Hemingway in Italy Read online

  Some thirty years later he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees, a novel which has its faults, as Burgess noted, yet which pays “eloquent homage to Venice” matched by few other works of fiction. Hemingway, Burgess said, evokes Venice’s stone and waters, “the views of Torcello and Murano from the lagoon, the cold mornings, the shops and the market”, to the point where you can practically taste the city of the sea.

  Hemingway came to share not only the Italian love of food, wine, landscape and art but also the attitudes and assumptions which underlie Mediterranean culture, even converting – or so he claimed – to Roman Catholicism. As Rena Sanderson has observed, for Hemingway Italy was forever the land where he could recapture a time when he was “young, handsome and gifted, and for the first time knew war and love – and when life was so full of surprises, promises and great expectations, it may have seemed like heaven on earth”.

  Writing a story about the war in 1919, Hemingway had his hero declare: “But did you ever see a sunrise from Mount Grappa or know the feel of a June twilight in the Dolomites? Or taste the Strega they have in Cittadella? Or walk through Vicenza at night under a bombing moon? There’s a lot to war beside fighting you know.” The thoughts are expressed by his character, Pickles McCarty, but surely also reflect his own as he recalls the perfume of “those big purple flowers” hanging over the white walls and walking “in the moonlight down to the trattoria”.

  It was Italy where Hemingway first fell in love, and Italy where he first faced the very real danger of death. He returned to it again and again, insisting on showing both his first wife, Hadley, and Mary, his fourth and last, the landscapes of his youth. He would surely have agreed whole heartedly with the French novelist George Sand, who wrote that “Just on the point of leaving Italy, I begin to get acclimatised to it. I shall come again, for having once tasted of that country, one feels as though expelled from Paradise."

  1

  War in the Dolomites

  “I’m an old Veneto boy myself. I love it and know it quite well”

  Hemingway to Bernard Berenson

  HEMINGWAY IS STILL REMEMBERED in Venice today for his famous frequenting of Harry’s Bar, the Rialto and the Locanda Cipriani on the island of Torcello, and for his long association with the Hotel Gritti Palace, where he adopted scampi and Valpolicella as the “ideal cure” while recovering there from injuries sustained on safari in Africa.

  But it was the Venice region, the Veneto, which Hemingway experienced first, at the age of just eighteen, as a land and people caught up in the tragic, exhausting final days of the First World War. The Veneto, in the North East of Italy, is bordered to the West by Lombardy, to the East by Friuli Venezia Giulia, and to the South by Emilia-Romagna, while in the North it meets the South Tyrol – formerly part of Austria, now Trentino-Alto Adige – and Austria itself.

  It offers an enchanting and varied landscape, from the mountains of the North with their forests, peaks and waterfalls to the flat coastal plains and the soft green hills and vineyards around Treviso, Padua, Vicenza and Verona. Today we think of the Veneto as the land of Palladian villas, of great painters – Titian, Giorgione, Bellini, Veronese – and of world famous wines – Prosecco, Soave, Bardolino, Pinot Grigio, Valpolicella – all against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty, from the Dolomites to the Po Valley, Lake Garda and the Venetian lagoons.

  But a hundred years ago the Veneto was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the First World War along the 400-mile Italian front. When war broke out in August 1914, Italy was at least nominally a member of the Triple Alliance together with Germany and Austro-Hungary. It did not take part however, arguing that the Alliance was meant to be defensive. In fact Italy harboured long-held resentment against Austro-Hungary, which had taken control of several regions in Italy as part of the 1815 Congress of Vienna peace accord following the Napoleonic Wars.

  Well aware of this, British and French politicians secretly persuaded Italy to change sides at the 1915 Treaty of London, signed by the Italian Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino. In their repeated offensives, known as the eleven battles of the Isonzo River, the Italians outnumbered their foes (and former allies) by three to one, at least at first, but failed to make gains, apart from capturing Gorizia. The Italian army had suffered from losses of equipment and ammunition in its campaign in Libya three years earlier, but also from low troop morale, with many soldiers distrustful of their army commander, General Luigi Cadorna.

  The weather in the “mountain war” was often atrocious: soldiers were killed as much by avalanches as by gunfire or shells. Several times in two years of fighting Italian forces broke through Austrian lines but were forced to withdraw because their supply lines were inadequate. Meanwhile the Austrians were given a boost by the arrival of German reinforcements, and in October 1917 the battered Italians were decisively defeated at the battle of Caporetto, a name which echoes down the years to this day as a symbol of national humiliation.

  The Caporetto disaster (the backdrop to A Farewell to Arms) gave rise to the myth that the Italian troops lacked the will to fight, and were even cowards. As Spencer di Scala notes in his biography of the wartime Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando however, although there were cases of mutiny and desertion “Italy’s military effort hardly deserves the dismissals its received from its allies after the conflict”.

  The myth can be traced, he suggests, to the tendency of General Cadorna to blame his troops for setbacks which in fact were due to his own incompetence. Certainly Hemingway later described Italian troops as “the bravest troops in the Allied armies” whose fighting in the impassable mountains deserved “all the credit in the world”.

