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

Street carriage house; cruised to Cuba and the Bahamas on his own boat to fish; and spent the late summer and fall on a Wyoming ranch where he and Pauline could hunt and he could write in a cabin among the trees.
    Despite all these signs of success, however, something had gone wrong for Hemingway in the years since the publication of A Farewell to Arms . The old friends, the writers and painters with whom he’d talked about art and life on the terrasse at the Closerie des Lilas or the Dôme, had been largely displaced by the sportsmen he hunted and fished with, or the rich men and their wives who frequented his new haunts: places like Bimini, which one of the old friends, who’d come for a visit, described as “a crazy mixture of luxury, indigence, good liquor, bad food, heat, flies, land apathy and sea magnificence, social snoot, money, sport, big fish, big fishermen, and competitive passion.” Hemingway was living large, and conscious that he was often paying for it with others’ money (whether Pauline’s or Uncle Gus’s or Esquire ’s or his publisher’s). Sometimes he confessed to feeling like a peasant in this luxe milieu; and in his letters to his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, he fretted over advances the publisher had made him that had not earned out—though Perkins, soothingly, told him that any money in the debit column was Scribner’s problem, not his, so he shouldn’t worry about it.
    What did worry Hemingway, though, was the nagging feeling that all this success might have blunted the sharp implement of his craft, that he might have sold out his talent. The books that had followed A Farewell to Arms —a romantic paean to bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon ; a collection of stories, Winner Take Nothing ; a self-aggrandizing account of his 1934 Kenyan safari, The Green Hills of Africa —had been greeted with disappointing sales and mixed reviews. (“Bull in the Afternoon” was the headline for one, which compared his macho literary style to “wearing false hair on the chest.”) Hoping for his author to return to form, even Maxwell Perkins permitted himself to say, “You must finish a novel before long.”
    But what kind of novel? In 1936, after six years of world economic depression, with fascism on the rise in Europe (and in America, if you counted Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic right-wing radio rants), Hemingway’s usual subject matter—expatriate life, bullfighting, game hunting, deep-sea fishing—seemed exotic, if not trivial; and the pose of his protagonists, which veered between stoicism and cynicism, didn’t satisfy an audience that increasingly wanted its artists to be engagé , like John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos. Why didn’t he write about a strike? one critic suggested. Although he had written an article for the left-wing magazine New Masses excoriating the U.S. government for neglecting victims of the 1935 Florida hurricane, Hemingway derided such ideas as “so much horseshit.” He wasn’t going to become a cheerleader for communism, or “a Marxian viewpoint,” he said, because “I believe in only one thing: liberty.”
    The other thing he’d believed in, the thing that had inspired his most completely realized fiction, was love—love lost, love denied, but still love. Lately, however, he’d seemed soured on the whole idea: the only love he wanted to write about was love gone bad. Waiting for him on his antique Spanish writing table at Whitehead Street were the edited manuscript of one story about an adulterous woman who hates her husband so much that she plugs him in the back of the head with a shotgun, and the advance copies of the August issue of Esquire magazine containing another story, this one about a has-been writer dying of gangrene in Africa, literally corrupted by his relationship with his rich wife. As good as these stories were—and they were among the best he had ever written—they dealt with themes that didn’t bear exploring too deeply