EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.
A lot of his toughness was real, but a lot was put on to cover his sensitivity. Ernest was one of the most sensitive people I have ever heard of and easily hurt. Most people thought he was too sure of himself, but I believe he had a great inferiority complex which he didn’t show.
Hadley (Richardson Hemingway) Mowrer,
quoted be Denis Brian, The True Gen.
‘. . . a great, awkward boy falling over his long feet . . . in life, a disturbing person with very dark hair, very red lips. Very white teeth, very fair skin under which the blood seemed to race, emerging frequently in an all-enveloping blush. What a help his beard, later was to be, protecting and covering this sensitivity . . . The inferiority complex remained to the end and with it came the braggadocio and the need to become somebody to himself . . . a quick and deadly jealousy of his own prestige and a constant . . . and consuming need for applause.
Frances Coates, on whom Hemingway had a high
school crush,
from an unpublished memoir.
Perhaps the most compelling of [Juanito] Quintana’s memories concerns Hemingway as a person: ‘Hemingway was strange, very strange. He was a strange man’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico,
Hemingway Review, Spring 2011.
While Hemingway remained devoted to things Spanish throughout a life that could be considered an experiment in trans-nationalization, Spaniards at times ridiculed him for his pretensions of insider status with bullfighting circles and for what some perceived as his poor ability to speak Spanish. According to José Castillo-Puche, Hemingway’s friend and biographer, by the end of his life ‘Ernesto was no longer a fascinating figure to people in Spain; he had become a sort of joke, in fact’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico,
Hemingway Review, Spring 2011.
THE FOCUS of this collection of essays is not on whether or not Ernest Hemingway was ‘a great writer’ or perhaps even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’. When all is said and done that is, arguably and whether the Hemingway champions like it or not, just a matter of opinion.
It is, though, indisputable that he gained a quite extraordinary global literary prominence; so for doubters less impressed by his literary credentials the questions are: how and why did he come to be regarded by many as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’?
Other writers were immensely popular in their lifetime — of those active in the 19th century writing in English one thinks of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there were many more.
The 19th century did not, though, have radio, television, streaming networks, online gaming or social or any other all-pervasive media, and reading for pleasure was one of the main leisure-time activities.
Yet even with the establishment and growth of radio, then television and the other modern pursuits favoured by many over reading, no writer in the past century achieved the level of celebrity in his or her lifetime that Hemingway did: his repute was truly global.
Perhaps Somerset Maugham was as well-known while he was alive as Hemingway, but although acknowledging and admiring Maugham’s output, few insist he was a ‘great writer’. Hemingway seems to have carved out a niche of his own, and fifty years after his death his name will still resonate with many who might not even know quite why.
But aside from his popular prominence, what is remarkable about Hemingway, and to some of us baffling, was that he was — and still is — not classed as a mere ‘popular novelist and writer’ but as one the greats of ‘literature’.
I have suggested that equally as effective and helpful as his mooted literary ability in the promotion of his career as a writer and as ‘a celebrity’ were developments and innovations in advertising and marketing.
Then there was ‘Ernest Hemingway’ himself who became ‘Papa’ Hemingway before he had even turned thirty: a larger than life character who certainly had a facility for self-promotion. As John Raeburn puts it in Fame Became Him.
Early in his career, [Hemingway] began to shape a public personality which quickly became one of his most famous creations, during his lifetime perhaps the most famous one.Why was he regarded by many as an top-notch hunter and fisherman, an expert on wines and writing, a fount of knowledge on everything from gambling to art to baseball to politics and, of course, writing? Mainly because he told us he was, although as Matthew J. Bruccoli points out pertinently in the introduction to Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame.
Hemingway got away with his braggadocio because his readers wanted to believe him. Why they wanted to believe him is unclear.In a sense, Hemingway’s most useful asset was for many years Ernest Hemingway, but although biographers have made us aware of the expansive and often wholly contradictory personality which drove his emergence as a global celebrity, there are still some aspects of his life and character none seems to have touched upon or have done so only lightly.
Yet each does to some degree illuminate the man and personality a little more and thus the celebrity he achieved.
. . .
Hemingway’s first biographer, Carlos Baker, did much of the spadework digging up the facts of Hemingway’s life upon which subsequent biographers based their work. Some of them undertook — or said they had undertaken — additional research, but once the basic details had been established, there was little variation (though often some contradiction) in what they had to report.
All tell us that Hemingway was a popular figure at school, Oak Park High (now Oak Park and River Forest High), but mainly with the boys and that he was not known to have dated many girls. It seems he was rather shy, then and later in life, something several good friends commented on.
But we know of two girls with whom he became infatuated. One was Annette Devoe, for whom Hemingway wrote a poem which began
I’d gladly walk thru Hell with you.Nothing much seems to have come of this infatuation, although Robert Elder, author of The Hidden Hemingway and writing in the Paris Review in May, 2017, tell us that Devoe kept a framed photograph of Hemingway all her life. How significant that was we don’t know.
Another crush Hemingway had was on Frances Elizabeth Coates (below left), a fellow classmate and a colleague on Tabula, the school magazine, and it is her recollections of the young man he was then which
She was a friend of Hemingway’s sister Marcelline and often confided in Marcelline about Ernest. For his part and although Marcelline teased Hemingway about his crush, he used Marcelline as a go-between to further his cause with Coates.
