Hemingway in Love Page 2

  He called me from the hall phone outside his room. He sounded in control, but his voice held a forced heartiness that didn’t belong there. His delusions had not changed or diminished: His room was bugged; his phone was tapped; he suspected that one of the interns was a fed. I had hoped his treatment would make him less fixated on his catalog of injustices, but, unfortunately, the phone call demonstrated that, if anything, they had intensified.

  After he had undergone the series of ECTs, along with many sessions with the psychiatrists, I visited him for the first time, on my way out to Hollywood, again hoping he would be less pursued by his delusions; but, no, the same obsessions haunted him.

  Inconceivably, Ernest was released by the Mayo doctors soon after my visit. He called me in Hollywood to say how delighted he was to be home in Ketchum and back at work. He had gone hunting the day after his return, he said, and there were eight mallards and two teals now hanging over the woodpile outside the kitchen window.

  His bonhomie was short-lived, however. His old trepidations soon found their way back and, in fact, intensified. He twice attempted suicide with a gun from his vestibule rack and was stopped only by vigorous physical intervention. During a return flight to St. Mary’s, though heavily sedated, he struggled to jump from the plane. When it stopped in Caspar, Wyoming, for repairs, he tried to walk into a moving propeller.

  * * *

  As I reached the outskirts of Rochester in my rented Chevy on that June day in 1961, I was feeling anxious about Ernest’s condition. I hoped the latest round of ECTs, along with accelerated sessions with the Mayo psychiatrists, had eliminated Ernest’s phobias, or at least reduced their hold on him.

  I checked into my hotel and went directly to the hospital. The head nurse opened Ernest’s door for me with her key, a foreboding. The room was small, but it had a large window that admitted abundant sunshine. There were no flowers and the walls were bare. On a table beside the bed were three stacked books, and next to the table was a straight-backed metal chair. There were metal bars horizontally across the window.

  Ernest was facing the window, his back to the door, standing at a hospital table that had been raised to serve him as a desk. He was wearing his old red woolen bathrobe (christened by Mary the “Emperor’s Robe”), which was secured with a worn leather belt that had a large buckle embossed “Gott Mit Uns,” a belt he had liberated from a dead German soldier during World War II’s battle of Hürtgen Forest. He wore his favorite scuffed Indian moccasins and a soiled white tennis visor over his eyes. His beard was scraggly and he seemed to have lost quite a bit of weight.

  “Mr. Hemingway, your guest is here,” the nurse said.

  Ernest turned; the startled look on his face held for a moment and then faded into a broad smile as he connected with me. He came to greet me, pulling off his visor as we wrapped our arms around each other Spanish-style and thumped each other’s backs. He was genuinely glad I had come. He appeared attenuated, as if the man he once was had disappeared and the man before me was only a marker to show who he had been.

  “Well, Hotch,” he said, “welcome to Never Never Land, where they frisk you and lock the door on you and don’t have the decency to trust you with a blunt instrument.”

  The nurse was standing in the doorway.

  “Nurse Susan,” Ernest said, introducing me, “this is El Pecas, the famous matador. Pecas, this is Susan who holds the key to my heart.”

  That got a laugh out of both of us.

  I gave her a tin of caviar I had brought for Ernest, to keep in the refrigerator.

  Ernest and I sat for a while, he on the bed, me on the chair, and at first he sounded like he was back on solid ground, but to my dismay, he began to lapse into a repetition of his old miseries: the room was bugged, also the telephone outside the door; poverty complaints; accusations against his banker, his lawyer, his doctor in Ketchum, all the fiduciary people in his life; worries about not having proper clothes; distraught over imagined taxes. There was much repetition.

  I stood up, intent on directing him away from the same grievances that had assailed him when I had visited him during his previous confinement. The ECTs obviously hadn’t affected them. I walked over to the table and asked him what he was working on.

  “Paris.”

  He was referring to his impressions of Paris and of some of the people he knew when he first went to live there with his first wife, Hadley, back in the early twenties.

  “How’s it going?”

  “That’s the worst of it. I can’t finish the book. I can’t. I’ve been at this damn table day after day after day after day. All I need is … maybe a sentence, maybe more, I don’t know, and I can’t get it. Not any of it, you understand? I’ve written Scribner to scratch the book. It was all set for the fall, but I had to scratch it.”

  I asked him if these were the sketches from the Ritz trunk, the ones I had read.

  He said they were, plus a final new one, which mattered most.

  “But those sketches,” I said, “as wonderful about Paris as anyone can hope to write.”

  On one of our trips to Paris, when we were staying at the Ritz (the time our Hemhotch syndicate won a steeplechase race at Auteuil that paid 27–1), we had lunch one day with Charles Ritz, who had succeeded his father, César. Charles informed Ernest that in redoing the hotel’s storage area, they had recently discovered a Louis Vuitton trunk that Ernest had stored there in the thirties. It was a trunk that Vuitton himself had made for Ernest, and he was delighted to see it come back to him. We opened it in Charles’s office, and among other things inside, there were a number of schoolboy blue notebooks in which Ernest had written about Paris in the twenties and the people he knew during his early years there. Ernest had given me the sketches to read; they were exquisite, poetic, penetrating, callous, timeless, like no one had ever written about Paris and the fascinating people of the twenties who were Ernest’s contemporaries.

  There was a rap on the door and nurse Susan came in. She said that Ernest’s doctor wanted him for some tests but that he wouldn’t be long. Ernest took a sheaf of papers from his improvised desk and handed them to me to read until he came back. He said this was a chapter I hadn’t read, the one that would conclude the book, the one that had to count.

  * * *

  I pulled the chair over to the window and began to read the handwritten sketch that Ernest had left with me. Entitled “There Is Never Any End to Paris,” it was different from the other sketches I had read that time at the Ritz, sketches that concentrated on Paris neighborhoods and the people Ernest had known back then: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach (an American-born bookseller and publisher), Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald among them. This sketch I was now reading was obviously intended to be the book’s finale; what made it different was that this one was written both as a tribute to his struggling but wonderful early years in Paris and as a lament for how it turned out for him, and what had caused it.

  Overall, it was a fervid declaration of love directed toward his first wife, Hadley, the memory of her in their fourth-floor walk-up on Rue Cardinal-Lemoine, and then where they had lived with their infant son, Bumby, at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, on the second floor, above a sawmill in the courtyard, and how, wrapped in sweaters, Hadley had played on an old piano Ernest had rented for her in the frigid basement of the local patisserie.

  In the sketch, Ernest also reveled in his skiing adventures with Hadley: Schruns in the Voralberg in Austria, where they both learned to ski and where the rooms at the Taube Inn had big windows, big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets, and served splendid breakfasts with big cups of coffee, fresh bread and fruit preserves, eggs, and good ham; the Madlenerhaus, the beautiful old inn where they slept close together in a big bed under a feather quilt, the window open and the stars close.

  Halfway through the sketch, however, Ernest veered off the romantic early years with Hadley, when they were very poor but happy, to describe what happened to their idyllic life when the rich people appeared, led by a pilot fish, neither the rich nor the pilot fish identified. When there are two people who love each other, Ernest wrote, the rich are attracted to them but that he and Hadley were naifs who did not know how to protect themselves. Charmed by these rich, Ernest admitted he was as stupid as a bird dog who goes out with anyone with a gun.

  And, most important, there was another of the rich, an unmarried woman who coveted Ernest and befriended Hadley as a means of infiltrating their lives and breaking up their marriage. Ernest confessed that he had been seduced by the simultaneous attention of these two women and that he had the bad luck of being in love with both of them.

  Before he ended his life, it was important to him that his final words explain the self-inflicted pain of letting the only true love of his life slip away. The tragedy of having loved two women at the same time had bedeviled him all his life. It was after he had a near-death experience in a plane crash that he decided to relive those perilous days that had consumed him back in the twenties, when he initially went to Paris, diluting the pleasure of the publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Ernest relived those years by describing them to me, and in the telling he found some measure of closure. But over the years of his life, it was an irreparable tragedy, one that he was never able to overcome, not through fame or plaudits or the profits of genius.

  I had read the chapter twice and let it settle in while Ernest was meeting with his doctor. In his summing up of his Paris years—the people, the places, the reversals, the triumphs, the fulfillments, the disappointments, the redolent recollections of life with Hadley—I was surprised he had omitted so many telltale revelations, like the one-hundred-day suspension of his marriage, which he had once told me about. It may be that his persecuted mind and h
is dire struggle to write precluded a full accounting, or perhaps he had intended that I be the custodian of his account of the tragic fallout of loving two women at the same time, the debacle from which he never extricated himself.

  * * *

  There was a rap on the door and nurse Susan came in to tell me the blood pressure tests were going to be a while longer and that if I preferred to wait in the lounge, where it was more comfortable, she’d come to get me. I told her I’d rather wait where I was.

  So sitting there at the window with the final chapter in my lap, I began to think about the plane crash—in fact, the two crashes—that led me to meet up with Ernest at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice in 1954.

  Uganda, Africa, 1954: Wreckage of the first of Ernest’s two consecutive plane crashes.

  PART TWO

  Rendezvous at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice

  It was on the morning of January 25, 1954, that word flashed around the world that Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Mary, had been killed in a plane crash in dense jungle near Murchison Falls in Uganda, setting off universal mourning and obituaries. But news of the tragedy was soon superseded by a report that Ernest had suddenly, miraculously, emerged from the jungle at Butiabe carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. To the startled reporters who rushed to interview him, Ernest announced, according to an AP dispatch, “My luck, she is running good.”

  A few hours later, however, his luck ran not so good. A rescue plane, a de Havilland Rapide, a 1930s-era biplane fashioned out of plywood, was sent to the crash site to fly Ernest and Mary back to their base in Kenya, but the de Havilland crashed on takeoff and burst into flames; it was that second crash that left its mark on Ernest.

  I sent numerous cables trying to reach him and eventually received a return cable asking me to phone him at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice. At that moment, I was in the Hague on assignment for a magazine, interviewing Queen Beatrice and her resident fortune-teller whom the queen consulted for royal guidance.

  I phoned Ernest and he urged me to conclude my royal interrogatory and come to the Gritti. He said, “I have a new Lancia with a good professional driver to take us over the Alps and along the Corniche to Pamplona for the Feria of San Fermín. Would like your company on the trip. I’m beat up from those kites falling all over Africa.”

  In the past he had called me often about pleasurable trips to desirable destinations, but this was the first time it was for a personal situation. He sounded self-conscious.

  * * *

  When I got to his corner room at the Gritti, Ernest was sitting in a chair by the window, tennis visor in place, reading his worldwide obituaries from a stack of newspapers on the desk beside him. I stood for a moment in the open doorway, shocked at his appearance. I had last seen him in New York in the fall of 1953, shortly before he had left for Africa. What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months. What there was of his hair (most of it had been burned off) had turned from brindle to white, as had his singed beard, and he appeared to have diminished somewhat; I don’t mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of indomitableness seemed to have gone out of him.

  Suddenly, he blurted aloud from the obit he was reading: “‘Swashbuckling ruffian of literature!’” and a laugh roared out of him. He picked up his wineglass from the table beside him and drained its contents.

  That’s when he saw me, and a wide smile spread across his face as he motioned for me to help him emerge from the depths of his chair. “I feel like a creature coming up from the deep,” he said as I helped pull him upright.

  “How are you, Papa?” I asked. “I mean the true gen,” using a favorite expression of his that referred to distinguishing between fact and innuendo.

  “Right arm and shoulder dislocated,” he said, “ruptured kidney, back gone to hell, face, belly, hand, especially hand, all charred by the de Havilland fire. Lungs scalded by smoke. Come on, I’ll show you the evidence in Technicolor.”

