1945-1961 — Part IV: Cheating death in Africa, the winning the Nobel Prize and entering his anecdotage

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.

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A lot of nostalgic nonsense is often written about poverty and hunger by successful authors who no longer have to experience them.

Novelist Julian McLaren-Ross

I met Ernest Hemingway at Sun Valley last week, and was taken totally by surprise. I had not been prepared by talk, photos, or interviews for a) that charm, and b) that beauty.

Leonard Bernstein in a letter to Martha Gellhorn, Jan 7, 1959

AT THE beginning of August Hemingway and Welsh finally set off for East Africa and their safari. In Kenya they linked up with Mayito Menocal, a friend from Cuba whose father had been president for eight years, Life photographer Earl Theisen and white hunter Philip Percival who had organised Hemingway’s safari in 1934.

(Jeffery Meyers writes that the Kenyan government, dealing with the Mau-Mau insurgency which was scaring off tourists, hoped that the publicity generated by Hemingway’s visit would persuade potential visitors that there was little danger and persuaded Percival to come out of retirement.)

Like Hemingway’s return to Pamplona after 22 years, his return to East Africa also fell a little flat. His alcoholism and ageing eyesight meant his shooting was often poor.

In 1934 it had Charlie Thompson, a Key West friend — two other friends had bowed out, protesting they could not afford the trip, but privately apprehensive of falling foul of Hemingway’s competitiveness and temper — who had outshot him and bagged more trophies. Now it was Mayito Menocal who was besting him and Hemingway did not like it.

Alcohol didn’t help: according to Kenya game warden Denis Zaphiro who was assisting Percival, Hemingway was drinking all the time. Quoted by Meyers, Zaphiro said

[Hemingway’s] drinking would have killed a less tough man. Two or three bottles of hard liquor a day. Wines etc with meals. Gin a favourite drink. I suppose he was drunk the whole time but seldom showed it. Just became merrier, more loveable, more bull-shitty. Without a drink he was morose silent and depressed.

Hemingway was once so drunk, he fell out of a fast-moving Land Rover driving through the bush. At one point he began to apologise to Percival for his poor marksmanship, but Percival was having none of it and cut him off, telling him simply ‘Oh, Ernest, don’t give me that nonsense, the whole thing has been a disgrace’.

Hemingway also became obsessed with the local Kenyan Masai culture and began to ape the Masai. While Welsh was away from the camp on a short pre-Christmas break in Nairobi, he shaved his head, dyed his clothes the colour of theirs and took up with a local young woman to whom he insisted he was now engaged. (He claims he also had sex with her but this is doubtful.)

Welsh behaved stoically throughout as though she were unconcerned, and curiously, biographers report, Hemingway’s odd behaviour acted as a stimulus to their sex life.

Often quoted by biographers is a passage Hemingway added to the diary she kept (the former journalist in her always had one eye on in the future publishing a book on her life with Hemingway). In it he makes direct reference to their sex life, one night indulging in role reversal in bed. He wrote that

Mary had always wanted to be a boy and thinks as a boy without ever losing any femininity . . . she loves me to her girls [sic], which I love to be, not being absolutely stupid . . . I loved feeling the embrace of Mary which came to me as something quite new and outside all tribal law.

More seriously once the safari proper had ended, he was almost killed, though his drinking cannot be blamed. On his 1934 safari he had contracted amoebic dysentery and had to be airlifted to Nairobi for emergency treatment.

Nineteen years later, he was treating Welsh to several plane trips to see the country from the air and he almost died in the second of two crashes.

The first crash occurred on January 24, 1954, when the pilot was flying low over the Murchison Falls in Uganda along the Victoria Nile, tried to avoid a flock of birds and his plane clipped a telegraph wire. The plane’s rudder and, crucially, the radio antenna were disabled.

The pilot managed to crash-land in the bush and no one was badly hurt, though Welsh was later found to have broken two ribs and Hemingway’s dislocated shoulder was thought to have been caused in that first crash.

With radio communication out of service, the pilot could not call for help. To avoid crocodiles in the river Hemingway, Welsh and the pilot took to higher ground for the night. When a BOAC airliner spotted the

wreckage, but saw no sign of life and an search plane that was alerted could also spot no one, Hemingway was presumed dead, and his ‘death’ made the headlines around the world.

