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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The first meeting between Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles ended in thrown punches and exchanged insults. This most unlikely of pairings would go on to have a tumultuous friendship that would last for the next twenty-five years. Lyrical and unafraid to tackle the difficulty of conveying the lives of two legendary self-mythologisers, this fascinating literary biography explores their intersecting paths, passions and love for Spain. Brought together by the Spanish Civil War and bound by bullfighting and the high life, Hemingway and Welles found their lives and art intertwining for more than two decades, as their fates gradually began to mirror one another. Pete Carvill, author of the acclaimed Death of a Boxer, uses extensive research and literary flourish to bring to life this epic tale of two of the twentieth century's most formidable figures.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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i“Orson Welles’s and Ernest Hemingway’s histrionic lives both occupied the twentieth century like Moby Dick in a goldfish bowl. Finally, here is a book that offers the rare amusement and pleasure of how their mythic paths crossed on the world’s stage. There are fine moments from Pete Carvill’s A Duel of Bulls that feel like little treasures from an unpublished chapter of A MoveableFeast that finally found their way to the page.”
Brin-Jonathan Butler, author of The Domino Diaries and The Grandmaster
“In this ambitious, beautifully written book, Pete Carvill playfully and exactingly explores not only the never-before-examined relationship between two of the most influential artists of the twentieth century but also the interplay and nature of self-myth versus truth in art and in all of our lives. A Duel of Bulls is a marvellous book I wish I’d written and one I will not only reread time and again but will damn well purchase as presents for friends.”
Davis Miller, author of The Tao of Muhammad Ali and The Tao of Bruce Lee
“An evocative and atmospheric book, full of imagination and empathy for the men at its heart and the connections between them. From its conception to its execution, it tells a powerful tale about people and the stories they tell – the stories of others and of themselves.”
Paul Scraton, author of A Dream of White Horses, Built on Sand and In the Pines
ii“A Duel of Bulls tells the story of two egomaniacs of cultural history whose first encounter led to a fistfight. In his literary biography of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, Pete Carvill transforms their relationship into a pulsating portrayal of men who gave everything for their art. The historical backdrop, illuminating scenes and witty dialogue come together in this intriguing book and bring two titans of literature and cinema to life.”
Carmen Eller, author of A Year in Moscow
“Pete Carvill deftly conjures the intersecting trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s great male egos as they bloat their way from New York to Seville, from Broadway to the front lines, in a patter of wisecracking dialogue and clever turns of phrase. You don’t have to be a Hemingway or Welles fan to get swept up in the antics of men so mighty they reduce world wars, geopolitical shifts and the lives of bit-part players from Rita Hayworth to Martha Gellhorn to trials – all in quest of the grit and guts needed to live up to their own legends.”
Ruby Russell, author of Doing It All
iii
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v
For Laurence and Kevin.
Some of us fell along the way. This book is dedicated to two of them.
Pete.
vi
vii
‘Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.’
– Orson Welles, F for Fake
‘I’d say you were doing something pretty dangerous this time. Mixing fact and fiction.’
– Mr Popescu, The Third Man
viii
Contents
Introduction
Storytelling (2025)
‘Existence,thephysicaluniverse,isbasicallyplayful.’
– Alan Watts
Writing is easier than any other profession. You sit and write or type, and eventually you wind up with something that you then have to cut down, edit, rewrite or simply dump. There are always fears about getting the facts and, most importantly, the words right.
But it is not a hard job, certainly nowhere near as tiresome as mining or nursing. There is no great muscle strain, dealing with the general public or – until the final stages at least, when an editor gets involved – any kind of boss.
Fears, however, remain, as well as challenges.
There have been challenges in producing this book; to write ADuelofBulls:HemingwayandWellesinLoveandWaris to write about the two, at times intertwined, lives of two men renowned for their capacity to embellish, lie and – frequently – bullshit.
Parsing fact from fiction is hard here and impossible there. And there are missed connections, inferences either ignored or paid xiitoo-close attention and missing facts. Lives lived so fully that they cannot be contained within a single book.
That is why this is not a serious academic work on either Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. There are as many facts included as possible, along with some creative licence taken in places to string them together. But A Duel of Bulls is primarily a form of entertainment. A piece of fun. Something to take you from one moment into the next.
