Everybody Was So Young (42 page)

Sara and Patrick had left Steele Camp and had moved for the winter into the town of Saranac Lake, to a lofty barn of a house at 129 Church Street, within range of the bells of four different churches. Dick and Alice Lee Myers came with Fanny to the Winter Olympics in nearby Lake Placid in February, and Sara had made friends with the family of Dr. Trudeau, with whom she sometimes went bobsledding. But there may have been an edge to these amusements. Honoria remembers her mother hurtling down the most difficult slopes, laughing and laughing, whether from gaiety or desperation she doesn’t try to guess.

Sara and Gerald were going through a difficult time—more difficult, perhaps, than their years at Montana-Vermala. The death of their healthy son, on Gerald’s watch (although Sara would never put it that way); the cumulative sense of time passing, for themselves and for their friends, what Archibald MacLeish, in “You, Andrew Marvell,” had called “the always coming on of night”: all this made things worse. And their physical separation, which had become almost a constant with Sara’s move to Saranac, merely underlined the isolation each had begun to feel. December 30 was their twentieth wedding anniversary, a date that in the Antibes days would have been celebrated by the three children, in festive clothes, bringing them flowers on their balcony. In Saranac, on December 31, this is what Gerald wrote to Scott Fitzgerald:

Of all our friends, it seems to me that you alone know how we felt these days—still feel. You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel. Sara’s courage and the unbelievable job she is doing for Patrick make unbearably poignant the tragedy of what has happened—what life has tried to do to her. I know now that what you said in “Tender is the Night” was true. Only the invented part of our life,—the unreal part—has had any scheme any beauty. Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed. In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot,—the children, their growth, their health, their future. How ugly and blasting it can be,—and how idly ruthless.

At the beginning of February, Gerald left for a six-week European buying trip for Mark Cross, his first. And it seems as if Sara, unnerved by the prospect of so solitary a winter, wrote the Hemingways to ask them to return to Saranac. They couldn’t. “Damn I wish we could come there for the winters sporting,” wrote Ernest, “but I have to work like the devil the rest of the winter.” Then the inflection of his voice changed: “How are you dear beautiful Sara?” he asked. “I had a gigantic dream about you about ten days ago and woke up determined to write you a long letter (longer than this one) and tell you how highly I thought of you. . . . There are about three records that I never hear without think of you. I wish you were here, Sara.”

Her next letter to him is missing. From his response, it seems to have been concerned not only with her own sense of isolation and despair, but with her feelings about Gerald and her marriage: “Poor Sara,” said Hemingway. “I’m sorry you had such a bad time. These are the bad times. It is sort of like the retreat from Moscow and Scott is gone the first week of the retreat.” (Although in this case it was Gerald who was gone, in Europe, Ernest never could resist a jab at Fitzgerald, especially in front of Sara.) The last half page, or more, of this letter is missing; what is left cuts off after a description of the paternal qualities of a mutual friend. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to wonder if the rest of the letter dealt with the father of her children, and if it was Sara who scissored it off so she could save the remainder, as she did everything else, for a keepsake.

Gerald returned to America in mid-March, but the difficulties between them that might have seemed implicit before he left became harder and harder to ignore. “There is one thing that has always surprised me,” Gerald wrote to Sara from New York in April, answering “2 type-written and rare semi-philosophical letters” from her, which have not survived:

and that is one’s tendency to feel that just because two people have been married for 20 years that they should need the same thing of life or of people. You are surprised anew periodically that “warm human relationship” should be so necessary to you and less to me. Yet nothing is more natural under the circumstances. You believe in it (as you do in life), you are capable of it, you command it. I am less of a believer (I don’t admire human animals as much), I am less capable (for a fundamental sexual deficiency, like poor eyesight), I lack the confidence (quite naturally) to command it—or to keep it in its proper relationship to me. Certainly feeling exists in people or it doesn’t. No two people show it in the same degree or manner. Hence the inadequacy of most relationships which are supposed to be kept at a constant emotional pressure.

