FINCA VIGIA, SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, CUBA

3/11/55

Dear Harvey :

It was fine to have your letter this morning and thank you for doing the tasks. Am sorry Campbell came and was a nuisance to Miss Pat. I love Miss Pat now and can't stand to have anything awful like that happen to her. The character with Campbell sounds really bad. We used to have to shoot a lot of characters like that and I never had any bad dreams about it. Am sorry I could not have been there and talked to him enough to make sure and then take him out and shoot him and put him an ash can and I never mention it. But that is not the way they run things in civil life and the first thing you know you would probably be in trouble. But that is what that type is born for and nobody gives it to them they get over confident and even insolent.

I don't read Mr. Barnaby Conrad. Had a copy of Tynan's book. He has seen a few less bull fights than Miss Mary and we'll think he was sort of comic but also nice with his hair bleached the same colour as his wife's and his vocabulary. Marlene asked me to be nice to him and we both were and who should criticise who and everyone has to start to see bullfights some time. It happened to come along at a good time and to have the luck to see Antonio Ordonez who is in love ( hopelessly but devoutly ) with Miss Mary. Since Africa I think he thinks of her as Blessed Miss Mary and he always brings the bull over and works him in front of us and we go up to the hotel room afterwards where he is cooling out, naked, with all the wounds showing, but with a towel over the private parts and he asks Mary to sit on the bed if she doesn't mind and we have our pictures taken together which amounts to immortality in bull fighting. We are all pretty good friends and why should I speak ill of Tynan? Antonio has me all mixed up as his father since his father, who was in the Sun Also, spooked out early after the first big wound ( and who can blame anybody ) but he got on the sauce, and really ran for Skid Row. So Antonio is the best bull fighter alive and he married Luis Miguel's sister Carmen who is a really lovely and beautiful girl. His favourite books, maybe the only ones he ever read, are The Sun Also Rises, For Whom and The Old Man and The Sea. This year he had to do his military service and they gave him hell on acct. of what we share the same views. Miss Mary is pretty much everybody's idol in Spain. It is all mixed up with us coming into the country when it was about as safe as walking into FBI headquarters with a poster in all Post Offices. I do not know how the Christ I had the stuff to do it but it made us quite a lot of credit. I had fought in the morning fights at Pamplona every year for eleven years; sometimes on the fifth day of day and night drunkenness having to stop and vomit on each of the three floors of the hotel Quintana but cheerful always and Maera and I having slept with two chambermaids each and going downstairs at five thirty am carrying our capes and completely gay when the stomach spasms hit. Fights every night or nearly. Maera and I wearing each others clothes and never count the denomination of a bill. Pull out the first one you touched. Mr. Barnaby Conrad and Mr. Tynan are products of a different school of thought and behavior. So when Miss Mary and I hit Pamplona where they should have shot me the whole attitude aside from a few people was LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD. It was even worse than Italy. Was there quite a lot as a kid and was under sentence of death in absetia ( mis-spelled ) but the way they

played it was Ernie Returns and then in lower case. 4 pages of photos of his child bride. Miss Mary was not a child but was very beautiful and unbelievably blonde and through some unexplainable feat of legend, to which neither of had contributed, the story was that she had renounced her title to marry me when I was penniless ( which has been often). This caught up with us in Cortina and was reported by the hair-dresser. I had received some sort of decoration which made Miss Mary legally, Lady Miss Mary and this was regarded as only a small recompense for what she had renounced.

One time we were drunk together on my birthday and Miss Mary decided that she was an heiress. Naturally she wished to show a little splendour. So she gave 2 million dollars to me, a million to Gregorio, 500,000 to Black Dog and then decided, like a good Heiress to conserve her assets. We were all very rich for several hours.

But you can see why simple people like Antonio and X admire her. An Heress, who kills lions for free, who renounced her title to marry a commoner (divorced) who gave away in one night in Havana harbour more than three million dollars, who ordered the Captain of the Port Police in Havana to be arrested because the smack fishermen were being given consistent under-weighing on their catches. And not only this, but a Child Bride (she had only been married twice before and the first time to a tennis player whose name she cannot recall). You can see how Antonio and I might fall in love with her. Plus the fact that every year she skis she breaks a leg. She treats the buffalo as though they were so many inoffensive turds. (have very impressive pictures of this). She falls in light aircraft and 24 hours later is burned in another aircraft. She speaks excellent Swahili and eleven Game Rangers including her true love Tchiungo are in love with her and at least three of them hope for my early death. It means nothing to her if I take a Wakamba wife as she says a wife with hard hands is an asset. She wanted me to bring back up to five Kamba wives to be useful and happy around the place.

So my love to Miss Mary and I shudder to think of what would have happened to Mr. Campbell and Cie. if she had opened with the fuze at zero. All 250 pounds of him would have disintegrated.

