The Paris Husband

How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway

Scott Donaldson

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781943657698
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

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.

1

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

Ernest had crushes on at least two girls at Oak Park High School—these documented for the first time by Robert K. Elder in 2016-17—but neither of these developed into a serious romantic relationship. That would not happen until he shipped off to Italy as an ambulance driver in the spring of 1918, and suffered two severe woundings. The first came around midnight on July 8, 1918, from Austrian mortar and machine gun fire. The second and more lasting wound was inflicted by Agnes von Kurowsky, the tall, attractive nurse he fell in love with while recuperating at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan. They made plans to be married, but after the armistice in November 1918, Ernest was shipped back to the States and Agnes (eight years his senior, like Hadley) stayed in Italy to serve out her term as a Red Cross nurse.

In his absence, she formed a liaison with an Italian officer. The “Dear Ernest” letter she wrote to him arrived in March 1919. She expected great things from him, she said, but she was simply too old for him, and she expected to marry her new lover (as it happened, she didn’t). Ernest was devastated. He’d fallen deeply in love, and the rejection plunged him into the depths of depression. He emerged with a determination not to risk giving too much of himself to anyone ever again.

In the 18 months between Agnes’s jilting and the party in Chicago where he met Hadley Richardson, Ernest had a series of relationships with women. One of these surely involved Katy Smith. The others were with younger girls he met in Horton Bay and Petoskey, Michigan, during the summer and fall of 1919: Irene Goldstein, a dark-haired beauty exactly his age; Marjorie Bump, a redhead two years younger; and Grace Quinlan, who was barely into her teens. But he made no commitments to them, and maintained the male friendships—mostly tied to fishing, the outdoors, and the war—that he could pursue without emotional consequences.

Marjorie Bump was probably the most important of the Michigan relationships. She and Ernest met in 1915, when—not quite 14 to his 16—she proudly showed him the speckled trout she’d just caught; they remained friends from that moment until his marriage. With her red hair and fetching freckles, she looked like a somewhat shorter version of Hadley.

If Hemingway’s fiction is any guide, their romance ended through the intervention of Bill Smith. In “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” companion stories in Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time (1925), a character modeled on Bill Smith (and called by that name in the first draft) congratulates Hemingway’s avatar, Nick Adams, for breaking off with a young woman named Marjorie—presumably Marjorie Bump. “Once a man’s married,” Bill declares, “he’s absolutely bitched … done for.” Nick wasn’t so sure about that. Breaking off with Marge made him feel “as though everything was all gone to hell inside.” As Hemingway scholar H. R. Stoneback commented in a revealing article about the real Marjorie Bump and these stories, what came to an end for Nick in “The End of Something” was his innocence. He was no longer a carefree young lad; he had to make choices, and he chose to discard Marge.

Yet at the end of “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick still hopes to make it up with her: “Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost. He would go into town on Saturday.” In real life, Ernest stayed up north in the fall of 1919 and saw a great deal of Marjorie, then a senior at Petoskey High School en route to college at Washington University in St. Louis. During the summer at Horton Bay, they’d taken moonlight swims and fished for rainbows, and in Petoskey, Ernest met Marge when school let out. He showed her the apprentice short stories he was writing, and they read and talked about books that the town librarian disapproved of, including Maurice Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers (1898). That summer and fall, he later wrote her, were “idyllic—Perfect as some days in Spring are and mountain valleys you pass on puffing trains—and other impermanent things.”

Irene Goldstein was another of Ernest’s interests. She was the most beautiful woman in Petoskey, or so Hemingway—and others—thought. The granddaughter of the founder of the city’s leading department store, she graduated from high school in 1917 and went on to Lake Forest College in Chicago’s fashionable north suburbs and then to Columbia College of Expression and Physical Education in the city itself. Home from college during Christmas break in 1919, she partied with Ernest in Petoskey, and they dated in Chicago over the next month before Hemingway left town to write part-time for the Toronto Star Weekly.

Ernest was back at the family home on Walloon Lake, just outside Petoskey, during the summer of 1920, and he and Irene played a lot of tennis together—nearly every day for several weeks. As always with Hemingway, a strong atmosphere of competition prevailed. He “played very dramatically,” she recalled, slamming his racket to the court when he missed an easy shot.

Theirs was hardly a love story, but they were attracted to each other and Ernest was reluctant to break the connection. It was after his three-week courtship of Hadley in the fall of 1920 that Ernest made physical overtures to Irene. In late December, he took her to Y.K. Smith’s apartment in Chicago, and as they were about to leave—she was on her way to Grand Island, Nebraska, to teach physical education at a high school—he flung himself on her. “I don’t do this,” she protested. Ernest backed off and took her to the train station by taxicab.

That’s what happened according to Irene’s recollection. Ernest told a different story to Hadley. His letter to her about the incident has not survived, but it’s possible to construe what he must have said from Hadley’s answer. Irene got carried away by her emotions and had made a pass at him, Ernest claimed, but he had held her off. Hadley admired his resolve. “Best sort of person you are,” she wrote him on January 8. “I love you.”

Ernest and Irene continued their correspondence during the winter and spring of 1921. As Miami University of Ohio professor Donald Daiker has pointed out, these letters were more breezy than passionate. Yet it is significant that in a letter dated March 16, Ernest told Irene that he was moving to a new apartment in Chicago and that “if [she were] going to be here during July” he’d stick around, for she knew he was “fond of [her].” He said nothing about his engagement to Hadley.

Manifestly, Ernest liked pursuing (or, even better, being pursued by) two or more women at the same time. Not just women, but also young girls, as in the case of Grace Quinlan, the precocious 14-year-old to whom he wrote two letters a few weeks prior to his wedding. He addressed her as “Dearest G” in both letters, and in one of them told her he’d dreamed about her and hoped to see her in Petoskey before the day of “heavy marriage.” (He also sent her photograph...