There will be, by necessity, errors and omissions, both purposeful and accidental. And, as both men were unreliable narrators of their own lives, it would be churlish not to continue that tradition in these pages.
The academics will find holes and cavities in this work. They will say that this thing or that thing is missing, that a certain person or event or turning point has not been accounted for or has been miscalculated in its importance. That a certain event or conversation did not happen thatway, if it happened at all. But the academics can have their books; this one is mine. Besides, there is always some fool who turns up and ruins the fun for everyone by knowing the correct answer.
And with that, our story begins…
Prologue
‘He Was a Very Close Friend of Mine’ (1973)
It was the end of the year and he was back, in London, on another chat show. It had been twelve years since Ernest Hemingway’s death, and it was only another twelve before his own. Orson Welles had reached the time of his life when he would talk more about what he had done rather than what he was going to do.
He was as large as he ever would be, and he sat deeply in the black leather chair, his stomach out halfway to his knees. He was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt, with an olive-green light jacket. His hair and beard were mostly grey. He was fifty-eight years old and still struggling, despite everything, despite of or maybe becauseof his reputation, to make his films. There was this project and that project, another project here and another one there, all of them calling for his attention, all of them needing money. So he went from country to country, from sofa to dressing room to film sets that were not his to potential investors, and he tried to drum up interest at each. Just a few more dollars, a bit more funding, and he would be able to finish something, finish anything.
He had already told the host to put aside his questions. The best xivthing to do, he said, was just to talk. Besides, he was practised at that, able to recite and retell his stories easily. And he had always been a performer, so it was easy to entertain this crowd. Or any crowd.
He picked up his walking stick. ‘Well, I don’t think I’m going to sparkle tonight, Michael,’ he said to the host, a practised glint in his eye, ‘but I have my stick and if you try one of those in-depth interviews, you ought to know that I’m armed!’
They spoke for ten minutes or so before the subject of bullfighting came up.
‘Are you, in fact,’ asked the host, ‘also still interested – and I know it was a passion of yours in previous years – in bullfighting?’
‘Yes,’ said Welles, ‘but less – I’m interested in what I remember. I don’t like it much any more.’
‘Why is that?’
Welles lit his cigar and put it in his mouth. He inhaled. ‘Well, two things.’ He took the cigar out of his mouth. ‘First of all, bullfighting, as somebody once said very well, is indefensible and irresistible. And it is irresistible when everything is as it ought to be, both with the beast – the sacrificial beast – and with the brave man who meets that brave animal for a ritualistic encounter.’
Welles reflected on the bullfights. He shook his hand above his head, a wave that turned into him smoothing down his hair.
‘I’m not going to go into all that mystique,’ he said, ‘which has been pretty worn out. But now the fact is that it has become an industry which depends on, for its existence, the tourist trade, so it’s become folkloric. And I hate anything which is folkloric, you know. But I haven’t turned against bullfighting because it needs a lot of Japanese in the front row to keep it going, and it does. I’ve turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who xvwas a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting. He said, “I’ve killed enough animals, and I’m ashamed of myself.”’
Welles thought about the hundreds, thousands, of bullfights that he had seen and of what he had learned from them. He thought the time had been wasted. He said he had seen enough of the animals die.
‘Wasn’t I living second-hand through the lives of those toreros who were my friends?’ he reflected. ‘Wasn’t I living and dying second-hand? Wasn’t there something finally voyeuristic about it? I suspect my afición.’
His voice changed. An admission. ‘I still go to bullfights,’ he said, almost with a shrug. ‘I’m not totally reformed.’
The host pushed a little more on bullfighting. There was another famous American afficionado of it, he said. Ernest Hemingway.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ the host asked.
‘He was a very close friend of mine,’ said Welles. ‘I knew him on and off for many years. We had a very strange relationship.’
The line sounded practised, the default defence to the question. But there were notes of truth. And there was certainly more there, maybe more so than even Welles could articulate.xvi
Act One
Two Bulls at Dawn (1929 to 1937)2
1
The Most Celebrated Writer in America Is Bored (1929 to 1932)
It was 1929 and Ernest Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida, where he liked to rise early in the morning when the air was still cool, go to his desk and write 500 words.
