home to Cuba, Hemingway’s health, which had increasingly taken a battering, went into a slow decline. He did have a strong constitution when he was younger, but the two concussions he suffered in Europe in 1944, both of which went untreated, and his steady excessive drinking were taking their toll.
Now in middle age, his metabolism was less able to deal with the stresses to which he subjected it, and age was slowly making itself felt. (He was upset that the thick head of dark hair he once had was getting ever thinner and had long had to wear spectacles for his poor eyesight, although he rarely wore them in public.)
His blood pressure was again dangerously high and he was again overweight. He was now taking a variety of medications to deal with his ailments, including his chronic insomnia, and he did make an effort to cut back in drinking and watch his weight; but by 1948 he decided an extended break in Italy might do him good.
It would be a belated honeymoon for him and Mary and a trip down memory lane during which he could show his wife various places he had known as a younger man, including the spot on the Pave River where he had been blown up by an Austrian mortar 30 years earlier.
One irony, as Michael Reynolds points out, was that thus he was ignoring his own advice. In 1921, after a trip with Hadley Richardson to find that same spot and failing because the landscape had already recovered from the devastation of war, he filed and sold to the Toronto Daily Star a short feature in which he advised readersDon’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened in the night in Paschendale [sic] or in the first wave working up the slope in Vimy, do not go back to verify them. It is not good . . . it is like going into the empty gloom of a theater where the charwomen are scrubbing.He and Welsh set off in September 1948 and docked at Genoa after a four-week voyage. They toured northern Italy, taking in Stresa, Bergamo and Cortina d’Ampezzo (which he had visited with Hadley and where he based his short story Out Of Season and where Welsh rented a villa for them for the following few months).
Towards the end of October they reached Venice and settled in the very expensive Hotel Gritti Palace. It was on this trip that in mid-December at the home of new hunting friends Hemingway met Adriana Ivancich (left), the daughter of an impoverished family of Venetian nobility.
At just a month short of her 19th birthday, she was 30 years younger, but he was smitten, and after spending Christmas at the rented Cortina villa, he returned to Venice for two weeks (without Welsh) to meet her again.
A few weeks later, an eye infection developed into erysipelas and he was kept in hospital in Padua as a precaution (although his life was never in danger as was later claimed for publicity purposes), then he and Welsh returned to the Gritti Hotel in Venice. Before leaving Italy to return to Cuba, he saw Ivancich (and her chaperone) several times.
By then he had started writing a short story which soon evolved into his fifth novel, Across The River And Into The Trees. Hemingway and Welsh set sail back to Cuba in April and were back at the Finca Vigia by the end of May 1949.
On the voyage home, which also took almost a month, Hemingway spent every morning working on his new story and carried on writing it once back at the Finca. He also wrote Ivancich many letters declaring his love for her. He was infatuated.
By September Hemingway said he had written 13,000 words of the story, now well on its way to becoming a novel, and with the assistance of Hotchner had contracted with Cosmopolitan to serialise the opening chapters. (The two stories he had agreed to write for Cosmopolitan nine months earlier were never written.
He claimed one had been written, but that he had not submitted it because it was ‘too rough’.) By the end of October another 13,000 words of his novel had been written, and a second trip to France and Italy was planned.
That November Hemingway and Welsh flew to New York to set off for a second trip to Europe. He had also agreed to spend the best part of three days while in New York with the journalist Lillian Ross who wanted to profile him in the New Yorker.
Ross had first met Hemingway on Christmas Eve, 1947, in Ketchum when she was writing a profile of Sidney Franklin (right), the Jewish matador from Brooklyn, New York. Franklin, originally Frumkin and reputedly known as El Torero de la Torah [the Bullfighter of the Torah], had been with Hemingway in Spain in 1937 and 1938 and Hemingway had given her background of his time and friendship with Franklin.
After their New York meeting in November, Ross’s long, not to say dull and longwinded — the Americans seem to love longwinded — profile, entitled How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? appeared on May 6, 1950, and caused a minor controversy.
The title was taken from a nonsensical phrase Hemingway had for no apparent reason taken to repeating (and is said to have done so for the rest of his life, to Welsh’s increasing irritation).
Ross was accused of trying to make Hemingway look like a fool, and indeed in some ways he does, but it is odd to blame Ross. She simply reproduced what he had said and the jokey way he had adopted of speaking in a kind of pidgin ‘injun’ fashion.
Many also felt Hemingway’s continual use of sports analogies and comparing himself to taking on past literary figures in the boxing ring was also silly. Hemingway had told herI started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.Although Hemingway adopted a nonchalant air about Ross’s feature and reactions to it, it did upset him and he was, according to Meyers, ‘shocked and felt awful’.
In a piece she published in the New Yorker almost 50 years later, Ross denied that the profile showed Hemingway in a bad light. She also insists that before publication the magazine had sent Hemingway proofs and because he had raised no objections she had assumed he was happy with the profile.
