TORTURED LOVE

Ernest Hemingway at work

Dearest Hem,

Your letter to Pauline, dated November 1926 is a sad testament to a tortured soul when it comes to love, and attachment, and obsession. There is so much of your passion reflected in this letter but reflected in such a way that the figure in the glass is a distorted, wounded, self debasing vision of the "man's man" of a writer that you give the world. My heart breaks for you.

What I see is that little boy Ernest, trying to be what others want, or need, or expect, and losing himself in the process. Being the caped hero can be exhausting, and being the caped hero who portrays wearing a cape as something for sissies is debilitating. This process has you intentionally cutting yourself off at the knees to prove you're a man's man and to debunk any and all stories that you live in the shadow of your mother. When it comes to women your relationship with your mother has forever tainted whatever comes after.

You are desperately down when you write Pauline, "Now I can look back on the days when I had just strait lonesomeness and waiting for you - but knowing that everything was all right and that it was just waiting - and they seem unbelievably happy. Because now you have given yourself and your heart as a hostage to your mother too and the whole thing seems so absolutely hopeless." Dear Hem, you have found a kindred soul in Pauline as you both are held hostage by your mothers. It's no wonder that the conditions of the separation have the capacity to reach right down and rip your heart out.

I am amazed at your level of insight, my friend, when you write, "I know you did the extra three months because you thought that was what Hadley wanted - and also because at the time you were in such a state that sacrificed seemed like the thing to do. And of course al that Hadley wanted was to delay the divorce - anything to delay the divorce - she didn't want to just smash us both up - she won't admit it but she knows we're the same person - sometimes she has admitted it - but instead of giving her the delay that is practically the only thing left in the world that she wants we railroad her toward divorce and smash ourselves both up at the same time. That makes nice thinking too."

The most telling thing that you share in this heart wrenching letter is when you speak about killing yourself because of the apparent hopeless nature of the situation. You point to the fact that you had made a promise to Pauline not to act rashly until she had returned from her exile, but, in the light of her personal emotional deterioration, as well as yours, you asked if this didn't excuse you from your promise. You write, "But now it is getting all out of control again and you have broken your promises and I should think that would let me out. Only nothing ever lets you out. But I'm not a saint, nor built like one, and I'd rather die now while there is still something left of the world than to go on and have every part of it flattened out and destroyed and made hollow before I die."

At the end of your letter, like the soliloquy before the hero plunges the dagger into his heart, you write, "And all I want is you Pfife and oh dear god I want you so. And I'm ashamed of this letter and I hate it. But I had to get this poison out and I've just been stewed in it and not hearing and all the mail boats that get in with nothing on them and then that horrible awful letter from your mother yesterday in which you were getting your just punishment." And there it was, the affirmation that your own life echoed, that the punishment of a mother is the most damning, the most damaging, the most lasting - there is nothing more lasting than a mother's "love."

There is no winner to be found in this version of Sartre's Huis Clos that is your life at this point. My heart goes out to you, to Pauline, and to Hadley and Bumby who's lives will be forever changed by these events that have been set in motion.  Sometimes there's no benefit to identifying a winner. Sometimes it's simply about picking up the pieces after the storm and trying to piece life back together again into something that allows you to move on.

Hem, I trust in your capacity to construct a story line and I trust in your ability to create something of the pieces that lie at your feet.

Wishing you better days,

Betsy

SUCCESS SHADOWED BY CHANGE

Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer

Dear Ernest,

It was so good to read your letters to your friends, in the early part of 1926. It seems as if everything is coming together. After all of the struggle, and rejection, and doubt (particularly that of your parents) around whether you were really made of the stuff it was going to take to be a successful writer. Here, finally, it's starting to unfold.

You write to William Smith and Harold Loeb, "I got loose from Liveright on account him turning down the satire. Scribners say they will back me solidly and loyally no matter how the books turn out financially. So now I don't have to worry. Only to work. will try and write some swell ones. I'm not going to think any more about what is to happen to the stuff. Just work."

In addition, my dearest Hem, you have found a true place of creative retreat in Schruns, Austria. Here, in the company of fast friends the likes of John dos Passos and Expats John and Sara Murphy you exercised your passion for the outdoors and devoted yourself to editing The Sun Also Rises.

Your relationship with Scribners would prove to be an over twenty-year partnership that was bound by your personal friendship with Maxwell Perkins, your editor at Scribners. It is interesting, dear Hem, that just as you were forging this lasting relationship with Scribners and Perkins, you were, at the same time falling for yours and Hadley's dear friend, Pauline Pfeiffer. Latter, in your biography, A Movable Feast, you wrote, "I should have caught the first train from Gare de l'Est... to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second, or the third. When I saw my wife again... I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her."

What I find interesting is that you continued to muddle along, going between the two women in your life and purposefully avoiding doing anything about it, particularly when it came to your family. You actually took extra measures to keep the whole affair under wraps and secretive. 

Hem, you had to have known it would happen sometime. Hadley discovered the affair in early May when all of you, including Pauline's sister, Virginia, were on a trip through the Loire Valley, in France. However, the rest of the world was still in the dark.

The avoidance was certainly made easier by your preoccupation with putting the finishing touches on The Sun Also Rises, writing back and forth with the likes of Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and traveling back to Spain for the bull fighting season. By July and August of 1926 you still hadn't resolved anything and you were still carrying on the charade of Pauline being "simply a family friend" even though there were now those in your inner circle who definitely knew better. 

Hadley, in her infinite wisdom (or mutual efforts at avoidance) invited you and Pauline to come and stay with her and Bumby, at F. Scott Fitzgerald's place in the French Riviera where she and Bumby were recuperating from whooping cough. You even wrote about the experience in your novel The Garden of Eden. But, your marriage, eventually did fall apart, didn't it?

You and Pauline returned to Pamplona, Spain for the bull fights and Hadley and Bumby returned to Paris to set up separate residences. Dear Hem, even as you continued to try to live your life on your terms and to write on your terms, the world, people, and events would continue to press back, censoring, editing, shaping and ultimately, from your perspective, constricting that freedom you were so driven to express. You write to your editor, Maxwell Perkins, in August of 1926, "I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane - or perhaps more sacred."

It was all bound to come to a head, Ernest, and it did when Hadley insisted that you and Pauline live apart for six months, with no contact, and if at the end of that time you still felt you were in love she would give you her blessings and grant the divorce. So, September of 1926 saw Pauline sailing for the States to spend the six months with her parents, and you facing a that same extended time without her.

What will come of all of this only time will tell. 

Hoping it all works out,
Betsy