Mrs. Hemingway.

Wagner-Martin, Linda

Mrs. Hemingway. By Naomi Wood. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. 317 pp. Paperback $16.00.

   Yes, Hadley would rather be in Paris or even St. Louis right now,
   these cities that nurse their ash-pit skies and clouds of dead
   sleet--anywhere but here, in the violet light of glorious Antibes.
   (5)

Naomi Woods precise language, haunting in its emotional accuracy, marks each one of the four monologues that comprise Mrs. Hemingway. Here, Hadley stumbles through her knowledge of Pauline Pfeiffer and Ernest Hemingway's affair, grounded as they are in the Fitzgeralds' rental villa so that little Bumby's exposure to whooping cough cannot imperil the children of Sara and Gerald Murphy at nearby Villa America.

Wood's expertly written four-part biography with sections titled using each wife's name ("Hadley," "Fife," "Martha," and "Mary") subverts the sense of Wood as author by creating a different voice for each of the fictional wifespeakers. No small accomplishment, Wood's deft chameleon act creates an intimate sense of each woman's being. She is particularly expert in choosing details: Hadley, in the scene at Antibes, comments on the sense of loss she feels in seeing Zelda Fitzgerald's perfume bottles on the dresser, acknowledging to herself that "it feels awful to have her marriage end in the rented quarters of another family's house" (5).

Mrs. Hemingway is a biography unlike any other account of Ernest Hemingway. The man comes to readers in refracted bits and pieces, some brittle as glass shards, others reflected over and over in glistening but warm mirrored surfaces. No one impression is like another. From Hadley's not knowing whether she should treat him as a man or a boy, with anger or with sympathy, to Mary's always unspoken grief long before his suicide, the reader is forced to focus on Ernest Hemingway. Wood's portraits are of his wives but from their deepest lives rises the contradictory spirit of America's greatest modernist writer.

Part of Wood's strategy is her single focus on each wife's story. Although she gives Hadley flashbacks to Pamplona, so that the all-important bullfight experiences are not lost, she keeps the reader's attention on Hadley during the summer of 1926, Hadley the wife after the affair is already a fact, Hadley hoping to reclaim Hemingway by instilling the "hundred days" edict.

The dates of Wood's chosen narrative emphases suggest her willingness to condense story lines, and in some cases, to truncate the stories we already know. "Hadley" is one summer day in 1926. "Fife," a narrative that takes the hundred days and beyond, moves to a June day twelve years later in 1938. Wood shows the "splendid" Key West house, complete with inground pool, as Fife awaits Hemingway's return from Spain where he has been covering the war.

The Martha Gellhorn biography is dated "August 26, 1944" and focuses on a day shortly after Hemingway has "liberated" Paris, or at last the Ritz bar. Martha is not surprised. She thinks, "Ernest loved being in the limelight wherever he went. Boxer, bullfighter, fisherman, soldier, hunter; he can't go anywhere without playing the hero" (166). But even Martha, dispirited as she has become through these horrifying days of war, adds, "Often, over the course of these years, she has longed for the plain friend she made in Spain" (166).

As she did in the two earlier biographies, Wood marks internal divisions in "Martha" with dated descriptions. The first such flashback in this third biography is "Key West, Florida. December 1936." It opens, "Martha went to Key West to meet her hero, not to marry him" (169). But even as the years of coverage overlap between "Fife" and "Martha," the narratives do not. Wood's choice of ways to characterize Pauline differs dramatically from the ways she positions Martha Gellhorn. The latter remains the journalist-novelist wife: ambitious in her work, trained perhaps better than her husband ever was, Martha shows her own built-in shit-detector when she laments that she "hates the way he throws himself around a city with all the swagger of a warlord. She hates, too, that other people can't see past his phony heroism" (166). Wood does give the reader Cuba and its lush environs, the good writing that both halves of the couple do, some Pilar fishing trips, but the primary emphasis of this third biography is on Martha as writer.

"August 26, 1944" is the day that Hemingway agrees to give Martha a divorce. But, unexpectedly, Wood does not use the end of his third marriage to segue into the fourth wife's biography. "Mary," rather, is headed "Ketchum, Idaho, September 1961" (243). In this longest biography of the four, Wood creates a kind of relentless requiem. The effusion of sorrow begins as readers see Mary Welsh Hemingway putting in another long day of going through her husband's papers, the accumulation from the Cuban finca, the years of unfinished work that he spoke to Martha so desperately about in the third biography. Unfinished work. Hemingway cannot write. Some days he cannot write a sentence.

