

The Muse of Kilimanjaro

She came from a powerful American dynasty. He was at the height of his literary power. Their secret encounter — revealed here for the first time — inspired Ernest Hemingway's greatest story.

Photograph by Ron Amstutz

On April 3, 1934, at roughly 5 p.m., the SS Paris slid into Pier 57 on the West Side of Manhattan after a seven-day Atlantic crossing. There were a handful of celebrities aboard, including Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and, not least, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline, just back from an African safari. The couple held a pose at the ship's railing for the press boys crowding the gangplank with their notebooks and Speed Graphic cameras. Hemingway, popping quotes as always, made nearly all the papers the next day. They asked what the famous writer was planning to do next. "My interest is now in Africa," Hemingway said, as reported the next day in the New York Times, "and all I am here for is to make enough money to return to East Africa."

Not long after his arrival back in America, something important happened to Hemingway involving a woman who, so far as I know, has never been identified in print. That is close to astonishing, considering this long-dead woman's claimed importance — by Hemingway himself — as the principal inspiration for what is one of his two or three greatest short fictions, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The extravagantly wealthy Manhattan society matron, according to Hemingway, invited him to tea and presented him with an alluring offer. (You might even call it provocative.) She would foot the bill for a return trip to Africa, apparently whenever he wished, as soon as he wished, as long as she could go along, accompanying Pauline Hemingway. Carlos Baker, author of the first major biography of Hemingway (more than 40 years ago), says briefly of this incident, "As Ernest later told the story, he considered the lady's offer and politely declined." Baker doesn't give her name, either in his text or notes, and neither is his name found among Baker's archived papers at Princeton University's Firestone Library.

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The real-life woman breathing behind "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," so I believe, controlled a fortune in the neighborhood of $179 million. Hers was one of the best-known surnames in America. It stood for money, for sport, for art, for philanthropy, for noblesse oblige. She would have been 23 years older than the not quite 35-year-old author who came to call on an April day in 1934 before he took the train home to Key West. She was a big-boned, middle-aged widow, well preserved, with high flair, noted cheek, and literary abilities of her own (she'd published a lot of poetry in her youth, some of it quite erotic for its time), whose financier husband had died seven years earlier of an attack of acute indigestion, leaving her the owner of one of the finest racing stables in America.

She had won the Kentucky Derby with Twenty Grand three years earlier, and she very much intrigued her guest.

I think Hemingway both wanted and didn't want us to know her name. It's almost as if he were baiting his future chroniclers with hints — not to say courting libel in his own day. What a dangerous game, down to the point of giving the "made-up" woman in the story the same first name as the person with whom you'd been to tea. When "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was published in the August 1936 issue of Esquire, the mystery woman (or the "dark lady," as I sometimes like to think of her), with all her wealth, was still very much — and litigiously — alive. Where is that note she supposedly sent to him? I wish I knew. But I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it. Her name was Helen Hay Whitney.

Hemingway left behind enough clues, in both life and art, some deliberate, some inadvertent, to allow us to identify her. The deliberate ones he inserted in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," a parable about many things but perhaps most centrally about the corruptions of wealth and what those corruptions have done to a kept man who once saw himself as the possessor of a true writing gift but is now dying bitterly from gangrene on the African plain. Harry, the man in the story, wishes to blame his fate as a failed writer on his rich wife, Helen, whom he has never loved, not really.

Hemingway writes about the incident in a January 1, 1947, letter to his closest friend of those years, General Charles "Buck" Lanham, whom Hemingway had come to know on the battlefield as a correspondent for Collier's during World War II:

"I put what I thought about the very rich (on a very limited scale) into 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.' Probably told you the story of that one. When I came back from Africa where I had been happier than I ever was in my life some reporter asked me what I was going to do and I said earn enough money to go back to Africa. So that was in the paper and the next day one of the richest (and nicest) women in US. wrote me a note and asked me to have tea (Bourbon was tea) with her and told me she had read what I said in the paper and that I didn't need to make money to go to Africa. She had all the money that was needed for that. There was a lot more to the story but I wrote the Snows as a study of what would or could have happened to me if I had accepted the offer."


