Beautiful Exiles Page 11

  Ernest set about lecturing the president as we soldiered on through a nicely wilted green salad and a healthy plate of rubbery squab. “All the nonsense against the Republicans, that’s the Red baiters talking,” he said. “The Spanish would wipe their country clean of the Fascists if we weren’t making them fight with their hands and feet bound by all this neutrality . . .” He hesitated, groping for a word other than his usual “shit.” “All this neutrality bunk,” he continued. “We’re neutral, and England is neutral, and France is neutral, and that damned Hitler says he’s neutral while he sends planes and bombs and tanks to his Fascist pals.”

  The president assured Ernest that he was sympathetic to the Republic. “I cannot, however, single-handedly lift the arms embargo,” he said. “I cannot ignore the Neutrality Act Congress just passed. I cannot ignore the request from the League of Nations that we remain neutral.”

  Waiters served the cake, which, having been sent by an admirer, was the only bit of the dinner or the conversation more satisfying than the china itself. Still, a well-placed article or two about The Spanish Earth being shown to the president might draw audiences to see it, and help them understand that what was at stake was democracy itself.

  Pauline came up to fly with Ernest to Hollywood, where The Spanish Earth played to an A-list private gathering, to universal applause. The only thing about it, one prominent playwright suggested, was that Orson Welles’s aristocratic narration was too smooth for the rough images of war. I don’t suppose it took much to convince Hemingway to pop over to Paramount’s Hollywood recording room and re-lay the track himself.

  I returned from Washington to New York to work on my Spain book for Morrow, but the words that came were lousier and lousier. Hemingway had gotten into my brain, so that the words were Hemingway-esque, which was even worse than my own lousy brand of mud. I didn’t know enough yet; that was the rub. I would have to head back to Spain to write this book, and before I could do that, I had to see Matie.

  At the train station, I collected a ticket and the latest issue of Collier’s to help pass the ride. There on the masthead was “Martha E. Gellhorn.”

  New York, New York

  AUGUST 1937

  Ernest returned to New York in August to give his editor the Cuban rumrunner book (with, thankfully, the cuts they had discussed). Perkins was in a meeting with another writer, Max Eastman, when Ernest arrived unannounced, but Perkins—not wanting to give Ernest a minute to again change his mind about the novel being finished—invited Ernest to join them. “I’m meeting with a friend of yours,” Perkins said, never mind that Ernest and Max Eastman hadn’t been friendly since Eastman wrote a critique of Ernest’s nonfiction book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, declaring it juvenile and without subtlety, written by a man who felt the need to convince the world he had “false hair” on his literary chest. The essay, “Bull in the Afternoon,” had run in the New Republic and been reprinted in an essay collection that now sat in a jumble of Eastman’s books stacked beside the black telephone, with the desk lamp shining brightly on it.

  Sure, Ernest shook Eastman’s thin, pretty hand, saying, “Eastman, old man,” trying to ignore the sight of the essay volume, the damned critique.

  Perkins breathed relief. He and Eastman settled back into their chairs, but Ernest remained standing. He walked to the window and looked out over Fifth Avenue. He told himself it was just a damned essay that no more than three pointy-headed intellectuals had ever read.

  He returned to Perkins’s desk to take a seat, but then changed his mind. He stood looming over them, not exactly meaning to loom, but not meaning not to either. With a grin that was meant to be playful but didn’t quite achieve the goal, he began to unbutton his shirt.

  “Look at this, Eastman,” he said, thrusting out his chest, which was huge and suntanned and matted with dark hair. “Does this look like false hair to you?”

  He laughed as if he were joking. He thought he was. He meant to be.

  The two Maxes glanced at each other and laughed nervously.

  “Why don’t you show us your chest?” Hemingway urged Eastman.

  Eastman glanced at Perkins, who was as much at a loss for what to do as Eastman was. He offered another nervous chuckle.

  Perkins said, “Ernest—”

  Hemingway interrupted, “Come on, Eastman, you old pussy. Show us your chest!”

  Eastman stood. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his top button.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Perkins said.