It would become too hot after that, with the dense and humid air seeming to invade everything. The noises would come, too, with people toing and froing in the streets, their conversations being carried along on the air and into the office he used. It was then that he would take himself off to play with Patrick, his second son and the first of the two boys he would have with Pauline, Wife #2, for a few hours.
He could be found later on most days in the bar of Sloppy Joe’s, over on Duval Street. He liked it there. They did not care in that place about what he wore. It was a thing that they had in common, as he did not care about what he wore, either. Pauline would always chide him for wearing this shirt or that shirt or for not having a tie. But he was comfortable in those old and dirty shorts, cinched together with a knotted rope. And the people down there, in the south of Florida, already knew him so well that changing his look 4at this point… Well, that would be something false, wouldn’t it? A piece of his life without the ring of truth to it that he tried to live by.
At the end of each week, he would go to the fights, where they would sometimes let him referee. But if he was not in the ring, he would sit and drink beer that had been stored in large chests of cold water and ice. And he was happy there, too, on those evenings when he could just sit on the low wooden benches with the heat hanging in the air and flecks of cold water dotting his hands, wrists and arms. But if he did get up, he would sometimes hear the voices say as he climbed up those three steps and went between the ropes, ‘Hey, that’s Ernest Hemingway, the writer. He lives around here.’
Those words were always said with a whisper, like a secret thrown quickly between friends. But he liked the recognition. He liked people to know who he was, even if he insisted that everyone treat him like anybody else.
It seemed to be a good life, but he felt like a man with an itch in his lower back that he was unable to scratch. Uncomfortable, most of the time.
His wife Pauline was dedicated to him, and that was good in its own way. And his books were selling. And the people and the critics liked those books. And he was treated like someone whose views were worth listening to. And that was good, too.
The thing with Pauline’s uncle Gus was one that he did not like, but he did not say anything. The house was Gus’s and so was the money that maintained it. And then there was Pauline’s trust fund, and it was that and Gus’s money that paid for the trips and the lifestyle. He loved all those things, and it was those things – the freedom to do anything he wanted, paid for by that money – that made him more than just a writer.
He would admit that it was a good life. He could admit that. Even 5if the life was not yet entirely his, like a suit and a mask that he was pulling on slowly. The only way to guarantee success, he thought, was to be successful.
Sometimes, Florida scared him. The heat and the family made him feel blocked. He feared becoming stagnant. He needed something new. He was a fiction writer, and the critics and the public loved him for that. He had done The Sun Also Rises. That was the big one. Then Men Without Women. Then there was A Farewell to Arms. Everything he wrote was moulded from the clay of his own life. He had mined those early trips to Spain with Hadley, Wife #1, for the first book, then that time with the nurse in Italy for Farewell.
That taking of his own life and moulding it was something that he had to do. He was no good at plots; they were not something for an old newspaper man. He could deal in facts and stories but not in the whimsical twists and turns it took to falsely snare a reader.
The public knew it. His publishers knew it. And because he wrote from his own life, he thought that he would write now about life properly. And death.
He had loved Spain almost from the start. That had been with Stein – his writer friend, his mentor. She was the one who had got him into the bullfights with her talk and her pictures of the torero Joselito. That was in 1923.
‘You should see it, Ernest,’ she had told him one afternoon in Paris. ‘It’s all there.’
‘It’s all there?’
‘Life and death. Is there anything else?’
‘What about the poor horses?’
‘They are indeed poor. But there is also Joselito. And if you cannot 6get to him – and you will, because I will introduce you – there is his brother Gallo.’
‘I want to write about life and death,’ he told her.
‘Then you need to go to Spain. It is the only place where you can see violent death now that all the wars are long over.’
‘I very much want to go.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I’m trying to learn to write, starting with the simplest things. And one of the simplest things of all, and the most fundamental, is violent death.’
He travelled to Spain with friends that summer in 1923. It was his first time. They spent a month there, starting in Madrid and then moving around: Seville, Ronda, Grenada, Toledo. They saw every bullfight that they could. Then he went back to Paris and to Hadley, and he brought her down with him to Pamplona. They became aficionados of the bullfights.
He wrote later in a letter to his former Chicago roommate: ‘Spain is damn good in hot weather.’
Lower down on the page, he wrote:
You’d be crazy about a really good bullfight, Bill. It isn’t just brutal like they always told us. It’s a great tragedy – and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skills and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.