In the spring of 1934, when the Hemingways returned from Africa, Helen Hay Whitney was 58 years old. Although she was matronly and had sort of a mannish face, the First Lady of the American Turf, as the sports pages liked to call her, still had piercing eyes and a way with long, trailing leopard-print scarves. She lived at 972 Fifth Avenue — that is, when she wasn't living at her family's 438-acre estate, Greentree, in Manhasset, Long Island. It was one of the greatest houses on Long Island — 21 servants, stables, kennels, three grass tennis courts, its own nine-hole golf course, baseball diamond, indoor and outdoor pools, four Rolls-Royces in the garage.

She'd gotten married in 1902 to Payne Whitney in a Washington wedding attended by Theodore Roosevelt and all of his cabinet and the justices of the Supreme Court. Her father, John Hay, had been, along with John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's two private secretaries, and then secretary of state under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. She was the mother of two adult children, Joan Whitney and John Hay Whitney, better known to the world as "Jock." Jock was destined to become a much more famous Whitney than either his mother or sister. Among other things he was a financier, sportsman, and philanthropist, he owned a yacht named Aphrodite, and he would become the last owner of the New York Herald Tribune. Joan married Charles Shipman Payson in 1924 and eventually became the owner of the New York Mets baseball team.

When Payne Whitney died, in 1927, Helen was 51. Jock and Joan were 23 and 24, respectively. In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the woman named Helen had lost her husband "when she was still a comparatively young woman and for awhile she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to bottles."

Hemingway first worked on the story in the late summer and early fall of 1935, after a season of great fishing on Bimini aboard his boat, Pilar, and had then put it away until the spring of 1936, when he was in Cuba. In the early draft, the dying writer's name is Henry Walden, but by the time the story appeared in print the main character was just Harry. If Hemingway had kept to his earlier plan, the initials of his protagonist, no less than those of Harry's wife, would have been — like Helen Whitney's — HW. Hemingway doesn't give the name of Harry's wife until late in the piece. Only then does he begin calling her Helen, whereas earlier she'd been "the woman" or "she." It's almost as if he were daring himself: in for a dime, in for a dollar. It also goes straight to the heart of Hemingway's method of creation: telling terrific lies about real people, rearranging and transposing and conflating, so that what he made up was somehow truer than if it had actually happened.

And what actually happened, apparently, is that Mrs. Whitney had read about Hemingway in the New York dailies of April 4, 1934, in which the author stood beside his wife and held his banded fedora and told the press of his intention to return home to Florida "to work like hell and make enough money so that I can go back to Africa and really learn something about lions." She sent him a note. Please come by.

Hemingway doesn't say where the visit took place, although presumably it was at her home on Fifth Avenue. Were just the two of them present? His couched words in subsequent years seem to suggest that. As Hemingway's letter to General Lanham attests, his hostess told him there'd be no need to worry about making more money for Africa, because she had all the money required and would be pleased to share some of it, since money was only something to be used well by those who possessed it.

Was she propositioning him with her money? Certainly you could construe that from what Hemingway said later, when he was spinning the events into myth, even though he also seemed to go out of his way in his several written accounts (there are only the written ones to go on, although Hemingway is said to have told the story more than once to friends) to say how "sincere" her offer was, how truly "nice" a person she was. It's possible her offer was no more and no less than what it purported to be on the surface. Where does the truth reside?

Hemingway discussed the "tea-taking" in a posthumously published 1981 essay in the Paris Review titled "The Art of the Short Story." He wrote it in 1959, when the journey to shotgun destruction had reached the point of no exit. (As Hemingway himself might have said, 1959 marked the end of the beginning of all that.) "The Art of the Short Story" is a terrible piece of writing — mawkish, boastful, truculent, almost incoherent in places. But there are paragraphs less embarrassing and more coherent than others, and that includes those in which he writes about the origin of "Snows":

"A really nice and really fine and really rich woman invited me to tea and we had a few drinks as well and she had read in the papers about this project, and why should I have to wait to go back for any lack of money? She and my wife and I could go to Africa any time and money was only something to be used intelligently for the best enjoyment of good people and so forth. It was a sincere and fine and good offer and I liked her very much and I turned down the offer.

