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.
Ernest may have commanded more money for his journalism, which he often viewed as a means of support while gathering experience for his fiction, but Martha was the more dedicated journalist.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
[Martha] was smiling and cordial until Ernest asked her whether he should tell the columnist [Earl Wilson interviewing Hemingway in January 1940] how he was busted and she went to Finland to make some more money to he could go on writing his book. Her expression darkened and she said curtly not to believe him, that that was just one of his jokes. Wilson was puzzled and Martha did not elaborate. What irritated her was that Ernest interpreted everything in terms of himself. The simple fact that she supported herself, that journalism was her job, was not satisfactory to his ego. He preferred to believe that she was doing it for him.
Bernice Kert, on Martha Gellhorn
in The Hemingway Women.
If the first stage had seen remarkable success and the second comparative failure and a slow decline in his reputation (matched, ironically, by growing fame), the third saw a spectacular revival of his standing with the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940.
Yet he was already growing unhappy and drinking more, not least because his latest novel was such a success and he feared he could and would never repeat it. He was also plagued by guilt about ditching Pauline Pfeiffer to marry Gellhorn (as he had been plagued when he ditched Hadley Richardson for Pfeiffer).
Then there was the uncomfortable fact that within a year of marrying Gellhorn, the strains in their relationship were already beginning to show, and he could not hide from the fact. It was also apparent that both he and Gellhorn had different ideas of what their future together should look like.
Hemingway and Gellhorn had been together as a couple, illicitly and then openly, for more than three and a half years when they married; and although according to Bernice Kert in The Hemingway Women some claimed Gellhorn had done most of the running in the early days, it was Hemingway who was eventually pushing for their union to be solemnised.
Hemingway and Gellhorn had been together as a couple, illicitly and then openly, for more than three and a half years when they married; and although according to Bernice Kert in The Hemingway Women some claimed Gellhorn had done most of the running in the early days, it was Hemingway who was eventually pushing for their union to be solemnised.
Unkind friends — there are always one or two — also suggested that at heart Gellhorn was more interested in a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, the well-known writer, than Ernest Hemingway, the man. Yet given the, eventually desperate, tone of the letters she wrote to him from Britain in 1943 in which she repeatedly urged him to join her, she does seem to have loved him a great deal.
While they had been conducting an affair, their partnership worked well, especially when they were together in Spain to cover the civil war, where it is said to have thrived on the ‘excitement’ of war and the supposed secrecy of their liaison. But unlike Hadley and Pauline, Gellhorn, who was already both a published novelist and a working journalist with some experience, was ambitious. She made it plain she would not be abandoning her career, and this did not sit well with Hemingway.
After Hemingway and Gellhorn’s third trip to Spain, Collier’s asked her to report for them on the situation in Czecho-Slovakia, and Hemingway left alone for New York, Key West and then Montana alone. He returned to Paris at the end of August and Gellhorn joined him there.
After Hemingway and Gellhorn’s third trip to Spain, Collier’s asked her to report for them on the situation in Czecho-Slovakia, and Hemingway left alone for New York, Key West and then Montana alone. He returned to Paris at the end of August and Gellhorn joined him there.
Then on the last day of September 1930 the Munich Agreement — still known in the Czech Republic and Slovakia as the ‘Munich Diktat’ and the ‘Munich Betrayal’ — was signed, and ever eager to be in the fray, Gellhorn returned to Prague in November to cover the forced cession of the Sudetenland to Germany.
Just over a year later while Hemingway was immersed in writing For Whom The Bell Tolls, Collier’s asked her to cover the invasion of Finland by Soviet Russia, and she was off again for two months.
At the time Hemingway seemed to support her decision to accept the assignment, but he was not pleased (and told friends, half-seriously, ‘What old Indian likes to lose his squaw with a hard winter coming on?’). It was clear that however much she adored — her word — Hemingway, there was no way Gellhorn was going to give up her professional life to become the mothering housewife he wanted and expected.
She was adamant that her career would always come first, and that became the central fault line in their union. She also carried on working, as she confessed to her mother Edna, because she both wanted and needed her own money — she always insisted on paying her way and sharing the Hemingway household expenses.
