The Paris Husband E-Book

Scott Donaldson

• Herausgeber: Simply Charly
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 151

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Ernest Hemingway was not only one of the most important 20th-century American writers, but also a man whose adventurous and colorful life has become the stuff of legend. War correspondent, ambulance driver, and big-game hunter, he was married four times and his love life was inextricably bound up with his artistic endeavors. His first marriage to Hadley Richardson—with whom he lived in Paris in the early 1920s—has long fascinated readers. Their passionate, complicated, and ultimately “doomed” relationship coincided with Hemingway’s formative years as a member of the so-called Lost Generation, and the failed marriage had a lifelong impact on the man and his writing.
In The Paris Husband, author and Hemingway scholar Scott Donaldson deftly separates fact from fiction to present a spellbinding and clear-eyed account of this seminal period in Hemingway’s life. Brilliantly utilizing all essential primary and secondary sources—including the author’s notebooks and drafts—Donaldson breathes new life into this ageless story, providing revelatory insights into Hemingway’s character and exploring the nuances of a magical, yet troubled, love affair.
For anyone interested in Hemingway’s development as an artist and why, as an older man, he continued to revisit this transformative and painful episode in his life, The Paris Husband is a lucid, accessible, and compelling narrative that will engage both diehard Hemingway fans, as well as those just discovering this iconic writer.

Leseprobe

The Paris Husband

How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway

Scott Donaldson

Simply Charly

New York

Copyright © 2018 by Scott Donaldson

Cover Design by Scarlett Rugers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-943657-69-8

Brought to you by http://simplycharly.com

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This book is for Janet Breckenridge and Britton Donaldson

Contents

DedicationPraise for The Paris HusbandIntroduction 1. The Paris HusbandHow It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley HemingwayAbout the AuthorA Word from the Publisher

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Praise for The Paris Husband

“Ever since Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast was published in 1964 two generations of readers have been fascinated by the eternal romance of Ernest and Hadley, a never-ending love story. The narrative has been recounted and analyzed in biography and fiction leaving a responsive audience yearning for more. Here comes The Paris Husband, a spellbinding account of the writer’s first marriage, its breakup, and the lifelong impact it would have upon Hemingway and his writing. A seasoned author and Hemingway scholar, Scott Donaldson brings this remarkable story to life with precision, lending keen new insight into Hemingway’s elusive character. A masterful work and a cracking good read.”

—Valerie Hemingway, author of Running With the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways

“If there were a Mount Rushmore of Hemingway scholars, Scott Donaldson would belong. This lucid, engaging history of Hemingway’s first marriage only enhances that legendary reputation. Donaldson is a perfect guide through this often mysterious period in the young Hemingway’s career. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Hemingway’s first steps on the international stage.”

—Mark Cirino, co-editor of Hemingway and Italy: 21st Century Perspectives and editor of the Reading Hemingway Series

“Accuracy can be fascinating. Scott Donaldson’s clear and simply focused narrative rings true. I like his reversal of the earlier title (Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife) because he makes all too clear that Ernest Hemingway was the central persona in the marriage with Hadley Richardson. Riveting.”

—Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Hemingway’s Wars: Public and Private Battles

“The story of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson has been recounted in countless biographies and spun into fable in popular fiction. It’s a powerful story because Hemingway’s love for Hadley was an essential gauge of his artistic trajectory. From romanticized scenes of young expatriate love to stolen manuscripts in a Parisian train station to the appearance on the slopes of Schruns of a third who would upset the couple’s equanimity Hemingway returned compulsively to moments in the relationship to try to understand when and why he betrayed the values for which his writing and his life stood. Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband is a wonderful book that does us the immense favor of separating certifiable facts from the inevitable conjecture and dramatizing that have come to encrust these scenes from a marriage. With clear-eyed tenacity and a gracious empathy toward both sides, Donaldson shows that at their core Ernest and Hadley shared an intimate friendship and genuine affection that not even a divorce could end. This is a beautiful piece of storytelling by one of our best American biographers.”

