#194 Ernest Hemingway (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy)

What I learned from reading Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 by Nicholas Reynolds. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  In 2010, I was a historian for the best museum you've never seen, the CIA Museum. We were preparing to install a new exhibit on the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, America's first central intelligence agency. I was tasked with finding out everything I could about this experimental organization, which included researching the company roster. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature. At once, a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's East Coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life. From Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the future chef Julia Child.

• 0:43David Senra?

  In OSS, they could almost literally design their own adventures. My head swimming in research, I made an offhand connection one day that would lead to uncharted waters. I remember reading in the past that Ernest Hemingway and Colonel David Bruce of the OSS had liberated the bar of the Ritz in Paris from the Germans in August 1944. Now I wondered if there was more to the story. Hemingway would not have been out of place in the OSS. He loved secrets and the edge they gave him. He craved action, but was not cut out for conventional soldiering. He moved easily between social and economic classes and across borders.

• 1:25David Senra?

  I thought to myself that he had a lot in common with many of the other men in the spy business whom I had met or read about. So had he been an OSS spy of some sort? What was the full story about Hemingway and intelligence in World War II? The writer had tried his hand at various forms of spying and fighting on two continents. The way stations were varied, often exotic: the battlefields of Spain, the backstreets of Havana, a junk on the North River in China. He seemed to gravitate to men and women who operated on their own in the shadows. And then I learned something that surprised me. He had signed on with another intelligence service, one that did not fit the conventional narrative of his life.

• 2:09David Senra?

  That service turned out to be the Soviet NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB.

• 2:16David Senra?

  A lifelong Hemingway admirer, I felt I'd taken an elbow deep in the gut. How could this be? The characters he created embodied so many American values we still cherish. Truth, bravery, independence, grace under pressure, standing up for the underdog. His voice was uniquely American and revolutionary. He had changed the course of American literature in the 1920s. Why would he sign on and why would he do it secretly? His greatest work, after all, came from sharing, not hiding, his life experiences. And so I set on a quest, day after quiet day, in reading rooms all over the country. I paged through his correspondence.

• 3:00David Senra?

  He was almost as great a letter writer as a novel writer. I wanted to uncover the backstory. Research has always been seductive for me. It felt right for one visit to the archives to lead seamlessly to the next. One more obscure book about the Spanish Civil War, or World War II, or the Cold War was never enough. And so, over the next three years, I filled in the outlines of the new Hemingway portrait from my unusual sources. Ultimately, I concluded that Hemingway's dalliance with the NKVD and the political attitudes that explain it made an important difference in his life and art. It influenced many of the decisions he made during his last 15 years.

• 3:43David Senra?

  Where he lived, what he wrote, and how he acted. The chapters of the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Cuban Revolution, and, two months before his death, the Bay of Pigs, made things worse for him. He did not understand politics and intrigue as well as he thought he did. And for long stretches of time, he overestimated his ability to control himself and others, even to change history. In the end, he began to understand his limits and came to the tragic conclusion that the only way to reassert control was to kill himself. That is the story I tell in this book.

• 4:23David Senra?

  That is an excerpt from the introduction of this fantastic book that I hold in my hand and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures from 1935 to 1961, and it was written by Nicholas Reynolds. Okay, so before I jump into what I learned from the book, some highlights for you, I want to tell you how this book came about. This has been several months in the making. I knew I wanted to read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, and a lot of it has to do with this quote that Steve Jobs said when he was giving a commencement address, I think it was at Stanford back in 2003. I just want to read you what he said. He says, "When you grow up, you tend to be told that the world is the way it is, and that your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life.

• 5:07David Senra?

  Have some fun and save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, that you can change it, that you can influence it." And then he skips a little bit and says, "Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again." And I want to point out what one quote right there, or that one word, "broader." Life can be much broader. So I knew I was going to be doing a series of biographies on writers, and specifically Hemingway, because Hemingway treated life, he lived life to the fullest, he treated it like the adventure it is. And I think so few people actually do that, given exactly what, and that's what Steve Jobs was echoing.

• 5:50David Senra?

  They say the prescription for life that society is giving you is so limited, and life can be so much broader. It can be as broad as you want to make it. And so, reading about and learning from people like Ernest Hemingway, I think serves as a reminder to you and I that life can be whatever we want it to be. It can be as broad or as narrow as you want it to be. Okay, and then second thing, second and last thing I want to tell you before I jump into the book, this is probably the book that I prepared the most for. When I got this idea to read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, I was like, "Well, I can't read a biography of Ernest Hemingway if I don't read Hemingway." So I wound up reading three of his novels in order. I read The Old Man in the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. And so, once I finished those three novels, those three books, I started listening

• 6:34David Senra?

  to the audiobook of this book. I thought I was going to read like a proper, extensive biography of Ernest Hemingway. The one I picked up was terrible. I went up giving up, the quickest I've ever given up on a book because the writing was so bad. But while I was listening to this audiobook, I thought it was the opposite. It was amazing. It was fun. I couldn't believe, there's so much unbelievable things that happened in his life that take place in this book, that about halfway through the audiobook, I ordered the paperback version. And once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. So that's a clear indication that I need to make a podcast about this. So I'm going to jump right back into the book. I want to tie, there's just one sentence that's going to set the tone for the life of Ernest Hemingway. "Hemingway was not there just to observe."

• 7:19David Senra?

  And so that reminded me about the part of the book I did last week, or a couple of days ago, whenever it was, on Arnold, when this guy was saying, "Hey, I'll pay for your plane ticket. You can fly to this competition just to watch." And Arnold's like, "Watch? No, no, I'm not here. I'm not merely here to be a spectator in life. I'm here to take part." And that is definitely a main theme of the life of Hemingway. So in addition to the fact that I wanted to study Hemingway because he treated life like an adventure, I also want to study him because he got to the very, very top of his profession. And his work still resonates to this day. My favorite book, the book that I liked the most of his, was The Old Man in the Sea. And it was published in 1950, 70 years ago. And you can pick that book up today and still be wildly entertained and learn something

• 8:00David Senra?

  from it. So it says, "By the year 1935, Hemingway had climbed to the top of his profession. Born just before the turn of the century, this ambitious young man from Illinois had started a revolution in literature while still in his 20s. His two bestsellers, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, reflected how much he had lived in his first three decades. He was a wounded veteran by 19, then a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and a member of the Paris branch of the lost generation of legendary talented writers. The Nobel Prize for Literature that Hemingway had later received explains the appeal of his work."

• 8:39David Senra?

  His writing honestly and undoubtedly reproduced the hard countenance of the age with a trademark combination of simplicity and precision. And I think, reading three of his books, that simplicity and precision really culminates in The Old Man and the Sea. I like The Sun Also Rises as well. I like For Whom the Bell Tolls less than either of the other two books. But in The Old Man and the Sea, just his brevity, his simplicity, his precision, the way he I'm not going to ruin the plot of the book, but essentially, almost the entire story takes place with one individual by himself on a boat. And it's wildly entertaining. And again, really quick to read, which again, I really appreciate writers like Hemingway because when you read a lot, you read there's just a lot of writers that are not writing to be read.

• 9:24David Senra?

  I don't know if they're writing for fellow adulation from maybe critics or other academics or other cases, but their writing is terrible. Hemingway wrote to be read. When he wrote, he was the soul of brevity, telling compelling stories in spare prose that spoke to millions of readers. His central theme was personal courage. He displayed a natural admiration for every individual who fights the good fight in a world, overshadowed by violence and death. Hemingway was so successful that he was now on his way to becoming a touchstone for every American writer. So he is about, he's in his, by 1935, that would put him in his mid-30s. So it says, he was so successful that he now became on his way to become a touchstone

• 10:06David Senra?

  for every American writer and a role model for American individualists. That's an important, his love of both the underdog and the individual is an important theme that we're going to revisit a couple of times today. They were reading Hemingway, quoting him, copying his behavior, and seeking his advice. He had only a handful of competitors. And on the next page, there's this sentence that I think tells us a lot about Hemingway. It says, "The editors lashed back that Hemingway was too focused on the individual." And did not understand the powerful economic forces determining the course of history. I would say that's a key to his personality. He valued the individual. He did not think of himself as belonging to a group. And one thing I admire about Hemingway, and tying back to this idea that he treated life as like adventure, he would live, he

• 10:50David Senra?

