“After I finish the novel, I mean to go to Spain to cover their civil war,” I said.
We had a good long chat then about Spain, the front line for stopping the rot of Fascism.
“Blood as deep as a man’s palm, that’s what they’re saying,” I said. “And the whole damned world looks the other way.”
Hemingway said, “I’ve paid passage for two volunteers going to fight with the International Brigades, and I mean to send fifteen hundred dollars”—as much as most people made in a year—“for the Republicans to buy ambulances.”
I said, “Money is just money, though. The thing is to tell the truth about it, and you can’t tell a truth you haven’t seen.”
Matie said, “You’ll excuse my poor parenting, Ernest. My daughter’s passions will override her manners.”
But he was already laughing. “Well, Daughter, I have in mind to go to Spain myself after I finish my new novel, so perhaps you’ll let me use some of my money to buy you a Papa Doble in Madrid?”
I said, “We’ll have to bring Skinner along.”
“We’d need a terrifically big suitcase for that.”
“A trunk.”
“A fine big trunk,” he said, and we all laughed, and he signaled for Skinner to bring me another Papa Doble. Matie’s and my brother’s glasses were still full.
I pulled out another cigarette, and he took the lighter from me, saying, “War is one of the hardest things to write truly; it’s a great advantage for a writer to experience it directly.”
He flicked the lighter and put the flame to my cigarette, sending a surprising little shiver through me as he steadied my hand with his touch. Ernest damn Hemingway.
He said, “But of course the bastards who haven’t seen war are always jealous and try to make it—and you—seem unimportant.”
I inhaled strongly on the cigarette, hiding behind the smoke of my inexperience. I’d seen plenty of the threat of war in Europe, but I had yet to see war itself.
“Spain, yes, that’s the place when the book is done,” he said. “I have a nice house here and a fine family. Still, the quiet gets to a man when a book is done.”
“Will you tell us about your new book, Mr. Hemingway?” I asked.
“Ernest,” he said.
“Ernest,” I repeated, and I lifted my fresh Papa Doble to my lips with my free hand, steadying myself to the crazy notion of being on a first-name basis with Ernest Hemingway.
He began telling us about the draft of the story that would become his third novel, To Have and Have Not—a story of a man who, in an effort to keep his family out of the have-nots, finds himself running rum and other contraband from Cuba to Key West. It was something, to hear him talk about his new lump of literary clay, to realize that even Ernest Hemingway wasn’t Ernest Hemingway in the early drafts. I was sure that if I listened hard enough, I could understand how he did it, how he hammered on the nail of every word until it was driven straight and true into the wood of a story, and how I might do it as well, or nearly so.
He was deep into the telling when a well-dressed man appeared in the bar’s doorway, calling out, “Ernest, old friend, here you are!”
Ernest stood and introduced his friend. “Thompson here owns the local hardware store, and he fishes with me,” he said. “Thompson, this is Edna Gellhorn. Her son Alfred. And her daughter, Marty, the writer. The Trouble I’ve Seen? Mrs. Roosevelt has been touting it, you know.”
“Yes, yes,” Thompson said. “But Pauline has a splendid crayfish dinner waiting.”
Ernest offered his friend a seat and a drink, both of which he declined.
“The Gellhorns are from St. Louis,” Ernest said. “Edna’s husband was a doctor there.” He was already charmed by Matie. He liked that she was a doctor’s wife like his own mother and yet nothing like his own mother, open in the way a woman ought to be rather than dictatorial.
Thompson acknowledged us. He hoped we found Key West suitable, which my brother assured him we did.
“But Ernest, everyone is waiting dinner,” Thompson repeated.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Ernest said. “You all go ahead.”
“Pauline sent me to fetch you,” Thompson insisted.
Matie said, “We ought not keep you from your dinner guests, Ernest.”
