Hemingway's Passions: His Women, His Wars, and His Writing

With chapters named after each of Hemingway’s five greatest lovers, author Nancy W. Sindelar begins with the note that, “Ernest Hemingway and his friends, family, wives, and lovers were prodigious letter writers.”

Although Hemingway requests that his letters never be published while alive, after his passing, many efforts are undertaken by his heirs to bring them to light. Sindelair notes that, for that project, all his letters are left unedited—though he is meticulous about grammar when he writes commercially.

“This book delivers the experience of Hemingway’s life through his greatest loves,” says Mariel Hemingway, his granddaughter, in the Foreword. Everyone not living under a rock knows at least a bit about Hemingway’s life and writings. What better way to elaborate than through his five (major) lifetime lovers?

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, where his Victorian-era home and museum are. He fights in WWI and tours combat areas during WWII, and his writings about those experiences earn him both a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer for Literature. His father is a medical doctor and his mother, a cellist, tends six children.

His family shares a love for outdoors; Ernest is a marksman by the age of four. Under influence of his paternal grandfather, a Civil War hero, he becomes a Red Cross volunteer during WWI, and begins covering news stories, “as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War.” There is much gore and suicide in his early short stories; he writes for a newspaper after graduating high school, then joins the Red Cross in Italy.

Much of Hemingway’s war experiences and personal injuries in action are reflected in his literature. He questions that religion “had not served to save mankind . . .” His parents disdain his early works as filthy, though he later achieves fame, mingling with famous literati in Paris.

Already a 19-year-old war hero with medals, he meets his first love, Agnes—an older Red Cross nurse—while he was ailing in fairly luxurious quarters in Milan in 1918. Early on, she doesn’t reveal her fiancé in New York. Agnes goes on assignment in Florence, but they continue to write love letters. The end of WWI brings Hemingway back to the USA and the end of their romance. Hemingway then, clearly, writes the (then-) controversial A Farewell to Arms from pain.

Hemingway meets lover number two, Hadley Richardson—eight years his senior and a “trust fund child”—while living in Chicago, having been ejected from his Oak Park family home. She becomes his first wife in 1921. They move to Paris, a “mecca for artists and writers,” and schmooze and booze with the literary greats.

Awaiting their first child, the couple moves to Toronto for his birth, then immediately back to Paris, where they feel at home. Gertrude Stein serves as mentor and godmother to “Bumby.” Hemingway explores sexuality in his short stories, learns from the local ex-pat greats, develops an affinity for bullfighting in Spain (the basis for The Sun Also Rises), and nurtures his roving eye.

Next up is “wealthy and chic” Pauline Pfeiffer, also a journalist, who enters the ex-pats’ inner circle and accompanies the married couple in their travels as “Hadley’s friend.” Hadley soon files for divorce after overt signs of Hemingway’s infidelity, and Hemingway marries Pauline shortly thereafter in Paris.

“The years in Key West were fertile ones.” They move there after marriage and there he produces several successful novels. He takes to deep-sea fishing. Son Patrick is born in 1928, and Hemingway’s father commits suicide after “deteriorating health due to diabetes.” Hemingway excels with A Farewell to Arms, studies bullfighting, and believes “All stories . . . end in death.”

Marriage grows stale yet again after son Gregory is born, and he cheats with Jane Mason in Cuba. Hemingway looks to safari adventure in Africa; Pauline accompanies him, which yields abundant short story subject matter.

Hemingway’s stories and novels typically emulate his actual lifestyle and women, always with ominous undertones. Pauline’s wealth sustains him, but he’s bored.

Hemingway’s “escape route was charted by” writer, Martha Gellhorn, in Spain, where they’re both war correspondents; he writes For Whom the Bell Tolls and is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Soon, Hitler comes to power, and Pauline divorces Ernest.

Martha helps restore Finca Vigia near Havana; they marry in Wyoming in 1940 and honeymoon in Asia, visiting Hawaii upon their return. Martha continues working, much to Hemingway’s dismay. “ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?”

“Their time together became increasingly antagonistic,” as Ernest wants to be the sole writer. He joins Martha in Europe during WWII, again as war correspondents, with Ernest “in dangerous situations . . . (obtaining) experiences needed for a good story.” They divorce in 1945.

Mary Welsh Monks, then married, is a feature writer for Time. She accompanies Hemingway to Cuba in 1945, learns Spanish, gets divorced, and they marry in 1946. In Italy, Hemingway, 49 at the time, predictably has an unrequited affectation with an 18-year-old daughter of a friend, and, of course, uses the experience in his next novel, “consistent with his pattern of escaping . . . married life.”

The Old Man and the Sea wins the Pulitzer Prize. During safari, a chartered plane with Hemingway and Mary crashes in Africa. Both are injured, Hemingway more seriously with a head injury—which later affects his mind. Though he earns much money, “his body was deteriorating, and his moods were increasingly irrational.” The Nobel Prize follows in 1954.

As the Castro regime strengths in Cuba, Hemingway, seriously ailing, buys a house in Idaho. “Writing became a struggle.” He is suspicious of the FBI following his life. He anonymously registers at the Mayo Clinic for electro-shock therapy, which seemed futile. “He believed suicide was a common-sense way . . . to end (their) lives.”

On July 2, 1961, he “blew away his entire cranial vault.” Mary had to handle all further arrangements. Their Havana property became a museum—Finca Vigia—and a Hemingway room was created at the JFK Presidential Library.

A brilliant way to sum up Hemingway’s life, Mariel pondered, “After experiencing a love lost or the tragedies of way, only the deep thirst for life would cause someone to courageously continue walking toward the danger.”

Features include a too-long prologue, a chronology of Hemingway’s life and loves; lengthy Footnotes, Bibliography, Acknowledgements, and Index add to the bulk of the book, though these extra pages may have better been used by more text about Hemingway’s emotions and fewer reference materials—typically often appreciated by scholars. (The author is a Hemingway scholar.) In essence, the text of Hemingway’s Passions ends at page 166 instead of 234. The Epilogue, however, is fruitful in that it updates the remaining lives of Hemingway’s many women.