Ernest Hemingway A Literary Life Linda Wagner-Martin 1403_940010_01_preiv.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page i Literary Lives Founding Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster University This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of the writers’ working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing, and social contexts which shaped their writing. Published titles include: Clinton Machann Tony Sharpe MATTHEW ARNOLD T. S. ELIOT Jan Fergus Harold Pagliaro JANE AUSTEN HENRY FIELDING John Beer Andrew Hook WILLIAM BLAKE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham Mary Lago CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË E. M. FORSTER Sarah Wood Shirley Foster ROBERT BROWNING ELIZABETH GASKELL Janice Farrar Thaddeus Neil Sinyard FRANCES BURNEY GRAHAM GREENE Caroline Franklin James Gibson BYRON THOMAS HARDY Sarah Gamble Linda Wagner-Martin ANGELA CARTER ERNEST HEMINGWAY Nancy A. Walker Cristina Malcolmson KATE CHOPIN GEORGE HERBERT Roger Sales Gerald Roberts JOHN CLARE GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Cedric Watts Neil Roberts JOSEPH CONRAD TED HUGHES Grahame Smith Kenneth Graham CHARLES DICKENS HENRY JAMES George Parfitt W. David Kaye JOHN DONNE BEN JONSON Paul Hammond Phillip Mallett JOHN DRYDEN RUDYARD KIPLING Kerry McSweeney John Worthen GEORGE ELIOT D. H. LAWRENCE 1403_940010_01_preiv.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page ii William Gray Tony Sharpe ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON WALLACE STEVENS Angela Smith Lisa Hopkins KATHERINE MANSFIELD BRAM STOKER Lisa Hopkins Joseph McMinn CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE JONATHAN SWIFT Cedric C. Brown William Christie JOHN MILTON SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Peter Davison Leonée Ormond GEORGE ORWELL ALFRED TENNYSON Linda Wagner-Martin Peter Shillingsburg SYLVIA PLATH WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY Felicity Rosslyn David Wykes ALEXANDER POPE EVELYN WAUGH Ira B. Nadel Caroline Franklin EZRA POUND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT Richard Dutton John Mepham WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE VIRGINIA WOOLF John Williams John Williams MARY SHELLEY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Michael O’Neill Alasdair D. F. Macrae PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY W. B. YEATS Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER Literary Lives Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71486–5 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–80334–5 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England 1403_940010_01_preiv.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page iii Ernest Hemingway A Literary Life Linda Wagner-Martin 1403_940010_01_preiv.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page iv © Linda Wagner-Martin 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4001–8 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4001–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne 1403_940010_02_prevxii.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page v Dedicated to all the students and scholars who have made my career as an Americanist so satisfying This page intentionally left blank 1403_940010_02_prevxii.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page vii Contents List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgments xi 1 “’Fraid a Nothing” 1 2 Eighteen and Fear—and Agnes 12 3 “Dear Ernesto” 19 4 The Route to In Our Time: The Arrival 32 5 Of Babies and Books 46 6 Pauline Pfeiffer and Hadley Richardson Hemingway 56 7 Marriage in the Midst of Men Without Women 66 8 A Farewell to Arms 77 9 The Bullfight as Center 86 10 Hemingway as the Man in Charge 96 11 Esquire and Africa 104 12 Hemingway in the World 112 13 Martha Gellhorn and Spain 121 14 War in Europe and at Home 131 15 The Fourth Mrs. Hemingway 141 16 From Cuba to Italy 149 17 Old Men, Prizes, and Reports of Hemingway’s Death 158 18 Endings 165 Notes 174 Bibliography 190 Index 195 vii 1403_940010_02_prevxii.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page viii List of Illustrations 1 The young family on Walloon Lake 2 2 Hadley Richardson before she became the first Mrs. Hemingway 24 3 Hadley and Ernest soon after their marriage 43 4 Pamplona (San Fermin fiesta) during the tense summer of 1926 61 5 The newly married Hemingways 68 6 A domestic scene 83 7 Hemingway poses proudly with his sons Patrick, Bumby, and Gregory 106 8 Hemingway with Martha Gellhorn soon after their wedding 132 9 Mary Welsh Monks on her way to becoming the fourth Mrs. Hemingway 147 10 A dinner scene at the Finca in Cuba 169 Cover photo: Mary and Ernest on safari All photos used by permission of the Hemingway Room, the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. viii 1403_940010_02_prevxii.qxd 3-5-07 11:54 AM Page ix Preface Of all the varied profiles of Ernest Miller Hemingway that already exist here in the twenty-first century, perhaps none does justice to his unusual capacity for adaptation. When Hemingway was with his male friends—during the Michigan summers, in the Paris cafés, in wartime, on his boat Pilar—or with other correspondents during the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, or World Wars I and II, he showed a carefully constructed masculinity. When he was with a woman he loved, he reflected at least a part of her empathetic sensuousness. When he felt the floodlight of media scrutiny upon him, he intentionally misbehaved— or at least his behavior fed his celebrity status: he was likely to be, at best, unpredictable. In a lifetime of only 62 years, Ernest Hemingway— whether healthy or ill—seemed proud of his ability to be a chameleon. Yet, of his important fiction it is frequently said that the principal male character resembles Ernest Hemingway. The judgment is not intended as a joke. The irony of a man who was so often a shape shifter being described as a stable persona in readings of his art has gone largely unremarked. Perhaps one of Ernest Hemingway’s most successful creations was himself, as both living person and fictional character. This biography gets to tackle such an irony. It is the aim of this study to emphasize the fluidity of the author’s self as it developed through his relationships with the women he married, and a few of those he did not. Married young, Hemingway was adapting to the influences of particu- larly his first and second wives, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer. But at the start of his life stood his mother Grace Hall Hemingway, sur- rounded by his four sisters—and the father Hemingway came later to see as less effectual than he would have desired. While his mother might today be seen as using some “tough love” behaviors with her older son, in Ernest’s imagination Grace worked actively to thwart his career. Supportive as his sisters Ursula, Sunny, and others were, aided by such Parisian women mentors as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, and carefully provided for by particularly his first wife, Hadley, the boyish naïf Hemingway was for years feeding all his energies into becoming the writer he had long dreamed of being. This study pays close attention to Hemingway’s progress toward his writerly goals, because it was as writer that Hemingway consistently defined himself. ix