Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

“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

and he appeared to have diminished somewhat; I don’t mean physically diminished, but some of the aura of indomitableness seemed to have gone out of him.

In my grotesque memory, I saw a farmhouse burning in the field with bedding and things from inside the farmhouse spread out on the field. There

“You ever read that old bugger Nietzsche?” he asked. “A little,” I said. “You know what he said about love? Said it’s a state where we see things widely different from what they are.” “Pauline?” “Yup. It didn’t take long to unsee those things. I guess it started when we went to live with her folks in Piggott.

When there are two people who love each other, Ernest wrote, the rich are attracted to them but that he and Hadley were naifs who did not know how to protect themselves. Charmed by these rich, Ernest admitted he was as stupid as a bird dog who goes out with anyone with a gun.

“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

But when I approached them at the Dôme with inscribed copies of the newly minted The Sun Also Rises they turned on me. Pat called me Judas and said they didn’t want my stinking book. I said, ‘What’s eating you? It’s only about our Pamplona trip. What’s wrong with that?’ ‘What’s wrong,’ he said, ‘is the whole world now sees me as a pathetic drunk wh

“Pauline had been writing me, sending cables, making sure I kept her in my sights.