Hemingway, Agnes and Italy

Hemingway, Agnes and Italy

Ernest Hemingway

     Maria Elena recently sent me an email.  Her encouraging missive was titled and ended with “This might be helpful.”  Its content, equally brief, contained this single quotation:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.” ¹

I have never tried this particular remedy for writer’s block.  It appears the implements needed, an orange, a fire, and the inspiration of Paris, have been available to me but never at the same time, which may be key.  An orange, no problem, but our last fire was in Kennebunk, Maine, far removed from the inspiration of Paris.  In any case, my muse should be Calitri, but I got the point.  

Early each month, I’m in this state of arid thought for the glint of a topic.  After eighteen years of monthly doodles, my wellspring of topics has dried to the point that I’ve entertained slipping in an old tale, old enough that none but ardent readers might notice.  Such a brief reprieve from the hunt, if only for a month, would at least get me closer to returning to Italia for fresh material as I gaze over Calitrani, not Parisian rooftops.

I have pestered Maria Elena for so long that now she emails me encouragement from across the room.  I didn’t need some ritualized orange peel practice to get me thinking, just its final encouragement: “You have always written before, and you will write now.”  After a bit of searching, to my surprise, this timely advice was penned by none other than one of America’s best writers, Ernest M. Hemingway.  On second thought, maybe I should buy more oranges than needed for a Negroni.

Forget about writing as well as Hemingway.  It is nearly impossible and the stuff of imitators.  He once said, “all style is, is the awkwardness of a writer in stating a fact.”

Ignoring my writing style, the closest I ever got to Hemingway was 907 Whitehead Street, Key West.  Sinatra had his “Rat Pack,” and there, Hemingway, his “Mob,” who nicknamed him “Papa,” a moniker that stuck with him throughout his life.  Cast in the formative events he experienced, he would write about the people who filled his life.  Names may have changed and locations swapped, but the emotion he put on paper, from angst to love, was his.  When not bobbing in his boat, Pilar (his second wife’s nickname), he wrote some of his best works in Key West in the 1930s, along with his colony of six-toed cats: To Have and Have Not (about Key West during the Depression) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spanish Civil War). 

In a favorite movie of mine, Midnight in Paris

Corey Stoll as Hemingway

(playing as I write this), a young Hemingway (Corey Stoll) portrays his masculine swagger, spouting staccato phrases as Hemmingway had about manliness, bravery, truthfulness, and a heroic life and death.  Sitting here, I await the Hemingway line that in war …

“There is nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully, then it is noble and brave.”

followed soon after by the appraisal that no subject of writing is bad …

“if the story is true and the prose is clean and honest and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

I want to believe these are actual Hemingway quotes, for they portray him exactly as he wrote in bursts of potent, succinct sentences filled with energy about what he’d seen and felt.  His poignant storytelling, with its evocative descriptions and precise dialogue, mirrors his belief that we must mindfully experience and live life fully to write about life.  He professed that only by genuinely living do we discover our true selves.  Hemingway held a simple meat-and-potatoes view of life without fancy garnish.  It's only permissible spices: the perils of war, the thrill of sports, and the passion of romance rather than the comforts of home, family, and social standing.  Today its equivalent might be termed living on the edge, the kind of guy who nowadays could begin a day on a Bezos Blue Origin rocket to the underskirt of space and, on his return, dive in a submersible to the Titanic.  To this, he brandished a competitive compulsion to be the best at whatever he did, which saw him become an avid big game hunter, sportsman, and, without question, writer. 

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago.  On graduation from high school in 1917, longing for adventure and eager for independence, he

Hemingway in Uniform

did not attend college but went to Kansas City, where he found employment as a reporter.  Poor eyesight in his left eye thwarted his repeated attempts to enlist in the Army during WWI.  He eventually managed to get to the Italian front by volunteering as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. ⁴

May 1918 found him aboard a French transport appropriately named Chicago, destination Bordeaux.  He reached Milan in early June.  There, he proudly wore an American Army officer’s uniform with the rank of second lieutenant, surprisingly issued to him by the Red Cross on his arrival.  He claimed to feel like a million dollars with the addition of leather cordovan boots.  He may have looked smart wearing it, yet his dashing appearance did nothing to prepare him for his first grisly assignment.

On his first day in Milan, his assignment was to recover the bodies of female workers from an explosion at a nearby munitions factory.  He joined others to collect their charred remains and their shredded body fragments from the perimeter’s barbed wire fence.  It was not the kind of gallant warfare he expected.  That gruesome experience began his transformation from a youth into a man. 

