Hemingway in Italy Read online

  Armchair Traveller

  at the bookHaus

  RICHARD OWEN was the Rome correspondent of The Times for fifteen years. He was previously the paper’s correspondent in Moscow, Brussels and Jerusalem, and also served as Foreign Editor. Owen has written several works of nonfiction, including Lady Chatterley’s Villa: DH Lawrence and the Italian Riviera.

  Hemingway in Italy

  Richard Owen

  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  The Armchair Traveller at the bookHaus

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SW1X 9AH

  www.thearmchairtraveller.com

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  Copyright © Richard Owen, 2017

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN: 978-1-909961-38-8

  eISBN: 978-1-909961-41-8

  Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

  Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

  All rights reserved

  Contents

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Introduction

  1. War in the Dolomites

  2. Fossalta di Piave

  3. Agnes and Catherine

  4. Love at La Scala

  5. The Torino Girl

  6. Bassano del Grappa

  7. Taormina

  8. In Another Country

  9. Genoa Correspondent

  10. The Biggest Bluff in Europe

  11. Rapallo and Cortina

  12. Che Ti Dice La Patria?

  13. A Grand Religion

  14. Extreme Unction

  15. Harry’s Bar

  16. Adriana and Renata

  17. Across the River

  18. Love in a Gondola

  19. The White Tower

  20. Scampi and Valpolicella

  21. Death in Ketchum

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  I am indebted to a number of people in Venice and the Veneto who helped me to research this book and granted me interviews: Irina Ivancich (Marchesi), daughter of Gianfranco and Cristina Ivancich and hence Adriana’s niece, who showed me not only the Villa Mocenigo-Baggiani-Ivancich at San Michele al Tagliamento and the family’s Palazzo Rota-Ivancich in Venice but also many of the places linked to Hemingway in and around Monastier; Baron Alberto Franchetti, who shared with me his boyhood memories of Hemingway and explained the finer points of duck hunting; Ciccinella Kechler, who introduced me to Hemingway enthusiasts at the Villa Barbarigo-De Aserta-Kechler at Fraforeano; Bruno Marcuzzo, the Hemingway guide at Fossalta di Piave, whose tour can be found on the website www.laguerradihemingway.it; Alberto Luca, Giandomenico Cortese and Raffaela Mocellin at the Fondazione Luca’s ‘Hemingway and the Great War’ museum at Bassano del Grappa; and Ivano Sartor, former mayor of Roncade and now the town’s archivist and historian.

  My thanks at Ca’ Foscari, Venice University, to Professor Valerio de Scarpis, Professor Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Professor Emeritus Sergio Perosa and Assistant Professor Gregory Dowling for their advice and insights; and at Oxford University to Martin McLaughlin, Professor of Italian and Italian Studies, and the staff of the Bodleian Library.

  My thanks, too, to Consuelo Ivancich at the Villa Mocenigo; Donatella Asta (nee Kechler); Baron Vincenzo Ciani Bassetti and his family and staff at the Castello di Roncade; the staff of the Park Hotel Villa Fiorita at Monastier for the exhibition ‘Hemingway + Piave’ at the villa, curated by local historian Angelo Ceron; Davide Lorigliola for his expertise on Hemingway and Friuli; and Massimo Sensini, the mayor of Fossalta di Piave. I am grateful to Clara Noli for making available to me her 2008 dissertation at Genoa University, ‘Adriana Ivancich a Venezia: Alterita e integrazione di una scrittrice’, and to Richard Ward and Justine Taylor of the Honourable Artillery Company for information on the Battle of the Piave.

  Films made about Hemingway include: My Name is Ernest, directed by Emilio Briguglio, with Massimiliano Tondello as Hemingway, Eleonora Bolla as Agnes and Anita Kravos as Adriana (2014); Hemingway and Gellhorn, an HBO made for TV movie starring Clive Owen as Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn, directed by Philip Kaufman (2012); Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, BBC, 4 episodes (1999); Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling with Life, directed by Stephen Crisman and narrated by Mariel Hemingway, US documentary (1998); and In Love and War, directed by Richard Attenborough, with Chris O’Donnell as Hemingway and Sandra Bullock as Agnes (1997).