As an independent woman of principle who had grown up the daughter of an active campaigner for women’s rights, Gellhorn resented being expected to be ‘Hemingway’s wife’ and later remarked that she had not wanted to be ‘a footnote in someone else’s life’. When The Heart Of Another, her collection of short stories, appeared in October 1941, Hemingway asked her to publish it under the name ‘Martha Hemingway’.
She refused, and in her book The Hemingway Women, Bernice Kert writes that the suggestion irritated her. Kert also reports that as marriage to Hemingway approached, Gellhorn began to feel trapped. She records that when Gellhorn wrote to her friend Clara Spiegel just before leaving for Finland to tell her she and Hemingway were soon to marry, Gellhorn had added that it
was perhaps simpler all round, but she herself thought ‘living in sin’ wonderful.Almost 20 years later, in a letter to her friend Leonard Bernstein, she admitted
By the time I did marry [Hemingway] (driving home from Sun Valley) I did not want to, but it had gone too far in every way. I wept, secretly, silently, on the night before my wedding and my wedding night; I felt absolutely trapped.
Nor did Gellhorn keep her doubts about marriage from Hemingway, and when she voiced them, he took it badly. Michael Reynolds writes
According the Michael Reynolds, Gellhorn’s mother, Edna, was also unhappy that her daughter had agreed to marry Hemingway. Edna had first met him in August 1940 in Miami and although she liked him, she advised Gellhorn against marriage.
While submerged in the final corrections [to the proofs of For Whom The Bell Tolls], Ernest’s emotional center took a heavy hit when Martha began questioning the wisdom of their marrying. At four in the morning Ernest wrote her a note, saying her news busted his heart and left him with a first-class headache. He knew that for the last eighteen months he had been ‘no gift to live with’, as she put it, but she must remember how he helped her with her book — The Heart Of Another. But if she was not going to marry him, she should tell him before he took the Pilar alone to Key West giving himself too much time to think, another veiled threat of suicide.The problem was, Reynolds adds,
not that Martha loved him too little but he loved her too much. To Rodrigo Diaz, his pigeon-shooting companion and sometime doctor, Ernest was always at risk in his relationship with Martha. Easily hurt, he was tremendously vulnerable beneath the tough exterior with which he faced the world.This was certainly not the first time Hemingway had used the threat of suicide as emotional blackmail. In the run-up to both his previous marriages he had also hinted darkly to his then brides-to-be that he might kill himself (and his reasoning on both occasions was less than clear).
A few months later when Edna arrived for the wedding ceremony — biographer Kenneth S. Lynn claims ‘unexpectedly’, but it would have been natural for Martha to have been invited her mother — she again tried to persuade her daughter to call off the wedding. Many years later, Gellhorn confirmed that her mother had misgivings about the union to Valerie Danby-Smith.
In 1959, Danby-Smith, who later married Hemingway’s third son, Gregory, had spent five months as part of Hemingway’s entourage in Spain where he was criss-crossing the country attending bullfights and in 1960 another six months with the Hemingways in Cuba. In her memoir Running With Bulls records that Martha Gellhorn told her:
I should have taken my mother’s advice and never married him. The relationship was fine as long as we were lovers Marriage was a disaster. My wise mother knew it and tried to warn me but I would not listen.
. . .
Before they married and while out West, Gellhorn suggested to Collier’s that in view of increasing Japanese aggression, she should visit China and the Far East to report on the defences in the area and the influence Japan was having in the region. Japan had first invaded China in 1931, and a second Sino-Japanese war began six years later.
Hemingway was against the trip, but he assumed that Collier’s would agree to send Gellhorn and so he intended to tag along, to protect her, he told friends, from ‘war, pestilence, carnage and adventure’.
Without telling her he arranged to supply the recently founded liberal daily PM newspaper with features on the situation in China. Privately he also agreed to report to the US government, which was supplying the Chinese nationalists with money and weapons to fight Japan.
The US, which regarded the Communists as ‘less corrupt’ than the Nationalists, suspected that the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was also using what they were supplying to wage a renewed civil war with the Communists and pocketing some of the money.
In mid-January 1941, Hemingway and Gellhorn set off on their extended tour of the Far East, which they jokingly referred to as their ‘crazy honeymoon’, beginning in New York where they first completed various errands. While they were there, Gellhorn agreed to help the newspaper columnist Earl Wilson interview Hemingway at the hotel where they were staying, and the meeting was underway when she returned from a shopping trip.