“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” ²

A few days later, now stationed at Fossalta di Piave, 40 miles north of Venice, he drove a battleship grey ambulance accented with a red cross on its roof and sides as part of the Red Cross Schio driver’s section there.  It was while there that he’d receive his true baptism.  He knew that combat was close by and, in some romanticized illusion of gallantry, was impatient to witness the action, if not embroiled in it.  Not far away, muddy trench lines ran where the Piave and Sile rivers twisted toward the sea.  If the Austrians broke through the Piave line, an Italian retreat south and a stand at the Sile River would be their only hope.  If the Austrians broke through at the Sile, they could easily cross the Veneto and reach Venice and beyond.

Sporting a mottled Brodie soup-bowl-shaped helmet and gas mask, his assignment was to recover wounded Italian troops from the line and distribute chocolate and cigarettes to the soldiers. ²  By late June, he’d viewed the places where terrible clashes had taken place in the recent battle and heard the stories of the Italian officers that had been part of the action whom he’d befriended. ⁶  The Battle of the Solstice had raged in this area weeks earlier.  Weeks later, following this battle that would amount to a turning point in the war, ambulance driver Hemingway, in the midst of danger, almost found himself added to the casualty list.

Artillery fire lighting the distant

Italian Troops at the Battle
of The Piave River

Dolomites around midnight, 8 July 1918, helped guide Hemingway toward the nearby Austro-Italian front.  His true motive was to get closer to the action.  Disobeying orders not to approach the front, he found his way to a forward observation post full of Italian machine guns ostensibly to deliver cigarettes and chocolate.  During his visit, a mortar barrage struck the position.  Hemingway was seriously wounded when shrapnel from an Austrian trench mortar exploded nearby and tore into both his legs.  It didn’t stop him.  Despite his wounds and under continuous fire, he was able to carry an Italian soldier with a chest wound to safety.  Delirious from his pain, he lifted the injured man onto his shoulder and headed back toward his vehicle.  He had only gone 50 yards when machine gun fire ripped into the right knee of his already wounded legs.  Down in the mud, he dragged himself and the soldier an additional 100 yards before losing consciousness.  In a letter to Hemingway’s parents, Hemingway’s friend Ted Brumbach, who visited him in the hospital, described it this way:

"A third Italian was badly wounded and this one Ernest, after he had regained consciousness, picked up on his back and carried to the first aid dugout. He says he did not remember how he got there, nor that he carried the man, until the next day, when an Italian officer told him all about it and said that it had been voted to give him a valor medal for the act." ⁵

Hemingway was carried to a first aid post in the mayor's house, which was later evacuated when attacked by the Austrians.  He was then taken by stretcher three kilometers into a bombed, roofless cow barn, part of the De Stefani winery that today offers Hemingway Wine Tasting Tours.  There, he spent a fitful night, soaked in his bloody uniform, surrounded by the dead and dying.  His wounds were so painful that he thought of

committing suicide using a pistol he’d taken from the battlefield.⁶  Today, a monument marks the spot where Hemingway was wounded.  Its inscription reads:

“On this embankment, Ernest Hemingway, a volunteer with the American Red Cross, was wounded on the night of 8 July 1918”.¹

He survived the night and later, at a first aid station in a schoolhouse, received morphine and tetanus injections before being moved once again, this time to Villa Toso at Casier, where he remained five days.  The worst was over; he’d soon be in even better hands. 

For his heroism, Hemingway received the Croce de Guerra, Italy’s Silver Medal of Valor, from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.  The trauma of this event remained with him all his life.  It would be these and other wartime experiences that would anchor his thoughts, only to surface throughout the pages of his novels, including A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Across the River and Into the Trees, in addition to three short stories of war on the Italian front, “Now I Lay Me,” “In Another Country,” and “A Way You’ll Never Be.”

Hemingway kept one of the 180 pieces of shrapnel removed from his battlefield wound the rest of his life.  In this rendezvous with death, he’d realized it had only been a fickle matter of inches that determined whether he lived or died, and the world would come to know as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.  Commenting on this experience years later in the anthology Men at War, Hemingway wrote:

"When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.” ²

Missing, however, in this near rendezvous with death is any mention of what happened to the Italian he carried to safety.  I wonder if he survived.  In the confusion of the battlefield, it is unlikely he’d been linked with the name of his rescuer, an unknown eighteen-year-old American teenager yet destined for fame.  Likewise, what of this Italian, his life, and his

Hemingway's First Love

potential progeny? 

Hemingway had seen the reality of war close up and was baptized in its blood, his purity forever altered.  To deal with the aftermath of war, what we call PTSD, his self-medication and replacement for the fluid of his baptismal font was alcohol.  He would quip that “not drinking was a wretched vice,” but alcohol would haunt him his entire life.  Increasingly dependent, it may have been his forced abstinence from alcohol that drove Hemingway to take his life.  His son would write, “He might have survived with alcohol but could not live when deprived of it.” ⁹

On July 17th, following a slow medical train ride, he was admitted to the Red Cross hospital in Milan at Via Cesare Cantu, a short walk from the Duomo di Milano.  There, he recuperated for six months, time enough for

Hemingway in Milan's Red
Cross Hospital

Hemingway to fall in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a tall, blond, twenty-seven-year-old American Red Cross nurse from Pennsylvania. 

