My First Mistress. My Second Wife. My Favorite Trust Fund.

I met Pauline Pfeiffer while I was still with Hadley. This was problematic.

Who Could Resist Such a Fine Lady.

It was lucky that Paulina had a trust fund. She helped me in my writing of A Farewell To Arms. I felt bad for Hadley, of course, being divorced, so all of the rights for The Sun Also Rises were left in her possession. She had a son to look after. My son. I think the money helped ease the pain (34).

Eventually.

Source:

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford University Press, NC: 2000.

I Speak Like I Write

 

I won this prize that’s famous. They made me give an acceptance speech.

~EH

My Mom Totes Messed Me Up

Grace and Ernest Hemingway. 1899.

My mother would dress me up like a girl and not allow me to cut my hair up until I reached the age of 6. By then, it was too late for me to not hate my mother. My sister got it the same. She was forced to keep her hair short and dress like a boy. Whatever sadistic game my mother was playing, we were certainly too oblivious to find any humor in it (87).

My mother was a strong, independent woman. She gave music lessons and eventually invited one of her students, Ruth Arnold, to stay and become a live in housekeeper. Ruth gave my mother the comforts to speak up to my father. She was in charge when she was home. I didn’t know what a lesbian was at such a young age, but my mother and Ruth took to loving each other when my father was not around. It was better his unabating depression forced him to take his own life. He wouldn’t have been able to deal with the humility if he found out about Grace and Ruth. It would all have been worse (87).

I did not see my mother in the last 20 years of her life (88).

Source:

Fantina, Richard. Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. Palgrave Macmillon, Gordonsville: 2005.

My Trust Fund Baby

I met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson in 1920 as I recovered from post-traumatic Agnes syndrome. She was 8 years my senior, and we wrote each other letters when she was in St. Louis and I was in Kansas City or Chicago. She was smart. She was tragic.

Her father had died by his own hands when she was 14. Her mother had passed away only right before I met her.

Source:

Tyler, Lisa. Student Company to Ernest Hemingway. Greenwood Press, Wesport, CT: 2001.

Hadley and I Looking Into Each Others Eyes

The First Lady

Agnes Von Kurowsky and I had a very short story together. She inspired my short story “A Very Short Story”.

She also inspired my prototype for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. She left me when I thought we would be married. It’s funny. Plans that become unplanned. Pretty swell.

I plan to leave all my next wives before they leave me.

Someone With Too Much Time on Their Hands

 

Someone made this image and music mash-up with some of my quotes. I am not partial to the song.

Paris

Paris is a distracting city. It was so distracting, my first year there I could not write my novel. Everything Paris was, Oak Park, Chicago was not. I was working abroad for the Toronto Star, writing articles and sending them, often about my life. My articles “American Bohemians in Paris a Weird Lot” and “A Veteran Visits Old Front, Wishes He Had Stayed Away” sold papers. Hadley got pregnant, and we did move to Toronto for a spell, and then back to Paris. I wrote things. Fitzgerald became a close friend and mentor. My books were published. I wrote what I knew and what I thought. Fitzgerald especially liked The Sun Also Rises in 1926 (30).

Source:

Wagner-Martin, Linda. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.

I Was In Europe, Though Not In Paris Yet

I graduated from high school in 1917. The war was going on in Europe. In Russia the Tzar was overthrown. The Austrians broke through the alpine lines at Caporetto. I became a reported for the Kansas City Star, where I learned to write a simple, declarative sentence.

My directions: “Short first paragraphs, vigorous language, no superfluous words, few adjectives, no trite phrases” (22). After 7 months, I joined the Missouri Home Guard, and volunteered my time in the Great European War driving ambulances for The Red Cross (23). I was called then called to duty, though the accident that happened shortly after I was ready to serve was tragic.

It was July, 1918 when I was asked to man a canteen on the Piave River front and was blown up by an Austrian Trench mortar (23). I was no yet 19 (23). For five months I kept in a hospital, where Agnes Von Kurosky nursed me back to health. She was attractive for an older lady. Seven years my senior and eager to take care of me. We were engaged to be married, though she did not and would not have it. The following march I received her letter stating there would be no wedding, just as there never would have been (23).

I returned to Kansas City to write for the paper and met Hadley Richardson. She was a St. Louis girl 8 years my senior. We were married in 1921 and moved to Paris when my magazine went bankrupt. I had the names of people to know in Paris. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach: these would be my friends. We moved to the Latin Quarter and called our fourth floor walk-up home (24).

Source:

Wagner-Martin, Linda. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.

Before I Got to Paris

I was born in a Chicago suburb on July 21, 1899, and grew up changing as America was changing. Oak Park was a place of conservatism. You could not buy cigarettes, drink Alcohol, or behave immorally any which way. I was the oldest son of a physician and a music teacher. My parents, well-to-do and educated people, are one of the reasons I became a writer. I sat down in front of a typewriter and bled. They taught me how to do that.

My father committed suicide before I turned 30. He was a doctor. Those who knew me did not know. In World War I participated as an ambulance driver. They said my eyesight was too bad to fight. We were on the Italian front, fighting. From there, I stayed in Paris with my bestie-friends Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and some others. At the age of 36 I went off the Spanish American War, and at 44 I went off to the Normandy invasion, invited as a reporter landing on Omaha Beach (16).

As a young man we had a lake Michigan home my father would take me to for hunting and fishing. I learned these skills as an apprentice learns from his master, observing and then trying. The trout were plentiful at the lake, as were the campsites, hiking trails, baseball games, and women. It was truly an American place for me in my childhood (17).

Teddy Roosevelt was good at sports. It made a boy want to be good at sports. I was not good at sports. Consider me to be the slowest in running, the clumsiest in football, and the swimmer most likely to drown. My event was “the plunge”, where I swam underwater for distance. I learned how to box when I grew taller. I learned how to protect myself against men of all sizes. I admired the boxers. The baseball players were also deserving men of respect. After finding myself in Spain at the right time, bullfighters were the only athletes worth watching (20).

I never went to college, though I did read many books.

~EH

Source:

Wagner-Martin, Linda. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford University Press, New York: 1999.