Hemingway: Never a Kept Man

HEMINGWAY: NEVER A KEPT MAN by Samantha Ehlinger Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Departmental Honors in the Department of English Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas May 4, 2015 ii HEMINGWAY: NEVER A KEPT MAN Project Approved: Supervising Professor: David Colón Department of English A. Layne Craig, Ph.D. Department of English John Tisdale, Ph.D. Department of Journalism iii ABSTRACT What do Ernest Hemingway's characters and their relationships signify about their author’s romantic life? This thesis will explain how several of his works return to the beginnings and endings of his first three marriages to Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Martha Gellhorn. Through his novels, he interrogates his ideas on marriage, particularly on power-dynamics in a marriage, and on female control. Throughout Hemingway’s works, he examines what makes relationships appealing at first, and then their dissolution inevitable. And while his pieces are not direct biographical, one-to-one comparisons, many of his characters treat questions he himself had yet to answer before his death. The works treated in this research are: The Sun Also Rises, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Hills like White Elephants,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Nobody Ever Dies,” Garden of Eden and A Moveable Feast. Hemingway attempts to justify and understand why his relationships fall apart—particularly his romantic ones— through his novels. He uses his fictional characters to interrogate how one partner can “keep,” the other, or hold them back from reaching his or her potential. He also uses his novels as a way to examine his own fear of the woman holding or maintaining power in a relationship, through pregnancy, money or unintentionally through marriage itself as an institution. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere thanks to each member of my committee, who took time to mentor me and provide feedback on this research: David Colón, Layne Craig, and John Tisdale. I am also very grateful to David Vanderwerken, a mentor, and the first advisor to this project. Thank you for encouraging me to pursue this research. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 HEMINGWAY’S FIRST MARRIAGE AND THE TOLL OF MARRIED LIFE..............4 EMERGING RELATIONSHIP PATTERNS, AND POWER DYNAMICS IN HEMINGWAY’S SECOND MARRIAGE ..................................................................28 HEMINGWAY’S THIRD WIFE, AND BREAKING (OR NOT) MARITAL HABITS ..........................................................................................................43 EPILOGUE ........................................................................................................................57 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................59 1 INTRODUCTION There is a danger of looking at a writer’s body of work as autobiographical if it is not explicitly named a “memoir.” But when one reads Ernest Hemingway’s work, how can comparisons not be drawn? From the nurse he fell in love with, to A Farewell to Arms, from his safaris in Africa, to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” or “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Of course, he was not present for all of the battles in A Farewell to Arms, and he did not know a woman who killed her husband like in “Short Happy Life,” but the general sentiments of his work, the themes, the places, or the time, cannot be dismissed as a mere “coincidence.” And while the subject of “how much biography is in it” has been talked to death, very few biographers seem to use Hemingway’s view of women in his personal life to inform his depictions of women in his literary life in any real way. And while a direct, one-to-one comparison of characters in the text to characters in his life would serve no purpose, one can use his relationships to inform and potentially add context to the relationships of the characters in his works. This thesis will focus primarily on Hemingway's relationship with his first three wives, and how his conceptualization of women informs his works. One of the most telling remarks to this end was Paul Hendrickson’s comment in Hemingway’s Boat, “In my view, Hemingway’s staid, Protestant, suburban, Midwestern roots—which he fought against all his life—could never allow him to reconcile his various adulteries and marriages past his first marriage, to Hadley, who was his truest love, or at least his truest marriage. In that sense, his subsequent marriages were doomed from the start” (44). So while his literature might not be memoir, and should not be argued as such, it is logical to argue that certain events in his life had an effect on his career. And as Hemingway’s 2 work tends to be a way for him to explore many of his opinions on life—like writing, for example—why couldn’t his work reflect his philosophy on marriage? Especially, when considering everything he has ever published explores marriage or relationships in some way, large or small. What do Hemingway's characters and their relationships signify about their author’s romantic life? This thesis will explain how several of his works return to the beginnings and endings of his first three marriages to Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Martha Gellhorn. Hemingway’s fourth wife is not included in this research. While he produced work during that relationship, the work seemed to reflect more on his past relationships. For example, A Moveable Feast is clearly focused on Hadley, and then briefly on Pauline. So, the work written during Hemingway’s marriage to Mary Hemingway is used in this research to inform the other three chapters. Throughout Hemingway’s works, he examines what makes relationships appealing at first, and then their dissolution inevitable. And while his pieces are not direct biographical, one-to-one comparisons, many of his characters treat questions he himself had yet to answer before his death. 1 The works I plan to treat are: The Sun Also Rises, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Hills like White Elephants,” “The Snows 1 Some, like Michael Reynolds, argue Hemingway’s work is not autobiographical. Reynolds emphasizes throughout Hemingway: The Paris Years that, “After he wrote The Sun Also Rises, most of his readers and more than one biographer assumed that all of his fiction was thinly veiled biography, which it almost never was” (61). This, however, is in its own way another generalization. While he may not have directly written memoirs and called it “fiction,” several of his novels and short stories draw on experiences from his own life, particularly his experiences with Hadley. This essay will make connections between Hemingway’s work and his ideas on the male/female power dynamic, but it will also qualify the limitations of using fiction as memoir. Other critics, like Debra Moddlemog (writer of “Reconstructing Hemingway’s Identity: Sexual Politics, the Author, and the Multicultural Classroom”) say that Hemingway “constantly uses his experiences in creating his fiction” (188). 3 of Kilimanjaro,” “Nobody Ever Dies,” Garden of Eden and A Moveable Feast. Hemingway attempts to justify and understand why his relationships fall apart— particularly his romantic ones—through his novels. He uses his fictional characters to interrogate how one partner can “keep,” the other, or hold them back from reaching his or her potential. He also uses his novels as a way to examine his own fear of the woman holding or maintaining power in a relationship, through pregnancy, money or unintentionally through marriage itself as an institution. 4 HEMINGWAY’S FIRST MARRIAGE AND THE TOLL OF MARRIED LIFE While some critics, like Michael Reynolds, seem to understate Hadley Richardson’s influence in Hemingway’s life, Hemingway’s biography seems to suggest that it cannot be overstated.2 Hadley was there for the most important period of Hemingway’s life—when he was forming his writing style, making connections, and learning how to handle the world of the artist. As Hemingway once wrote: “‘When I saw my wife standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs of the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her” (A Moveable Feast 46). After their divorce, Hemingway would continue to try and understand what had happened through his novels and short stories, ending with A Moveable Feast, published posthumously, and considered the closest to a memoir he would ever write. Hemingway even acknowledges his need to assess how his relationship dissolved—what caused him to cheat all those years ago: Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came well out of it finally and married a much finer man than I ever was or could hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came out of that year. (A Moveable Feast 124) As Hemingway’s grandson, Seán Hemingway, said, “The most difficult part of writing A Moveable Feast for Ernest Hemingway was coming to terms with his betrayal of Hadley with Pauline and the end of that first marriage” (9). Hemingway dwelled on the 2 Others agree with this take, though with slightly different foci in their criticism. For more, see Miriam B. Mandel’s contribution to, Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. 5 dissolution of his first relationship for years—he and Hadley’s initial friendship with the fashionable Pauline Pfeiffer, and his and Pauline’s eventual exclusion of Hadley in pursuit of their own growing attraction for one another. One could only surmise that after decades of trying to understand this subconsciously or consciously through his work, he was finally able to write the piece he needed to write—a dedication to what he had with her, and an apology for what they lost. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote that Hemingway “had a high sense of honor, which he was always violating; he evidently had a permanent bad conscience” (qtd.

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