He managed to persuade his newspaper, the Toronto Star, to pay him for two articles on the subject in 1923. ‘Bullfighting is not a 7sport,’ he wrote piously. ‘It was never meant to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull.’ It was less a guide to the fights and the festivals that he wrote but more a guide to himself, an advert of the life he was living. He wrote of Pamplona and said that it was where he had seen the best fights.
He wrote about bullfighting again the next year, in 1924, in In Our Time. These were small and brief pieces, a bundled-together collection of short stories, almost dashed off. But Spain held to him.
Maxwell Perkins became his editor in 1925, and the first thing Hemingway did was write him a letter about bullfighting.
‘I hope some day,’ wrote Hemingway,
to have a sort of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta of the Bull Ring, a very big book with some wonderful pictures. But one has to save all winter to be able to bum in Spain in the summer and writing classics, I’ve always heard, takes some time. Somehow, I don’t care about writing a novel and I like to write short stories and I like to work at the bullfight book so I guess I’m a bad prospect for a publisher anyway.
He and Hadley kept going back. They took more friends with them in 1925. Everyone fought on that trip, but it was good material.
He came home and wrote The Sun Also Rises. He based it on the friends. He based it on the good material. But when he and Hadley went to Pamplona in 1926, Pauline was there and that meant that his first marriage was ending.
Hadley gave him a divorce in 1927, and he married Pauline a few days later. Then they went to Florida, and he wrote books and articles, but he carried on thinking about Spain and the bulls. There 8was a book there, he felt, and he wanted people to understand about the bullfights, to know that they were not as cruel or brutal as they seemed to be. And he wanted it for himself, to be the great American voice on bulls and men.
Pauline went with him to Spain. He wanted to go. She wanted to be with him. They visited just after they married.
He went back to America and wrote A Farewell to Arms. It made him think of the nurse in Italy. He wanted to think of other things.
His father died a few months later. Dr Clarence Hemingway had put a gun in his mouth. A note was struck.
Ernest Hemingway needed to think again about something else.
He decided to go back to Spain and write of the bulls and the men who fought them.
It was September 1929 and Hemingway had been following the bulls around Spain for weeks. Now, he was looking for the Cafe Gran Via in the centre of Madrid. There was one torero that he was keen to meet.
The day was hot, and he was sweating in the heat of the late afternoon. It was thicker and fuller than in Florida, and it settled and moistened his armpits and the backs of his legs. The skin of his bad knee squeaked against the rubber brace that kept it in place.
He saw the cafe then, and his eyes settled on the party sat outside. He scanned the crowd for a face familiar from newsprint: the Jewish bullfighter from New York, the one that the papers wrote all the stories about.
‘Sidney Franklin?’
A small, lithe man with short red hair and pale skin looked over to him. ‘I am he,’ he said. He nodded.
‘I believe my friend wrote to you about me.’
Franklin looked at the sweaty, dishevelled heavyset man in front 9of him. Hemingway’s clothes were wrinkled. There were flashes of grey in the dark stubble blanketing his chin. ‘He did?’
‘Yes. Guy Hickok from the Brooklyn Eagle. He said he would write to you about me.’
Franklin shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But please sit down and have a drink. Where are you from?’
Hemingway took an empty seat opposite Franklin. ‘Oak Park, near Chicago. But I live in Florida now.’
‘I’m from Brooklyn. Your name?’
‘Ernest Hemingway.’
There was a murmur behind Franklin. Some heads turned in the direction of Hemingway.
‘I’ve heard your name.’
‘Hickok wrote to you, then?’
‘No, but I know your name.’
‘Maybe you have read some of my stories or one of my books?’
Franklin waved dismissively. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. Are you a writer?’
Hemingway laughed. ‘Yes but probably not much of one.’
‘Would you like a drink? You can order anything you want.’
‘Thank you, but that wouldn’t be right. I’ll get this.’
A waiter came over. Hemingway asked for a bottle of Pernod.
They began to talk beyond pleasantries.
‘Tell me, Ernest,’ said Franklin. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you “Ernest”?’
‘Others call me “Papa”.’
Franklin nodded. ‘OK, Papa. What are you writing now?’
‘Not much. I have a new book coming out in a few months. I’m calling it A Farewell to Arms. After that, I’m going to write something about this. Maybe about you.’
