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.
According to José Castillo-Puche, Hemingway’s friend and biographer, by the end of his life, ‘Ernesto was no longer a fascinating figure to people in Spain; he had become a sort of joke, in fact’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto
Rico, Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
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 Dimaggio 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.
James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly, Oct 1983.
DESPITE the break in Europe, Hemingway’s health declined even more. After substantially cutting back on his drinking, restricting himself to just two glass of wine a day and spending more than a year without drinking hard liquor, his consumption gradually increased again. Reynolds writes
To visitors he claimed he was drinking only light wines and one or two whiskeys, but the numbers [recorded in the Finca ‘liquor’ bills as part of information submitted to the IRS] say that his need for alcohol was regaining control of his life. Combined with his continued daily intake of tranquillizers, antidepressants, heart medicine, testosterone steroids and larges does of vitamins, Hemingway’s drinking, which was forbidden with several of the drugs, contributed to his steadily deteriorating health.
Also worrying was the political situation in Cuba which throughout 1957 and 1958 was worsening. A few years earlier Hemingway had foolishly put himself at risk from the authorities of dictator Fulgencio Batista by seeming to support a group of revolutionaries who were training in Cuba to start an uprising in the Dominican Republic.
He had written a small cheque as a donation for the revolutionaries, so to keep a lower profile for a while and on the advice of his Cuban doctor — who was astonished that Hemingway had actually signed a cheque rather than given them cash —he had taken off to the Rockies for the rest of the year.
Once back at the Finca, he did wisely mind his own business, but violence was increasing. The bodies of men and women who had been tortured and killed by Batista’s men were being found everywhere, including near the Finca.
At one point, according to Reynolds,
Hemingway, Welsh and his first mate Gregorio Fuentes took the Pilar out to sea where the men tore open bunks to take out ‘heavy rifles, sawed-off shot guns, hand grenades and canisters and belts of ammunition for automatic rifles’ and threw the arsenal overboard. Had the government discovered the cache [perhaps left over from the ‘sub-hunting’ days and subsequently used to see off sharks], Hemingway would have been hard-pressed to explain their presence.
With an eye to the future and the worsening situation in Cuba, Hemingway also asked Ketchum friends to rent him a house for the winter. Reynolds adds
He may have been a great friend of the Cuban people, but in the dark of night he was just another rich American exploiting the Cuban poor.
For the last few months of 1957 and the first seven of 1958 Hemingway worked steadily on both his memoir and The Garden Of Eden (which was thus growing ever longer). He returned to the Finca in the spring of 1958 after expressing an interest in buying the house in Ketchum in which he eventually shot himself. The years at the Finca, Hemingway’s home for the past 20 years were coming to a close.
He and Welsh spend the last few months of 1958 and the first of 1959 in Ketchum, with Hemingway working on one of his several manuscripts. At the end of December 1958, Castro’s revolution succeeds and Batista flees the island.
In March 1959, Hemingway and Welsh return to the Finca, stopping off in their way for another trip to Europe.
Within weeks, concerned by the situation in Cuba, Hemingway contacted the seller of the house in Ketchum he had his eye on and bought it for cash. Then he and Welsh set off for another tour of the bullfighting in Spain.
When Charles Scribner heard of their trip, he suggested to Hemingway that Scribner’s could publish a revised and updated edition of Death In The Afternoon with a new addendum based on his most recent trip.
At the same time Charles Scribner told him he would like to reissue a collection of his short stories for students and asked Hemingway to submit a list of stories he might like to see included, write a preface for the new volume and a brief introduction to each featured story.
When a series of one-to-one (mano a mano) encounters between brothers-in-law matadors Luis Miguel Dominguin and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordonez was mooted, Life magazine’s Madrid correspondent contacted Hemingway and contracted him to write a 10,000 word feature on the encounters. This is the piece which grew remorselessly from the agreed 10,000 word to 30,000 then to 120,000 as Hemingway began to lose control. It was eventually posthumously published in 1985.
. . .
The Hemingways were the guests of one Nathan ‘Bill’ Davis at his estate, La Consula in the hills outside Malaga. Davis was a very wealthy American with business interests in the US and Spain and who, according to some biographers, ‘collected celebrities’ — Noel Coward, Lauren Bacall, Vivien Leigh and Ava Gardner were among his many visitors.