“You go ahead, Thompson,” Earnest repeated. “Tell Pauline I’ll have something to eat here, she needn’t worry that I’ll starve. Tell her I’ll catch up with you all later, for drinks at Peña’s.” Leaving the man to report to Pauline that her husband was too busy having drinks to attend his own dinner party. And Thompson would barely mention Matie and my brother. He would focus on the leggy blond in the black sundress, as if that said even one true thing about me.
Key West, Florida
DECEMBER 1936
As a girl, I was tall for my age, and gawky, and half Jewish when being part anything other than pure and white and Protestant as the damned Easter lily was held against you. There were other things to hold against me too. My mother was fair-haired and charming, a woman who might have had any beau but chose an intelligent and accomplished doctor—one who was entirely too Prussian and bald and unconventional to please St. Louis society. Matie had no love of St. Louis society, though. She preferred a man who would never bore her, and Dad was that. She preferred a man who would believe her his equal in every way when men just didn’t, who would gather liberal minds of all races to his dining table and the devil be damned if a white man wasn’t supposed to invite a black one through the front door. We were scandalous progressives, we Gellhorns. In the early years before suffrage, the years when I started school, mothers would warn their daughters against me and my dangerous radical suffragette mother, who’d been their perfectly respectable friend until she began taking her young daughter to suffrage rallies she organized herself, for heaven’s sake.
I was cursed as well to be sent into the boy-girl world of fortnightly ballroom dancing classes at my tallest and gawkiest. Not that I didn’t get taller; of course I did. But that was the height of my relative height, when I’d grown and the boys I was to dance with hadn’t, so their eyes stared right at my budding breasts. They were boys, too, who imagined themselves boys still, with none of the madness for love that already consumed us girls.
My best friend was as plump and uncontrollably redheaded and freckled as I was tall and talkative and quick to laugh at my own jokes. Her parents, like mine, made her attend the ballroom dancing classes, our mothers and fathers imagining us fox-trotting gracefully with respectful boys when the truth of it was that forty-some girls were made to stand at the edge of a sweat-stinking gymnasium while a dozen pimply-faced boys chose among us. We stood so hopefully at first. But boy after boy passed us by to choose some other pimply-faced girl with the good fortune to be more appropriate somehow than we would imagine ourselves even years later, when the boys’ heights and their appetites for love had caught up with ours.
After those first humiliations—waltzing hand in hand with the unchosen girls—and with our parents refusing to relent, we began to hang back as our classmates flooded the gymnasium, and to duck the ordeal by hiding in the coatroom. We spent whole evenings in the wet-wool stink of abandoned coats, whispering about the gawky boys and the prettier girls as if we really didn’t want those boys to be holding our own sweaty hands, or massacring our toes, or stealing kisses from us while the dance instructor schooled some other poor pair about the lilt and tilt of the waltz.
There was no one I loved more than my mother, no one of whom I was prouder, but I don’t suppose anything hardens a heart faster than being an eight-year-old given wide berth by the other girls in the lunchroom. I don’t suppose any amount of blond hair and blue eyes makes up for hiding in a coatroom when a girl is thirteen and just beginning to form her opinion of herself, not even after she can see how young and disinterested those boys were, how much they would rather have spent their Saturday evenings reading comic books or torturing frogs.
And so, even when I looked my very best and I could occasionally enter a room with my long legs and my blond hair and my blue eyes and feel men looking, it was someone else they were admiring, some imposter who never had hidden from the fortnightly boys or the lunchroom girls. I always knew that one moment of a closer look would reveal the ugly truth: my weak chin and my hooked nose, my nonexistent eyebrows, my hair that generally took its own frizzy path through humidity and fell flat as the stinking farmland around St. Louis most of the rest of the time. I never thought myself attractive until I grew old and could look back at photos and see that I had been, but no longer was.
Key West seemed to me the best place I’d found in America—a haven where I might make progress on my novel. There was the sea to swim in, and a young Swedish fellow I’d met swimming, a bum to be sure but one who was a lark, who swam with me in the afternoons and danced with me at night. So when my brother headed back to St. Louis with Matie, his break from medical school over, I took a room at the Colonial Hotel on Duval Street for another week or two, to write.