  didn't live in one spot all the time. The longest place he ever lived, I don't know, being in Cuba, but he lived all over the world. He'd lived in Key West, which we're going to get to right now. But he saw the entire world. He was constantly traveling. It's amazing. It's almost like, you ever seen the movie Forrest Gump, where Tom Hanks, playing Forrest Gump, the character's always like every single, there's like every single historical event, he just happens to be. Hemingway has a lot of that in him. Whether he's in, either in China, meeting the future leaders of, the communist leaders in China, he's watching the D-Day invasion in Normandy, off the coast of France, from a boat. He just happens to be there. When the Allies liberate Paris, he's there. He just has all these experiences. He just pops up like he's Forrest Gump. So this is a little bit about,

• 11:33David Senra?

  and when he, when he goes into, this book goes into a lot of detail about where, when he does choose a place to call home. I think this says a lot about what's important to him. Hemingway had moved to Key West. It was a place, and remember, this is in the 1920s, okay? Let me go back to that page. It says, "It was a place where the robust handsome sportsman, who was six feet tall and solidly muscled, could live a halfway rugged outdoor life, barefoot, wearing plain t-shirts, half unbuttoned, and shorts. In 1928, Key West was a poor man's tropical paradise, reachable from the mainland only by rail or boat." So I'm going to pause in the middle of that paragraph. If you don't know, it's the southernmost

• 12:17David Senra?

  tip of the United States. It's closer to Cuba. It's 90 miles from Cuba than it is to Miami. And I've been to the Keys, I don't know, 10 times, maybe a dozen times. Some of the strangest experiences of my life and strangest people I ever met, live, happened in, in the Keys. It's a bizarre, even to this day, and it's much more developed now than it was in Hemingway's day. Hemingway's day, it's like almost living, and what he liked about it, I'm not really, I'm in the America, but I don't really, I'm not really in the country. So it says, "It was a poor man's tropical paradise, reachable from the mainland only by rail or boat." Now, there's a seven mile bridge. "Many of the streets were not paved. Many of the buildings had no plumbing or electricity. The closest thing to a grocery store was a small warehouse that sold necessity." So most of the people lived there.

• 13:02David Senra?

  You might buy rice and beans, stuff like that at the warehouse, but mostly they're catching, they're eating mostly seafood. He was, he had a goal, at one point it was like to be the world's best deep sea fisherman. He was something, a passion of his entire life. It's also why he chose to live in Key West and later in Cuba. It was a place of shabby discomfort. Good friends, gambling, 15 cent whiskey and 10 cent gin. He's definitely an outsider, definitely a misfit. He's attracted to these bizarre people and these bizarre places. Part of the island's charm was that the mainland was far away. The Key West was a town of independent fishermen and bootleggers. And on this page is a picture of his house in the Keys. I've actually been there.

• 13:46David Senra?

  And the note I left myself was, you know you were good at your job when they turn your house into a museum. So not only is this house in Key West a museum, but also his house in Cuba is a museum. Talks about his personality and why he might want to pick to live in a place like the Keys, which was very remote. Hemingway placed a premium on rugged self reliance. So now we're going to jump ahead to Spain. The book is kind of in a chronological order, but it goes, it goes back and forth with like flashbacks and stuff. So again, it's not, you gotta read the book to get the whole story like, like every other book that I talk about. And this is a fantastic book. Buying copies for friends, like, there is so much in this book that has, there's like a history of everything that's going on that I have to omit, but it's very fascinating.

• 14:31David Senra?

  And this is a little bit about, I want to bring this, these two paragraphs to your attention because there's something that was very consistent with Hemingway's. How many times he was within inches or minutes of death? Even when they said he was, by the time he was like 19 or 20, he was injured, he got injured in World War I. He was an ambulance driver for the, for the Red Cross. And they wound up getting shelled by, I think, German artillery. I can't remember, it was Germans definitely shot at him. I don't remember if it was bullets or missiles or bombs or whatever, but the guy next to him wound up dying. He wound up being in a hospital for six months. In this case, he's, he's going to cover the civil war that's happening in Spain in the 1930s, and they just light up his car. And this happens several times. There's pictures in the book of what the car looks like. It's unbelievable. This is a description of what happened. The time was the spring of 1937, the place, Spain.

• 15:16David Senra?

  A photo shows that the once elegant black sedan had been riddled with bullets, probably from a passing enemy fighter plane. It is now a wreck, front tire flat, windshield shattered, one headlight dangling from its socket. The car's engine is exposed, its hood lying useless a few feet away. The open door suggests that the passengers got out fast. Two of those passengers was Hemingway and a columnist named Joris Ivins. They stand between the camera and the rack miraculously unscathed. For most of his life, Hemingway liked to live on the edge and take risks. But the expression on his face suggests that, at least this time, the brush with death was close enough for him. And that's also something I learned and come to respect about Hemingway. You might not agree with his views on things or the way he acts.

• 16:01David Senra?

  He is a wild uncontrollable person, definitely not civilized by any means. But he is willing to make sacrifices and pay the, if there's going to be consequences for his actions, he's willing to deal with those consequences, both good and bad. In many cases, he puts himself in the, in the very real possibility of dying. He is not cowardly by any means. This, this is just a highlight of something, most of which I'm going to omit, that the book talks about a lot. It's just the, the level of violence that, because you're dealing with all kinds of, it's a book about spying in some cases, right? So you have the CIA, the NKVD, the, the British version of that, I don't remember what the

• 16:46David Senra?

  name is, Japanese spies, Chinese spies. But again, it, this, I'm going to read the sentence and the reason I'm reading the sentence because this, this is, they're describing events that took place, let's see, almost 100 years ago. And this still goes on today. We just saw the same thing happen to the journalist Jamal Kasagi, I think is how you pronounce his name. And it says, "The NKVD would lure a Trotskyite in for an appointment, then interrogate, kill, and cremate him, leaving no trace whatsoever."

• 17:16David Senra?

  So let me go back to what I was just talking about, why he was willing to put himself in so many dangerous situations, what his goal was. He wanted to be the, not a, not one of, the war writer of his generation. War, and his reason was, war gave answers that could be found nowhere else. And again, he had a very early experience, and it's something he had, he had experience with war from the time he was 18 till almost his entire life, minus maybe his last decade. World War II was basically his last experience with war. And he lived about another decade, decade and a half after that. But he wanted to be the war writer. Now, he doesn't say war correspondent, even though that's the job he has. And he was gonna wind up getting in trouble later on, because he doesn't, he's

• 17:57David Senra?

  like, I'm not here to just report. So he, in many cases, he'll pick up guns. He's, there's so many unbelievable things in this book. He winds up, he winds up encountering these French guerrillas, right before the end of the war in the liberation of Paris. And he can speak French, speaks a bunch of languages. He winds up leading them, they take over a hotel, they capture, and he's supposed to be reporting on the war. And they capture a bunch of German soldiers, like, they're, it's, this is gonna blow your mind. It is going to blow your mind. So I do want to bring one thing to your attention that I didn't, again, it's kind of weird when you discover one thing and then you see it. Now that I've been aware of this book, I've seen it mentioned a few times. I was actually surprised about this. This is a, well, let me tell you what's going on in the story.

• 18:40David Senra?

  So there is the Comintern. The Comintern was like an organization that was controlled by the Soviet Union that would advocate for world communism, right? And so what they would do is they would figure out a way to convince people to adopt communism is through propaganda. So they would want to recruit a bunch of writers or famous people, actors, whatever the case is, to their side, so that they can kind of preach the gospel of the Comintern. So Hemingway, they tried to recruit Hemingway. He is never a communist. He's definitely on the left, but he is more, he describes himself as an anti-fascist. But he was never a communist. They tried to recruit him. And even when the books are saying, oh, he signed on with NKVD, he didn't do anything with them. And this is before the Soviet Union wind up being an enemy of, you can't call him a traitor, because it

• 19:23David Senra?

  wasn't, they were an ally, they were an American ally at the time. But anyways, I thought that part of the book was a little bit overplayed because then I'm reading through the book, I'm like, OK, I listened to the audiobook, right? And then I read the book. And I was like, where the hell did I miss the part where he's actually contributing to the NKVD? And at the end, it's like, well, you know, he signed on, he never really did anything with them. I was like, all right, well, come on. He's got enough, there's enough interesting things in his life, we don't have to overplay that part, I guess, was my interpretation of it. Maybe I missed it, I don't know, but that was my interpretation. So anyways, this is where the commentator is trying to recruit Hemingway. He's never going to sign on and be a full-fledged communist. He thought, again, he's an individual, I like to have a loose association with fellow irregulars, fellow misfits, but I'm not going to do your bidding.

• 20:08David Senra?