  Still, Eastman slowly unbuttoned his own shirt. His skin was pale, his chest hairless.

  “What do you mean, accusing me of impotence?” Ernest said, again going for humor but now missing widely. “How many times did you jerk off last night?”

  Eastman said gently, “Ernest, I didn’t say a word about impotency.” He nodded to the book on Perkins’s desk. “You can read it yourself.”

  Max Perkins said, “Be reasonable, Ernest.” He picked up the book and flipped to the essay, and began reading a passage in which Eastman did grant Hemingway a sort of courage—the courage to admit that he loved killing, that it allowed him to face down death. “This is you he’s writing about, Hem,” he said.

  Ernest grabbed the book from Perkins and manhandled the pages until he found the other passage, the one about false hair. “Go ahead, read it to me, why don’t you, Eastman?” he demanded. “Read it to my face.”

  Max Perkins said, “Really, Ernest,” trying to calm him. Then to Eastman, he said, “Ernest has just finished a new novel.”

  “Have you? Congratulations,” Eastman said, following Max Perkins’s attempt to change the subject.

  Ernest snapped the book closed right in Eastman’s face, laughing as he caught Eastman’s nose in the pages.

  Eastman came up swinging.

  As quick as anything, the two were wrestling each other to the floor, someone catching the telephone cord on the way down, sending the telephone and the books and papers and the lamp flying off of Max Perkins’s desk.

  Perkins scurried around the desk to save Eastman.

  Eastman was on top of Ernest, besting him.

  Perkins, imploring them both to be reasonable, pulled Eastman off of Ernest and put himself between them.

  Ernest burst out laughing, as if the tussle had been in good fun, the way he had with Orson Welles at the screening of the soundless The Spanish Earth. A loss didn’t count as a loss if it was all in good fun, even if a win always was a win. He picked up the telephone and set it back on the desk, gently replacing the receiver in its cradle.

  Eastman said, “Who’s calling on you, Max? Hemingway or me? This man is a lunatic.”

  Ernest went for him again.

  Again, Perkins intervened, and Ernest, reluctant to have his own editor call the law on him, stood down. Already, his forehead above his left eye was beginning to swell.

  “Now listen,” Perkins said, “it will do no one any good for this to go beyond this room. Is that clear?”

  Ernest returned to his editor’s office the next day, and he apologized to Max Perkins, if not to Eastman. He was sorry, he said, if he and Eastman had broken the lamp—which he saw had been replaced. He said he’d gone out for a drink the prior night with the editor from Esquire, and the two had had a grand laugh over poor Eastman, whom Ernest assured him had looked far worse despite the purple goose egg on Ernest’s forehead.

  “It wasn’t to leave this room,” Perkins said.

  “But it was only—”

  “You can’t expect Eastman to sit quietly while you put your own little version out in public for a laugh at his expense.”

  “My own little version? Christ, Max—”

  “I’m quite sure Eastman would tell a different story if he were telling, which he isn’t, Ernest. Not yet.”

  Ernest, somewhat chastened, said, “We should give Arnie the book. We’ll give it to him and remind him mum’s the word.”

  “Hemingway.”

 
“I’ll take it over to the Esquire offices myself.”

  Perkins lit a cigarette and inhaled. “All right. Sure, let’s give him the book and ask him to keep it quiet,” Perkins conceded, his words emerging in puffs of tobacco smoke.

  In an attempt at humor and humility, Ernest took the essay-volume-turned-weapon from Max’s desk and flipped to the offending page.

  “Ha! Look at this, Max,” he said. “You can see a mark from Eastman’s nose on the page!” He laughed, oblivious to or ignoring the fact that Perkins didn’t laugh with him.

  Ernest picked up a pen and signed at the bottom corner of the page “for Arnold from Papa” and dated it.

  “You can sign as witness, to make it official,” he said to Max Perkins.

  Perkins, somewhat reluctantly, signed too, and Ernest took the book to hand deliver it. At the Esquire offices, he wrote on the front endpaper—below where Eastman had signed and dated it the day of the fight and drawn, inexplicably, a six-fingered hand—that this was the book he’d ruined on Max Eastman’s nose, and that he truly hoped Eastman would burn in a hell of his own making.

