Beautiful Exiles Page 22

  “If that is civilized, then, damn, I want no part of it!” I said.

  Ernest said, “If I put something in the book, then it belongs there, and Max and Charlie can go obscenity themselves if they don’t want to publish it that way. A book is a whole thing, and if you start chipping out bits of it, or even chipping off the edges of some of the bits, well then, you would have a different thing.”

  They all worried over the fact that the Republicans didn’t look any better than the Fascists in the novel on account of one awful scene in which some Republicans dragged the town’s Fascists from a church into the square for the sole purpose of brutally beating them and then pitching them off a cliff. It’s such a long scene it would be pretty unbearable even if it were the Fascists being so cruel, which it wasn’t, it was the men we all admired.

  Ernest’s answer was that Max should simply not send galleys to anyone on the left who might object.

  Max sent a set of the galleys to the Book-of-the-Month Club, along with a note that two short chapters comprising an epilogue of about fifteen hundred words would be added to tie up loose ends—chapters, he assured them, that had been written but which Ernest wanted to hold on to until he’d had a chance to read the galleys from start to finish. Ernest was sure Book-of-the-Month would reject the book. He consoled himself with all the books he was sure they wouldn’t have liked: Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

  On August 26, Perkins wrote to tell Ernest that For Whom the Bell Tolls would be the November Book-of-the-Month Club selection. They planned to print a hundred thousand copies. Scribner would publish as many or more.

  That same day, Ernest packaged up all but eighteen pages of the galleys and airmailed them back. He still wasn’t happy with the epilogue, which he’d rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He wrote to Max that, in his own mind, the book really ended with Robert Jordan feeling his heart beating against the pine needle forest, right where it had begun. The epilogue seemed like going back into the dressing room after the fight.

  He was like a horridly caged bear after he sent that letter. He revised the epilogue he’d now convinced himself the book didn’t need, only to tear it up and start a fresh approach, and then another. He was a beast to me in the process, the way so many of us are unkind to the people we love when we’re letting go of a thing we’ve worked so hard on, when if we just had, say, another five years, we could make the thing a masterpiece, but our time is up. Nothing I could do or say was anything but dead wrong and vile and mean-spirited, even when it was only to ask if he’d like a cup of coffee or a glass of booze.

  “I’m not your fucking punching bag, Nesto!” I objected one night when we were well into the booze. “You’ll always be writing something, and if that is forever going to make you too cranky to be nice to me, then fuck you.”

  It was the worst time to hash out anything, when we were in the booze, but the only time we did it—exploding about the different ways we wrote or failed to write and the way we did one thing or another around the house, the way we drank too much (my complaint) and had sex too seldom (his), all with an undertone of the difficulty of the divorce from Pauline.

  I left him to do as much drinking as he pleased, and I went off to bed thinking that if he wouldn’t be nice to me before we married, I couldn’t see how he would be after I was his captive wife. Thinking I didn’t really mean what I’d said, it was only the booze talking, the booze and the darkness of not writing. Thinking it was the booze talking for him too, the booze and the darkness about the book being just at that point where the writing is about to be judged. Thinking I ought to go back and climb in his lap because I knew it wasn’t me that was the problem, it was the book, but the book wouldn’t fight back, and he needed someone to fight back.

  By morning, he’d have forgotten about the fighting. He always did. So I tried to forget it as well. We were good for each other, Bug and I, as long as we weren’t both dealing with the darkness at the same time.

  I found, the next morning, a copy of the latest draft of his epilogue shredded into little squares, which he had left on the drinks cart next to an empty bottle of scotch. He’d gone back to working after we’d argued, in the middle of the night and full of booze.

  Beside the scraps of the former epilogue, he’d propped a folded piece of paper with my name written on it. He’d been no good company while he was writing this beast of a thing, the whole eighteen months, he wrote, but would I please be a good Bongie and try to remember how cranky I’d been with A Stricken Field and what a good boy he’d been about that? He wrote, “If you don’t mean to marry me, for God’s sake tell me with time enough to accept it before I have to take the Pilar across to Key West by myself. Don’t leave me with all that time alone and far too much to think about.”

  I reread the note, trying to sort out what he meant by it, nervous about what he might mean. He ought to be so happy, with the book done and the thing so brilliant. But I knew how it was. I knew how the darkness came. I knew the emptiness that was left when you let a thing go, the limbo before you knew how one thing might do and were on to the next.

  He had such high ambitions. He only wanted to write something that would win “that thing,” which was how he spoke of it when he spoke of it, which he didn’t much do for fear of jinxing himself.

  I felt a little sick, reading the rest of the note. I felt like I ought to be a better person, more understanding.

  He closed it by saying Mr. Scrooby now referred to himself as “us.” I wondered if he’d used that nickname for his penis with Pauline too, or with Hadley. I thought I ought to be more like Hadley always had been, concerned only with Ernest’s life and not with her own even before he’d ever published anything, before anyone else knew that he was Ernest Hemingway who only wanted to write well enough to win the Nobel Prize.

  The next morning, Max telegrammed that he agreed they should print the novel without the epilogue. For Whom the Bell Tolls was done.

