That Monday, Hemingway wrote a letter to Scribner’s wife, Vera, at the family estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. “At sea,” he wrote at the top.
Mary asked me if I couldn’t tell her something that would help her to reconcile herself or anything to console both of us because it was very bad. I told her the best thing was to think of how you and Charlie loved each other and how kind you were to each other when you were here and how proud he was of his children and his work and of you. How fortunate Charlie was to have the good fortune to be a Christian and how you had said your prayers together when you were down here.
A week later, at home, Hemingway wrote to Vera and Charlie’s son, Charles Jr., who’d now be coming out of the navy to take over the firm: “Since he had to die at least he has gotten it over with.” It’s what he’d said, seventeen years before, to Gerald and Sara Murphy, when their son Baoth had died: he has gotten it all over with. That’s the letter with the elaborate Pilar metaphor: “It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad.” Pilar was so new then.
A couple of days before his letter to Charlie Junior, Hemingway had written to his own sons—Nita Jensen typed the letters from the talk machine. He’d been back on shore for two days. Patrick’s was longer and kinder. In the five months since Pauline’s death, Hemingway had been talking about many business matters to both his children by Pauline. One of these was the question of selling or renting out the Key West property, whose ownership had reverted to Hemingway and also to his sons. At least on paper, his sons had become well-off young men. Why should he be obligated to pay further child support to Gigi? “If Gregory is receiving the amounts of money which you told me you were receiving, or had received in the month of January, it seems a little incongruous for me to send him $100 a month,” he told Pat. “It seems almost hopeless for me to write a letter to Gregory, since he does not answer them. But I will write one anyway.” He did—it’s the next letter on the tape belt, two paragraphs, mailed to Doreen Place in Venice. “This type of letter probably bores the shit out of you but it certainly bores the shit out of me to have to write them. Charlie Scribner died a week ago Monday and so it will be rather difficult for me to borrow money from him against my loan account paying two percent to send you a monthly check until you attain the age of 21 years.”
Gigi wrote back four days later, using the bottom half of his father’s letter: “I am not only tired of this type of letter but offended by everyone you write. If you were a shit as this type of letter would lead anyone to believe, I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think you are and I love you very much and this is why I am offended.”
Hemingway read it and wrote right back: “For your information I never took or received a dime from my family from the time I was 16. I paid my father’s debts and supported various relatives and have supported Mary’s father and mother since we were married. I do not relish being called a shit by any teenage delinquent at the safe distance of several thousand miles.”
Two weeks later, the vacation got taken up again. The day before, on March 9, trying to repair relations with his son, Hemingway wrote: “Charlie Scribner dying so suddenly made things pretty complicated.… I was trying to skip burdening you with any of this when I wrote you that I would omit personal problems or whatever the phrase was. Have been busy trying to work them out and I have them worked out so that there is money for your hundred dollars a month until you are 21. So please never worry about that.”
He and his wife were heading down the driveway on the morning of the tenth when Juan the chauffeur said, “¿Has oído lo que pasa en La Habana?” Have you heard what’s happening in Havana? Fulgencio Batista was happening. Hemingway (he always sat in the front seat, Mary in the rear), reached over and switched on the radio. The army had surrounded the presidential palace. The road to town was clogged with convoys of canvas-roofed trucks, with soldiers sitting on the rims and riding on the running boards. But they got to the harbor and aboard Pilar and out to sea and rode against the wind to Bahía Honda. From How It Was: “One night we set the bright gas lantern on the stern fishbox, watched sardines in droves congregate toward it just below the surface.” Gregorio netted them for bait—which, the next day, netted for the fishermen some tasty Nassau grouper and turbot and rock hind. They stayed out until March 29 and then came home with the fish hold loaded to its brim. Two days later, an awkward, giddy couple drove out to see them to tell them of their news—and, to their surprise, got offered on the spot the use of the finca for their wedding reception. “It will add a romantic touch to the formalities,” Walter put in his journal entry of March 31, 1952.
It’s later that same summer, nine months since the death at St. Vincent’s, two months from publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Gigi’s finishing premed exams at UCLA, hoping to be admitted to the university’s med school. In four months he’ll turn twenty-one. He’s seeing a psychiatrist. This letter’s date is July 3. At its end: “Give my love to Miss Mary and tell her if I see her again I sure as hell would like all to be forgiven. I did a terrible thing in lying about that clothes business and I make no excuses for it (except to say that the whole business is my least rational aspect) but everyone’s life is not simon says.” He’s talking about the French underpants theft from Mary’s closet—six years ago. Has it swum upward in some recent therapy sessions?
Listen to the rage of four months onward, right around the time of his birthday: “You ever write another letter like that and I’ll beat the shit out of you,” he says to his father on November 3, nine days before his birthday. Several paragraphs later: “When Mother died and I first called, you accused me of killing her.… If we see each other again and you act nastily, I will fight and I will beat the shit out of you.”