  He led me into the bathroom. On a table in the corner between the tub and the sink were half a dozen glasses containing urine. Ernest picked up one of them and exhibited its dark contents in the light. He said, “Couldn’t piss for two days on account of plugged somewhere with kidney-cell stuff. Look at it—floating around like quill toothpicks. Color spooks me. Prune juice. Doctor on boat coming here from Africa very good. Gave me stuff for kidneys, scissored away all dead flesh from the burns—very classy doctor, said I should have died at the crash. Said I still might. Put me on a strict diet. Tell you the truth, I was really spooked you had lost a member of our firm when the de Havilland crashed and crumbled and burst into flames. I was in the rear section, Mary up front with the pilot, Roy Marsh. They got out all right, but the fire was broiling the rear metal door, which was bent and smashed. I was choking from the smoke; besides, there was no room to get to the jammed door to push on it. That second, right there, I felt I was checking out. I’ve had bum raps before—ramming that water tower in blackout London, which leveled me and blasted my head open; the car wrecks in Idaho that broke bone, the direct hit in the trench in Fossalta, some others—but I always felt I’d make it and the hell with the grim son of a bitch with his scythe, but this time, frying in that sardine can, busted all over, I thought, Shitmaru, it’s the finish line, they’ve nailed me to the cross and lit the fire, but somehow I cleared enough space to reach the door that was bent and jammed and with my good left shoulder and my head I was able to force it open enough to squeeze out.

  “We stood there, helplessly watching the de Havilland burn up. My clothes were smoking. I made several scientific notations that might interest students of the alcoholic occult. First noted were four little pops, which I chalked up as belonging to our four bottles of Carlsberg beer. Then there was a more substantial pop, which I credited to the bottle of Grand Macnish. But the only really good bang came from the Gordon’s gin. It was an unopened bottle with a metal top. The Grand Macnish was corked and, besides, was half gone, but the Gordon’s had real éclat.”

  He went back to his chair and poured two glasses of champagne from a bottle in a silver ice bucket on an end table. He said reading all his obituaries had made him feel better but that now that he had leveled with me about how beat-up he was … he’d always held back on the stuff he was going to write, inventory, insurance against the dry-up … but the way he was feeling now, he thought they’d shortened him out, and he would tell me some of it so if he never actually got around to it, then someone would know. “Like the one hundred days. You know about the hundred days?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a morbid, but every time you take out insurance, it’s an act of morbidity, isn’t it? You still keep your notes?”

  I said I did, and the Midgetapes.

  “And I have mine. We’re in good shape.”

  * * *

  Ernest had reserved a dinner table in the Gritti’s historic dining room, but he said he felt too rocky for public dining, so he opted for the room-service menu. It was a large room with high, arching windows facing the Grand Canal, beautifully furnished with Venetian antique furniture, so being served in front of those windows, with gondolas floating below, was certainly not an imposition.

  Ernest ordered calves liver (fegato alla Veneziana), which he said was a restorative, and he ordered a bottle of Valpolicella Superiore, which he told the floor waiter to pour for us without waiting for the bottle to breathe. “Italian reds don’t need oxygen,” he said. “I got that bit of Bacchanalian wisdom from Fitzgerald.”

  I said, “You got a lot from Fitzgerald, didn’t you?”

  “Got and gave,” Ernest said. “Met him first in Paris at the Dingo Bar. Introduced himself. Of course I knew who he was. His short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, one of them, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,’ hell of a story. Scott loved the Ritz, had a regular spot in the main barroom. Sometimes he’d invite me for a drink and I’d have to spruce up my old corduroy jacket with my one necktie, which was so corkscrewed, it could have opened bottles. Scott didn’t fraternize with other writers living in Paris, like Ezra Pound, Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, but he sort of took me on as my sponsor and mentor. Scott was going on thirty, which he thought was the end of his road, and I think he viewed me as a possible redemption project, but I didn’t know why, because he had made a solid name for himself with The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby, which had just been published. He asked to see some of my short stories, even though they’d been roundly rejected.