10‘About me?’
‘About the bullfight.’
‘And what is so interesting about the bullfight?’
‘Everything.’
‘That is a good answer.’ Franklin reached over and took Hemingway’s bottle of Pernod and poured an inch of it into his dirty wine glass. ‘Do you know what I’m not going to do, Papa?’ he asked, finishing the cloudy liquid in one gulp.
‘No.’
‘I’m not going to go back to my hometown of Brooklyn until I am famous across the whole of Spain. And I’m going to make America fall in love with the bulls. I think they just might, like they have fallen in love with all kinds of sports.’
‘That is my ambition, too. It begins in Spain.’
He and Pauline went back up to Paris afterwards to see the old friends who still spoke with him after their affair and his divorce from Hadley. He asked those people not to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald where he and Pauline were.
He and Fitzgerald had a strange relationship. The younger Hemingway had often turned to the older, more erudite Fitzgerald for guidance. It was Fitzgerald who had suggested that Hemingway remove the first eight pages of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway did.
But then Hemingway had become successful, and he had written three books while Fitzgerald had become a drunk. He embarrassed Hemingway, and he grasped onto their friendship with greased, stubby fingers. Hemingway had loved him. Fitzgerald had loved him, too.
Hemingway went to see Stein, and she compared him and Fitzgerald.
‘The thing is, Ernest,’ she said, ‘that you both have flames. That is 11your talent. Scott’s flame shines brighter than yours, but he is going to burn out quicker than you. You will go longer.’
Hemingway thought she meant that Fitzgerald was better. Fitzgerald apologised for Stein’s comments. He hoped that Hemingway would still love him.
He began writing Death in the Afternoon in March 1930. He had lived with the bullfights and with Spain in his head for years.
Uncle Gus helped him out again. He wrote to friends in Spain and asked them to send books and magazines to his nephew-in-law, and then uncle Gus thought again and sent a telegram so that they would get the message quicker.
Hemingway sank into the books when they came. He read. He took notes. He wrote paragraphs here and there. He thought about Franklin and included him.
In July, he and Pauline were back from Spain, and they took a road trip to Wyoming, driving from town to town, looking for a cool and quiet spot for him to write.
They ended up in Montana, and he wrote his 500 words in the morning, and then he would hunt and fish in the afternoon. Pauline read what he wrote, offered suggestions. Hemingway did not use anything that she did not like.
He picked up more injuries. They added to the concussions in Italy and in France – one in war, the other in peace. An injured knee led to septicaemia. He cut his face open when a horse he was riding on bolted through trees. The stitches gave him a permanent scowl.
In November, he was driving through the night outside Park City, Montana. It was he and the writer John Dos Passos and their friend Floyd Allington riding through the night, drunk. The road 12was bad. Some headlights blitzed him, and he jerked the car up onto the side of the road and over it and into a ditch. It rolled. He broke his arm.
He spent one night on a shared ward in the hospital and, when the staff learned who he was, they moved him to a private room. The break in his arm started above the elbow and curled its way up, severe enough that the doctors needed to operate to reset it.
Hemingway was miserable. It was his right arm, and he could not work. The nerves may have been dead. He may not, physically, have been able to write again.
Pauline came to him and offered to take notes. He waved her away. ‘I’m a writer,’ he said. ‘I have to be able to write!’
The bullfighting book moved out of his grasp. He could still see it like a mirage on the horizon. He knew the route from here to there. It moved further away.
He stayed in bed for two months. His hair and his beard grew long. His arm stayed in a splint for the longest time. He hated being immobilised. He believed that his body should not betray him. He hated the pain. He thought that if pain was to have any meaning, then it had to end. But the pain did not end.
His mood blackened. He cancelled a planned safari trip to Africa. Uncle Gus had been paying for that, too.
He went back to Key West with the arm still useless. It began to heal weeks later. Shimmers of feeling ran along his fingers and up through his arm. Long-dormant muscles began to reawaken.
One day, Pauline’s mother went to see him.
‘How are you, Ernest?’ she asked. She would never call him ‘Papa’.
He shook his head, looked into her eyes. ‘The only car I want from now on’, he said, ‘is one that is guaranteed to kill the driver!’
