Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife

by Gioia Diliberto

also began to lose interest in portraying in realistic ways the domestic life that most men and women lead. His ability to write from the woman’s point of view, as in the stories “Up in Michigan,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “The End of Something,” disappeared almost completely after 1927, the year he divorced Hadley. His writing grew increasingly “hobbled,” as John Updike wrote, by “a narrow stoic universe,” where the hero “always acts right and looks good” and the heroine exists simply to satisfy his needs.

Writing

He found her stoic, smart, devoted, romantic, and wounded. These qualities also belong to the heroines of his three major novels, who, as the scholar Carol H. Smith has noted, “are remarkably alike psychologically.” Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls have all been damaged by life in some fundamental way, and they are all desperate to escape their pasts through love. What’s more, the romances in these books follow the same pattern as Ernest and Hadley’s. The couples meet and immediately fall in love, but the relationships are doomed.

Portrayls

want what you want,” she wrote Ernest during their courtship in a sentiment expressed by nearly every Hemingway heroine in love. Catherine Barkley, for example, says to Frederic Henry, “I want what you want. There isn’t any me any more,” and Maria tells Robert Jordan, “Understand always that I will do what you wish.”

Want

Florence’s feminist views were closely tied to her other passion, spiritualism. Spiritualists believed that the emancipation of women would harmonize the social sphere. They divided the world between the Father-God and Mother-Nature and thought the mingling of these two principles would remove the damage done by individualism. Man would lose his aggressive compulsions, and woman would become more rational and masculine. None of this appealed to Hadley. During the period of her mother and sister’s intense involvement with feminism, Hadley’s isolation in the family deepened.

Florence

Florence expressed her venom in a poem that was published in Reedy’s Mirror in 1916. Titled “Contra-Ception,” the poem attacked sex as “a hateful, pernicious invasion of body and soul and being,” and birth control as the devil’s black art that would enable “man’s degenerate lust” to “devour” women. With birth control, Florence wrote, marriage would be “one long orgy.” In her view, “No genuine male will stand for [abstinence] / To any degree whatsoever,” once the threat of pregnancy had been removed.

Contraception

Hadley became so worried about her health that she consulted the family gynecologist, Dr. George Gellhorn, Martha Gellhorn’s father. “He picked up right away that my trouble was I didn’t like my mother, and I didn’t like living with her, and he talked and talked to me about how much I owed her,” she said. “But I resented my mother and her teaching. No matter how wonderful something was, if she approved of it,

Dr.Gellhorn

Still, with a few important exceptions, she praised everything he wrote, not only because she loved him, but also because she knew how deeply he needed unambiguous support. She had never known anyone so desperate to succeed or so devoted to his art.

Support

The real Hadley, as Ernest portrayed her in such stories as “Cat in the Rain,” “Out of Season,” and “The End of Something,” is a far stronger, more assertive woman than the supplicant of her letters or the idealized Hadley of A Moveable Feast.

Real

can learn from you.” The truth was, Hadley was more mature than Ernest, and her “olderness” was an important element in the relationship. Hadley enjoyed mothering Ernest, and Ernest liked playing the role of petted child. Still, he insisted that the difference

Mothering

Hadley was amazed to find that she could keep up with Ernest and his lively group of friends. Fatigue and weakness, she told him, had dominated her life for the last decade. “I often give out ahead of the average [person] even,” she wrote. “That failing gets less every day tho. How I love all sorts of endurance that’s piling up day by day now.”

Stamina

respect for sweet-tempered, yet physically tough, women shows up throughout his fiction. From Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms to Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls to Renata in Across the River and into the Trees, some of his best-known female characters are gentle, passive women who endure pain, even death, without complaint. Ernest made Hadley feel “matched up and appreciated and taken care of.”

Strength

Hadley quickly learned after her wedding that she was more in love with her husband than he was with her, and that she would live throughout her marriage in the shadow of his personality. But in the winter of 1921 there was little hint of dissonance, only the hope, as she wrote Ernest, of “everything lovely and wonderful that is to come.”

Shadow

Ernest was content for Hadley to play the role of passive partner to his ambitions, but over time her own lack of ambition would cause problems in their relationship.

