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.
[Hemingway’s] pre-1946 depressions usually followed the completion of a book when he did not know what to write next. His post-1946 depressions were different. Because he was leaving work largely completed but not quite finished, one or more books for always begging for attention. As a result, he would move back and forth among them, even during his depressed periods, and unfinished work was always look at the back of his mind.Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.Despite his tough-guy image, Hemingway was a soft-hearted man. He was apparently persuaded to grant [Malcolm] Cowley’s interview in Cuba after the critic pleaded that his son’s education was at stake.Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: a biography.Mary was Hemingway's wife during the years of his greatest fame and most radical deterioration, of the Nobel Prize as well as the Mayo Clinic. She felt she had been an entity, and feared she would become an appendage. At the age of 36, she gave up her independence and professional career, adopted his sporting passions, entertained his coarse cronies matched his numerous accidents with her own falls and fractures, and even tolerated his infatuation with two teenage girls the ‘vestal virgin’ Adriana Ivancich and the flirtatious Valerie Danby-Smith.Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: a biography.
THE nominally fourth and final stage of Hemingway’s life lasted for 16 years. It began when he arrived back at his home at the Finca Vigia near Havana from ‘the war in Europe’ in mid-March 1945 and ended at around 7am on Sunday, July 2, 1961, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, when he was able to end his life at his third attempt.
Those final 16 years were marked by ever-worsening health, both mental and physical, a stormy fourth marriage, and two middle-aged amour fou for women who, at just 19, were several decades years younger than him.
Notably for a man regarded by many, not least by himself, as one of America’s greatest writers, those last years saw a scant published output. Yet, ironically, he actually wrote more fiction between 1945 and 1961 than he had in his first 16 years as a ‘celebrated author’; but he published just a fraction of it, just two works.
These were a novel, Across The River And Into The Trees, and The Old Man And The Sea, that is sometimes called ‘a novel’ but at 27,000 can be regarded either as a novella or even a long short story. Across The River And Into The Trees appeared in 1950 and was almost universally derided. The Old Man And The Sea, though, was celebrated and praised to high heaven, although a dissenting few gave it only two cheers.
The remainder of the welter of words he produced in those final 16 years — and welter seems to be the most appropriate word — was not published until several years after his death and then only after heavy and drastic editing.
Those posthumous works consisted of a memoir, A Moveable Feast (first published in 1964) a novel, Islands In The Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer, a second ‘bullfighting book’ which began life as a feature he was contracted to write by Life magazine (1985), a second novel, The Garden Of Eden (1986) and True At First Light (1999), a ‘fictional account’ — Hemingway’s own description — of his second African safari.
Quite why Hemingway was reluctant to offer those works for publication is unclear. Some biographers suggest he suspected some of it was still not up to snuff and he intended to revise it until he thought it was.
The Garden Of Eden dealt in part with sexual ambiguity and role reversal, and Hemingway is thought to have feared it could not be published in his lifetime. In the mid-1950s it would certainly have startled those middle-Americans — and frankly middle-brow — who now made up his core readership.
It would not be unkind to suggest that his publisher Scribner’s only released the posthumous work to squeeze the last remaining dollars out of their property, although they would doubtless deny such a charge and insist the world had a right to read all the work of an ‘important writer’.
Some academics have loyally claimed that some of the writing does have merit, but it is difficult to rid oneself of the suspicion that the occasional attention it is given is overwhelmingly because it is ‘by Ernest Hemingway’.
Substantiating the suggestion that Scribner’s had more than one eye on the bottom line were the publication in 1964 of By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, a compendium of his journalism from throughout his career, and, in 1985, Dateline: Toronto, a collection of the freelances pieces he filed from Paris for the Toronto Star. Finally, a Moveable Feast was re-edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway and re-published in 2009.. . .When Hemingway returned to the Finca Vigia, he set about preparing it for the arrival of Mary Welsh (left) whom he expected to join him and become his fourth wife.
To make that possible, he had visited Martha Gellhorn in the Dorchester hotel (where she was laid up with influenza) while on his way home from Europe and finally agreed to the divorce she had long demanded. She was desperate to possess a passport which identified her under he maiden name.
