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.
The loss of literary friends, remoteness from cultural life and lack of intellectual stimulation were increased by the move to Cuba, which put him out of touch with social and political reality in America. At the same time his estrangement from his family and separation from his children increased his sense of isolation. The dolce far niente life in the tropics made it more difficult for him to discipline himself. When Martha was away, he missed his immediate audience, became lonely and lacked the orderly household and attention to his needs that he had become accustomed to with Hadley and Pauline. When Martha was home, their domestic quarrels upset him. As his third marriage headed towards disaster, he found it more and more difficult to concentrate on his fiction.
Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A biography.
WHILE Hemingway’s sub-hunting patrols began to last longer and he and his crew did not return to the Finca at night to live it up, Gellhorn relished the peace and quiet and tried to get on with writing a new novel (which was published in 1944 as Liana).
The time was also a respite from the rows she had with Hemingway that increasingly occurred, over her complaints that he was wasting his time, his boozing sessions and, biographer James R. Mellow reports, about their respective writing. This was a topic on which Hemingway was particularly sensitive.
While Gellhorn was progressing with her novel, he had written no fiction since For Whom The Bells Tolls was published and its success intimidated him. Their arguments could be vicious: Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, recalls his father shouting at Gellhorn
I’ll show you, you conceited bitch. They’ll be reading my stuff long after the worms have finished with you.Yet Gellhorn also felt she should be doing more. Finally, in mid-1942, Collier’s hired her to undertake an extensive tour of various Caribbean islands and report on how they were being affected by the submarine war.
She was away for two months, and as always when she was not with Hemingway, her heart beat harder for him and (according to Bernice Kert) she wrote him ardent love letters almost daily. She was back at the Finca at the end of October, but the day after Christmas took off again, to visit her widowed mother in St Louis.
When Hemingway was home from his sub-hunting trips, her nagging that he should get himself over to Europe to report on the war carried on throughout 1943, but still he refused. Then, in mid-summer, Gellhorn accepted an offer from Collier’s to become its war correspondent in Europe, and she left in September.
With the Pilar in dry dock for maintenance and the navy dragging its heels over whether it still required its services, Hemingway was high-and-dry: he was no longer sub-hunting, could not go fishing, was afraid to start writing again but, worst of all, he was left in his own company and he hated being alone.
Writing to Hemingway, first from New York, where her departure had been delayed by several weeks, and then from London, Gellhorn still expressed her deep love for him and again repeatedly urged him to join her; but Hemingway was adamant that he would stay in Cuba, and no one is sure why. Jeffery Meyers suggests that he
had risked is life in Spain and still suffered from the emotional effects of his break with Pauline, was exhausted by the strain of completing For Whom The Bell Tolls and discouraged by the extreme discomforts of his trip to China. After his experience in Spain and China, he believed that the lies, propaganda and censorship necessary in war made it almost impossible to be an honourable correspondent.However plausible such an explanation is, even Meyers seems to have his doubts: he also quotes Patrick Hemingway’s take on his father’s reluctance to travel to Europe to report on the war:
He felt that he was entitled to stay behind, living in a place that he liked and enjoying himself.That his son Patrick gave this as Hemingway’s reasoning suggests it might even be something his father had explicitly told him or that Patrick inferred it from what his father said. There is now no way of knowing. In fact, Hemingway was certainly no longer enjoying himself.
Michael Reynolds in the final volume of his five-part biography offers this explanation:
Martha misunderstood Ernest’s lack of interest in going to another war as a journalist, but then she misunderstood the Pilar patrols also. Having spent six [sic] weeks as a Red Cross man in World War I and having covered the Greco-Turkish War (1922) as a reporter for the Toronto’s Daily Star and the Spanish Civil War (1937-38) a journalist for the NANA (North American News Alliance), Ernest was loath to repeat the frustrations of watching the action without being able to participate, and not since his brief experience as a reporter in Toronto (1023-24) had he written news stories. He was a feature writer whose personal perspective was always a key ingredient in the story.Hemingway, Reynolds suggest, probably rightly,
wanted to command troops in battle, but with the freedom that independent ventures like the Pilar patrols allowed. . . He did not want an honorary commission to feed the US propaganda machine, nor did he want to become a cog in some huge operation over which he had no control. In May 1942, he explained to Max Perkins that he was willing to go to the war, send his sons to the war, and give his money to the war effort. The one thing he could not do was write propaganda.But Hemingway’s attempts to ‘go to war and fight’ had so far never succeeded. Some accounts have him, at 18 while still working for the Kansas Star, in turn volunteering for the US army, the US navy and the US marines, but being turned down by each service because of the poor sight in his left eye.