Sadly for Hemingway, Coates was not as interested in him as he was in her, and was herself smitten with another Oak Park High pupil, John Grace, whom she married in 1920. Yet while being courted by Grace, she did go on several dates with Hemingway — out to dinner, to the movies, canoeing, skating and even visiting the opera.
When Hemingway was taken on by the Kansas City Star as a trainee reporter in October 1917, he and Coates wrote to one another, although those letters have been lost. We know these details because later in life Coates told her granddaughter, Betsy Fermano, about Hemingway and wrote a short ten-page memoir of him which Fermano now has.
Sadly for Hemingway, Coates was not as interested in him as he was in her, and was herself smitten with another Oak Park High pupil, John Grace, whom she married in 1920. Yet while being courted by Grace, she did go on several dates with Hemingway — out to dinner, to the movies, canoeing, skating and even visiting the opera.
When Hemingway was taken on by the Kansas City Star as a trainee reporter in October 1917, he and Coates wrote to one another, although those letters have been lost. We know these details because later in life Coates told her granddaughter, Betsy Fermano, about Hemingway and wrote a short ten-page memoir of him which Fermano now has.
According to Robert Elder, Marcelline blames Coates for Hemingway’s decision to sign up with the Red Cross ambulance service and take off to the war in Europe.
That is merely Marcelline’s claim, however, and what else we know of Hemingway while he worked in Kansas makes it less likely than not. He was a young man keen for adventure and to get to the ‘war in Europe’, and he only joined the Red Cross because the other armed services would not take him because of his bad eyesight.
After Hemingway was blown up at Fossalta on the Piave river and was treated in the Red Cross hospital in Milan’s via Manzoni — and was also courting Agnes von Kurowsky whom he had persuaded himself he would marry — he and Coates carried on writing to each other. In one letter to Coates he wrote
Dear Frances, you see, I can’t break the old habit of writing you whenever I get a million miles away from Oak Park. Milan is so hot that the proverbial hinges of hell would be like the beads of ice on the outside of a glass of Clicquot Club by comparison. However, it has a cathedral and a dead man, Leonardi Da Vinci and some very good-looking girls, and the best beer in the Allied countries.Elder notes that Hemingway seems to be
trying to make [Frances] jealous. He’s trying to say ‘look at all these beautiful women around me’, and then he’s bragging about trying beer, which would’ve been sort of the ultimate sign of rebellion, because he grew up in Oak Park, which was a town sort of founded on the temperance movement and was a dry town.
She kept an envelope of newspaper clippings recording his successes, his marriages and divorces and his suicide in 1961. Pertinent to what we know about the Hemingway of his later years is Coates’s description of the young Hemingway. She recalled that he was
a great, awkward boy falling over his long feet . . . in life, a disturbing person with very dark hair, very red lips. Very white teeth, very fair skin under which the blood seemed to race, emerging frequently in an all-enveloping blush. What a help his beard, later was to be, protecting and covering this sensitivity. The whole of his face fell apart when he laughed.Relevant is Coates’s observation that
The inferiority complex [which once assumes Coates believed she had discerned in Hemingway] remained to the end and with it came the braggadocio and the need to become somebody to himself … a quick and deadly jealousy of his own prestige and a constant … and consuming need for applause.Boasting, showing off and ‘playing the big man’ is, of course, common among males on the cusp of adulthood, and Hemingway was far from unique, yet in his case it was a habit which never left him and seemed even to have grown as he got older.
Coates’s reference to an inferiority complex is echoed by Hadley Richardson. By then long divorced from Hemingway and married to Paul Mowrer, her and Hemingway’s friend in Paris, Hadley is quoted by Denis Brian in The True Gen that
A lot of [Hemingway’s] toughness was real, but a lot was put on to cover his sensitivity. Ernest was one of the most sensitive people I have ever heard of and easily hurt. Most people thought he was too sure of himself, but I believe he had a great inferiority complex which he didn’t show.Hemingway’s sensitivity — which very often manifested itself as an over-sensitivity — has been noted by all biographers, but none seems to have suggested he might have suffered from an inferiority complex, either when he was young or throughout his life. If he did — and both Coates and Hadley believe he did — it would explain quite a bit about his behaviour.
Although he was critical and judgmental of others, often quite viciously, Hemingway could not abide himself or his work being criticized. An inferiority complex might also illuminate why as he grew older, he increasingly demanded almost absolute devotion from friends and acquaintances, and dropped those who did not offer it. Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, who was close to Hemingway for several years in the 1930s, noted that
As long as people around [Hemingway] were worshipping and adoring, why, they were great. The minute they weren’t, there was a tendency to find others who were.An underlying and unresolved inferiority complex would also elucidate Hemingway’s frantic competitiveness, his often almost comical machismo (not least his boast later in life about ‘we bad boys’), his insistence on being — and being acknowledged as — an expert on everything, the tendency, as goes the British saying, ‘to get his retaliation in first’, to go on the offence as a means of defence.
This would, of course, only have any bearing on his writing in as far as his personality played a role in his writing. But it is not an aspect of the man that seems much to have been much discussed.
. . .
In keeping with the image Hemingway liked the world to have of him as a knowledgeable man-of-the world who was an expert on everything (and who liked to be thought of as privy to inside knowledge) was to be regarded as fluent in French and Spanish. Often Italian and German are added to the list of foreign languages he was said to have spoken well.
