Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 8

  Her father had made it clear that he was not a fan of her first book and did not consider her to be a serious writer. She tried to repair their damaged relationship, but he wrote her a letter at this time excoriating her for her “affair with that little French runt that gave you so much ‘valuable experience’ and us so much real pain.” George Gellhorn was vicious and unyielding, accusing her of “capitalizing on your yellow hair and your lively, spicy conversation.” She should, he continued, “have the pride of wanting to show the world that you can hold your place with anybody else, not only while you are young and attractive to men, but at any time.”

  They were harsh words, indeed, for any father to direct at his daughter; he all but accused her of whoring herself to achieve her literary goals rather than relying on her talent. And his words were all the more painful coming as they did in the last year of his life. Martha finished her book in a mad burst of creative energy and sent the manuscript off to St. Louis for her father’s approval. This time he softened, reading her vivid descriptions of human suffering during the depression “without stopping and with breathless interest.”

  Sadly, he took to his bed with stomach pains while scrutinizing her latest literary effort. Martha raced home to be at his side, then returned to Connecticut when it appeared he was out of danger. Shortly afterward, he unexpectedly died following surgery to remove the growth in his stomach. Martha went back home for the funeral, which was attended by many down-and-out local people whom the Gellhorns had helped, including most of the black citizens in town. She had managed to extract some measure of respect from her father before he passed away, but she would have given anything for more time to convince him that she was the writer he wanted her to be.

  Her short novel, The Trouble I’ve Seen, was published first in England thanks to the efforts of H.G. Wells, who not only functioned as her literary agent, lining up the publisher and negotiating her advance, but also contributed a preface in which he talked about Martha’s “lucidity and penetration.” British novelist Graham Greene chimed in as well, giving her a backhand compliment by saying her novella benefited from its lack of “female voices of unbalanced pity or fictitious violence.”

  While H.G. Wells talked about Martha’s lucidity and penetration, it was penetration of a different sort that occupied his mind. The randy old writer was head-over-heels in lust with his literary protégé. He bombarded her with lovesick letters, calling her “Stooge” and envisioning them together “on a sunny beach, Stooge getting sunburnt, me getting sunburnt, Stooge very much in love with me and me all in love with Stooge, nothing particular ahead except a far off dinner, some moonlight and bed—Stooge’s bed.”

  The Trouble I’ve Seen finally came out in the U.S., published by Morrow in September 1935. Its American reception was even more encouraging than Great Britain’s, with the novella garnering reviews in every major city and publication in the country. The Saturday Review of Literature put an endearing photo of the author on its cover, praising her for her “profound and sympathetic understanding.” Martha’s prose, the reviewer said, appeared to be “woven not out of words but out of the very tissues of human beings.”

  H.G. Wells continued his frenetic pursuit of the talented and attractive woman he had launched. His letters flew across the Atlantic and grew more and more ardent by the week. Martha was clearly not attracted to the short, round man with his shaggy mustache, who stood six inches shorter than her and smelled constantly of walnuts, according to Rebecca West. But Martha was not beyond encouraging him nonetheless, writing back to him and calling him “Wells darling,” a salutation that was calculated to stoke his burning passion for her even more.

  “What is liking? What is love?” he asked in one of his missives. “I dunno. I am strongly moved to ask you to pack up and come to England and to bed with me.”

  When she remained in Connecticut instead of sailing across the ocean to be with him, Wells decided to visit her to continue his entreaties in person. He arrived in Connecticut as snow was falling late in the autumn of 1935—and proceeded to drive her to distraction with his nonstop ranting that kept her from her work. He followed her around the house most of the day, talking constantly, beginning at breakfast with his theories about the ice age and ending at dinner with his thoughts about Henry James and his influence on American and British literature. Martha could stand it no longer. She sent a telegram to the famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, a friend of Wells, encouraging—begging—him to invite Wells for an extended visit to Hollywood. Luckily for her, Wells accepted, but not before informing her that she would be sorry when he was dead because she had not taken advantage of the opportunity to learn more about the world and about life from him. But three thousand miles of separation did not deter Wells from his pursuit of her through his letters, any more than that distance mattered when he was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Why have I of all men to wander about the world without a responsive Stooge to talk to and sleep with and love?” he wrote. “You weren’t given that nice body of yours just to fritter it away?”