In mid-January 1941, Hemingway and Gellhorn set off on their extended tour of the Far East, which they jokingly referred to as their ‘crazy honeymoon’, beginning in New York where they first completed various errands. While they were there, Gellhorn agreed to help the newspaper columnist Earl Wilson interview Hemingway at the hotel where they were staying, and the meeting was underway when she returned from a shopping trip.
The fault line in their relationship surfaced again when Hemingway joked to Wilson that Gellhorn had agreed to report for Collier’s on the Russian invasion of Finland only to make money to allow him to go on writing his novel. This did not got down well with Gellhorn at all. Kert writes that her
expression darkened and she said curtly not to believe him, that that was just one of his jokes. Wilson was puzzled and Martha did not elaborate. What irritated her was that Ernest interpreted everything in terms of himself. The simple fact that she supported herself, that journalism was her job, was not satisfactory to his ego. He preferred to believe that she was doing it for him.The trip to the Far East lasted for just over four months, and for Hemingway it took in four weeks in Hong Kong while Gellhorn flew off for a short tour of China and what was then Burma. She then re-joined Hemingway in Hong Kong and together they embarked on a very miserable, very cold and very rainy tour
of southern China, which involved travelling up-river by boat and several days of riding mean Mongolian ponies along muddy mountain paths.
They met Chiang and — in a clandestine operation — the Communist leader Zhou En-lai, but neither enjoyed the tour at all. Then they parted, Hemingway slowly made his way back to the US while Gellhorn carried on to Burma, the Dutch East Indies and Singapore.
There she was astonished by the disorganised British defences, whereas the Dutch in contrast, she reported, had been a paradigm of efficiency.
Although Hemingway had not been keen on the trip from the start, he was stoical about the conditions they encountered, whereas for Gellhorn it became a never-ending agony. Hemingway was notorious for his low standards of hygiene and dishevelled appearance, but Gellhorn was fastidious over cleanliness, both her own and those of her surroundings. She hated the filth and squalor she found in China, especially the ever-present smell of ‘night soil’, the euphemism for human shit.
Although Hemingway had not been keen on the trip from the start, he was stoical about the conditions they encountered, whereas for Gellhorn it became a never-ending agony. Hemingway was notorious for his low standards of hygiene and dishevelled appearance, but Gellhorn was fastidious over cleanliness, both her own and those of her surroundings. She hated the filth and squalor she found in China, especially the ever-present smell of ‘night soil’, the euphemism for human shit.
None of this bothered Hemingway, who enthusiastically took to Chinese cuisine and enjoyed the many boozing sessions with Chinese officials and the endless banquets held in their honour. Gellhorn did not.
Once back at the Finca Vigia in Cuba in mid-1941 life ran along the lines Hemingway envisaged but which began to challenge Gellhorn. She did not enjoy having to run his household and organise staff. She disliked that it was always open house for Hemingway’s drinking buddies from Havana who would drop in at all times.
Once back at the Finca Vigia in Cuba in mid-1941 life ran along the lines Hemingway envisaged but which began to challenge Gellhorn. She did not enjoy having to run his household and organise staff. She disliked that it was always open house for Hemingway’s drinking buddies from Havana who would drop in at all times.
Hemingway’s sons came to stay for the summer, and she ensured they were always amused, but that encroached on time she would rather have spent writing. His sons, Jack, Patrick and Gregory — known as Gigi — became fond of Gellhorn, although they regarded her more as a pal and an older sister than a stepmother.
At first she gamely played along with Hemingway’s ad hoc and disorganised living regime, although she did make her feelings known. (Hemingway’s sons were impressed that unlike Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer, Gellhorn did not kowtow to their father, talked back and gave him as good as she go.)
When her mother Edna came to stay and the three of them were due to meet for lunch in Havana, Hemingway did not show up. A furious Gellhorn tracked him down to La Floridita where he was drinking with friends, bawled him out for being so rude to her mother and dragged him off. Then Japan, on December 7, 1941, attacked Pearl Harbor.
. . .
