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The Most Celebrated Writer in America Is Bored (1929 to 1932)

It was 1929 and Ernest Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida, where he liked to rise early in the morning when the air was still cool, go to his desk and write 500 words.

It would become too hot after that, with the dense and humid air seeming to invade everything. The noises would come, too, with people toing and froing in the streets, their conversations being carried along on the air and into the office he used. It was then that he would take himself off to play with Patrick, his second son and the first of the two boys he would have with Pauline, Wife #2, for a few hours.

He could be found later on most days in the bar of Sloppy Joe's, over on Duval Street. He liked it there. They did not care in that place about what he wore. It was a thing that they had in common, as he did not care about what he wore, either. Pauline would always chide him for wearing this shirt or that shirt or for not having a tie. But he was comfortable in those old and dirty shorts, cinched together with a knotted rope. And the people down there, in the south of Florida, already knew him so well that changing his look at this point. Well, that would be something false, wouldn't it? A piece of his life without the ring of truth to it that he tried to live by.

At the end of each week, he would go to the fights, where they would sometimes let him referee. But if he was not in the ring, he would sit and drink beer that had been stored in large chests of cold water and ice. And he was happy there, too, on those evenings when he could just sit on the low wooden benches with the heat hanging in the air and flecks of cold water dotting his hands, wrists and arms. But if he did get up, he would sometimes hear the voices say as he climbed up those three steps and went between the ropes, 'Hey, that's Ernest Hemingway, the writer. He lives around here.'

Those words were always said with a whisper, like a secret thrown quickly between friends. But he liked the recognition. He liked people to know who he was, even if he insisted that everyone treat him like anybody else.

It seemed to be a good life, but he felt like a man with an itch in his lower back that he was unable to scratch. Uncomfortable, most of the time.

His wife Pauline was dedicated to him, and that was good in its own way. And his books were selling. And the people and the critics liked those books. And he was treated like someone whose views were worth listening to. And that was good, too.

The thing with Pauline's uncle Gus was one that he did not like, but he did not say anything. The house was Gus's and so was the money that maintained it. And then there was Pauline's trust fund, and it was that and Gus's money that paid for the trips and the lifestyle. He loved all those things, and it was those things - the freedom to do anything he wanted, paid for by that money - that made him more than just a writer.

He would admit that it was a good life. He could admit that. Even if the life was not yet entirely his, like a suit and a mask that he was pulling on slowly. The only way to guarantee success, he thought, was to be successful.

Sometimes, Florida scared him. The heat and the family made him feel blocked. He feared becoming stagnant. He needed something new. He was a fiction writer, and the critics and the public loved him for that. He had done The Sun Also Rises. That was the big one. Then Men Without Women. Then there was A Farewell to Arms. Everything he wrote was moulded from the clay of his own life. He had mined those early trips to Spain with Hadley, Wife #1, for the first book, then that time with the nurse in Italy for Farewell.

That taking of his own life and moulding it was something that he had to do. He was no good at plots; they were not something for an old newspaper man. He could deal in facts and stories but not in the whimsical twists and turns it took to falsely snare a reader.

The public knew it. His publishers knew it. And because he wrote from his own life, he thought that he would write now about life properly. And death.

He had loved Spain almost from the start. That had been with Stein - his writer friend, his mentor. She was the one who had got him into the bullfights with her talk and her pictures of the torero Joselito. That was in 1923.

'You should see it, Ernest,' she had told him one afternoon in Paris. 'It's all there.'

'It's all there?'

'Life and death. Is there anything else?'

'What about the poor horses?'

'They are indeed poor. But there is also Joselito. And if you cannot get to him - and you will, because I will introduce you - there is his brother Gallo.'

'I want to write about life and death,' he told her.

'Then you need to go to Spain. It is the only place where you can see violent death now that all the wars are long over.'

'I very much want to go.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes. I'm trying to learn to write, starting with the simplest things. And one of the simplest things of all, and the most fundamental, is violent death.'

He travelled to Spain with friends that summer in 1923. It was his first time. They spent a month there, starting in Madrid and then moving around: Seville, Ronda, Grenada, Toledo. They saw every bullfight that they could. Then he went back to Paris and to Hadley, and he brought her down with him to Pamplona. They became aficionados of the bullfights.

He wrote later in a letter to his former Chicago roommate: 'Spain is damn good in hot weather.'

Lower down on the page, he wrote:

You'd be crazy about a really good bullfight, Bill. It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy - and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skills and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.

He managed to persuade his newspaper, the Toronto Star, to pay him for two articles on the subject in 1923. 'Bullfighting is not a sport,' he wrote piously. 'It was never meant to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull.' It was less a guide to the fights and the festivals that he wrote but more a guide to himself, an advert of the life he was living. He wrote of Pamplona and said that it was where he had seen the best fights.

He wrote about bullfighting again the next year, in 1924, in In Our Time. These were small and brief pieces, a bundled-together collection of short stories, almost dashed off. But Spain held to him.

Maxwell Perkins became his editor in 1925, and the first thing Hemingway did was write him a letter about bullfighting. 

'I hope some day,' wrote Hemingway,

to have a sort of Doughty's Arabia Deserta of the Bull Ring, a very big book with some wonderful pictures. But one has to save all winter to be able to bum in Spain in the summer and writing classics, I've always heard, takes some time. Somehow, I don't care about writing a novel and I like to write short stories and I like to work at the bullfight book so I guess I'm a bad prospect for a publisher anyway.

He and Hadley kept going back. They took more friends with them in 1925. Everyone fought on that trip, but it was good material.

He came home and wrote The Sun Also Rises. He based it on the friends. He based it on the good material. But when he and Hadley went to Pamplona in 1926, Pauline was there and that meant that his first marriage was ending.

Hadley gave him a divorce in 1927, and he married Pauline a few days later. Then they went to Florida, and he wrote books and articles, but he carried on thinking about Spain and the bulls. There was a book there, he felt, and he wanted people to understand about the bullfights, to know that they were not as cruel or brutal as they seemed to be. And he wanted it for himself, to be the great American voice on bulls and men.

Pauline went with him to Spain. He wanted to go. She wanted to be with him. They visited just after they married.

He went back to America and wrote A Farewell to Arms. It made him think of the nurse in Italy. He wanted to think of other things.

His father died a few months later. Dr Clarence Hemingway had put a gun in his mouth. A note was struck.

Ernest Hemingway needed to think again about something else.

He decided to go back to Spain and write of the bulls and the men who fought them.

It was September 1929 and...