"So I get down to Key West and I start to think what would happen to a character like me whose defects I know, if I had accepted that offer. So I start to invent and I make myself a guy who would do what I invent… So I invent how someone I know who cannot sue me — that is me — would turn out… I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows? Real gamblers don't gamble… So I

make up the man and the woman as well as I can and I put all the true stuff in and with all the load, the most load any short story ever carried, it still takes off and it flies."

How someone I know who cannot sue me. I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows?

The dying man in the story is filling with gangrene, while his spouse, "this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent," waits with him for an evacuation plane from Nairobi. The story takes place over most of one day and that night. The rescue plane doesn't arrive in time. Harry dies because he has done something so simple as to fail to use iodine two weeks previously, when a thorn scratched his knee as he and his wife were crouching with their cameras to get closer to a herd of waterbuck. And so he goes in and out of his dreams and deliriums and acid accusations while the rot rises and the hyenas inch closer. "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well." The things he'd never get to write are presented in the form of five italicized and intensely poetic flashbacks.

But it's really himself Harry hates. "He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it… by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook."

His wife says, "You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do." She has a great house on Long Island. She has a daughter who made a debut. She has survived the tragedy of a husband's early death. She has a "well-known, well loved face" from magazines like The Spur and Town & Country. She isn't what you'd call pretty, although Harry does appreciate her face. She has a great talent for the bedroom. She is fond of drink.

Things had commenced easily enough between the widowed Helen and Harry: "She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular procession in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life."

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" had been off the stands about a month when Hemingway wrote to his close friend, the poet Archibald MacLeish, from Cooke City, Montana: "Me I like life very much. So much it will be a big disgust when have to shoot myself."

Literary critics have argued for years whether Harry's dream of flight to Kilimanjaro at the end of the story represents moral redemption. But apart from that, and separate from the beauty of the language itself, the real power of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is that an author still so young and in seeming control of his life and craft was able so vividly to foresee his own doom. There's a school of critics and biographers who contend that, by the early 1930s — roughly around the time he got his fishing boat, Pilar — the arc of Hemingway's creative life had crested and was on its way down. In some ways "Snows" might be read as the top of the crest — but it's far more complex than this. The Hemingway story is a sine curve, like most of our lives.

Earlier I mentioned hints left inadvertently behind and of clues outside the story. Hemingway may have left a telltale sign on an envelope. A few days before, Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich had mailed Hemingway a letter from Chicago with a $3,000 check enclosed for a down payment on Pilar. The clue? It's a word on the front of the envelope, partially obscured by a tiny brown blot. What I believe is written there, in Hemingway's hand, along with "Wire Philadelphia" and "go to Museum" and "guy at 11:45 at Scribner," is: "write Mrs. Whitney."

No correspondence between Hemingway and Whitney has ever surfaced. Which isn't the same as saying it didn't once exist.

One more clue: In Jock: The Life and Times of John Hay Whitney, by the late New Yorker writer E.J. Kahn Jr., there is this passage about Jock's mother: "Helen herself, though she all but stopped writing about the time that a third child was born to her in 1912 and died in infancy, never lost her interest in literature. It pleased her when people like Ernest Hemingway came to call. The story goes that she told him his works were mostly potboilers, and that he concurred." There are no endnotes in Kahn's book to pin down when such a visit might have taken place. But if the real Helen Hay Whitney did indeed have the real Ernest Hemingway to a private meeting in her salon, and if she did indeed make him an intriguing offer, and if she did indeed tell him that his stuff wasn't pure literature and that he should try to do better, did her much younger guest take it all in with a predatory grin and his ingrained Midwestern politeness, knowing that he'd soon enough fix her up in print?

The Helen in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is not Helen Hay Whitney, any more than the dying author named Harry is Ernest Hemingway. But there are enough allusions and parallels and associations to make clear that Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing, that he had some part of Helen Hay Whitney in mind and some part of himself in mind when he sat down and began to tell lies terrifically — almost recklessly — in the way of a beautiful gambler.

As Hemingway wrote to General Lanham, "There was a lot more to the story."

This article is excerpted from Hemingway's Boat, by Paul Hendrickson, to be published by Knopf in September 2011.

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