He also liked to be thought of as an expert not only on bullfighting but on Spain and Spanish life and its culture in general. But at the very least those claims are certainly questionable.
When Hemingway and Hadley arrived in Paris in December 1920, he did not speak a word of French but Hadley had learnt to speak some at school and is said to have become fluent, but Hemingway did not and he relied heavily on her.
It is likely that over the following ten years he did learn some conversational French, although whether it was simply an ability to make himself comfortably understood or whether he could hold involved conversations and express himself clearly and succinctly is unclear: standards in what passes for fluency vary, and one hundred years later it is impossible to establish how well he spoke the language.
Notably, although he did have some French acquaintances, his social circle — which included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Archibald McLeish, Evan Shipman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Bill Bird, Robert McAlmon and Ernest Walsh — was composed largely of American and British English speakers.
The received consensus is that despite his claims, he never bothered to become fluent in French. It is thus unlikely that he read the French authors in their native language, and so it is debatable whether he — or anyone else who does not have an almost native command of a foreign language — was able to pick up on the nuances, subtleties and hidden allusions (by the use, say, of a certain idiom or phrase) intended by the writer.
Given the circumstances and comparative brevity of his visits to Italy, Austria and Germany, his command of Italian and German were also more likely to have been rudimentary.
It would have allowed him to order a meal in a restaurant or a drink in a bar and hold a basic conversation but, as many have discovered, understanding clearly and comprehensively what is being said in a foreign language lags behind the ability to ask questions and make simple statements in that language. Hemingway might have persuaded himself he ‘spoke Italian and German’ but doubt remains.
The same is true initially of Hemingway’s ability to speak Spanish, although he certainly claimed he was bi-lingual. In a letter to William Faulkner he wrote
Difference with us guys is I always lived out of country... Found good country outside, learned language as well as I know English ...Dos [Passos] always came as a touristbut that claim was countered by Spaniards who knew him. During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish writer and journalist Arturo Barea ran the Republic’s censorship office in a telecommunications building near the Hotel Florida in Madrid where Hemingway and many other correspondents were based.
When journalists wanted their reports and features cabled to head office, they could only do so through Barea’s office, and Barea met Hemingway regularly. Reviewing Hemingway’s Civil War novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, he writes that in his novel Hemingway
commits a series of grave linguistic-psychological mistakes in [For Whom The Bell Tolls] — such, indeed, as I have heard him commit when he joked with the orderlies in my Madrid office. Then, we grinned at his solecisms because we liked him.In his review, Barea is also critical of Hemingway’s claim to ‘know Spain’. He does get some details right, Barea wrote, but he also gets a lot more wrong. He notes
Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, you will indeed come to understand some aspects of Spanish character and life, but you will misunderstand more, and more important ones at that. Ernest Hemingway does know ‘his Spain’. But it is precisely his intimate knowledge of this narrow section of Spain which has blinded him to a wider and deeper understanding, and made it difficult for him to ‘write the war we have been fighting’.
Writing in the Hemingway Review in 2011, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera of Puerto Rico University, concurs with Barea and questions how well Hemingway did know Spain. He notes that
. . .
Although Hemingway liked the world to see him as a bit of a rogue a ‘Jack the lad’, a ‘bad boy’, he was essentially conservative in nature: as they say ‘you can take the boy out of Oak Park, but you can’t take Oak Park out of the man’.
He was not a natural rebel. He always made sure his taxes were paid on time and in full, and when his lawyer who handled his tax payments suggested a ruse to bring down his tax bill, Hemingway sternly told him that he would not tolerate anything unethical.
Hemingway spent roughly forty days in Spain during 1923, 1924, and 1925. His prolonged absences between these brief initial encounters with the country are important to understanding his initial perceptions. Each time the author returned to Spain after an average absence of about eleven months, he would have re-lived a ‘honeymoon period,’ wherein language and cultural barriers remained more stimulating than annoying.Quoting other researchers, Herlihy-Mera notes that each visit by Hemingway to Spain could well have been marked by
‘euphoria, enchantment, fascination and enthusiasm’ during which visitors are still innocent of negativity about the realities of life in the new place’and that
‘Visitors are open and curious, ready to accept whatever comes. They do not judge anything and suppress minor irritations. They concentrate on nice things . . . such as the food, landscape, people, and country’.Herlihy-Mera adds that
Because each of Hemingway’s first seventeen trips to Spain was short — less than three months long — we might argue that he left each time before he could experience ‘culture shock,’ [a] process of acculturation [that] allowed Hemingway to imagine Spain as a perpetual paradise.Herlihy-Mera also argues that in his enthusiasm for bullfighting Hemingway
seems to have centered his transformative quest for Spanishness on the example of specific social demographics — male, upper-middle-class toreros, aficionados, and their affiliates, figures who often represent conservative sectors of Spanish society . . . Concentration on this subgroup exposed Hemingway to certain social, political, linguistic, and cultural realities and lessened his exposure to other — no less typically ‘Spanish’ — arenas.He adds that
