Hemingway and Gellhorn by Jerome Tuccille

Author:Jerome Tuccille
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-07T06:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN

Chapter Twenty-four

When he reached Havana Ernest rented rooms in two different hotels: one on the fourth floor of the Ambos Mundos, his favorite trysting place years earlier with Jane Mason, where he holed up to start his new book, and the second room in the SevillaBiltmore with a stock of provisions—a large ham, sausages, bread— where he slept. As he explained to Max Perkins a couple of months later, the only way he could get any privacy was to “tell everybody you live in one hotel and live in another. When they locate you, move to the country.”

Ernest spent the next five weeks there, cutting back on his drinking, writing furiously every day, exercising regularly, and trimming his weight back under two hundred pounds. Martha claimed that she joined him in Havana as early as February 18, while others said she didn’t get there until April. But it appears unlikely that both of them would have put up with such a lengthy separation. Each couldn’t wait to put their affair on a more permanent footing. More than likely, the earlier date is the correct one. In the mornings, they ambled together over to the Ambos Mundos to pick up their mail and then went about their business. Ernest quickly lost himself in his story about the Spanish Civil War. The book developed its own momentum. It fairly exploded out of him as he channeled it onto the reams of blank paper stacked in front of his typewriter. The novel flowed like a rushing river. Ernest hadn’t written with this kind of passion in years. He knew it was going to be good—far better than good, the best he had ever written. He worked surely and rapidly, a man possessed.

When the first flush of energy finally spent itself, Ernest took the ferry back to Key West by himself with several chapters in hand. He wired Max Perkins that the book was “flowing along beautifully.” Pretty soon Max would be getting the monumental novel that he knew Ernest could write, the one Max had so patiently been waiting for him to deliver. On April 5 Ernest boarded the one possession he cared about above all others in the world, the Pilar. When he motored back to Havana in his boat, Ernest’s life with Pauline had effectively come to a close.

While Ernest was away, Martha made a futile attempt to tidy up the slovenly room stacked with cured hams and sausages, alcohol, guns, and fishing gear that served as their homestead. The chaos and mess that grew like a fungus across the room was bad enough in Madrid during wartime conditions, but in peacetime Havana it was unacceptable as a domestic living arrangement.

“I am really not abnormally clean,” Martha said later. “I’m simply as clean as any normal person. But Ernest was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I’ve ever known.”

She was taking over the house-hunting, she told Ernest when he got back to Havana. Ernest had no problem with that as long as she left him alone to work on his book.

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