Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  PAPA

  HEMINGWAY

  a personal memoir

  A. E. Hotchner

  Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. New York

  Foreword

  On July 2, 1961, a writer whom many critics call the greatest writer of this century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as his genius, a winner of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, a soldier of fortune with a home in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains, where he hunted in the winter, an apartment in New York, a specially rigged yacht to fish the Gulf Stream, an available apartment at the Ritz in Paris and the Gritti in Venice, a solid marriage, no serious physical ills, good friends everywhere—on that July day, that man, the envy of other men, put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

  How did this come to pass?

  Why?

  I was his close friend for fourteen years, right up to the day he died. I knew about his life: the adventures, the conversations, the dreams and disillusions, the triumphs and defeats of this complicated, unique, humorous, intense, fun-loving man who was Ernest Hemingway but I cannot tell you why. No one can.

  But to tell about his life, I must inevitably tell of his death and the events which preceded it. I gave long and hard thought to that—whether it should be gone into at all, or parts of it suppressed, or generalized and disguised. But in the end I was guided by what Ernest had told me when I wondered whether I should be as frank and open as he was about Scott Fitzgerald. "Every man's life ends the same way," Ernest had said, "and it is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another."

  He said that for him there was only one way to account for things—to tell the whole truth about them, holding back nothing; tell the reader the way it truly happened, the ecstasy and sorrow, remorse and how the weather was, and, with any luck, the reader will find his way to the heart of the thing itself.

  That is what I have tried to do, holding back nothing, and it is as close as I can get to the Why.

  A. E. HOTCHNER

  Rome, 1965

  PAPA

  HEMINGWAY

  Part One

  I am glad we do not have to try to kill

  the stars. Imagine if each day a man must

  try to kill the moon. The moon runs away.

  But imagine if a man each day should have

  to try to kill the sun? We are born lucky.

  Yes, we are born lucky.

  the old man and the sea

  Chapter One

  Havana ♦ 1948

  In the spring of 1948 I was dispatched to Cuba to make a horse's ass out of myself by asking Ernest Hemingway to write an article on "The Future of Literature." I was on the staff of the magazine Cosmopolitan, and the editor was planning an issue on The Future of Everything: Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Henry Ford II on Automobiles, Picasso on Art, and, as I said, Hemingway on Literature.

  Of course, no writer knows the future of literature beyond what he'll write the next morning, and many can't see even that far ahead, but here was I checking into the Nacional Hotel for the express purpose of cornering Mr. Hemingway, introducing myself, and asking him to gaze into a literary crystal ball for good old Cosmo.

  Horse's ass isn't strong enough. From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe. In my schoolboy fantasies I had identified with Nick Adams (he was approximately my age and was the protagonist of many Hemingway short stories) as he made his way through a murky world of punch-drunk fighters, killers, suiciding Indians, dope addicts and whores, and the rigors of war on the Italian front. During the Second World War, as an Air Force officer in France, I had been further awed by War Correspondent Hemingway's military exploits. He had entered the hostilities and affiliated himself in a nonjournalistic manner with Colonel Buck Lanham's Twenty-second Infantry Regiment, as it moved through Normandy, the grim action in Luxembourg, and the terror of Hiirt-gen Forest, where the Twenty-second suffered 2060 casualties out of 3200 men.

  I had tried to evade this Cosmopolitan assignment, but had been summarily ordered to try to get this asinine article or else. The or else had quite a bite to it, as I was in my mid-twenties, only six months on the job, which was the first I had been able to find after dissipating my Air Force severance pay with a year in Paris. I had Hemingway's address in the little town of San Francisco de Paula, which is about twenty minutes outside Havana, but the more I considered going out there and knocking at his door and disturbing him face to face, which is what the editor had instructed me to do, the more my blood congealed. After two days of sitting by the Nacional pool in a semicomatose state induced by pure cowardice, I finally decided, the hell with it, there were other editorial jobs, I would not go banging on his door; and even had I had his unlisted telephone number, which I hadn't, I couldn't have managed to phone him.