Throughout his life, [Hemingway] would emphasize his preference for certain wines (Rioja and Valdepeñas, not Cava or Malvasia) and foods (jamón serrano or suckling pig, not butifarra or vieiras), and he adopted particular ways of speaking Spanish (with occasional distinción of c and z, mixed in with seseo), all of which derive from contact with northern regions. We might argue, then, that Hemingway’s Spanish mimicry was specific to the taurine subgroup and its regional particularities. In short, Hemingway’s Spain was a rather narrow view of Spain.As for Hemingway’s command of Spanish, Herlihy-Mera quotes the bullfighter Luis Dominguín who said that
It was difficult to converse with him ... because his Spanish was extremely poor, even childlikebut Herlihy-Mera attempts to be even-keeled and adds
Such rejection — from Spaniards in particular — must be qualified. For centuries, Spanish grammarians have written prescriptive texts that recognized only peninsular versions of the language. The Real Academia Española did not officially recognize Latin American Spanish until 2009 — a remarkable circumstance, as speakers of peninsular Spanish currently comprise less than 10% of the Spanish-speaking world.Hemingway, writes Herlihy-Mera
lived in Cuba longer than any other place (the United States included), and we might surmise that by 1954 [when he first met Dominguín] his exposure to Latin American dialects of Spanish exceeded his exposure to peninsular speech . . . However, a significant amount of colloquial Cuban language, including variations in spelling, pronunciation, word order, pronoun placement, use of the perfect tense and diacritics — would have been considered ‘incorrect’ by peninsular standards in Hemingway’s lifetime, especially coming from a native speaker of English.It should also be noted that at some point Luis Dominguín took against Hemingway as he came to believe the writer was biased towards the skill and abilities of his fellow bullfighter and brother-in-law Antonio Ordóñez. Hemingway biographer Jeffery Meyers quotes him as saying that he when he first met Hemingway in a Madrid bar he was not aware of his reputation as a writer. Dominguin goes on
Hemingway was a great personality, but I immediately knew he was an embustero — a liar — when he claimed he had killed water buffalo with a spear, like the Masia. He had a gigantic ego. He pretended to knowledge he didn’t have. I was a rebel, refused to call him Papa and used his proper name, Ernesto.Dominguin says that
it was difficult to converse with him, especially at his Finca in Havana [in September 1954] because his Spanish was extremely poor, even childlike, because he worked in the mornings and because he began to drink heavily as soon as he stopped writing. There was only a brief period during the first few drinks when good talk was possible. Hemingway talked mainly about women and bragged of his sexual conquests at the Floridita, a Havana bar with an upstairs bordello. He once said he had made love five times that morning. This was obviously absurd. It was naive of him to think that I would believe him, would be impressed by his claims and would agree that five times is better than four times, that quantity was better than qualitySuch personal antagonism aside, however, Herlihy-Mera notes that
Spaniards at times ridiculed [Hemingway] for his pretensions of insider status with bullfighting circles and for what some perceived as his poor ability to speak Spanish. According to José Castillo-Puche, Hemingway’s friend and biographer, by the end of his life, ‘Ernesto was no longer a fascinating figure to people in Spain; he had become a sort of joke, in fact’.On occasion a man as sensitive as Hemingway might well have been aware of that attitude and it cannot have pleased him. Pertinently his reputed knowledge of Spain, bullfighting and the country and its culture played and still play a large part in Hemingway’s fame and reputation. It seems that it was not necessarily all its was cracked up to be.
. . .
I don’t mind Ernest falling in love, but why does he always have to marry the girl when he does it?
Pauline Pfeiffer, the second Mrs Hemingway.
He was not a natural rebel. He always made sure his taxes were paid on time and in full, and when his lawyer who handled his tax payments suggested a ruse to bring down his tax bill, Hemingway sternly told him that he would not tolerate anything unethical.
Living in Cuba he did, though, make use of his non-domicile status to help to reduce his tax bill, which after the success of For Whom The Bell Tolls became remarkably high, but this was entirely legal.
When he wasn’t being exceptionally rude and unpleasant, he was polite, charming and chivalrous (and it is suggested this extreme dichotomy was the consequence of an undiagnosed bi-polar disorder).
He also liked the world to regard him as something of a Don Juan, but biographers agree the man from Oak Park did not sleep around and had been to bed with comparatively few women. These would,
obviously, include his four wives, but we know of only four affairs he had while married — with Pauline Pfeiffer, Jane Mason (left), Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh (although when he met Welsh his marriage to Gellhorn was de facto over) — and thus he married three of his mistresses.
Furthermore, there is uncertainty about whether he even did have a sexual affair with Jane Mason, despite the heavy hints dropped by Hemingway. Some claim he did and that it lasted a year or two, others say it lasted for only a few months, and Mary Dearborn, Hemingway’s most recent major biographer, seems to imply there was no affair, although she is oddly reticent and uninformative on the matter.
Dearborn stresses that Mason and Pauline Pfeiffer were very good friends and got along well, and that Mason might have drawn the line at betraying that friendship by sleeping with Pfeiffer’s husband.
If true, this would echo the moral position taken by Lady Duff Twysden — the Sun’s Lady Brett Ashley — who was a good of Hadley Richardson and who also drew the line at sleeping with her friends’ husbands. Thus for Twysden the unmarried Harold Loeb was fair game to be taken to her bed, but Hadley’s husband Ernest was not.
Hemingway was remarkably good-looking in his twenties and thirties, and once he had overcome his teenage awkwardness and blossomed, his looks, personality and enormous energy attracted both women and men; but in one way he seems not to have matured much.