Yet a boyish 19, he proposed to Agnes.  They planned to wed in America in 1919.  In October, Agnes was transferred to Florence to care for the wounded Italians, and Hemingway returned to the front, this time at Piave to Grappa.  On 27 October, in the buildup to the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, the final offensive launched on the Italian front during World War I, he returned to the American hospital in Milan, suffering from jaundice.⁸  

Following the war’s end, he returned to his home in Oak Park to prepare for his wedding.  He was a different man.  Travel, combat, and newfound love had reshaped him. 

Agnes & Ernest at the Milan Hospital

It was during his stay with his parents that Hemingway, following an exchange of love letters, received a “dear john” from Agnes in March 1919.  She announced that she had met and was in love with aristocrat Domenico Caracciolo, an Italian artillery officer, and was breaking off their engagement.  Feeling more a mother than sweetheart to him, she confided: “I am now and always will be too old.”  While she would marry twice, neither would be to Caracciolo, whose mother objected to the “American adventuress.”

Hemingway was devastated and never recovered from this blow.  In his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes about a wounded American soldier and his doomed love affair.  In it, an English night nurse, Catherine Barkley, much like Agnes, portrays this never-forgotten memory of his life and real love. ¹  They hadn’t realized it, but a visit in December 1918 to Fossalta di Piave, to the riverbank where he’d been wounded and where he would, over the years, often return, was the last time they met.  Agnes married her second husband, William C. Stanfield Jr., in 1934.  From 1956 to 1965, the couple lived in Key West, Florida.  As fate would have it, as small as Key West was at the time, she and Hemingway, who also lived there, never met.  Beautiful Agnes remained Hemingway’s great love.  Their separation greatly impacted Hemingway, who spent the rest of his life trying to recreate that passion. ⁷

Hemingway also held a special love for Italy where his life’s adventures began and would forever keep hold of him.  Hemingway would return especially to the Veneto region, throughout his post-war life.  He had a particular affinity for the region and especially loved enchanting Venice, which he once described as “absolutely god-damned wonderful.”  His favorite hangouts included Harry’s Bar with ice-cold martinis garnished with garlic-filled olives, Scotch whiskey, and Gordon’s gin, the Rialto fish market (he loved eels), and Café Florian in St Mark’s Square.  It was while staying at Venice’s Gritti Palace Hotel that the then 50-year-old Hemingway laid the foundation for Across the River and Into the Trees.  In this 1950 novel, he expounds on some of his favorite themes: living life to the fullest, the complexities of love, killing cleanly, and dying courageously.  It is teeming with profound insights from his experiences, especially the harsh reality of war, which both damaged and made him the writer he became.  Throughout his life, he demonstrated his keen interest in war and its effects on those who lived through it. ²

“For some, war is a distant concept, a thing that happens to other people. But for those who have lived it, war becomes a part of their very being, forever etched into their souls.”

Wherever Hemingway wandered—from Paris’ “lost generation,” Sloppy Joe’s at Key West, the heat of Cuba, war-torn Spain, in brushes with fascism, on the beaches of Normandy, or hunting on the planes of Africa, Italy was always in his thoughts.  He explored the country, north to south and coast to

Cortina Italy - Hemingway in His
Buick Roadster 

coast, before and after his 20-year absence (1929-48), whether in a friend’s battered Ford or his imported convertible Buick Roadmaster—to Bellagio on Lake Como, Stresa on Lake Maggiore, and Sirmione on Lake Garda, Milan from La Scala and the San Siro Racetrack to his alcoholic sprees in his favorite haunts, making friends in Turin, downing robust Sicilian wines in Taormina, and practically camped out in Venice during and after the war.  With each return, Italy reclaimed him, but he found his memories unrequited, for with time, nothing remained the same.  His numerous return visits to the riverbank battlefield at Fossalta di Piave had taught him that much.