  I have drawn on the biographies and studies of Hemingway in English and Italian listed in the Bibliography, and on the three volumes of Hemingway’s collected letters published by the Cambridge University Press, as well as the Selected Letters 1917–1961 edited by Carlos Baker. The writer’s archive of letters, manuscripts and photographs, donated by his wife Mary, is held in the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Some scholars regard AE Hotchner’s memoirs as not altogether reliable. On the other hand, as Linda Patterson Miller points out in the Spring 2016 edition of The Hemingway Review, they Acknowledgements and Sources “ring true” emotionally and deal with “a pivotal time in Hemingway’s life that would inspire thereafter the predominant themes of his art – betrayal, remorse and possible redemption through art”.

  My thanks to Ilse and Barbara Schwepcke at Haus Publishing, and to Emma Henderson, my editor at Haus; to the Hemingway Foundation and Society; to Yessenia Santos, Senior Permissions Manager at Simon and Schuster, and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust; and to Mark Cirino, Associate Professor of English and the Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair of English at Evansville University, Indiana, and General Editor of the Reading Hemingway series for Kent State University press.

  My greatest debts are to the late Giovanni Cecchin, former visiting lecturer at Princeton, whose detailed and indefatigable research into Hemingway and Italy over a period of twenty years is an indispensable resource; and to my wife Julia, who accompanied me on my travels and whose knowledge of Italy was invaluable as ever.

  There are some misunderstandings concerning Hemingway’s Italian experiences: the Milan American Red Cross hospital where Hemingway was treated, and where he fell in love with Agnes, was in Via Cesare Cantu, not Via Manzoni; Jim Gamble, Hemingway’s superior in the mobile canteen service at the front, was not a member of the Procter and Gamble soap dynasty; Elsie Jessup, Agnes von Kurowsky’s fellow nurse and partial model for Catherine Barkley, was American, not English; the foreign minister Hemingway and Guy Hickok visited in San Marino in 1927 was not Mussolini but almost certainly Giuliano Gozi. I may of course have made errors of my own: if so, they are the responsibility of none of the above but mine alone.

  Introduction

  “Sometimes I think we only half live over here. The Italians live all the way”

  Hemingway to his sister Marcelline after his return from the Italian front in 1919.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY is most often associated with Chicago, Florida, 1920s Paris, Spain, Cuba and Africa. But Italy was equally important in his life and work: it gave him his first brush with war at the Austrian front in the First World War (A Farewell to Arms), provided him with inspiration after the Second World War (Across the River and Into the Trees), and helped him to recuperate after he was seriously injured in two plane crashes while on safari in Africa in the 1950s.

  It was also the country in which he met the first great love of his life, Agnes von Kurowsky, and the last, Adriana Ivancich – the two women for whom he felt overwhelming passion, Agnes when he was not yet twenty, Adriana when he was fifty. Ironically both relationships – as far as we know – were platonic: he had four marriages and a number of affairs, but Agnes and Adriana were for Hemingway not just object
s of desire, they were idealised visions of the eternal feminine which captivated him, one at the outset of his action-packed life, the other as it neared its final phase.

  He started out not as a novelist, but as a journalist and foreign correspondent. I had long admired Hemingway’s fiction; when I had the idea for this book after visiting Bassano del Grappa, and started to look into his links with Italy, I found that among the many Hemingway works I already had on my bookshelves were the collected Nick Adams Stories and a first edition of Across the River and Into the Trees. But what also drew me to him was the fact that his fiction is underpinned by the thorough research and memory for detail which is (or should be) part of the craft of journalism.

  He did not keep notes or a journal, he once told his friend and assistant Aaron (AE) Hotchner: he could “just push the recall button and there it is”. The spare and direct minimalist writing style for which he became famous – and which influenced a generation of writers – was first crafted on the Kansas City Star, whose style guide instructed reporters to use short sentences and simple, vigorous language. Hemingway later served as European correspondent for the Toronto Star, covering among other dramas the Greco-Turkish war and meeting Benito Mussolini, both before and after he became Italy’s dictator.