Unfortunately, Welsh was not quite as sold on the idea of marrying him as Hemingway believed. She had already been married twice, and when she informed her parents she was about to divorce her second husband, she notably did not tell them she would be marrying Hemingway, merely that she might be marrying him.
Although Welsh had agreed to marry Hemingway in Paris in August 1944 — reportedly persuaded to do so by Marlene Dietrich who had first met Hemingway more then ten years earlier — she was certainly in two minds about the prospect.
Between mid-May 1944 and the beginning of March 1945 when Hemingway had met and courting her, she had already seen and fallen foul of the ugly, often vicious, side of his personality. By turns Hemingway could be very sweet and loving (as several mawkish love poems he had written for her testified) and very, very nasty, especially when he was drunk, which he often was. In those nine months he had been rude to and insulted her in public on several occasions, and had already hit her.
Once — apparently on Valentine’s Day 1945 — and again while steaming drunk, he had placed a framed photograph of Noel Monks, her second husband, in Ritz Hotel lavatory bowl and blasted it with a set of German machine pistols his US army friend Charles ‘Chuck’ Lanham had just given him.
Furthermore, Welsh had never been short of admirers, which aroused Hemingway’s jealousy, and he even accused her of sleeping with senior army officers to gain information. Monks himself was also jealous of what his wife was getting up to while he was away covering the war.
Monks and Welsh had married on New Year’s Day, 1939, in Chelsea, London, but when Welsh found out he was having an affair while reporting from Cairo, she, too, began to play the field. In a letter to Welsh in February 1945, Monks’ list of her lovers included ‘a pip-speak general’, ‘a film unit guy’ (which would have been Irwin Shaw), a ‘queer-looking guy’ and ‘pimply-faced [Michael] Foot’ (who later became an unsuccessful leader of Britain’s Labour Party).
As for Hemingway, Monks declared she had thrown ‘a sprat into the sea and caught [herself] a whale’. He and Welsh were divorced in Chicago on August 31, 1945.
Despite whatever misgivings she had, Welsh joined Hemingway in Cuba in May 1945, and once his divorce from Gellhorn was finalised in December 1945, she and Hemingway were married the following March.
Yet her doubts continued: after a somewhat fraught two-part civil ceremony at a lawyer’s office — it was all in Spanish and Welsh didn’t understand a word — and several off-colour quips Hemingway made that upset her, followed by a pleasant wedding reception in a friend’s apartment, he again turned nasty on the drive back to the Finca.
That night (as we know from the diary she kept) she resolved to leave him. The following day she changed her mind. Those 24 hours were pretty much the template of their subsequent married life together.
On many occasions Hemingway treated Welsh like dirt: once while entertaining friends to dinner, he threw a glass of wine in her face; on another occasion and again in company, he tipped the supper she had prepared onto the floor. Once when he was due home for lunch with friends, he turned up with a young Cuban prostitute in tow.
Later he would always be sweetness and light, and attempt to soothe Welsh’s anger with an expensive gift. To the astonishment of their friends who witnessed how Hemingway treated her, Welsh rolled with the punches, and though she often confided in her diary that she wanted to leave Hemingway, she never did.
Part of the problem was that for many years she did not feel the Finca Vigia was her home: Martha Gellhorn had discovered it, had renovated and had furnished it, and pictures of Martha were still everywhere.
Unlike Hemingway’s first three wives who had a well-off upbringing, Welsh came from a ‘humble’ background (although her father, a riverboat captain, was unusually enlightened, listened to classical music and insisted his daughter should always stand up for herself).
She felt she could not compete with the smart, often very attractive wives of Hemingway’s friends (with whom he flirted openly in front of her and with whom he often believed himself to be in love).
Two of the ridiculous infatuations Hemingway developed, one with a 19-year-old Venetian woman and ten years later with an Irish would-be journalist of the same age, humiliated her, but she clung on.
Even after an an excruciating extended visit to Spain in 1959 when she finally made firm plans to leave Hemingway and bought an apartment in New York, she could not make the break and was at his side in the final 18 months of his life when his mental health finally gave way and blew his head off.¬. . .