Two days later he wrote again:

Dear Sal:—

Addenda: I suppose it’s downright tragic (if things in life are tragic,—or just life—) when one person who lives by communicated affection should have chosen a mate who is (damn it) deficient. I have always had (as early as I can remember) the knowledge (conviction, feeling) that I lacked something that other people had,—emotionally. Whether this is due to the absence of degree and depth of feeling, or the result of trained suppression of feelings, distrust and fear of them, I don’t know.

It’s fashionable now to pigeonhole people, as Hemingway (and to a lesser extent Fitzgerald) tried to do, by either/or sexual preference. But Gerald belonged to a less arbitrary generation, and to a class and milieu—the New York of Stanford White and the polymorphous Paris of Cocteau and de Beaumont—in which ambiguous or bisexual behavior was, if not accepted, at least ignored. He himself maintained to Sara that “nothing which I believe in . . . should cause this lack [of feeling];—nothing against Nature,” and he meant it. He didn’t think of himself as homosexual in an exclusive sense. “Outside of a man and a woman, and children and a house and a garden,—there’s nothing much,” he wrote. But his old feelings of ambivalence, imposture, and diffidence, the ones he had written to Archie about in 1931, had been exacerbated by Sara’s evident need of emotional, and probably sexual, warmth. And although in 1926 he might have told Scott Fitzgerald, as Dick Diver told Rosemary, that his love for Sara was “active love,” by 1936 this was less and less true. At lunch one day with Phil Barry and Archie MacLeish, Gerald responded to their off-color stories about their sexual exploits by exclaiming, “Thank God all that is behind me!” This may have been a pose, adopted to distance himself from his friends’ self-conscious machismo, or it may have been an overstatement. But to Sara he admitted that his “deficiency” must make her feel “rotten.”

Shortly after Sara got this letter, and despite having said earlier that she couldn’t get south that winter, she drove to Florida with John and Katy Dos Passos and flew by seaplane to join Ernest in Havana. (Pauline, who was visiting her family in Arkansas, wasn’t with them.) Although Dos was correcting proofs of The Big Money and barely looked at a fishing rod, the rest of them went out on the Pilar nearly every day. After an inauspicious beginning in which Ernest raised only one marlin which “Dos blew” (as Ernest sourly put it in his ship’s log), Sara managed to catch three dolphins, one barracuda, and one arctic bonito within two days. In the evenings the Pilar chugged back to Havana harbor with a “fish flag” flying if they’d caught anything, and Dos and Katy and Sara and Ernest had dinner together in the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Very possibly they talked about their absent friend Scott Fitzgerald, whose three autobiographical essays about his professional and personal breakdown, later published as The Crack-Up, had just appeared in Esquire. Ernest, predictably, hated them—“whining in public,” was his comment. When Sara read them she had written to Scott: “Do you really mean to say you honestly thought ‘life was something you dominated if you were any good—?’ Even if you meant your own life it is arrogant enough,—but life!” It’s easy to imagine her saying the same thing to Dos and Katy and Ernest, over dinner at the Ambos Mundos, and adding (as she did to Fitzgerald), “If you just won’t admit a thing it doesn’t exist (as much) . . . [but] rebelling, dragging one’s feet & fighting every inch of the way, one must admit one can’t control it—one has to take it,—& as well as possible—that is all I know.”

After dinner, when Dos had gone up to his room to work on his galleys, they would sit with their drinks and listen to the three straw-hatted Cubans who played rumbas and Latin versions of “There’s a Small Hotel” for them. One day, after a long night, Sara “breakfasted” Ernest on Bromo-Seltzer and whiskey sours where the Pilar was anchored in a secluded cove. And sometime during this week in Havana, Sara and Ernest dug rather deeply into what each of them had made of their lives.

“Some people,” Hemingway’s son John acknowledges, “say that Father had some kind of secret thing going on with Sara. Although he “can’t imagine it,” the rumor has never entirely disappeared. The reasons aren’t hard to determine. Like Picasso, Hemingway was the sort of man Sara invariably responded to, magnetic, male, and physical, but with an artist’s intuitiveness; she had always been attracted to him—certainly Scott Fitzgerald had noticed—and at this point in her life she was hurt and needy. And Hemingway, the man who didn’t like to sleep alone, was alone, his marriage to Pauline tacitly on the rocks.