You and Miss Pat or rather Miss Pat and you should come down here some time before us prehistoric animals (I run with Sam Langford and the Saber Toothed Tiger, and Miss Mary is Hors de Concours) are extinct.

Thanks again for the beautiful stand you took on the LIFE statement of WHAT WE NEED.

Best always,

20

September 24, 1954.

Mr. Bernard Berenson,
I Tatti,
Settignano,
Firenze, Italy.

Dear B.B.:

It was good to hear from you and to know that you are well. You
are very right about how we never achieve what we set out to do.
We do make it come off sometimes as we know when we re-read it
after a long time. It always reads to me, then, when it's very
good as though I must have stolen it from somebody else and then
I think and remember that nobody else knew about it and that it
never really happened and so I must have invented it and I feel
very happy. One always has the illusion about the last thing that
has been written and so I have an exaggerated confidence in the
Old Man book. Each day I wrote I marvelled at how wonderfully it
was going and I hoped that on the next day I would be able to
invent truly as I had done the day before. When I had finished,
there were only 3 or 4 corrections to be made and I thought there
must be something wrong, but each time I read it, it made the same
effect on me as a reader, not as one who had written it, that it
made before. I still can't read it without feeling emotion and I
know that you will believe that this is not the emotion of some-
one admiring what he has done, because he did it, but because I
was reading it as completely detached as though it were written
by someone who was dead for a long time.

We are old enough to try to talk truly and I tell you this only
as a curiosity. A few other things which I invented completely
such as the story in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" of Pablo and Pi-
lar and their doing away with the fascists in the village. I
read when by chance I have to do it with complete astonishment
that I could have invented as I did. You know that fiction,
prose rather, is possible the roughest trade of all in writing.
You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You
have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to
invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is
not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it
seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience
of the person who writes it. Obviously, this is impossible and
that is probably why it is considered to be valuable when you
are able to do it. But it is impossible to hire out or contract

21

- 2 -

to be able to do it, as to hire out to be an alchemist.

But B.B. I think we should never be too pesimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves. I would be very proud, that is an understatement, if I had as good a hoja de servicio as you have. The unobtainable is something else. The mountains have all been climbed, most countries worth visiting have been explored long ago and in old places like Africa you learn that many many people had seen everything long before they were financed by missionary money or James Gordon Bennett.

Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless and are extremely harmful if one is susceptible to them. You must forgive me for presuming that we are the same age but I had the experience of the destruction of vital organs which ordinarily would take a long time to achieve. Also the indelicacies that accompany these destructions and our life expectancy is more or less the same. This does not give me the right to tutearte because I have only the brain of 55 but in the Wakamba tribe to which I belong you are an elder at 55 and once you are an elder you are outranked by older elders but you are considered to have reached a certain age, if not of discretion, of experience.

At present I work at about ½ the capacity that I should have but everything is better all the time and, by a Susceptible like of good animals to the weather, I can be depressed by it when it is rainy, muggy and with constant barometric changes which change also the pressure of the vertebra on the spinal cord. There's only 6 weeks more of bad weather to get through and then we will have the type of weather that makes you want to write rather than force yourself to write. I am such a simple writer that in my books the temperature and the weather of the day is nearly almost that of the weather outside. The type of weather we have had this summer I would not wish to inflict on anyone reading what I write and so I'm working in an air-conditioned room which is as false a way to work as to try to write in the pressurized cabin of a plane. You get the writing done but it's as false as though it were done in the reverse of a greenhouse. Probably I will throw it all away, but maybe when the mornings are alive again I can use the skeleton of what I have written and fill it in with the smells and the early noises of the birds and all the lovely things of this finca which are in the cold months very much like Africa.

22

- 3 -

But B.B. there is nothing like Africa as there is nothing like youth and nothing like loving who you love or waking each day not knowing what the day will bring, but knowing that it will bring something. Here now things are quite dull except for annoyances and the occasional presence of people that you like or care for. I think you are better off at Settignano and you were always better off than me because you have more books. Thank God for books. I wish that we could contribute to something which would make people write ones which were worth reading. Mary would send her love but she is taking a sun bath. I think I may send it, safely, without consulting her.

Our best to you always,

Ernest

E.H./vc

I dictated this in the process of brealsing in a new secretary. Reading it over and correcting her errors (too late to correct any more) it reads a little like a bloody speech.

E.H.

49

4

It is now 0700 on Palm Sunday. I just read this letter and never read so many mis-spelled words and the sentiments expressed sound like printed mottos on the wall of the house of illiterates.