To that claim A. E. Hotchner countered that the proofs had not arrived until the Monday of the week of publication — which was on the following Saturday — so there had been no time to make changes.
This is disingenuous: if Hemingway had been upset and had wanted the profile to be amended, a quick phone call to the magazine in New York would surely have been sufficient to delay publication: whatever difficulties that might bring would not be his but the magazine’s concern. At the heart of it all was, as Meyers writes, thatHemingway put on a performance for Ross, expected her to see through his act and show the highbrow readers of her magazine the man behind the rather transparent mask. Instead, she accepted the façade, repaid his generosity with meanness and established her reputation at his expense . . . Though [Hemingway] assumed the role of a dumb ox, constantly spoke with wisecracks and sporting metaphors, he was not as stupid or boorish as Ross’s account suggested. She never recorded or revealed the serious and sensitive side of his character, and chose to portray him as a boring braggart who keeps punching himself in the stomach.In her 1999 New Yorker response, entitled Hemingway Told Me Things: Notes On A Decade’s Correspondence, Ross (left) reports that she and Hemingway had, in fact, kept up an ‘unshakeable’ friendship until his death and had written to each other regularly. Referring to the ‘controversy’ in one letter he urged her to ignore it, she wrote. In another letter he told herAll are very astonished because I don’t hold anything against you who made an effort to destroy me and nearly did, they say. I always tell them how can I be destroyed by a woman when she is a friend of mine and we have never even been to bed and no money has changed hands?Admittedly, Hemingway’s forgiveness seems a little left-handed in that he does claim Ross ‘made an effort’ to destroy him, but he also lets her off the hook.
To others, though, Hemingway did indicate that he wasn’t overly pleased with how Ross had portrayed him, though characteristically he held different positions on the issue depending upon to whom he was talking or writing. In her 1999 response Ross insisted that shewanted to give a picture of this special man as he was, how he looked and sounded, with his vitality, his unique and fun-loaded conversation, and his enormous spirit of truthfulness intact. He had the nerve to be like nobody else on earth, stripping himself — like his writing — of all camouflage and ornament.In retrospect, her claim that Hemingway ‘had the nerve’ to ‘strip himself’ bare is ironic —by 1999 Ross must have been familiar with the rather less adulatory biographies that had appeared in the 1980s and 1990s which did a great deal of the stripping for him.
Arguably Hemingway’s lifelong efforts to present himself the world as hard, stoic, tough, fearless and above all a ‘real man’ suggest on the contrary a fair degree of camouflage and ornament. For example, he decided his novel The Garden Of Eden, which would certainly have stripped him of any camouflage, was ‘too sexually adventurous to be published during his lifetime’.
In the novel David Bourne, the main male protagonist in the heavily cut and edited published version and his alter ego (as, arguably, were all of Hemingway’s ‘leading men’), indulges in sexual games and gender reversal with his bisexual wife. We know — from Hemingway — that he and Welsh did the same: in bed, he sometimes became ‘Catherine’ and she was ‘Pete’.
Ross’s ‘controversial’ 1950 profile is a case in point of the confusing complexity that in Hemingway masqueraded as simplicity. Hemingway champions might jump in and claim that ‘complexity’ was and is the essence of his work; others, though, might counter that the ‘complexity’ detected by academics is invariably speculative and the kind of ‘knowledge’ that can never be proved.
Hemingway was certainly not ‘stripping himself of all camouflage and ornament’ when he chose to he play the dumb ox in his encounter with Ross and expected her to see right through the mask and describe to her readers the fine, sensitive artist beneath the surface.
The obvious question is: why didn’t he just play it straight? Why did he put on a performance for Ross?
One answer to that is unexpectedly simple: as the friends Denis Brian interviewed for his book The True Gen continually point out, Hemingway was a great joker: he was always up for a laugh. He did put on a performance for Ross, but the po-faced New Yorker writer took it all at face value. In that light it is no surprise Hemingway felt rather stupid.
Seventy years on, it is almost impossible to sort out what was what, and, frankly, it can now be seen as the trivial episode of little consequence it was. The ‘controversy’ it caused at the time among the chattering classes does, though, underline the extraordinary public status and fame Hemingway had — and which he enjoyed — at the time.
It also highlights the rather silly, not to say dangerous, game Hemingway was playing with the public and the critics of how he was perceived. On the one hand he wanted to be seen as a ‘bad guy’ — not many years later he often used the phrase ‘we bad boys’ — the no-nonsense kind who knew all about life and the knocks it dealt. At no point in his life did he want to be seen as an arty intellectual.
Yet when, as in the Ross profile, he was taken by his word and portrayed as a simple, down-to-earth, rough and tough man, he didn’t like it one bit, despite his disclaimer to Ross. That same ambivalence about who he was and, particularly, how he wanted to be seen, permeated his dealings with a number of academics who contacted him and asked for his cooperation with various studies of his work they planned to complete.. . .
