by Andrew Farah
She appears as Renata, the eighteen-year-old lover of the fifty-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell, in Hemingway’s sixth novel, Across the River and into the Trees. In fact, the age gap between the fictional and the real couples was almost identical, and, not surprisingly, the colonel addresses Renata as “Daughter.” In the book, Cantwell spends much of the last day of his life recalling his time with the Contessa Renata and reminiscing about his past. As with Hemingway’s connection with Adriana, the sexual relationship between Cantwell and Renata is ambiguous early in the novel, but later, in the Gritti Palace Hotel, Renata says, “I can be your daughter as well as everything else.” The colonel responds, “That would be incest.” Hemingway knowingly fueled the myth that he and Adriana were lovers by forbidding publication of the novel in Italy for a period of two years after its release elsewhere (ostensibly to protect her reputation). Despite the critics’ universal dislike of the work, it remained on the best-seller lists for twenty-one months, as would anything with Hemingway’s name on it.
Carlos Baker has suggested that Hemingway was attempting a poetic metaphor “of greater complexity than he had ever tried before.” Renata, which means “reborn,” represented the spirit of youth and renewal in both Ernest and his fictional stand-in Cantwell.6 As with much of Hemingway’s work, the reader is rewarded by not becoming distracted by the autobiographical backdrop. The short novel is a profound meditation on coming to terms with one’s life in its last few hours. Cantwell is a man with a firm hold on the control column of a crashing plane, self-consciously managing its descent. And the colonel would have his intimate rendezvous with his young friend, under a blanket in a gondola, yet Hemingway would never consummate his affection for Adriana. At Hemingway’s invitation, Adriana, along with her mother, did stay at his Cuban home for almost two months. But she spent the final month on the island in a hotel, in response to the rumors of intimacy.
From a psychiatric standpoint, Hemingway was simply expressing his fantasy life in his fiction, which was nothing new. But years later, he agonized over the delusional belief that he was going to be arrested for intimacy with a minor. (Adriana was eighteen, and technically he had nothing to fear even if they were intimate, but, by definition, a delusion is an unrealistic belief, unshaken by facts and reason.) Furthermore, no evidence has surfaced since his death that he and Adriana were ever lovers, though this was accepted folklore in Italy. Adriana’s protective mother, who chaperoned her during her trip to Cuba (with her brother), in addition to Mary’s jealousy and watchfulness, would have been enough to prevent that. Her brother always insisted when interviewed that the relationship was not sexual but rather one of father and daughter. But in Hemingway’s private thoughts, he persisted in the fantasy life after his book was complete. He continued to express himself in letters with almost Shakespearian level of double-speak: love-struck language couched in paternal greetings and farewells. He even spoke of a creative partnership with her, White Tower. Adriana would be the full partner and artistic genius behind his dust jackets. (The White Tower is an obvious reference to the tower built at his Cuban home; however, it was in the White Tower restaurant that he had courted Mary in London in 1944—thus, the name of this fictitious company was possibly another private dig at his wife. And he dedicated Across the River, the work inspired by Adriana, to Mary.)
The dementia that exacerbated his abusiveness, vulgarity, and insults in his last decade was the same process that also propelled his fantasies into unrealistic fears that finally distilled into delusion. He had met Adriana in 1948, and before ten years had passed their relationship was the focus of his paranoia. The sicker he became, the more demented his brain, the more he obsessed he became with the idea that he would be arrested at any moment for taking “indecent liberties with a minor.” Thus, the fantasies that he earlier described in elegant fiction became a source of psychological torment.