In Hemingway’s case this might be an unfair suggestion as Davis had known Hemingway at least since 1942 (and possibly as early as 1930) as a letter from Hemingway shows, Davis grew up in California, but his wealthy family originated in Pennsylvania, and novelist Booth Tarkington is said to have based the wealthy Indiana family in his novel The Magnificent Ambersons on the family of Davis’s mother.
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Hemingway and Welsh with various family and staff at the La Consula estate |
Hemingway and Welsh arrived in May before the corrida season got underway, and Hemingway began writing the preface to the new collection of short stories he had promised Scribner. In this he adopted an unusual persona, that of a lecturer addressing a class of students, and his preface reads as though he were giving a lecture.
It doesn’t come off at all, and when he completed it and showed it to Welsh for her opinion, she was unimpressed. She told him the attempted humour fell flat, she thought it sounded condescending and much of it simply made little sense.
Later, when Hemingway sent the preface to Charles Scribner, the publisher was equally underwhelmed, but unlike Welsh he could not say so directly. Michael Reynolds records that Scribner did his diplomatic best
to draft his response to Ernest’s preface which was clearly inappropriate for almost any audience. He agreed with Ernest’s list of stories to be included, but wanted to do some judicious editing of the preface
After digesting Scribner’s response and weighing it in the same basket with Mary’s less than enthusiastic critique, Ernest sent Scribner a brusque telegram to stop not only the preface but the entire short story project. It was the first time that anyone at Scribner’s had told him a piece of his writing was unpublishable.
This preface was perhaps another sign of Hemingway’s continuing mental and physical decline. When the bullfight season got underway at the beginning of June, the non-stop travelling across Spain from north to south and east to west proved to be exhausting and will not have helped.
Although Hemingway kept it up, Welsh grew weary of it, and she and Bill Davis’s wife Annie passed on several bullfights and returned to peace and comforts of the La Consula estate.
As usual Hemingway surrounded himself with an entourage of acolytes who were in almost constant attendance, although would be unfair to call them ‘hangers-on’. All were there at Hemingway’s invitation and often at his expense — Hemingway did not just like to have an audience but almost needed one.
Joining the entourage in Pamplona was Valerie Danby-Smith, a 19-year-old Irishwoman who was based in Madrid where she was combining nannying duties for friends with attempting to launch a career as a journalist. She had found occasional work as a stringer for a Belgian news agency and was asked to get an interview with the ‘world-famous’ writer Ernest Hemingway when the agency heard he was in Madrid.
Hemingway almost always gave journalists seeking such a meeting short shrift, but he was taken with Danby-Smith, and although he did not agree to an interview, he invited her to be one of his guests at the Pamplona festival due a few weeks later. Danby-Smith says she regarded the invitation as just a throwaway remark and gave it little thought until she was contacted by Juanito Quintana.
Quintana, who had lost his hotel in the Civil War when it was commandeered by Francoists and was now acting as Hemingway’s agent in Pamplona, wrote that he had reserved a hotel room and corrida tickets for Danby-Smith and asked her to confirm she would be attending.
When she told him she didn’t have the money, he and Bill Davis persuaded her to join them as their ‘secretary’ at $250 a month (about $2,430 in 2022). It was something of a sinecure: though Danby-Smith did occasionally take down letters dictated by Hemingway, her main role was simply to be in attendance.
Hemingway was once again smitten by a much younger woman, and much to Mary Welsh’s irritation, Danby-Smith gained pride of place, sitting next to Hemingway at dinner and with him in the front seat of the car when travelling to the next bullfight.
As had happened in Venice and Cuba when Hemingway believed himself to be in love with Adriana Ivancich, Welsh was again completely cast out, ignored by Hemingway who had eyes only for Danby-Smith.
When at the end of the festival he took his entourage for a picnic to the spot on the Irati river north of Pamplona he had taken Hadley more than 30 years earlier, Welsh slipped on a stone in the river and broke a toe in three places. She got no sympathy or attention from Hemingway.
Forty-five years after that summer’s tour of corridas with Hemingway, Valerie Danby-Smith, who eventually became Valerie Hemingway when she married Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, wrote a memoir.
Part of it chronicled the four months she spent with Hemingway in Spain and six months living at the Finca the following year. It was published as Running With Bulls in 2004 and is something of a curio.
After Hemingway’s death, Valerie settled in New York and had a halfway successful career in publishing and magazine journalism before she married Gregory and had her family; but she is otherwise unremarkable, and probably the only reason anyone would read her book is what it might tell us about Hemingway we did not already know. And it tells us nothing new.
Apart from an overlong and quite detailed chapter on following the bullfights around Spain (which bores readers as Danby-Smith admits it began to bore her) and another chapter describing her time at the Finca as Hemingway’s by then bona fide secretary, most of the memoir does not involve Hemingway at all.
More to the point, the picture Danby-Smith gives of Hemingway is quite at odds with what his biographers write. Although she says she grew fond of him, she complains he was possessive of her and that the late-night meals she was obliged to attend as part of his entourage at which Hemingway repeated the same anecdotes and jokes became tiresome.
She does acknowledge that he lost his temper once or twice in Spain— although not with her — but she makes no mention of his fluctuating moods and the continual decline in his mental and physical: she gives the impression there was nothing much wrong with him. His biographers and friends tell a different story.
A graphic account of the state Hemingway was in comes from his World War II friend Charles ‘Buck’ Lanham. He was a guest at the 60th birthday party Welsh had organised at La Consula (and largely paid for) and had flown in from the US to attend. He told Denis Brian, as recorded in The True Gen
. . .
[Hemingway] was a sick man. The plane crashes had ruptured his liver and ruptured his spleen. And he had very bum kidneys that he was treated for constantly. Of course, he was an absolutely incredible drinker. He could drink twenty-four hours a day. So he had a physical breakdown in all departments. He had lost a great deal of weight and was unhappy with himself. He was cursing his doctor every day because although he was supposed to be with him the whole time, the doctor was doing a little sightseeing.
The doctor was George Saviers, Hemingway’s friend and physician in Ketchum who with his wife had been asked to join the touring entourage in Pamplona and were also guests at the La Consula birthday party.
Lanham continues
I went into Ernest’s room the morning I arrived to see if he was all right, because I’d heard he was ill the night before. And, my God, I looked around his room and there were bottles of urine in every possible place, all labelled and dated, waiting for the doctor to analyses them. Ernest was furious when I came in. He was sitting, reading. He was never a hypochondriac, but now he was a very sick man. He couldn’t write anything. Life had lost all meaning, all point for him.
There is no hint of this decline in Danby-Smith’s memoir.
Just before leaving for the US and then for Cuba, Hemingway asked Danby-Smith to come back with him to work as his secretary at the Finca. He told her he relied on her completely and couldn’t write without having her around. He even hinted that he might kill himself if she refused. She told him she would think about it.
. . .
Welsh, neglected and sidelined, not just in favour of Danby-Smith but of other celebrity guests, had finally had enough, and returned to Cuba a month early. Without consulting her, Hemingway had invited Antonio Ordonez and his wife to stay at the Finca and the newly-bought house in Ketchum, and Welsh ostensibly left to prepare the homes to accommodate their guests.
Sensing her mood, in Paris to see her off Hemingway presented her with a $4,000 watch, but it did not assuage Welsh. Once back at the Finca Welsh wrote Hemingway a long letter complaining about how he had treated her treated and telling him that once their visitors were gone, she would find an apartment for herself in New York and end their marriage.
Hemingway responded by telegram that he didn’t agree with her decision, and when a few weeks later he was back in Cuba, he presented her with another very expensive gift, a diamond pin. Yet again she changed her mind about leaving him and decided to stay, but his treatment of her did not improve.
In Idaho, Ordonez and his wife had to return to Spain prematurely, and a little later, out hunting with Hemingway and George Saviers, Welsh slipped on ice and fractured her elbow. On the drive to hospital, according to James Mellow, she was groaning with pain, but was told by Hemingway ‘You could keep quiet . . . Soldiers don’t do that.’
Hemingway and Welsh were back in Cuba by mid-January, and because her fractured elbow meant Welsh could no longer type up the Life bullfighting feature Hemingway was writing by hand, he contacted Danby-Smith and asked her to come over to Cuba to work as his secretary.
She flew out and according to Danby-Smith’s memoir, the three of them — Welsh now apparently less jealous of her and taking Danby-Smith with her on shopping trips to Havana — enjoyed a quiet and peaceful time, with Hemingway writing in the morning while she typed up his work and letters he dictated.
Hemingway had always wanted a daughter, but according to Danby-Smith his interest in her was not paternal and he did regard her as a possible new wife. At point, she writes, he asked her to marry him, and though she did not take the proposal seriously, there is little reason to doubt Danby-Smith’s claim.
Six years earlier on the last occasion Hemingway saw Adriana Ivancich, in Paris in 1954 where she was studying art had, he had also suggested, although more obliquely, that he and she might marry. But in other respects Danby-Smith’s account is too rosy — Hemingway was going downhill fast yet Danby-Smith has nothing to say about that.
She records walks she and Hemingway took, enjoying the evening air and walking to a local bar to sit and chat. Her memoir gives the impression that he was content and at peace. Yet there were increasing signs of his paranoia: later that year, before Christmas in Idaho and at supper with friends, he noticed the lights were on in his local bank and claimed the FBI were in there going through his records.
In Cuba he could not stop writing ever more of his Life feature, extended his Life deadline and told Scribner’s not to count on the revised version of Death In The Afternoon being ready in time for publication later that year.
Finally, in mid-summer and in something close to desperation, he summoned A E Hotchner to Cuba to help him cut the Life feature to the length required by the magazine. By then it had reached 120,000 words, but Life expected just 30,000.
Yet Hemingway rejected every one of Hotchner’s suggested cuts, for reasons that often made no sense to Hotchner. The piece was eventually brought down to just under 60,000 words — though double what Life wanted — and Hotchner took manuscript to New York. Life weren’t pleased with its length but agreed to publish it in three parts for $90,000 ($875,000 in 2022) with another $10,000 for when it appeared in the Spanish addition of Life.
Yet still Hemingway wasn’t happy with it and told Scribner’s that before he submitted it for publication, he would have to travel to Spain again to check one or two further details.
The trip marked beginning of Hemingway’s final decline which only ended when he shot himself.
Hemingway flew to Europe unaccompanied and, says one biographer, it was his first flight on a jetliner. He had previously only flown in turbo-prob aircraft and never across the Atlantic in a civil aircraft. He was disconcerted by how much faster the journey was.
Welsh, with Danby-Smith at the apartment she was renting, say biographers, was oblivious to the mental state Hemingway was in but became very alarmed when Hotchner rang her one night a day or two after Hemingway had arrived in Spain to tell her that according to a news report that Hemingway had collapsed in Malaga and might have died. He hadn’t — as Hemingway reassured her by cable — but he was far from well.
Bill Davis and his wife were shocked to see how much his mental and physical condition has deteriorated since they last saw him ten months earlier. Hemingway asked Welsh to fly out to take care of him, but remembering the misery of the previous year, Welsh was reluctant to do so. Instead she sent Danby-Smith and then shortly afterwards Hotchner also flew to Spain. He had seen Hemingway just weeks earlier but he, too, was shocked by the state he found Hemingway in.
As biographer James Mellow put it
At La Consula the bewildered Davises [had borne] the brunt of Hemingway’s breakdown. He kept to his bed for days, was stone silent whenever the drove him anywhere. (He told Hotchner that Davis was trying to kill him in a car accident, not having succeeded the year before.) It was clear to Hotchner that Hemingway was suffering from delusions.
Back in the US by the beginning of October, Hemingway joined Welsh at her New York apartment, but he then refused to leave it because he was convinced he was being tailed by the FBI. Welsh wanted to get him back to Ketchum — by now ‘home’ — but she persuaded him to go there only with difficulty.
His paranoid behaviour worsened. When they arrived by rail at Shoshone Falls, the station closest to Ketchum, he spotted two men in overcoats and claimed they are two FBI agents tailing him. Two college professors who arrived to see him were shocked by his appearance and, says Reynolds, later reported
. . . his face was pale and red-veined, not ruddy and weather-beaten. We were struck by the thinness of his arms and legs . . . he walked with the tentativeness of a man well over sixty. The dominant sense we had was fragility.
