In love and war: a Hong Kong honeymoon for Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn
Hemingway created a sensation in Hong Kong, in 1941, when the American literary star ‘honeymooned’ in a region racked by the Sino-Japanese conflict, writes Stuart Heaver. Oh, and Martha Gellhorn was here, too.
He was arguably the greatest writer of his generation and a revered American literary icon but few associate Ernest Hemingway with China and fewer still know of his affection for Hong Kong.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the start of Hemingway’s first and only visit to Asia; his Pan Am Clipper seaplane touched down on a dank and overcast Victoria Harbour on February 22, 1941. Hemingway had married the glamorous author and journalist Martha Gellhorn, in Cuba, the previous November and he ironically described this 100-day Asia trip as their “honeymoon”.
Having disembarked, the A-list celebrity couple made their way from Kai Tak, using the Star Ferry, to the 48-bedroom Hongkong Hotel, on Pedder Street. Hemingway had barely unpacked before assembling what his wife referred to as a “mixed jovial entourage”.
Hemingway occupied the lobby bar of the hotel and surrounded himself with a coterie of colourful drinking buddies. The Grips, as the bar was popularly known, was already a well-established venue for swapping tall anecdotes, telling risqué jokes and consuming gallons of alcohol. It suited the gregarious writer perfectly.
Hemingway “took to Hong Kong at once”, Gellhorn was to write, in her account of the trip, in the book Travels With Myself and Another, published in 1978.
The local press, including the South China Morning Post, which had been anticipating his arrival for weeks, could not get enough of Hemingway as he held court in The Grips and boasted of the rapid sales of his latest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which would sell more than 800,000 copies in its first two years of publication.