—Kirk Curnutt, author of Coffee with Hemingway and A Reader’s Guide to Hemingway’sTo Have and Have Not

“Separating fact from fiction, Scott Donaldson has deftly reconstructed the story that filled the older Ernest Hemingway with remorse—the narrative of his magical, doomed marriage to Hadley during the early years in Paris. Donaldson offers an inside view of Hemingway’s work as a journalist and handles two vexed episodes, Hadley’s loss of the early manuscripts and Pauline’s infiltration into their lives, with admirable balance. As a renowned scholar-biographer, he makes brilliant use of the author’s notebooks and drafts to deliver fresh insights into Hemingway’s assessments of blame—final judgments that neither version of A Moveable Feast can fully convey. Anyone who wants to understand how that first marriage broke apart and changed a troubled literary life will find this an irresistible read.”

—J. Gerald Kennedy, author of Imagining Paris  

“Drawing expertly on his many years reading, researching, and teaching that have produced five books entirely or partially about Hemingway, Scott Donaldson gives us here the most authoritative account of the complex courtship, marriage, and divorce of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway. Deftly and effectively utilizing all the relevant secondary and primary source materials—some of the latter previously unpublished—Donaldson debunks myths promulgated by previous biographers and critics, setting the record straight in a fascinating and highly readable narrative that will be as revelatory for Hemingway fans as for those previously unfamiliar with the story of his first marriage.”

—Jackson R. Bryer, President and co-founder of F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and co-editor of French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad

“In The Paris Husband, preeminent literary biographer and respected Hemingway scholar, Scott Donaldson sets the record straight about Ernest Hemingway’s precious, tumultuous—and legendary—Paris years. Drawing upon his detailed knowledge of Hemingway’s biography as well as his deep understanding of Hemingway’s personality, Donaldson offers readers a compelling and compassionate glimpse of Hemingway as husband that helps humanize the iconic author and this mythic period of his development.”

—Suzanne del Gizzo, Editor of The Hemingway Review

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Introduction

On the evening of December 3, 1922, Hadley Hemingway went to the Gare de Lyon in Paris to take the overnight train to Lausanne, Switzerland, where her husband Ernest was covering the international peace conference negotiating the end of the Greco-Turkish War. Ernest had been urging Hadley to come, and she would have made the trip sooner but for a lingering bout with the flu. Now she was on her way, and happy at the prospect of reuniting with the young man (23 years old to her 31) she had married two years earlier and was very much in love with.

In preparing for the trip, Hadley packed a suitcase with clothes to last through the winter skiing months she and Ernest were planning to spend in Chamby-sur-Montreux, a resort overlooking Lake Geneva, about 20 miles from Lausanne. As a surprise for Ernest, she also gathered up the unpublished stories, poems, and draft of a novel he’d been working on, putting these papers in a separate valise. He could show some of that writing to Lincoln Steffens, the famous former muckraker also covering the Lausanne Conference, who had taken an interest in Hemingway’s future. And Ernest could do some revising during their stay in the mountains. This, it turned out, was a terrible mistake.

At the train station, a porter helped Hadley find an unoccupied compartment. He placed her suitcase on the top of the luggage rack and the valise on a lower shelf. She was early, as she hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught in traffic and missing her train, so she left the bags where they were and went out to buy a sandwich and some Evian water. When she got back, the suitcase was still in its place, but the valise was gone—stolen, presumably, by a thief soon to be disillusioned by its contents. Desperately, Hadley told the conductor what had happened, but there was really nothing else to do. The valise, and the serious writing Ernest had done during their year in Europe, was gone. She rode the long journey to Lausanne in sleepless agony.

She married Hemingway, and was helping to support him because she believed in his talent as a writer: a real writer, not merely the youngest reporter on international matters during a critical time in Europe. How could she tell her husband the news? Would he be able to forgive her? How could she forgive herself?

