What Was It Like to Meet Ernest Hemingway in a Bar?

Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn in Sun Valley, Idaho 1940.

What Was It Like to Meet Ernest Hemingway in a Bar? 

BIOGRAPHY

MAY 1, 2018

Back in the 1936, novelist Ernest Hemingway was a very famous man. So what was it like when the journalist Martha Gellhorn, who was visiting Key West with her family, met him in a bar?

Here is an excerpt from Paula McLain’s new historical novel, Love and Ruin, (Ballantine Books), which tells the story of Hemingway and Gellhorn, who became his third wife, during their very first encounter.

He wore a ragged T-shirt and shorts that seemed to have come from the bottom of a fish barrel—both of which weren’t doing him any favors. But it was him. His dark, nearly black hair fell over one side of a pair of round steel-wire spectacles. He caught me watching him, and our eyes met for a split second before he passed his hand through his mustache absentmindedly and went back to a stack of letters he was reading.

I didn’t say a word to Alfred or Mother, just let myself look at him for a moment, as a tourist looks at a map. His legs were brown and muscled as a prizefighter’s. His arms were brown, too, and his chest was broad, and everything about him suggested physical strength and health and a kind of animal grace. The whole picture made an impression, but I wasn’t going to trot over there and confess that I had his photo in my handbag, marking the page of my mystery novel. I’d clipped it from Time magazine, and also the long article alongside it, that he’d written about bullfighting. I didn’t want to stammer out how meaningful his writing was to me, or abase myself by claiming I was a writer, too.

While still at Bryn Mawr, I had pinned my favorite quote from A Farewell to Arms above the desk in my dormitory room: “Nothing ever happens to the brave.”

It was meant to be a daily reminder as I worked on my own writing, and a challenge, too, though I secretly hoped that everything happened to the brave. That life came hot and bright and loud if you flung yourself fully in its direction.

In the dark close bar, I tried to galvanize myself to approach him somehow. He was my hero, and not twenty feet away. Nothing ever happens to the brave, I thought, pinching myself and waiting for something clever to come to me, but nothing seemed good enough.

I swallowed hard and a little breathlessly and turned away to face my family again, and my daiquiri. The drink was tart and strong, with floating bits of ice. Overhead, the blades of the fan clipped round like a slow-breathing animal. Beyond the open door two seagulls harassed each other, wrestling over a black mussel shell. And Mr. Hemingway continued to ignore us, reading his mail until Skinner, chipping more ice for a second round, asked where we were from.

“St. Louis,” Mother said proudly.

That did it. He stood up from his end of the bar and came over. “Two of my wives went to school in St. Louis,” he said to Mother in a neighborly way. “I’ve always liked that town.”

Two of my wives? The way he’d phrased it, you’d think he’d had a dozen—not that I would have dared risk pointing it out.

“It suits us most of the time,” Mother said. “Though down here you have better rum. The sunshine isn’t bad, either.”

When he smiled at her, his brown eyes shone warmly and a dimple stretched along his left cheek.

“I was born in the Middle West,” he told her. “Near Chicago. It always looks better to me from a distance—the country as well as the people.”

Alfred had been quiet, but suddenly stood and shook hands, and we traded names all around. I was proud of him and Mother for not startling or seeming overimpressed at the introduction. The whole country knew who Hemingway was, and most of the rest of the world, too. But here in his town, it was obvious that he liked to be taken for a regular Joe. The T-shirt alone proved that.

“Let me show you around while you’re here,” he said to us all while looking pointedly at Mother. She was still a very handsome woman. She kept herself up, as they say, and had lovely silvering hair, open blue eyes, a perfect mouth, and absolutely no vanity. Except for our recent loss at home, I’d always thought she was the most contented and well-adjusted person I’d ever known. Luck came to her often, as it did now. And it was almost as if a roulette wheel had been set spinning the moment we got on the bus or even before, the black marble spit out precisely here with a winning, effortless, inevitable click.

A private tour of Key West by Ernest Hemingway? Of course. Sure thing. Don’t mind if we do.

From the book Love and Ruin by Paula McLain. Copyright © 2018 by Paula McLain. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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