At two in the morning, their breaths blowing steam in the subfreezing air, Ernest, his wife Mary, and their maid Lola boarded the Union Pacific's City of Portland from Idaho on the first leg of their return to Cuba. They arrived in Havana by plane from Miami to find Finca Vigia like a refrigerator; without heat, usually unnecessary in Cuba, it was ill fortified against the northerly wind that chilled the island. Ernest immediately returned to his ever-lengthening account of the previous summer's mano a mano, and Mary soon agreed that they should bring Val [Valerie Danby-Smith, the 18-year-old Irishwoman who had become part of the Hemingway entourage the previous summer and who was officially acting as a secretary] in from New York City to handle his mail and the piles of unfiled paper. By February 8th, the young Irish girl was in residence at the Finca, her presence acting as a stimulus to Ernest's writing which was soon progressing at an almost alarming rate. In less than four weeks he wrote 17,000 words on what was growing inexorably into a book, not the 30,000 essay contracted with Life.
In New York, Scribner's was eager to publish the untitled Paris sketches, either in the fall of 1960 or the following spring. Charles Scribner Jr. said, "The pieces are magically effective and it will make the year for us, whatever year they appear." He also urged Ernest to consider publishing one or more of the chapters in periodicals that were begging for them, sight unseen. Hemingway hedged: the book needed another month's work, which he could not afford to give it until the bullfight story was finished.
There were those, Ernest wrote, who probably thought he had no book, that he was borrowing money like Scott Fitzgerald against empty paper, but Charlie knew the Paris book was real and ready to publish should anything happen to him. If Scribner was reading the letter carefully, he must have wondered at the outdated reference to Fitzgerald who surfaced whenever Ernest felt unappreciated. Had he been closer to the Finca, Scribner might also have worried that Ernest was making references to the possibility of overwork killing a man, and that he was not sleeping more than four hours a night. These signs went unheeded at the time, but in retrospect would loom larger.
Money, time, deadlines, endings, movies, television - pressures were building. Functioning as the H&H Corporation, Hemingway and editor Aaron Edward Hotchner were embarked on a lucrative venture that had no immediate end in sight. Although he worried about the deals Hotchner was making for television shows, movies, and the theatre, Ernest had to do little but approve them. Hotch was already at work on their next Buick-sponsored production, an hour-long version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro with Robert Ryan cast as Harry the dying writer. Snows would be followed by The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, fulfilling their four-show contract.
Buick was so pleased with the impact of the Hemingway dramas that the car company immediately gave him another new car and asked for a second series for 1961 - if Hotchner could guarantee happy endings to adaptations of A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, ludicrous conditions that Hotchner rejected out of hand.
Ernest could easily afford his low-risk profile, for he was literally being swamped with offers of money. German television had recently bought the TV version of The Killers for $2,000. In all of these ventures, Ernest risked nothing, and Hotchner did the work: writing the film script adaptations, arguing with the sponsors over their desire to censor productions, and casting the scripts.
Life was a trade-off. In his early Paris years, Ernest saw clearly, drank hard, lived cheap, stayed up late, worked the next day, but could not sell a story. Then there were no pills to take, no worries about blood pressure, no failing liver or sick kidneys, no doctors poking and prodding. Now with every hand asking for his words, his name, or his presence, the money could not buy him sleep or provide a new liver. He was "in the money", all right, but the money could not save him or his friends. Neither fame nor fortune was going to cure Gary Cooper's prostate cancer, for example. All Ernest could do was write and not think about friends, or about Cuban politics growing steadily more threatening. At his writing platform, standing and typing, he was pounding out a prodigious number of words each day. Blood flowed, bulls died, matadors were rushed to emergency surgeons, wounds healed, the dangerous summer went on and on.
In three and a half months Hemingway wrote 84,000 words describing one corrida after another. When the weather warmed, he swam a half mile each day in the Finca pool, and fished infrequently. On Sunday afternoons, he, Val, Ren, Juan the chauffeur, and Pichilo the gardener attended the cockfights, sometimes fighting Hemingway cocks, sometimes not, but always betting on the bloody fray.
In the Cuban capital and across the country, life was less idyllic. In Oriente province, the Movement of Revolutionary Recovery demanded free elections to turn the country away from communism. These rebels against the Castro government were being tracked down by Fidel himself. On May Day, Castro stirred a crowd of 250,000 to a frenzy, charging that the United States was fomenting counter-plots against him. He warned that Cuba must find a successor for him, for he might be "disappeared" by the northern aggressor.
