Book Review: Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a Memoir by A.E. Hotchner (2015)

 

The cover of Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a memoir by A.E. Hotchner, 2015.

The author A.E. Hotchner, 1917-2020.

After reading A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his life in Paris during the 1920’s, I picked up A.E. Hotchner’s 2015 book Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. Hotchner was a writer who became friends with Hemingway in 1948 and he traveled extensively with Hemingway during the last decade of his life. Hotchner wrote the famous 1966 memoir Papa Hemingway, a huge best-seller that showed the writer’s life up close. Hemingway’s widow Mary Walsh Hemingway sued Hotchner in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the publication of Papa Hemingway, claiming that Hotchner had violated her privacy. Mary was also upset that Hotchner made it clear in the book that Hemingway’s death was a suicide, while she was still claiming that it was accidental. (The lie about his death being accidental allowed Hemingway to have a Catholic funeral service.)

Hotchner was also friends with Paul Newman, the impossibly handsome actor, humanitarian, and race-car driver. Hotchner and Newman were the co-founders of Newman’s Own, the non-profit food company. Hotchner died in 2020 at the age of 102.

Hotchner helped with the editing of A Moveable Feast, and he provided the book with its title, based on a conversation he and Ernest had about Paris. Hemingway in Love contains material that was too sensitive to be included in A Moveable Feast. At the time A Moveable Feast was published in 1964, Hemingway’s widow was still alive, as was his first wife Hadley. By the time Hemingway in Love was published in 2015, everyone was dead, except for Hotchner.

Hemingway in Love is largely comprised of conversations that Hotchner had with Hemingway in 1954 and 1955. Hotchner kept copious records of his conversations with Hemingway at the time, and the story Hotchner tells is in keeping with the wistful nostalgia of A Moveable Feast.

The Ernest Hemingway of Hemingway in Love comes off as a much more sympathetic character than the Ernest Hemingway presented to the reader in A Moveable Feast. For one thing, we don’t have Hemingway constantly lording his information and expertise over us. Hemingway is often guilty of what we would now call “mansplaining,” and he strikes me as the type of person who knows three facts about a subject and then suddenly thinks he’s the world’s leading expert.

The book presents a more nuanced look at Hemingway’s friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway actually says some nice things about Fitzgerald, rather than just damning him with faint praise, or lobbing a passive-aggressive insult towards Scott. Hemingway tells Hotchner about Fitzgerald “there was a sense of bonding from the very beginning, a sense of brotherhood.” (p.28) In another passage, Hemingway says of his relationship with Fitzgerald, “Affectionately criticizing each other was the bond of our friendship.” (p.86)

We learn that Hemingway met Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife, through the Fitzgeralds. (p.30) At that time, Ernest was married to Hadley, and much of the book details with Hemingway’s conundrum as he found himself in love with both women at the same time. As the love triangle developed, Fitzgerald emerged as a sensible voice of reason, a role that Hemingway did not allow him to play in A Moveable Feast. When Scott and Ernest were at a café on the Riviera, Scott confronted Ernest about the situation, saying of Pauline “She’s going to bust up your marriage if you don’t get rid of her.” (p.39) Ernest protested that he was enjoying being the object of affection of two women. Scott’s reply was: “A man, torn between two women, will eventually lose ‘em both.” (p.40) Hemingway also tells us that “Scott said I was a sad son of a bitch who didn’t know a damn thing about women.” (p.40) For those of us who are Fitzgerald fans, it’s rather refreshing to hear Scott say that to Ernest, rather than the other way around.

Finally, as the situation came to a head, Hadley got Ernest to agree to not see Pauline for 100 days. If at the end of the 100 days he was still in love with Pauline, she would grant him a divorce. Hadley also didn’t see Ernest during the 100 days. To hear Hemingway relate it to Hotchner, he was in crushing agony during this time, and he was strongly considering suicide during the 100 days: “I decided the best way would be to jump off an ocean liner at night.” (p.93) During the 100 days, Fitzgerald again emerges as a voice of clarity, telling Hemingway “You need the shining qualities of Hadley. Her buoyancy. Neither Pauline nor her money can provide that.” (p.88)

After 71 days, Hadley had enough and wrote a letter to Ernest saying that she was going to divorce him. Ernest got what he thought he wanted: the freedom to marry Pauline. Hemingway converted to Catholicism for the devout Pauline. Fitzgerald, who was raised Catholic but left the church when he was an adult, chided him about his sudden conversion. “Well, old Mackerel Snapper, wolf a Wafer and a Beaker of blood for me,” Fitzgerald wrote in a letter from July of 1928. (By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, by Scott Donaldson, p.226) Hemingway in Love tells us the information that after a bout of impotence with Pauline, Hemingway was “cured” after praying in a Catholic church. (p.117-19)

To hear Ernest tell it to Hotchner, his marriage to Pauline was not much fun, even from the beginning. Of course, it’s tough to say if this was really how Hemingway felt in 1927, or it was more reflective of his mood in 1954 and 1955, when he was discussing these events with Hotchner.

Interestingly enough, Hemingway married three writers after his divorce from Hadley: Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Walsh. Hemingway complained to Hotchner in 1955 that Mary was bugging him about wanting to write more, comparing her complaints to Martha Gellhorn’s. “Martha was just as bad, constantly drumming me about her writing, how we had to make time to fit her schedule, where and when we had to go here and there for her assignments. She was a pretty good writer, I’ll give her that, but also as a writer, I wasn’t about to put her needs before mine.” (p.79) Well, that sounds like a fun marriage, doesn’t it?

There is an inaccuracy from Hemingway regarding Fitzgerald. Hemingway claims “I never use actual names in what I write,” saying that he gave Scott a cover name in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” (p.97) This is incorrect—in the original Esquire magazine text, the narration mentions “poor Scott Fitzgerald,” and how Fitzgerald’s admiration of the rich had wrecked him. (To add insult to injury, Hemingway also gets the quote from Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy” wrong.) Only after repeated badgering from Maxwell Perkins and Fitzgerald himself did Hemingway agree to changing it for book publication to “Julian.”

Hemingway in Love also has Ernest recalling a scene with Fitzgerald in Paris where both writers were at a low ebb. Zelda has had mental breakdowns, and Ernest says that Pauline is about to divorce him. The last time the Fitzgeralds were in Europe was September of 1931, so it’s possible such a meeting occurred then, but Ernest and Pauline wouldn’t actually get divorced until 1940, so 1931 seems to be too early for this scene. But maybe Pauline was just thinking about divorcing Ernest in 1931?

One other timeline oddity, which we can probably just put down to the vagaries of memory, is when Hemingway says about Hadley, “What threw me was how quickly Hadley had married.” (p.129) Hadley married journalist Paul Mowrer in July of 1933, six years after her divorce from Hemingway. Contrast that to Hemingway’s haste to wed Pauline: Ernest and Hadley were divorced in January 1927, and he and Pauline were married in May of 1927. Six years hardly seems “quickly” compared to less than six months.

Hemingway in Love is a fascinating little book, and if you’re interested in Ernest and Hadley, it’s a must read.