13Pauline stepped over to them. She put her hand on her mother’s arm. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Papa is OK.’
Living with him was uneasy for five months. He thought of Spain and of fishing. He thought of all the things that he could not do with this arm healing only gradually.
He would snap. His mood would blacken. He needed to write.
Spain moved further away.
The following year, 1931, began with Pauline pregnant again. He wanted a girl. He did not know what was coming.
The arm healed. He began to write again. He fiddled with short things to reopen the gates. The mind began to dredge up words, phrases, structures. He got them down on paper.
They bought a house. It was theirs.
Key West had been poor but was now becoming rich. The money flowed in. Hemingway liked to believe, even if it were not true, that he had been poor once, starving in a cold apartment in Paris.
He and Pauline sailed separately back to Europe. She went to Paris. He settled in Madrid and watched bullfights. The monarchists clashed with the police. People died.
A Spanish painter named Luis Quintanilla told him that there needed to be a revolution in Spain.
‘It’s a necessity,’ he said. ‘A forest needs an occasional fire so that it does not choke itself.’
Hemingway dipped between Spain and France, travelling around the first and then popping up to see Pauline, pregnant, in Paris. He saw Sidney Franklin again in Madrid.
In July 1931, Hemingway took his first son, Jack, with him to Pamplona. The boy lived now mostly with his mother in Chicago and 14saw his father only once or twice a year. The boy reminded his father of earlier, happier, simpler times.
Hemingway had given him the middle name of ‘Nicanor’ after a bullfighter. That bullfighter fought that day.
Little Jack, eight years old, sat bored on the rounded stone seats of the Plaza de Toros in Pamplona. He watched one of the people he had been named after stride across the hot sand, plant his legs and kill a bull. He saw the misty spray of blood in the air, and he heard the murmuring and breaths of approval from the crowd. He hated it.
Afterward, the bullfighter Cayetano Ordóñez performed poorly. Ordóñez had been the inspiration for Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway hated him.
The crowd did, too. Boos ran around the arena like the sails of a ship going up. There was a single one at first, thrown down into the ring, where it landed with a thump on the dense sand, but tens, then hundreds of people were throwing their heavy, brown, leather seat cushions into the ring.
Jack tugged at his father’s sleeve. Hemingway’s face was tight. ‘Can I throw mine, too, Papa?’ Jack asked.
‘If you must.’
Jack stood and picked up his cushion in both arms, then squeezed through the people and stepped down to the fence that separated the ring from the spectators. He pushed the cushion up onto its top, then pushed between the metal rails so it fell straight down into the callejón, a great distance from Ordóñez. He went back and sat next to his father.
Hemingway looked ahead. He shifted and twitched, the muscles in his jaw straining like hawsers.
‘Why do you hate him, Papa?’
15Hemingway looked down at his son. ‘Cowardice,’ he said, immediately. The answer was lurking just beneath the surface. It rose and bobbed upon the water. ‘Cowardice, son. If you see him—’ he jabbed his finger in the direction of Ordóñez ‘—if you see him, then you have before you the worst sort of cowardice.’
He kept on writing the book. He added. He pruned. He took photographs and then developed them. He asked Sidney Franklin for his knowledge, and he added that, too, to the pages. He left Pauline, pregnant, in Paris, then went to Madrid to write some more.
They went home to the States in the September after months of being in Europe. They went to Kansas City and rented an apartment.
Gregory Hemingway came into the world on 12 November 1931. His father had wanted a daughter. He did not know what was coming.
Pauline suffered, nearly died. The surgeon had to reopen the wounds and scars from Patrick three years earlier before he pulled Gregory from his mother.
Afterwards, the surgeon went out into the waiting room and saw Hemingway. ‘It’s another boy,’ he said.
‘Another boy?’
‘Yes. Congratulations.’
Hemingway had wanted to call her ‘Pilar’. ‘Another boy?’
‘Congratulations. But your wife – she will not be able to do this again.’
‘Another boy.’
Pauline stayed in the hospital for a month. Hemingway went home to work on Death in the Afternoon.
He worked on the text into 1932. Dos Passos came to visit him in Key West and told him to cut things.
16The book was finished by the middle of January. They took Greg and baptised him.
That night, Hemingway called Dos Passos.
‘Dos, it’s me.’
‘Hem?’