It was Africa that accelerated his return to Italy.  It was there that Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, experienced a brush with

death, two in fact.  Many newspapers reported his death, which a much alive Hemingway enjoyed reading.  In Uganda, their small Cessna clipped a telegraph wire while avoiding a flock of ibis and plunged onto the crocodile-infested shores of the Nile.  Stranded, the Hemingways and their pilot camped overnight and were rescued the following day.  Shortly after takeoff aboard a second aircraft, it crashed and caught fire.  The pilot kicked out a window and pulled Mrs. Hemingway through.  Ernest, too large to fit through the window, forced a door open with his head.  As a result of this crash, he suffered extensive injuries, including burns, a concussion, skull fracture, along with kidney, liver, and spleen damage.  He chose to recover in his beloved Venice.  During this time, he spent his days at his old haunt, the Gritti Palace on the Grand Canal, “in his pajamas, an old sweater and carpet slippers, wearing an eyeshade.”  There, he stumbled upon what he termed the ‘Venetian Cure’ of scampi, and with each meal, a full bottle of Valpolicella, especially the

Ernest with His Fourth Wife Mary
Welsh Hemingway in Africa, 1954

Amarone variety.⁶  

Heavy drinking, shocking flirtations, revolutionary war involvement (enough to get J. Edgar Hoover’s interest), duty as a foreign correspondent, severe mood swings, and a cutting-edge intellect heightened with a venturesome lifestyle are all associated with charismatic Ernest Hemingway.  Together with a blunt public image, they became an integral part of Hemingway's bigger-than-life persona. 

While he played upon his exaggerated image as a war hero and thoroughly savored the attention he gained as a famous novelist, maintaining his lifelong adventurous spirit came at a cost.  All told, he suffered “at least nine major concussions during his life,” said psychiatrist Andrew Farah.  His biography of

the writer includes an examination of the conditions that led to the novelist’s suicide.¹⁰  Farah hypothesized that Hemingway suffered from the same post-concussive disease that plagues football players and boxers today known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  “It was after the second plane crash that his cognition was not the same,” said Farah.  “His memory was worse.” ¹⁰  Even following a series of electroshock treatments, his headaches remained persistent; he suffered from paranoia, continual bouts of depression, and bipolar mood swings as a result of lifelong alcoholism and physical maladies, including multiple head injuries.  

Just shy of his 62nd birthday in 1961, Hemingway had his final rendezvous with death when, as his father before him and his sister, brother, and granddaughter following him, Ernest ended his life by committing suicide in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, better known as Sun Valley.  Finding the key to the gun cabinet that his wife, Mary, had hidden, he removed a favorite shotgun, placed its twin barrels against his head, and pulled the trigger.  

Hemingway impressed me as a larger-than-life swashbuckler and entrepreneur of adventure tales who, in his words, believed “life was stale without manufactured glamour.”  Surprisingly, he was disciplined enough to write, dedicating mornings to the practice.  Widely recognized and acknowledged for his prose resulted in his award of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) followed in 1954 by the Nobel Prize in Literature (a congratulatory telegram from Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman would remark, “The Swedes aren’t so dumb after all”). ¹¹ 

 I wonder if, among his torments, he ever ran out of material to write about or suffered writer’s block.  His Paris counsel to writers involving oranges and fire implies there may have been a want for ideas at times.  But if ever he experienced its abyss, the wealth of his artistic inspiration clearly lay in Italy.  I’m not comparing myself to Hemingway; He had his method, I mine.  We do, though, both share Italy as our muse.  I also have Maria Elena for inspiration and encouragement—you wouldn’t be reading this without her.  She and a self-imposed monthly deadline fuel my discipline, quite contrary to Hemingway’s writing etiquette.  I’m just not disciplined enough to edit repetitively, as he did each day, and god-forbid cut stuff out like a surgeon because, greedy as I am, and with a 30-day deadline as my excuse, I cherish every word, however misspelled.  I’ll finish with a toast to this manliest of men as I raise a glass to him, not with a Veneto-style goblet of Amarone Della Valpolicella or a straight gin martini but with a Negroni.  I told you we differed.

From That Rogue Tourist,

Paolo

1  Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction, https://www.openculture.com/2013/02/seven_tips_from_ernest_hemingway_on_how_to_write_fiction.html

2  Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath,   https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/hemingway.html#:~:text=Hemingway%20wrote%20one%20novel%20with,with%20a%20young%20Italian%20countess.

4  Ernest Hemingway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

5  Ernest Hemingway Wounded on the Italian Front, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ernest-hemingway-wounded-on-the-italian-front

6  Review-Hemingway-in-Italy-by-Richard-Owen, https://www.travellingbookjunkie.com/review-hemingway-in-italy-by-richard-owen/

7  This month… Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky, the Nurse from ”A Farewell to Arms,"  ,” https://feminismforreal.com/this-month-agnes-hannah-von-kurowsky-the-nurse-from-a-farewell-to-arms/

8  Hot on the Trail of Hemingway in Monastier, https://www.sogedinhotels.it/en/villa-fiorita/historic-hotel-treviso/hemingway-in-monastier

9  The Fire Inside: The Great Drunkards and What They Drank, https://drunkard.com/56-fi-hemingway/

10  Hemingway’s Brain, JFK Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/kennedy-library-forums/past-forums/transcripts/hemingways-brain

11  A Mutable Feast,  https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/books/batch-of-hemingway-ephemera-from-cuba-is-digitized.html