Life With Papa

Rolling to starboard like an old freighter, Ernest Hemingway lumbered about his weather-beaten manor in the village of San Francisco de Paula, Cuba one day last week, greeting the press. He had summoned reporters and photographers for an announcement from Stockholm. At 55, "Papa" Hemingway had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the announcement came through, he was ready with an uncharacteristic statement: "I am very pleased and very proud to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature." But later, Hemingway could not resist being Hemingway. He seized a microphone and cracked (in colloquial Spanish): "This will notify my friends, or others who are planning to bum me, that the money hasn't arrived from Stockholm yet."

Ultimate Honor
Thus the world's ultimate literary honor came to America's best-known novelist, a supercraftsman who has won enormous popularity while setting a new literary style. As a globetrotting expert on bullfights, booze, wars, women, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and courage (which he once defined as "grace under stress"), his personality had made as deep an impression on the public as his novels.

While the Nobel award is usually given for a writer's life work, the Swedish Academy singled out Hemingway's Pulitzer Prizewinning 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea (which was first Published in LIFE), for honorable mention. At the Hemingway home, as the day waned and the celebration waxed, the great author began to say that maybe he shouldn't have had the 1954 award. He would have been happy if Carl Sandburg ("a very dedicated writer") had won, he said. Later he thought that Bernard Berenson, the art historian, would have been a worthy recipient. Several gin and tonics later, he decided that the Danish authoress, Baroness Karen Blixen (pen name: lsak Dineson) should have had it. But he was still happy that he had won; he needed the dough.

"A Fine-Looking Corpse"
The robustious novelist looked as fit and frisky as Spanish bull: he was deeply tanned, and the beard on his chin, which had been a casualty of his harrowing adventures in Uganda and Kenya last winter (TIME, Feb. 1), was restored to snowy magnificence. But he would be unable to make the trip to Stockholm to receive his prize in person. He was on a strict regimen of abstinence ("but I broke training today") and 10:30 bedtime, recovering from his African injuries. "I look robust," he said, "and would undoubtedly make a fine-looking corpse, but I'm really in no shape to travel."

Recovering from a broken spine, a ruptured kidney, an injured liver and a fractured skull was a slow process, even for Hemingway. By last week, he had found his convalescence a little trying. "Starting tomorrow, I won't be able to receive anyone else," he told the reporters. "I must get back to work. I don't expect to live more than five years more and I have to hurry."

When the $35,000 prize money arrives from Stockholm, he plans to use $8,000 to pay off pressing debts. The rest he will spend "intelligently, " which, by Hemingway standards, will include a return trip to the brushfires and Mau Mau and the green hills of Africa.