After the success of For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940, Hemingway submitted no more work for publication for ten years. Under the circumstances, Scribner’s showed remarkable patience with the writer the house still regarded as one of its principal assets, although in 1947 Maxwell Perkins, who had guided Hemingway’s career for 20 years, had, according to biographer Kenneth Lynn, privately confided in his wife that ‘Hemingway is through’.
Then in 1950 came Across The River And Into The Trees. As did three of the four novels Hemingway had so far published, it began life as a short story and was based on the first of his infatuations.
Lynn suggests Perkins would have been aware of the novel’s many weaknesses and would strongly have advised Hemingway to publish it as a short story; but Perkins had died suddenly a few months after voicing his misgiving about the writer’s future and did not oversee the novel’s publication or witness he critical mauling it received.
The critics, though, be damned: despite the awful reviews it was given, Scribner’s patience was rewarded: the novel sold very well, spent seven weeks in the bestselling lists and was serialised by — though decidedly middle-brow and mid-market — Cosmopolitan magazine. Even more gratifying were the sales of The Old Man And The Sea which appeared two years later.
Despite publishing just those two works in the final quarter of his life, Hemingway had, in fact, been writing consistently for several months at time ever since he returned from Europe in 1945.
Nominally he had attended World War II — an interlude he later promoted to ‘fighting in Europe’ — as a war correspondent; but he was quite candid that his purpose was essentially to collect material for his next novel.
Within months of his return to Cuba, he set about writing what he declared would be his ‘big book’, a ‘war novel’ that would cover the conflict at sea, on land and in the air. The ‘sea’ war story was to be based on his ‘submarine hunting’ off the Cuban coast, the ‘land’ war on the weeks he had spent with Colonel Charles ‘Chuck’ Lanham’s 22nd infantry regiment in France, Belgium and Germany, and the ‘air’ war on his flights with the RAF.
Following his usual disciplined routine of rising early and working until about noon, he set to work in earnest in October 1945, initially continuing to write the story based on Bimini he had begun before the war. In tandem he also began writing the novel that was eventually published — later drastically pruned it has to be said, with two central characters removed completely — as The Garden Of Eden.
(There is disagreement among his biographers when Hemingway began writing the novel: Kenneth Lynn, James Mellow, Jeffery Meyers and, most recently, Mary Dearborn contend it was begun in the mid-1940s, but Michael Reynolds suggests the novel wasn’t started until the early 1950s.)
This period of intensive writing carried on until 1948. By then he had abandoned his plan for an ‘air’ war novel, perhaps realising that his few flights with the RAF as an observer might not furnish him with enough material.
Then work on his ‘big book’ stopped as his health increasingly deteriorated. Since returning to Cuba in 1945 he was drinking ever more heavily, had put on even more weight and his blood pressure was dangerously high.
Some biographers suggest he was afraid he would die suddenly of an aneuryism, and following his doctor’s orders, he managed, briefly, to lose weight and bring down his blood pressure. But he could not regain the impetus to carry on with his writing.. . .It was around this time that he attracted the attention of three journalists and of several academics. In 1948, Aaron Edward (A.E.) Hotchner (right), who was then working for Cosmopolitan magazine, was asked to visit Hemingway in Cuba and sign him up to contribute to a series on ‘the future of literature’.
Hemingway agreed, but as part of the contract he wanted Cosmopolitan to publish two of his short stories (which he had not yet written) and to serialise part of his ‘war novel’. He wanted $15,000 (just over $164,000 at today’s prices) for the overall deal.
He explained that sum was less than he might usually demand, but as a writer resident outside the US the tax implications were favourable: he explained that tax-free those $15,000 were worth $75,000 before tax.
The proposed series of articles was, in fact, abandoned after Cosmopolitan appointed a new editor and the two short stories were never written. But according to Michael Reynolds, Cosmopolitan still paid up and did serialise his next novel, though that was not the ‘war book’ both expected it to be at the time.
These dealings saw the start of Hemingway’s relationship with Hotchner (who soon moved on from Cosmopolitan) and the two became friends and collaborators. Hotchner had studied law but was trying his hand at journalism. He became something of an acolyte and confidant who was often in attendance and always on call until Hemingway killed himself.
