Papa Hemingway (35 page)

By the following afternoon I submitted to Ernest a list of eight suggested cuts in the first hundred pages; he went into his bedroom to look them over while I resumed working in the tower. The shimmering, unyielding heat gave me the sensation of operating in slow motion. It occurred to me that despite my many visits to Cuba, this was the first time I had been there in the summer.

Ernest and I conferred on cuts the following morning in his bedroom. He had in front of him seven different-colored pills, which he swallowed one by one with siphon water, and a lined pad of paper on which he had neatly written his reasons for rejecting each of the cuts. He handed me the list.

It was a startling document: in the first place, some of it didn't make any sense; for example, in rejecting one five-page cut, Ernest listed four reasons why those pages should be retained and then concluded by stating: "But has effect of making things happen no-where"; secondly, the whole thing had an uncharacteristically disorganized, badly phrased, petulant ring; and in the third place, I could not figure out why Ernest painstakingly wrote all this out and sat there watching me read it. We had many times in the past conferred about his manuscripts for
Across the River and into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea,
the Paris sketches, and short stories, but this was the only time he had gone through the process of writing notes, and strangely incomprehensible notes at that.

But I accepted them without discussion, and for the next three days I continued to work on the manuscript, suggesting cuts that Ernest would consider and then carefully reject with written notations on his pad. I explained my reasons for each suggested cut but did not press them, for I realized that Ernest was being severely harassed by conflicting desires to save every word of what he had written and to deliver a properly cut version to
Life.
"What I've written is Proustian in its cumulative effect," Ernest explained, "and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect."

In the late afternoons we went down to the big, cloudy pool to swim. The water was as bracing as a hot bath. I watched Ernest slowly enter the pool. He looked thin. His chest and shoulders had lost their thrust and his upper arms were macilent and formless, as if his huge biceps had been pared down by an unskilled whittler.

One night when it was too hot to sleep, I found in my room an old volume that contained issues of a magazine called
This Quarter
which had been published in Paris in the Twenties. Thumbing through it, I came upon "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Undefeated" in what was obviously their first publication. I also found an article by the poet Ernest Walsh, the magazine's editor, in which he prophesied: "Hemingway selected his audience. His rewards will be rich. But thank God he will never be satisfied. He is of the elect. He belongs. It will take time to wear him out. And before that he will be dead."

On the fourth day Ernest finally approved a cut of three pages, and from then on he slowly, grudgingly, painfully began to accept cuts until finally at the end of nine days he had a total of 54,916 excised words. The following day Ernest said he could not use his eyes any more. "I can see the words on the page for only ten or twelve minutes," he said, "before my eyes cut out, and then I can't use them again for an hour or two." We decided that I should bring the manuscript back to New York and give it to
Life
to make additional cuts from the 53,830 words it now contained. "I'll tell you, Hotch, although I move about as cheerfully as possible," Ernest said, "it is like living in a Kafka nightmare. I act cheerful like always but am not. I'm bone-tired and very beat up emotionally."

"What bothers you most—the Castro business?"

"That's part of it. He doesn't bother me personally. I'm good publicity for them, so maybe they'd never bother me and let me live on here as always, but I am an American above everything else and I cannot stay here when other Americans are being kicked out and my country is being villified. I guess I knew it was all over for me here the night they killed Black Dog. A Bastista search party, looking for guns, came barreling in here in the middle of the night and poor Black Dog, old and half blind, tried to stand guard at the door of the
finca,
but a soldier clubbed him to death with the butt of his rifle. Poor old Black Dog. I miss him. In the early morning when I work, he's not there on the kudu skin beside the typewriter; and in the afternoon when I swim, he's not hunting lizards beside the pool; and in the evenings when I sit in my chair to read, his chin isn't resting on my foot. I miss Black Dog as much as I miss any friend I ever lost. And now I lose the
finca—
there's no sense kidding myself—I know I must leave it all and go. But how can you measure that loss? Everything I have is here. My pictures, my books, my good work place and good memories."

"Can't you do something about the pictures?"

"I'd settle for the Miro and the two Juan Gris."

"Maybe I could get them out in my luggage if we took them out of their frames and rolled them."

"No, I wouldn't let you risk that."

"What about a request from The Museum of Modern Art to exhibit them? You told me Alfred Barr had asked you several times for a loan of the Miro."

"I guess it's worth a try. I'll write him."

"I read the new chapters of the Paris book last night—they're wonderful, Papa. They make me feel I was living there and that those times were mine, and the next time I go to Paris I will expect it to be just that way."

"Will I be boiled in Congressional oil for being kind to poor Ezra?"

"No, that's all over. I don't think this Congress knows who Ezra Pound is."

Ernest was in a quandary as to which book should be published first—
The Dangerous Summer
or the Paris book. He even wondered whether
The Dangerous Summer
should be published as a book at all. After a long, vacillating discussion I suggested we both think about it and discuss it again when he came to New York. 1 asked him to give me advance notice of his arrival date so I could try to arrange an appointment with the eye specialist, a very difficult man to reach.

"Well, don't worry if you can't get the appointment," Ernest said. "There isn't much anyone can do for
keratitus sicca . . .
or for anything else, I guess."

We were going to go out on the boat with Mary and Honor the following day, but Gregorio reported that the sea was worthless and no one had taken anything for four days. Ernest and I drove into Havana and had one daiquiri each at the Floridita and then Ernest went to the bank to get a manuscript out of the vault. It was a short novel called
The Sea Chase,
which Mary thought could be made into a good motion picture, and Ernest wanted to know what I thought. Across the top of the first page, and above the title, he had written in longhand, "The Sea (Main Book Three)," which indicated that this was the sea section of what he had always referred to as his "big book," or "blockbuster," a work that was to have had three parts to it: the land, the sea and the air.