Ten days later, on the thirteenth, the day after he turns twenty-one, he calls his father a “gin-soaked abusive monster.” He tells him he “will die unmourned and basically unwanted unless you change, papa.” He says, “When it’s all added up, papa it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons—Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the people?” He says, bringing up his mother:
You accused me of killing her—said it was my arrest that killed her. For your information, a heart condition is incurred over a period of time. Do you think that little scene did her any good? I would never think of accusing you of killing her … but you accused me, you cocksucker—you wonder if I don’t forget all and kiss your sickly ass when you send me a birthday greeting? You think you can repair a break in the damn with a telegram? God have mercy on your soul for the misery you have caused. If I ever meet you again and you start pulling the ruthless, illogical and destructive shit on me, I will beat your head into the ground and mix it with cement to make outhouses.
There’s a PS to the letter that amounts to a letter in itself.
Next day: “I suppose you wonder what has happened to all my filial respect for you. Well, it’s gone Ernestine, dear, it’s gone!”
Ernestine, dear.
Further down: “Little goody-goody Miss Mary, for instance, who’s taken more shit from you than they dump in Havana harbor. But we know better, don’t we, you’ll never write that great novel because you’re a sick man—sick in the head and too fucking proud and scared to admit it. In spite of the critics, that last one was as sickly a bucket of sentimental slop as was ever scrubbed off a barroom floor.”
Four days later, Hemingway answers:
Your threats to beat up your father are comic enough. Ordinarily I would ignore such nonsense. But obscene threatening letters sent through the United States mails are not comic at all.… I am not a gin-soaked monster going around running people’s lives.… Your mother wrote me before she died that she did not believe that you were tak
ing drugs but that you had simply deteriorated mentally so that you were unable to accept any discipline and that even any suggestions angered you.… Right now I could use a good flash of your old charm and decency. I cannot use any more obscene or threatening letters. Mary can do without your thefts and your insults.
He signs it, “Your father, E. Hemingway.”
Three days later, Gigi replies, and please understand is all over the page, as is the need for a cease-fire. “The clothes business is something that I have never been able to control, understand basically very little, and I am terribly ashamed of. I have lied about it before, mainly to people I am fond of, because I was afraid they would not like me as much if they found out. It has been a terribly destructive influence on my life and is undoubtedly responsible for a lot of moral disintegration.”
About four days later, a father, who must have had nearby a work in progress about sex-twinning honeymooners and their fears of moral disintegration, wrote across the front of Gigi’s envelope: “No answer.”
In Papa, Gigi wrote: “My mother made her absences in the early and most formative years of my life readily explicable later on, when she admitted, ‘Gig, I just don’t have much of what’s called a maternal instinct, I guess. I can’t stand horrid little children until they are five or six.… But I loved you, darling, I really did, though I guess I didn’t always show it.’ ” This paragraph ends: “Understood completely and forgiven. But not originally.” Did he ever really forgive? It’s hard to believe that.
In late September 1945, back from war, trying to heal, to begin serious writing again, Hemingway said in a letter to his future wife, Mary Welsh:
13 years since Gigi was born and twenty one since Bum but don’t believe the basic problems have changed much.… Went to Africa after Giggy was born. He born in Oct., went abroad following July and didn’t come back until the next year after May or June. Along about April (ten months) Pauline said, “I think I ought to see my Baby.” … I love them but learned from haveing to take all care of Bumby that anybody good you hire can take better care of them at the start than I can and no reason to have the drudgery wear out husband and wife or split them apart and no sense ever have baby drive you crazy.
Hemingway and Pauline went to Africa in 1933, when Gigi was two, so he’s off in his dates by about a year. Nor are other time frames right. But it isn’t that; it’s the casual claim that a mother, who couldn’t stand horrid little children, had more or less yawned near the end of the long absence and said: Mmmm, guess I oughta see my Gig. Not that her husband was any less accountable. (They’d left their baby child in the care of a shadowy woman named Ada Stern. For at least part of the time away, five-year-old Patrick was put with relatives in Piggott. The Dickensian-named Miss Stern, from upstate New York, had begun watching over Gigi when he was three months old—and she tended him until he was twelve. In Papa, Gigi describes how, when he was a toddler, she’d threaten to leave him when he was bad. “She would pack her bags and go hobbling down the stairs with me clinging to her skirts, screaming, ‘Ada, don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’ ” And Ada would say, “All right, I’ll stay, you little shitsky.” He loved her, though, in spite of everything.)
In Papa, Gigi makes it sound as if he might not ever have spoken again to his father had Hemingway not suffered those two back-to-back airplane crashes in East Africa (near Murchison Falls in January 1954) from which, as we now know, he never really recovered in either his body or mind. Gigi writes: “The first headlines announced that the wreckage of the plane had been sighted and that there was no sign of life. Thinking he was dead, I realized how much I still loved him. When I found out soon afterward that he had survived, I resolved to patch up our differences. After he won the Nobel Prize that October, I sent him a congratulatory wire.”
What he doesn’t say—once again, John Hemingway in Strange Tribe fills in the record—is that there was a quiet letter of apology nearly six months before that wire. He’d said, “I didn’t mean to say those things. I was crazy at the time, just as crazy as Mouse was when he used to swing at you during the shock treatments [of 1947]. If you don’t ever want to see me again, O.K., but I hope you will change your mind when you find out over a period of time that I am on my feet again.” Over the next several months father and son talked of business matters, family matters. In early August 1954, Hemingway wrote a letter any child would crave to have.