Eventually he and Hemingway formed a small company, H&H Enterprises, which produced radio and, later, TV drama of some of Hemingway’s works. (The dramas were sponsored by Buick and featured in the Buick-Electra Playhouse. The initial four were so popular that Buick wanted to commission a second series, to include The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, but stipulated that they should be adapted to have a ‘happy ending’. Unsurprisingly Hemingway passed.)In that same year, Malcolm Cowley (left) was commissioned by Life magazine to write a long profile of Hemingway.
Hemingway had been acquainted with Malcolm Cowley in Paris 25 years earlier when both were part of the Anglo/American expatriate community in Montparnasse (although Cowley and his new bride lived outside Paris).
Although according to Denis Brian in The True Gen, his book of interviews with Hemingway friends, the two kept up an amiable correspondence over the years, Hemingway was rather rude about him in his short story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro.
When the dying writer reminisces about his younger days in Paris — for which read Hemingway reminiscing about his younger days in Paris — Cowley appears briefly as anAmerican poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement.In the first versions of the story Cowley was referred to by name, but this was subsequently amended to ‘an American poet’.
Cowley had also earned Hemingway’s distain because for several years in the 1930s he had worked for the left-wing publication, The New Republic. His standing with Hemingway rose, however, with the introduction Cowley wrote to The Viking Portable Library volume of Hemingway’s work that was published in 1944: in it he suggested Hemingway should be treated far more seriously as artist.
Despite that plaudit, Hemingway was not immediately keen on granting Cowley an interview and having a profile published. Throughout his life Hemingway had a decidedly ambivalent attitude to publicity: on the one hand he often shamelessly promoted himself (which was certainly a major factor in his initial rise to literary fame); on the other he pleaded that he, too, was entitled to a private life and believed it harmed a writer’s work if his readers knew too much about him.
Hemingway was full of such contradictions. He had once loftily complained about writers who ‘never learned how to say no to a typewriter’; and in a letter to Maxwell Perkins several years earlier he had declared thatIt wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.Yet increasingly Hemingway himself found it difficult to say ‘not to a typewriter: after Life magazine had commissioned him in 1959 for a 10,000-word feature on a series of Spanish bullfights, it later agreed, at Hemingway’s request, to extend the length to 30,000 words.
The piece eventually grew to 120,000 words. This was all a far cry from the often brutally concise style of his first four books which had so impressed the critics and helped to make his name. By 1932 with Death In The Afternoon he had certainly forgotten ‘how to say no to a typewriter’; and his verbosity was so out of control by 1935 with Green Hills Of Africa that reviewing the book in the New York Times Charles Poore observesSome of his sentences . . . would make Henry James take a breath. There’s one that starts on page 148, swings the length of 149 and lands on 150, forty lines or so from tip to tip.The manuscripts for his two posthumous novels, Islands In The Stream and The Garden Of Eden, were also exceptionally long — Eden even reached more than 200,000 words — and both had to be drastically cut before they were published. This from the writer whose ‘terse, precise and aggressively fresh prose’ in The Sun Also Rises was so admired.
Yet arguably there is nothing hypocritical about Hemingway’s attitude to the publicity he sought and the privacy he persuaded himself he needed: as a man who sincerely believed he was right about everything, he was possibly simply unaware of the obvious ironies.
According to Hemingway, he agreed to the profile after Cowley pleaded that the money Life would pay him as it would allow him to send his son to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire (and so much for Cowley’s left-wing principles). According to Cowley, quoted by Denis Brian in The True Gen, he wasn’t quite as desperate for the money as Hemingway implied.