  By the time the young Hemingway volunteered to drive Red Cross ambulances at the front, the Italians had retreated to last-ditch defensive lines near Venice. Now, however, it was the turn of the Austrians to founder because their rapid advance had outstripped their supply lines, and Italy’s turn to be reinforced by troops from Britain and France. British forces included the 2nd Battalion Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), which among other feats played a crucial role in the surrender of the Austrian garrison at the river island of Papadopoli. Italy also benefited from the help of the United States, which supplied Italy with badly-needed strategic materials such as coal and steel.

  In what went down in history as the Battle of the Piave River, the Austrians – now deserted by their German allies, who in the Spring of 1918 were under pressure on the Western Front – mounted a two-pronged offensive, only to find that thanks to information given to them by Austrian deserters, the Italians were waiting for them. In October 1918, under a new commander, General Armando Diaz, Italy launched its own offensive across the Piave, crushing the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto. Austro-Hungary sued for peace, and an armistice was signed at Padua in November. It was the beginning of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Hemingway only became involved in the war a few months before it ended – but the experience was so profound it stayed with him for the rest of his life. The United States finally entered the war in April 1917, and American engagement in this far-away conflict captured the imagination of a teenager whose boyhood interests had hitherto been closer to home – fishing, hunting and camping in the lakeside woods of Northern Michigan.

  He was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, a leafy middleclass Chicago suburb: his father, Clarence Edward (known as Ed), was a doctor, and his mother Grace was a musician, singer and artist. They were a church-going family (Ernest had four sisters and a younger brother), with a summer home on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan, which gave the young Hemingway his life-long love of the outdoors.

  At high school in Oak Park he excelled at boxing, athletics and water polo. But his other passion was English, and the school newspaper, The Trapeze, in 1916 published his first piece, about a local performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of Bach, Brahms and Wagner: no doubt with advice from his mother he used surprisingly professional musical terms
(“excellent staccato work”, “smoothly flowing motif ”). In high school he also began to write stories, including ‘The Judgement of Manitou’, in which a Michigan Indian hunter who has falsely accused his white companion of stealing shoots himself after stepping into a bear trap, reflecting that this is the fate decreed by Manitou, an Indian god.

  Impatient to be a proper writer, Hemingway decided to forego college and instead head straight into journalism. Thanks to an uncle who lived in Kansas City and knew the chief editorial writer on the Kansas City Star he spent a six month stint as a trainee local reporter on the paper, where he studied the style book diligently to acquire the house style of “vigorous English” and “short sentences” while “not forgetting to strive for smoothness”.

  But the young trainee also longed for adventure: he was fascinated by military history, especially the American Civil War, in which both his maternal grandfather Ernest Hall (born in Sheffield) and his paternal grandfather Anson Hemingway had fought. The chance for action came in the form of the American Red Cross, which was recruiting ambulance drivers for the Italian front. He had already volunteered for the Missouri Home Guard: now came the prospect of adventure abroad.

  Hemingway may have been influenced by Hugh Walpole, the English writer who at the outbreak of war in 1914 had been rejected for army service because of poor eyesight and had instead enlisted in the Russian Red Cross, an experience he described in his novel The Dark Forest, which the young Hemingway had read (and in which the hero falls in love with a nurse). Hemingway later claimed that, like Walpole, he had applied for army service but been turned down because of an eye defect (he had a weakness in his left eye), although biographers have found no record of such an application.

  Whatever the truth, toward the end of May 1918, after rejecting the offer of a safer job away from the frontline dealing with logistics, he found himself sailing on a battered French transport ship called – appropriately enough – the Chicago (“a rotten old tub”) from New York to Bordeaux. He and other volunteers went to Paris, which at the time was under bombardment from German artillery, and finally reached Milan in early June, lodging in some style not at a hostel but at the Hotel Vittoria near the city centre. Before leaving the US the American Red Cross had given the newly recruited drivers the rank of second lieutenant and issued them with US army officer uniforms.

  To this Hemingway, who thought the uniform looked “like a million dollars”, added stylish cordovan (or cordwain) leather boots and later a Sam Browne belt. His first duty was distinctly unglamorous on the other hand: in a baptism of fire (his own words), Hemingway was sent on his first day in Milan to a bombed munitions factory at Bollate, 12 miles from the city, to collect the bodies of female workers, an episode he later described in Death in the Afternoon. “One becomes so accustomed to all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking”, he wrote.

  The grisly scene he found was in stark contrast to the “pleasant, though dusty, ride through the beautiful Lombard countryside”: arriving where the munitions plant had been, “some of us were put to patrolling about those large stocks of munitions which for some reason had not exploded, while others were put at extinguishing a fire which had gotten into the grass of an adjacent field”.

  They were then ordered to pick the charred remains of the dead women off the surrounding barbed wire fence and take them to an improvised mortuary. What struck Hemingway most forcibly was the fact that some of the women’s long hair had been completely burned away. “I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments.”

