Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works

Chapter 6: The Fishing Was Good Too Cuban Writer Claims Torrid Love Affair with Jane Mason Drew Hemingway to Havana

61 The Fishing Was Good Too Cuban Writer Claims Torrid Love Affair with Jane Mason Drew Hemingway to Havana William E. Deibler While many North American scholars still debate whether Ernest Hemingway and Jane Kendall Mason were lovers, Cuban writer Enrique Cirules has no doubts. In his book Ernest Hemingway in the Romano Archipelago, he asserts unequivocally that the two had “an intense and scandalous love affair” (23) that was gossiped about across the island. In his book, published in Cuba in 1999, Cirules claims that the ultimate purpose of Hemingway’s many visits to Havana in the 1930s was not to fish for marlin, but “to see the radiant Jane Mason” (21). Not only were they often seen carousing together in Havana’s fabled night spots and at the Masons’ home on the banks of the Jaimanitas River, he asserts, but they also carried on their affair at sea, first aboard a friend’s yacht and later on Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar. When Hemingway and Mason spent four months together in 1934, “everything rapidly became scandal,” Cirules writes (40). They cruised the northern coast of Cuba aboard the Pilar, literally shacking up for several days in a fishing hut at Punta Ganado. Particularly intriguing is Cirules’s assertion that “in the days of World War II” (58–59) Hemingway spent two days in a hotel in San Fernando de Nuevitas —the Cuban writer’s hometown—with a beautiful and mysterious blonde. As described, the tryst is strikingly similar to the fictional meeting between Thomas Hudson and his first wife in Hemingway’s posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. Cirules writes that by all indications Hemingway met Jane Mason when she was barely twenty years old, during the writer’s second visit to Havana in April 1929. “Beginning in 1929 Hemingway was constantly on the Cuban coast,” Cirules writes, and “in the company of Jane Mason he developed an almost excessive 62 William E. Deibler liking for the splendors of Havana” (22). He asserts that the two engaged in “an intense and scandalous love affair” (23) that lasted until 1936. Between fishing trips in the morning, attending the horse races and jai alai games in the evening, and eating, drinking and “some womanizing” (20) at night, Cirules writes, Hemingway revised the galley proofs of Death in the Afternoon in his fifth-floor room in the Ambos Mundos Hotel on Obispo Street. The 1929 date he gives is clearly wrong, however. Hemingway did not begin writing Death in the Afternoon until 1930 and didn’t finish it until 1932. There are other problems with this account, too. In fact, Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, sailed for France in April 1929 and did not return to the United States until mid-December of that year. Moreover, all of the biographical sources state that Hemingway and Pauline met Jane Mason and her husband, wealthy American businessman Grant Mason, not in 1929, but in 1931, sailing for New York aboard the Île de France. The events that Cirules erroneously states took place in 1929 actually occurred in April and May 1932, when Hemingway and his Key West friend, Joe Russell, visited Cuba aboard Russell’s charter boat, the Anita, to fish for marlin in the Gulf Stream. That trip, originally planned for ten days, stretched out for two months. The erroneous date might be overlooked as a simple mistake if it were an isolated incident, but Cirules’s book is riddled with similar errors. He claims, for example, that Hemingway spent all of 1939 in Havana, “locked away, cloistered” (31) in his room at the Ambos Mundos, writing the first draft of For Whom the Bell Tolls, when actually, Hemingway was in Havana for only five months that year, April through August, during which time he worked on the novel and he and Martha Gellhorn rented and moved into the Finca Vigía, which he later purchased . Hemingway’s travels that year are well documented. He was in New York and Key West from January to March, and traveled in September to Wyoming and eventually to Sun Valley, Idaho, where he remained until mid-December. Problematic, too, is Cirules’s claim that Hemingway and Mason spent four months together in 1934 sailing the northern coast of Cuba aboard the Pilar. The implication is that they were alone on a long, romantic cruise. Hemingway did spend nearly four months on his newly acquired cruiser that year, marlin fishing off Cuba, but he...