He seemed to settle in at Ketchum and to get on with writing, but was constantly worrying — about his bank balance (which was exceedingly healthy) and that he did not have sufficient money to pay his various taxes, about potential legal trouble over getting Valerie Danby-Smith into the US and, according to Michael Reynolds
He worried that a cottonwood tree blown across the Big Wood River [at the foot of the hill on which his house stood] formed a natural bridge across which ‘anybody’ could infiltrate his defenses.
On either side of the front door he had crude glass portals built so that he could see whoever as at the door.
It was clear to everyone that Hemingway was mentally in a bad way and Welsh knew she had to get psychiatric help for him. But when Saviers suggested he check in at the Menninger Clinic (which specialised in treating poor mental health), Hemingway refused point-blank (sixty years ago there was an enormous stigma attached to be thought ‘crazy’).
He finally agreed to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and was admitted on the last day of November 1960, ostensibly for treatment for his hypertension. The initial medical tests confirmed for the first time that he was probably suffering from haemochromatosis.
But the primary treatment was for his very poor mental condition and for better or worse it was at the Mayo that Hemingway was given the electro-shock treatment for his chronic depression. Such treatment did show positive results for some patients and medical protocols have been transformed since 1960. But given that over the past sixteen years Hemingway had been concussed several times, for which he had never been treated, in his case the electro-shock treatment is thought to have caused brain damage.
It did, though, bring about a short-term improvement and he was discharged to return to Ketchum at the end of January. Over the next few weeks he did seem a little better, but his memory seemed to have been destroyed which upset him a great deal. All he could write were letters — he was unable to carry on with completing the introduction to his memoir or even come up with a title.
Then the paranoia returned and he became convinced his letters were being read and his phone was being tapped. He further despaired in mid-April when Cuban counter-revolutionaries launched their abortive in invasion on the Bay of Pigs and he thought the several manuscripts stored in a Havana safety deposit box were lost to him for ever.
A week later, Welsh rose one morning in Ketchum to find Hemingway downstairs with a shotgun and two cartridges. He had also composed a suicide note. She knew that George Saviers was due to make his daily call to measure Hemingway’s blood pressure and she kept her husband talking for an hour until Saviers arrived.
He persuaded Hemingway to be taken to the local hospital where he was sedated. A few days later he persuaded Saviers to allow him to go home to do complete various unspecified tasks, and was taken there by a hunting friend and a hospital nurse. He got into the house before them and when they caught up with him, he was loading a cartridge into a shotgun.
They managed to get the shotgun off him and took him back to hospital. The following day — and against his will — he was flown back to the Rochester’s Mayo Clinic. But he was now intent on killing himself: when the plane landed to refuel and passengers got out to stretch their legs, he tried to walk into a spinning propeller.
But Welsh didn’t when arrived at the clinic to see him: he ranted at her, accused her of conspiring to have him locked away in the hospital and she was puzzled and concerned that Hemingway’s erratic mental condition was not apparent to his doctors.
She contacted another respected psychiatric hospital — the Mayo clinic did not specialise in treating mental ill-health — which assured her it would be willing to admit Hemingway.
She asked the Mayo to recommend that Hemingway be transferred, but was told that would not be necessary.
When she went to visit her husband, she was astonished to find he had somehow persuaded his doctors that he was far better: he was sitting in his physician’s office
dressed in his street clothes, grinning like a Cheshire cat
and she was told he was ready to go home. At the end of June he was driven home and arrived in Ketchum on June 30. and he seemed happier but it became clear that he was still paranoid: the following evening Hemingway, Welsh and a friend were at a restaurant having dinner when he informed them that two men sitting nearby were FBI agents keeping an eye on him.
The morning after that Hemingway rose and found the key to the gun cupboard in the basement. Although Welsh had locked the guns away, she had inexplicably refused to hide the key to the cupboard. Hemingway returned upstairs to the foyer, stuck the shotgun barrel in his mouth and blew off the top of his head.