The following day the three were rescued by a passing river launch and taken to a town on the east bank of Lake Victoria where a second pilot was waiting to fly them to Entebbe.

However, the ‘runway’ was simply a stretch of very rutted baked earth and the plane crashed on take-off, bursting into flames.

Welsh, their first pilot and their second pilot escaped through a small window.

But Hemingway was trapped, too large to squeeze through the window and the port door was jammed shut. With flames already engulfing the inside of the plane, he finally got the door open by using his head as a battering ram.

He and Welsh were driven inland to another town where Hemingway received only perfunctory medical help (a doctor reportedly simply bandaged his head and cleaned up superficial cuts but examined him no further).

The next day they were taken to Entebbe where Hemingway agreed to a press conference — the world now alerted that the famous writer had not died after all —and he played up to his image as the ‘indestructible’ Papa Hemingway’.

In fact he was in great pain, seeing double and was intermittently deaf. After three days resting in a Nairobi hotel bed (and already drinking again), he was up and about, though he ears were still ringing and he was still seeing double. Several weeks later he made a fishing trip with his son Patrick and Philip Percival and others, but he was in considerable pain and often irascible, so much that Patrick upped and left the party after his father shouted at Patrick’s wife and made her cry.

To compound his already serious injuries Hemingway insisted on helping put out a bush fire, fell into the flames and suffered second and third-degree burns. It wasn’t until he and Welsh were back in Europe that, in Venice, he received proper treatment and the full extent of his injuries were established.

They included two cracked discs in his spine, ruptures to his liver, spleen and a kidney, a dislocated shoulder and right arm and his skull had broken open. Pressure on a nerve paralysed his sphincter muscle (which meant for some time he was obliged to defecate standing up). He had also suffered his fourth severe concussion in ten years.

He spent a month in bed in Venice recuperating, and a friend who saw him in said he had looked more like 70 hair now white.

. . .

In the spring of 1954, at 54, Hemingway still comparatively young. But the years of heavy drinking, his several concussions and his latest round of injuries had taken a severe toll. His slow but terminal decline, mental as well as physical, over the following seven years was now underway.

In addition to medication for his high blood pressure and insomnia, he was taking several other drugs and, crucially, it was not clear how all these interacted. For several of the drugs depression was a known side-effect, and he certainly should not have been mixing all that medication with alcohol.

Months before his death in 1961, while being treated for his depression in Minnesota, his doctors also diagnosed haemochromatosis, a hereditary disease which stops the body from ridding itself of iron and from which he would have been suffering all his life.

The slow but steady accumulation of iron causes damage to the heart and liver, as well as the swelling of arms, legs and feet and erectile dysfunction, all conditions from which Hemingway had suffered for many years. Mentally, he became ever more irascible and his mood fluctuated wildly and, as was now usual, Welsh carried on bearing the brunt of his unpredictable and often manic behaviour.

Later that year Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had always displayed his characteristic ambivalence towards the award, purporting to disdain all such baubles and prizes; but even years earlier, in a letter to Charles Scribner, he was hinting that he might be due to win it.

That he was finally honoured in October 1954 suggested to some biographers that his near-death in East Africa had persuaded the Nobel Committee it might be better to hand the prize to Hemingway sooner rather than later while he was still alive.

The letter he had sent to Scribner had been written in anger: in November 1941 Hemingway was awarded the gold medal of the ‘Limited Editions Club’ for his then new novel For Whom The Bell Tolls. He told Scribner’s he would be unable to attend the award ceremony in New York and asked them to send a stenographer to record the speech fellow writer Sinclair Lewis would make. But Scribner’s forgot to do so and Hemingway was furious.

In his letter to Charles Scribner complaining about it — he had hauled Max Perkins over the coals a few days earlier — he claimed the speech might have been printed as a pamphlet and could have secured him the Nobel Prize for Literature. His logic in making his claim is not clear, but what is clear is that even then he considered himself to be great writer who should be honoured by the Nobel Committee.

