1929-1940 — Part I: Fame and growing wealth

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.

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Leaving Paris and dividing his time between Key West and Wyoming cut Hemingway off from Cosmopolitan culture and educated friends, and shifted his interest to marlin-fishing and bear hunting. He had no intellectual equals in Florida and dominated friends who deferred to him as the local hero. He was a great listener before he moved to Key West and a great talker afterwards. The new atmosphere encouraged him to adopt coarse language, to indulge in heroics, to boast, to swagger, to suppress the sensitive side of his nature and to cultivate the public image. In Key West Hemingway was (and is) not only a living legend, but also the main tourist attraction.

Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography.

A man is essentially what he hides. The real and most important of the many Hemingway was the reflective man who wrote the books and concealed his innate sensitivity under the mask of a man of action. Though he like to rage against aesthetic posturing — ‘Artist, art, artistic! Can’t we ever hear the last of that stuff’ — he was, as James Thurber remarked, ‘gentle, understanding, sympathetic, compassionate.’ Yet Hemingway rejected this side of his character. Max Eastman said that in Death In The Afternoon Hemingway deliberately turned ‘himself into a blustering roughneck crying for more killing and largely dedicated to demonstrating his ability to take any quantity of carnage in his powerful stride’. . . The transformation from private to public man, spurred by wealth and fame, began to take place in the early 1930s. It helped to explain the gradual decline of his work after A Farewell To Arms and the sharp descent after For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography.

THE FOURTH decade of the 21st century saw Hemingway’s fame steadily grow, but after just four years in the literary vanguard it also saw his reputation as a writer slowly decline.

He was still writing steadily, though much of what he produced was journalism, which paid him well; yet the stir he had created early in his career was not repeated until the beginning of the 1940s when he published his bestseller For Whom The Bell Tolls and then not again for another 13 years until The Old Man And The Sea appeared. It became obvious that the promise he had shown as a young turk in Paris was not to be vindicated.

For the sake of convenience, one might consider there to have been four separate stages in Hemingway’s life, each stage correlating to the woman to whom he was then married. The first stage saw him, with Hadley Richardson as his first wife, living in Paris and intent of making his way as a writer, fathering his first son and learning to network.

That stage concluded with the success of his first collection of short stories, the almost overnight success of his novel The Sun Also Rises, his divorce from Richardson after five and a half years of marriage, and his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer.

When the second stage of his life began, he had made a name for himself as an up-and-coming young writer and was completing what was to become his second bestseller. He was riding high. He fathered two more sons and published several more books, and, in part thanks to his second wife’s money, Hemingway was now able to live the life of a wealthy man.

But just a few years into his second marriage, he began an affair with a woman who was 14 years younger than Pfeiffer, and although one biographer, Michael Reynolds, writes that he doubts that this affair took place, other biographers insist it did; but it did not break up his marriage. But a second 

affair, with the woman who was to become his third wife, did, and his divorce from Pfeiffer and marriage to Martha Gellhorn (right) in 1940 concluded what might be seen as the second stage of his life.

The third stage saw Hemingway publish just one work, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but it, too, was a bestseller. His third marriage eventually disintegrated, in part due to Hemingway’s insistence that Gellhorn should be the kind of doting wife Richardson and Pfeiffer had been and who would put him at the centre of everything.

Gellhorn, herself a published novelist and working journalist, and not least ambitious was not that kind of woman. For a while she did try to live the life of being ‘the novelist Ernest Hemingway’s wife’(and his three sons became fond of their new stepmother though they are said to have regarded her more as an older sister); but she was unhappy and soon sought and found journalistic assignments which took her away from home.

By the time Hemingway acknowledged that the marriage had failed and, in 1945, agreed to give Gellhorn the divorce she wanted, he had already started a relationship with Mary Welsh. Despite Welsh’s profound misgivings, both from the start of her relationship with Hemingway and throughout their marriage, in 1946 she became his fourth and last wife, and a nominal fourth stage of his life began.

As Jeffery Meyers points out in his biography, the 1930s saw the invention of the ‘famous Papa Hemingway’ the world came to know and to some extent revere. Although that figure was based on the ‘real’ Hemingway, it was a self-conscious contrivance (and was thus in some ways quite artificial). The private man — the sensitive writer — and the public figure he sold to the world — the action man celebrity — diverged ever more, with the public figure eventually swamping the private man.