‘Yeah.’ His voice was slurred and soft, like a drunk lover whispering on their way to bed. ‘It’s finished.’
‘Are you drunk, Hem?’
‘Call me “Papa”.’
‘Papa, are you drunk?’
‘A little. But it’s finished.’
‘What is?’
‘The book. The book is finished.’ The line went silent.
Dos Passos waited. He heard a gulp, then the rustle of the handset being covered with a hand. Silence. The rustle again. ‘Hem?’
‘Papa.’
‘Papa.’
‘I cut out all the stuff you hated.’ Another pause. ‘Damn you, because they were good things to go. I think the book is best now. It’s done, and the boy has been christened. And I am a little drunk.’
‘You are a big drunk.’
Hemingway laughed. ‘That’s Dos,’ he said, without explanation, and then hung up the phone.
He fought with the publisher over the photographs. He wanted 100. They offered him sixteen pictures. He fought. They offered him thirty-two. He fought. They let him have sixty-four.
He accepted, then went to Havana to fish for two months.
He slipped into black moods that he tried to lift by writing short stories, small sips of that needed medicine. He waited.
17The book came out in September. Some reviewers loved it. Some were indifferent. He preferred the ones who loved it. He slapped across the face one who did not.18
2
El Americano (1933)
Orson Welles woke in his room on the fourth floor of a compact building in Seville. It was late, and he – just a few weeks past his eighteenth birthday – rolled over once again in the bed, pulled the thin sheet back above his slender shoulders and tried once more to sleep. He lay on his side for a few more moments and, despite promising to himself that he would not open his eyes, did so.
‘Damn it,’ he said.
He rolled over onto his back and looked up at the tan ceiling above his head. Then he looked around the room and his brain began to fire into motion with each image that passed into his eyes, his pulse like the hum of a movie camera.
‘Damn it,’ he said, again, to the empty room.
He turned a few degrees to his right and sighted the half-empty bottle of water on the stool beside the bed, its glass all scuffed. He pushed himself up onto one elbow and drank from it. The water was expectedly warm and had that metallic, coppery smell that came with the water in Seville.
He looked down at his naked feet and the toes that were nearly 20touching the end of the single bed. He tapped the big one of his right foot against the bed’s dark and wooden frame.
‘I’m still here,’ he said. ‘Still here.’
He lay back and closed his eyes once more, but he knew that sleep was not going to return. He exhaled for as long as he could, and he let the warm and dry air empty from his chest. Then he opened his eyes and looked once more at the ceiling.
‘Better get up.’
He sat up and then turned, putting his feet on the floor. The tiles, which he had noted grimly and morosely when taking the room a week ago, were the colour of dried blood and as cool beneath his soles as running water.
He breathed once more, and he took in the room that would house him for another three weeks. He tried to drink another mouthful of water but thought better of it and spat it back into the bottle.
It was a small room that kept easily a small single bed but not much more, an after-thought tacked onto the hotel for single, poor travellers. It had in its corner a small wardrobe, next to which he had placed his two empty cases, a tall iron stand with a mirror and basin and an old wooden desk on which he had placed the rented Corona typewriter.
I should write today, he thought glumly. But only after breakfast.
He got up and walked to the room’s door, where he listened for the sounds of voices or footsteps in the corridor. He pressed his ear to the wood and listened while holding his breath.
There was no one there.
Quickly, for he had slept naked, he unlocked the door, cracked it open an inch and looked down the corridor. There was no one there, so he opened it a few more inches, reached down and picked 21up the porcelain pitcher of cold water that the hotel manager had left.
After locking the door, he went back in and poured half of the pitcher into the basin, lowered his head to the water and splashed himself across the face and beneath his arms. Flecks of cold water collected in drops upon his ears.
Welles leaned forwards until his face was less than the distance of a finger length away from the mirror. He shook his chin, stretching out the line of his jaw and then he turned his head from one side to the other, trying to see himself from three different angles.
He pursed up his top lip and looked at his teeth. He did not know why. Then he rubbed at the light stubble on his chin and above his mouth and resolved that he would get a shave once he had some money.
Then there was the nose. This was the part he did not like. It was too pugnacious, too short. It was like there was this great expanse of his face, upon which he could register so much, which then bunched up so tightly into this small, button-like nose. He would always believe that his visage had taken on the shape and dimensions of an onion laid on its side, its stalk moving into the world always a half inch in front of him.