He had good cause for such suspicions. The US Senate was funding a Voice of America radio station to broadcast into Cuba as if it were a nation occupied by the enemy, while Congress gave President Eisenhower power to withhold $350 million in Cuban technical aid. On May 7th 1960, Cuba resumed formal relations with Soviet Russia. It did not take a political scientist to see which way the winds were blowing.
At the end of May, Ernest declared that the 100,000-word preliminary draft of the bullfight book was done. However, he was planning to return to Spain for more material on the mano a mano, which would extend the story to 150,000 words. With anti-American slogans appearing on familiar walls, Mary urged Ernest to think first of moving as many of their valued possessions as possible off the island, but he refused to consider the idea. This was their home.
In her biography, Mary said later, "For seven months I had been considering some manner by which, with the least trauma for each of us, I could retire from what seemed to me his new style of living. But I shelved the idea. He seemed to have so many grave problems confronting him that I could not increase them." Not the least of these problems, which Mary never quite specified, was Hemingway's intake of alcohol, which had once again risen dramatically from the prescribed two glasses with supper. Their January to June liquor bill from Licores Manzarbeitia in Havana was $1,550.49 for 18 bottles of liquor and fifty-five cases of wine during a period with almost no Finca visitors.
Hemingway was fighting with imaginary demons by night and sometimes by day, increasingly worried about money when there was no worry, increasingly questioning the loyalty of old friends. He could, when necessary, put on a straight face for the world, keeping whatever was raging inside him under control, but when alone with Mary, he was becoming a stranger. Firmly believing that in his work was his deliverance, he pushed himself harder and harder, adding another 10,000 words to the bullfight book before turning back to the Paris book.
His pre-1946 depressions usually followed the completion of a book when he did not know what to write next. His post-1946 depressions were different. Because he was leaving work largely completed but not quite finished, one or more books were always begging for attention. As a result, he would move back and forth among them, even during his depressed periods, and unfinished work was always lurking at the back of his mind. As summer approached in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway was a man pursued, a writer unable to outrun his demons.
By July 7th, Valerie had typed up the bullfight book and Ernest had corrected it; Hotchner had come and gone. Hemingway was making plans to leave for Spain toward the end of the month, but Mary refused to go with him. She was not about to suffer through a summer like the last one. She and Val would wait in New York for Ernest to return. Valerie, on the other hand, wanted to go to Spain with Ernest, but Mary made it clear that was not an option. In fact, Mary was determined to place some limits on her husband's subsidising the young Irish girl. Val well understood the conflicted triangle in which she held down one precarious corner.
On July 25th, Hemingway, Mary, and Val took the P&O ferry to Key West, where the immigration officer remarked that Val's visitor's visa needed to be renewed. Mary said that this information "sent Ernest into a disproportionately large tizzy. He muttered about the dire consequences of law-breaking." Ernest flew to New York and on to Madrid, leaving Mary, Val, and their considerable luggage to follow by train from Miami.
A week later, tired and lonely, he complained that La Consula was full of strangers making him nervous and unable to sleep. His head was not right, and he worried that he was having a complete nervous breakdown. It had happened this way before, he assured Mary, and he had recovered to write wonderfully. He asked her to send Val to him if it could be done without creating a scandal, for there was so much mail that he was too tired to answer.
The overwork was "deadly"; he could not sleep. Drinking only wine in small amounts was "bad" for him, but without it he became more "nervous". He, who often claimed that he always woke cheerful in the morning, now waking in terrible shape.
In Mary's breezy and detailed letters to Ernest about her life in New York - plays, luncheons, friends to see - she showed little concern about her husband's complaints. But on August 20th, Mary sent Val to Europe as Ernest requested, hoping her presence might calm him down.
All through September Mary received long, rambling, repetitive letters from Ernest filled
plaints, worries, and other clues that he was deeply mired in the slough of despondency. When he saw his face on the cover of the September Life magazine, he was horrified. He confessed that his mind was in the worst shape ever, and he understood why Mary refused to come with him.
ON October 8th, Ernest landed back in New York, where he did his best to project his confident public persona; but inside he was a shaken, worried man, his self-confidence badly eroded, his memory playing tricks on him, and his nervous system clearly in trouble. Once in Mary's 62nd Street apartment, he refused to go outside, claiming that someone sinister was waiting out there for him. As quickly as possible Mary got him to Ketchum, where they both hoped that rest and quiet would restore his equilibrium. As they arrived at the Shoshone train station, two men in top coats came out of the Manhattan Cafe across the street. "They're tailing me out here already," Ernest told George Saviers, who met them at the platform.