Halfway through the 1930s Hemingway suffered a severe and prolonged bout of depression. Although he had experienced depressions throughout his life (with some biographers suggesting that he, like his father who shot himself in 1928, might have been bi-polar), this episode was worse than anything he had suffered before. It is thought that from the early 1930s on and for the rest of his life Hemingway increasingly found it a strain to live up to the image of himself he had created.

Many friends from his early days testified to the thoughtful, intellectual, quite shy and kind man they knew in Hemingway; but this was on total conflict with the action-man writer who drank a great deal, was free with his fists and would take no bullshit from anyone he seemed to want the world to accept. 

Little by little the ‘old, private’ Hemingway came to be buried and the ‘new, public’ Hemingway took over. Certainly, the conflict affected his work, the quality of which tailed off. Despite the excitable claim by one biographer, Michael Reynolds, that in his 1935 book Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway had taken writing ‘into a fourth and fifth dimension’ (whatever that means), he never recaptured the reputation for iconoclasm he had — to my mind somewhat spuriously — gained in the Paris years. Thus, writing in the New York Times in 1962, Maxwell Geismar noted

Sometimes called Hemingway’s best novel, too, [For Whom The Bell Tolls] is a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvelous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbable or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.

Geismar’s observation chimes with that of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov who declared that Hemingway ‘was a writer for boys’.

It is pertinent that Hemingway’s ostentatious and repeated insistence as the young unknown of the 1920s Paris years that he was only concerned with creating his fiction and art, and had no interest in fame or its trapping was nonsense. From the outset and even when still an unknown, as John Raeburn shows in Fame Became Him, Hemingway engaged in a subtle and effective campaign of self-promotion and networking. As his once close friend in Paris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, noted

Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.

With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, he took a detailed and active interest in his image and how he was marketed, and until the day he died he had an unceasing concern with how the world viewed him as ‘one of American’s greatest contemporary writers’ (which he truly believed he was).

. . .

Even though Scribner’s Magazine started serialising A Farewell To Arms in May 1929, the work was not yet wholly complete. Hemingway was dissatisfied with the novel’s ending and so — he claimed — he wrote dozens more, trying to find the right way to conclude his story. He had worked on that ending while crossing from Havana to Europe in the spring of 1929 and once back in France continued trying to find the right one.

He immediately took off to Hendaye, then a small fishing village just south of Biarritz, when his son Patrick, not yet 12 months old, was hospitalised with influenza. It didn’t matter that, in addition, his wife Pauline had to undergo surgery to clear her sinuses. Hemingway, according to Michael Reynolds, had a ‘mortal fear of flu’ and thought it best to remove himself from the danger of contracting it from his baby son.

He chose Hendaye because several years earlier he had written the last few pages of The Sun Also Rises there, and now he was back to find that satisfactory but elusive conclusion to A Farewell To Arms. In the event he could not and only came up with the ending to the novel as we now know when he was back in Paris by the middle of May.

In July Hemingway was back in Pamplona for the bullfighting, with Uncle Gus, Pauline’s sister Jinny and his journalist friend Guy Hickock. Pauline had remained in Paris, but joined him after the fiesta had ended (with her hair dyed blonde to surprise him) for another tour of Spain.

Their subsequent extended tour of more bullfights and a return to Santiago de Compostela was not a complete success: Hemingway and Pfeiffer argued so much that Hemingway even made a note in his diary of the days when they did not argue.

For one thing, Pfeiffer was becoming ever more concerned about how much Hemingway was drinking, but Reynolds suggests that his volatile moods and the outburst of temper which were spoiling the trip were also because now he had finally finished his novel, he felt empty. Hemingway himself described, rather pretentiously — the scrap of paper from which this is taken is, like all the other scraps of paper Hemingway could not bring himself to throw away, in the JFK Library in Boston — that

within the writer there was his death, and that death was the book.

The writer might physically survive any number of books, Hemingway tells us, but

each [book] would kill off a part of him, a piece of what he knew, leaving the book with a life of its own.