  Did she actually have sex with Wells at any point along the road they traveled together for a while? The answer depends on whom you believe. The issue remains a matter of conjecture unless there was a fly with the gift of speech on the wall in their bedroom at the time, and so far none has come forward. Wells later wrote that Martha was one of the less important “women I have kissed, solicited, embraced and lived with.” About his stay in Connecticut with her, Wells claimed that “We two had a very happy time together for a week, making love, reading, talking over her second book.”

  Martha was outraged when she heard about his account of their relationship. “Why the hell would I sleep with a little old man when I could have any number of tall beautiful young men?” she asked in a letter to a friend.

  The only motivation that makes any sense is career advancement; we’ve all done less-than-admirable things to get a leg up in the world, and Martha’s legs were more lovely than most. But to give her the benefit of the doubt, she may well have been clever enough to present the prize without actually bestowing it.

  “I’d have swum the Pacific rather than get involved with him beyond friendship,” she wrote separately to Wells’s son, who was planning to publish his father’s version of their relationship posthumously in an update to his autobiography. “He was my father’s age and not, you will agree, physically dazzling…He was fun unless he was bullying intellectually, and I was very fond of him but the rest is rubbish.”

  She got her way on that point. When Wells’s son published the revised edition of his father’s book, Martha’s name had been reduced to asterisks.

  * * *

  Despite the fifteen minutes of fame that descended on Martha after the publication of her second book, she failed to land assignments she coveted at both Time and the New Yorker magazines. She did begin a romance, however, with a correspondent for Time, a rising young star in the world of journalism named Allen Grover. Allen benefited from being much closer to her age than Wells was, only eight years her senior. He too was raised in St. Louis and was an escapee from its embrace as soon as he was able to set off on his own. He was tall and thin, with straight black hair that he wore in the style of the era—slicked back with hair tonic. Like Bertrand, Allen was also married when Martha took up with him. She fell harder for him than she intended, but then distanced herself quickly when he refused to leave his family.

  “The only terms on which to take you are the installment plan ones,” she wrote to him, acknowledging that an intermittent fling with him was the only option available.

  Martha escaped to Germany, where she found work temporarily in a library and embarked on a series of affairs with handsome blond men who shared her political views. They all “grabbed for my body,” she wrote. “The only part I really liked was arms around me and an illusion of tenderness. But I could not make much illusions, and arms didn’t last; and the rest happened to someone else
(it was always painful) and except for two men I never saw anyone again afterwards.” The men she favored more than the others were all married and refused to leave their wives. One of them she called a “monster and a brute.” She told her friend Eleanor Roosevelt that she felt “like a canary with a boa constrictor,” confiding in her as Eleanor had done with her shortly after they met. But Eleanor was not as sympathetic about her rootless adventures and her serial affairs as Martha would have hoped.

  Eleanor wrote a letter to Edna Gellhorn saying that Martha should not be allowed to “get sorry for herself and become just another useless, pretty, broken butterfly. She has too much charm and real ability for that.”

  On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Martha decided to accept her mother’s invitation to return home and take stock of her life. She arrived in St. Louis in December 1936. She was broke, her career was at an impasse, and the men she craved had every intention of remaining married to their existing wives. Martha wanted and needed much more out of life than that. She craved a real partner, a man who loved her, a man who understood her ambitions and aspirations, a man who would stay by her side along the less-traveled road to literary achievement and the fight for social justice. The Gellhorns were facing their first Christmas without the family patriarch. Martha suggested to Edna that they head down to Key West with her younger brother Alfred, her favorite sibling, who was home from medical school for the holiday. Martha had never visited Key West, but she was certainly well aware of the storybook town where the sun shone brightly, the water was warm and clear, and the atmosphere was laid back and relaxing.

  Yes, Martha wanted very badly to go to Key West. There was a writer who lived there, the most famous writer in America if not the entire world. The writer had inspired her from the time she was a teenager. Hadn’t she hung his poster on her dormitory wall and read every book and story he wrote? Hadn’t she made a special effort to avoid imitating him too closely so as not to compromise her own individuality as a writer?

  He was a big handsome man, a supremely gifted writer, perhaps a literary genius. He was married like the other men she was most attracted to. And Martha knew where he liked to hang out. Everyone knew by now where Ernest hung out after his mornings at the typewriter and afternoons fishing from his boat. She needed a new adventure, a change of direction. And she wanted to go to Key West to find it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He was sitting there on his favorite stool in Sloppy Joe’s when Martha, Edna, and Alfred walked in. Martha recognized him first and thrilled to the presence of the “large, dirty man in untidy somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt,” who was reading his mail, as she wrote later. She had read all of his books, starting with his early short stories, then moving on to his novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. She had read the two quasi-nonfiction books he wrote after moving to Key West with Pauline, Death in the Afternoon about bullfighting in Spain, and Green Hills of Africa based on his African safari with Pauline and his buddy Charlie Thompson. Ernest had been attacked by critics on the left for writing about bullfighting and big game hunting instead of focusing his talents on the big issues of the day, primarily the fight against fascism that was spreading its poison across the globe. But the public accepted his stories as a welcome escape from their own pressing problems, and his books continued to sell. And there he was in person, reading his mail in the bar that would have remained just one of many Key West watering holes were it not for the famous author who made it his second home.

  Martha directed her family to a table in full view of the bar, and she took a seat facing Ernest with her legs crossed while pretending not to notice him. Ernest was an observer before he was a writer. Very little crossed his path that he failed to notice, and Martha could almost feel his eyes drinking her in even though she was careful not to return his stare. From his perspective, Ernest was instantly aware of the elegant blonde with the lovely body and shapely legs. He correctly pegged the older woman as her mother, but he was wrong in assuming that the young man was her husband. Naturally competitive, Ernest resolved to get Martha away from the “young punk,” which he estimated would take about three days. His eyes targeted their table as he ignored the stack of mail on the bar while he planned his next move.

  Al Skinner, Joe Russell’s three-hundred-pound bartender and bouncer, also noticed the young woman who was so atypical of Sloppy Joe’s usual clientele. He remembered her wearing a black dress that offset her long legs and her blonde hair piled high on her head. Others who were there at the time described Martha wearing a black cotton sundress and Ernest dressed as usual in a T-shirt and fish-stained Basque shorts held up with a rope instead of a belt. The two of them looked like “the beauty and the beast,” said Skinner, a reflection of Ernest’s style of dress rather than his muscular good looks. James Joyce, who knew Ernest during his Paris years, described him as “a big powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo.”

  “Martha definitely made a play for him,” Lorine Thompson remembered. At the time, she, Charlie, and Pauline were at the Hemingway house, waiting for Ernest to return home for dinner. “Martha was a very charming girl, and if I had known her under other circumstances I would have liked her very much. She said she came to see Ernest. She wanted him to read a book she had written, she wanted to know him. There was no question about it. You could see she was making a play for him.”

  Ernest took the bait. He rose from his barstool, approached their table and introduced himself. He relaxed after he learned that Alfred was Martha’s younger brother. He asked Martha about her work, said he would be happy to read what she was currently working on, and offered to take her and her family on a tour of Key West while they were in town. Martha listened intently and found herself charmed by his easy manner. He was “an odd bird, very lovable and full of fire and a marvelous story teller,” she wrote later to Eleanor Roosevelt.