  The story got out, of course, leaving Ernest little choice but to return to Perkins’s office Friday, after Eastman had left for a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, to “make it right,” as his editor put it. The way Ernest put it to me was, “Perkins told me ‘no one has any right to humiliate a man like that, Hem’”—casting himself as victor, the one who left the unseemly brawl with his pride intact.

  That was pretty much what Ernest said to the New York Times as well in his public “apology.” “I feel kind of sorry,” he was quoted in the papers as saying, but Eastman “shouldn’t go around telling these lies.”

  Scribner would say nothing more than that it was “a personal matter between the two gentlemen.”

  Ernest, as he boarded the Champlain to return to Madrid, was hounded by reporters.

  “The man jumped me like a woman clawing,” he insisted. “I didn’t want to hurt the poor schmuck. He’s a sad old man.”

  When confronted with Ernest’s quote, Eastman claimed to have declined to hit Ernest back, saying, “My dear old mama brought me up to be a better man than that.”

  Ernest had just finalized the Cuban rumrunner novel, now titled To Have and Have Not—not that that excused him, but if any writer is good in that moment of having to let go of a book, knowing all the wrong in it will be forever wrong, I don’t know him. It ought to be such a glorious moment—a book is done!—but every glorious moment in the life of a writer is cloudy. Even the bits that are right in a book leave your soul ripped out of your chest and left on the pavement to be examined by every casual passerby. Ernest, after a start that left him the darling of American literature, had set his own bar so high that he couldn’t possibly make the jump every time, but that didn’t make missing it and having the critics slay him for it any more fun. And now it had been eight years since he’d brought a novel out.

  To Have and Have Not was scheduled for publication October 15, an impossibly short two months away. His purgatory would be mercifully brief.

  I sailed on the Normandie that August with Dorothy Parker and her husband, who were absolute dears, and the playwright Lillian Hellman, who eyed my tailored slacks and decent boots with her lidless eyes and asked if I meant to cover the Spanish war for Vogue.

  “For Collier’s,” I replied, dismissing her crankiness as having more to do with having found her partner, Dashiell Hammett, in their own bed with a young starlet than with me. “I’m a war correspondent for Collier’s,” I said.

  It felt so good to say it and mean it.

  “Not that I don’t think Vogue is awfully swell.”

  Madrid, Spain

  SEPTEMBER 1937

  The weather back in Madrid was splendid at first. We’d come the long way, touring the countryside with Herb Matthews in a Dodge truck, sleeping on mattresses in the truck bed and surviving on tinned salmon, ham, and coffee we boiled over villagers’ open fires. We abandoned our truck to crawl uphill one dawn to a frontline dugout, where we lay on a straw floor, peering through a periscope to see sugar-beet fields warmed in the slant of morning light and, across the valley, five towers rising from within a walled city, and a looming outcropping of rock that was Mansueto, all of it heavily fortified, impossible to take. The going from Teruel had been even more brutal, on horseback with a cavalry escort up to the mountains, then down a steep ravine between Jucar and Huecar. We were so hot and dusty that, despite the nearness of the Fascist lines, we went for a swim. Ernest praised me for how tough I was about it all, and he seemed so proud, and I was a war correspondent for Collier’s. I wrote my damned heart out, the real gen. I wrote my damned heart out, and, after we found our way finally to Madrid and the Hotel Florida again, I sent my pieces off and hoped to hell that people would read them.

  Herb and Del had an apartment overlooking the Retiro Park, and Dorothy Parker arrived with her husband and a load of canned goods, but others we loved were gone; that was part of Bug’s growing darkness—not just that they weren’t there, but that they had abandoned Spain, or hadn’t lived to do so. We went to a very sweet zoo with an elephant kept in an astonishing little Hindu temple, and to the flea market. We gambled at dominoes, and whenever the shelling started, we opened the windows to protect the window glass, and Ernest put Chopin on the Victrola—Ballade no. 3 or Mazurka in B Minor, op. 33, no. 4—at top volume. It almost drowned out the sound of the bombs, if you could keep yourself from listening too hard. But there was less and less to report, and Ernest was being paid so little by NANA compared to what he’d gotten in the spring. And of course there was the novel.