  He was way too type A, strong personality to ever do that. But anyways, so they're recruiting him and this other lady named Barbara Tuchman. So it says Barbara Tuchman would write the bestseller, The Guns of August, which attracted the attention of JFK, President John F. Kennedy. So that book, we just learned about this book recently on podcast number 188, that was the book that Joe of Trader Joe's, the founder of Trader Joe's, was reading when his company almost went bankrupt. It's a book on war, ostensibly, but his point was that the book's main concept, this is Joe's point, the book's main concept is that there are multiple solutions to non-convex problems. So that applies to combat, non-convex problems, but also to business.

• 20:53David Senra?

  And so he had the idea, it's like, well, there's multiple, there's multiple solutions and multiple paths out of impending bankruptcy, I just have to find them. And so let's go back to his time in Spain. This time in Spain, so now he's doing reporting, but he considers himself a war writer. So this is what his experiences in Spain are going to be, he writes about in The Sun Also, no, not The Sun Also Rises, that's about bullfighting and like Paris writers, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Okay, so we're not there yet. So it talks about like now he's putting himself in harms way, more about his personality. Perhaps to test himself, he had not been in combat for almost 20 years. He seemed to relish going out into the battlefield with the crew. So it says, "It turned out the cameraman that he's with had forgotten his camera.

• 21:38David Senra?

  Hemingway crawled back on his hands and knees to look for it while enemy sharpshooters marked his path with near misses. Bullets hit close by." This happens over and over again to him. "The group that he's with, these guerrillas, they were filled with tough, colorful, and educated men, as well as a few women, from various countries, including the United States." The kind of people who appealed to Hemingway, it gives us some of the personality traits of people he admires. "They were not just dreamers, but men risking their lives for their beliefs. They were authentic." So again, a lot of times when people say what they admire in other people, it's traits that they may want to have in themselves. He definitely admired men that risked, or men are people. They risked their lives for what they believed in, and they were authentic. He tried to do both of those.

• 22:21David Senra?

  And this is interesting, where he talks about the communist guerrillas that he's embedded with in Spain, coming from all over. If you happen to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, the main character, Robert Jordan, I think is the main character's name in that novel, is an American who had come, he was an American teacher, who had come to Spain to help, to help fight the Civil War. And he's the one that has the skills and wants to blowing, blowing up bridges, which we'll learn more about later on. No, no, no, we're not going to learn about it later on. We're going to learn about it right now. I thought this was coming in a few pages. All right. So it says, this is the experiment, the experience about to describe to you now, actually happened in real life. It is the main plot of For

• 23:05David Senra?

  Whom the Bell Tolls. So this is why, again, I think of, I'm going to talk to you more about how he approached his work, because he gets his top of his profession. I think that's very interesting to you and I. But really, it's about exposing yourself to a wide variety of experiences. So those experiences can influence your work.

• 23:21David Senra?

  So it says Hemingway was with the guerrillas for four days at their camp and in the field. They loaned him a revolver and asked him to carry hand grenades and food on the 15-mile march to the objective. Setting off at dusk, the 30-man band slipped through fascist lines, traveled near but not on a road, and finally, under cover of darkness, crawled up to a set of railroad tracks on a small bridge over a river. Before long, they could hear a train in the distance and see sparks from the locomotive lighting up the night sky. The train was moving slowly enough to give them time to carefully prime their charges while Hemingway rummaged around in his pack for a camera.

• 24:04David Senra?

  At the guerrilla's urgent request, he turned off the flash but was able to use the light from the explosion to photograph the attack. The bridge collapsing into the water just before the locomotive reached the riverbank. The cars coming off the rails, their iron wheels plowing up the earth before they came to rest, now useful only as scrap metal. The guerrillas did not wait for the enemy to react but started for home at once. That is the main plot, which is a lot longer in the book, of For Whom the Bell Tolls. And then this is more on how his time in Spain related to his work. Hemingway was also in Spain as a suitor, humanitarian, military adviser, and above all, writer. As he tried to explain to the guerrillas, the writer and the reporter were different.

• 24:46David Senra?

  The reporter wanted facts for a story to file as soon as he could get through. The writer wanted to absorb the experience of wartime, which is when he gets back home, it's going to make his writing more profound and resonate more because he actually saw these things. He actually experienced them. Now, what was interesting is how he had a blind spot. At this time in history, regardless of whether in the left or right, they're all authoritarians. And this reminded me of advice that Charlie Munger gives that I think is really good. And he's like, "Listen, avoid intense ideology. It turns your brain to mush." And so throughout his life, the closest relationships that Hemingway's going to have are forged

• 25:30David Senra?

  in these areas, whether it's in his time in Spain, on World War II. He goes through extreme experiences with these people and he winds up with lifelong friends. And one of them is this guy named Regler. Regler had to flee. I think he was Jewish. So he had to flee Germany. He saw the authoritarianism that was happening in Germany in the 1930s. So he's a Jew and a communist. And he winds up going to Moscow thinking, OK, I escaped these authoritarians. And then he starts seeing the behavior by Stalin. He's like, wait, you guys are playing to be the enemy, but you're doing the enemy to Hitler and fascism, but you're doing the exact same thing. And so he tried to educate Hemingway on this. And Hemingway eventually gets this later on, but not to the degree that Regler does because

• 26:13David Senra?

  he's just like, I've seen the show trials and executions and all this stuff that was happening in Germany is now playing out in Russia as well. And we saw this before. This is podcast number 159. Andy Grove winds up being essentially the third co-founder of Intel. His memoir, Swimming Across, only covers the first 20 years of his life. In one part of the story, Germany is controlling Hungary where he lives. And then eventually, they're quote unquote liberated by Russia. And they're happy for a little bit. And then they start seeing the same thing where the Germans would pull people, pull his relatives out of their house and execute them. The Russians start killing people. They wind up raping his mother and all the women living in his apartment building. And so you read that book, and first of all, it's just extremely well-written and an amazing story that he survived that.

• 26:58David Senra?

  But you just, you see that there is, the authoritarians, people that want complete control are more alike than they profess to be different. And so that's what Regler was saying. Regler was living in Moscow, where he started to understand in a way Hemingway never would, what it was like to live under the dictatorship on a day-to-day basis. Often, it ominously mirrored Nazi Germany. And Regler speaks about this so much, he tries to educate Hemingway about this, that eventually, he's forced to flee Russia, too. So he had to leave. Imagine living, experiencing that in your life. You have to flee the antisemitism in Germany. You get to Moscow, and you realize, hey, this isn't right either. You speak up about it, and they're like, you either leave the country or it will kill you. And I think Regler has to live the rest of his life in Mexico.

• 27:38David Senra?

  One thing about Ernest Hemingway, he has a volcanic temper, which I'll go into. I don't even know if I go into it today, but there's definitely a few stories in the book that express that. He also has a gigantic ego and does not think that rules apply to him at any means. And this is something we've seen a lot in these biographies. He considered himself to be more influential than he actually was, believing that others lived by what he said and wrote about Spain. For one, the young writer Bessie was surprised to learn that Hemingway believed that it was his speech in New York City in June 1937 that motivated Bessie to travel to Spain and join the battalion. Bessie quoted Hemingway as saying that he knew, quote, "that my speech influenced a lot of boys to come over here."

• 28:21David Senra?

  This was, Bessie continued, "the kind of egomania," and this is coming from his friend, "the kind of egomania the guy suffered from. I decided to go to Spain long before I heard his speech." And this is the part I mean about the rules don't apply to him. We're still in Spain at this point. On the battlefield, Hemingway continued to alternate between witnessing and participating in the fighting. He logged many miles with fellow journalists, this guy named Jay Allen for the Chicago Tribune, and then Herbert Matthews of the New York Times. Matthews is his friend. They wound up being friends for a long time, including when Hemingway lives in Cuba and listen to what he's going to do to him. And Hemingway did not hesitate to set aside his notebook and pen when a loyalist needed his help. These are the guerrillas fighting the fascists. That's what he calls them in Germany, or, excuse me, in Spain.

• 29:06David Senra?

  Hemingway called on his calling to help move an artillery piece stuck in the mud. So he's getting in, he's like, "These guys need your help. We're not just here to write about it. Let's actually help." And got angry when Allen refused, claiming that he was hired to write, not fight the war. See, Hemingway never made that distinction. Nor did Hemingway appreciate the lecture on the laws of war that followed. How reporters had no legal right to carry sidearms. Hemingway was not only carrying guns, he was firing at the people. Hemingway pitched in again when a truckload of youths, the truck turned upside down, and boys were strewn along the roadway. Hemingway left from the car and started giving first aid, while Matthews got out his notebook and started asking questions of the injured. Oh, my God.