He, his wife Muriel and his son Robert spent ten days in March 1948 in Havana, staying at the Ambos Mundos and enjoying the Hemingways’ hospitality. Robert Cowley remembers that his mother was very impressed with Hemingway’s ‘extraordinarily good manners’. But he also recalls thatYou could also tell [Hemingway] was an extraordinary hater, because once sitting in the living room he read aloud to everyone there a letter from someone he utterly despised. He’d read one sentence and comment, read another sentence and comment. I’d never heard anything funnier or more vicious. He was very funny . . . He looked very directly into your eyes when he spoke to you and held that look and spoke confidentially. He was an immense man, great broad shoulders, narrow his, but a hell of a big gut.Cowley’s profile eventually appeared in the second week of January 1949 under the title A Portrait Of Mister Papa. It included much that Hemingway had asked Cowley to keep out —
his ‘counter-intelligence’ activities and ‘sub-hunting’ on the Pilar which he felt might upset the Cuban government and his ‘fighting’ in Europe.
Cowley sent him a draft of the piece for his comments, yet with each letter to Cowley requesting this and that deletion, Hemingway added further details, many of which were complete nonsense: that there ‘was Indian blood in the family’, that one of his sisters ‘had been in love with him’ and he had been obliged to give up driving after five car crashes in which people had died or been badly injured. Michael Reynolds writesCowley must have been perplexed by Hemingway’s frequent and contradictory letters, taking away with the left hand what the right had give. But this behaviour also kept Cowley asking questions, for each of Hemingway’s responses would reveal some new piece of biography, some more fabulous than accurate, all provocative and sometimes paranoid.In these letters to Cowley and others, Reynolds addsHemingway was rehearsing the biography, modifying here, exaggerating there, leaving a confusing trail of truths, half-truths and outright fantasies. At 48 he was saying outrageous things to complete strangers, things he would never have said earlier. What appears at times to be mania can also be read as his response to the canonization of his generation [of writers] already dead.Both Hotchner and Cowley accepted Hemingway’s claims, even the more outlandish stories, without question. These included having an ‘aluminium kneecap’, ‘having fought as a professional boxer’, ‘running away from home to live the life of a hobo’, ‘being a star football player’ at school and carrying two canteens with him when ‘he went to war’, one filled with gin, the other with dry vermouth.
Yet it would be unfair to take Hotchner and Cowley too strongly to task: both had been commissioned to enlist Hemingway because he was, in 1948, one of America’s best-known and most successful novelists (and this was before he wrote and published Across The River And Into The Trees).
It would have been odd for them to have listened politely to what he had to say, then concluded he was simply — as we now know — telling a string of whoppers. Those of his friends in Cuba who drank with him and knew him well were increasingly inclined to take most of the claims and stories with a large pinch of salt, especially when each ‘achievement’ became more spectacular with the telling.
Talking to Denis Brian, friends and acquaintances of Hemingway suggested he was often sending people up and would tell his tale tales for a joke; this is certainly possible, but one does wonder why he would do so with Cowley for what was to be a serious profile.
Hotchner and Cowley had never met before Hemingway, though Kenneth Lynn points out that Cowley, in particular, was not as scrupulous as he might have been. In his introduction to The Viking Portable Hemingway in 1944, he had even got the year of Hemingway’s birth wrong. But, Lynn adds,On boozy days and nights at the Finca, the lord of the manor had undoubtedly grown expansive, and Cowley never seems to have wondered whether his host’s fascinating yarns could be trusted. A Portrait Of Mr Papa not only took Hemingway’s sub-hunting activities far too seriously, but grossly exaggerated the significance of his war service in France.Hemingway’s reaction to Cowley’s profile, says Lynn, was that is was ‘OK’ but ‘not awfully accurate. Lynn addsSome years later, Cowley stoutly defended his reportorial reliability by pointing out that the only specific objection Hemingway had raised was about the anecdote of his carrying canteens of gin and vermouth at his belt during combat in World War II. In the first place, Hemingway had scoffed, good vermouth hadn’t been available, and in the second place he would never have wasted a whole canteen on the stuff, no matter what.In view of Hemingway’s protest, Cowley’s canteen anecdote does begin to look more than questionable. In fact, the claim was made in an interview with the New York Times’ editor and writer C L Sulzberger by ‘Buck’ Lanham who was accompanied by Hemingway for several weeks at the front in the autumn of 1944.
More seriously why did Hemingway want to play down the ‘canteens of gin and vermouth’ claim, but allowed other equally fatuous claims — for example, running away to live as a hobo — stand?