  He’d been so sure To Have and Have Not was the best thing he’d ever written, his triumphant return, the way we finally convince ourselves about our new stuff so we don’t kill ourselves in the space between when a book is written and when it reaches readers’ hands. But the reviewer for The Nation found the book shockingly unprofessional. The New Republic declared it the weakest of Ernest’s books, and the New York Times, finding it empty and mechanical and formulaic, declared that Hemingway’s reputation was lessened with its publication. Sinclair Lewis wrote in Newsweek that Ernest needed to quit trying to save Spain and instead save himself.

  I tried so hard to be sympathetic. None of us can stand to have no juice to write with, or to have what we’ve written pissed on, never mind both at once. I tried to focus Ernest on the few good reviews, and the good bits of the ones that weren’t overall splendid. I tried to focus him on the cables from Max Perkins saying the book was selling terrifically. But I was increasingly a target of his crankiness. He didn’t have Sidney Franklin to cater to him in Spain this time, and I wasn’t the type to cook a big breakfast, or even get up to eat with him. He wanted people around all the time, and I liked a little quiet sometimes. And sex was always more difficult than it ought to be, more painful. Ernest seemed always to want it, every day and then some, and I wanted to be good to him, I did, but there were so many times when I didn’t want it: when I was having my period, of course, although he insisted that was the safest time of all; when I had bathed and was nice and clean; even in the middle of the night, when he had had a nightmare and woke me to keep him company.

  I had no juice to write with either; nothing happening to stir the juice, and it’s a hard thing to be forever taking it from a crank and saying you love him anyway and trying to make him feel better when you’re the dregs yourself. And of course there was the fact that those reviews of his book all came to him with letters from Pauline, that she was still being the good wife even though she must have been torn apart by its depiction of a marriage that must have looked to her very like her own.

  Our solution was increasingly to drink too much and sleep too little and eat poorly, to have squabbles over everything from our sex life to the war to the writing itself, tearing at each other’s egos in little bits. I tried not to think of the way Ernest had been with Pauline at that first dinner in
Key West, the two of them sniping at each other over whether Ernest should go to Spain or stay home and love his family.

  I turned to writing a long piece for Collier’s that evolved into a meditation on the who and why of the soldiers coming to Spain from around the world. I began a new book, also about Spain. I started making plans for a lecture tour of the United States, to rally support for the cause.

  “What the hell good will it do to abandon me here just to rant at a bunch of pansy-assed homebodies who don’t give a damn about anyone who doesn’t live in Poughkeepsie?” Ernest wanted to know.

  “This agent tells me a lecture tour will raise money for the cause, and visibility too. And I’m chewing cement here is the thing, you know I am.”

  Neither the Collier’s article nor the novel was shaping up to be anything.

  “You can’t whine about it, for fuck’s sake,” Ernest said. “A real writer never whines about the writing. A real writer sits down and writes.” Never mind that he whined about the writing going so poorly for him too. Still, he did write. He was better at that, he was. He had no juice in the midst of those dreadful reviews, but still he got up each morning to write.

  “Fine, go on your damned tour, then,” he said. “I ought to go home to Pauline and the kids anyway.”

  “Sure you should,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it, that was just my own darkness talking—my own darkness made worse by my inability to sleep for Ernest forever waking me, by the sleeping pills that left me dull in the morning, by the forever thinking about the soldiers I interviewed. And there was the new play Ernest was writing, in which a rowdy American journalist hero—one who was just like Ernest right down to the love of raw onions and the nightmares, except that he was also a very noble secret agent for the Republicans—lived in rooms like ours with an American correspondent who went to Vassar rather than Bryn Mawr but had my blond hair and my legs and a silver fox wrap just like the one I’d purchased with some of my Collier’s money, and who was an utter fool. He was calling the play “Working: Do Not Disturb,” too, as if I were keeping him from working rather than working like hell myself.