Adriana was roughly Gregory Hemingway’s age (they were one year apart), so she could have indeed been the daughter Ernest and Pauline had hoped for, but perhaps Adriana’s psychological needs fit like a missing piece into the puzzle of Hemingway’s world as well. Her father, Carlo, was planning on running for mayor of Venice at the end of World War II. But in the bitter and chaotic months after the war, he was murdered by his political enemies. His body was discovered by his son on June 12, 1945, in the rubble of San Michele.7
Adriana’s older brother, Gianfranco, would win Hemingway’s admiration as well, but for different reasons. He was wounded by the machine guns of a British Spitfire while serving as an officer in the Italian armored regiment at the battle of El Alamein, under the command of Erwin Rommel.8 After recovering, he joined the OSS as chief of partisan activity in the Veneto region. He later served as a translation officer after the German surrender at Trieste. His heroics also included conducting a mafialike vendetta that targeted his father’s murderers. Despite this heroic and battle-tested résumé, Gianfranco was shy, unassuming, and quiet. After earning a law degree at the University of Padua (in 1947), he was off to Cuba in November 1949. He stayed as Hemingway’s guest, sleeping in Finca’s “white tower.” Though he did take a job with a shipping company, he was also there to assist with the manuscript of Across the River, mainly correcting Italian names and geography. Hemingway arranged the financing of a farm in Cuba for Gianfranco and, in order to further help him financially, gave him a manuscript of The Old Man and the Sea in 1953.9 He lived in the Hemingways’ guest house for nearly three years and became quite close to Mary.
While Ernest addressed Adriana as “Daughter,” Gianfranco was Mary’s “Bunney” (mainly because of his short stature, but the affection is clear). And he proved more than just psychological ballast to Ernest’s infatuation with Adriana, as one of Mary’s notes to him reveals: “Bunney—Bunney—It is curious how it doesn’t get any better—the hurting and longing in the bones and blood and skin and eyes and ears and nose. Sometimes, hurting strong, I ask myself ‘Was it worth this—that joy, this misery?’ And the answer is always ‘Yes.’ Dearest Huomino [little man].” Mary gave instructions that this note could be made public only after her death.10
Hemingway believed Adriana a successful artist in her own right. She illustrated “The Good Lion” and “The Faithful Bull,” fables he wrote in 1950 for her small nephew and which appeared in Holiday magazine.11 And her cover drawings for Across the River and The Old Man and the Sea appeared on their dust jackets. Yet they were submitted and accepted at Ernest’s suggestion. The advertising and promotion director at Scribner’s explained that “the jacket drawings for both these books as executed by ‘A’ were so bad that we had to have them skillfully redrawn. So what was on the jacket was not actually her original art, which was pretty abominable.” 12 She published a book of her own poetry, I Looked at the Sky and the Earth, a work passed over by several publishers before she took the manuscript unannounced into the offices of Alberto Mondadori, who looked at it over the next few weeks and eventually agreed to its publication. Mondadori was one of Hemingway’s two Italian publishers, and it’s hard to accept that her work made it to press on the basis of its merits, as her poetry could have been written by any high school girl with a crush.
The last letter of Hemingway’s to reach Adriana before the false reports of his death in Africa spoke of his desire to write another story of Venice: “the real story of their love,” a difficult story of Venice, one that would be a truer account of their love, more sensitive, and certainly more discreet.13 But Across the River had done enough damage. Adriana did indeed suffer from the scandal and gossip that resulted from being Hemingway’s muse and the real Renata. She met him for the last time in his hotel room in Venice in 1954. He apologized for the trouble the book had caused her: “I am sorry about the book. You are the last person I would have done any harm to.” He insisted she was not Renata and he was not the colonel. On this last day, he again spoke tenderly of his affection for her and concluded “Probably it would have been better if I had ne
ver met you that day under the rain.” By the end of the visit, both were in tears.14
Adriana would write her memoir, La Torre Bianca (The White Tower), in 1980 and, tragically, would hang herself from a tree on her family’s farm near Capalbio at the age of fifty-three. She had attempted suicide two prior times, and her last attempt was not immediately successful. She was cut down and taken to the hospital, only to die a few hours later.
Hemingway would revisit his Adriana infatuation when he hired the nineteen-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith as his secretary; he insisted on her company at meals and bullfights throughout his travels in Spain and France in 1959. And, once again, his involvement with her would become a springboard for his dementia-driven paranoia. The young Irish girl with a light complexion and dark hair had been sent to Spain specifically to interview Hemingway. Her initial attempt at the interview was embarrassingly unsuccessful, so Hemingway gave her instructions on how to better conduct one. Afterward, he invited her to the Pamplona festival in July, and from then on she was officially part of his entourage.
