Cockeyed Happy

Ernest Hemingway's Wyoming Summers with Pauline

Darla Worden

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781641603676
• eBook ISBN: 9781641603706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"Streamlined and impacting, Darla Worden's  Cockeyed Happy could be construed as a narrative of the author himself, a compelling account of Hemingway's summers in Wyoming—and I can think of no finer compliment." —Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries
In March 1928, after the phenomenal success of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway returned to the United States with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—the stylish Vogue editor and scorned "other woman" who would give up everything to be with him and, in the end, lose it all.
The couple fled Paris in the wake of the huge gossip storm about the American author's affair and abandonment of his wife and son. Escaping to Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains to write while Pauline recovered from the birth of their first child, he finished A Farewell to Arms and fell in love with the land around him. Pauline soon joined him in Yellowstone and Jackson Hole.
In Cockeyed Happy Darla Worden tells the little-known story of Hemingway and Pauline during six summers from 1928 to 1939—from smitten newlywed to bored, restless husband and ultimately to philanderer as he falls in love with another woman once again.

Part I

1928

What Ernest Loved About Pauline

Keen editorial eye1

Her family became his family: Jinny, Mother Pfeiffer

Uncle Gus’s support

Strong again2

“Someone to feel swell with” after a day’s work3

The “feeling of us against the others”4

Willing to join him on adventures

Believed in the “promotion of masculine society”5

Vowed to always let him have his way6

She could give him “little Pilar” in three years7

Her throat never got sore like his8

Spontaneous lovemaking*1

EXPLORERS COME WEST

HE’D NEVER BEEN OUT WEST BEFORE, but he’d heard it had some of the best fly-fishing in the world. As Ernest steered the yellow Model A toward the Bighorn Mountains, they reminded him of the Sierra de Guadarrama in Spain—the same color and shape but bigger.1 He missed Spain already. Because of Patrick’s birth, he’d had to skip the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona this summer, and he swore he’d return next year. But for now, he and Bill Horne had driven three days from Kansas City to reach a dude ranch in Wyoming, where Ernest hoped to go fishing and finish his book.

Ernest recorded mileage each day—340, 380, 320. He liked to keep lists and record things, like how many fish he caught and game he shot.2 They had crossed a corner of Nebraska and come up the North Platte River3 into Wyoming—a changing landscape with hills like sand dunes, rocky outcroppings, buttes topped with scrubby ponderosa pine, and miles of sagebrush-speckled plains.

The entire country was baking in a heat wave, and forget about finding a cool drink to quench your thirst because of Prohibition—something that Ernest was having a hard time adjusting to after the Roaring Twenties in Paris, where liquor flowed freely. Finding liquor in America was like tracking game: you had to be stealthy. In Kansas City, though, he had connections, and he had brought four quarts of bootleg scotch for the trip.

Ernest had been planning to go out to Idaho,4 where you had to pack in on horseback, but Bill invited him to Folly Ranch and Ernest had accepted in spite of his feelings about dude ranches. If he could catch an enormous amount of trout without working too hard for them, he’d be happy.5 He also needed a respite from the awful heat and a quiet place to work.

It was July 30 when they turned onto a steep shale road that snaked up the mountainside, the coupe leaving a trail of red dust as it climbed. Ernest maneuvered the roadster around potholes, bumping over rocks and ruts, trying to stay away from the edge as Bill peered over the sheer drop-off where boulders the size of cars had tumbled thousands of feet to the valley floor.

“Look out, Ernie!” Bill yelled when Ernest came too near. The view was seductive—they could see the little towns of Sheridan and Big Horn in the valley below.

“Ernie, look out!” Bill shouted again.

“Do me a favor, Horney,” Ernest said. “When you get out, just close the door.” Bill didn’t make a peep after that.6

Ernest met Bill when they were in the autoambulanzia*17 for the Red Cross in the Great War, on the Italian front, where they’d had to avoid more than potholes. He’d been nineteen, Bill, twenty-seven,8 and they’d traveled from New York to Paris, then to Milan and eventually Schio, Italy, where they were assigned to their posts. Bill had been there for him when Ernest was injured—227 shrapnel wounds in his leg—and they had been friends ever since.

The air became cooler as they gained altitude, and the breeze felt good. Kansas City had been too bloody hot, over ninety degrees each day. He hadn’t been able to work in that heat, especially while worrying about Pauline, dangerously ill in the hospital.9 After the caesarean, she had to stay in the hospital for ten days due to gas distention, and at times Ernest had worried that it was the end for her. When she was finally out of the woods, he had taken her and their new son, Patrick Miller Hemingway, to stay with her family in Piggott, Arkansas, to recover while Ernest went fishing with Bill.