Wherever he looked he found fears. Morose, losing weight rapidly, silent, brooding, and paranoid, Ernest was being sucked into a black hole from which he would not emerge. He worried about his income taxes, his property taxes, and his bills, worried there would not be enough money to pay them. At this time he owned almost $400,000 in Morgan Guaranty bank shares. He worried, quite rightly, that he would not be able to return to Cuba, where his manuscripts and his reference library representing his literary capital were at risk. When two college professors from Montana State University showed up at Hemingway's door, they were shocked to see the ghost of the man standing before them. One of them later wrote, "The only resemblance to the man we had imagined was in the fullness of the face. And even the face was pale and red-veined, not ruddy or weather-beaten. We were particularly struck by the thinness of his arms and legs. . . He walked with the tentativeness of a man well over 61 The dominant sense we had was of fragility."
And when Hotchner came out to Ketchum before Thanksgiving, he too was shocked to find Ernest in such bad shape. Hotchner wrote Bill Davis that the symptoms from the previous summer had grown worse. Mary, he reported, was on the verge of seeking psychiatric help for Ernest, whose grasp of reality was, in some crucial ways, completely missing. To say that Hemingway was opposed to being treated as mentally ill would be an understatement. Anyone growing up in the first half of this century was loath to be labelled "crazy", for mental illness marked that person as a liability. As Ernest's fictional character, the shell-shocked Nick Adams, said in 1932, "It's a hell of a nuisance once they've certified you as nutty. No one ever has any confidence in you again."
George Saviers gently suggested that Ernest should seek help at the Menninger Clinic, but Hemingway refused to go to a solely psychiatric hospital. Then Saviers suggested the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where Ernest could go to treat his high blood pressure. On the last day of November, Hemingway and Saviers climbed into Larry Johnson's single-engine Piper Comanche to fly across the snow-covered mid-west to Rochester, where that night Ernest stood at the check-in desk of St. Mary's Hospital. He had difficulty answering simple questions: name, address, next of kin, names of parents. When asked the name of his mother, Ernest blanched, mumbled, and became nervously agitated. Saviers stepped in quickly, saying he would finish the form but first it was important to get Ernest into bed and sedated. As a result, Ernest was registered in Saviers's name, certain that state and federal agencies were pursuing him for unnamed crimes.
No mention in writing was made of Hemingway's paranoia and delusions, but shortly after his admission, electroshock therapy began. With his bowels and bladder completely empty, Ernest was strapped down on the gurney, a white gown his only cover, his muscles slowly relaxing as the injection took effect and the white room began to soften. The nurse applied a greasy jelly to his temples, placed a rubber gag between his teeth to prevent injury, and fixed the electrodes in place. Then the doctor in white pushed a button for electric current to jolt Hemingway's brain into an induced grand mal seizure, the equivalent of a concussion.
It was some time before he woke from the comalike state, his mouth dry, his head fuzzy, unable to say where he was or why. Ten times Ernest was wheeled into the white room for more electricity to overload his neural connections. Ten times he was convulsed. Ten times he awoke wondering. As one neurologist would later write: "I have no doubt that ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] produces effects identical to those of a head injury. After multiple sessions of ECT, a patient has symptoms identical to those of a retired, punch-drunk boxer." After one session of ECT the symptoms are the same as those of concussion. For a head like Hemingway's, already several times concussed, such a treatment could produce serious brain damage. Short-term memory loss was an expected side effect of ECT, but long-term loss was always a possibility.
Late on Christmas Eve, Mary Hemingway sat down on her hotel-room bed and wept as she wrote in her journal that Ernest seemed "almost as disturbed, disjointed mentally as he was when we came here". On New Year's Eve, she wrote out her resolutions: 1. I will not worry or fret or brood about other women in love with Papa.
2. I will try to make each single day, the greatest, the most perceptive, pleasurable, carefree and happy.
3. I will not be sad or miserable at night. I will go to bed hopeful.
4. I will be disciplined only by my own tastes, not by phony customs.
Mary Hemingway was standing with her back to the edge of her own limits, emotionally bankrupt, and in her own words, "I feel I too may begin to confuse illusion with reality".
On January 22nd, Hemingway was discharged. When first back in Ketchum, Mary was relieved that he seemed so much better. He remained somewhat silent but not visibly morose.
Draft after draft was begun on the introduction to the Paris sketches, but each attempt was put aside as inadequate.