The lost valise has provided material for several novels, including Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax (1990) and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife (2011), and has generally been regarded as a crucial event leading to Ernest and Hadley’s breakup and divorce in 1927. “It can’t be denied that the loss of the manuscripts was the beginning of the end for Hadley and Ernest,” Gioia Diliberto observed in her first-rate biography, Hadley (1992):

The perfection of the marriage was tainted by the loss, and things were never quite the same again. Hadley felt guilty about the incident for the rest of her life. Even as an old woman, she couldn’t talk about it without crying. Ernest never truly forgave her, and perhaps in his own mind, he used his lingering resentment to justify betraying her with another woman.

The issue of betrayal would trouble Hemingway’s four marriages, as he successively cast off one wife for another. Hadley understood from the beginning the danger posed by Ernest’s attractiveness and attraction to other women, and decided to take the risk anyway.

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The Paris Husband

How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway

A Relationship with Rivals

Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway met in October 1920 at a party at his friend Y.K. Smith’s Chicago apartment. She had arrived from St. Louis on the overnight train and was ready, at nearly 29 years of age, to take charge of her life. For most of that life, she’d been treated as an invalid. Her mother—born Florence Wyman—was a strong-willed feminist with an abhorrence of what she perceived as the “abnormal, inordinate, and insane” sexual activity required of most women. “Occasional and rare” sex for procreation was all right, though, and she and her husband James Richardson produced four children. Hadley was the youngest, and subjected to physical and psychological abuse in childhood. Her mother infantilized her, insisting that she stay in bed at the least hint of sniffles. Florence also dominated her husband, who suffered from drinking problems and financial difficulties. When Hadley was 13, he killed himself with a pistol shot to the head.

Hadley went to Mary Institute, the St. Louis girls’ school founded by T. S. Eliot’s grandfather. Although shy and reserved, she did well in her studies and made several lifelong friends. At the family’s home in the fashionable West End, she practiced diligently on the two Steinway grand pianos in the music room, developing the musical talent she’d inherited from her mother. On a trip to Europe with her mother and sister Fonnie, the 17-year-old Hadley met the gifted piano teacher Anne Simon. Impressed by Hadley’s playing, Simon encouraged her to drop out of Mary Institute and study piano in Washington, D.C. Hadley very much wanted to go, but her mother said no.

Instead, she finished her senior year and enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, perhaps the most rigorous of the Seven Sisters. There, presumably, Hadley could escape her mother’s stifling domination. But college did not work for her. Soon after she started her studies, she was deeply affected by the accidental death of her favorite sibling, Dorothea, 11 years her senior. At Bryn Mawr, she formed a close friendship with another student, and her mother (though a thousand miles away) became convinced that Hadley had entered into a lesbian relationship. That “rotten suggestion of evil” effectively ended the friendship and plunged Hadley into depression. Unable to concentrate on her work, she did poorly on her exams, withdrew from Bryn Mawr in May 1912, and limped home.

Back in St. Louis, her mother and sister Fonnie continued to treat Hadley as a frail creature unfit to lead an ordinary existence. For several years, her behavior seemed to justify that judgment: she languished around the house, reading, playing the piano, and doing little else. Yet when her mother fell ill, Hadley took over the caretaking duties for the family. After her mother died in August 1920, she felt empowered to strike out on her own.

What brought Hadley to Chicago two months later was a letter of invitation from Y.K. Smith’s sister Katy. The two had been classmates at Mary Institute, and although Katy was a far more independent “new woman” than Hadley—she’d graduated from the University of Missouri and was pursuing a career as a journalist—they had kept in touch ever since. Y.K., a successful copywriter for an advertising firm, was Katy’s older brother. He and his wife Doodles, a pianist, maintained an open marriage, a shocking arrangement at that time and in that place. They rented out rooms in their apartment house in Chicago’s bohemian district to young men of promising talent, and threw lively parties there.

Undoubtedly, Katy thought that inviting Hadley to attend one of those parties would help liberate her from her repressive family background. But she could hardly have anticipated how well the evening would work out for her friend, or how badly for herself. That night, Katy learned a lesson that Hadley herself was to learn a few years later: the danger of introducing young Ernest Hemingway to an attractive friend.