The day they left, Ernest invited me to a dinner party at his and Pauline’s stone wedding cake of a mansion on Whitehead Street. I ought to arrive in the late afternoon, he said, and he’d show me the gardens, and we could chat about writing without boring the others. He was known for his generosity to other writers, and if there’s a novelist in this world who couldn’t use a little generosity in her life, I don’t think I want to know her. And he was wonderful about the writing.
He’d recently bought a fishing boat, he told me as we sat together on a bench in the shadow of the carriage house in which he wrote, a white cat in his lap, and he used the fishing to talk about how he wrote.
“Whether it’s the beads of water on the line as it tightens like a hanging rope, or the drops thrown by the thrashing fish—that’s what you need to know. Remember the noises, the light, the exact action that made you excited or angry or scared. Then write down the details so the reader feels your exact feeling.”
My exact feeling in that moment was revulsion mixed with pity and something else I couldn’t name as I registered the white cat’s six toes. The something else had to do with Ernest and his affection for the cat, as if he were responsible for the deformity, or saw it as his own. I looked away, to the top of the Key West lighthouse visible above the palm and banana and mahogany trees, to the peacocks and the funny flamingos blandly roaming in the earthy undertone of sea air. I knew what he was saying, and yet I didn’t know it. I wanted to say, But look how well I write, will you? You don’t have to tell me how to write. I wanted to chide him for what he did in “Cross Country Snow,” humiliating my ex-beau Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French journalist Ernest had known in Paris, who could talk in nine-syllable words. Ernest was no good with big words himself, so maybe he couldn’t deliver Bertrand as a talker. But I only reached out and touched the cat’s odd little paw. I knew if I kept Ernest talking—even about things I already knew—he would come to things I didn’t know, or things like the fish talk that I knew without really knowing, that I might do more cleverly with the knowledge right where I could see it as I wrote.
“Don’t forget the weather in your books,” he said. “The weather is damned important.”
“The weather is hot and muggy,” I said, wiping my hair—still damp from my afternoon swim with The Swede—back from my forehead.
“Muggy? Only if you’re unhappy, Marty, and how can you be unhappy spending your afternoons swimming and your nights dancing? A dancer like you ought to find this ‘sultry.’”
“Am I spending my nights dancing?” I said lightly, wondering how much he could know about The Swede.
“Key West gives up its secrets more easily than you imagine.”
I laughed, and I said, “Perhaps the word I’m searching for, then, is ‘steamy,’ Ernest. Setting the stage for some marvelous crime of passion?”
“Love is a fine subject for a writer, as is murder,” Ernest said. “But make it love and murder set in wartime. A day at war offers more action and emotion than a whole life at peace.”
By the end of the week, Ernest had dubbed me “Mermaid” for forever arriving for our late-afternoon chats with my hair wet from a swim, and he’d given me his Cuban rumrunner novel manuscript to read—a task nearly as provoking to me as I imagined war would be.
“A modern War and Peace, that’s what it will be when I’ve finished the thing,” he said. The editor and cofounder of Esquire had suggested he make the novel from two of his short stories. “Key West and Cuba,” Ernest said. “Rich and poor. Smuggling and corruption and sex. That’s the thing to put me back where I belong.” His braggadocio hiding something; when a man brags like that, most often the person he’s trying to convince is himself, and, sure, The Sun Also Rises was a terrific book and A Farewell to Arms perhaps even better, but what had he written since 1929? Three books that hadn’t been much liked by the critics, that had sold better than my first novel, but not by much.