Other accounts say he did not even bother trying to enlist because of that bad eye, but went straight to the Red Cross to get over to Europe.
According to Reynolds, in early 1944 he even applied to join the Office for Strategic Services (the OSS, which after the war evolved into the CIA). Another Reynolds, the former CIA historian Nicholas Reynolds, suggests the approach to the OSS did not come from Hemingway but was made — quite possibly at Gellhorn’s instigation — by Robert Joyce, the Havana embassy’s former second secretary and a friend of Hemingway’s and who by early 1944 had himself joined the OSS.
Writing in Studies In Intelligence in 2012, Nicholas Reynolds confirms that an approach was made and adds
When after six months away Gellhorn returned to the Finca from Europe in March 1944, Hemingway’s frustration and anger boiled over, and he took it out on her viciously. Kert, Meyers and Hemingway’s other biographers report that he subjected her to a non-stop and vicious litany of complaints and insults, accusing her of vainglory and selfishness, and madly putting herself in harm’s way simply to seek thrills.
Gellhorn later told Kert that he would sometimes even wake her at night to continue his attacks. Hemingway’s marriage was most certainly coming apart and was very soon to end.
It has long been thought that Hemingway (like his father Ed) suffered from manic depression, and Michael Reynolds believes his vicious verbal assault on Gellhorn were a symptom. He writes that never having seen her husband behave as he had
At some point he had changed his mind about travelling to the ‘war in Europe’, but no biographer has suggested when or why. With a view to working as a correspondent, he contacted Collier’s magazine (or was contacted by the magazine — biographers vary) and by early March he had been hired.
His deal was very good indeed: $3,000 ($44,937 in 2022) for each feature of between 2,500 and 3,500 words and ‘reasonable expenses’, though once he was back in the US in 1945, part of that deal caused him grief.
He submitted a three-page long list of expenses, adding up to an extraordinary $13,436 ($201,271), but Collier’s thought the expense claims were anything but ‘reasonable’. The magazine’s managing editor described them as ‘out of all proportion to the enterprise’ — Hemingway had filed just six pieces in the ten months he was in Europe — and refused to accept them. Hemingway was furious, but eventually had to settle for $6,000 ($89,875).
The US Department of War would only allow each publication one front-line correspondent and Gellhorn was demoted. Some — not least Gellhorn — suggest that by approaching Collier’s instead of another publication — many would certainly have hired him — Hemingway was guilty of spite.
But Michael Reynolds points out that Department of War regulations at the time would not allow female correspondents any closer to the front than women serving in the US army, usually as field hospital staff. Thus Gellhorn would anyway not have been able to work on the front-line.
What was an act of spite, however, was Hemingway’s refusal to negotiate a seat for Gellhorn on the RAF plane flying him to Britain. Ironically, she herself had helped him to secure the flight after putting him in touch with the children’s author Roald Dahl. (Dahl was a British air attaché in Washington — part of Hemingway’s brief was to profile the British Royal Air Force).
But when she asked her husband to secure a seat for her, too, he claimed that no women were allowed on the flight. In fact, they were.
Instead she found herself a berth on a Norwegian ship carrying explosives to Europe and departed a day or two before he flew off, her voyage of more than two weeks made all the more uncomfortable because there was no alcohol on board; and Gellhorn, who smoked forty cigarettes a day, was also forced to abstain because of the ship’s cargo.
Arriving in London on May 17, Hemingway settled into the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and began a round of socialising, re-connecting with journalist friends and heavy drinking.