Another possible reason for the arguments between the couple might have been the aversion Pfeiffer had to contraception and the effect it had on Hemingway’s sex life. After her problems when giving birth to her second son — Patrick was eventually delivered by caesarean section — Pfeiffer was told by her doctor that she should not consider having another child for at least three years. Various biographers have established that Pfeiffer — then still a devout Roman Catholic — refused to use any artificial form of contraception and would only consider practising coitus interruptus.

. . .

Although Hemingway and Pfeiffer carried on renting their flat in the rue Froidevaux, they were not settled and spent the next few years commuting between Paris and Key West, Spain and Wyoming. After their two-month tour of Spain, they were back in Paris by mid-September, and A Farewell To Arms was published towards the end of October 1929.

Sales were spectacular, and on the back of the fame-cum-notoriety Hemingway had achieved with The Sun Also Rises, the novel consolidated his position as the writer on whom to keep a keen eye. The first 30,000 copies printed sold out within three weeks, and in quick succession two more print runs of 10,000 each were ordered. His fame and new position as a writer of consequence also had a bearing on his lifestyle. 

For several years Hemingway and Hadley, not poor (despite Hemingway’s persistent claims) but not rich either, had enjoyed spending Christmas in cosy, comfortable and — for Americans with dollars to exchange for local currency — exceptionally cheap Schruns in Austria.

Christmas 1929 was spent in Switzerland in a much grander style, with various wealthy friends, including Gerald and Sara Murphy, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and, now newly married to each other (and not quite as wealthy), John Dos Passos and Katy Smith. (Smith was the sister of Hemingway’s friend Bill from the Walloon Park days, and he had known here since he was 12. She was also, coincidentally, a friend and roommate of Pfeiffer’s at college). This, too, was part of the transformation of ‘Ernest Hemingway, the aspiring young writer’ into Ernest Hemingway, the ‘successful author’.

Hemingway and Pfeiffer did not see in New Year 1930 in Switzerland, and just over a week after returning to Paris, they set sail back to Key West (where they were still renting). There Hemingway entertained friends and his Scribner’s editor Max Perkins, and tried to interest them in his new enthusiasm, marlin fishing.

Later in the year, he took off with his family for his first several months of hunting and fishing in the American West, and it became his practice to spend the late summer and early autumn in Wyoming, later in Montana and later still in Idaho. He had already started work on his ‘bullfighting and writing’ book Death In The Afternoon earlier in the year while Perkins was staying and carried on writing it over the following months.

The ostensible reason for returning to Key West had been for Hemingway to have somewhere quiet to write; yet he was, in fact, quite happy settling down to write wherever he was, whether in Key West or the Rockies, following his usual routine of writing in the morning and hunting or fishing in the afternoon.

Then, in the November, came the car crash in Wyoming in which he was badly injured, and he had to abandon work on the book for several months. Driving with Dos Passos as a passenger, he had been dazzled by the lights of an oncoming truck, swerved and rolled the car. The accident saw him break his right arm severely between his elbow and shoulder, and writing became impossible.

Holed up in hospital in Billings for many weeks did not improve his mood. Archibald MacLeish (below left), his, then still close, friend from their Paris days, spent 48 hours travelling all the way from the east coast to visit Hemingway, only to be accused by Hemingway, bizarrely, of coming out to see him die. 

When he was eventually discharged from hospital just before Christmas 1930, though still able to do little with his right arm, he spent the holiday in Piggott with his wife’s family.

In the spring of 1931 and after living in Key West rentals for several years, Hemingway and Pfeiffer bought a house in Whitehead Street — or rather good old Uncle Gus bought it for them. The house was 80 years old and somewhat dilapidated, but had once been one of the smartest houses on what was then still an island; over the following years Pfeiffer renovated and extended it extensively.

It was a distinct improvement on the pokey tenement flats with a communal lavatory in the hallway Hemingway had chosen to live in in Paris; thus the transformation of Hemingway, the ‘writer who had starved for his art’ of his early years into Hemingway ‘the wealthy and well-known novelist’ continued.

. . .

A Farewell To Arms did indeed make him wealthy with his own money: when passing through New York on his way from Paris to Key West at the end of January, he was informed that in just three months it had already sold 80,000 copies.

