Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Read Free Book Online Page A

remain together, nominally, for the next five years, until 1939, but by then Hemingway’s affair with his next wife-to-be, Martha Gellhorn, would be almost three years old.
    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. Also in that sense, Hemingway was much like another famous and onetime resident of Oak Park, Illinois: Frank Lloyd Wright. The two geniuses, who spent separate lifetimes flouting middle-class mores, even as they couldn’t seem to escape them, overlapped for about a decade in that Republican community of churches and impressive houses and upright families located eight miles west of downtown Chicago. (Wright was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, and his career in architecture lasted until his death in 1959. In seven decades of work, he designed, if not completed, over one thousand buildings. He was in his early thirties, residing in Oak Park, struggling for commissions, with a growing family, when Hemingway came into the world in the summer of 1899.)
    There’s no question Hemingway had great passion for his second wife,for a time. In the beginning of the affair, in Paris, and on the ski slopes of Austria, and at the summer bullfights in Spain, Pauline had made a covert play for him, betraying her friendship with Hadley, just as Martha would make a shameless play for him a decade later—and he would more than willingly, if not immediately, comply. After Hemingway’s death, MacLeish—who had known him since the twenties in Paris and who, like almost all of Hemingway’s closest friends, had an ugly falling-out with him that would never completely repair itself (the second of two major fights was aboard
Pilar
, or at least began there, when
Pilar
was very new)—said astutely: “I have always suspected that his subsequent detestation for her [he was speaking of Pauline] was in part the consequence of his own sense of disloyalty.” At the close of A
Moveable Feast
—that aforementioned slender, wistful, posthumously published, and often gratuitously mean memoir of Paris in the early days—Hemingway talks so bitterly against Pauline and so tenderly of Hadley, with whom he’d had his first son, Jack, whom he liked to call Mr. Bumby, when Mr. Bumby was small:
    Before these rich had come [he was referring to the Murphys, Gerald and Sara], we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.…
    When I saw my wife again 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. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.
    In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which is fiction, not memoir, the dying writer, by turns self-pitying and accusatory, says of his older wife: “She shot very well this good, this rich bitch.… She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face.” As in all his fiction, Hemingway was making things up from what he knew. His imagination was conflating and rearranging and transposing several women and different events from his life. But it’s still hard to read parts ofthat story and not picture biographically the woman to whom