The photographer Robert Capa threw a welcome party for him on May 24 (and, according to his autobiography, managed to drum up ten bottles of Scotch, eight bottles of gin, a case of champagne and some brandy).
At 4am the following morning, the car in which he was returning to the Dorchester and driven by another guest as drunk as he was crashed head-on into a steel water tank in the blacked-out Lowndes Square. Hemingway was thrown head-first into the windscreen and his scalp was partly detached from his skull.
He was at first reported dead, but the following day was said to have suffered only ‘slight injuries’. In fact, he injuries were quite bad. He hurt both knees and was diagnosed with severe concussion, the first of several serious head injuries over the following months and years which are now believed to have affected his mental as well as his physical state.
Joyce cabled OSS headquarters with the suggestion that OSS Director Donovan and Whitney Shepardson, the sophisticated international businessman who was head of Secret Intelligence (SI, the espionage branch of the OSS), to consider approaching Hemingway about working for SI. This message caused some head scratching as it worked its way around the OSS. Just what could Hemingway do for the OSS? wondered Lt Cdr Turner McWine, the chief intelligence officer for the OSS in the Middle East. The author’s prominence and reputed temperament would make it hard for him to fit in.Nicholas Reynolds records that
The SI wasn’t convinced Hemingway would be of any use to them and passed the matter on to Morale Operations (MO), the OSS’s black propaganda arm who it thought Hemingway might have more potential than for the work of SI. Hemingway’s file duly made its way over to MO, whose leaders concluded a few days later that Hemingway was too much of an individualist even for their unconventional mission.Thus the approach came to nothing, and Michael Reynolds quotes an OSS document dated May 1, 1944, explaining that it had decided
in the negative about Hemingway. We may be wrong, but feel that, although, he undoubtedly has conspicuous abilities for this type of work, he would be too much of an individualist to work under military supervision.Whether at any point Hemingway was aware of this — though he might well have been informed by Joyce — is simply not recorded.
. . .
Gellhorn later told Kert that he would sometimes even wake her at night to continue his attacks. Hemingway’s marriage was most certainly coming apart and was very soon to end.
It has long been thought that Hemingway (like his father Ed) suffered from manic depression, and Michael Reynolds believes his vicious verbal assault on Gellhorn were a symptom. He writes that never having seen her husband behave as he had
even at several years remove [Gellhorn] did not consider that Ernest might be suffering from something other than loneliness. The charges [he made against her] of being insane, of seeking out danger, or acting selfishly and irresponsibly applied as much to himself as to her. His son Gregory firmly believed that his father changed during the 1943-44 period into a different person. Hemingway’s last wife, Mary Welsh, would experience the same sort of abuse that Martha reported. It was as if some inner, furious animal was set loose, an animal over which Hemingway had some control in public, but little at home. Anyone looking backwards from 1960-61 might say that his behavior was a manifestation of the depression that eventually destroyed him.Shorter ‘patrols’ in the Pilar had resumed in the last months of 1943, but the final patrol ended in early January. After that Hemingway spent his time brooding and drinking (and had spent Christmas 1943 without Martha).
At some point he had changed his mind about travelling to the ‘war in Europe’, but no biographer has suggested when or why. With a view to working as a correspondent, he contacted Collier’s magazine (or was contacted by the magazine — biographers vary) and by early March he had been hired.
His deal was very good indeed: $3,000 ($44,937 in 2022) for each feature of between 2,500 and 3,500 words and ‘reasonable expenses’, though once he was back in the US in 1945, part of that deal caused him grief.
He submitted a three-page long list of expenses, adding up to an extraordinary $13,436 ($201,271), but Collier’s thought the expense claims were anything but ‘reasonable’. The magazine’s managing editor described them as ‘out of all proportion to the enterprise’ — Hemingway had filed just six pieces in the ten months he was in Europe — and refused to accept them. Hemingway was furious, but eventually had to settle for $6,000 ($89,875).
