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