• 29:48David Senra?

  Hemingway shouted at Matthews to get the hell out of the way before he, Hemingway, killed him.

• 29:56David Senra?

  And now we have, so the reason I want to move to this next section is because Hemingway is now looking back at his time in Spain. I remember he's in his early to mid 30s. He is, no doubt of myself, it's no wonder he created a novel so many people loved. His soul was in it at the time. He's going to look back and realize, okay, I was a little bit too bought in. And his book actually talks about, which is interesting, because his book made both people mad, both sides mad, because they talked about the atrocities on both sides. And they're like, no, no, no, you should only talk about that side, or hey, I thought you were with us. It was just really interesting, just a fundamental aspect of human nature, this tribalism that we all engage in, that I think I always want to

• 30:36David Senra?

  be aware of, make sure I'm not having my mind or my thoughts polluted by our inevitable instinct to have an us versus them mentality. So this is looking back more than a decade later, he would admit during the war that started for him in Spain, he had become so stinking righteous, that he gave him the horrors to look back on. For Hemingway, the Spanish Civil War was not just an outlet for a writer who wanted to be a fighter, or just source material for his next book. In words and actions, literally on and off the battlefield, Hemingway fought for the republic and against fascism, both when it furthered his career and when it did not. He was willing to make personal and professional sacrifices. So let me repeat that sentence, because it's apparent over and over again. He was willing to make personal and professional sacrifices.

• 31:18David Senra?

  Okay, so now we get into his actual work, how he actually constructs his novels and these books that he wrote so long ago, and that people are going to be reading them probably for hundreds of years from now. It's just amazing to me. So this is his state of mind as he begins to work, and we also see what he, he understands he's a, I'm not a sick individual, that's not the right way to put it. He is depressed when he's not in combat. So it says, and I think this is, I'm not trying to criticize him here, this is something, if you read any kind of military history, for thousands of years, people have talked about this, like, they're in the most dangerous, terrifying, sometimes terrible environments in their life, and they look back at it as, that was the best job I ever had, that was the best time of my life.

• 32:04David Senra?

  So it says, "From Key West, he felt both angry and guilty. He had seen town after town bombed to the ground, the inhabitants killed, the columns of refugees on the roads bombed and machine-gunned, shot and shot again. It was the sort of thing that kills things inside of you. He could not bear to think about his good friends who were still in the thick of things. It was better to be with them." He had, and this is what I mean, he had slept good and sound every night in Spain throughout the whole war. He had never felt better. These are his words. "He concluded that one's conscience is a strange thing, and not controlled either by a sense of security nor danger of death." He wrote that he had, now he's back in Key West, this is how crazy this is. Now he wrote that he had bad dreams every night, really awful ones, in the greatest

• 32:49David Senra?

  detail. It was strange because he never had any bad dreams in Spain. I mean, just think about that. You put me in a horrible environment, an environment where I could be killed at any moment, and I'm sleeping like a baby. I'm back home in a place where I love, and because of that sense of adrenaline, competing for the highest stakes, I feel depressed. And this is something he deals with his entire life, and this deep depression that he has is, leads in part to him shooting himself. And so the one thing he can do is he just throws himself into work. So it says, "For Hemingway, now is the time to withdraw from the world and work." This is when he's writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. The only thing, this is a quote from him, "The only thing about a war, once it has started, is to win it, and that is what we did not do.

• 33:33David Senra?

  The hell with war for a while. I am not killed, so I have to work." And so, one of the things I most admire about Hemingway, and I don't know how he does it, because the guy, his main interests in life are reading, writing, drinking, war, and women. And this guy drinks, and I would speculate that that causes, I mean, if you drink as heavily as he did for multiple decades, I can't imagine, I mean, not only does it break down your body, but it's gotta be depressing, long-term, right? So, he still had some kind of weird discipline, though, to wake up early. And so what he would do is he'd wake up every day before dawn and just write uninterrupted for hours at a time till about the early afternoon. So he's probably putting, let's say, six, maybe seven hours of uninterrupted writing. And then he would go and live his

• 34:18David Senra?

  other life for the other part of the day. And so he'd go fish, he would drink, he would shoot, he would date, because he collected four wives through his life. Was a terrible husband, by the way. Never faithful, had tons of mistresses everywhere. So that's just the kind of life. He would want, after a morning of solitude and writing, he would then come, like, he would want to hang out with friends and play cards and be physical. He was very much, very similar to how Theodore Roosevelt talked about the benefits of getting out of your mind and into your body and doing things that are exhausting and difficult. I think Hemingway would have agreed with Roosevelt.

• 34:58David Senra?

  Now, let's go back to that guy, Regler, the guy, the friend I told you about that escaped Germany, then had to escape Moscow to go to Mexico. And this is his description of Hemingway, which is his lifelong friend. And it is part of the reason why I wanted to study him. And I'll tell you which sentence jumps out at me. "Regler seemed to understand how his friend thought, describing Hemingway as basically unpolitical. Ernest had a better grasp of the law of the jungle than of politics. He was more like a hunter than a politician. He thought in terms of black and white, of life and death. He did not see that modern dictators had no respect even for the law of the pack. Hemingway did not stand for Western democracy, but for," this is the part

• 35:38David Senra?

  that jumps out at me, "but for experiencing life in all its fullness. But for experiencing life in all its fullness," I'll repeat it one more time, "for experiencing life in all its fullness." That is, I think, the main point of studying people like Hemingway. It's for the reminder of how full life can be if we want it to be. "in places like the hills of Africa or the waters off of Key West." This is more about his focus while he was writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. And he wrote a lot of this. This is fascinating to me because this is not a short book. By hand. He winds up, I think, writing, there's a picture in the book where he's writing pencil and then he types it up and then edits it in pencil, if I'm not mistaken. He said some interesting, actually, that made me think. Let me grab this quote. There's a bunch of

• 36:21David Senra?

  quotes about, about writing that he has. So he says, "Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done." I thought that was fantastic. And then he says, "It wasn't by accident that the Geseburg Address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics." So he's telling us to be brief. So anyways, there's a picture of him editing this book. Let me go back into this. During the first, first months of World War II, Hemingway remained deeply absorbed in his book. Occasionally, I don't know, there's like drilling happening and I have no idea what's going on. I don't know if you guys can hear that. Sorry if you can. I'm just gonna push through, though. Hemingway remained deeply absorbed in his book, occasionally surfacing to write letters or tend to Gelhorn. This is his third wife. She commented in

• 37:02David Senra?

  a letter that he was like an animal with his manuscript, keeping it close to him or hiding it in a drawer under other papers. He never willingly showed it to anyone and would not talk about it. So let's go back to that. She commented in a letter that he was like an animal with his manuscript, keeping it close, hiding it, and never talking about it. So this is the beginning of World War II. He is not, he's living in Cuba at this point, but he's not, he hasn't traveled to Europe yet. He actually gets hired or asked to do some like precurs, like some, some information gathering, some like, almost like spying for the United States. This comes from the US Secretary of Treasury. They want him to go to China and do some research because they're about to provide, the United

• 37:47David Senra?

  States is about to provide economic support to China in their fight with the Japanese. So said he wanted Hemingway to go on a fact-finding mission, a common practice at the time. Senior government official might ask a prominent citizen or politician to travel overseas, immerse himself in the local scene, and report his impressions. Hemingway was flattered to be asked. This is the kind of recognition he craved. In his mind, he was more than just a novelist or a journalist. He was a sophisticate who understood how the world worked and could use his understanding to help shape events. Hemingway thought that spying was one more of his many life skills, and he was not wrong.

• 38:25David Senra?

  And so it's during this time where you see more of his aspects of his personality. Another example, he does not feel rules apply to him. And then he talks about how good it feels to be great at what you do. And then we see his preferred method, like he just wants a loose association with fellow misfits. He does not want to be part of a group. Another trait he shared with other spies was an assumption that everyday rules did not apply to him. Hemingway had been living, and this is also applies to his work, that's why I'm bringing it up. Hemingway had been living by his own code for decades. In literature, it had to do with his revolutionary writing style. And he talks about now, at this point in the story, For Whom the Bell Tolls is already out, and it's selling really well, and it's being reviewed very well. So it says, "He described how it felt almost too good to write as well as he could and then have his work sell.

• 39:10David Senra?