  The Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho

  SEPTEMBER 1940

  It was a lovely thing, to stand on the diving board in fresh, clear, if slightly thin, air, with the steam pouring around me and the white-capped mountains in the distance, and the Sun Valley Lodge’s clean, fluffy white towels always waiting in generous piles atop the fence posts around the pool. Ernest and I had stopped in Key West on the way, to select the half of the books Ernest was to get under the settlement he’d finally reached with Pauline and to pick up a new Buick convertible for which his editor had sent an $890 check directly to Muhlberg Motor Company, charging it against his advance. I’d stayed a week in St. Louis with Matie. But now we were writing in our suite or on our private wooden sun terrace each morning. I was helping Ernest read through a new set of galleys for For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as trying to get my stories just right for The Heart of Another, a collection Scribner was going to publish. Ernest had finally convinced me that Duell, Sloan and Pearce hadn’t so much put my prior books up for sale as locked them in a damned vault.

  Our afternoons were full of shooting and fishing and riding with Ernest’s sons, and having long conversations, especially with Bumby. Ernest was hell-bent on convincing Bumby to take a year off after he graduated from high school the following spring.

  “College will always be there,” he told his son, “and a man might as well catch a steelhead if there’s only one life.”

  The military draft had been reinstituted, and as much as the rich and glamorous in Sun Valley tried to ignore the war when they weren’t making money on it, it seemed only a matter of time before American boys would be in it too.

  We all read books that Ernest had Max Perkins send us, and we rode horses, and when we weren’t playing tennis with the boys, we were playing with Gary Cooper and his wife, Veronica Balfe—“Rocky”—swapping partners sometimes. Ernest had known them since Cooper starred in the 1932 movie version of Ernest’s
in-love-with-the-nurse novel, A Farewell to Arms.

  “Cooper would make a top-notch Robert Jordan, don’t you think so?” Ernest said to me after one particularly spirited game in which Ernest and Rocky had prevailed, much to Bug’s glee. We were dressing for an evening of eating and drinking and dancing to Glenn Miller’s swing band, and entertaining Ernest’s Hollywood agent, Donald Friede, who’d come to talk about the film rights for Bell. I agreed Cooper would be terrific, and while I was at it I noted that Ernest might ask Gary where he bought his clothes, as he always looked so sharp.

  “That’s his face you’re responding to, Mrs. Bongie,” Bug said. “All the silk ties and slim-cut jackets in the world won’t make my face look like his. It would take the TB to slim me down to his weight, and he’d still have that goddamned face.”

  “But I love your face, Mr. Bongie,” I said, and I thought of the photo of him I’d had on my dorm room wall at Bryn Mawr. He’d been as handsome as Cooper in his youth, and he wasn’t two years older, but Cooper’s face remained smooth and his body slender, his hair still full so that he looked years younger than Ernest.

  Still, even in a room with a movie star like Gary Cooper, Ernest was the one people circled around. He had a way of looking at you with those big brown eyes that made you feel like you were the most important person in the world, and his voice was still soft and warm, and he told such great stories, in a shy way that was absolutely lovable when he hadn’t drunk too much.

  Ernest liked to go shooting with Cooper, whom he conceded was a better shot with a rifle (“probably on account of he doesn’t drink as much”), although he claimed he was better with a shotgun so it was overall a draw. I had no claim to match Rocky with any gun whatsoever; she was a damned skeet-shooting champion. I did like her immensely though. She seemed so happy with Gary. She seemed someone I might turn to for happiness advice. So one afternoon when she and I were shooting pheasant some distance from Ernest (who was helping Gigi handle his gun without having to sit), I asked her if the lack of privacy bothered her.

  “But of course that’s why Mr. Harriman invited us here, to have our photos taken to promote his new little resort,” Rocky said. “He’s bent on having it rival the Swiss Alps, and who wouldn’t want to hobnob with the likes of Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway?”

  “What Averell Harriman is bent on is the side benefit of increasing ridership on his Union Pacific Railroad,” I said, “but, Rocky, that’s not—”

  “I was being flip, Mart. We’re all here to have fabulous sex with our husbands night and day, of course. This place is just lovely for that, isn’t it?” She laughed delightedly.

  I laughed with her, wondering, Did she really enjoy sex?

  “I don’t mean that kind of privacy,” I said. “I don’t love being followed around by photographers, of course, but . . . what I meant was . . . well, does Gary ever . . . ?”

  Gary was always so well presented, so charming and solicitous. Ernest was charming and solicitous too, but he wasn’t above skewering even his friends in his books, even his lovers in his plays. He wasn’t above taking all our lives and our vulnerabilities and laying them out in order for readers to have a good chuckle at our expense. Gary didn’t write, that was part of it. But Gary wasn’t a man who would ever read Rocky’s mail, even when it came from a former lover, if she had former lovers, which maybe she didn’t; they’d been married for decades. So maybe that was explanation enough. Maybe Gary had been married for decades while Ernest’s two marriages had collapsed. Maybe that was why Gary Cooper could trust his wife and leave her mail unread.