Hemingway arrived at the party accompanied by Bill Smith, Katy’s younger brother. Ernest had known the Smiths for years, for they were neighbors during the summers that both families spent in northern Michigan. Bill was a favorite fishing companion and close friend. As for Katy, although she, like Hadley, was eight years Ernest’s senior—she’d seen him grow from a callow 10-year-old to a remarkably good-looking young man—she was now in love with him. And there could be no doubt that he cut a dashing figure: handsome, with dark hair, a wide grin, flashing brown eyes, and an Italian officer’s cape draped across his shoulders. Slim and tall, he bore little resemblance to the bearded and rugged Papa Hemingway of latter years. In photographs from that time, he looks rather like a young T. S. Eliot.

Ernest was drawn immediately to the new young woman from St. Louis. He liked Hadley’s red hair, golden good looks, beautiful figure, and the dress she’d bought for the party. He liked her for the way she was, in Diliberto’s description, “unpretentious, submissive, intelligent, sexy, tough in spirit.” And they had a great deal in common too, as upper-middle-class Midwesterners with parallel backgrounds. Both had dominant mothers and deeply disturbed fathers; in fact, Ernest’s father would kill himself in 1928, just as Hadley’s had done in 1905. Both were eager to free themselves from unhealthy family situations. “The world’s a jail, and we’re going to break it together,” Hadley wrote him soon after they met.

Both had artistic ambitions, too—Ernest as a writer and Hadley as a musician—but with the significant difference that once liberated from her confinement, Hadley devoted herself to his future. She believed in Ernest absolutely, and gave his writing her entire emotional and financial support.

Hadley stayed on in Chicago for three weeks after the night of the party, and by the end of that time, she and Ernest were beginning to talk about marriage. Katy Smith was embittered at being cast aside for her former school friend. “You have no judgment,” she told Hadley when she heard of their engagement. The comment struck home, as revealed in a letter Hadley wrote to Ernest. “The story of how you gyped Butstein [one of Katy’s nicknames] makes me weak in the knees for my own future,” she wrote. “I say it would be unscroopulous [sic] to work me that way.”

Ernest declined to tell Hadley the details of his relationship with Katy, but he explored the romance in two unpublished sketches written before his marriage to Hadley in September 1921, as well as in “Summer People,” a story printed posthumously in The Nick Adams Stories (1972). “Summer People” is set in northern Michigan and contains a scene depicting copulation between “Wemedge” (a nickname for Ernest) and “Stut” (another nickname for Katy). Katy, who married novelist John Dos Passos a decade later, denied that she and Ernest had ever been lovers.

The first of the unpublished pieces is written in the form of a letter (unsent) to Hadley. Ernest, his friend Bill Horne from the Red Cross ambulance service, and Katy (“Stut”) are discussing his forthcoming marriage.

Stut says she thinks you oughta allow her to wear half mourning … Said she’d try and remember it was your wedding … Says she gives us a year at the longest—says you’ll be off me inside of a year and that then she’ll come over and live with us to hold the home together.

Bill Horne thought Ernest should delay getting married until he had resolved his relationship with Katy. Ernest passed on this advice in a letter to Hadley, admitting that he felt troubled about the matter. She was suitably alarmed, and responded that if a delay were necessary, it was all right with her. She was sure of her feelings and of the love they shared. And she wanted the same commitment from him. “I want you to think very hard about it all and make very sure that all’s right for our marriage way, way inside.”

In the second unpublished item, a story called “The Current,” Ernest showed his awareness of Hadley’s doubts about marrying him. In the story, a red-haired young woman named Dorothy Hadley refuses the proposal of her suitor on the grounds that he “could never be really in love with anyone.” Besides, he was too good-looking. She would not subject herself to going out with him and overhearing people say, “Who is that red-haired girl with that handsome man?”

Hadley decided to marry Ernest despite such reservations. But he did not make it easy for her to overcome these doubts. It soon became clear to her that she would always compete for his affection with others—women and men alike.

Life before Hadley