  He loved things military and being around soldiers, but he did not want to join any man's army. His preference was for a loose affiliation with other irregulars, which made him feel like he was part of the action, but left him free to come and go as he pleased." And this sentence tells us a lot about his personality. "Hemingway was a man who did not mind hardship, especially in the service of a cause he believed in, but he also would tolerate luxury." And we see that, like, he's, you know, he's on the battlefield, he's cold, he's in danger, he's not eating very much, and then they'll wind up taking over like a village or like a hotel, and then they'll just live it up. They'll get drunk on the best wine, the best alcohol, they'll eat the best food, he'll carry on affairs. Like, he wants the full spectrum of life.

• 39:55David Senra?

  He wants the zeros and the tens. Complete and utter misery, that makes him feel alive, and then complete and utter debauchery. He'll partake in both. And this is right before he's gonna travel to Europe, he's gonna leave Cuba. Actually, no, I'm gonna, I have some more stuff to tell you, because he winds up doing this, he winds up getting like a ragtag band of spies under his own control in Cuba too, which is hilarious. But let me just tell you what he was engaged in the four years before World War II. During the previous four years, he had immersed himself in a series of life events that would have exhausted most mortals: infidelity, divorce, and remarriage. Committing himself heart and soul to a lost cause in Spain, cutting his ties to Key West and moving to Cuba, writing a 470-page masterwork of world literature, and traveling to another

• 40:39David Senra?

  war in an unknown part of the world. And that's when he went to China. Okay, so now this is about Cuba is almost like his muse. You could really think it's a place he lived the longest. He was depressed towards the end of his life because a few days before he kills himself as the Bay of Pigs and he realizes I can never go back to Cuba. Like, they're not going to let an American there, no matter, even if I was sympathetic to their regime or other cases. So it's a place he deeply, deeply loved. Says Hemingway was in love with the island country. There was only 90 miles from Key West. It was foreign and exotic. Even before he lived there, he was repeatedly drawn back to Cuba, usually on fishing trips. By the end of the decade, he had made the island his home. So it talks about a little about where he lived and his house.

• 41:22David Senra?

  Most rooms would soon turn into branches of the main library in Hemingway's study. Stacks of books sprouted on almost every available surface. By 1961, there would be something like 7,500 books in the house. So when I got to that part about him having 7,500 books in the house, I was reading a, saw an article one time on Jim Mattis, this general, the American general, who, he has like a personal library of like 6,000 books or some crazy thing like that. But he talks a lot about the importance of reading. And there's a quote by Jim, I kept, he says, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you."

• 42:05David Senra?

  Hemingway talks about one of the worst things that happened to him when he winds up having to get electroshock therapy, go through depression, his inability to read, which was, his love, the love of his life was reading. You see that 7,500 books. The American, go back, let's go back to the, what he liked about Cuba. "The American writer liked the choices and the freedom." Remember, this is 1940s. He's living in Cuba for, let's say, 1940, maybe 19, the 40s and 50s. This is, you know, Wild, Wild West. There's, you got a small corrupt dictator for sure. This is even before Castro. You got the mafia, you got US businesses. It's, it's a wild place. So he says, "The American writer liked," and that's what, just like Key West, that's

• 42:50David Senra?

  why he liked the Keys. He liked this like pirate kind of lifestyle. "The American writer liked the choices and the freedom that this island offered, the well-to-do expatriate. Life in Cuba was more colorful and exciting than life at home. The rules were different. That is, when there were any rules at all." Talks about some of the stuff he was into. There was the superb fishing. There was also the shooting club. Cockfighting, already illegal in many American states, and Cuban baseball. These are some of the things he loved. So I've told you before, my father was actually born in Cuba. He fled at almost the same exact time him and his, my grandparents fled Cuba. The exact same year, actually. No, maybe two years before Hemingway did. They fled in 59, or maybe 60.

• 43:34David Senra?

  But the reason I bring that up is because I remember, and I don't understand the appeal at all, but I remember my dad taking me to illegal cockfighting, to watch illegal cockfighting when I was like five or six years old. I have no idea why Cubans like this, the idea of cockfighting. I guess they do, they make a lot of money off it because they gamble and stuff. But that is just something that followed as the people, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe, I don't even know the number, it's a large number, would flee Cuba for the United States and they brought cockfighting with them. So it says, "Last but hardly least, Hemingway enjoyed the cool and quiet early mornings in Cuba, so conducive to writing as any other time and place he knew. He liked to get up at dawn and work by himself."

• 44:16David Senra?

  So there's that, his, the same work ethic and same preference for work that he had in the Keys, he brought it to Cuba. Cuban society also suited him, so that's another thing. Hemingway was very informal. He liked to be barefoot, and so that's something he also liked about the society in the Keys and in Cuba. Cuban society also suited him. It was much less formal than American society. As he noted happily, "A man only had to put on shoes when he went into town." So it is from his residence in Cuba, his time there where he's going to work with the US government and set up a anti-fascist spying group. They're looking for Germans in Cuba, in the water, and then the water's out of there. There was going to be some...

• 45:02David Senra?

  There's gonna be some stories that are gonna blow your mind. This guy retrofits his boat and starts hunting German U-boats. I mean, this is unbelievable. Before I get there, though, I want to talk about something that was surprising to me. Let me read this to you because I had learned this previously, but a lot of people I don't think knew this. "The Eastern Front," this is the fight of World War II between the Russians and the Germans, "was unquestionably the most manpower and intensive theater in the war. Its scale dwarfed most other battlegrounds in the greatest armed conflict in world history." So not only is World War II the largest armed conflict ever to exist, but that, this, the Eastern Front, the Ostfront, is where almost everything happened. Statistics tell the story clearly. Between 80 and 90% of the German casualties in World War II would occur on this front.

• 45:45David Senra?

  That is bananas, 80 to 90% of German casualties. This meant that something like 4 million German soldiers would die, along with an estimated 11 million Soviet soldiers. So I didn't know any of this. I always tell you the person that inspires me the most, the person, what I feel is like the best podcaster to ever live, was, is Dan Carlin. I almost said George Carlin. It's Dan Carlin from Hardcore History. He has a four-part series called "The Ghost of the Ostfront." I think every one is like between an hour and a half to two hours long. It's in his back catalog, so you gotta go and buy it, and it's worth every penny. It's worth hundreds of times what he charges for it. But it's just, if you don't know anything, or even if you want, maybe read a couple of books about the Ostfront, Dan Carlin did a masterful job.

• 46:30David Senra?

  There's so many anecdotes and stories in there that are just unbelievable, including making, being stuck in snow, laying down your captured soldiers when it's below freezing out, covering them with water so it freezes, they freeze to death, and then driving your trucks out on that. I mean, there's just so many stories in that. And again, he's the one that taught me how important the Ostfront was to World War II, and it's just a great way to learn. His podcast, it's just a great way to learn about that. Let me go to this thing about the Crook Factory. So this is, they're setting up this counterintelligence bureau in Havana, and Henry Way is running this thing. So he says he wanted to devote his time to a different kind of intelligence operation, one that would initiate, that he could initiate and control himself. Taking charge was something that he wanted throughout his life as a spy.

• 47:15David Senra?

  This is a description of Hemingway's crew. Hemingway had the ability to mobilize a bizarre combination of bartenders, warfarats, down-at-heel polothe players, and former bullfighters, even priests, assorted exile counts and dukes. And this is just a crazy environment. All these people were living in Cuba at this time. Counts and dukes, and several Spanish loyalists. In all, there were between 20 and 25 members of his crook factory. They went about their work in unusual ways. So they're out there trying to collect information that would help the Allies, and usually spying on German people. He sets them up in bars, and restaurants, and hotels, in bordellos, just everywhere all over the island. And their job is to collect information, bring it back to the information to him.

• 48:00David Senra?

  He'll then write it up, synthesize it, and turn it over to the US. Hemingway's leadership style may have been unconventional, but it was effective. And this is not only in Cuba. He was very effective with leadership when he chose to lead. It was really interesting, because he was kind of like a lone wolf, you know? He inspired loyalty and enthusiasm in his workforce, despite the alcohol. Again, he's drunk all the time. Hemingway made his agents focus on detail and debrief. I don't even know how he-- I wonder if he wrote with alcohol? Because I know he's drinking a lot at night, but he's writing in the morning, so I'm not sure. But his agents focused on detail and debrief of them thoroughly. After the meeting, he might stay up the rest of the night, painstakingly writing and editing reports. Before driving to the embassy, he would then enter by a discreet side door and deliver his information to Joyce, that was his connection, who was impressed by Hemingway's diligence.

• 48:45David Senra?

