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.
When Fenton also began querying his sister Marceline and his outlawed sister Carol . . . Hemingway gave him a ‘cease and desist’ order . . . The correspondence developed into angry exchanges. Yet, with each angry response, Hemingway, by way of correcting errors, also began feeding out more tempting bait . . . it was to Fenton that he gratuitously offered the dubious information that he had had to get the hell out of Petoskey because of troubles with four or five girls.
James Mellow, Hemingway —
A Life Without Consequences
[Quintana] said they were ‘big drunks’ who misbehaved and were so disrespectful that he once had an employee serve some of the Hemingway crew lobster water as if it were consommé. When asked if Ernest’s behavior made him angry, the ever-polite Quintana replied ‘close to it’ and went on, ‘when he was too drunk he would disturb the other guests and I couldn’t put up with that’. Perhaps the most compelling of Quintana’s memories concerns Hemingway as a person: ‘Hemingway was strange, very strange. He was a strange man’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, of the University of
Puerto Rico, the Hemingway Review
APART from the critical mauling Hemingway’s new novel received, there were other reasons that made this a miserable time in his life. He had a ferocious long-distance argument on the telephone with Pauline about their son Gregory (after which she died suddenly the following day and his youngest son Gregory blamed him for her death).
His mother also died (though he had not seen her for 21 years), a grandson died and Charles Scribner (the II) head of his publishers Scribner’s also died. His blood pressure and weight were still very high and as usual he slept badly, if at all.
Adriana Ivancich and her mother Dora had arrived two months after the novel was published and were staying in the Finca’s guest quarters. Adriana’s brother Gianfranco was also holed up at the Finca. A year earlier, Gianfranco had landed a job with a Havana shipping company while the Hemingway’s were in Europe and had been given free run of the Finca.
Although Hemingway had asked for his new novel not to published in Italy for a few years to forestall any possible scandal, Venice still got to hear about it and there was a shocked reaction.
Adriana was easily identified as the model for the novel’s ‘Venetian noblewoman’ (though a friend of Adriana’s claimed she herself had been the model) and eventually Dora decided she and her daughter should move out of the Finca and into a Havana hotel for the sake of appearances.
To make it worse for Hemingway, Adriana was unimpressed with his novel and declared that a young Venetian woman from a sheltered background who would jump into bed with an older man was ‘unbelievable’. It would simply not happen.
As usual Welsh bore the brunt of Hemingway’s anger and misery. At one point he threw his glass of wine at her in front of his guests. When Welsh had offered to help Gianfranco by typing a US visa application, for no apparent reason Hemingway became furious when he walked into the room and saw them, and threw the typewriter on the floor. Yet again Welsh simply rolled with the punches.
Hemingway insisted that Adriana was ‘a muse’ and that her presence helped him write, and while she and her mother were still staying at the Finca — and in the wake of the dismayed reaction to his novel — he began writing The Old Man And The Sea.
He had resurrected the story from one of his Esquire features that had appeared in April 1936. This in turn was based on a tale Carlos Gutiérrez, his first mate on the Pilar at the time, had told him.
The new work is often referred to as a novel, but at just 27,000 words it is more a novella. Under a deal struck with Life worth $40,000 ($436,769 in 2022), the story was published in full in the magazine’s Sept 1, 1952, edition of which all five million copies of sold out.
It was also chosen as a Book of The Month for which Hemingway was paid $21,000 ($229,303), and when Scribner’s published it a week after it appeared in Life, it had an initial 50,000 print run.
Eventually, producer Leland Hayward paid Hemingway $150,000 ($1,637,884) for the film rights and his help as an advisor.(It should be pointed out that a great deal of the money went to the US Inland Revenue Service in tax, although Hemingway was able to mitigate how much tax he paid because he lived outside the US.)
The Old Man And The Sea certainly salvaged Hemingway’s career as a writer. Contemporary reviewers hailed it as a ‘return to form’, but praise was not universal and often a muted. Fellow novelist William Faulkner began his review with
Also smoothing that path, some suggest, were the two plane crashes Hemingway had survived at the conclusion of his African safari earlier that year. It had possibly decided the Nobel committee that perhaps he should be awarded the Prize before death did carry him away.
For years, not least because of Hemingway’s simple and uncomplicated prose, The Old Man And The Sea became a staple in school and college English literature syllabuses, and as such became part of the fabric of many a man and woman’s early years.
Many might thus remember it fondly, although how much it would delight their rather more mature minds in later life is another matter.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hemingway came to the notice of young academics who had heeded Malcolm Cowley’s urging in his introduction to The Viking Portable Hemingway to take the Ernest Hemingway’s work more seriously as art.