Despite his ostensible indifference to the prize, he was very put out when William Faulkner, his rival, fellow writer and also an alcoholic had won the Nobel Prize four years earlier. In a letter to a friend, the New York Books Review editor Harvey Breit, he wrote

You see what happens with Bill Faulkner is that as long as I am alive he has to drink to feel good about having the Nobel Prize. He does not realise that I have no respect for that institution and was truly happy for him when he got it.

To which claim Evelyn Waugh might have responded ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper’.

. . .

Since Hemingway had returned to Cuba from Europe in 1945 until the last year of his life, it became his habit to work on one manuscript, then carry on with, or even start, another. Writing Across The River And Into The Trees had interrupted his work on the ‘big war book’, and in the wake of that novel’s publication, he had written and published The Old Man before returning to writing his ‘big book’ about the World War II.

By then this had become purely the ‘sea’ element of his planned trilogy and the ‘air’ and ‘land’ war volumes had gone by the board. At some point between returning from Europe and the mid-1950 she had also started to write what became The Garden Of Eden. Hemingway continued working on it intermittently before — no one knows why — abandoning it and packing it away at his bank in Havana.

In 1956 he also began writing a ‘semi-fictitious’ account based on his second African safari, a book he apparently hoped would be something between a novel and reportage. This became True At First Light and was published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Hemingway’s birth, though the original 200,000-word manuscript had to be extensively cut by more than half and edited before it was deemed to be in any shape.

Increasingly after he won his Nobel Prize in the autumn of 1954, the peace and quiet Hemingway had enjoyed and valued at the Finca Vigia became elusive. He was now one of Havana’s tourist sights and coachloads of sightseers pitched up outside the Finca’s gates to catch a glimpse of the legendary ‘Papa’ Hemingway.

Quite apart from the tourist hoi polloi, the number of friends — some old, many increasingly new, some invited, others not — who turned up grew. It seemed dropping in on Nobel Prize winner and famous writer Ernest Hemingway had become part of the social round. Hemingway was both irritated and pleased but made them all welcome.

Then, in the summer of 1955, preliminary work on filming The Old Man And The Sea began, and to honour his contract with producer Leland Hayward to ‘advise’ with the script and shooting, Hemingway was obliged to put aside his writing and spend a great deal of time with the production team. He soon found it frustrating.

For one thing he had disagreements with Hayward’s screenwriter Peter Viertel, who wanted to alter one or two aspects of the story. Hemingway was having none of it. Leland also began some location shooting in Cuba and it seems Hemingway’s ‘assistance’ was also required for that. 

But when the film people had departed for the year, he returned to his African ‘novel’, though not for long: at the end of 1955 and early 1956 he was laid up in bed for three months with nephritis (once known as Bright’s disease)and hepatitis. Once he had recovered, Hayward was back in Havana in the spring and wanted his help filming the fishing sequences.

All in all Hemingway, who had previously avoided being involved with the filming of any of his previous work, found his involvement thoroughly dispiriting experience. Michael Reynolds records that Hemingway was

determined to have real sharks attacking and actual marlin in an authentic ocean. That was the Hollywood promise written down on paper; but as he was to learn, words written on the West Coast somehow had different meanings from standard English. Moreover, anything scheduled, promised or planned meant absolutely nothing in the movie business.

It got no better:

Trying to coordinate the weather, film crew, blood bait and sharks was proving almost impossible. When the camera crew were ready, the weather was too rough to film. When twenty gallons of slaughterhouse blood and four tubs of fish heads were standing by, the film crew was somewhere else. One part or other never got to the right place on time. Days were wasted. Money was spent and spent again. If not the sharks, then the marlin would not cooperate — too small, to far away, not jumping enough. When not wasting time at the dock, they wasted time at conferences or waiting for Spencer Tracy to show up.

When Tracy (right), an alcoholic but on the wagon, did arrive in Havana, he started drinking again. Hemingway also thought that Tracy was miscast as ‘the old man’ because he looked too fat and healthy for the unlucky but stoic fisherman who had spent three days and nights at sea with no sleep whatsoever. 

Finally, unable to get the footage of marlin and sharks needed, Hayward, Hemingway and the film crew took off to the coast of Peru for just over a month to try their luck their.