The Bay of Pigs disaster in April marked the end of any hope that he might one day return to Cuba. From the darkness into which he was again descending, he was certain he would never again see the Finca, his library, the Pilar, or his paintings. The manuscripts for what would become Islands in the Stream and True at First Light, the African novel, were, he thought, lost to him. Days later, Mary found Ernest in the front vestibule of the house with his shotgun, two shells and a note. "For an hour I talked to him - courage, his bravery, faith, love - and managed to delay any decisive action until George [Saviers] arrived, and managed to take Papa to the Sun Valley hospital where they put him to bed and gave him sedatives."
Hemingway was later flown against his will back to Rochester. Mary remained in Ketchum, too emotionally torn apart to go through the clinic routine again.
When the plane landed to refuel in Rapid City, South Dakota, Ernest with Don at his heels, began going through the hangar and parked cars looking for a gun. At one point he walked toward the whirling prop of an airplane, stopping only when the plane cut its engine.
Ernest had re-entered the Mayo convinced that he would never be able to write again, which filled him with "humiliation and chagrin" and all but overwhelmed him with agitation, restlessness, and money matters. As he seemed to improve with the shock treatments, Hemingway and his psychiatrist, Dr Howard Rome, frequently discussed suicide. Ernest pointed out that Rome needed to trust him for there were numerous ways he could kill himself. He did not need a gun when there was glass to break or his belt to form a noose. On his honour he promised Rome he would not kill himself at the clinic. They shook hands, confirming their pact, and thereafter Ernest went out almost daily for walks, for swims, for target shooting, for meals. The shock treatments continued until Rome was convinced that Ernest was truly better.
But at the end of May, when Mary finally went to Rochester to visit her husband, she was appalled that the doctors thought Ernest was improving. Having watched Ernest in the presence of Dr Rome, Mary was certain that her husband had gulled the doctor about the state of his mind. When Rome asked her to come to his office, she was "dumbfounded to see Ernest there, dressed in his street clothes, grinning like a Cheshire cat", ready to go home. In Ernest's presence, Mary could not bring herself to argue with the doctor's decision. Two days later, in a rented Buick with George Brown, Ernest's sometime trainer and old friend, driving, Ernest and Mary began their last cross-country trip west, arriving in Ketchum on June 30th.
The next day, Ernest seemed happier than he had been in a long time. After a long country walk, he visited George Saviers, and stopped by the Sun Valley Lodge to see Don Anderson. That night Mary, George Brown, and Ernest were sitting in a corner table of the Christiania Restaurant. When Ernest asked their waitress about two men at another table, he was told they were salesmen. Salesmen would not be out on a Saturday night. "They're FBI," Ernest said. Mary redirected his attention to the bottle of wine on the table, and the meal ended pleasantly enough. Later that evening, Ernest and Mary harmonised on a favourite Italian tune as they went to their separate bedrooms.
Sunday morning, July 2nd, Ernest was awake before the sun rising over the mountains east of Ketchum lit his bedroom window. There would be no more white rooms with electrodes stuck to his head. He could not go back to Cuba, but neither could he go back to a locked ward. If he could not write, then he could not write, but there was one thing left he could do well, a thing for which he had practised all his adult life. In bathrobe and slippers, he padded softly past Mary's room where she was sleeping soundly. Down the stairs and into the kitchen, he found the ring of keys on the windowsill, and moved toward the basement stairs. In the locked storeroom where Mary had his shotguns for safekeeping, the odour of gun oil and leather was an old friend. From the box of 12-gauge shells, he pulled out two and dropped them in his pocket. Picking up his favourite Boss shotgun, he turned out the light and climbed slowly back up the stairs to the first floor.
Born in July, blown up in Italy in July, Pamplona in July - it was, of all the months, his most memorable. On the first of July each summer of his youth, the family boarded the steamer that carried them up Lake Michigan for their two months at Windemere. July was the cottage, the lake, and the woods. It was trout fishing and camaraderie with the summer people, baseball games in the village, campfires in the night. July was faces and places no longer within reach. July was the big wound in Italy when he died for the first time only to come back out of the explosion to find his kneecap somewhere in his boot and his head ringing like a bell.
Now, so many Julys later, he stood in the foyer beside the empty gun rack, broke open the breech of his shotgun, slipped in two shells, and snapped the breech shut. The taste of gun oil and powder solvent filled his mouth as cold steel made contact against his hard palate. The clock on Mary's bedside table clicked as the minute hand moved to 7:30. Then two, almost simultaneous explosions woke her to her widowhood, her world, changed, utterly changed.
Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael Reynolds is published by W.W. Norton ($30.00 in US)