Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

“Hadley would notice the mutilated rejection slips and tell me not to be discouraged, that she loved my stories and that someday somebody would publish them and they would be a big success and my picture would be in bookstore windows, smiling and holding a pipe. “She would put her hands on the sides of my face and pull me toward her and hold me and

What I felt was the sorrow of loss. I had contrived this moment, but I felt like the victim.

“Yes but not for long. Poor Scott. Terribly black-ass. He’d come to collect some things he’d left in storage.” “Was he with Zelda?” “No, he had to put her somewhere for safekeeping. He was feeling bereft and sorry for himself, and for her. We were having dinner at the Closerie. ‘Just imagine,’ he said, ‘ten years ago we were the Golden Girl and her

I told Ernest how moved I was reading his loving tribute to Hadley in the final chapter he had given me. I said, “No man has ever loved a woman more or written about that love so tenderly. I only wish that one day I would meet a woman I would love like that.” “Hadley and I were lucky. The stars were perfectly aligned for us. Hadley believed in me a

“Another thing I counted on was continuing my Thursday nights with Joyce, but when I showed up at our usual watering hole, he let me know that my present predicament put me off-limits for the time being because I was so inundated by my dilemma that my lachrymose disposition watered down his Bushmills. “It’s true that drinking ratcheted up my anguis

“The gloom intensified when I received a letter from Fitzgerald telling me that Hadley had remarried with Paul Mowrer, a journalist I knew. Gentle, thoughtful man, he was Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Letter said they were going to live in a country place near Crécy-en-Brie, outside Paris. What threw me was how quickly Hadley had

I said I remembered him writing about Le Jockey and the fight with the British sergeant in one of his stories, but the girl wasn’t Josephine Baker. “No,” he said, “I thought her feeling about the soul was her private business, so I invented a woman to take her place in the story and I left out everything about the soul.

wrote about Scott, for example, but I gave him a cover name: Julian [in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”].

“Something even sadder happened that time in Paris.” He slowly shook his head and took his time remembering. “I was at Lipp’s on their enclosed terrace having a drink—there was a taxi stand there and a cab pulled up to discharge a passenger and damn if it wasn’t Hadley. Hadn’t laid eyes on her since our divorce. She was very well dressed and as bea