The US Department of War would only allow each publication one front-line correspondent and Gellhorn was demoted. Some — not least Gellhorn — suggest that by approaching Collier’s instead of another publication — many would certainly have hired him — Hemingway was guilty of spite.
But Michael Reynolds points out that Department of War regulations at the time would not allow female correspondents any closer to the front than women serving in the US army, usually as field hospital staff. Thus Gellhorn would anyway not have been able to work on the front-line.
What was an act of spite, however, was Hemingway’s refusal to negotiate a seat for Gellhorn on the RAF plane flying him to Britain. Ironically, she herself had helped him to secure the flight after putting him in touch with the children’s author Roald Dahl. (Dahl was a British air attaché in Washington — part of Hemingway’s brief was to profile the British Royal Air Force).
But when she asked her husband to secure a seat for her, too, he claimed that no women were allowed on the flight. In fact, they were.
Instead she found herself a berth on a Norwegian ship carrying explosives to Europe and departed a day or two before he flew off, her voyage of more than two weeks made all the more uncomfortable because there was no alcohol on board; and Gellhorn, who smoked forty cigarettes a day, was also forced to abstain because of the ship’s cargo.
Arriving in London on May 17, Hemingway settled into the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane and began a round of socialising, re-connecting with journalist friends and heavy drinking.
The photographer Robert Capa threw a welcome party for him on May 24 (and, according to his autobiography, managed to drum up ten bottles of Scotch, eight bottles of gin, a case of champagne and some brandy).
At 4am the following morning, the car in which he was returning to the Dorchester and driven by another guest as drunk as he was crashed head-on into a steel water tank in the blacked-out Lowndes Square. Hemingway was thrown head-first into the windscreen and his scalp was partly detached from his skull.
He was at first reported dead, but the following day was said to have suffered only ‘slight injuries’. In fact, he injuries were quite bad. He hurt both knees and was diagnosed with severe concussion, the first of several serious head injuries over the following months and years which are now believed to have affected his mental as well as his physical state.
Gellhorn, who had finally arrived at Liverpool on May 31 and travelled to London, immediately visited 
him, only to find him and a circle of visiting cronies living it up and drinking spirits and champagne, Hemingway’s head swathed in a bandage that looked to her like a turban.
At the sight of him (left) and much to Hemingway’s irritation — he had been expecting sympathy — Gellhorn burst out laughing. She was also angry that though he was supposedly suffering from a head injury he was still boozing, and she soon left. As Reynolds puts it
He also suffered from bad headaches and continued to do so for many months, but he and the other war correspondents knew that the long-planned invasion of Europe was imminent and he did not want to miss it. The correspondents were rounded up on June 2 and driven to the south coast, and finally set out across the English Channel on the night of June 5.
In the early hours of June 6, they were transferred to the various landing craft which carried the Allied troops to the Normandy beaches. There the men stormed the beaches — many died — but the correspondents, including Hemingway, had to stay on their landing craft and were eventually taken back to the ships which had brought them over.
Once back in the Dorchester Hotel, Hemingway wrote his account of the invasion (or of what he has seen of it given his vantage point in a landing craft) in his first report for Collier’s, although it did not appear in the US until July 22.
It was a somewhat fanciful report of his day and, typically, Hemingway takes centre stage. In the piece he hints, obliquely, that he had indeed landed on Omaha Beach — he writes, ambiguously, ‘the day we took Fox Green’. Less obliquely he gives the impression that he had more or less taken over command of the landing craft from the inexperienced US army lieutenant in charge who had sought his advice.
Several conversations between them are repeated verbatim, which might have alerted sceptics, although at that point the reputation of the ‘famous writer’ as a ‘man of action’ was rarely doubted. (His new editor at Collier’s later told Hemingway he thought the work he had filed from Europe was poor, but that the readers had liked it.)
A week or two later, Hemingway’s account of the D Day invasion grew into a wholly fictional description of what he had done ‘once he was on the beach’.
This was given to a young naval lieutenant, William van Dusen, he had met in mid-May on the flight over from the US and with whom he had stayed in touch in London.
