Read Online Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill - Free Book Online Page A

friends seemed to do. Perhaps, she thought, she could find a way to get to Madrid, where she could volunteer as a writer, an editor, a translator—there must be some use for the six languages she spoke—and start fresh, doing work that mattered. A new life! It seemed just barely possible.

July 1936: Key West
    On July 17, the cruiser Pilar , thirty-eight feet long with a black hull, green roof, and mahogany cockpit, tied up in Key West harbor after a six-week fishing trip to Bimini; and its captain, Ernest Hemingway—burly, dark, unshaven, in his usual Key West getup of dirty shorts and torn T-shirt—made his way home to the big house on Whitehead Street that he shared with his second wife, Pauline, and their two sons, Patrick and Gregory. The Bimini trip had been a fine one. To begin with, Hemingway had hooked a 514-pound, eleven-foot-long tuna off Gun Cay, and after a seven-hour battle—Hemingway had sweated away more than a pound an hour hauling on the lines—he’d managed to land it, still full of fight, thirty miles away from where he’d started; by the time he got back to port he’d drunk so much beer and whiskey he could hardly stand, but somehow he pulled the fish up on stays on the dock and proceeded to use it for a punching bag. Almost as good as the fishing were the couple of meetings he’d had with an editor from Esquire magazine, Arnold Gingrich, who suggested he make a novel out of a couple of short stories he’d written about a renegade Caribbean rumrunner called Harry Morgan—a book that, both men felt, would put Hemingway back on top of the literary world where he belonged.
    In the early 1920s, in Paris, when he had lived in the cramped flat above the sawmill in the rue Notre Dame des Champs with his first wife, Hadley, and their baby son, John, nicknamed Bumby, and his first collection of short prose sketches (with its bravely uncapitalized title), in our time , had been published by one of the little presses, no one had been more innovative, more exciting, or more admired among the Lost Generation literati than Hemingway. And when The Sun Also Rises , his novel about angst-ridden expatriates in Paris and Pamplona, appeared in 1926, followed three years later by the tersely elegiac Great War love story A Farewell to Arms , no writer had seemed so successful. His spare, clean prose and his clear-eyed presentation of unvarnished subject matter that he knew from personal experience—“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” he would say; “write the truest sentence that you know”—seemed to set him apart from all who had come before him; in consequence he’d been rewarded with critical praise, robust book sales, and record-setting magazine fees. For the past three years Esquire , for which he’d been writing articles about such far-flung places as the Caribbean and Kenya, had been giving him an audience of half a million readers a month. And when A Farewell to Arms was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, Hemingway became even more of a celebrity than before.
    With fame had come fortune: and not just, or even principally, from his earnings as a writer. Pauline Hemingway, née Pfeiffer — dark, gamine , quick-witted, tart-tongued—was the wealthy daughter of one of the richest landowners in the state of Arkansas, and the niece of a childless pharmaceutical czar whose greatest pleasure was to give her (and her husband) presents. The green-shuttered stone house on Whitehead Street ($12,500)? Out came Uncle Gus’s checkbook. A big-game safari in Africa, complete with guides and private planes ($25,000)? Uncle Gus was happy to foot the bill. The days were long gone when Hemingway had had to write in cafés to escape the noise of the downstairs sawmill, or take the train to the races at Auteuil because it was cheap, and bring along a packed lunch so as not to spend money in the racecourse restaurant. Now he worked in a spacious second-story study in the Whitehead