Accounts of Hemingway’s activities in Cuba over the following 27 months vary though the broad outlines are clear. From the beginning of the war in Europe, Gellhorn had been puzzled that he didn’t try to get himself hired as a war correspondent and head over there, and she persistently and increasingly nagged him to do so.
But Hemingway was content to go fishing on his boat Pilar and drink with his Cuban buddies. Nor did he attempt any new writing except to compose an introduction to Men At War, his selection of ‘war writings’ (in which he, not so modestly, included some of his own work).
Quite how Hemingway acquired a reputation for being an ‘authority on war’ is a puzzle. He certainly read very widely on the subject, but although in later life he claimed he had ‘gone to war’ in World War I and strictly he had done so, it was certainly not in the sense understood by most as ‘being under arms and fighting’.
Quite how Hemingway acquired a reputation for being an ‘authority on war’ is a puzzle. He certainly read very widely on the subject, but although in later life he claimed he had ‘gone to war’ in World War I and strictly he had done so, it was certainly not in the sense understood by most as ‘being under arms and fighting’.
He had arrived in Italy in 1918, but his ‘war’ lasted just a month and consisted of driving a Red Cross ambulance for two weeks, then handing out chocolate and cigarettes to Italian solders for two weeks. Hemingway later claimed that when he was in Spain during 1937 and 1938, Republican commanders had sought his advice on tactics.
Although Charles Collingwood, a fellow World War II fellow correspondent, conceded that Hemingway’s wide reading on military matters was an advantage when talking to senior army officers, that he was ever ‘consulted on tactics’ is almost certainly just another grandiose exaggeration if not an outright invention.
By May 1942, though, after a few months of inactivity, he did come up with a project which might make him useful. Hemingway believed that among the many Spanish exiles Cuba were a number of fascist sympathisers who might assist the Germans and their U-boot fleet.
By May 1942, though, after a few months of inactivity, he did come up with a project which might make him useful. Hemingway believed that among the many Spanish exiles Cuba were a number of fascist sympathisers who might assist the Germans and their U-boot fleet.
He approached Spruille Braden, the newly-appointed US ambassador, to suggest that he should see up a counter-intelligence network to monitor these sympathisers.
The network, which Hemingway eventually nicknamed ‘the Crook Factory’ and whose headquarters were the Finca guest house, was 26-strong and made up of six full-time agents and 20 part-timers.
They were all Hemingway’s Havana friends and acquaintances, high and low — drinking buddies, bartenders, fishermen, whores and even a Basque Roman Catholic priest (one of the few who had not supported the Falangists) who had fled Spain and washed up in Cuba.
They were instructed to pass on what they heard and saw, and Hemingway visited the US embassy once a week to deliver a summary of their information to the second secretary, Robert Joyce.
Very little of any use was uncovered by the network, but (writes Jeffery Meyers) Joyce, a friend of and sympathetic to Hemingway, explained why the Crook Factory’s reports were tolerated at the embassy and in Washington. If the reports, says Meyers, were
sensational [The Crook Factory was] paid more — $20 instead of $10. [But] most of these reports were contradictory — less than useful, as he caused confusion in Washington headquarters at the Pentagon — not to speak of the FBI at home and in Havana.But, Meyers adds,
a major-general who headed G-2 in the Pentagon in 1942, said Army intelligence was interested in and welcomed reports from military attaches on all matters . . .Whether useful and productive or not, the activities of Hemingway’s ‘spy network’ began a feud with the FBI which continued — on the Bureau’s side — until Hemingway blew his head off eighteen years later.
The FBI agents stationed at the embassy under ‘legal attache’ Raymond Leddy felt Hemingway was encroaching on their territory. (They became particularly worried when Hemingway and his network began ‘investigating’ Cuba’s head of police whom Hemingway suspected was corrupt. He most probably was, but the FBI did not want to fall out with a man on whose cooperation it relied.)
Leddy also became aggrieved after Hemingway once introduced him as a member of ‘the Gestapo’ and later described the FBI as ‘Franco’s Bastard Irish’ — Hemingway was convinced the FBI was run by Irish Roman Catholics who had instinctively supported the Fascist nationalists in Spain’s Civil War.
A file was opened on Hemingway which soon caught the attention of the FBI’s founder and boss, J. Edgar Hoover, though Hoover advised his men on the ground in Cuba to tread carefully as Hemingway seemed not only to have the ear of ambassador Braden, but, through Gellhorn who was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, that of US president Roosevelt.