In a somewhat adolescent manner, Hemingway was forever falling in love, with the good-looking wives of friends, with Marlene Dietrich (whom he had met crossing the Atlantic and with whom he formed a lasting friendship) and later with two women young enough to be his daughters. None fell in love with him.
As for Hemingway’s sexual ‘conquests’, he claimed that in Michigan he had slept with a local Indian girl, Prudence Boulton, which is certainly possible, though perhaps he had been her ‘conquest’, and she had seduced the then shy and awkward teenager.
A year or two later, in 1918 and in New York waiting to ship out to Europe with the Red Cross is reported to have told friends and family that he had become engaged to Mae Marsh (below).
at the time a young, successful film starlet who had appeared in Birth Of A Nation. His parents were horrified, and he quickly reassured them it wasn’t true and that he had been joking (and as Hemingway was prankster, that might well be true). True? Well, only if another version of that engagement is not true.
In that version Hemingway told Dale Wilson, a fellow Star reporter, he had used money his father had sent him to buy an engagement ring and presented it to Marsh, asking her to marry him and suggesting the ceremony could take place in a small church ‘around the corner’.
Mae, in this telling, knew that Hemingway was off to Europe and turned him down on the grounds that being a ‘war widow’ did not appeal to her. So where did ‘the engagement’ take place, in New York or Kansas City? Or was it just another Hemingway tall story.
Oddly, in her biography, Mary Dearborn claims Hemingway had indeed known March in Kansas City Star. She was staying in the city and in the course of his — unspecified by Dearborn — Star duties Hemingway had met her. They socialised, says Dearborn, but there was no romance because Marsh was involved with another.
She might, though, have enjoyed hanging out with the good-looking and engaging 18-year-old trainee reporter. In fact, both versions are inventions. Almost 50 years later, it occurred to Dale Wilson to check whether the story was true and, he says, he rang Marsh in California two years before her death in 1968. She says she was never engaged to Hemingway and had, in fact, never met him, though she would have liked to have done.
Despite claiming he and Marsh had become engaged, Hemingway never actually claimed she was one of his ‘conquest’. But Kate Smith, the older sister of his Michigan friend Bill Smith, had been, he said.
Though this claim is also unlikely, we have no way of knowing the truth. Kate Smith was just under three months short of being eight years older than Hemingway, an age difference more marked when one party was in his teenage years.
Kate was also a friend of Hadley Richardson from when both attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (though Hadley did not graduate), and it was through Kate, a Hemingway flatmate in Chicago, that he met Hadley when she came to visit her.
Another woman Hemingway claimed to have slept with, thus attempting to prove he was a stud, but most certainly had not was the owner of a small pension in Taormina, Sicily, who, he told friends, had hidden all his clothes and had obliged him to service her all week.
That account is thought to have been invented to conceal that he had, in fact, in December 1919 spent the week at a Taormina villa with his Red Cross superior, James Gamble, who was seventeen years older than him.
Hemingway also claimed he and his hospital nurse Agnes von Kurowsky had been sexual lovers. She always denied it — although her letters show he interest in Hemingway was greater than she later cared to admit — and as she was not short of admirers, on the balance of probabilities his claim is also doubtful.
Kurowsky also advised Hemingway to turn down an offer for him to become Gamble’s secretary and companion for a year in Europe, all expenses paid. She suspected the offer had a homosexual motive of which Hemingway, then still only 19 and for all his assumed worldliness might have been unaware.
When in Constantinople in 1922 covering the aftermath of the Greek-Turkish war for the Toronto Star, Hemingway says he spent a hot, sticky night with a big-breasted, Turkish whore. This claim is another which is dubious: Hemingway also tells us he was covered in lice and quite ill while in Constantinople, and one wonders whether in that state intercourse with a local prostitute seemed enticing.
Twenty years later, now living at the Finca Vigia, he liked it to be thought he (‘we bad boys’) regularly slept with whores — his usual hangout, El Floridita in Old Havana, had a brothel on the floor above the bar. Perhaps he did. He most certainly brought one Havana whore, who he nicknamed Xenophobia, to the Finca Vigia several times when his wife Mary was away, and once did so she was at home and he was very drunk.
Other accounts have it that he introduced the whore to Mary on Pilar, his fishing boat: as with all biographies, as Debra Moddelmogg insists in Hemingway: New Essays In Fiction, when reading a biography, caveat lector — there are inevitably many versions of ‘the truth’.
In the last decade of his life, Hemingway regularly and openly boasted — often with Welsh present — about all the whores he was sleeping with, so perhaps, apart from these six women, there were several other ‘lovers’. To that mooted number, however, one should add a seventh, one Leopoldina Rodriguez.
. . .
Leopoldina is notable in several ways, not least that of all Hemingway’s biographers only Carlos Baker mentions her in his biography. Why the other major English-language biographies ignore her existence is unclear.
Andrew Feldman, writing in the autumn 2011 edition of the Hemingway Review, believes the almost non-existent relations between Cuba and the US made research on the island difficult if not almost impossible. But, Feldman adds, Cuban and Russian biographies of Hemingway are quite detailed about Leopoldina and her relationship with Hemingway.
