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Ernest had a way of attracting further tests. In the early Paris days, his infant son, Bumby (John Hemingway, first child by first wife, Hadley Richardson), cut the pupil of Daddy's right eye with his fingernail. Baker recounts how Hemingway broke a toe on a gate, tore his stomach on a boat cleat, ripped open his hand on a punching bag, and shot himself in both legs while trying to land a shark. He was particularly prone to head injury: four major concussions in one two-year stretch.
Violence characterized many of Hemingway's personal relationships too, as novelist John Dos Passes found out when he visibly and unflatteringly portrayed Hemingway in his novel Chosen Country. Hemingway spoke lividly of training his dogs and cats to "attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards." According to Baker, he called Scott Fitzgerald, who revered him, "a rummy and a liar with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel." Thomas Wolfe he rated as "a one-book glandular giant with the guts of three mice." Once he provoked a fight in a hotel dining room with William Saroyan, and when the poet Wallace Stevens, 20 years his senior, visited him on Key West, he left with a rather mysterious black eye. All things being equal, William Faulkner got off lightly: he was merely nicknamed "Old Corndrinking Mellifluous."
Papa's Pocket Rubens. Hemingway was almost as hard on the women in his life. With considerable literary license, he transmogrified some of the girls he admired into famous fictional characters. Agnes von Kurowsky, his World War I nurse, became Catherine in A Farewell to Arms; a hard-drinking English aristocrat, Lady Duff Twysden, turned up as Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises; the aging colonel's lissome contessa in Across the River and Into the Trees is a highly romanticized version of 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich, an Italian beauty whom the Hemingways knew in Venice in 1949.
He was also fond of boasting that he had taken every woman he wanted, and some he hadn't. When he left handsome, auburn-haired Hadley for his second wife, Pauline (a Vogue fashion editor, "small and determined as a terrier"), he described himself as "son of a bitch sans peur et sans reproche." Author Martha Gellhorn was No. 3—he wooed her during the Spanish Civil War and separated from her in World War II. She complained that he took too few baths—and besides, she had her own career as novelist and journalist to follow. Hemingway classified her with his mother, whom he condemned as "a domineering shrew." Baker appears to stand discreetly in awe of Mary Hemingway (called "Papa's Pocket Rubens" by her husband), who stood by him from 1945 to the end.
Warts and All. Hemingway's motto was "l faut (d'abord) durer" (One must, above all, endure). He was relaxed, fulfilled, only when writing well or when life's hostilities were out in the open—during war. "Having a wonderful time!" he wrote friends after his baptism of fire as a World War I ambulance driver. As a correspondent in World War II, he reiterated: "I love combat." Baker suggests that Hemingway's "esthetic of pleasure and pride" in "killing cleanly" may have been applied to war as well as the hunt.