Table Of ContentLiterary 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
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
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Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Ernest Hemingway
A Literary Life
Linda Wagner-Martin
© Linda Wagner-Martin 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-4001-8
All rights reserved.No reproduction,copy or transmission of this
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Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-52029-9 ISBN 978-0-230-22322-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230223226
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Dedicated to all the students and scholars who have made
my career as an Americanist so satisfying
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 Esquireand 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
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
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
x Preface
After his divorce from Pauline and his marriages to both Martha
Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, Ernest Hemingway developed an often
unpredictable personality. His self as it had been shaped earlier under-
went changes that even the most loving partner could neither anticipate
nor prevent. The second part of Hemingway’s life is, consequently, given
a briefer treatment in this biography. The greatness of the man as writer
remains the truest biography of Ernest Hemingway.