I’ve digested what you told me about you not feeling ok when you were writing those bad letters. I know, beside accepting what you told me, that it is true on acct. of the penmanship. Now everything is straight. Not chickenshit like forgiveness. Rubbed out. Any time you want to show up: show up I am working hard now and not seeing anybody.…
This is not a cry towell letter. It is just to give you the gen. In the aircraft nonsense I got smashed really bad. I never had a broken back before, certified anyway, and it can be uncomfortable and shitting standing up, while not a difficult feat, can get to be a bore.… I went 22 days when I couldn’t unlock the spincter. Then shat a species of white hard nobby rocks about ball size.… One time when I missed from my berth to the can Miss Mary said, “Don’t you know that no gentleman ever shits on the floor?”
Soon they were talking about the possibility of Gigi going to Africa to visit his brother Pat. Gigi wanted to take his wife and child, and also his old governess. His father thought it a terrible idea to take a child and a sixty-seven-year-old woman to Africa—the risk of infection would be enormous. Gigi made a budget and asked his father for $2,500. Hemingway promised to send it—and more, if he won the Nobel, which was shortly to be announced. “About dough again,” he wrote on October 12, sixteen days before he got the prize: “I have $6,046.81 in the bank. $33,000 income tax paid this year.… I pay $320 a month for Mary’s mother and father in the nursing home, which adds up to $3,840 per year, plus extra expenses, and is a little more than half of my total income from all securities which I had originally intended to be a reserve fund for when I was sick. My basic income, if I were ill and could not work, is about the same as yours and Mouse’s.”
The next day, talking again of Africa’s danger: “There are all sort of things there are no serums against.”
Gigi did go to Africa with his family in early 1955, and about all of it was a disaster. He departed with $5,000 in his pocket from his father—“right off the top of the tax-free bounty of Sweden,” he says in Papa. He had an affair with the wife of a plantation owner. He threw down money from his inheritance on a coffee farm. But he had no real interest, let alone know-how, in managing a coffee operation. In Nairobi bars, he drank himself into stupors. In the bush, he wouldn’t come out of his tent for days. He got into quarrels with his brother Pat, who was trying to establish himself as a guide and white hunter in Tanganyika. In December, his wife gathered up four-year-old Lorian and flew back to America, to her sister’s place in Arkansas. In a few months, there was her husband on her doorstep, crying, drunk, making threats, eventually getting himself arrested. None of this appears in Papa. What appears: “I felt guilty about Mother’s inheritance, thought that since I had killed her it was blood money, and I got rid of it incredibly fast. My marriage finally broke up and I was drafted into the army.”
On the page before this: “I shot eighteen elephants one month, God save my soul. But it’s no use running when you’re sick, because when you finally stop, you find you’re just as sick as when you started.” Such beautiful ellipsis.
It was apparently somewhere in here—mid-to-late 1955, maybe into early 1956—that Gigi’s father wrote an elliptical story about a boy and wing shooting and plagiarism. Its first sentence: “ ‘It’s a very good story,’ the boy’s father said.” Its last: “And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.”
About the army, into which he was sworn, on the fifth anniversary of Pauline’s death, October 1, 1956: they sent him home before he completed basic training. The ex–buck private, judged psychologically unstable, tu
rned up in Miami, unloading trucks. His father, just across the Straits of Florida, hadn’t heard.
From Papa: “After an undistinguished career in the peacetime army, I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic. Although the yellow-green emotional filter was still in place, the focus of my mind was sharpening.”
About the killing and the elephants: years later, in Montana bars, when he was a doctor, and a damn fine one (until everything got bitched again), the fleeing man used to tell friends, in various states of melancholy and rage, “Those assholes, they believed what I wrote about the eighteen elephants.” He meant the readers of his best-selling book, and all the subsequent Hemingway chroniclers who’d passed the story on.
In the approximately five years between the end of his army “career” in 1956 and his father’s death in 1961, Gigi did little but disappoint and often disgust his father. The reverse could also be said. More manic trips to Africa, more depressive ricochets back home, with Hemingway paying many of the bills, including hospital bills. On August 15, 1957, Gigi ended up in a Miami medical center, where they gave him shock treatments for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia. “I’m sorry that I got into this shape, but I will be out of here soon,” he wrote to his father, five days after he was admitted. Hemingway wrote back, in a softened key:
Thanks very much for your two letters. I’ve talked to Dr. Jarrett and to Dr. Anderson and arranged to handle the hospital bills and the cost of your treatments as you asked in your letter of August 20…. They say that treatment cannot possibly do your brain any harm.… We want to do everything that can be done to make you well, Gig.… Do you have a good radio? If not, ask the hospital to rent you one. I will pick up the bill with the regular bill. The same holds true for magazines and books.… [T]ake it as easy as you can and know that for once we are getting something constructive accomplished on these worries that have bothered you for so long.
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