  He led and described a life of action, from bull fighting and deep-sea fishing to big game hunting on safaris. When his early collection of short stories Men Without Women was published in 1927 some reviewers said he was fundamentally a reporter preoccupied with bull fighters, bruisers, touts, gunmen, soldiers, prostitutes, hard drinkers and dope fiends. Like DH Lawrence, whom he admired, he has tended to be seen in our own time as unfashionably misogynist. As Caroline Moorehead notes in her biography of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, his name evokes “masculine swagger”, even “an increasingly drunken slide into belligerence and depression”. According to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, even his sexual prowess was exaggerated: he was often “too distracted to be a consistently good lover”.

  His excessive drinking was legendary. I am indebted to Gregory Dowling of Venice University for pointing out that in Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway’s alter Introduction ego Colonel Cantwell and his Venetian girlfriend Renata consume “1 gin and campari, 1 double-dry Martini, 2 more dry Martinis, 1 Campari gin and soda and 4 more dry Martinis at Harry’s Bar, followed by 1 bottle of Capri Bianco, 1 bottle of Valpolicella, 2 bottles of Champagne (Brut ’42) during the meal, another bottle in the gondola, and a bottle of Valpolicella in the hotel room”. Professor Dowling adds that this surely “takes us a little beyond the bounds of literary realism” – though it undoubtedly reflects Hemingway’s real life attachment to alcohol.

  By the time of his final stay at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice in the 1950s, he was drinking Valpolicella at breakfast followed by martinis, daiquiris, tequila and both Scotch and Bourbon whisky. As early as December 1925 he told a friend from Michigan, Bill Smith, that he had done some “A1 drinking” with Pauline Pfeiffer, the Vogue magazine journalist who would shortly become his second wife. On one occasion he downed two bottles of Beaune with her, followed by a bottle of Chambertin and a bottle of Pommard, plus (though with some help from his fellow writer John Dos Passos) a quart of Haig whisky and “a quart of hot Kirsch”. He claimed he had “never been fitter” and rose every morning with a clear head and “in absolutely swell shape”.

  “I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle”, he wrote to his Russian translator Ivan Kashkin in August 1935. “I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.” Rum was best to steady the nerves before an attack, whisky for keeping out the cold, red wine essential with food. But in reality he suffered (not surprisingly) from chronic liver and kidney problems as well as high blood pressure. He was also accident prone, forever injuring himself sailing, driving, skiing or on safari, and at one stage in Paris brought a glass bathroom skylight down on his head by pulling the wrong chain, causing gashes which required nine stitches.

  And yet, Caroline Moorehead adds, “for a whole generation, the ‘lost generation’ whose malaise he so perfectly captured, he was regarded by many as the finest writer of his age”. Hemingway, Anthony Burgess wrote, was “six-feet-tall, huge-chested, handsome, ebullient, a warrior, a hunter, a fisherman, a drinker. It is the fusion of sensitive and original artist and big-muscled man of action that has made of Ernest Hemingway one of the large international myths of the twentieth century”. As Hadley’s biographer Gioia Diliberto has noted, he disliked “professional beauties and overgroomed socialites”, preferring “strong, intelligent women” who were “not slaves to conventional ideas of femininity”.

  Orson Welles, who went duck shooting with him near Venice, observed that although in his writing Hemingway was “tense and solemn” in pursuit of what was “true and good”, in person he could often be “riotously funny”. He could be snobbish and arrogant: Baron Alberto Franchetti, who as a boy went duck hunting with Hemingway on the family estate near Venice in the 1950s, remembers his father, Nanuk, admonishing the writer for distributing sweets to local children from his limousine, telling him “You are not in Africa now”. Franchetti also remembers Hemingway standing up and challenging the dozen or so other hunters dining with him to knock him down if they could: “They all ran the length of the room and thumped him on the chest with both hands joined together – but he stayed on his feet and went back to his place smiling and happy with his chest puffed out.”