  So eventually, he gets to the point where he's like, "All right, I want to do something else." He winds up-- he has this ship called-- it's a boat. It's like a 38-foot boat called the Pilar. It was a fishing boat that he used not only in Cuba, but also had in Cuba. And he winds up trying to attack German U-boats off the coast of Cuba, and was willing to die to do so, because he hated the Germans. He noted-- this is a brief description of the closest encounter that he had. And he did this for months, maybe? Maybe a year? He noticed another ship. It was a gray-painted vessel, and it made his pulse quicken. He decided to investigate, proceeding at the moderate speed of seven knots. So his whole point is like what their idea was, that he's collaborating with the US. It's like, okay, you're a fishing boat.

• 49:27David Senra?

  Always just make sure that it always appears you're fishing. Sometimes U-boats will pop up, and they'll sometimes try to buy fish off fishermen, or sometimes say, "Hey, we'll kill you if you don't give us-- like, we need to redo supplies." And so they're like, that may occur with you. And then you just throw a grenade or you try to, you know, destroy the U-boat. It sounds so ridiculous. He decided to investigate, proceeding at the moderate speed of seven knots, right for a boat that wanted to look like she was fishing, not speeding to a fight. She was, it talks about the boat that they're after. She was so large that she looked like an aircraft carrier to Hemingway's friend, now serving as first mate. The writer sailor's reply was, no wolf, unfortunately, she's a submarine, and passed

• 50:10David Senra?

  the word for everyone to be ready to close. This was the moment the captain and crew had trained and hoped for. He continued to steer towards the probable U-boat, closing the distance between them, dry-mouthed but happy, eager to attack. The crew broke out submachine guns and hand grenades. That's not an understatement. He had an entire, his wife talks about later on, like, they go out in the middle of the ocean, this is like towards the end of his life, and for 30 minutes, him and another guy have to just unload all the weaponry. They were worried about, like, there's a revolution coming, maybe they think that they're sympathizers. He never wanted to betray the United States. He says over and over in the book, I'm no fucking traitor. That's his exact quote. Even though he did, he did not like any government.

• 50:54David Senra?

  He didn't like the US government, he didn't like the Cuban government, he didn't like, he just, he was not a fan of governments in general. He was more the underdog, more like the people trying to take control. And I think that's part of why he was so confused by Castro's revolution at the very beginning. But anyways, this idea where they're going after this German U-boat, it's like they're pulling out all these guns. They have like an entire arsenal, which is just crazy. This guy is, the reason it's crazy is because he's one of the most famous writers in the world. Look what he's doing in his spare time, and he wants to do this. The crew broke out submachine guns, hand grenades. Hemingway wanted to hide, they're hiding the guns, hide his violent intentions. The Germans would only see the fishing boat trying to catch fish until it was too late.

• 51:38David Senra?

  The submarine changed course and sped up. Hemingway pursued, but the target was moving too fast. The submarine slipped from sight, so it goes under, and then the polar floated alone on the ocean. The event was so, was a disappointment for Hemingway, the warrior, ready to die for his country. He and his crew would, as he later wrote, have all gone to Valhalla for eternity, happy as goats. Many of the cruises that Hemingway commanded lasted for days and some lasted, and two of them, two of them ran for close to three months. For long stretches, the crew members had only each other for company. They endured every kind of weather. Again, we see Hemingway willing to sacrifice for what he wants to do, perhaps seeking to capture some of the hardship. Hemingway decided to name the operation Friendless. And there's

• 52:21David Senra?

  pictures in the book. This is actually documented. This actually happened, which is just so crazy. The United States government hiring the probably the most famous American writer, one of the most famous American writers, to do covert operations against German U-boats. Okay, so after a while, he's like, okay, this is not, this is not where the action is. German U-boats wind up being pulled back towards the war in Europe. Europe is getting a lot worse. Americans are already on the ground at this point. So now he's gonna go, he's like, all right, I gotta get to World War II. I gotta go to where the action is. And this is where I mentioned, like, he's in, it's like the Forrest Gump version of Hemingway. So he's in Paris as the Allies tried to take back, he's in France as the Allies tried to take Paris. He winds up, again, he's going there as quote unquote, "war correspondent",

• 53:05David Senra?

  but he's, he's gonna take prisoners, he's gonna shoot people, like, and he winds up leading this band of French communist guerrillas that I mentioned earlier. There, Hemingway created a rather well-organized, if tiny headquarters, complete with large maps tacked to the wall, marking German positions and friendly patrol routes. And he literally developed intel that was useful for routes he would find routes in for the Allies that were not guarded by Germans. This is just crazy. Speaking English, French, and broken German, all salted with curses, Hemingway took charge. He received intelligence couriers, refugees from Paris, and deserters from the German army, methodically gathering information and writing reports that he passed to Allied intelligence officers. He called in favors

• 53:48David Senra?

  to get himself as close to the, this is the D-Day, D-Day invasion, as close to the invasion beaches as possible. From a boat, a 38-foot landing craft, he watched history unfolding in the waters off Normandy on June 6, 1944. Around and behind him was one of the greatest armadas in history.

• 54:06David Senra?

  So now he's embedded with some US soldiers, some ally soldiers. They went up taking over this little village from the Germans. And this is where, to remind myself, is one of the most famous writers in the world is holding you captive pantless. Bruce charged Hemingway with keeping order, and he did it in his own way. He is said to have come up with the novel idea of making his German prisoners take their pants off on the theory that a man without pants was less likely to escape. And then he put them to work peeling potatoes, onions, and carrots in the hotel kitchen. At dinnertime, he added insult to injury by making the prisoners put on frilly jackets and wait on their captors. So eventually, they progressed out of the village, and they went up pushing into Paris.

• 54:50David Senra?

  And Hemingway, I remember, somebody I just recently discovered back on podcast number 185 with Cesar Ritz, and that book was fantastic. But, you know, he founded Hotel Ritz in Paris. Hemingway admired Cesar Ritz's talent, because they wind up taking, at the very beginning of the book, the author talks about reading the stories, like, is it really true that Hemingway liberated the Hotel Ritz from the Germans? It says, "They escaped to the relative calm of the Ritz, the venerable establishment in the heart of Paris that was more like a chateau than a hotel." Remember, on podcast number 185, that was Cesar Ritz's point. He had spent a lifetime working in and managing and running hotels. And he's like, "This is a masterpiece. It's going to feel like a large townhome.

• 55:33David Senra?

  It's going to feel like a home that you just, instead of a hotel." And so it's interesting that there's a description, "It's more like a chateau than a hotel," which was Hemingway's idea of heaven. And there's a quote from him, "When I dream of the afterlife, the action always takes place in the parrot's ritz," Hemingway once wrote. Now, this is Bruce, who was the commander, the American commander that was with Hemingway at this point. What he says about, he says something about Hemingway that I think I'm going to tie to another idea that I've read like, three years ago, never forgot. So it says, "Bruce concluded that Hemingway had displayed the rare combination of advised recklessness and caution," so a combination of recklessness and caution, "that knows how

• 56:14David Senra?

  properly to seize a favorable opportunity, which, once lost, is gone forever." He's a born leader of men, and in spite of his strong independence of character, is a highly disciplined individual. So that is really on the fleeting nature of opportunity. Podcast number 37 from the book The Fish That Ate The Whale, which is a autobiography of Sam Zemurray, one of the craziest life stories you'll ever read. Here's a quote in that book I've never thought about, or excuse me, never forgotten, rather. And it's describing Zemurray, and Zemurray has the same kind of traits that Hemingway here has, this combination of recklessness and caution, and how to seize a favorable opportunity which once lost is gone forever. It's a quote from The Fish That Ate The Whale.

• 56:59David Senra?

  "There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to." So still in World War II, he winds up teaming with, this is this guy that's going to be Lanham. His name's Lanham, he's Charles T. Lanham, Colonel Charles T. Lanham. He goes by Buck. He winds up being Hemingway's best friend for the rest of his life. And so he's the person, he says he's never been closer to another person than him. And this is just a quick story about them together.

• 57:44David Senra?

  "After ten days later, the two men were still testing each other. They were at dinner in an old farmhouse, eating a steak dinner in Hemingway's honor, when a German shell came through one wall and went out the other without exploding. While most of the other diners scurried for shelter, Hemingway calmly continued to cut his meat. Lanham told his guests to move, or at least put on his helmet, but he refused, and they argued, while more shells tore through the walls, again and again miraculously without exploding. Not to be outdone, Lanham took off his helmet and resumed eating. The other diners, which were Lanham's officers, returned to the table after the shelling had tapered off. Some of them called Hemingway and Lanham brave, others hinted at bravado. Lanham settled the matter.

• 58:29David Senra?

  It was a foolhardy test of fate." Hemingway was drawn to this writer, excuse me, this warrior writer, so.