Communication between human beings is not very good. When I write to you it is to amuse you and because I am lonesome. One thing Santayana said that was good was that he never had a French friend. It was a terrible critique of society. Imagine living in France and having no friends; not even Robert Desnos nor Jacques Prevert nor your doctor nor your concierge nor your concierge's wife nor any whom nor anybody where you had credit nor Cricri du Boisrouvray who you would have married if you had not been a fool nor Henriette who came up from Bordeaux when it was impossible to do in the war because she heard you were in Paris and you never saw her, because you had gone North nor all the people you fought with in the different wars.

" Ecoute, Boursier. If I had to retire."

" Merde. Je me trouve très bien ici. Ma flanc gauche est proteger par une colline. J'ai le trbahilleuse bien place. Je me trouve enormement bien !" ici et je ne reste.

Never a French friend. I can think of no more unenviable poverty.

When we were fighting to come into Paris we had a fine song.

It went, " Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins

Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins

Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins

That's where my Bumby lives."

It was the song we made up for my oldest boy to sing

when he was a little boy so he would remember where he lived. These French were bad boys and crazies and they thought it was a great American fighting song. Red Pelkey, who had served seven years in the regular army, and never spoken a word of French in his life until we had landed in Normandy, now, since we had been commanding French, spoke only French and had forgotten English. He was under the impression that his name was Jim because the French all called him Jim. Actually his name was Archie and he was my driver and a private; not first class. I think he was a legitimate crazy anyway. But there had been a fight outside of Rambouillet and we had dressed all our Frenchmen in the clothes of the deads and Pelkey had become a sergeant through inheriting clothes and stayed a sergeant for months. The French all called Paris "Paname". That is the argot name for it if you love it. It comes from Devil's Island slang. I think. Since we were figuring on taking this place and reaching a mystic point known as Dix Bis Avenue des Gobelins. Pelkey, got sort of confused by it being always referred to as Panama. His vocabulary, with me, was new reduced to saying, "Oui, Papa, Jenay pah vue, Papa. Ell son pah pahs encore arrivay, Papa. Sa gazhe bien, Papa. Too lemond cohtent, papa but un peu trow de tanks."

I used to say, " Archie can't you truly speak English any more ?"

He would say, " No, Papa. Too say jelly perdu. Toolemong

parle francay ay moi jay pense on francay."

I would say, " You still can read a map in English and understand co-ordinates ?"

"Oui, Papa. Nayeh jamais purr sur moi. Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins. Pah deh probleme. Ohn battre. May pah pour patrie. Patrie foute."

This went on for quite a long time and Santayana might have detected something wrong. But Pelkey had many French friends and I had a few and we were doing what we were supposed to do. Sometimes Pelkey would have spiritual problems like this, "Papa, tchay dee jamay fuddilay le john svahnt que papa inteerorogay. Bon ?"

" C'est un ordre."

"Merci, Papa. Ohn ah fussilay troe without raisons. Le boys sohn troe enthusiasteque. Eels ohnt vooln fussilay oon faim."

" On fait ca jamais."

63

that terrible, dreadful state of absolute clear-headedness that is non-believer's limbo and then we go down to Schruns in the Vorarlberg and have a wonderful, healthy, happy life and I re-write. Then you re-write again. Then you have a book. With all sorts of various dreadful things happening all the time.

The next novel, A Farewell To Arms, was more accidentado. It is almost too rough to remember. I had the first draft written and was ready to re-write when my father shot himself and I was the head of a large family with many problems and debts. It was necessary to put these completely out of my mind and think only of the re-writing and at the same time attend to all problems and debts meticulously. This is the training that makes people who run into you later in your life think that you are taking pleasure when you are ruthless.

Better to stop now before coming to the circumstances of other novels.

About projects I do not know. My middle boy, Patrick, is out in Kenya. He loves Africa as though Africa were a girl. She has never poxed him yet and I know I loved her the same way and still do; and she poxed me good. Africa and the Sea are the two loveliest whores I know. If we have money at the first of the years and I owe no money to anyone I think Mary and I should go to Africa. Have worked here now two and a half years hard and should get up in the hills and I might be some help to Patrick out there. We could try to get to Italy and see you coming back. You would be disappointed in me but you would see Mary and out of Africa there is always something new and I could try to bring it if nothing else.

This letter is like a three feature cinema. Basta.

October 2 1952

Dear Mr. B:

Thank you very much for sending the thing about the book. I can't
thank you for taking so much trouble but I will try to write always in a way to make
you proud if I can do it.

Mary has gone to New York to see the theater and the town and make the small triumphs that I don't like and that only make me feel bad. The fun is when you have just finished a book and know it is right. I get excited when they come out. But afterwards I would rather think and talk about something else.