At different times he was contacted by and corresponded with Carlos Baker (who was later appointed, with Hemingway’s consent, to write his biography), Phillip Young and Charles Fenton. The British writer and journalist John Atkins also contacted Hemingway.
All were initially rebuffed by Hemingway who again insisted he did not want his private life examined or delved into. Soon, however, Hemingway began to provide limited cooperation, at first with two and then three of them.
Baker was able to persuade him that he simply intended to analyse the work in terms of the artistic process and Hemingway eventually agreed that passages from his stories and novels could be quoted.
John Atkins, who planned something similar — an appraisal of Hemingway’s art — also met little resistance and proceeded. Hemingway later declared himself pleased with Atkins’s book, The Art of Ernest Hemingway. Although it was subtitled ‘His Work And Personality’, it did concern itself almost wholly with the work. On the other hand Young and Fenton had no luck at all.
Charles Fenton was planning an account of Hemingway’s early ‘apprenticeship as a writer’, covering when he wrote and helped to edit his high school newspaper and magazine, his seven months with the Kansas City Star and short pieces he sold to the Toronto Star. He had already been interviewing family and friends who knew Hemingway from those early days, and James Mellow writes
More seriously for Hemingway, Philip Young announced that he believed Hemingway’s fiction was not just rooted in the severe wounds he had received at Fossalta in July 1918, but in other ‘psychic’ wounds he had suffered when younger, such as the ending of his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky and even earlier ones when growing up in Oak Park and at Walloon lake.
It is not clear what these ‘psychic wounds’ might be apart from the knockbacks every youngster encounters to a greater or lesser extent while maturing into adulthood. Hemingway not only complained that Young had no medical qualifications for undertaking such an examination, but he also had a deep suspicion of psychiatrists and psychiatry.
Adriana was easily identified as the model for the novel’s ‘Venetian noblewoman’ (though a friend of Adriana’s claimed she herself had been the model) and eventually Dora decided she and her daughter should move out of the Finca and into a Havana hotel for the sake of appearances.
To make it worse for Hemingway, Adriana was unimpressed with his novel and declared that a young Venetian woman from a sheltered background who would jump into bed with an older man was ‘unbelievable’. It would simply not happen.
As usual Welsh bore the brunt of Hemingway’s anger and misery. At one point he threw his glass of wine at her in front of his guests. When Welsh had offered to help Gianfranco by typing a US visa application, for no apparent reason Hemingway became furious when he walked into the room and saw them, and threw the typewriter on the floor. Yet again Welsh simply rolled with the punches.
Hemingway insisted that Adriana was ‘a muse’ and that her presence helped him write, and while she and her mother were still staying at the Finca — and in the wake of the dismayed reaction to his novel — he began writing The Old Man And The Sea.
He had resurrected the story from one of his Esquire features that had appeared in April 1936. This in turn was based on a tale Carlos Gutiérrez, his first mate on the Pilar at the time, had told him.
The new work is often referred to as a novel, but at just 27,000 words it is more a novella. Under a deal struck with Life worth $40,000 ($436,769 in 2022), the story was published in full in the magazine’s Sept 1, 1952, edition of which all five million copies of sold out.
It was also chosen as a Book of The Month for which Hemingway was paid $21,000 ($229,303), and when Scribner’s published it a week after it appeared in Life, it had an initial 50,000 print run.
Eventually, producer Leland Hayward paid Hemingway $150,000 ($1,637,884) for the film rights and his help as an advisor.(It should be pointed out that a great deal of the money went to the US Inland Revenue Service in tax, although Hemingway was able to mitigate how much tax he paid because he lived outside the US.)