At a plateau, Ernest spotted a spring and pulled off the side of the road to fill up the car with water.10 The Ford was a wedding gift from Pauline’s rich uncle, Gus, who shipped it to them when they arrived in Key West, Florida, last April.*2 The company had only made fifty thousand of the model, and Uncle Gus wanted Pauline and Ernest to be one of the first to own one.11 Ernest had already logged seventy-six hundred miles in the car, beginning in Key West with his new father-in-law, Paul Pfeiffer, and driving together to the Pfeiffer home in Piggott. Pauline, who was then eight months pregnant, took the train. Riding for five days with someone you have only just met, in dreadful heat, on gravel roads, stopping at night to sleep in “tourist cabins,”12 was a sure way to get to know a person.

And now driving with “Horney,” someone he had not seen in seven years, was an opportunity to catch up—so much had happened. After Ernest married Hadley Richardson in 1921, they had moved to Paris. He had lived there until this spring, when he and Pauline had returned to the United States so their baby could be born here. He’d seen Bill just a few times on brief visits from Paris to the Hemingway family home in Oak Park, outside Chicago, where Bill lived. Now that Ernest was back, maybe he would see Bill more often. This trip gave them a chance to reminisce about their time in the war together; perhaps some of those stories would make their way into his new novel.

His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, had been published two years earlier while he was in Paris. He’d written about men who returned to Paris after the Great War—Gertrude Stein had called them “The Lost Generation”—drifters without purpose after what they had seen in the war. His new book took place in Italy, where Ernest had spent months recuperating in a Milan hospital after his injuries and had fallen in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. His leg eventually healed, but his heart had been broken on receiving a letter from Agnes after he returned home, saying she was dumping him to marry a duke.

That was ten years ago, but he could still conjure those feelings—feelings he was putting into the story of a soldier falling in love with his nurse in Italy. He was on page 486, with a third still left to write, and he hoped to finish the “bloody book”13 in the solitude of Wyoming before Pauline joined him in a few weeks.

At the spring, the men stretched their legs. Ernest was six feet tall,14 and Bill was even taller. The alpine meadows around them exploded with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and black-eyed Susans, and in the distance, they spotted a mountain range with a tall, snowcapped peak despite the summer heat. Bill said he felt “just as much explorers as Columbus was in the Santa Maria.”15 Ernest welcomed the chance to discover this new place with the “Horned article” or “Article” for short—Ernest affectionately gave friends, family, even himself nicknames. Wyoming was the blank page just waiting for him to put his mark on it. To write, he needed something new: new lands, new experiences, and new people.

That’s how The Sun Also Rises had come to him. After attending the bullfights in Pamplona with his friends, he’d been on fire. He had sat down at his typewriter, and ten weeks later had written a bestselling novel that was based on his experience. Critics called it a new style that combined journalistic reporting and real people with fiction techniques. It was thrilling to have written a book like that at age twenty-six, a book that rocked the literary world, even if many of those friends no longer spoke to him.

Back in the car, the road was so narrow in places that any cars headed downhill needed to yield to cars going uphill by allowing them to pass. Luckily, there weren’t many cars coming down—mostly just cattle grazing in the mountain meadows and crossing the road when they felt like it.

Ernest steered onto a road that looked like a cattle trail and stopped at the ranch gate, where Eleanor Donnelley, their hostess, stood waiting to greet them, along with a surprise: fifteen of her friends from Bryn Mawr.

Shit,16 Ernest thought, so much for working.

STRENGTH
IN THE AFTERNOON

PAULINE WAS RESTING on the sofa of her parents’ home in Piggott, writing Ernest a letter. Her mother would not allow her to use the typewriter upstairs, so she was forced to write the letter by hand. “Mother is a dragon about the steps,” she wrote.1 The doctor had been clear after Patrick’s birth: no stairs, no lifting, and no more children for three years unless she wanted to be an invalid or a corpse.2 Even though Ernest had hoped for a daughter they would name Pilar, he had seemed content with another son: Patrick Miller Hemingway, born June 28, 1928.

John Hadley Nicanor Hemingw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Part I: 1928
• Part II: 1930
• Part III: 1932
• Part IV: 1936
• Part V: 1938–1939
• Epilogue: 1940
• Success
• Author’s Method
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index