I read it that evening. Mary was absolutely right; it was a compact, exciting adventure, set in the Bahamas during World War II, that involved hunting down the escaped Nazi crew of a sunken U-boat. It was in fact a fictionalized account of what might have happened to Ernest (Thomas Hudson in the book) and his
Pilar
crew if they had picked up the trail of a U-boat in 1943. It has not yet been published, but undoubtedly will be.

When I told Ernest my reaction, he said he guessed he had better reread the manuscript. After Honor had read it to him, he said, uncertainly, "Some things I ought to do to it. Maybe after the Paris book, if I can still see enough to write."

I tried to discourage Ernest from going to the airport with me; he was terribly debilitated from the heat and his own pressures, but he insisted. "Transport out is heavy and tricky these days," he said, "and I want to be sure you're okay." We had been able to get a reservation only because one of Ernest's Cuban friends was an executive with the airline. Castro had cut down outgoing flights to two a day, and there were a lot more people than that who wanted out.

In the car Ernest turned to me and said, "Hotch, I've been up all night worrying. I wasn't going to say anything because a deal's a deal and you've already done so damn much for me, but it's something I couldn't live with."

"Well, if it's anything I can possibly do . . ."

"This deal with
Life.
I know it's all set and
legally
I'm bound to it, but Christ! How did I ever sign on like that? I'll sell out three issues for them for less than I got for the one issue that had
The Old Man and the Sea
in it. You see, it started to be one thing and then became another and then another and I boxed myself into a corner. But this will be a year of heavy taxes and I don't know where it's coming from. I don't want to borrow from Scribner's; I don't like borrowing there now that old Charlie is gone, but this forty thousand figures to be all I earn in i960. And now I've got to go back to Spain to work on the piece some more so that I can cable them something to update it, and that will eat up a lot more dough."

He was so anguished that against my honest judgment, which was that Ernest had firmly committed himself to terms, I found myself saying, "Well, why don't I talk to Ed Thompson when I get back?"

"Promise him first look at the Paris book. With some good Paris pictures it might be a good entry for them."

"How much more do you want, Papa?"

"If I could get seventy-five, I could put forty in the tax account and have thirty-five to live on."

I happened to know that Ernest's annual income from royalties on his former books was around a hundred thousand dollars, that he had large holdings of stocks and bonds, most of which he had bought twenty or thirty years ago, and that his tax account was stocked beyond any possible demands his income could make on it, but I respected his pretense that he had to live each year on what he earned that year. In the precarious world of free lance, it is a highly desirable attitude, albeit a rather unrealistic one when the writer has reached the eminence that Ernest had attained. It was probably a holdover from his hungry times.

The airport building was choked with people. The crowd in front of the ticket counter was so thick I had to use my best New York subway maneuvers to clear a path for us. At the counter we found out the bad news: Castro had issued an order that morning canceling all flights to the United States until further notice. It was an act of reprisal for a new requirement that all Cuban aircraft refueling in the United States pay cash on delivery.

We fought our way back out of the mob, and Ernest led me to an office in the terminal building where one could charter flights. The man there was an old friend who knew Ernest back in the early Thirties when he ran contraband rum into Key West. Ernest and he had a short discussion in low voices, and then the man picked up my bag and said to meet him in ten minutes on the airfield ramp on the other side of his office.

While we were waiting out the ten minutes, Ernest gave me the pad of lined paper on which he had been making his
Dangerous Summer
notes. "I did some final work on the cutting," he said. "You can read it on the way back. You know your way out of Key West, don't you?"

"Sure."

Ernest's pal flew me to Key West in a Cessna, without benefit of Havana customs. I hired a car in Key West and drove along the magnificent highway that stretches across the water and the keys to Miami, where I eventually got a seat on a jet to New York. I took out the pad Ernest had given me. It was crammed with page numbers and directions, some of them countermanding a few cuts he had previously approved and suggesting cuts in their stead, but most of them simply detailing cuts we had already made, with explanations about them. These latter notations covered fifteen pages of the note pad and seemed to have been written mainly as private explanations to himself.

Ernest and Mary arrived in New York on Friday, July 13th. In the intervening week I had had lunch with Ed Thompson and, after warning him to get fortified with a double Old Grand-dad, had told him the bad news. If ever a decoration is awarded for bravery under editorial fire, I recommend Ed Thompson as its first recipient. He drained the last of his Older Granddad, ordered another, expelled a short sigh and said, "Well, there is only one Ernest Hemingway and I guess there is some merit in what he says. Tell me gently."

I said a hundred thousand dollars and we agreed upon ninety thousand with rights to
Life's
Spanish edition thrown in for an additional ten thousand.

Almost every day after I left Havana, Ernest had called me to discuss the dilemma of which book to publish first, and I finally suggested that it might be a good idea to get his publisher's opinion. I set up a meeting at Ernest's Sixty-second Street apartment on the afternoon he arrived, and I had also arranged an appointment for Ernest with the Chief of Opthal-mology at New York's biggest hospital. He was reputedly the country's foremost specialist and he had a Park Avenue office where he saw a few private patients. He had told me on the phone that
keratitis sicca
was a rare and serious condition that not only caused blindness but was, in most cases, fatal.