At the sight of him (left) and much to Hemingway’s irritation — he had been expecting sympathy — Gellhorn burst out laughing. She was also angry that though he was supposedly suffering from a head injury he was still boozing, and she soon left. As Reynolds puts it
Having had plenty of time at sea to review their relationship, Martha entered the room half-sure their marriage was over; when she left she had no doubt. ‘If he really had concussion, he could hardly have been drinking with his pals or even receiving them. He did not look in the least ill anyway.’ The concussion was real enough, and drinking was a sure way to make it worse. Ernest, garrulous and full of male-bonding jokes . . . was [now] with Martha in the war zone she so fervently desired, but it was a husband she hardly recognised. . . Before the ground war began on the beaches of Normandy, the private war between Martha and Ernest was finished. There was no acknowledgement of defeat by either party, but that was only a formality.Hemingway was discharged after just three days, still in his ‘turban’ and still with his 57 stitches in place. His concussion alone would have required several weeks of recuperation, and some biographers believe he discharged himself.
He also suffered from bad headaches and continued to do so for many months, but he and the other war correspondents knew that the long-planned invasion of Europe was imminent and he did not want to miss it. The correspondents were rounded up on June 2 and driven to the south coast, and finally set out across the English Channel on the night of June 5.
In the early hours of June 6, they were transferred to the various landing craft which carried the Allied troops to the Normandy beaches. There the men stormed the beaches — many died — but the correspondents, including Hemingway, had to stay on their landing craft and were eventually taken back to the ships which had brought them over.
Once back in the Dorchester Hotel, Hemingway wrote his account of the invasion (or of what he has seen of it given his vantage point in a landing craft) in his first report for Collier’s, although it did not appear in the US until July 22.
It was a somewhat fanciful report of his day and, typically, Hemingway takes centre stage. In the piece he hints, obliquely, that he had indeed landed on Omaha Beach — he writes, ambiguously, ‘the day we took Fox Green’. Less obliquely he gives the impression that he had more or less taken over command of the landing craft from the inexperienced US army lieutenant in charge who had sought his advice.
Several conversations between them are repeated verbatim, which might have alerted sceptics, although at that point the reputation of the ‘famous writer’ as a ‘man of action’ was rarely doubted. (His new editor at Collier’s later told Hemingway he thought the work he had filed from Europe was poor, but that the readers had liked it.)
A week or two later, Hemingway’s account of the D Day invasion grew into a wholly fictional description of what he had done ‘once he was on the beach’.
Eighteen years later, in a piece entitled Hemingway’s Longest Day and published by True magazine in February 1962, van Dusen recounted how Hemingway had taken charge and rescued a US combat team who were pinned down on the beach by enemy fire on.
After leading the men to safety, van Dusen wrote, Hemingway had crawled all the way back across the beach to a command post to report on the situation and German positions.
After leading the men to safety, van Dusen wrote, Hemingway had crawled all the way back across the beach to a command post to report on the situation and German positions.
In his piece van Dusen attributes the information to ‘a source’; in fact, the only ‘source’ for this piece of fiction was Hemingway himself.
Within days of arriving in London and while Martha Gellhorn was still at sea and on her way to Britain, Hemingway had met his fourth wife, Mary Welsh (right) at Soho’s White Tower restaurant.
He took her to lunch there a few days later, but that first date was apparently not memorable, and Welsh (who had many other admirers and was often squired) says she thought nothing of it.
But one night he called on her at her room in the Dorchester and when he left surprised her by telling her he intended to marry her. It would seem Hemingway, too, had decided — or realised — his marriage to Gellhorn was over.
Within days of arriving in London and while Martha Gellhorn was still at sea and on her way to Britain, Hemingway had met his fourth wife, Mary Welsh (right) at Soho’s White Tower restaurant.
He took her to lunch there a few days later, but that first date was apparently not memorable, and Welsh (who had many other admirers and was often squired) says she thought nothing of it.
But one night he called on her at her room in the Dorchester and when he left surprised her by telling her he intended to marry her. It would seem Hemingway, too, had decided — or realised — his marriage to Gellhorn was over.
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