  So I took the coward's way out and wrote him a note saying that I had been sent down on this ridiculous mission but did not want to disturb him, and if he could simply send me a few words of refusal it would be enormously helpful to The Future of Hotchner.

  Early the next morning the phone rang. "This Hotchner?"

  "Yes."

  "Dr. Hemingway here. Got your note. Can't let you abort your mission or you'll lose face with the Hearst organization, which is about like getting bounced from a leper colony. You want to have a drink around five? There's a bar called La Florida. Just tell the taxi."

  At that time the Florida (that was its proper name but everyone called it Floridita) was a well-lighted old-fashioned bar-restaurant with ceiling fans, informal waiters and three musicians who wandered around or sat at a table near the bar. The bar was of massive, burnished mahogany; the bar stools were high and comfortable, and the bartenders cheerful, skilled veterans who produced a variety of frozen daiquiris of rare quality. On the wall there were several framed photographs of the Hemingways drinking La Florida's most publicized product— the Hemingway daiquiri, or Papa Doble. Requested by most tourists, a Papa Doble was compounded of two and a half jiggers of Bacardi White Label Rum, the juice of two limes and half a grapefruit, and six drops of maraschino, all placed in an electric mixer over shaved ice, whirled vigorously and served foaming in large goblets. I sat on a stool at the Obispo Street end of the bar, in the corner under the framed photos, and ordered a Papa Doble.

  Before leaving for Havana, I had searched for a Hemingway biography but could find none. All I knew about his life was that he was born in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, on July 21, 1899, the second of six children; he was devoted to his father, a doctor, who passed along his keen interest and skill in fishing and hunting to young Ernest. However, Ernest's inability to get along with his mother made his home life chaotic, and soon after graduation from Oak Park High School, he left home.

  Not yet eighteen, he wangled a reporting job on the Kansas City Star, and the following year, having been rejected by the U.S. Army because of his defective eyesight, he managed to get accredited by the Red Cross as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. In July, 1918, at Fossalta di Piave, he was hit by an Austrian trench mortar and severely wounded.

  After the war, with his mutilated leg patched up, he returned to the States and then got a job on the Toronto Star. In 1920 he married a St. Louis girl, Hadley Richardson, with whom he had a son. That marriage was dissolved in 1927, when he married Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris writer for Vogue, who became the mother of his two other sons. In 1940 Pauline divorced him. The writer Martha Gellhorn became his third wife, and she was supplanted in 1946 by Mary Welsh, also a writer.

  Early in the Twenties, married to Hadley, he lived in Paris, where he wrote The Sun Also Rises, a
novel about his generation which brought him quick and enduring fame. He then enhanced his literary position with A Farewell to Arms, which he completed after returning to the United States to live in Key West. To Have and Have Not was a reflection of those Key-West years.

  Between books he traveled far and wide, fished for marlin and tuna, hunted big game on safari, and followed the bulls in Spain. When civil war broke out in that country, he fought on the side of the Loyalists and later wrote about it in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the most widely read of all of his books. That's about all the data I had.

  Hemingway arrived a little late. He was wearing khaki pants held up by a wide old leather belt with a huge buckle inscribed gott mit uns, a white linen sport shirt that hung loose, and brown leather loafers without socks. His hair was dark with gray highlights, flecked white at the temples, and he had a heavy mustache that ran past the corners of his mouth, but no beard. He was massive. Not in height, for he was only an inch over six feet, nor in weight, but in impact. Most of his two hundred pounds was concentrated above his waist: he had square heavy shoulders, long hugely muscled arms (the left one jaggedly scarred and a bit misshapen at the elbow), a deep chest, a belly-rise but no hips or thighs. Something played off him—he was intense, electrokinetic, but in control, a race horse reined in. He stopped to talk to one of the musicians in fluent Spanish and something about him hit me—enjoyment: God, I thought, how he's enjoying himself! I had never seen anyone with such an aura of fun and well-being. He radiated it and everyone in the place responded. He had so much more in his face than I had expected to find from seeing his photographs.

