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“I would never have written any of them In Our Time, Torrents, or The Sun if I had not married you and had your loyal and self sacrificing and always stimulating and loving—and actual cash support backing,”
He settled in St. Louis in 1857. The city in those days was still a frontier town. Wagons camped along the Mississippi, and Indians hunted buffalo on the plains just outside of town.
Hadley became so worried about her health that she consulted the family gynecologist, Dr. George Gellhorn, Martha Gellhorn’s father.
How ironic. First wife Harley’s GYN is Third wife’s Martha’s father.
(She died in 1920, leaving a $75,000 estate.)
$75,000 in 1920 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,191,266.25 today, an increase of $1,116,266.25 over 105 years.
Irma Rombauer, who wrote the original Joy of Cooking.
Once, Hadley went to Fonchen’s dance recital at her alma mater, Mary Institute.
That was Marty Gellhorn.” In 1940 Martha Gellhorn became Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.
The disappointment of a youthful passion, as George Eliot wrote, “has effects as incalculable as those of small pox.”
Damn, George Eliot writes well.
Petoskey, Michigan,
Walloon Lake,
She is passive, optimistic, and generous.
He is aggressive, pessimistic, and self-absorbed.
In a nine-month courtship they saw each other only seven times—and
She was collecting income from a $30,000 trust fund set up by her paternal grandfather, and she stood to inherit about $20,000.
Hadley spent much of her day running the household, directing the servants and cooking meals for Ruth, Bertha, herself, and often a large group of friends.
a kind of mother figure,
She explained, though, that she couldn’t go because she was too busy running her boarding house—so
Hadley had to budget the money she received from her boarders to maintain her apartment and provide meals.
She’d been to Dr. Gellhorn the previous year
Once her mother’s estate was settled, Hadley would have two trust funds yielding about three thousand dollars a year.
Money continued to be a worry for both of them. A big issue was whether Hadley and Fonnie should sell the Cates Avenue house.
Ernest suggested Hadley read The Red Lily, by Anatole France; “the most passionate book I’ve ever read,” Hadley wrote.
$75 a month for rent; $90 for housekeeping, which included such items as $6 for milk, $30 for meat and vegetables, and $2 for eggs; $69 for Ernest’s lunches and miscellaneous expenses.
Even though the September 3 wedding was only three weeks away, many details had yet to be settled.
Ernest described the Charleses’ hilltop house in his 1923 short story, “The Three-Day Blow”:
Grace had worked hard to make everything perfect for the newlyweds.
The next morning, they both awoke with bad colds.
But it’s doubtful whether she would have been disrespectful to her in-laws without strong encouragement from her husband.
Chicago. The honeymoon, Hadley admitted, was “mostly a flop.” They’d been sick, and the weather bad.
She wanted to make sure her son had a completely devoted wife.”
Hadley had a regular income from her trust funds,
Hadley’s maternal uncle Arthur Wyman had died, leaving her $8,000.
France, not Italy, was the place for a writer.
By the end of the dinner Ernest knew he had to get out of Chicago.
By November 28, the newlyweds had booked passage on an old French ship, the Leopoldina, scheduled to sail from New York for Le Havre on December 8.
she had her waist-length red hair cut just below her ears in her first flapper’s bob.
It took ten days to reach Europe,
They arrived in Le Havre at noon on December 22
they went straight to the Hôtel Jacob (later called Hôtel d’Angleterre),
Room 14
Henry James had set much of his novel The American on the end of the street, where it became the rue de l’Université.
They usually ate dinner at a small café around the corner from the hotel on the rue des Sts. Pères,
The two-room flat they settled for was on the fourth floor of an old building at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, in a working-class neighborhood in the fifth arrondissement. They moved in on January 8.
Down the street was the place de la Contrescarpe,
Off to one side was the narrow, steep rue Mouffetard,
Years later, Ernest would make much of their supposed poverty,
Still, the Hemingways could have afforded a nicer place. With Hadley’s trust fund and Ernest’s earnings as a journalist, they made about $5,000
a year, not counting Hadley’s $8,000 inheritance from her uncle,
(The wealthy American expatriates Sara and Gerald Murphy, for example, kept a lavish Riviera estate on $7,000 a year.)
Ernest paid Marie, whom he joked was their “feminine ménagerie,” twelve dollars a month.