The truth was that while Ernest’s prose made me swoon, I sometimes balked at his stories; his women were so often such infuriating little prigs. There was trash in this new novel too—the kind of self-aggrandizing poop that ruined his 1933 story collection, Winner Take Nothing, and plenty of it. His writer-friend John Dos Passos was disguised as an alcoholic womanizer, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—who’d taken Ernest under his wing when Scott was already terrifically famous and Ernest was no one at all—was treated even worse. What ought to have been a tidy rope of story threads was fraying out in all directions too. Still, the way Ernest used words—spare and flowing, poetic—that was there, and hard to shake off. Your writing was a different thing after you read Hemingway, even if you didn’t want it to be. His dialogue in this new book left me in crazy awe, and I told him that, I praised that.
He said, “The damned critics want me to be a cheerleader for the Reds, but that’s just one little horseshit corner of the world Dos Passos can have.”
“How do you mean to end the book?” I asked.
“My hero will get his guts shot out in a bank robbery, but I’m still groping for the old miracle to end it.”
“The ‘old miracle’?”
“You can’t end a book with anything less than a miracle, Stooge.”
Stooge? And yet he’d said it with such affection, as if it were an honor.
“And just whose straight man do you think I am, Hemingway?” I asked.
“Well, that fellow who moons around you at the beach seems to think you’re his stooge, doesn’t he?” he said, repeating the nickname I didn’t suppose was worse than “Mermaid,” and I did give my own friends and family nicknames that weren’t always flattering: “The Swede,” of course; and my favorite teacher from Bryn Mawr was “Teachie”; and my old Paris love, Bertrand de Jouvenel, was “Smuf.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the comic and The Swede is the straight man, Ernesto,” I said.
He laughed and he said, “A writer has to take a lot of punishment to be funny, I hope you know that.”
Me, I’d had punishment enough to write funny all day and night.
“I’m close to nailing this book,” he said. “I’ve got to go to Havana again, though. I can sort it out in Havana.”
He asked to see pages of mine, which was intimidating but also really something, to have Ernest Hemingway taking my work seriously. It made me take it more seriously myself. It made me look as closely as I could, and I saw that it was all just a think-book, everyone moping about town without one single interesting thing occurring, not even a cat with six toes. So I chucked every damned word of the rotten stink. It killed me to do it, but I chucked it and I started new, mulling it all while I swam and while I talked with Ernest.
Nights, I danced with The Swede, and lay alone in bed with the humid air softening my lungs and my skin and my despair, invoking my gods—who all look like typewriters—to give me strength to write a book as alive as five minutes ago. I woke with the sun hot on my whole long
body and the writing sloshing in the mush of my brain. The story I meant to write was lovely and dire, and I knew it would be a fine book if only I could do it the way it ought to be done.
Key West, Florida
JANUARY 1937
We were a tableful at dinner one night: the Thompsons and me, and Pauline and Ernest and their two sons, eight-year-old Patrick with Ernest’s serious face and the nickname of “Mouse,” and bright-eyed five-year-old Gigi (pronounced like “piggy”), who was really Gregory. They were such nice boys that I thought I might even have children myself someday if I knew they would turn out as well. Ernest had another son too—“Bumby,” who lived with Ernest’s ex-wife, Hadley, who had been dear friends with Pauline. People like to put that on Pauline; they like to point out the irony of a devout Catholic stealing a husband without jeopardizing her relationship with her unforgiving God, the way rich girls often do. But Pauline wasn’t the one who’d done the leaving.
The evening started well enough over cocktails in the front room, not Papa Dobles, but whiskey for Ernest and a Cuba Libre for me, because it’s such an easy thing to ask for, just rum and cola and lime, and I didn’t want to put Ernest to any trouble. After he started making Pauline’s drink—an extravagant cocktail for which Ernest opened a whole new bottle of champagne—I did wish I’d asked for something more elegant, but I didn’t want to look an absolute fool for not knowing what I liked to drink. So I sipped my Cuba Libre and listened to Pauline, who wore her hair cropped short as a boy’s and no more makeup than I did. She was smart and quick-witted in a cutting sort of way that left us laughing together at the funny people on the island, and feeling a bit guilty for laughing at someone else’s expense.