The Old Man And The Sea certainly salvaged Hemingway’s career as a writer. Contemporary reviewers hailed it as a ‘return to form’, but praise was not universal and often a muted. Fellow novelist William Faulkner began his review with
His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries.In the New York Times Orville Prescott declared
The Old Man And The Sea is a short novel, only 27,000 words. It is much simpler and enormously better than Mr Hemingway’s last book, Across The River And Into the Trees . . . Within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.In the Partisan Review Delmore Schwartz noted, perhaps a little tactlessly, that
The ovation which greeted Hemingway’s new novel was mostly very nice. For it was mostly a desire to continue to admire a great writer. Yet there was a note of insistence in the praise and a note of relief, the relief because his previous book [Across The River And Into The Trees] was extremely bad in an ominous way, the insistence, I think, because this new work is not so much good in itself as a virtuoso performance which reminds one of Hemingway at his best.Writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review John Aldridge had some good words to say about the story before admitting
But one must take care not to push these generosities too far, if only because they spill over so easily into that excess of blind charity we all tend to feel for Hemingway each time he pulls out of another slump and attains to the heroism of simply writing well once again.He suggested the novella should be recognised
for the degree of its success in meeting the standards set down by his own best previous achievement as an artist. I have these standards in mind when I say that The Old Man and the Sea seems to me a work of distinctly minor Hemingway fiction.In sum Aldridge remained unconvinced and wrote
In the best of the early Hemingway one always felt that the prose had been forced out under great pressure through a tight screen of opposing psychic tensions . . . now the prose [in The Old Man And The Sea] . . . has a fabricated quality, as if it had been shipped into the book by some manufacturer of standardized Hemingway parts.Several decades on, critics and reviewers were even less kind. In the Atlantic Monthly in October 1983 James Atlas simply recorded that
The end of Hemingway’s career was a sad business. The last novels were self-parodies, none more so than The Old Man And The Sea. The internal monologues of Hemingway’s crusty fisherman are unwittingly comical (‘My head is not that clear. But I think the great Di Maggio would be proud of me today’); and the message, that fish are ‘more noble and more able’ than men, is fine if you’re a seventh grader.And in his biography of Hemingway 12 years later, Kenneth S Lynn was almost brutal, though arguably his summing up The Old Man And The Sea is fair:
Today, there is only one question worth asking about The Old Man. How could a book that lapses repeatedly into lachrymose sentimentality and is relentlessly pseudo-Biblical, that mixes cute talk about baseball (‘I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland’) with crucifixion symbolism of the most appalling crudity (‘he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up’) have evoked such a storm of applause from highbrows and middlebrows alike — and in such overwhelming numbers?Fellow biographer, James Mellow, is a little kinder but also not as impressed with the novella as Hemingway hoped readers would be. He writes
Critics read [the sharks] as tropes for critics. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Hemingway insisted on setting the record straight: ‘You know I was thinking about actual sharks when I wrote the book and had nothing to do with the theory that they represented critics. I don’t know who thought that up.’ But Hemingway, with a new book in process [the sea war element of his ‘big book’] and still smarting over the critical reception of Across The River, was promulgating his own metaphor of the artist at bay. In a letter to Harvey Breit, he spoke of the lobo wolf: ‘He is hunted by everyone. Everyone is against him and he is on his own as an artist is.’ There was no doubt that The Old Man And The Sea was a surrogate fable of Hemingway’s own life as a writer who had dared to venture to far from the shore on the wide blue Gulf Stream, which had become Hemingway’s major metaphor for the mysterious force of life. . . Hemingway, too, was a former champion trying for a comeback, as Santiago was formerly El Campeon, not only a great fisherman, but rather awkwardly — it is one of the sentimental flaws of the novel — the champion arm wrestler of the island. The too easy identification of Santiago with Hemingway himself unavoidably taints the narrative with a kind of self-pity.Hemingway’s novella, the last work he published in his lifetime, not only evoked a storm of applause (and some relief that ‘Papa’ was not yet passed it), but won him the Pulitzer Prize and is also believed to have smoothed the path to being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.
Also smoothing that path, some suggest, were the two plane crashes Hemingway had survived at the conclusion of his African safari earlier that year. It had possibly decided the Nobel committee that perhaps he should be awarded the Prize before death did carry him away.
For years, not least because of Hemingway’s simple and uncomplicated prose, The Old Man And The Sea became a staple in school and college English literature syllabuses, and as such became part of the fabric of many a man and woman’s early years.
Many might thus remember it fondly, although how much it would delight their rather more mature minds in later life is another matter.
. . .
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hemingway came to the notice of young academics who had heeded Malcolm Cowley’s urging in his introduction to The Viking Portable Hemingway to take the Ernest Hemingway’s work more seriously as art.
At different times he was contacted by and corresponded with Carlos Baker (who was later appointed, with Hemingway’s consent, to write his biography), Phillip Young and Charles Fenton. The British writer and journalist John Atkins also contacted Hemingway.
All were initially rebuffed by Hemingway who again insisted he did not want his private life examined or delved into. Soon, however, Hemingway began to provide limited cooperation, at first with two and then three of them.
Baker was able to persuade him that he simply intended to analyse the work in terms of the artistic process and Hemingway eventually agreed that passages from his stories and novels could be quoted.
John Atkins, who planned something similar — an appraisal of Hemingway’s art — also met little resistance and proceeded. Hemingway later declared himself pleased with Atkins’s book, The Art of Ernest Hemingway. Although it was subtitled ‘His Work And Personality’, it did concern itself almost wholly with the work. On the other hand Young and Fenton had no luck at all.