  Back in Milan, Hemingway and his equally novice Red Cross colleagues tried to come to terms with this “unreal” experience, and dealt with it by being detached, analysing (as he put it) the way a human body could be “blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell”. There was also time for his first taste of a city he would get to know better shortly – the Duomo, the cafes of the adjacent Vittorio Emmanuele Gallery, the San Siro race track.

  But within a few days he was at the Italian front where, as he later wrote, the 18-year-old Hemingway lost forever “the illusion of immortality”. Italy was “the strongest experience of his youth, the one that made him a man and the writer we know”, says Angelo Ceron, curator of an exhibition marking the centenary of the First World War at Villa Fiorita, in Monastier di Treviso, which at the time was on the frontline. “He arrived in Italy from the States full of ideals, a non-drinker and pure, and during his stay in the Veneto he lived through very powerful and shocking experiences: war, death, love and alcohol”.

  Some insights into the Venice and Veneto of the time can be gleaned from the letters of Hemingway’s fellow novelist John Dos Passos, who had also volunteered as an ambulance driver and was at first stationed at Dolo, ten miles from Venice. In January 1918 he described going on a “little steamer” through the “cold lagoon water” from Fusina to Venice, only to find the city “swathed in sandbags”, the elaborately carved front of the Doges Palace “bricked up for fear of aero bombs”, shops and shutters closed, windows boarded up, and the city inhabited by soldiers and sailors “and a few scared civilians”. And yet “there was enough life left in it to excite me considerably”.

  The flat landscape of the Piave district is today a mixture of farmland, vineyards, housing estates and light industries. What was once a battlefield is now bisected by the Venice-Trieste motorway. But the villas Hemingway discovered are still there, as are the canals and the straight roads lined with plane trees, and the Dolomites looming above. It is not difficult to recapture the mixture of excitement and enchantment the young Hemingway felt as he arrived in what had been transformed from a placid agricultural area into a war zone.

  The first American ambulance drivers had arrived toward the end of 1917, and were divided into five sections: No 1 at Bassano del Grappa, No 2 at Roncade, No 3 first at Dolo then at Casale sul Sile, No 4 at Schio and No 5 at Fanzolo. Hemingway was assigned on 9 June 1918 to Schio, below Mount Pasubio, southeast of Rovereto and north of Vicenza, where the Section IV unit drove battleship-grey ambulances with a red cross painted on the roof and sides.

  Hemingway and his fellow volunteers (many of them students from Harvard) were housed in a former wool warehouse by a stream, the 30,000 square metre Lanificio Cazzola, with the upper floor once used to store wool lined with army camp beds, with a trunk at the foot of each one and a giant stars and stripes hanging from the ceiling. A plaque on the building – now converted into apartments – records in both Italian and English the gratitude of local people to Hemingway and the other Section IV drivers for their “work of human solidarity”.

  Hemingway also found time to write for the Schio Red Cross newsletter, called Ciao. The mess or canteen on the ground floor, run by the Italian army, offered spaghetti, rabbit stew and local wine: when off duty the volunteer drivers enjoyed even better fare at an inn in the town centre, the Albergo Due Spade in Via Carducci, where Hemingway had first lodged – now a charming osteria with a stone plaque on the frontage portraying Hemingway – or drank beer at the Stella d’Italia and the Alla Fraschetta. Another favourite haunt was the Osteria Madonnetta (‘Little Madonna’) in the picturesque town of Marostica, situated between Schio and Bassano del Grappa, home to another Red Cross ambulance base.

  Little more than a decade old at the time (it was founded in 1904) the Madonetta still has the same tables and chairs, according to the present owner, Wladimir Guerra. “My grandmother Amelia remembered the Americans who came here – in fact they came so often we were known as the Osteria degli Americani. She said they mostly drank – there was not much to eat, and in those days you had to bring your own bread to go with the wine.”

  Hemingway must have been enchanted by Marostica, which boasts two ancient castles, one in the town and another on the hill above, and which just after the First World War found
fame as the site of a living human chess game, still played on its main piazza. There were also R and R trips to Mestre, whose brothel, the Villa Rosa, Hemingway portrayed in fictional form in A Farewell to Arms – though according to his Red Cross colleagues in reality Hemingway resisted the charms of the girls and blushed when they accosted him.

  What he really wanted to do was to get closer to the war. Before leaving for Italy he had thought of war as “something like a football game”, according to his family, with America as the home team and the Austrians and Germans as the other side. The reality was rather different – and changed him for life.

  2

  Fossalta di Piave

  “I’m going to see if I can’t find out where the war is”

  Hemingway to Ted Brumback, fellow Red Cross driver

  PLEASANT AS LIFE in Schio might be, the war was very close – and the young Hemingway was impatient to take part in it. The Italians had occupied a trench line on the Asiago plateau and were holding it against the odds. In A Farewell to Arms, published a decade or so later, Hemingway gives a vivid description of the “flashes from artillery” lighting up the brown bare mountains beyond the crops and fruit trees.

  The backdrop to the story is Gorizia, but the atmosphere it conveys is that experienced by the author in the Dolomites.

  Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motortractors ... To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too. But it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain.