The Sensitive Macho: Ernest Hemingway and “A Moveable Feast – the 2009 Restored Edition” (Part 2)

Hadley Hemingway

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway in 1922

The intimate passages concerning Hemingway’s first wife Hadley reveal to us Hemingway the husband and lover. Some of these passages (especially those in the intriguing chapter “The Pilot Fish and the Rich”) were expurgated by Mary Hemingway, causing the man to come across as an unrepentant cheat who blamed his adulterous behaviour on Hadley. The Restored Edition tells us that this is quite far from the truth.

Hadley and Hemingway had a close bond. They did many things together, even tried to grow out their hair together (humorously described in “Secret Pleasures”). When he describes their love-making, which facilitated his writing process, it is always with a touch of tenderness and hope.

Hadley and Hemingway used to go skiing in Schruns in Austria (he had found it an agreeable place to write). Despite the awful avalanches that would occur now and then, Hemingway’s memories of the place were mostly romantic: “the winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood…” (123). He then recalls that was the last time he and his first wife were truly happy, because later their marriage would be destroyed by his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer. But of this he writes:

In the mechanics of how this was penetrated I have never tried to apportion the blame, except my own part (italics mine) … the bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out … any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came out of it finally and married a much finer man that I ever was or could hope to be… (123)

Hemingway admits that in matters of love and lust one never has any control, and that he is the only one to blame. His feeling of guilt is especially tangible in the chapter “The Pilot Fish and the Rich”:

But to really love two women at the same time, truly love them, is the most destructive and terrible thing that can happen to a man … the wife does not know about it and trusts the husband. They have been through really difficult times and share those times and have loved each other and she finally trusts the husband truly and completely. The new one says you cannot really love her if you love your wife too. She does not say that at the start. That comes later when the murder is done. That comes when you lie to everyone all around and all you know is that you truly love two women (216).

At one point Hemingway thought it was necessary to extricate himself from the situation, and ran off to New York (he had the tendency to flee when marital problems became too weighty to handle). But upon his return and Hadley came to meet him at the station, he was once again racked with guilt: “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in  … I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” He then continues: “I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone … Remorse was a fine good thing and with a little luck and if I’d been a better man it might have saved me for something worse probably instead of being my true and constant companion for the next three years” (218-9).

These self-deprecating lines reveal a sensitive side of Hemingway we are rarely allowed to see in his fictional works. He says the remorse “was never away day or night until my wife had married a much finer man than I ever was or ever could be and I knew that she was happy” (219).

The chapter ends with a particularly touching paragraph, in which Hemingway writes about the breaking of one’s heart: “Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart…” He then waxes sentimental, concluding that “this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy” (220).

The breaking of one’s heart is a subject Hemingway will return to in the final piece (“Nada y Pues Nada”) he was to write for the memoir in April 1961, two months before he committed suicide.

All page numbers refer to the 2011 Arrows Books restored edition.

Link to Part 3: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2012/04/sensitive-macho-ernest-hemingway-and_15.html