Charles Fenton was planning an account of Hemingway’s early ‘apprenticeship as a writer’, covering when he wrote and helped to edit his high school newspaper and magazine, his seven months with the Kansas City Star and short pieces he sold to the Toronto Star. He had already been interviewing family and friends who knew Hemingway from those early days, and James Mellow writes
When Fenton also began querying his sister Marceline and his outlawed sister Carol . . . Hemingway gave him a ‘cease and desist’ order . . . The correspondence developed into angry exchanges. Yet, with each angry response, Hemingway, by way of correcting errors, also began feeding out more tempting bait . . . it was to Fenton that he gratuitously offered the dubious information that he had had to get the hell out of Petoskey because of troubles with four or five girls.Hemingway — inexplicably given public stand on the matter — even suggested who Fenton might like to contact to find out more. Hemingway’s attitude might sound odd, but one aspect of his personality was a narcissistic egocentricity and he loved to be the centre of attention. That might explain why he blew hot and cold with Fenton whose book eventually appeared in 1954.
More seriously for Hemingway, Philip Young announced that he believed Hemingway’s fiction was not just rooted in the severe wounds he had received at Fossalta in July 1918, but in other ‘psychic’ wounds he had suffered when younger, such as the ending of his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky and even earlier ones when growing up in Oak Park and at Walloon lake.
It is not clear what these ‘psychic wounds’ might be apart from the knockbacks every youngster encounters to a greater or lesser extent while maturing into adulthood. Hemingway not only complained that Young had no medical qualifications for undertaking such an examination, but he also had a deep suspicion of psychiatrists and psychiatry.
In the mid-1930s he threatened legal action against a Lawrence Kubie, the psychiatrist attending Hemingway’s mistress Jane Mason’s after she either jumped or fell from the second storey of her villa in Cuba (and whether it was a real suicide attempt or not has never been established.)
Hemingway heard that Kubie intended, as part of a series on several authors, a psychological analysis of Hemingway based on his fiction. Young was now planning something very similar.
Young’s dilemma was that he had already completed his book and had found a publisher, but his publishers would not proceed without permission from Hemingway to quote from his work. According to Young (in a preface to Hemingway: A Reconsideration, the 1961 revised edition to his book) the dispute over use of quotations carried on for over a year.
Young, a junior academic with a growing family and running out of money, was becoming ever more desperate as his publishers began to lose interest. Accounts of how the matter was resolved differ (and those differences are instructive on how much we can rely on biographers). According to James Mellow, Hemingway had written to Young
asking for [his] word ‘that the book is not biography disguised as criticism and that it is not a psychoanalytical study of a living writer’. Other than that he would have no objections to allowing Young to quote from his books.
This is certainly not the account Young gave in his preface to the 1961 edition of his book. As the book was exactly the kind of psychoanalytical study Hemingway feared — and hence his objection that Young had no medical training equipping him to undertake it — it makes sense that for more than a year Hemingway withheld permission for the quotations to be used. Mellow makes no mention of that.
The matter was finally settled when the kind heart that so often beat in Hemingway’s breast came to the fore: sympathetic to Young’s increasing financial plight, he simply changed his mind and granted his permission.
As for Carlos Baker’s book, he was so pleased with it that eventually he nominated the academic to be his official biographer. His only stipulation was that he and Baker should never meet.
In 1941 after the Pulitzer Prize board accepted the jurors’ recommendation to award the prize to Hemingway for For Whom The Bell Tolls, one influential board member insisted that Pulitzer Prize should not be associated with a novel with such profane and sexual content.
The board decided not to aware the prize Hemingway after all (though it did not award it to another author, either). Twelve years later though, he did succeed and won the Pulitzer prize for The Old Man.
That same year he began planning his second safari in East Africa. When Look magazine heard about it, it struck a deal with Hemingway and agreed to pay him $10,000 for a 3,500-word feature on the safari and another $15,000 for a series of pictures to be taken by their staff photographer Earl Theisen, at total of $25,000.
Yet again those figures also counsel caution when we read a biography: according to Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway was to be paid double that sum: $25,000 for the feature and another $25,000 for posing for Theisen’s pictures. So which is it? Who knows?
He and Mary Welsh set off for Europe in June and planned to visit Paris and then Spain before carrying on for Kenya. It was the first time Hemingway was back in Spain since Franco’s Nationalist defeated the Republicans, and he was apprehensive.
Their visit took in Valencia and Madrid as well as July’s Pamplona festival. As in 1925, Hemingway surrounded himself with friends for his Pamplona visit, but his return — perhaps another trip down memory lane — was not a great success. For one thing the town was now overrun with visitors, and he and Welsh could not find accommodation less then 25 miles away.