Welles took a step back from the mirror and raised his arms. He brought them together and made a quick buzzing noise like a wasp.
‘Hazzap!’ he barked, under his breath. ‘Just like magic.’
But the nose was still there.
‘Oh well,’ he said.
He dressed quickly into a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt, then left the room, locking the door behind him. He passed other rooms, from which he heard faint and light snores. He stopped and 22took a copy of the International Herald Tribune that his neighbour had ordered but not woken early enough to prevent its theft. He folded the paper over and slipped it behind him, into the waistband of his trousers.
He stepped out of the hotel corridor and went down to the second floor. Before he turned and went down the next flight of stairs, he stopped and looked at the locked wooden door on the landing, the one that led into the rooms of whiskey and girls that he was doing his best to avoid. There was an extinguished red light above the door.
It had not been in his plans, nor those of his guardian, to stay above a brothel. But nor could he say that he had complained too much afterwards when he found out why there was heavy traffic on those stairs, married with the heavy and mixed scents of perfume, whiskey and sweat.
The streets were still wet when he stepped out onto them, the cleaners having passed by only recently, and the sweet, tangy smell of oranges hung in the air like a played note. Welles walked towards La Maestranza, the place where the toreros fought bulls, went a few blocks and found a small cafe where he ordered coffee, bread and fruits.
He spread before him the International Herald Tribune and read while he waited. In London, Winston Churchill was warning against the threat of Germany’s rearming; in Cuba, a war and a revolution were brewing; New York saw a Jewish boycott beginning of German businesses.
He ate his breakfast leisurely once it had arrived, then ordered a second one. He felt most mornings, when he awoke, inconsolably hungry, as if his insides were completely and hopelessly a chasm.
23After he had finished with the paper, he took a pen from his pocket and began to write in the margins of the stories, rolling his sleeves so that he would not brush ink from the newsprint upon the cotton.
‘Detective… Jim… No, Johnny…’ Welles said to himself. ‘That’s a better name for a boy detective. Detective… No, private detective Johnny Hardy of Baltimore, who lives with his aunt Constance.’
That will do, thought Welles. That’s an idea. A teenaged boy detective who lives with his aunt in Baltimore. That’s something I can write.
He thought that he could write and send this one to Adventure. It seemed like the sort of premise it would take once he had fleshed it out into a story and given it some ‘lift’. He would work out in the afternoon what was supposed to happen and to whom and when, and he would string it all along until it hung together perfectly. And in a day or so, when he was happy that it was good enough, he would send it to his man, John Clayton in Chicago, who would package it as one of his own and then forward it on for him, before sending back whatever would be his share of the fee.
He sketched out a simple, three-act structure on the back page of the newspaper, which he then removed from the rest, folded and stuck in his pocket. He left the carcass of that morning’s edition on the table, then walked through the streets to the Western Union office near the city’s main train station.
The inside of the office was dark and stuffy, as if someone had thrown a warm and thick woollen blanket, with slits for the odd piece of sunlight to pass through, over the building. He had come into the building off Calle Arjona, gone down a white tiled corridor with blue walls, turned, gone down some steps and entered a brown room that seemed made entirely of wood.
24‘Nombre?’ The thin, punctilious clerk looked over the desk at him.
‘Welles.’
‘El Americano?’ It seemed the word had spread about the young American kid who had come to Seville.
‘Si.’
‘Un momento, por favor.’ The clerk began to look through a small stack of telegrams, clipped inside a large, leather book.
‘Primero?’
‘Qué?’
‘Primero. Your first name.’
‘George. George Orson Welles.’
The clerk pulled out a thin strip of paper. ‘Si, si. Passport?’
Welles handed over the document. The clerk took it, examined it and pushed over a paper for him to sign. Then he handed him a thick envelope.
‘Gracias.’
Welles stepped back into the corridor and opened the envelope. There was a one-page note inside, nestled up against a half inch of Spanish money.
He unfolded the note: We sold three stories. STOP. Money enclosed. STOP. Clayton. STOP.
Welles took the money and pushed it deep into his right pocket, sticking it beneath the heavy pen. Then he folded the note, put it back into the envelope, folded that, too, and placed it in his left pocket.
