Abstract
For all Hemingway’s self-definition as writer (“I loved to write very much and was never happier than when doing it,” he told Perkins), after 1940, he spent great amounts of time worrying about alimony and income taxes, and staying ahead of his financial responsibilities. Keeping the Finca going cost $1000 a month, