Bullets & broken hearts
Hemingway hated his mother. This was probably because he was so very much like her. She was clever and ambitious, and he might also have blamed her for his father’s suicide and the cause of all his problems with women.
Only three years before the author killed himself, he was trying to finish Paris Sketches, about his early life in Paris. Just back from his second African safari in 1954, he was living in Cuba with his fourth wife Mary. But he never finished the book, which was eventually published posthumously under the title A Moveable Feast.
This unpublished manuscript revealed the guilt and heartbreak Hemingway felt for ending his first marriage to Hadley Richardson, which started in Michigan in 1921 and ended in Paris in 1926. They had married after knowing each other only a few months, but Hemingway was determined to marry the irreproachable, level-headed girl with red hair and good legs. He didn’t listen to any of the warnings that, at almost 30 years old, she was eight years older than he was.
Her two small trust funds gave them a little independence, and Hemingway also worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. They left for Paris almost right away and lived in a small walk-up apartment. Hemingway immediately embarked on his literary career and through Hadley met other expatriate British and American writers, who taught him the rhythm of writing. They were happy years, and Hemingway had a tough time writing of his betrayal of Hadley four years later, leaving her destitute, with her trust funds sadly depleted and a young son, Jack. He was still working on the manuscript three weeks before he ended his life.
Pauline Pfeiffer arrived in Paris as an unmarried young woman working for Vogue. She was small and slender with a bright impish face. Well read and quick-witted, she was full of praise for Hemingway’s talent. She became Hadley’s friend – and almost innocently but in determined fashion set out to marry Hadley’s husband.
Hemingway began his affair with Pauline after an Austrian ski holiday, where she accompanied the Hemingways, and then when they went to Pamplona, where Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises. That autumn, Hadley demanded a divorce. Hadley accepted Hemingway’s offer of all the royalties from The Sun Also Rises, and Hemingway married Pauline the following year.
It is unlikely that Pauline was totally to blame for ending Hemingway’s first marriage. It may have been the other way around. He was a young, impecunious, married writer, while she was rich and had a well-paid job. Pauline’s uncle also financed their first 1932-33 safari to Africa. Hemingway never got Africa out of his system and wrote two marvellous short stories and The Green Hills Of Africa, an account of his African experiences.
During the 13 years he was married to Pauline, Hemingway produced some of his best writing. She travelled with him to Europe, Africa, Cuba and the western United States – neglecting her two sons, Patrick and Gregory. She tried hard to keep her man but eventually lost him to Martha Gellhorn, a beautiful, blonde, 28-year-old journalist, whom Hemingway met in 1936 in Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West. He was then 37.
Hemingway went with Martha Gellhorn to Spain, to cover the Spanish Civil War, and they spent Christmas together the following year in Barcelona. She was an extremely gifted journalist, and eventually reported on virtually every major conflict that took place during her 60-year career. The Daily Telegraph considered her to be the greatest war correspondent of the 20th century.
Martha Gellhorn, Ernest's third wife, in Hawaii in 1941
What the two had in common was not love, but a competitive passion. Gellhorn put her career above her marriage, and a jealous Hemingway was increasingly resentful of her long absences from him. After four years of contentious marriage, they divorced.
Even after the Second World War, Gellhorn continued reporting and was known to have been a much better journalist than Hemingway. When asked about this, she replied, ‘Ah yes... but I didn’t have the laughter and the tears.’
She had many affairs during and after her relationship with Hemingway, and eventually, in 1954, married Tom Matthews, the managing editor of Time magazine, and settled in London.
Mary Welsh, another American journalist, was born the same year as Martha Gellhorn, in 1908. She was small, resilient and attractive, and had an amazing ability to cope with disaster and bad news. She was also still married to the Australian journalist Noel Monks. But when Monks was posted abroad, Mary participated in the hectic single life of wartime London. Living at The Dorchester, she visited Hemingway, who was recovering from a car accident in St George’s Hospital. With both Martha Gellhorn and Mary’s husband out of the way, the abandoned couple soon became lovers.
Hemingway, embittered by years of rejection, wanted a more permanent relationship with her and convinced Mary Welsh to divorce Monks, which she did in 1945. She married Hemingway in Cuba the following year, where the couple continued to live until they finally moved to Ketchum, Idaho in 1959. By then he was suffering from chronic depression. Mary remained loyal throughout these anguishing final years, when he was often hospitalised for shock treatments.