Mary's own soliloquy is a flashback, "remembering the man she'd fallen in love with in the Ritz hotel.... How wonderful life with Ernest Hemingway would be! And now? Now he seemed unable to even register the things that had once given him pleasure" (246). Wood selects carefully from the myriad of painful details she might have used from the fifteen-year marriage. (Mary did some of this recounting in her own autobiography, How It Was.) Wood instead begins to build toward re-creating a family of the Hemingway wives: Mary notes, "A strange family indeed; such unlikely sisters" (302). She remembers the months when Pauline had come to live with them because Patrick was convalescing in the guest house after a car accident; she remembers their sorrow at Pauline's sudden death in 1951. She remembers that her first phone call after Hemingway's suicide was to Hadley, when she continued the fantasy that he had "mishandled" the gun. Later, Hadley phones Mary, ostensibly to ask about the Paris sketches, but in actuality to see how she is doing, alone in the sorrow, alone in the surroundings which Hadley could envision so well: "Ernest's study is a palace of paper" (274).

Wood also creates a memorial to Hemingway through the entirely fictional character of Harry Cuzzemano, the unstoppable fan, an avid book collector from 1926, who was sure he could find the stolen suitcase, which Hadley was bringing to Hemingway. Remarkable in his persistence, Cuzzemano wants to see the place of Hemingway's death: even as Mary tells him that the vestibule is never used, he finds a way into that room and sits there on the bench used for putting on boots. He has asked Mary to return his letters; he has told her that he has already burned Hemingway's letters to himself. He has explained that he wants to erase his presence from the annals, that he is insuring that he "won't even be a footnote in history" (295). Such a gesture seems to be at odds with his constant attendance, his collecting, his nagging Hemingway for this or that. What Wood achieves is a sense of this man's real devotion to the art of Ernest Hemingway, and the resonance of his devotion comes through as Mary--at first only disapproving of his invasion--joins him on the vestibule bench and tells him about Hemingway's visits to the clinic, his depression, his lack of any will to live. In their communion, then, she begins to realize, and to recognize, the truth of her husband's need to end his life.

Fanciful as this character is, Wood has taken over the narrative with his presence. True to his wishes, history does not record Henry Cuzzemano. Wood, however, has inserted him as a character in each of the four biographies. He is the agent of understanding here at the end, as Mary--who has not brought herself to even remember what she finds after she runs downstairs at the sound of the gun--makes the start on her last confession.

The reader does not get to hear that confession, however. What the reader has been given (and this much earlier in the fourth wife's biography) is Mary's noticing a large, shadowy stag. She is finishing a cigarette. "She's about to go back inside when she sees a big stag tread through the garden, caught in the last of the quarter moon. The animal is nothing less than majestic. Its antlers are huge and its legs have such a drifting, dignified walk, it's as if they don't even really touch the soil. Lonesome creature, with such a heaviness on its head, she wonders how he bears the load." (281). "Lonesome." "Such a heaviness on its head." Until he cannot, any longer, no matter his personal concerns, "bear the load."

A striking if understated image for the Papa who willingly took on so much, trained his readers to see the majesty in Santiago's brave efforts--as well as the majesty in his catching the unimaginable fish--and kept after one elusive goal after another: Wood shows her finesse as she builds a structure that keeps Ernest Hemingway before the reader's eyes and consciousness.

Reading Mrs. Hemingway took me back to 1976. Before the Hemingway Room existed in the John F. Kennedy Library (before the John F. Kennedy Library existed, in fact), the Hemingway archive was housed in the County Records Building in Waltham, Massachusetts. There, the first curator of the Hemingway papers, Jo August (later Jo August Hills) sorted through thousands of pages, many of them illegible, and parceled out materials to scholars from around the world. I remember her excitement as she was reading an advance copy of Mary Hemingway's How It Was. I remember her coming to me early one morning, saying, "I have the Martha papers catalogued; would you like to read them?" (Later, the Gellhorn papers were moved elsewhere.) In the spring of 1976, none of us Hemingway students believed that Hemingway scholars would ever tire of pouring through the treasures--handwritten notes, unidentified pages, difficult letters--all uncatalogued or uncopied. We were still allowed to use the original pages of his works.

Naomi Wood's Mrs. Hemingway reminds the reader of that excitement. She rightly credits Bernice Kert's 1983 book, The Hemingway Women, a resource we may not have appreciated enough at the time. (Similarly, Carlos Baker's still-magnificent 1969 Ernest Hemingway: A Life offers readers a wealth of information.) That these early biographers assembled so much material, did so much investigative work, tried to judge impartially and accurately, must be recognized as providing a sturdy scaffolding for twenty-first century scholars (and novelists and readers) to use in finding their own resources, drawing their own conclusions, and taking aim at some of the more inaccurate legends that a figure such as Ernest Hemingway--and perhaps the women who loved him--is sometimes subjected to.

Mrs. Hemingway shows the positive side of being able to draw from these weighty resources: Naomi Wood uses her own scintillating imagination, gives her narrative multiple convincing voices, and draws a set of convincing biographies that lead the reader to new worlds, exciting worlds, of life with the Hemingways.

Linda Wagner-Martin

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill