One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village of Latisana and picked up an Italian girl — 18, jet black wet hair, slender legs — who had been waiting for hours at the crossroads. In the car, on his way to a duck shoot, was Ernest Hemingway — round puffy face, protruding stomach and, at 49, without having published a novel in a decade, somewhat past his sell-by. He apologised for being late, and offered the rain-sodden girl a shot of whisky which, being teetotal, she refused.
So did Papa, that ‘beat-up, old-looking bastard’, encounter the siren he called ‘my last and true love’: Adriana Ivancich, a mingling of Lolita and Tadzio, who appeared to him ‘as fresh as a young pine tree in the snow of the mountains’ and who went on to serve as Hemingway’s regenerative muse for his remaining 12 years. ‘It was just something that struck me like lightning.’
Of books on Hemingway there is no end. The author of this one has some skin in the game. His great-uncle was a drinking buddy of Hemingway in Venice, and his aunt was the dedicatee of Hemingway’s story ‘The Faithful Bull’. Plus, growing up near Adriana in southern Tuscany, Andrea di Robilant later met her, by then more than partial to whisky, subdued, with a melancholy gaze, and ‘struggling with depression’ — like not a few who entered Hemingway’s destructive orbit. He may have liberated English prose from mandarins such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, but he sure as heck manacled the hearts of those he tried to love. ‘Women frightened him,’ his third wife Martha Gellhorn used to tell me, by the by declaring that he was also ‘insane’ and a rotten lover. ‘He wasn’t talented for intimacy.’
Hemingway was in Venice by accident. He had travelled from his home in Cuba with his fourth wife Mary, and the Buick, to spend the summer touring ‘Cézanne country’, but they had ended up in Genoa after their ship developed rudder trouble and was forced to by-pass Cannes. In Italy, old memories and wounds revived. Thirty years earlier, when the same age as Adriana, he had been hit by a mortar shell at Fossalta. Mary wrote in her diary: ‘Papa’s old foot wound has opened up wide again.’
Swiftly reduced to the status of ‘ghost-wife’, Mary was compelled to watch the excruciating spectacle of her sozzled husband padding after Adriana ‘like a puppy’. He calls Adriana ‘daughter’ (‘You are my true and only daughter’), and invites her into a gondola to exchange ‘mistakes’ (their code for kisses). As the author limply puts it: ‘Although they probably did not go beyond kissing and cuddling, their intimacy certainly invited speculation about a sexual relationship.’ Within a short time, Hemingway credits Adriana (who does not speak much English) with the late-flowering of his creative juices: ‘When I see you and I am with you I feel I can do anything and I write better than I can write.’ Hmmm.