After Hemingway’s 1961 suicide, his lawyer read out the contents of his will. Everything, including copyright to all his manuscripts, was left to his widow, Mary. She was instantly a wealthy woman. As his literary executor, it was Mary who was responsible for editing and publishing A Moveable Feast. In her own autobiography, How It Was, she painfully described Hemingway’s sad ending. Some time before his death, she recalled how he had stepped past her one morning in an Italian bathrobe holding a shotgun. ‘Honey, you wouldn’t do anything harmful to me as well as you?’ Mary asked. A sedated Hemingway was taken away to the Ketchum Hospital. Years later, Mary said, reconsidering, ‘I wondered if we had not been more cruel than kind in preventing his suicide then and there.’
In Bernice Kert’s unique book, The Hemingway Women, she speculates as to who the real women were in Hemingway’s life. His wives, certainly, and his strongwilled mother, Grace Hemingway. There were also the women who did not marry him but who influenced his fiction: Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse reinvented as Catherine Barkley in A Farewell To Arms; Lady Duff Twysden, the prototype for Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; Jane Mason, very similar to Margot Macomber in Hemingway’s African short story, The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber, and Adriana Ivancich, the model for Renata in Across The River And Into The Trees.
Hemingway, like his mother, had a deep mistrust of women. He suffered himself, and he made women suffer. This shows in his writing. On the other hand, he seemed to choose his wives well. They were adventurous, intelligent and resilient, but it was never possible for him to sustain a longlived, wholly satisfying relationship with any one of them. In marriage he soon became bored and restless, critical and bullying.
Sadly, the conflict between his yearning to be looked after and his craving for excitement and freedom was never resolved. What he failed to complete in his life, he managed to achieve in his fiction.
Hemingway In Africa, by Christopher Ondaatje (HarperCollins, £20) and The Hemingway Women, by Bernice Kert (WW Norton & Co, £12.99).
Only three years before the author killed himself, he was trying to finish Paris Sketches, about his early life in Paris. Just back from his second African safari in 1954, he was living in Cuba with his fourth wife Mary. But he never finished the book, which was eventually published posthumously under the title A Moveable Feast.
This unpublished manuscript revealed the guilt and heartbreak Hemingway felt for ending his first marriage to Hadley Richardson, which started in Michigan in 1921 and ended in Paris in 1926. They had married after knowing each other only a few months, but Hemingway was determined to marry the irreproachable, level-headed girl with red hair and good legs. He didn’t listen to any of the warnings that, at almost 30 years old, she was eight years older than he was.
Her two small trust funds gave them a little independence, and Hemingway also worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. They left for Paris almost right away and lived in a small walk-up apartment. Hemingway immediately embarked on his literary career and through Hadley met other expatriate British and American writers, who taught him the rhythm of writing. They were happy years, and Hemingway had a tough time writing of his betrayal of Hadley four years later, leaving her destitute, with her trust funds sadly depleted and a young son, Jack. He was still working on the manuscript three weeks before he ended his life.
Pauline Pfeiffer arrived in Paris as an unmarried young woman working for Vogue. She was small and slender with a bright impish face. Well read and quick-witted, she was full of praise for Hemingway’s talent. She became Hadley’s friend – and almost innocently but in determined fashion set out to marry Hadley’s husband.
‘The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both. Then the one who is relentless wins.’
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway began his affair with Pauline after an Austrian ski holiday, where she accompanied the Hemingways, and then when they went to Pamplona, where Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises. That autumn, Hadley demanded a divorce. Hadley accepted Hemingway’s offer of all the royalties from The Sun Also Rises, and Hemingway married Pauline the following year.
All’s fair in love and war
The family of Pauline Pfeiffer was wealthy; a significant fact because Hadley’s trust funds had almost run out of money. She was Catholic, so before their marriage in May 1927, Hemingway converted to Catholicism. By the end of that year, a pregnant Pauline persuaded Hemingway to return to America. They left Paris and moved to Key West in Florida, where Pauline’s uncle bought them a house.It is unlikely that Pauline was totally to blame for ending Hemingway’s first marriage. It may have been the other way around. He was a young, impecunious, married writer, while she was rich and had a well-paid job. Pauline’s uncle also financed their first 1932-33 safari to Africa. Hemingway never got Africa out of his system and wrote two marvellous short stories and The Green Hills Of Africa, an account of his African experiences.