• 58:38David Senra?

  Buck Lanham is a warrior that likes to write. Hemingway is a writer that likes to go to war. And so they have similar interests, even though they're oriented around, like, one's a warrior, one's a writer. Both admire the skills of the other person. And so this is Hemingway's description of him. He says, "It was always so much fun to be with a man who was literate, articulate, and completely brave. During a fight, he was absolutely intact, intelligent, humorous, and the best company in the world." And he continues to describe his bond that he makes with Lanham. And again, another reminder for us that he just doesn't care about rules that don't apply to him.

• 59:23David Senra?

  "The writer who wanted to fight and the fighter who wanted to write complemented each other and formed a bond as strong as any Hemingway had ever had with another man. Hemingway mused that he had never been closer to anyone as a friend than to Buck, nor had he admired anyone more." So when the war's over, he winds up getting in all this trouble because there's a bunch of other war correspondents. He's only there because he got these credentials to be a war correspondent. And yet, he's the only one really going to war and engaging in war at the same time, keeping people captive, doing all this crazy shit that he's doing. And so other reporters don't like that, and they snitch on him. And so it says, "He was now being called to account for conduct unbecoming a war correspondent. The allegations were that he had stockpiled weapons, commanded troops, and joined the

• 1:00:08David Senra?

  fight to liberate Paris." So he's all, he's like, "I can't believe this." And it says, "These allegations were all true." And so they wind up dropping, nothing, like, they're not gonna, he's an American icon. They're not gonna put him on trial in America. So they wind up dropping it. He winds up getting some kind of Bronze Star or some kind of award later on. But this is more about just he has skin in the game and that he's willing to make sacrifices. And so there's a firefight, they're surrounded by Germans. Lanham called for him. "I'll be right there, wait for me," was Hemingway's instant response. To get to Lanham, he dashed to a fire break where many others had died. He stayed with the Colonel until the Americans had fought the Germans to a standstill and left them no choice but to surrender. It was for Lanham another pivotal moment in their relationship, one that he would never

• 1:00:53David Senra?

  forget. Years later, he would write that all of the things that he had carried in his heart from those days, none was more alive than the memory of that night. And it's interesting because Mary, his fourth and final wife, Hemingway has like a one day, it accounts like what he does the day before he kills himself. And one thing he did was reread a few times the last letter that Lanham sent him. So they had us close to ship until Hemingway killed himself. And though his job was to report on the fighting, he took the same risks as the men whose job was to fight. He went outside the wire, much farther than he had to go. He was cool under pressure, willing to fight when he had to, and he displayed a sixth

• 1:01:36David Senra?

  sense that troops call a feeling in the tips of your fingers that mark the best practitioners in the art of war. So this is a description of that, him and two other guys are walking. The war's almost over, but it's not over yet. Suddenly, they heard a ripping sound that only Hemingway recognized, and he shouted, "Oh, God, jump." So they're in a car again to Walton and their driver, seconds before a German fighter fired a stream of bullets into their Jeep. The plane came back for a second pass, again firing down the middle of the road and missing the men in the ditch by a few feet, a very thin margin for a strafing again. He's almost dying. So many times in his life, he just comes this close to death. Hemingway calmly unhooked a canteen from his belt and offered Walton a premixed martini. Walton had never enjoyed a drink more. The three picked themselves up, brushed the dirt off their clothes, and then walked on

• 1:02:20David Senra?

  past the smoldering wreck of their ride. So eventually, he leaves Europe, goes back to Cuba, and now it's time to write. And we see that same thing that happened after he left Spain, he's depressed again. This is really what he loves best. Hemingway started writing to Lanham, telling him how much he missed him. "He's absolutely homesick for the regiment," he wrote, "that he had the black ass." That was Hemingway's description for depression. He talks about, "I have the black ass all the time." He added that, "He had not been depressed during the fighting when there was a war to win and had Lanham's companionship." Same thing he was saying about his time in Spain. You see the echo there? That he had learned more than-- oh, he's telling Lanham, "that he had learned more while he and Buck were together than he had learned altogether up until then."

• 1:03:03David Senra?

  This was a supreme compliment from a man who put so much store by living life fully. There's that theme, the main theme of Hemingway's life, right? Living life fully, broad, full life, living life fully and learning from it. For the writer-soldier Hemingway, war, especially ground combat, was the ultimate life experience. "It is wicked to say, but it is the thing that I love best." He felt most alive when risking his life, all of his senses fully engaged. Hemingway relished being useful. He relished the camaraderie that gelled in combat.

• 1:03:39David Senra?

  So I'm gonna fast forward, uh, cuz now we're gonna start getting into the decline of his life. And I thought this was very interesting. So that time, uh, after World War II, in the 50s, you have that McCarthyism, where they're saying, people are seeing communists around every corner. They're pulling people in front, especially famous people, uh, mostly in Hollywood. They're pulling them, they're making them, um, come to testify in front of Congress, swore, like, say, "I'm against communism and for America," and everything else. And so Hemingway hates to see, like, this, uh, he feels like it's a violation of, like, civil rights. And so he writes a letter to McCarthy, which is just funny to me. I'm just gonna read it. He says, "The letter itself is disjointed and obscene. Hemingway begins by questioning McCarthy's courage and war record.

• 1:04:23David Senra?

  Some of us have seen the dead, and you were not one of them. I mean, you didn't even see combat. He tells McCarthy that he is a shit and invites him to come to Cuba for a private boxing match to settle their differences." And now, after, I feel, reading his writing, studying his life, that's a very McCarthy, uh, excuse me, that's a very Hemingway thing to do, just something that's uniquely Hemingway, I guess. Uh, I wanna, he writes a book in between, before he writes The Old Man and the Sea, which, again, I feel is my favorite book. I've only read three of his books, but by far my favorite book. I think it was fantastic. But really, I wanna bring to your point, like, no one really knows anything, and really just try to listen to your own internal instincts. This is what critics said about Hemingway, about the book and Hemingway as a writer.

• 1:05:08David Senra?

  Right before he writes The Old Man and the Sea, he writes another book. It's kinda, it's not well-received by critics, and they just say something like, "Oh, this guy's done." And it's just like hilarious in hindsight. It's like, "Yeah, he's done, he can, he should just give up." And then he rips off and writes his masterpiece. Uh, and his masterpiece, for the record, will be around and useful to future generations of humans, way more than your shitty little criticism of him. And again, I just don't understand. I love what Steve Jobs said one time. He was, he was, uh, he, somebody was criticizing him. He answers the guy's question, handles it well. And at the end, he goes, by the way, what do you make? That's so great. Show me what you actually make. Or you just go around criticizing other people. And I think that's boom, you hit, you nailed, Steve Jobs nailed it there.

• 1:05:52David Senra?

  Like, what do you, that's fine if you want to criticize me, but you, like, if you want to criticize Hemingway, you better, you damn sure better be able to write a novel better than him. So this is what they say, and it's just so annoying to me. It's not even annoying, that's not the right word. It's just, it's predictable, and I think distasteful, and it's not the kind of human I want to be. I think the Wright Brothers had it, um, had it right. Because back in the day, you know, there's tons of people, super famous people, Thomas Edison, Hero Maxim, the guy that was running Smithsonian, I can't remember his name at the time, all trying to do what Wright Brothers tried to do, which is try to invent, you know, powered flight. And they constantly were asked, once they invented, to comment on the work of other people. And they both said, it's like, that's not, like, that's not something we're going to do. Every person that's pursuing their path thinks that's the path. Like, it's just like, I'm going to, essentially saying, I'm going to focus on my own work.

• 1:06:37David Senra?

  I don't need to comment about that other guy's work. I think there's a lot of wisdom in what the Wright Brothers are saying. Which pronounced, so says the Saturday Review of Literature, pronounced that the book was a synthesis of everything bad in Hemingway's previous work, and throws a doubtful light on the future. The New Yorker was sad that so fine and honest a writer had made such a travesty of himself. Time Magazine said the book showed that Hemingway, the previously acclaimed champ, was now over 50 and on the ropes. So no, they were all wrong. He's going to now release, two years after this, release his masterpiece. And this is a little bit about that. I'm going to, I'm going to omit some parts in case you haven't read it, because I don't want to ruin the plot. The Old Man in the Sea is a novella about a poor Cuban fisherman named Santiago who is engaged in a personal struggle for survival.

• 1:07:19David Senra?