According to Michael Reynolds, Hemingway’s accounts for 1929 showed that he had earned $18,416 (the equivalent of $282,806 in 2021). With the addition of Pfeiffer’s annual trust fund income of $6,000 ($92,139 in 2021) Hemingway was now able and did live the very good life.

That right arm took some time to heal. but once it was finally functional and Hemingway was able to work again, he and Pfeiffer sailed back to Europe, Hemingway to Madrid to undertake further research for Death In The Afternoon and Pfeiffer back to Paris.

She eventually joined him in Spain, and in July they were back at the Pamplona festival, then undertook another extended tour of Spain. By September Pfeiffer was seven months pregnant, and she and Hemingway sailed back to the US. It was on that voyage that Hemingway met Jane Kendall Mason with whom he went on to have his first affair while married to Pfeiffer.

The house in Whitehead Street which Pfeiffer's Uncle Gus bought for her
and Hemingway and which was his home in Key West for almost ten years

. . .

The startling success his early years as a writer and of his two volumes of short stories and two novels did not continue, and Hemingway’s literary career took something of a left turn in the 1930s.

By the end of January 1932, he had finally completed Death In The Afternoon, a curious amalgam of an extensive guide to bullfighting, its history, practices and lore, as well as his pronouncements on writing and literature, and it was published the following September.

In 1935 came Green Hills Of Africa, his semi-fictional book about his two-month safari in East Africa of the year before (which was again funded by Uncle Gus). It was another curious amalgam, this time his account of big-game hunting, its practices and the African people he came into contact with. It, too, allowed him to pronounce on writing, literature and the work of several of his fellow writers.

By then, still only in his mid-thirties Hemingway regarded himself as some kind of literary sage and now believed he was qualified to lay down the law on what constituted ‘good writing’.

Neither his bullfighting book nor his safari book sold well, and both had a mixed critical reception. Reviewing the book in New Republic, the influential critic, literary theorist and notably a one-time Hemingway champion Edmund Wilson (right) wrote

[Hemingway] delivers a self-confident lecture on the high possibilities of prose writing, with the implication that he himself, Hemingway, has realized or hopes to realize these possibilities; and then writes what are certainly, from the point of view of prose, the very worst pages of his life. There is one passage which is hardly even intelligible — the most serious possible fault for a writer who is always insisting on the supreme importance of lucidity.

The criticism is quite specific, especially in Wilson’s concern about a lack of lucidity in the prose verging on unintelligibility. A wiser writer might have taken note, but Hemingway, who had convinced himself he was one of America’s best writers, took no heed. Revisiting the book several years later — and still unimpressed — Wilson added

[Hemingway] has produced what must be one of the only books ever written which make Africa and its animals seem dull. Almost the only thing we learned about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them. And as for the natives . . . The principal impression we get of them is that they were simple and inferior people who enormously admired Hemingway.

Writing in the New York Times, Charles Poore was not as dismissive and noted

The writing is the thing; that way he has of getting down with beautiful precision the exact way things look, smell, taste, feel, sound.

But this praise is more than tempered by his astonishment that

Some of his sentences in Green Hills Of Africa would make Henry James take a breath. There’s one that starts on page 148, swings the length of 149 and lands on 150, forty lines or so from tip to tip.

Again, what was Hemingway, the advocate of ‘the importance of lucidity’ thinking? Did the writer who insisted — boasted — he re-wrote and revised his work obsessively even bother to read over what he had produced? It’s hard to believe he had, and a sentence which

starts on page 148, swings the length of 149 and lands on 150, forty lines or so from tip to tip

might well have done with revision, especially if parts of the book, according to Wilson, were ‘hardly even intelligible’. Perhaps Wilson, Poore and the other critics who were less than enchanted by Hemingway’s new book were also not pleased by his — now very well-known and somewhat tactless — description of them in Green Hills Of Africa as

lice who crawl on literature. 

. . .

Two years earlier, in 1933, Hemingway had published Winner Take Nothing [sic], his third volume of short stories, and it, too, had failed to set the reading public alight. It has been suggested that in Depression-era America the downbeat title of the collection and its publication in time for the Christmas market did sales no favours.

