Autumn in Venice by Andrea di Robilant

Author:Andrea di Robilant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

All through May, Hemingway worked continuously on the galleys of Across the River and into the Trees. Even at this late stage, he was still rewriting paragraphs and changing the endings of many chapters, polishing and improving his sentences with last-minute edits. The daily grind kept his imagination firmly anchored in Venice, where all the action of the book took place.

Mary was still depressed over her inability to have a child. After Pauline, Patrick, and Henrietta left, she tried to overcome her sense of failure by throwing herself into new projects around the house, redoing some of the rooms and planting a new rose garden. Hemingway, ensconced as he was in his Venetian fantasy, showed little solidarity.

When Bea Guck, Mary’s close friend and wife of her cousin Homer Guck, flew down to comfort her, Hemingway at first seemed glad to have her at the house—he got a kick out of talking baseball with her. Then, one day, he invited Mary and Bea to have lunch on the Pilar, which was moored down at the harbor, at the exclusive Club Náutico. Hemingway arrived an hour late and visibly drunk, with his compadre El Monstruo. With them—surprise, surprise—was the young and sexy Xenophobia, their favorite prostitute. Bea was a good sport about the bizarre lunch party that followed, but Mary was furious. The next day, she told her husband she was leaving him as soon as it was possible to move out. “My view of this marriage is that we have both been failures,” she explained to him in a scathing letter. “My principal failure is that somehow I have lost your interest in me, your devotion and your respect. . . . Your principal failure is that you have been careless and increasingly unthinking of my feelings . . . undisciplined in your daily living. Both privately and in public you have insulted me, and my dignity as a human being. . . . I think we must now both admit that this marriage is a failure. Therefore let us end it.”

Later that day, Hemingway came into her room looking glum. He’d read the letter. Her leaving him was not part of the plan. He didn’t want to lose her, even though she irritated him and he sometimes wasn’t his best self with her. “Stick with me kitten,” he said. “I hope you will decide to stick with me.” But after pleading with his wife not to abandon him and finally obtaining a grudging reprieve, he headed back to his cocoon, to spin his fantasy and write to Adriana how much he missed her: “And how are you now and did you sleep well? With me now it is just like all the hours I would wait in Venice until I could see you and then the dead ones after you would be gone.”

It gave Hemingway a sensual, physical pleasure to express his feelings to Adriana, to tell her over and over, “I am in love with you.” This pleasure energized him and made him feel good, and had become necessary to him.

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