Ambition

Hadley’s passive-aggressive quality was perhaps her least attractive feature—her willingness to let “accidents” accomplish her submerged desires—and some scholars believe that it contributed to the famous incident in 1922 when she lost Ernest’s manuscripts.

Passive·aggressive

As James Joyce once said of him, “He writes as he is. . . . He’s a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have lived it if his body had not allowed him to live it.”

Joyce

“If he took exception to anyone, that was it. There was no reasoning with him about it. He eventually turned on almost everyone we knew, all his old friends.”

Grudge

against the world fired his talent. On paper, he used his bitterness to capture people in a few bold strokes. Hadley also knew that Ernest’s outward anger was really a reflection of his own self-doubts. Ernest’s intolerance of any flaw in others, his compulsive need to be superior to everyone (and to remind the world of his superiority), reflected his deep insecurity about his own worth. He had to be the best at everything in order not to feel completely worthless. Hadley was pleased when Ernest took a protective interest in a pregnant Swiss woman who also had been on their boat. “We kept her at our hotel until her train,” Hadley wrote Grace, “and then Ernest took her down and saw her off in a comfortable seat.” Such kindnesses, she felt, helped make up for his cruelties. While

Anger

To their friends, the Hemingways were an ideal couple, as devoted to each other as they were to Ernest’s art. The American humorist and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart thought the Hemingway marriage so “perfect” it was almost “holy.” Ernest and Hadley seemed to grow more in love all the time. Stella Bowen recalled how they “would brighten up to each other” in a room full of people and “how little their lack of money

In love

seemed to matter to them.” Ernest constantly bragged about Hadley to his friends. He wrote Bill Smith that she “fishes not with the usual feminine simulation of interest but like one of the men. She’s as intelligent about fights as she is about music, she drinks with a male without remorse, and turned out Bumby the boy spring off who is built like Firpo, sleeps all night and is as cheerful as a pup. Hash hasn’t lost any looks and gets better all the time. She runs the house like a Rolls Royce.”

Bragging

Harold Loeb, for example, was a scion of the wealthy Guggenheim and Loeb families. He was thirty-three, handsome, athletic, and talented. With his mother’s money, he had founded and edited one of the more successful literary magazines, Broom, and he’d written a novel called Doodab. Soon

Loeb

Sara Murphy did what she could to help Hadley. She directed her chauffeur to deliver groceries, including fresh vegetables from her garden, to Hadley every day. She paid Bumby’s doctor bills. But her generosity hid a slight coldness. Sara knew about Ernest’s affair with Pauline and was sympathetic to Hadley as the wronged wife, but she preferred Pauline’s company to Hadley’s. Even as a child, Jack Hemingway recognized something of this and said he never felt comfortable around Sara, because “I sensed that she thought my mother was from a lower class of people.

Sara Murphy

Ernest’s pain brought out Hadley’s instinct to mother him, always an important element in their relationship.

Maternal

He came to feel that his father had done more to help his mother than hurt her. “He opened up the possibilities of life for [her] and through him she gained strength and independence, as well as the confidence she had so desperately lacked in her family . . . where she had been made to feel helpless and useless and a physical inferior. Through Papa she learned her own worth and that she could get along and make her own friends, even learn another language, become athletic, and make a happy home in another land, alone.” Many

Jack H

When he betrayed Hadley, he lost touch with his best self. The depressed side of his personality began to take over, as the sensitive, joyous side retreated. At the same time, he was losing interest in portraying intimacy between real men and women. Instead he became increasingly preoccupied with a stoic male world and a type of flat, fictional heroine who exists only to satisfy her partner.

Betrayl

Ernest told Hadley she was the only woman in his life who never gave him trouble. “The more I see of all the members of your sex the more I admire you,” he wrote her on July 26. Ernest complained that Pauline was undermining his work by demanding large sums of money, and that she wouldn’t cooperate with his plans to visit their sons. Martha later infuriated him by her refusal to subordinate her career to his, and by her long absences during journalism assignments. “If one is perpetually doomed to marry people from St. Louis,” Ernest wrote Hadley on December 1, 1939, “it’s best to marry them from the very best families.”

Birthday