After his meeting with Ross, Hemingway and Welsh, with two friends and Hotchner in tow, set sail for Europe. Six weeks in Paris were followed two more months in Venice where the the ageing, lovelorn, paunchy and balding Hemingway spent more time — again always chaperoned — with Adriana Ivancich.
Finally, after inviting her and her mother Dora to stay with them at the Finca Vigia later that year, he and Welsh sailed back to the US and travelled home. There, Hemingway revised the manuscript for Across The River And Into The Trees, and it was published by Scribner’s at the beginning of September.
He then turned back to continuing his work on his ‘Bimini novel’, part of the ‘sea war’ war element of his ‘big war book’. Nothing more was to become of the putative ‘land war’ volume as he had used all his experience and the material intended for it in Across The River.
Another complication was that after Hemingway had first announced to Scribner’s that he was writing a new novel but gave no more details, the house had assumed this would be the ‘big book’ he kept talking about. They were disappointed when it was not.
Fearing that the public, which had also been guyed up to expect a grand big ‘war novel’ from the famous Ernest Hemingway, might feel a little cheated, Scribner’s cooked up an explanation.
It hi-jacked the few weeks Hemingway had spent in hospital in Padua while his erysipelas was treated and turned it on the fiction that he had been very ill. Thus, ‘almost at death’s door’, Hemingway — so the story went — had temporarily abandoned writing the ‘big book’ and written a shorter novel he felt confident he would have the time to complete.. . .
The rumpus with Ross’s profile might have underlined Hemingway’s status as ‘one of America’s greatest contemporary writers’, but his latest novel damaged it badly. The critics — who Hemingway had long convinced himself hated him — were not impressed.
Some were simply baffled that Across The River And Into The Trees was being presented as a serious work; others were prepared to write off Hemingway as a literary force, a man of the past. Hemingway’s first biographer Carlos Baker, who two years later published the admiring Hemingway: The Writer As Artist, observed thatIn spite of Ernest’s high hopes and preliminary vauntings Across The River was received that September with boredom and dismay. The American reviews bristled with such adjectives as disappointing, embarrassing, distressing, trivial, tawdry, garrulous and tired. Many said that the book read like a parody of his former style.A lone — and quite odd — voice of praise came from fellow writer John O’Hara in theNew York Times who claimed thatThe most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across The River And Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616.Like Hemingway, O’Hara (right) was also an alcoholic and might well have been drunk when he that extraordinary claim.
Far more typical of what the critics thought of Hemingway’s novel — which he was convinced was the best thing he had ever written — was, also in the New York Times, from J Donald Adams. He wroteTo me, Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel’s life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.In the New Yorker, Alfred Kazin recorded thatIt is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book — pity, embarrassment that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvellously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar.Equally baffled by the novel was Maxwell Geismar in the Saturday Review of Literature:This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination…. The ideological background of the novel is a mixture of True Romances, Superman, and The Last Frontier.In a letter to a friend John Dos Passos was even more direct:How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?A year later in the Kenyon Review, Isaac Rosenfield beganIt is not enough to say that ‘Across the River and into the Trees’ is a bad novel, which nearly everyone has said (the fact is, a good deal of it is trash) or to ascribe its failure to Hemingway’s playing Hemingway. Such judgments fail to go deep; they make an artificial separation between the man and the artist, and attribute to the former, as though these were superficial mistakes, shortcomings which are the very essence of Hemingway’s art. It seems to me that no writer of comparable stature has ever expressed in his work so false an attitude toward life.Rosenfield adds, though notably before Hemingway had written and published The Old Man And The Sea,For all these reasons, it seems to me that his reputation must soon decline, and while the excellent aspects of his style, at least in the earlier novels and some of the stories, the clear, clean writing that he does at his best, will retain their value, the deep moral significance that some critics (e.g. Cowley) have found or pretended to find in his attitude toward life has already begun to look like a hoax.At a very narrow pinch, Hemingway might have been able to persuade himself that this was all just more of the same from those damned, nasty critics who were simply out to get him. But the standing of his novel did not improve with age.
Writing 40 years later in Ernest Hemingway, his short review of all of Hemingway’s work published before 1990, Peter L Hays — an academic, not a critic — noted thatto disastrous reviews that criticised the slackness and self-indulgence on the prose that seemed a bad parody of the early, taut Hemingway styleand addsCritics have tried to redeem it from its own failings, praising the denseness of allusions to such writers as Dante, Thomas Mann (Death In Venice), and Gabriele D’Annunzio, the symbolic resonance of nearly every scene, every word, but none of these make the novel work.A slightly kinder, more sympathetic note of consolation was struck by Britain’s Cyril Connelly (quoted by Jeffery Meyers in The Critical Heritage) thatIt is not uncommon for a famous writer to produce one thoroughly bad book.We don’t know whether Hemingway ever came across Connelly’s rather left-handed claim but it is unlikely much to have cheered him.
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