During the 13 years he was married to Pauline, Hemingway produced some of his best writing. She travelled with him to Europe, Africa, Cuba and the western United States – neglecting her two sons, Patrick and Gregory. She tried hard to keep her man but eventually lost him to Martha Gellhorn, a beautiful, blonde, 28-year-old journalist, whom Hemingway met in 1936 in Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West. He was then 37.
Hemingway went with Martha Gellhorn to Spain, to cover the Spanish Civil War, and they spent Christmas together the following year in Barcelona. She was an extremely gifted journalist, and eventually reported on virtually every major conflict that took place during her 60-year career. The Daily Telegraph considered her to be the greatest war correspondent of the 20th century.
A conflicted man
Gellhorn lived on and off with Hemingway even while he was married to Pauline. Eventually she moved to Cuba with him in 1939, and they were married the following year. ‘We were good in war,’ Gellhorn said of her relationship with Hemingway. ‘And when there was no war, we made our own.’Martha Gellhorn, Ernest's third wife, in Hawaii in 1941What the two had in common was not love, but a competitive passion. Gellhorn put her career above her marriage, and a jealous Hemingway was increasingly resentful of her long absences from him. After four years of contentious marriage, they divorced.
Even after the Second World War, Gellhorn continued reporting and was known to have been a much better journalist than Hemingway. When asked about this, she replied, ‘Ah yes... but I didn’t have the laughter and the tears.’
She had many affairs during and after her relationship with Hemingway, and eventually, in 1954, married Tom Matthews, the managing editor of Time magazine, and settled in London.
Mary Welsh, another American journalist, was born the same year as Martha Gellhorn, in 1908. She was small, resilient and attractive, and had an amazing ability to cope with disaster and bad news. She was also still married to the Australian journalist Noel Monks. But when Monks was posted abroad, Mary participated in the hectic single life of wartime London. Living at The Dorchester, she visited Hemingway, who was recovering from a car accident in St George’s Hospital. With both Martha Gellhorn and Mary’s husband out of the way, the abandoned couple soon became lovers.
Hemingway, embittered by years of rejection, wanted a more permanent relationship with her and convinced Mary Welsh to divorce Monks, which she did in 1945. She married Hemingway in Cuba the following year, where the couple continued to live until they finally moved to Ketchum, Idaho in 1959. By then he was suffering from chronic depression. Mary remained loyal throughout these anguishing final years, when he was often hospitalised for shock treatments.
After Hemingway’s 1961 suicide, his lawyer read out the contents of his will. Everything, including copyright to all his manuscripts, was left to his widow, Mary. She was instantly a wealthy woman. As his literary executor, it was Mary who was responsible for editing and publishing A Moveable Feast. In her own autobiography, How It Was, she painfully described Hemingway’s sad ending. Some time before his death, she recalled how he had stepped past her one morning in an Italian bathrobe holding a shotgun. ‘Honey, you wouldn’t do anything harmful to me as well as you?’ Mary asked. A sedated Hemingway was taken away to the Ketchum Hospital. Years later, Mary said, reconsidering, ‘I wondered if we had not been more cruel than kind in preventing his suicide then and there.’
In Bernice Kert’s unique book, The Hemingway Women, she speculates as to who the real women were in Hemingway’s life. His wives, certainly, and his strongwilled mother, Grace Hemingway. There were also the women who did not marry him but who influenced his fiction: Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse reinvented as Catherine Barkley in A Farewell To Arms; Lady Duff Twysden, the prototype for Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; Jane Mason, very similar to Margot Macomber in Hemingway’s African short story, The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber, and Adriana Ivancich, the model for Renata in Across The River And Into The Trees.
Hemingway, like his mother, had a deep mistrust of women. He suffered himself, and he made women suffer. This shows in his writing. On the other hand, he seemed to choose his wives well. They were adventurous, intelligent and resilient, but it was never possible for him to sustain a longlived, wholly satisfying relationship with any one of them. In marriage he soon became bored and restless, critical and bullying.
Sadly, the conflict between his yearning to be looked after and his craving for excitement and freedom was never resolved. What he failed to complete in his life, he managed to achieve in his fiction.
Hemingway In Africa, by Christopher Ondaatje (HarperCollins, £20) and The Hemingway Women, by Bernice Kert (WW Norton & Co, £12.99).