Homing To The Stream :Ernest Hemingway In Cuba

By Kelley Dupuis

Born and reared in the suburbs of Chicago, Ernest Hemingway was a product of the American heartland who, once he got out of it, never wanted to have much to do with the American heartland again. Aside from a few of his earliest short stories, which in any case are set in upper Michigan rather than suburban Illinois, Hemingway never published a word about where he came from, nor did he ever go back for long.

There are as many possible explanations for this as there are biographies of Hemingway. Some have suggested that Hemingway, like others of his generation who lived as expatriates in Europe after World War I, found the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of middle America stultifying. Unlike most of his fellow expats, however, Hemingway never went home. After leaving his birthplace of Oak Park, Illinois in the fall of 1921 with his new bride, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, Hemingway spent the rest of his life either outside the United States or on the periphery of its life, in places like the Florida Keys, the upper plains states, (he enjoyed Montana and Wyoming for their hunting) the Pacific northwest, specifically Idaho, where he ended his life in 1961...and Cuba. Given the enormously complex relationship that Hemingway had with his family, particularly with his demanding and overbearing mother, whom he repeatedly and for years denounced as a "bitch" to anyone who would listen, it's possible that Hemingway simply wanted to give the midwest a "wide berth" because that was where his mother was until her own death in 1951. (One of Nietzsche's biographers has suggested that Nietzsche's own passion for climbing high mountains may have stemmed from a desire to get as far away as possible-in this case the direction being up-away from a father as overbearing as Hemingway's mother was reported to be.)

Shortly before Ernest and Hadley were married in September, 1921, Hadley had said to Ernest, "The world's a jail and we're gonna break it together." They were young-he was 22 on their wedding day; she was not quite 30-and deeply in love; in later years, after later marriages, Hemingway would suggest that Hadley was the only woman whom he had ever truly loved. But, although he was at heart a romantic, and conventional enough a midwesterner in his heart to feel that any time he fell in love with a woman, he ought to marry her, Hemingway couldn't be monogamous. His friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald (who managed to remain married to the same woman until he died even though his wife, Zelda Sayre, was mentally unstable, he was an alcoholic and their marriage was a stormy melodrama) predicted quite early on that Hemingway was going to require "a new wife for each book." The remark turned out to be quite prescient; it was in fact the course of Hemingway's four marriages that took him to Cuba and lodged him there-he ultimately made Cuba the most permanent home he would ever make of any place.

Hemingway's trek south began in 1927, when he and Hadley divorced over his affair with wealthy Arkansas socialite and magazine journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who promptly became the second Mrs. Hemingway. One thing Hemingway would never do with his wives, until his fourth and last one anyway, was to subject the new wife to living in the environs of the old. The venue of Ernest and Hadley's marriage had been Paris, where he struggled in the early-to-mid 1920s to get his writing career started. With the end of his first marriage, Hemingway's affection for Paris declined temporarily, and another friend and fellow novelist, John Dos Passos, suggested to him that Key West, Florida might be a good place for him to relocate. In 1928, when Hemingway and Pauline went to live there in a house that her wealthy Uncle Gus had given them as a wedding present, Key West was a sleepy, run-down fishing village at the end of the Keys southwest of Miami. Prohibition was still in effect, and among Key West's attractions for the notoriously-bibulous Hemingway may well have been that its very position on the periphery of America made prohibition little more than a word there; smuggled liquor from Cuba was easy to get, and the island had plenty of its own sources of bathtub booze as well. Key West was in fact popular with the artistic and literary crowd; poet Wallace Stevens was among those who spent time there. In any case Pauline and Ernest set up housekeeping in Key West and Ernest, who already had one son from his marriage with Hadley, soon had two more.

Every tourist who's ever gone to Key West to take pictures of Hemingway's house there knows that Sloppy Joe's Bar was his favorite Key West hangout. He quickly made friends with its owner, Joe Russell, described by Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds as "a salty, red-faced bootlegger who was the real thing." Russell had a boat for fishing, the Anita, and he and Hemingway often went out on fishing expeditions in it, some of which lasted for days. One such expedition took place in the spring of 1932. Pauline had given birth to Hemingway's third and final son the previous November. Hemingway wasn't pleased about becoming a father again, and the birth put further strain on what was already a strained relationship-Pauline's family's money had been largely responsible for freeing Ernest from the necessity to write journalism, enabling him to devote himself exclusively to fiction, and he was not a man to be comfortable with owing anyone anything. Partly to get away from the strained relationship and partly to get away from the sound of a crying baby, Hemingway went off with Russell in April of that year on another fishing trip. They sailed to Havana for what was supposed to be a two-day stay. They ended up staying four months.