In Pamplona Hemingway was reunited with Juanito Quintana (left), who had appeared as the hotel owner Juanito Montoya in The Sun Also Rises, and yet again there are several versions of just how warm their friendship was.
In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes (i.e. Hemingway) is acknowledged by Montoya (i.e. Quintana) as a man who shares the true afficon for bullfighting and he treats Barnes with respect as an insider (a role Hemingway always liked to play), although he disapproves when the Barnes group seem to lead the young matador Pedro Romero astray.
This is a rosier account of Quintana’s feelings according to Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, of the University of Puerto Rico. Writing in the Hemingway Review Spring 2012 edition, he says that Quintana had mixed memories of Hemingway and his friends
Hemingway heard that Kubie intended, as part of a series on several authors, a psychological analysis of Hemingway based on his fiction. Young was now planning something very similar.
Young’s dilemma was that he had already completed his book and had found a publisher, but his publishers would not proceed without permission from Hemingway to quote from his work. According to Young (in a preface to Hemingway: A Reconsideration, the 1961 revised edition to his book) the dispute over use of quotations carried on for over a year.
Young, a junior academic with a growing family and running out of money, was becoming ever more desperate as his publishers began to lose interest. Accounts of how the matter was resolved differ (and those differences are instructive on how much we can rely on biographers). According to James Mellow, Hemingway had written to Young
asking for [his] word ‘that the book is not biography disguised as criticism and that it is not a psychoanalytical study of a living writer’. Other than that he would have no objections to allowing Young to quote from his books.
This is certainly not the account Young gave in his preface to the 1961 edition of his book. As the book was exactly the kind of psychoanalytical study Hemingway feared — and hence his objection that Young had no medical training equipping him to undertake it — it makes sense that for more than a year Hemingway withheld permission for the quotations to be used. Mellow makes no mention of that.
The matter was finally settled when the kind heart that so often beat in Hemingway’s breast came to the fore: sympathetic to Young’s increasing financial plight, he simply changed his mind and granted his permission.
As for Carlos Baker’s book, he was so pleased with it that eventually he nominated the academic to be his official biographer. His only stipulation was that he and Baker should never meet.
. . .
In 1941 after the Pulitzer Prize board accepted the jurors’ recommendation to award the prize to Hemingway for For Whom The Bell Tolls, one influential board member insisted that Pulitzer Prize should not be associated with a novel with such profane and sexual content.
The board decided not to aware the prize Hemingway after all (though it did not award it to another author, either). Twelve years later though, he did succeed and won the Pulitzer prize for The Old Man.
That same year he began planning his second safari in East Africa. When Look magazine heard about it, it struck a deal with Hemingway and agreed to pay him $10,000 for a 3,500-word feature on the safari and another $15,000 for a series of pictures to be taken by their staff photographer Earl Theisen, at total of $25,000.
Yet again those figures also counsel caution when we read a biography: according to Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway was to be paid double that sum: $25,000 for the feature and another $25,000 for posing for Theisen’s pictures. So which is it? Who knows?
He and Mary Welsh set off for Europe in June and planned to visit Paris and then Spain before carrying on for Kenya. It was the first time Hemingway was back in Spain since Franco’s Nationalist defeated the Republicans, and he was apprehensive.
Their visit took in Valencia and Madrid as well as July’s Pamplona festival. As in 1925, Hemingway surrounded himself with friends for his Pamplona visit, but his return — perhaps another trip down memory lane — was not a great success. For one thing the town was now overrun with visitors, and he and Welsh could not find accommodation less then 25 miles away.
In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes (i.e. Hemingway) is acknowledged by Montoya (i.e. Quintana) as a man who shares the true afficon for bullfighting and he treats Barnes with respect as an insider (a role Hemingway always liked to play), although he disapproves when the Barnes group seem to lead the young matador Pedro Romero astray.
This is a rosier account of Quintana’s feelings according to Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, of the University of Puerto Rico. Writing in the Hemingway Review Spring 2012 edition, he says that Quintana had mixed memories of Hemingway and his friends
[Quintana] said they were ‘big drunks’ who misbehaved and were so disrespectful that he once had an employee serve some of the Hemingway crew lobster water as if it were consommé. When asked if Ernest’s behavior made him angry, the ever-polite Quintana replied ‘close to it’ and went on, ‘when he was too drunk he would disturb the other guests and I couldn’t put up with that’. Perhaps the most compelling of Quintana’s memories concerns Hemingway as a person: ‘Hemingway was strange, very strange. He was a strange man’.