It seems he met her at the Floridita bar which he began visiting from 1940 on where she was a regular. Although she apparently sold her body for sex, it would be unfair to regard her as a common prostitute; and although Hemingway might well have had sex with Leopoldina, the two seemed to have formed a lasting friendship. As Feldman puts it
Bulit was born in in 1941 and lived with her aunt and grandmother while growing up and knew Hemingway. Notably, Hemingway paid the rent on the flat where Leopoldina, Ilse and Leopoldina’s mother lived (and later paid all her hospital bills when she developed cancer and finally the bill for her funeral).
Hemingway’s Cuban friends and Bulit confirm that Leopoldina was close to Hemingway and, says Feldman, his portrayal of ‘Honest Lil’ in Islands In The Stream is a pretty close description of Leopoldina. She was of mixed African, Asian and white heritage and was born the daughter of a maid to upper-class Cubans.
Like many her young women like her, she became the mistress of a wealthy man and bore him a son, hoping that he would marry her. He didn’t, but he did take her to Paris. There they parted ways and she became the mistress to a Falangist leader who was executed by Franco’s fascists in 1936 but who have given her money to return to Cuba before he died.
She had enough money to open her own dress shop, but it did not flourish. Leopoldina was as well-educated as a woman in her position might be, was said always to dress elegantly and, like Honest Lil, abhorred ‘unkind words and obscene actions’.
She had many well-connected friends and acquaintances — the Floridita is said to have been a bar frequented by many Cuban politicians, businessmen and journalists — and Feldman writes that for Hemingway she was a valuable source of information:
Hadley, Pauline and Mary were accustomed always to bow to Hemingway’s wishes and whims, but Leopoldina is reputed to have given Hemingway as good as she got and refused to play up to ‘the great writer’.
For example, she was especially dismissive of his novella The Old Man And The Sea. According to Feldman (quoting Bulit who overheard the conversation when Hemingway visited her aunt, by then dying of cancer):
One aspect of Hemingway’s personality and psychological make-up which has been touched upon but not much discussed by his biographers is what might be described as ‘mild gender dysphoria’. That the biographies don’t touch upon it is not surprising because only in recent years (at the time of writing) have gender dysphoria and related issues been more openly discussed.When he wasn’t being exceptionally rude and unpleasant, he was polite, charming and chivalrous (and it is suggested this extreme dichotomy was the consequence of an undiagnosed bi-polar disorder).
He also liked the world to regard him as something of a Don Juan, but biographers agree the man from Oak Park did not sleep around and had been to bed with comparatively few women. These would,
Furthermore, there is uncertainty about whether he even did have a sexual affair with Jane Mason, despite the heavy hints dropped by Hemingway. Some claim he did and that it lasted a year or two, others say it lasted for only a few months, and Mary Dearborn, Hemingway’s most recent major biographer, seems to imply there was no affair, although she is oddly reticent and uninformative on the matter.
Dearborn stresses that Mason and Pauline Pfeiffer were very good friends and got along well, and that Mason might have drawn the line at betraying that friendship by sleeping with Pfeiffer’s husband.
If true, this would echo the moral position taken by Lady Duff Twysden — the Sun’s Lady Brett Ashley — who was a good of Hadley Richardson and who also drew the line at sleeping with her friends’ husbands. Thus for Twysden the unmarried Harold Loeb was fair game to be taken to her bed, but Hadley’s husband Ernest was not.
Hemingway was remarkably good-looking in his twenties and thirties, and once he had overcome his teenage awkwardness and blossomed, his looks, personality and enormous energy attracted both women and men; but in one way he seems not to have matured much.
In a somewhat adolescent manner, Hemingway was forever falling in love, with the good-looking wives of friends, with Marlene Dietrich (whom he had met crossing the Atlantic and with whom he formed a lasting friendship) and later with two women young enough to be his daughters. None fell in love with him.
As for Hemingway’s sexual ‘conquests’, he claimed that in Michigan he had slept with a local Indian girl, Prudence Boulton, which is certainly possible, though perhaps he had been her ‘conquest’, and she had seduced the then shy and awkward teenager.
A year or two later, in 1918 and in New York waiting to ship out to Europe with the Red Cross is reported to have told friends and family that he had become engaged to Mae Marsh (below).
In that version Hemingway told Dale Wilson, a fellow Star reporter, he had used money his father had sent him to buy an engagement ring and presented it to Marsh, asking her to marry him and suggesting the ceremony could take place in a small church ‘around the corner’.
Mae, in this telling, knew that Hemingway was off to Europe and turned him down on the grounds that being a ‘war widow’ did not appeal to her. So where did ‘the engagement’ take place, in New York or Kansas City? Or was it just another Hemingway tall story.
Oddly, in her biography, Mary Dearborn claims Hemingway had indeed known March in Kansas City Star. She was staying in the city and in the course of his — unspecified by Dearborn — Star duties Hemingway had met her. They socialised, says Dearborn, but there was no romance because Marsh was involved with another.
She might, though, have enjoyed hanging out with the good-looking and engaging 18-year-old trainee reporter. In fact, both versions are inventions. Almost 50 years later, it occurred to Dale Wilson to check whether the story was true and, he says, he rang Marsh in California two years before her death in 1968. She says she was never engaged to Hemingway and had, in fact, never met him, though she would have liked to have done.
Despite claiming he and Marsh had become engaged, Hemingway never actually claimed she was one of his ‘conquest’. But Kate Smith, the older sister of his Michigan friend Bill Smith, had been, he said.