Its lukewarm reception by the critics did not cheer up Hemingway, who demanded unalloyed admiration as a matter of course. In The Artist’s Reward, a profile of Hemingway Dorothy Parker had written for the New Yorker in 1929 just after A Farewell To Arms had been published, she had observed:

As I wrote this, the reviews of A Farewell To Arms had not yet reached Ernest Hemingway in Paris. All those by what are called the big critics may be laudatory, serious and understanding; but it is safe to say that if there be included among them one tiny clipping announcing that Miss Harriet McBlease, who does ‘Book-Looks’ for the Middletown Observer-Companion, does not find the new Hemingway book to her taste, that will be the one Our Hero will select to brood over . . .

Overall, the 1930s did, though, see Hemingway at his industrious best, and his time was certainly not all spent marlin fishing off the Cuban coast and hunting in Wyoming and Montana. In the early months of each year living in Key West, he produced several short stories, following his established routine of getting down to write in the early morning, then, four or five hours of work done, relaxing in the afternoons.

Apart from his fiction, he also produced light, journalistic pieces, particularly for the men’s lifestyle magazine, Esquire, and later for Ken, a left-leaning political magazine which were both co-founded by Arnold Gingrich. Ken first appeared in April 1938, but lasted for just over a year and fell foul of potential advertisers not much liking it’s political position even though this had specifically been toned down

The pieces Hemingway wrote for Esquire, which the magazine called ‘Letters’, were mainly — although not exclusively — articles on hunting and fishing, and he had licence to write on whatever topic he liked. (As Raeburn demonstrates in Fame Became Him, Hemingway was invariably always centre-stage in these pieces, subtly establishing his credentials as an expert or authority on pretty much everything).

The arrangement — and Hemingway later admitted that he could hardly believe his luck in landing it — came about because of the high public profile he was enjoying from 1930 on.

Gingrich (left), who launched Esquire in 1933 as a fashion magazine for men along the lines of Vogue, calculated that having Hemingway’s by-line would give his magazine cachet and attract male readers. Gingrich had bumped into him in a New York bookshop several months before the magazine was launched and on the spot asked him whether he would write for Esquire.

There was, though, according to Adrienne Westenfield, writing in Esquire about the friendship between Gingrich and Hemingway, a second reason for hiring Hemingway: because the magazine was to be distributed in gentlemen’s clothes stores and haberdashers, Gingrich was worried it might mainly attract a gay readership and presumably discourage heterosexuals. His solution (which might now makes us laugh) was, writes Westenfield,

to publish supposedly ‘manly’ stories about sports and outdoor pursuits. He set his sights on Hemingway, an ascendant celebrity novelist and prolific journalist with two acclaimed novels under his belt (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms), but also an avid outdoorsman as famed for his hyper-masculine pastimes as for his literature.

Gingrich was an astute businessman, but Hemingway knew his worth: the contract he signed saw him — eventually — being paid twice as much as any other contributor. For the first issue, however, Hemingway had, uncharacteristically, agreed to a comparatively modest $250 ($5,092 in 2021) for each piece he wrote after Gingrich told him that was all his magazine could afford; but, says Westenfield, Hemingway swore Gingrich to secrecy: he feared it would damage his reputation if word got out that he, the great writer, had settled for such a pittance.

When the first issue in October 1933 sold far better than expected and Gingrich decided the second and future issues should also be available on newsstands, Hemingway immediately demanded $500 for each ‘Letter’ (and his fee later even reached $1,000). In a letter to Gingrich, Hemingway, says Westenfield, outlined that his philosophy was

[to] make all comercial [sic] magazines pay the top rate they have ever paid anybody. This makes them love and appreciate your stuff and realize what a fine writer you are.

Gingrich, who regarded hiring Hemingway as something of a coup and later in life confessed he had seen Hemingway as the magazine’s ‘principal asset’, also agreed to allow Hemingway’s work to remain unedited and appear as it was submitted. A bonus of Hemingway’s involvement was, for Gingrich, that it had also encouraged other ‘name’ writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner to contribute to his magazine.

Hemingway's first letter for the launch issue of Arnold Gingrich's Esquire in October 1933. He was paid 'only' $250 ($5,092). When the magazine proved
to be a great success, distribution was expanded and Hemingway demanded
and got $500 for each letter. Gingrich later admitted he regarded Hemingway
as one of his magazine's 'prime assets'