Yet again the marlin caught were to small for the ‘part’ they were to play, and Hayward eventually settled for using a large plastic model to represent the Marlin the old man catches and straps to the side of his skiff, only for it to be eaten by sharks. Hemingway was not pleased.

By the summer of 1956, almost 30 months after the plane crashes, Hemingway’s recovery was still incomplete and his health was suffering in new ways. In addition to his high blood pressure and excess weight, his cholesterol count was became excessive and both he and Mary Welsh were found to be clinically anaemic.

As much to get away from the steady stream of ‘celebrities’ who were dropping in as for their health, they decided on another break in Europe and Africa and set sail at the beginning of September. The conflict between Israel and Egypt (which had blocked the Suez Canal by sinking more than 40 vessels) put paid to any notions of visiting East Africa, but they were able to tour bullfights in Spain, although in Madrid Hemingway fell ill again and was laid up in bed for several weeks.

Eventually returning home and stopping off in Paris in November, Hemingway is said to have been reminded by the Ritz Hotel of two small trunks he had supposedly stored in the hotel basement at the end of the 1920s.

. . .

The discovery of these small trunks or boxes was certainly serendipitous (and some might sceptics might prefer to refer to it as their ‘discovery’). The generally accepted account, first given by Leonard Lyons on December 11, 1957, in the gossip column he wrote for the New York Post, is that they contained old notebooks, newspaper clippings and manuscripts. In 1964 in the New York Times Book Review, Mary Welsh wrote that the

two small, fabric-covered, rectangular boxes, both opening at the seams . . . [contained] blue-and-yellow-covered pencilled notebooks and sheaves of typed papers, ancient newspaper cuttings, bad water colors done by old friends, a few cracked and faded books, some musty sweat shirts and withered sandals. Ernest had not seen the stuff since 1927, when he packed it and left it at the hotel before going to Key West.

Such a detailed description might seemed copper-bottomed proof of the discovery and the boxes and their contents, although notably Mary Welsh’s source was Hemingway himself. The same was true of Lyons: he had been informed of the contents by Hemingway when he had lunch with him at the Finca.

Hemingway later wrote that it was finding the two trunks that led him to reminisce about his years in Paris and and decide him to write a memoir. One sceptical academic, however, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, then of the University of Ottowa, suggested that, on balance, it is more than possible the supposed discovery was just another Hemingway myth.

Writing in the Autumn (Fall) 1980 edition of the journal College Literature and expanding her claim 11 years later in a full-length book, Ernest Hemingway’s Moveable Feast: The Making of a Myth, Tavernier-Courbin outlines the arguments for and against her scepticism. She attempts to demonstrate — and perhaps succeeds — that the ‘discovery’ was more probably what we might today call a public relations exercise.

Tavernier-Courbin suggests the revelation was a convoluted ruse by Hemingway to get himself off a hook: he had previously claimed that writers who resorted to composing their memoirs were tacitly admitting they were at the end of their career and had more or less thrown in the towel. ‘Finding’ the two trunks and claiming they caused him to reminisce might acquit him of that charge.

To substantiate her claim, Tavernier-Courbin describes several oddities and inconsistencies in the Lyons and Welsh’s accounts. For example, she writes, the suitcases were said to have been stored at the Ritz in 1927 when Hemingway travelled to Key West for the first time. In fact, he didn’t do so until 1928.

One of the boxes was said to have contained the original manuscript for A Farewell To Arms, but it could not have done: Hemingway had later presented that manuscript to his new wife’s uncle, Gus Pfeiffer. Storing the items would not have been in itself have been unusual: two other suitcases that had been stored at another hotel at about the same time.

But these were referred to in several letters written by Hemingway in the late 1920s, yet the first mention of the supposed Ritz trunks is more than 30 years later in Lyons’s column in 1957.

According to Welsh the Ritz Hotel had first asked Hemingway to remove the trunks in 1936, though she could only have been told this by Hemingway himself; thus it can have no bearing either way on whether the story of the trunks is true.

Such inconsistencies are, though, circumstantial and might well simply be down to misunderstandings and faulty accounts by Lyons and Welsh. Furthermore, whether or not two small suitcases were found is neither here nor there: Reynolds suggests that by late 1956 Hemingway had already begun musing on the past and in letters to friends seemed to be rehearsing various anecdotes.