Valerie did not have Adriana’s pedigree or elegance, nor was she attractive, but, unlike Hemingway’s association with Adriana, there is evidence of his intimacy with Valerie beyond his usual paternal doting on young women. There was an obvious romantic intensity between them in public, and when Hemingway’s Idaho friend and hunting buddy Forrest MacMullen was interviewed, he left no doubt that Ernest and Valerie were lovers.15 It is understandable that Valerie would believe herself the subject of his later delusions of “indecent liberties with a minor,” but there is no way of knowing if Hemingway was paranoid because of his affection for Adriana or Valerie or both. Whichever romance he was ruminating on, he was convinced that an arrest warrant was coming, sooner or later.
Whether or not they were lovers, by the summer of 1959 Valerie agreed to their tentative agreement and stuck by his side as a “secretary” at $250 per month. Mary questioned the arrangement, inquiring just exactly what she was expected to do. Eventually Valerie grew tired of the late nights and the heavy drinking, but, like Adriana, she would journey from reality to delusion in Hemingway’s mind (unlike Adriana, she was bypassed in his fiction). Hemingway would obsess about her immigration status—believing that somehow he was the one responsible for her presence in the United States “illegally”—and this would become another major source of mental torment in his last two years. Though she was never in violation of immigration law, he feared he would be arrested for her situation at any moment.
She would eventually help Mary pack up the Cuba house and sort Hemingway’s papers after his death. Valerie also spent time with his youngest son, Gregory, at Hemingway’s funeral, and eventually married him (she was the third of his four wives). And, in 2004, she wrote her own memoir, Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways.
Between Adriana and Valerie, another young lady would capture Hemingway’s attention, speaking volumes about his state of mind. The fantasies that were acted out and that were ignored by his wife and companions displayed a lack of inhibition consistent with a severe mental illness.
On safari in 1954, Hemingway announced to Mary at dinner that she was depriving him “of his new wife,” a girl of Wakamba ethnicity from a nearby village. Mary took the issue in stride and, after inspecting her, suggested only that the young native girl needed a “proper bath.” She then left Kimana by plane for two weeks of Christmas shopping in Nairobi. When she returned, she found that Ernest had shaved his head and begun hunting with a spear, had dyed his suede jackets and shirts the orange-rusty shades worn by the Maasai nomads of Kenya, and overall “had gone native” with a vengeance. He ignored the dangers of spearing a leopard out of a tree and chased it into the bush with a shotgun. The new wife, whom Ernest called “Debba,” was on hand for all Christmas festivities (at one point she was chaperoned by her aunt).16
In Mary’s writing about Ernest and Debba, it was her turn to be ambiguous, stating that the Christmas celebration at camp had gotten so “energetic” that the couple had broken her bed while she was away.17 Ernest enjoyed his reputation as a polygamist among the natives, who recalled Pauline from his last safari. They assumed Mary was his fair “Indian wife” and Pauline his dark one. They even assumed he was married to “Miss Marlene” Dietrich, whose voice they heard on his portable phonograph and who worked for him in a “small amusement Shamba I owned called Las Vegas.”18 The title of Honorary Game Warden for the Kimana Swamp further fueled his narcissism, and he was soon out “half the night prowling with a spear.”19
Five years later, Hemingway would report to his confidant, Hotchner, that he had “an African son” and added that he had gifted the bride’s family a herd of goats, but Hotchner dismissed these statements as “typical EH fabrication.”20 In the original manuscript of his “Africa Journal,” which would eventually be edited and published as True at First Light, Ernest’s desires are certainly on full display: “I … went out to see Keiti … thanked him for the action he had taken as an elder and told him that I would approach the father of the girl Debba formally. He smiled very happily. Then I told him that if I had a child from the girl Debba he would have a choice of a career as a soldier, a doctor, or a lawyer or that he could go for his upbringing to the Kingdom of Mayito. If he wished to stay with me as a son and not have to make a career he could be my true son and we would hunt together.”21 The “Africa Journal” is indeed a fictionalized memoir, where lovely descriptions of Africa’s landscape and wildlife are sparse and relationships and dialogue take center stage. On this platform for Ernest’s fantasies, he projects a condescending acquiescence onto Mary, who says, “I think it’s wonderful that you have a girl that can’t read nor write, so you can’t get any letters from her.… But you don’t love her do you? … Maybe you like her because she’s like me.… I like you more and I love you.”22
As for Debba’s appearance, the only description we have of her says that she was “a masculine-looking sturdy young woman—short of hair and square of face.”23 She was around fifteen years old and not nearly the Beatrice that Hemingway fantasized she was. One safari companion, Denis Zaphiro, a ranger with the Kenya Game Department, described her as “an evil-smelling bit of camp trash.”24 No matter, as it was the idea of a Debba that propelled Hemingway, regardless of the specifics of her physical presence. All that really mattered about her physically was that she existed. Perhaps Mary understood this at some level, as she had with Adriana.