Though this claim is also unlikely, we have no way of knowing the truth. Kate Smith was just under three months short of being eight years older than Hemingway, an age difference more marked when one party was in his teenage years.
Kate was also a friend of Hadley Richardson from when both attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (though Hadley did not graduate), and it was through Kate, a Hemingway flatmate in Chicago, that he met Hadley when she came to visit her.
Another woman Hemingway claimed to have slept with, thus attempting to prove he was a stud, but most certainly had not was the owner of a small pension in Taormina, Sicily, who, he told friends, had hidden all his clothes and had obliged him to service her all week.
That account is thought to have been invented to conceal that he had, in fact, in December 1919 spent the week at a Taormina villa with his Red Cross superior, James Gamble, who was seventeen years older than him.
Hemingway also claimed he and his hospital nurse Agnes von Kurowsky had been sexual lovers. She always denied it — although her letters show he interest in Hemingway was greater than she later cared to admit — and as she was not short of admirers, on the balance of probabilities his claim is also doubtful.
Kurowsky also advised Hemingway to turn down an offer for him to become Gamble’s secretary and companion for a year in Europe, all expenses paid. She suspected the offer had a homosexual motive of which Hemingway, then still only 19 and for all his assumed worldliness might have been unaware.
When in Constantinople in 1922 covering the aftermath of the Greek-Turkish war for the Toronto Star, Hemingway says he spent a hot, sticky night with a big-breasted, Turkish whore. This claim is another which is dubious: Hemingway also tells us he was covered in lice and quite ill while in Constantinople, and one wonders whether in that state intercourse with a local prostitute seemed enticing.
Twenty years later, now living at the Finca Vigia, he liked it to be thought he (‘we bad boys’) regularly slept with whores — his usual hangout, El Floridita in Old Havana, had a brothel on the floor above the bar. Perhaps he did. He most certainly brought one Havana whore, who he nicknamed Xenophobia, to the Finca Vigia several times when his wife Mary was away, and once did so she was at home and he was very drunk.
Other accounts have it that he introduced the whore to Mary on Pilar, his fishing boat: as with all biographies, as Debra Moddelmogg insists in Hemingway: New Essays In Fiction, when reading a biography, caveat lector — there are inevitably many versions of ‘the truth’.
In the last decade of his life, Hemingway regularly and openly boasted — often with Welsh present — about all the whores he was sleeping with, so perhaps, apart from these six women, there were several other ‘lovers’. To that mooted number, however, one should add a seventh, one Leopoldina Rodriguez.
. . .
When Leopoldina died, Hemingway paid for and attended her funeral. ‘A solitary man who accompanied her remains to the cemetery paid for her funeral. He was gray-haired and bearded, an American wearing a short-sleeved guayabera, large moccasins and a pair of very wide baggy pants’. Bulit [Leopoldina’s niece] suggests that witnessing the senseless suffering of friends like Leopoldina and finally losing them may have contributed in part to Hemingway’s own feelings of hopelessness and possibly his 1961 suicide.
Andrew Feldman, Hemingway Review, vol 31, Fall 2011
Leopoldina is notable in several ways, not least that of all Hemingway’s biographers only Carlos Baker mentions her in his biography. Why the other major English-language biographies ignore her existence is unclear.
Andrew Feldman, writing in the autumn 2011 edition of the Hemingway Review, believes the almost non-existent relations between Cuba and the US made research on the island difficult if not almost impossible. But, Feldman adds, Cuban and Russian biographies of Hemingway are quite detailed about Leopoldina and her relationship with Hemingway.
It seems he met her at the Floridita bar which he began visiting from 1940 on where she was a regular. Although she apparently sold her body for sex, it would be unfair to regard her as a common prostitute; and although Hemingway might well have had sex with Leopoldina, the two seemed to have formed a lasting friendship. As Feldman puts it
Leopoldina Rodríguez was neither a Floridita barfly nor Hemingway’s would-be mistress, but a complex woman with her own history, experiences, and desires.Feldman is thought to have been the first North American scholar to be allowed access to the Finca Vigia Museum and he interviewed many of Hemingway’s Cuban friends as well as the Cuban journalist Ilse Bulit, Leopoldina’s niece.
Bulit was born in in 1941 and lived with her aunt and grandmother while growing up and knew Hemingway. Notably, Hemingway paid the rent on the flat where Leopoldina, Ilse and Leopoldina’s mother lived (and later paid all her hospital bills when she developed cancer and finally the bill for her funeral).
Hemingway’s Cuban friends and Bulit confirm that Leopoldina was close to Hemingway and, says Feldman, his portrayal of ‘Honest Lil’ in Islands In The Stream is a pretty close description of Leopoldina. She was of mixed African, Asian and white heritage and was born the daughter of a maid to upper-class Cubans.
Like many her young women like her, she became the mistress of a wealthy man and bore him a son, hoping that he would marry her. He didn’t, but he did take her to Paris. There they parted ways and she became the mistress to a Falangist leader who was executed by Franco’s fascists in 1936 but who have given her money to return to Cuba before he died.
She had enough money to open her own dress shop, but it did not flourish. Leopoldina was as well-educated as a woman in her position might be, was said always to dress elegantly and, like Honest Lil, abhorred ‘unkind words and obscene actions’.