We have lovely weather now and the sky is almost like Italy. I ought to be
in Italy now but I have to try to run my life so that it does not ruin evryone else's
life. But this is when I miss Italy the most. When Mary is here then I love her
very much and forget about everything else. But when she is away I get very
lonely and manythings move in that ordinarily I can keep out.

Your book is having very big reviews. All reviews are shit. But I send
these anyway air-mail in case you should not have seen them. When I was a boy some one
told me that we had to eat a ton of it in our lives and so it was better to eat it
fast and get it over with. So I ate it fast but then I found you were expected to
eat it all your life. But sometimes I re-act a little and say, "I am very sorry
gentlemen, but I am not hungry today." Confirmed, or patriotic, shit eaters
never forgive this deviation.

Why did we have to be born on such separate dates? We could
have had a lot of fun. Maybe we will yet. hat you wrote about the book made me
happier than anything about it except writing it.

Do you ever have the feeling that you lived at all times in many
different countries? Or is that crazy. I can smell the horses in the morning
and I know exactly how the different types of xx body armour felt and
where you chafed and I know all about Tyburn hill and when I was first in Mantova
it was like coming home at night after a concussion. When I am a little crazy
I can remember the daundest things and Salaambo always bored me because I
remembered how it really was. But everything has been written except those things
nobody wrote about. So I write them. It would have been fun though to have
lived in the old days when there was better companionship and have written when
everyone started from scratch.

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse
than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get
a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

Must stop and not bore you any more and send the clippings. Please
forgive me for writing dull and stupid letters.

Mary would send her love if she were here. Please take good care.

Your friend,

68

Dear Mister B. B. - One of the most rewarding things about reading you is that I can re-read and re-read and always find something either new or forgotten. I'm doing that again now in *Aesthetics and History*, and it occurs to me you ought to charge twenty times more for your books than other people for theirs because yours stay valuable, and unfinishable---undiscardable, I mean---twenty times as long.

I saw a picture of you in a magazine the other day working in bed and looking so attractive I wished I could climb right in beside you and disrupt the work.

Saturday, September 13th.

1951

December 6, 1955

Captain W. M. Rakow, USN
4633 47th Street N.W.
Washington 16, D.C.

Dear Willie:

Thank you very much for your letter of November 29th and for the other two that I didn't answer. Was jammed up with work and let my correspondence get in bad shape as usual. Book is on page 712 now and still going good.

Thanks ever so much for that beautiful ash tray from
the SHENANDOAH. It looks very handsome in the house and
reminds me of a fine time. Certainly wish you had a ship
and were not executing for a half Admiral and deputized to a
quarter General. It must be a pain to be ashore and work-
ing in that joint after having left a lovely ship like the
SHENANDOAH.

Mary is in fine shape. She had a spot of anemia but
it is clearing up good. On the night that Krisel gave me
the ash tray we had been to a stupid decoration ceremony
at the Palacio de Deportes and I had sweated almost as much
as on the SHENANDOAH under the television lights but with-
out SHENANDOAH's facilities for drying out the clothes.
Caught a bad cold in one of the kidneys I hurt in the plane
crash and it cut out and the other one was affected too.
That is all over now but I am still staying in bed for awhile
on doctor's orders to get everything healed up perfectly.
He said it was a sort of pneumonia of the kidneys. All the
analyses are normal now.

Have lots of good books I've saved up for taking a trip
down the coast with Pilar so it was as much fun to spend my
vacation in bed as anywhere else. Please give our best to
Dottie and best always to you, old timer.

We worked very hard on the photography in
bad weather. Had to tow the cojmar boats in ten days since
instead of let them come in under sail. got a 452 and 473
marlin the first day and good shots of marlin, galvanized and
Dalpin. But had a bigger fish. We'll get off at 6 o'clock and
be back in a few days.

Dear Mister Berenson —

Ever since your sweet letter came, I have been saying, regularly, to Ernest, do write to Mister Berenson and tell him that we hope to see him this winter. And Ernest has been saying "yes, yes" with the far-away look of husbands answering wives. But I can't nag him because he has lately been finishing a novel, mostly set in Venice, and is a vial of seething chemicals, dangerous to meddle with.

Our news is that we leave this lovely perfumed island (this morning the sun is brilliant on the bougainvilles outside my window and the sky truly as blue and pure as the autumn skies I saw last year in Florence or the January skies of Cortina). We leave tomorrow for New York and Paris and Venice and, lured by you, Ernest promises we shall both go also to Florence, probably in January or February.

I long to see the cypresses of Fiesole again and Ernest also promises that, if we may go to see you, he will not talk too much. Because I want to hear you. You and he are so very different that I worry that you may not get on. On the other hand, you and he are, with no qualifications, the two most attractive men I've ever met. which is something in common.

So, until later. And meanwhile, our very best wishes —

November Fourteenth. 44