Certainly, from mid-1957 until his death he was writing and re-writing sketches — in tandem with other projects — for what became A Moveable Feast (which was not a title chosen by Hemingway). At one point he declared the memoir completed — Reynolds writes that Hemingway claimed the first draft was written in six months — and delivered the manuscript to Scribner’s; then he changed his mind and halted publication. In a letter to Charles Scribner the year before he died, he explained he wanted to re-write parts of his memoir and that he was also afraid of suits for libel.

A Moveable Feast was eventually published in 1964 after Mary Welsh had edited it. She insisted she had not changed a word Hemingway had written but had merely re-arranged some of the chapters and corrected grammar and spelling.

That is not wholly true: when her edited version was compared to various drafts and manuscripts in the Boston JFK Library, it became obvious that Welsh had suppressed some parts of what Hemingway had initially submitted to Scribner’s, including flattering references to Hadley Richardson.

Forty-five years later, in 2009, a new edition of the memoir, edited by Hemingway’s grandson Sean, was published in which parts of the original manuscript were reinstated and chapters again re-arranged.

The first, 1964, edition was a bestseller — a month before it was published, Life magazine printed eleven of its twenty sketches and Scribner’s gave the book an initial print run of 85,000 copies. It featured on the US bestseller list for eight months and held the top spot for five of those months. The critics also liked it, and for many of them, A Moveable Feast contained the best writing Hemingway had produced in years.

Some noted what has since been described as the settling of scores — Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford who had all promoted Hemingway in his early, unknown years were made to look foolish or otherwise flawed. Scott Fitzgerald especially is made to look very silly.

Though not named, Pauline Pfeiffer, John Dos Passos and Gerald and Sara Murphy are condemned as being responsible for the break-up of his marriage to Richardson; biographers repeatedly note that Hemingway always managed to shift the blame for his misdeeds on to others. Yet on those sour notes the critics gave Hemingway a pass, perhaps relieved that the writing was not as bad as it had become over the past twenty years.

Slightly more sceptical were several British critics: in the London Magazine the novelist Julian McLaren-Ross felt that Hemingway’s adoring portrayal of Hadley Richardson seemed to be the model for all the ‘far too admiring and acquiescent’ women in his fiction and notes tartly — but honestly —that

A lot of nostalgic nonsense is often written about poverty and hunger by successful authors who no longer have to experience them.

In the journal Encounter the Cambridge academic Tony Tanner suggested that

The book is written with a good deal of arrogance: every episode is turned to leave Hemingway looking tougher, more talented, more honest, more dignified than anyone else.

In the New York Review Of Books Frank Kermode, another Cambridge academic, welcomed the memoir as

in some ways, Hemingway’s best book since the 1920s

which could, though, be understood as a tacit admission that a great deal of the work Hemingway produced since A Farewell To Arms appeared in 1929 more than 30 years earlier was quite not up to snuff.

Referring to the blatant score-settling, Kermode also notes ironically that Hemingway’s famous built-in ‘shit detector’

can purge not only your prose but your acquaintance.

Something of a mystery and still so far unexplained is the last line in Hemingway’s preface that

If the reader prefers, this book can be regarded as fiction

and although he adds

but there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

It is not at all clear how. The obvious, rather puzzling question is: exactly why might a reader prefer the book to be regarded as fiction?

Although A Moveable Feast did not appear until three years after Hemingway’s death, he cannot have known its publication would be delayed when he wrote his preface, and presumably he expected it to appear in his lifetime.

If he had concerns about possible libel suits, he would, or should, have known that these were unfounded: those men and women he named in his memoir who might have objected to what he wrote about them — and sued for libel — were long dead. Those who were not yet dead were not named.

Some critics were charmed by Hemingway’s descriptions of his ‘we wuz poor, but we wuz happy’ domestic bliss with Hadley, their toddler ‘Bumby’ and F Puss their cat; others perhaps agreed more with McLaren-Ross’s implication that it was all a little sentimentally unreal.

In that respect it might well be regarded as fiction, and the dialogue from a writer whose gift for dialogue had long been championed is curiously stilted, artificial and cloying.