  A flock of doves rose up, flushed by the dogs, and we raised our guns and shot. Rocky got two at least, while I missed every one. I hadn’t really been much for hunting even before Sun Valley, ever since I’d seen that beautiful hawk I shot in Cuba fall in service of nothing more than my pride. But a few days before, in a horrific outing that reminded me of Pablo’s men massacring the town Fascists in Ernest’s novel, our little posse shot five hundred rabbits, which, through Ernest’s organization, we’d cornered against a canal so they had no escape. The farmers had complained of the rabbits ruining their crops; that was the excuse for it. The boys weren’t there that day, at least.

  “Well, it will be different in China,” I said. “No one in China will have a clue who Ernest and I are.”

  “Really, Marty, you aren’t going to drag Ernest to China,” Rocky said. “Even Gary says the poor man is exhausted from writing that book.”

  She reloaded her shotgun.

  “Ernest is resting now,” I said. “And he likes to cover war as much as I do. We’re war correspondents; it’s what we do.”

  He’d promised that after he finished the book we would go off to cover some war together like we had in Spain, with nothing but the work and the good we could do and no one prying into our private lives every moment, wanting to photograph us for the morning papers as if our lives were anything to write about. But now that it was finished, he bounced back and forth between reneging—which sometimes led to knock-down-drag-outs about whether we’d ever made this deal—and phoning my editor at Collier’s to insist I would cover China better than anyone and ought to be given the damned assignment, already, what was he waiting for? Ernest was funny that way. He would get it in his mind that he wanted to live life one way, and then he’d get it in his mind that he wanted to live entirely differently. I suppose we all do. I suppose we all bumble through life far more randomly than we like to think.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Rocky?” I asked.

  “Well, sure, I suppose I don’t have to answer if I don’t want to.”

  “It doesn’t hurt?” Thinking of what she’d said: fabulous sex with our husbands night and day.

  She said, “What doesn’t hurt?”

  A young boy’s voice called out to me across the field then, Gigi shouting, “Look, Marty! I got one!”

  Rocky and I both laughed delightedly. “That boy is such a doll,” she said. “I’d like to arrange a marriage between him and my Maria.” She laughed again; her daughter was just a toddler. “All Hem’s children are dolls, aren’t they? Just like their daddy.”

  We were still in Sun Valley when Ernest received the first copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls. With all those people around, with his own sons and with movie stars and famous writers, he might have wanted to show it to everyone, but he took the package and he took my hand and he pulled me back to our private suite.

  “Open it, Mookie,” he said, handing the package to me as if it were a present bought specially for this day.

  “I can’t open it, Bug! It’s your book!”

  “Your book is mine, and mine is yours,” he said. “Open it.”

  “I—”

  “Open it, Mrs. Heminghorn Pig!”

  I slid the end of the package open and pulled out the volume. “It’s a hideously fat book, for sure, Mr. Pig!” I said. “Look how fat it is! Feel how much it weighs! You have to be a pretty important book to be that fat.”

  “We’ll have to put it on the scale back at the Finca!”

  “You’ll never get under two hundred with this in hand,” I said.

  He laughed and laughed. He was so pleased.

  “I love thy bridge on the cover,” I said, mimicking the way his Spanish characters spoke.

  “Dost thou?” he asked. “I don’t know. It’s—”

  “It’s a very fine bridge,” I said. “They fixed it just like you told them to: metal and spidery.”

  “With some distance for the perspective.”

  “With some distance.”

  “Open it, Daughter,” he said. “Open the book.”

  I opened it to the verso and the title page.

  He stood right beside me and reached over and turned the pages, to the dedication: “This book is for Martha Gellhorn.”

  “Oh, Bug,” I said, and I stood there looking at the black letters on the white page, and it was hard, suddenly, to get a decent breath in
to my chest.

  “It’s our book, Mookie,” he said.

  Sun Valley, Idaho

  OCTOBER 1940

  After Bumby and Mouse and Gigi left Sun Valley, Ernest and I rode up the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, twenty-three miles of trail that took a week to cover, and none of it much less than straight up or straight down. I was tough about it (although not half as tough as the horses), finding little comfort other than the bar of my favorite soap I used faithfully in the clean water of the streams. But the outdoors seemed to calm Ernest. He let up on the drinking some and even seemed open to coming to China with me if I got the Collier’s gig.

  When we got back, I was sick as hell with a nasty flu.

  “Next time we’ll take the horses up on the ski lifts,” Bug suggested. But laughing only made me ache more.

  Collier’s had given the China assignment to someone else, it turned out. It already made me sicker than the flu to sit idle while Quentin Reynolds wrote about London as if the bombs were dropping on him alone, and now I’d be left to Bucharest or some even smaller corner of trouble. But I’d take that. I didn’t much care as long as someone gave me an assignment somewhere.

  Ernest was in serious negotiations with Paramount for the film rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Dorothy Parker, who might write the screenplay, arrived in Sun Valley in mid-October to chat with him. On the whole I thought Hollywood was crap for serious writers, but I loved her humor and Ernest did too, or said he did, although he thought someone else would be better for the screenplay, someone with cojones. He had cojones himself when it came to the film rights: he’d just turned down $100,000.