So what happened next? John and Katy Dos Passos and Sara left Havana after a week. In Miami they telephoned Pauline, who had just returned to Key West, and begged her to see them, if only for an hour, in the Miami airport. Pauline duly arrived, on her way to rejoin Ernest in Havana, looking, Sara said, “like a delicious, and rather wicked little piece of brown toast.” (Pauline, for her part, thought Sara looked “beautiful. . . . She met me at the Pan-American station in pearls and one of her hats and I thought who or whom is that lovely woman expecting and it turned out to be me.”) And when Sara got home to the Adirondacks she wrote Ernest a letter whose lines beg to be read between.

“About being snooty,” she said: “You don’t
REALLY
think I am snooty do you? Please don’t. It isn’t snooty to choose.” There’s just the faintest echo here of the old Sara—the Sara of Picasso’s pictures, the Sara who Scott Fitzgerald complained was being “mean to me,” the woman who had chosen one man and was going to stick with him. “Choice, and one’s affections,” she said now to Ernest, “are about all there are.” And, as if to remind him of the choices he had made: “Oh Ernest, what wonderful places you live in and what a good life you have made for yourself and Pauline.”

Hemingway wasn’t used to people saying no to him—if indeed “no” is what was said—and he doesn’t seem to have risen to the challenge of these choices. Ever since The Sun Also Rises, he had used his fiction as a weapon. Now, in a story he was calling “The Happy Ending,” but which would be published as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he seems to have turned that weapon on Sara. “Snows” takes place on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the writer Harry Walden is dying of gangrene, literally corrupted by his relationship with a wealthy woman. He is lamenting the lost chances and lost loves of his life, the good times he had in Paris and in the Vorarlberg when he and the century were young. And he is musing on the pernicious influence of “the very rich,” about whom he has had an argument with “poor Scott Fitzgerald”—the argument sparked by the now mythic exchange about the very rich being different from you and me because (in Hemingway’s view) “they have more money.” Poor Scott (Hemingway grudgingly changed the name to “Julian” in later published versions of the story) “thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing wrecked him.”

Although Hemingway had berated Fitzgerald for creating composite characters, he had done it himself (A Farewell to Arms’s Catherine has trace elements of Pauline and Hadley, as well as Hemingway’s lost love Agnes von Kurowsky); and “Snows”’s Helen, while she owes something to Pauline and Jane Mason, bears other marks as well. Like Sara (and like Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver), she is the heiress to a midwestern industrial fortune; even more like Sara, she has suffered the death of a child. As Harry is waiting for the end to come she says to him—like Sara imploring Baoth to breathe in that hospital room in Boston, or arguing with Fitzgerald about not admitting defeat—“You can’t die if you don’t give up.” But he does die, and before he does he feels death’s presence inextricably linked with hers: “She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from . . . Town and Country . . . and he felt death come again.” Although Jane Mason had posed for a face cream ad in Ladies’ Home Journal which Hemingway kept in his files, it was Sara Murphy, when she was engaged to be married to Gerald, who had had her face on the cover of Town and Country. And apparently it was Ernest who, hiking or hunting in the Rockies, had found that photograph tacked to the wall in a deserted mountain man’s hut, and had torn it down and sent it to her.

Hemingway had once written Archie MacLeish a letter—one of those rather gratuitously cruel letters he occasionally sent to male friends to show how tough he could be—in which he said that “Every woman’s husband is, in a way, after a certain time, her own fault. All women married to a wrong husband are bad luck for themselves and all their friends.” In case Archie didn’t catch his drift, he added: “Cf. Mr. Benchley’s pal and Mrs. Parker’s confidante,” surely a reference to Gerald and Sara. But whatever Sara might have confided to Hemingway about her marriage, she would never think of it as causing “bad luck” for her; she knew where her heart truly lay. She had chosen, and so had Gerald. Later that spring, after she returned from Florida, Gerald told her that, although his “defect” made him “terribly, terribly sorry that I am as I am. . . . only one thing would be awful and that is that you might not know that I love only you. We both know it’s inadequate (that’s where ‘life’ comes in);—but such as it is it certainly is the best this poor fish can offer,—and it’s the realest thing I know. Who knows but that the good Lord may let it make up for its defect in some other way?”