  Franchetti nonetheless recalls that Hemingway was “very affectionate towards me, a lovely person”. For Fernanda Pivano, his Italian translator, the image of Hemingway as “macho” was a “distortion”: in reality he was generous to a fault to others (to Ezra Pound, to John Dos Passos, to Gianfranco Ivancich, Adriana’s brother), was vulnerable, even fragile beneath his blustering exterior, and had a “timid, disarming smile”. Almost all his books, Pivano suggested, were founded on “the struggle between good and evil, in which evil is represented by cowardice and falsity and good is represented by loyalty and courage”.

  Hemingway, Gianfranco thought, was by nature rather shy and diffident behind his bluff exterior, and was extraordinarily sensitive toward others, seeing their strengths and defects “almost as if he had a sixth sense”. “The more our friendship grew”, AE Hotchner wrote in his recent memoir Hemingway in Love, “the more I realized that the stories that had circulated about his gruff, pugnacious personality were a myth invented by people who didn’t know him but judged him by the subjects he wrote about.”

  Countess Roberta Kechler, the daughter of Federico Kechler, who first introduced Hemingway to hunting in the Veneto, remembers his courage in the face of pain when he returned to the region for the last time after the air crashes in Africa. “He was our guest at our estate at San Martino di Codroipo in Friuli for ten days or so while he recovered: the doctors were astonished that he was still alive. But he loved to say ‘I am a fighter’. He was the most generous of beings, generous with his time, and with his intelligence”.

  Hemingway wrote sensitively and passionately about love and death against an Italian backdrop – and it was above all Venice and the Veneto which he came to regard as his second home. It was here that he developed and honed the spare, clear, uncluttered style of carefully chosen words and phrases for which he became famous, and which has been much imitated since. As Ford Madox Ford noted, “His words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place”. Or as Hemingway himself put it in his memoir A Moveable Feast, the task of any writer trying to get started is to write “one true sentence, and then go on from there”.

  Setting out on his writing career as a young man in Paris, he absorbed the authors whose books he borrowed or bought from Sylvia Beach’s left bank library and bookshop, including Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal as well as contemporaries such as Aldous Huxley – and Lawrence, telling Gertrude Stein that although he could not get on w
ith Women in Love Hemingway in Italy he had admired and learned from Sons and Lovers, The White Peacock and stories such as ‘The Prussian Officer’. The admiration was mutual. Lawrence wrote of Hemingway’s early collection of stories In Our Time that it was “a series of successive sketches from a man’s life ... it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man’s life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent.”

  And like Lawrence, Hemingway fell in love with all things Italian, including the language, although he never fully mastered it and often mangled it (“I could never spell Italian and have no dictionary”, he wrote to his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, in 1926 when sending the manuscript of his story ‘In Another Country’). It was “in the Veneto that my grandfather became a man and experienced for the first time the essential things of life – pain and fear in war, and then love and loss, all of which set in motion his fiction”, the writer’s grandson John Hemingway told the Venice newspaper Il Gazzettino in July 2015, during a centenary celebration of Hemingway’s Italian experiences held at Caorle.

  Italian references even worked their way into the original version in 1931 of Death in the Afternoon, which is otherwise about Spain, and had to be excised. “They say everyone loves Italy once and that it is well to go through it young”, Hemingway said in the original version, adding “I loved northern Italy like a fool, truly, the way I had loved northern Michigan”. He listed the places which had captured his heart: Fiesole, Taormina, Rapallo, Milan, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Mestre, Treviso, “all around the Venetian plain” and “all of the Dolomites”.

  It was, above all, the north of Italy that he “really cared about”, Hemingway said. In addition to the Veneto Hemingway remembered most fondly Milan, where his first serious love affair with a Red Cross nurse inspired A Farewell to Arms. It was northern Italy which gave him his first taste of freedom, of passion, of companionship under fire, perhaps too of liberty from the Protestant constrictions of the American heartland in which he had grown up.