Within weeks (biographer Kenneth Lynn suggests he had already become bored with ‘counterintelligence’) Hemingway had begun another undertaking which helped him convince himself — although not Gellhorn, who also ridiculed the Crook Factory as just another excuse for Hemingway and his cronies to live it up — that he was contributing to the ‘war effort’.
Within weeks (biographer Kenneth Lynn suggests he had already become bored with ‘counterintelligence’) Hemingway had begun another undertaking which helped him convince himself — although not Gellhorn, who also ridiculed the Crook Factory as just another excuse for Hemingway and his cronies to live it up — that he was contributing to the ‘war effort’.
After the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the devastating success German U-boats were having sinking commercial ships, Frank Knox, the US Secretary of the Navy had appealed to all US boat owners on the east and south coasts to play a useful role, and Hemingway decided to volunteer his and Pilar’s services.
The U-boats had been particularly effective in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, attacking vessels carrying bauxite (needed to produce aluminium) and oil. In February 1942 the Germans had sunk nineteen ships, another nineteen in March, eleven in April, thirty-eight in May.
In the eleven months after the attack on Pearl Habor, 263 ships were sunk in the Caribbean Sea. Hemingway’s plan was to sail the Pilar in waters off Cuban coast to lure a German U-boat to the surface — there had been occasions when U-boats had stopped small private vessels to commandeer whatever fresh water, fish and vegetables might be on-board.
Then, Hemingway hoped, he and his crew could gun down any German seamen on deck, lob grenades into the U-boat’s conning tower, disable the vessel and capture it. However unlikely it seemed,
Hemingway’s proposal again found favour with ambassador Braden, and he allocated a supply of rationed gasoline, machine guns, grenades and bazookas to Hemingway and his crew.
The Pilar was even equipped with a shortwave radio and US marine radio operator to report nightly to the US navy Gulf force and even monitor possible broadcasts from U-boats. (The flaw in that proposal was that no one on the Pilar, least of all the marine radio operator, spoke or even understood German.)
At first Hemingway sailed the Pilar out of Havana and returned home to the Finca each night, but soon he decided to expand his operations to monitor the many secluded bays and inlets along Cuba’s long coastline where a German U-boat might berth unobtrusively and leave stocks of munitions and provisions. He stationed the Pilar on a small sandbank off the north-eastern coast of Cuba, and the missions began to last for several weeks at a time.
At first Hemingway sailed the Pilar out of Havana and returned home to the Finca each night, but soon he decided to expand his operations to monitor the many secluded bays and inlets along Cuba’s long coastline where a German U-boat might berth unobtrusively and leave stocks of munitions and provisions. He stationed the Pilar on a small sandbank off the north-eastern coast of Cuba, and the missions began to last for several weeks at a time.
In the event no German U-boats were captured (or blown up) or any secret stocks of munitions or provisions discovered. Once when Hemingway thought the Pilar had spotted a large Spanish vessel towing why might have been a German U-boat, it was shown to be a false alarm.
Despite a conspicuous lack of success, Hemingway took his ‘war effort’ seriously, but there were sceptics: one Mario Ramírez Delgado, a captain in the Cuban Navy who did actually sink a German U-boat — the U-176 on May 15, 1943 — described Hemingway as merely
a playboy who hunted submarines off the Cuban coast as a whim.Gellhorn was as scornful of the scheme as she was of the counterintelligence network. She believed it was nothing but a silly ruse to obtain gasoline so Hemingway could continue his marlin fishing. (None of the biographers report that Hemingway and his crew did any fishing, but they did sometimes lark about, on at least one occasion lobbing grenades at buoys off the coast).
The spying ceased at the end of April 1943, after eleven months, apparently as planned, when a number of necessary repairs kept the Pilar in dock and out of action.
Finally, in October 1943, and after waiting for the renewal of US navy authorisation for the Pilar to continue its patrols, Hemingway was informed it would not be coming through. The British had cracked the Enigma coding machine which the German admiralty used to communicate with and coordinate its U-boat fleet, and the Allies had decimated Germany’s U-boat fleet. The Germans now no longer posed a threat to Allied shipping.