Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. A Memoir.

Miller, Linda Patterson

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. A Memoir. By A. E. Hotchner. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016. 192 pp. $19.99.

A. E. Hotchners Hemingway in Love: His Own Story comes fifty years after Papa Hemingway, a book that recounts Hotchners relationship with Hemingway between 1948 and Hemingway's death in 1961. Hotchner had been commissioned by Cosmopolitan in 1948 to convince Hemingway to write an article on "The Future of Literature," and Hemingway had agreed to meet him at the La Florida bar [also known as La Floridita] in Havana to talk about the project. As "the daiquiris kept coming" during that first encounter, Hotchner maintains that he somehow managed "to make some notes on our conversation," which was "the beginning of a practice I followed during the entire time I knew him. Later on I augmented these journals with conversations recorded on pocket tape transistors that we carried when we traveled" (9). These notes and recordings, along with his own memories, provided the backbone for the 1966 memoir. The book was both compelling and controversial, for it rendered in precise detail and often within quotes, speech and descriptions directly attributed to Hemingway. To my knowledge, no one has ever claimed to have seen or heard Hotchners tapes, and he acknowledges in Hemingway in Love that the tapes ultimately "disintegrated" (xi). The publication of Carlos Baker's Selected Letters (1981) followed by the Hemingway Letters Project, which is now publishing all of Hemingway's extant correspondence, has allowed scholars to see how extensively and perhaps disingenuously Hotchner drew on Hemingway's letters as the basis for Hemingway's dialogue and the vivid rendering of events. The publication of Papa enraged Hemingway's fourth wife Mary Hemingway, who felt that Hotchner had violated his relationship with Hemingway, and with her, for the sake of self-promotion.

Now comes Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a memoir that Hotchner claims will embellish the earlier book by reinstalling key material that Random House had required he omit for legal reasons, particularly as related to individuals who were still alive, including Mary Hemingway, who would be hurt by learning of Hemingway's true feelings about his earlier wives. Hemingway's supposedly true feelings about his first two wives provide the overarching thematic focus for this new book. Hotchner claims that Hemingway's plane accidents in Africa in 1954 triggered in Hemingway a radical change both physically and emotionally such that he wanted to tell the "true gen" for the sake of posterity. In particular, it prompted him, almost compulsively, to tell Hotchner "about a painful period in his life that he had never discussed but that he wanted me to know about in case he never got around to telling about it" (xiii). Hemingway's confessions (as Hotchner sees them) establish the narrative structure for this slim new book, some of which derives from Papa almost word for word.

As events progress chronologically between 1954 to 1961, Hotchner brings the narrative back to where Hemingway had previously left off in retelling of "the agony of that period in Paris when he was writing The Sun Also Rises and at the same time enduring the harrowing experience of being in love with two women simultaneously, an experience that would haunt him to his grave" (xiii-iv). Hotchner believes that Hemingway designated him to be "the custodian" of that account and that before Hemingway "ended his life, it was important to him that his final words explain the self-inflicted pain of letting the only true love of his life [Hadley] slip away" (14-15). Hotchner intersperses Hemingway's love story throughout the text by prompting Hemingway repeatedly to pick up where the story left off. "Now that he was talking about Martha and Pauline, I thought this was a good time to get Ernest back to talking about the hundred days [of Hadley's imposed separation on Ernest and Pauline] " (75); or, on another occasion, "I reminded him that before lunch he had been telling me about the hundred days" (89). And so it continues, with Hotchner again anointing himself as both the guardian and the chronicler of Hemingway's deepest thoughts, particularly the reality that Hemingway believed throughout his life that his worst mistake was in betraying his true love Hadley and consequently himself.

Hotchner gives F. Scott Fitzgerald a larger role in Hemingway's dilemma than scholars have allowed. According to Hotchner, Hemingway first met Pauline and her sister Virginia when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald invited them all to dinner in 1925. "First impressions?" Hotchner asks. "Small, flat-chested, not nearly as attractive as her sister.... Even though I never thought about Pauline after that first encounter, as I was to find out, she had serious thoughts about me, thoughts that became schemes and ruses, subterfuges, connivances" (27-28). Hotchner details a couple of instances wherein Hemingway and Fitzgerald discussed together Hemingway's dilemma. None of the extensive Fitzgerald/Hemingway scholarship corroborates that Hemingway came to Fitzgerald for advice about Pauline, and sometimes the circumstantial facts of both Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's lives during this time call the reliability of these supposed encounters into question. For example, Hotchner has Hemingway and Fitzgerald meeting in Paris when Hemingway was stopping over on his return from his 1934 safari with Pauline. According to Hotchner, Fitzgerald was there that spring to pick up some things in storage. However, Fitzgerald was in Baltimore, Maryland, all that year as he was completing and then publishing, finally, Tender Is the Night. There is no indication that he was ever in Paris at this time. Nonetheless, Hotchner relates that, according to Hemingway, Fitzgerald was "very much on Hadley's side," telling Hemingway: "'I warned you that Pauline was not content to be your mistress, that she wanted to marry you.... She would probably bring you some positive things, but she would also bring you remorse. Don't try living with remorse--remorse will break your goddamn heart'" (81-82). In the 1934 Paris scene, Hotchner recounts their conversation over dinner at the Closerie wherein Hemingway tells Fitzgerald that Pauline was finally divorcing him and that he had "made a mistake with Pauline, that's all. A goddamn fatal mistake" (133-34).

Further errors and embellishments call into question the reliability of this text. For example, Hotchner maintains that Gertrude Stein confronted Hemingway in 1926 about not liking her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but that book didn't see print until 1933. He makes a point that Gerald Murphy's studio in Paris where Hemingway stayed during his separation from Hadley was on the sixth floor at 69 Rue Froidevaux (and this becomes important in the way that it factors in to Hotchner's narrative), but Hotchner seems to be confusing one of the Murphys Paris apartments with Gerald's studio, which was a ground floor, thirty-foot-high space that allowed for Gerald's oversized paintings. Hotchner talks about Hemingway and his feelings for his sister "Geraldine." Hemingway had no sister by that name. In sum, this book lacks veracity as a scholarly text. But how does it stand up as memoir? And what kind of slack do we cut for memoir in these times when, as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has stated in reviewing the memoirs of Henry James, "memoirs are doing much of the work of emotional transmission that novels once did"? Hemingway himself made the argument in A Moveable Feast that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact" (Preface).

I must confess that when I first read Papa without having had access to all the Hemingway scholarship, and not yet cognizant of the related controversy, I liked it emotionally. It rang true, and it captured graphically, I thought, a tender and complex writer who was confronting his own life and art during his final decade. Hemingway in Love rings true emotionally also in isolating and arguing for the significance of a pivotal time in Hemingway's life that would inspire thereafter the predominant themes of his art--betrayal, remorse, and possible redemption through art. Fact or fiction, the book is worth something for doing that.

Linda Patterson Miller

Penn State, Abington

WORKS CITED

Gopnik, Adam. "Little Henry, Happy at Last,. The New Yorker 18 Jan. 2016: 76. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. Preface. A Moveable Feast. New York: Simon 8t Schuster, 1996. v. Print.