  As he came toward the bar, greeting the barmen, I noticed that on his forehead, well above his left eye, there was a large oblong welt that looked as if a patch of flesh-colored clay had been stuck there haphazardly.

  "Hotchner," he said, shaking hands, "welcome to the Cub Room." His hands were thick and square, the fingers rather short, the nails squared off. The bartender placed two frozen daiquiris in front of us; they were in conical glasses twice the size of my previous drink. "Here we have the ultimate achieve-merit of the daiquiri-maker's art," Hemingway said. "Made a run of sixteen here one night."

  "This size?"

  "House record," the barman, who had been listening, said.

  Hemingway sampled his drink by taking a large mouthful, holding it a long moment, then swallowing it in several installments. He nodded approval. "Hotchner . . . that's a very suspicious name. Where you from?"

  "St. Louis."

  "What part, Chouteau Avenue? Did your grandfather fight Nut Sigel?"

  "Do you know St. Louis?"

  "First three wives from St. Louis." He shook his head sadly. "I know St. Louis. Only good person I know who didn't leave there was Martha Gellhorn's ma." The bartender placed on the bar in front of us a platter heaped with unshelled shrimp. "Couple of years ago," Hemingway said, picking up one of the shrimp, "I founded the Royal Order of Shrimp Eaters. Want to join?"

  "Sure. What do I do?"

  "Members of the order eat the heads and tails." He bit off a shrimp's head and crunched it happily.

  I bit off a head and crunched it, but not happily.

  "It grows on you," he said, picking up another. Two more vases of daiquiris arrived. The bartender handed Hemingway a letter; he looked at the return address, folded it and put it into his pocket. "Basque friend of mine is a prolific letter writer and each letter ends the same way: Send money." The trio, which consisted of a big, happy guitarist, a serious, unsmiling guitarist, and a thin, dark-skinned vocalist who also played the maracas, began to play and sing a spirited number.

  "Pals of mine," Hemingway said. "They're singing a song I wrote for them. Wish Mary was here. She sings it best. One night we were in here, bar crowded, everyone having a good time, when in came three eager young gents to have a drink at the bar, and they have FBI written all over them. So I send word to these boys and at the stroke of midnight they break into 'Happy Birthday' in English, everyone joining in, and when we get to 'Happy birthday, dear FBI,' those three J. Edgars nearly caved in. They cleared out fast."

  We chain-drank daiquiris and discussed Havana as a place to live and work. "Character like me," Hemingway said, "the whole world to choose from, they naturally want to know why here. Usually don't try to explain. Too complicated. The clear, cool mornings when you can work good with just Black Dog awake and the fighting cocks sending out their first bulletins. Where else can you train cocks and fight them and bet those you believe in and be legal? Some people put the arm on fighting cocks as cruel? But what the hell else does a fighting cock like to do?

  "Then there's the bird population—wonder birds, truly—resident and migratory, quail that drink at the swimming pool before the sun comes up. And lizards that hunt out of the arbors at the pool and the vines on the house. Am very fond of lizards.

  "You want to go to town, you just slip on a pair of loafers; always a good town to get away from yourself; these Cuban girls, you look into their black eyes, they have hot sunlight in them. If you don't want to get away from yourself, you can shut out everything by not going to town and jamming the phone.

  "A half hour away from the finca you've got your boat set up so you're in the dark-blue water of the Gulf Stream with four lines out fifteen minutes after you board her. Or maybe you feel like shooting live pigeons at the shooting club just down the way from the finca. Matches for big money if that's the way you want it. That's the way we had it when Tommy Shevlin, Pichon Aguilera, Winston Guest and Thorwald Sanchez were around to make teams, and you can't ask for better shoots than when the Dodgers are training and we have match-ups with Hugh Casey, Billy Herman, Augie Galan, Curt Davis and some of the others who are all crack shots. The same people who crusade against fighting cocks also blast you for the pigeon shoot. Although it's barred in a lot of places it's legal here and it's the most exciting betting-sport I know—for the shooters. To watch it is a deadly bore."