  The evening wore on agreeably as Ernest poured on the charm that captivated not only Martha, but Edna and Alfred as well. But at his house on Whitehead Street, Pauline was growing visibly agitated, lingering over cocktails with the Thompsons, wondering when Ernest was going to come home. At seven-thirty, what was left of her patience dissolved in a haze of cigarette smoke. She turned to Charlie and said,

  “Oh, Charles, you know where he is. Drag him back here and let’s eat.”

  Charlie Thompson went outside to his yellow Ford sedan and drove straight down to Sloppy Joe’s, which was still located on Greene Street. It took only a glance for him to size up what was going on. Ernest waved him off and told him he’d meet them all later. When Charlie got back to the house, he broke the news to Pauline without pulling his punches; Pauline’s bullshit detector was as finely honed as Ernest’s.

  “He’s talking to a beautiful blonde in a black dress. Says he’ll meet us later at Pena’s.”

  The cook, Miriam Williams, was supposed to serve them all lobsters for dinner, but now that plan had to be aborted. Pauline was more than miffed, but she got in Charlie’s car and drove with them to Pena’s Garden of Roses, a local beer garden. If Pauline was upset on the way over, she was even more irate a while later when Ernest finally showed up. He had walked Edna and Alfred back to the Colonial Hotel on Duval Street, and then invited Martha to accompany him to Pena’s to meet Pauline and his friends. Pauline took one look at Martha and realized that her husband had become infatuated once again, this time with an alluring blonde who was nine years younger than him and thirteen years younger than Pauline.

  “Pauline always tried to be very tolerant of Ernest and any of the girls that sort of made a play for him, or that he seemed entranced with,” Lorine recalled. “Pauline tried to ignore it. What she felt underneath nobody knew.”

  Martha and Pauline could hardly have been more different physically. Arnold Samuelson, a writer who knew them at the time, described Pauline “with her black hair brushed back in a boy’s haircut. She was built like a boy and wore no makeup. Her face was tanned from being out in the su
n and there was nothing you could see she had been doing to make herself beautiful except keeping her weight down.” Photos show her to be a small sexy woman in a tomboyish way, with a nice compact figure and shapely legs. It wasn’t so much that Martha was more attractive than her that worried Pauline. Some men might have found Pauline more to their taste. Rather it was their difference that bothered her. Martha was too much like Jane Mason, the stunning blonde with the angelic face and hyperactive sex life who “collected” books and authors and caused Pauline so much grief.

  * * *

  With the prize she sought in Key West virtually in her grasp, Martha decided to stay on after Edna and Alfred went back to St. Louis. Ernest invited her to his house to meet the “mob,” as he referred to the endless stream of writers, editors, painters, and locals who fleshed out his entourage, and join in the festivities. Ernest entertained virtually nonstop, carving out the morning hours for his writing, and then taking whoever happened to be visiting at the time out on the Pilar for an afternoon of fishing. Always there were parties in the evening during which the food and drink flowed freely.

  Miriam Williams prepared one feast after another for Ernest’s guests, but she was appalled by some of the behavior she observed, including her employer’s. “Mr. Ernest and Miss Martha would be outside and kissing and carrying on,” she said to a friend. “Look at that. The way some people act!” There was something to be said for a man who brought his girlfriends home to meet his wife—but exactly what was to be said depended on one’s perspective.

  Ernest had already started work on his so-called “proletarian” novel, To Have and Have Not, which would turn out to be the most political book he had written to date. Perhaps he was more stung than he let on by the reviewers who criticized his lack of social and political engagement. Perhaps he was genuinely moved by the economic conditions that afflicted so many of his countrymen. He also had to be aware that Martha was likely to be impressed by a novel dealing with Prohibition and its impact on the local scene—although it’s unlikely that he would have colored his fiction to suit a new paramour. Whatever the case, Ernest pressed on with his latest autobiographical novel that included revealing portrayals of his friends and girlfriends.