But Hemingway’s psychological need for a second (fertile) wife drove his disinhibited, head-first dive into native attire, custom, and ritual courting, as was spelled out plainly enough in a letter just a few weeks before he put away his “African Journal” for the last time: “Miss Mary who can’t have children can have Debba to help her as a second wife. Debba can have children and they can be doctors, soldiers or lawyers as they decide. This all was cleared with the elders.”25 Desire and motivation were spelled out, like his journal, unedited. And Mary was his second infertile wife, following Martha, her predecessor. Hemingway claimed she had never shared this fact with him before or during their marriage and that he learned it only through a slip of the tongue by Charles Scribner. Ernest was furious, insisting that Charles should have told him this fact about Martha before they were married or simply never shared this fact. Scribner wrote to Ernest in 1950, essentially telling him that his memory was selective: “she [Martha] told me that you would not believe that it was possible for her not to have a baby when married to you, no matter how much she explained it” (emphasis added).26
As with any patient with disinhibition, unspoken and even unconscious desires are often pursued, as if the patient were propelled by forces he or she cannot articulate. Though Hemingway could articulate in letters his ideas regarding the fertility of each lover, it does not necessarily follow that he was insightful. What also speaks to the fact that his behaviors, and their documentation, reflect disinhibition in the pathological sense is his specific writing co
ncerning Debba in his “African Journal” (later heavily edited and published as True at First Light). When she asks to hold his rifle after a killing, she says, “It was so cold.… Now it is so hot.”27 As they ride next to each other in the Rover, he elaborates on how she enjoys pressing his pistol and holster against her thigh.28 Hemingway’s overt focus on libido more likely than not simply leaves his readers embarrassed for him. And at this point in his life he was worldly, presumed to be mature, and long accepted as one of history’s greatest writers. Such adolescent sexuality would, one hopes, never have seen the light of day if the “African Journal” had not been published after his death. He never expected the manuscript to be published in this form. One might expect, or at least hope, that he would have deleted these passages, but the fact that they are there in the rough draft is worrisome enough.
But do these behaviors reflect disinhibition to a pathological degree or simply a man indulging in himself and his freedom and exploring unabashed desires? Certainly alcohol played a role. He was drinking two or three bottles of hard liquor a day and wine with meals.29 At one point he was so drunk that he fell out of a “fast-moving” Land Rover.30 Whatever the mixture of motivations, it was clear that no matter how inappropriately or even bizarrely he acted, there were no negative consequences. No one, not even a man as respected and mature as Philip Percival, who had led safaris for Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill, among others, was willing or able to put limits on his behavior.
Just as discrete amnestic episodes (periods with sudden onset but lasting a only brief time during which a person in his fifties or sixties simply goes blank, becomes confused, and cannot recall what he is doing, such as where he is driving) are harbingers of a dementia to come, similar periods when one becomes disinhibited and oblivious to social norms and appropriate behavior are also harbingers of a future decline into dementia.