She had many well-connected friends and acquaintances — the Floridita is said to have been a bar frequented by many Cuban politicians, businessmen and journalists — and Feldman writes that for Hemingway she was a valuable source of information:
Throughout the writer’s residence in Cuba, Leopoldina was a resource concerning all things Cuban. She appears to have influenced the writer’s religious practices as well as helped him to understand and appreciate Santería (an Afro-Cuban religion combined with elements of Catholicism), popular folklore, and other elements of Cuban culture.From what Feldman writes and what he was told by those he spoke to in Cuba, the relationship Hemingway had with Leopoldina was very different to his relationship with his four wives and other women.
Hadley, Pauline and Mary were accustomed always to bow to Hemingway’s wishes and whims, but Leopoldina is reputed to have given Hemingway as good as she got and refused to play up to ‘the great writer’.
For example, she was especially dismissive of his novella The Old Man And The Sea. According to Feldman (quoting Bulit who overheard the conversation when Hemingway visited her aunt, by then dying of cancer):
Leopoldina was making fun of Hemingway and calling him a liar: ‘That old man is as false as the perfumes sold at the Ten Cent on Galiano Street. He is just a hero you invented.Leopoldina was thus her own woman, strong, proud and self-respectful, and although of the four wives Martha Gellhorn was also strong-willed and proud, Leopoldina does not seem to have shared Gellhorn’s for many irritating self-regard (Hemingway’s friend Charles Lanham couldn’t stand her and took a dislike to her when he, she and Hemingway once had dinner). Notably, Hemingway seems to have responded to her strength of character in a way which might otherwise seem alien to him. As Feldman writes in his conclusion
‘He exists,’ Hemingway repeated in broken Spanish, ‘He exists.’
The more Leopoldina insisted that he did not exist, the angrier Hemingway became.
‘Both knew their weak points well. Leopoldina was completely exasperated when he yelled at her that she was stupid. ‘The women of our family were not raised to accept man-handling’, reports Bulit, ‘using a sharp tone that I still remember, Leopoldina said, ‘Let’s see if you have the courage of your fisherman after you have your entrails ripped out of you or you are faced with a really desperate situation, as I am now’. This retort apparently left the writer speechless.
Their lasting relationship appears to have been one of meaningful confidences and sincere friendship as well as emotional and possibly physical affection.
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Hemingway and Leopoldina Rodriguez, possibly in the Floridita |
. . .
When doing so, it is important to distinguish between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, although the two words had long been regarded as synonymous. Instances of those genetically born in one sex but who insisted they belonged to the opposite gender have become far more frequent, probably because of the growing publicity and awareness of gender dysphoria.
We have no way of knowing but it seems likely the proportion of men who insist they are women and women who insist they are men has not changed much over the centuries. They were previously referred to as ‘transexual’ but ‘transgender’ might be the more appropriate word.
Without any evidence it would be both silly and wrong to claim outright that Hemingway did suffer from gender dysphoria, but there are definite indications that he did come to acknowledge what he might have thought of as ‘his feminine side’. And anxiety about his feelings — as much a social anxiety in the US of the early 2oth century — might help to explain his almost manic desire to prove what a ‘real man’ he was.
The occasional suggestion is made that Hemingway’s ostentatious machismo was designed to hide that he was a closet homosexual but that can almost certainly be ruled out. If he was, then he does not seem to have engaged in any homosexual activity, for given the prominence he achieved worldwide surely claims would be made partners: it would have been impossible to keep it quiet.
It is unhelpful that unlike physical conditions, dysphorias, like other aspects of the human psyche, cannot be ‘measured’. We are aware that some men and women insist outright that they belong to the opposite gender and are prepared to undergo surgery to ‘change sex’.
But we have no way of knowing or even gauging whether in some men and women gender dysphoria, so to speak, comes and goes, whether a ‘mild gender dysphoria’ is possible.
Aspects of Hemingway life and behaviour we can be sure of include his mother Grace sometimes dressing him up in girls’ clothes when until he was about five and conversely sometimes dressing up his sister Marcelline in boys’ clothes.
Although Marcelline was a year and a half older than Ernest, Grace liked to treat them as twins and even delayed part of Marcelline’s schooling by one year to that both might be in the same class, notably dressed identically.
As an adult Hemingway developed a hair fetish and as early as his first marriage to Hadley Richardson liked to engage in role reversal in his sexual life. In his second novel A Farewell To Arms the hero Frederic Henry and the woman he falls in love with like to pretend that ‘the one can become the other’.
That theme is repeated in the brief sexual encounters of Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom The Bell Tolls and most explicitly in the posthumously published novel The Garden Of Eden. Most explicitly, Hemingway himself wrote in the diary she kept that he liked to be his fourth wife Mary’s ‘girls’ and she liked to be ‘his boy’ during their sexual activities.
When Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, was about eleven, Ernest came across him trying on some of Martha Gellhorn’s stockings. Gregory went on to become a fully practising transvestite and eventually underwent reassignment surgery to become Gloria.
We are always warned not to confuse transvestism with gender dysphoria, but in Gregory/Gloria’s case the cross-dressing seems to have masked an underlying gender dysphoria. Notably at one point Hemingway remarked that Gregory
has the biggest dark side in the family, except me.That can, of course, be interpreted in different ways — Hemingway was aware of many of his faults — but were he to have suffered from a ‘mild gender dysphoria’, it too would have gone some way to illuminating his behaviour.
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