  Just like his other books, there's a, there's a strong indication that Santiago was heavily inspired by somebody he actually knew in his life. After going 84 days in his one-man skiff without a catch, he hooks a marlin that he battles for three days. I'm going to skip, I don't want to ruin the plot, but I'm going to get to the punchline. That is not the most important thing. As Santiago, written by Hemingway, famously tells the reader, "A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." That is a fantastic sentence. "A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." Santiago fought the good fight and endured with style and grace. He triumphed in spirit. The book won the Pulitzer for Fiction, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Okay, but now here's the problem. That's his greatest work, but now all the lifestyle he had, he's got a ton of injuries. I didn't know he had like suffered multiple concussions

• 1:08:04David Senra?

  in World War II. He had another concussion on his boat. He drank like a fish. He's a crazy person. Probably didn't sleep very much. So he ages terribly. You see pictures of him when he's like 45 and then pictures when he's like 55. I was like, oh my God, that's not a decade. That's decades, man. But Hemingway did not feel great. He did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award and instead sent an acceptance speech that was a dark reflection on his life's work. This is Hemingway. "Writing at its best is a lonely life. The writer grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. But he should always strive to create something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed." And then we go into like this decline of

• 1:08:45David Senra?

  his physical health and compounded with depression. The accident on his boat in 1950 was more serious than he left on. He got a concussion. He fell in like a gaff, which is like this big hook to like stab fish to death, I guess is what it's used for, and winds up like getting a concussion. And then he had like swelling in his spine. So it was more serious than he let on, and it was coming after at least two serious concussions in World War II. In January 1954, he survived, this is unbelievable. So he goes to Africa, again, he's all over the world. In January 1954, he survived two plane crashes in Africa during a 24-hour period. First, the sightseeing flight that he chartered crashed, landed in dense brush in Uganda. Hemingway suffered a mild concussion. Then the rescue plane

• 1:09:30David Senra?

  that came for him the next day inexplicably crashed and burned on takeoff. To escape, Hemingway literally butted the door open with his head. Seriously compounding the earlier injury credited for saving the lives of other people on board, there was a rupture of kidneys, a collapse of his intestines, severe injuries to the liver, major concussion, several burns to legs, belly, right forearm, left hand, his head and his lips. He also dislocated his right arm and his shoulder. Hemingway would never fully recover from these injuries. It marked the start of an irreversible downward spiral, one that was aggravated by various other illnesses and a deep depression. The thought that his work was deteriorating kept him up at night, kept him up for more than one night.

• 1:10:14David Senra?

  So now he's only injured. It is a slow, multiple-year realization that, okay, I cannot stay in Cuba. A place that he loved. And so it says that this is his schedule right before Castro. At least until 1957, Cuba was Hemingway's safe haven. So it says he could settle back into the routine that I think had nourished the body and spirit in his past. He would still write in the morning, then he would swim in the pool after lunch, and then take his boat into the stream to troll for marlin. If the weather was rough and the fish weren't biting, they were still shooting at his club or the occasional cockfight in the village. In the evening, he would linger over dinner with longtime Cuban friends who'd drop by almost every day. So he really relished. He enjoyed. It was his favorite place in the world.

• 1:10:59David Senra?

  He did not want to give it up. And slowly but surely, he's getting intertwined. Batista sends guards multiple times to his house. And this is like, this is how John Wick starts. You don't bring people to your side by killing their dog. And so he had a bunch of drunk soldiers show up one time. This is right before Castro is gonna throw out Batista. And he just, they're just, it's silliness. They come, they come by, they're saying, oh, you know, we've heard, they basically say, you know, we hear there's like a rebel soldier or an oppositionist that are here. So Hemingway opens the door, he's like, what do you want? They're reeking up alcohol. And he's like, listen, there's no oppositionists here. There's no revolutionaries on his property. And he's like, you guys gotta get out of here.

• 1:11:44David Senra?

  And so they wind up not even searching his house. They, they went up, turning around and leaving. And the next morning, his dog, Machakos, was found dead with a head wound. And they start coming to his property, because he's got people coming from all over, like all over the world to come visit him. Remember, he's super famous at this point. And so they come back, and the Royal Guards come back. They come back onto the property to confront Hemingway, who calmly explained, there's like, you're running a conspiracy here, who calmly explained they had nothing to worry about. The only conspiracy was one to drink whiskey. So this is another example of like his forced gumpness, where he's there for the revolution. And he's realizing, he slowly but surely realizes, he was definitely pro-Castro at the beginning.

• 1:12:27David Senra?

  I think that was tempered a little bit, because he writes his son, "No one is right. Both sides atrocious. Things aren't good, and the overhead is murder. Might pull out of there, the future looks very bad." It says, "By dawn, Cuba had no government, and Havana was quite literally lawless."

• 1:12:43David Senra?

  So as the years go by, he realizes the revolution becomes very anti-American as well, and that's going to cause him to... He feels a lot of great sadness about... He's spending time splitting his time between Cuba and Idaho at this point, but he does come to a realization shortly before he dies that he's never going to see his place in Cuba again. That caused great sadness to him. So this is more about his sad decline. His friends were taken aback by how much he had deteriorated over the past year. They had all seen the writer in most of his moods, but none like this, showing symptoms of extreme nervousness, depression, fear, loneliness, suspicion of the motives of others, insomnia, guilt, remorse, and failure of memory. Hemingway wrote Mary that he feared a complete physical and nervous crack-up from deadly

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  overwork. This was one of the many pleas for help that he sent her that month. She arranged for treatment by doctors at the Mayo Clinic, where he would stay from November 30th, 1960, to January 22nd, 1961. So he dies, and he's going to kill himself on July 2nd, so six months after he gets out of the Mayo Clinic. What were they doing there? The main diagnosis was depression, complicated by paranoia. Hemingway's psychiatrist opted for electroconvulsion therapy. The doctors sedated Hemingway, strapped him to an operating table, and attached electrodes to his temples in order to run an electric current through his brain. The obsession still would not go away. The writer's paranoia about the

• 1:14:10David Senra?

  government still did not lift. And then the Bay of Pigs happens, and it says, "On the second day of the invasion, he drafted a letter to his publisher, saying that he had tried and failed to edit his memoirs about his life in Paris in the 1920s. Everything he tried simply made things worse. This was not a passing complaint, but an acknowledgment of defeat. He could simply no longer do the work that had sustained him." So he talks about losing his memory, which he thought was the most valuable asset he had for his work because of the side effect of electroconvulsion therapy is remy loss. "He simply could no longer do the work that has sustained him. The distant fiasco at the Bay of Pigs was another defeat, one that was almost as painful. He understood he would

• 1:14:53David Senra?

  never be able to go home, to walk under the sibba tree, to the front door of the finca, or steer his boat out of the harbor past the old Spanish castle, or spend an afternoon drinking with his friends." When she went downstairs on the morning of Friday, April 21st, Mary found Hemingway in the sitting room with his favorite shotgun in his hand and two shells on the windowsill within easy reach. For a harrowing hour and a half, she gently talked to him about the things they could still do. Go to Mexico, revisit Paris, maybe even Africa for another safari. When their good friend, the family doctor, arrived to take Hemingway's blood pressure, they were able to talk him into putting the weapon down. They took him to the local hospital and as soon as possible arranged to fly him back

• 1:15:37David Senra?

  to the Mayo Clinic for another grim round of electroshock therapy in a locked ward. On the way, he tried to kill himself twice. At the airport, he attempted to walk into a whirring airplane propeller. At the end of June, Hemingway's doctor, Mayo, decided that his patient was ready to go home. Mary suspected the truth, that her husband had manipulated the psychiatrist into signing the discharge papers. He was still leaving broad hints that he planned to commit suicide, like the letter he had wrote earlier in the month to Renee, his Cuban quote unquote "son," who was keeping the finca up. Hemingway wrote that he was almost out of gas. He was a shadow of his former self.

• 1:16:19David Senra?

  He didn't even have the will to read, a touchstone in his life that he had loved above everything. Writing, he remarked, was even more difficult. Hemingway asked Renee to look after his cats and dogs and his beloved finca, and assured him that whatever happened, Papa would always remember him. Despite her misgivings, Mary and George Brown, the boxer from New York who had been his friend for decades, picked Hemingway up at the clinic and drove him back to Idaho on Friday, June 30th. Two days later, Mary woke to what sounded like two drawers slamming shut, one after another, and went to investigate. She found Hemingway dead in the room where she had disarmed him in April.

• 1:17:02David Senra?

  He had gotten up before anyone else, padded quietly downstairs, and with one of his double-barreled shotguns, killed what was left of the great American writer who had fought so hard for what he believed in. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I highly recommend reading the book. It's fantastic. If you want to support the podcast at the same time, you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player. That is 194 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.