Hemingway had seen Havana once before, when he and Pauline had a stop-off there on their way to Key West from France in 1928. But Havana had new attractions for him now, not the least of which was 22 year-old Jane Mason, the wife of the head of Pan American Airways in Cuba. They began an affair as Hemingway took up extended residence at what would be his base in Havana for the next several years, the Hotel Ambos Mundos. In the spring of the following year, as his second marriage continued to unravel, Hemingway was in Havana for another extended stay, and once again Jane Mason was there. Pauline used the excuse of the annual visit of Hemingway's son Jack, known as Bumby, to come over from Key West as she brought the boy to Havana to spend time with his father. But Hemingway made her feel unwelcome and she soon went back to Key West alone.

Hemingway and Mason talked of getting married, but it didn't happen. Instead, in 1936 back in Key West, he met Martha Gellhorn, a vivacious and attractive blonde and fellow author/journalist with whom he would soon share a hotel room in Madrid while they were both covering the Spanish Civil War as correspondents, and who would become the third Mrs. Hemingway in 1940 after Pauline, a devout Catholic who did not take divorce lightly, finally agreed to divorce Ernest so he could marry Martha. The divorce became final in November of that year and Hemingway and Gellhorn were married the same month.

The house in Key West had been a gift from Pauline's family; obviously Ernest and Martha weren't going to live there, although he remained generally on good terms with Pauline and they did sometimes visit. The logical place for the newlyweds to settle after their Hawaiian honeymoon was the city that had virtually been Ernest's home away from home since 1932: Havana.

Aside from the fact that he had already established in Havana what's known in the world of bullfighting as a querencia-the part of the ring where the bull feels comfortable and at home-there were other reasons for Hemingway to like Havana. During the years of the Grau and Batista regimes that preceded the rule of Fidel Castro, Havana was something of a playground for the wealthy of America's east coast (some have called it "America's brothel.") Havana was a good place to have a good time, and Hemingway liked a good time. His years in Key West had already given him a taste for tropical ambience. Naturally sloppy in his personal habits, (Martha Gellhorn casually nicknamed him "Pig") he liked a place where he could go around in shorts and loose-fitting shirts all the time. His outings aboard the Anita with Joe Russell-who died of a stroke in 1941-had given Hemingway a passion for deep-sea fishing, and the Gulf Stream, adjacent to Cuba, offered the best marlin fishing in the world. Always fond of blood sports, Hemingway discovered and became an enthusiastic follower of cockfighting in Havana, and there was also the less-bloody, but for its human participants more dangerous, sport of Jai Alai, another amusement of which Hemingway became a devoted aficionado.

Martha had in fact joined Hemingway in Havana the year before they were married, but she was not about to share a small, dirty room at the Hotel Ambos Mundos with him. Looking in a newspaper, she found a 15-acre estate about 15 miles from downtown Havana called the "Finca Vigia" ("Lookout Farm.") The place was badly dilapidated and Hemingway thought it not even worth trying to renovate, but Martha saw it as a challenge and hired workers at her own expense to knock the Finca into liveable shape. At first they rented the farm for $100 a month; in December 1940 after they were married, Hemingway bought the Finca Vigia for $18,500. It was the first home he had ever owned that hadn't been given to him by someone else, and he "settled" there to the extent that a man as restless as Ernest Hemingway could settle anywhere. The Finca provided a spacious, quiet place for him to work. It had a swimming pool and tennis court, and Hemingway's myriad cats and dogs wandered freely about the place. Soon he was a regular fixture at Havana's Floridita bar, where he could be seen downing ice-cold dacquiris in his own reserved seat at the end of the bar.

But the Hemingway-Gellhorn marriage was as doomed as his two previous ones. Martha had in fact expressed misgivings to a friend before her marriage to Ernest as to how well things would work out. Both of Hemingway's first two wives had been older than he was, she pointed out, whereas she was nine years his junior. Martha was less than enthusiastic about assuming the role of housekeeper, and Hemingway's mercurial temper, often exacerbated by drinking, increased tensions. Martha later decried her husband's "ceaseless, crazy bullying" of her. There is also some evidence, not surprising perhaps in view of the fact that Martha was the first of Ernest's wives to be younger than he was, that they were sexually incompatible.

Then World War II came along and invaded what was already less than Eden. Hemingway had already been directly or indirectly involved in four wars: World War I; the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey; the Spanish Civil War and, most recently, the Japanese war in China, which he and Martha had gone off to cover as correspondents shortly after their marriage. He was inclined to sit this one out, although in 1943 German U-boats were slipping into the Gulf of Mexico to torpedo American and Venezuelan shipping, and Hemingway saw an opportunity to participate in war without straying too far from home. By now he had his own fishing boat, the Pilar, and with the connivance of the American ambassador in Havana, Spruille Braden, Hemingway embarked on a slightly-crackpot "U-boat hunting" scheme-he had the Pilar outfitted with machine guns and ammunition, rounded up a crew and made a number of patrols in the Gulf Stream looking for German subs. (They never found one.) Other than that, Hemingway inclined toward staying home in Cuba as the war in Europe raged. Martha didn't. She was an ambitious writer who loved her work and was not going to be content with sitting around the Finca Vigia being Mrs. Hemingway when the whole world was at war. She went off to cover the war as a correspondent for Collier's magazine, and Hemingway was eventually cajoled into doing likewise. In 1944 he went to London, his first stop toward becoming Colliers' front-line correspondent after the Normandy Invasion, at which he was present. His marriage to Martha was already in trouble, and the war finished it off-in London he met yet another woman journalist, Mary Welsh, who would become the fourth and last Mrs. Hemingway. In 1946 he brought her to the Finca Vigia, where she became the somewhat-uneasy but increasingly confident mistress of the place.

Mary did, in fact, unlike her predecessor Martha, go to great lengths to make the Finca a "home," although for Hemingway "home" seldom meant much more than a base of operations. Mary put in a great deal of work maintaining flower and vegetable gardens on the property and went to great pains with the upkeep of the decaying house while also having to work around her husband's less-than-fastidious personal habits and coexisting with a menagerie of cats, dogs and other animals on the property. Years earlier, Pauline Pfeiffer had tried to keep Hemingway close by giving him a decent home in Key West; Mary Welsh in the 1940s and '50s made similar efforts in Cuba for a man now in his fifties and aging quickly, with a list of physical-and mental-ailments that would mount and mount over the years, making their life together on the island as stormy as the previous Hemingway marriages.

Hemingway would in fact make Cuba his base of operations for the remaining years of his life, although being naturally footloose and craving audiences as well as excitement, he and Mary and would often leave their somewhat-remote tropical outpost for sojourns in the United States, Europe and Africa. When Castro came to power in 1959 and the Americans who had been in Havana evacuated the place quickly, Hemingway chose to stay on; he had been fully aware of the corruption and abuses of the previous regimes and, naive about Communism, felt he had no reason not to accept Castro as a welcome reformer. He went so far as to wish Castro "all luck" with running the country, an attitude which didn't do much to endear Hemingway to either the U.S. government or the FBI. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had in fact been "keeping an eye" on Hemingway ever since the sub-hunting adventure of 1942-43, and Hemingway's mounting paranoia in his later years about FBI surveillance was not entirely without basis in fact. (Castro returned Hemingway's compliment, by the way-since Hemingway's death he has been a much-honored cultural hero in Cuba, the government maintaining his house as a museum and even having his boat the Pilar transported overland to be the museum's chief attraction.)

People did sometimes ask Hemingway why he chose to live in Cuba. Late in 1948 he wrote an article for Holiday magazine in which he talked about his life there, offering his readers verbal snapshots of cool mornings at the Finca, cockfights and pigeon shoots, but most importantly the incomparable marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream, which he lovingly called "the Great Blue River." In fact it was not only in journalism but in his often less-than-successful later fictions that Hemingway's attractions toward this part of the world are apparent. In his 1937 "proletarian" novel To Have And Have Not Hemingway displayed his affection for the seamy side of Havana life, and on one level his late novella The Old Man And The Sea could be read as a lyrical tribute to the Gulf Stream. His posthumous novel Islands In The Stream, cobbled together in 1970 from a huge pile of manuscript that he churned out between 1946 and 1950, while it may be unbearably talky in places, is in other places a moving tribute to the Caribbean world-and to Cuba. Hear Hemingway in that novel use his unmatched gift for evoking topography to share with his readers what was, unquestionably, a longstanding love-of-place:

He got into the car and told the chauffeur to go up O'Reilly to the Floridita. Before the car circled the plaza in front of the embassy building and the Ayuntamiento and then turned into O'Reilly he saw the size of the waves in the mouth of the harbor and the heavy rise and fall of the channel buoy. In the mouth of the harbor the sea was very wild and confused and clear green water was breaking over the rock at the base of the Morro, the tops of the seas blowing white in the sun.

It looks wonderful, he said to himself. It not only looks wonderful, it is wonderful.

Kelley Dupuis May 2001

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com