  "But doesn't it get monotonous to go through an entire year without changes of seasons?" I asked. "Don't you miss the spring and fall the way it is in New England?"

  "We have changes in the seasons here too," he said. "They are subtle, not abrupt as in New England, where our parents took off from because it was cropped out and the soil no damn good. But let me have Red Lodge, Montana, or even Cody, Wyoming, or West Yellowstone, with Big Jim Savage dealing off the bottom of the deck so wonderful that only the boys can see it, or Billings on a Saturday night, or even, hell, Casper, which is an oil town where Miss Mary was hospitalized."

  The daiquiris kept coming as we discussed Robert Flaherty's documentary films, which Hemingway greatly admired, Ted Williams, the Book-of-the-Month-Club, Lena Home, Proust, television, swordfish recipes, aphrodisiacs, and Indians, until eight o'clock, not threatening the Hemingway daiquiri-record but setting an all-time Hotchner high of seven. Hemingway took a drink with him for the road, sitting in the front seat of the station wagon next to his chauffeur, Juan; and I somehow managed to retain in the rum-mist of my head that he was going to pick me up the following morning to go out on his boat. I also managed—don't ask me how—to make some notes on our conversation for the benefit of the Cosmopolitan editor. This was the beginning of a practice I followed during the entire time I knew him. Later on I augmented these journals with conversations recorded on pocket tape transistors that we carried when we traveled.

  There were two Pilars in Hemingway's life: one, the lusty partisan of For Whom the Bell Tolls; the other, a forty-foot black and green cabin cruiser—both named after the Spanish shrine. The seagoing Pilar was docked in the Havana harbor, ready to roll when we got there. It had a flying bridge with topside controls, outsized riggers that could handle ten-pound skipping bait, and the capacity to fish four rods. Ernest introduced me to her with old affection.

  First, though, he introduced me to a lean Indian-skinned man who was Gregorio Fuentes, mate on the Pilar since 1938. Went to sea when he was four," Ernest said,
"out of Lanzarote in the Canaries. Met him at Dry Tortugas when we were stormbound there. Before Gregorio, had another wonderful mate, Carlos Gutierrez, but somebody lured him away with more dough while I was away in the Spanish Civil War. But Gregorio is a marvel: got Pilar through three hurricanes with his absolute seamanship, is a peerless fisherman, and cooks the best pom-pano you ever tasted."

  The big engines turned over; Ernest climbed topside and steered her out of port, past Morro Castle, and up the coast about seven miles, toward the fishing village of Cojimar, which was destined to be the village of The Old Man and the Sea. Gregorio set out four lines, two with feathers, two with meat bait. I was topside with Ernest.

  He took out some tequila and we both had a sip to see if it was cold enough. "It's getting there," he said. "Wish you had been along on the last trip. The kids were down on ten days' vacation and I took them to Cay Sal and Double-Headed Shot Keys in the Bahamas. We caught around eighteen hundred pounds of game fish, turned three big turtles, got lots of crayfish and had wonderful swimming. That water is almost virgin fishing and the kids had a wonderful time."

  He then began talking about the Pilar with extraordinary pride. "She sleeps seven but in the war she slept nine."

  "She was in the war?"

  "From 1942 to 1944 we turned her into a Q-boat and patrolled the waters off the north shore of Cuba. Antisub. Worked under Naval Intelligence. We posed as a commercial fishing boat but changed Pilaris disguise several times so it didn't look like any one boat was fishing too much. Had thirty-five hundred dollars' worth of radio equipment in the head; the actual head was however you could manage over the side. We had machine guns, bazookas and high explosives, all disguised as something else, and the plan was to maneuver ourselves into a position where we were hailed and ordered alongside by a surfacing U-boat. A U-boat not on alert could have been taken by our plan of attack. Crew was Spanish, Cuban and American, very good at their jobs, all brave, and I think our capture attack would have worked."