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CHAPTER 19 The Marriage Unravels (1938) When Ernest and Pauline arrived in Key West in late January 1938, Ernest began pulling together a book of all his short stories and catching up on correspondence, including a letter to Hadley with two checks enclosed from Gus Pfeiffer for Bumby’s education fund. Gus sent each of the boys an additional forty shares of Warner stock with a par value of one hundred dollars per share, paying a 4 percent dividend. Home only three days, Ernest told Hadley in the letter that already he missed Spain.1 As days passed, he grew increasingly irritable and paranoid. Time magazine coverage of the Tereul offensive angered him because Herbert Matthews appeared to be the only journalist present, when in reality Ernest felt Matthews had him to thank for being there. With the Catholic hierarchy on the other side of the war, Ernest suspected that Catholics on the night desk of the New York Times must have thrown away his stories and deleted his name from Matthews’s dispatches. The author’s Key West lifestyle seemed frivolous compared to what he had experienced and accomplished in Spain, and he believed Maxwell Perkins had failed to promote To Have and Have Not extensively enough. To make matters worse, Ernest had conflicted feelings for Martha and guilt over his treatment of Pauline. He admitted to Max that he had gotten himself into “an unchristly gigantic jam.”2 By mid-March Ernest had learned of a new fascist drive across Spain and welcomed the excuse to get out of Key West and return to the action. A resigned Pauline helped him pack and flew with Ernest to Newark to see him off. He boarded the Isle de France and headed back to Europe in time to meet Martha in Paris. After the pair arrived in Barcelona, they were virtually inseparable for the next two months. While in the New York area, Pauline had tea with Maxwell Perkins and his wife and visited Jay and Ruth Allen. Though she was reserved around others, the tears flowed when she let down her guard around her sister. Pauline resisted hearing it, but Virginia 206 insisted to Pauline that Ernest no longer resembled the man they knew and that if the marriage ended, Pauline should not let him off the hook easily. Gus Pfeiffer, one of the few family members unaware of the impending split, maintained his support for the author. Ernest called him from New York on the day he sailed to say goodbye, and Gus followed up with a letter reinforcing his regard. “My confidence in you started at our first meeting in Paris, and has not changed or wavered,” he told him, adding that nothing he might do in the future would change that because “the background of my regard and respect for you is faith in your being honest. Also I know if you do make a mistake, it hurts you more than it will hurt those affected by it.”3 It was ironic that Ernest should receive such a letter at a time when he was not being honest with himself or others. Pauline returned to Key West and tried to keep her letters to Ernest light and cheerful. In spite of her upbeat tone, Pauline made it clear that she did not want Ernest to come back if it meant him being as miserable as the last time. When he cabled that he might come home in May, she warned “please do not think of coming if you want to stay on for any reason, and I do not think you could be happy here with the war going on.” She added that life in Key West had not changed since he left and that since he had found it so disagreeable the last time, it probably wouldn’t be any different when he got back, “so if you are happy over there don’t come back here to be unhappy but hope you can come back and we can both be happy.”4 By mid-May Ernest’s contract with the North American News Alliance had wound down, and NANA had little reason for continuing it. Clients such as the New York Times thought Ernest’s stories too often duplicated those of their own correspondent, Herbert Matthews. NANA attempted to eliminate duplicate coverage by having Ernest do only human-interest stories, then only significant developments, but the restrictions severely limited his style...

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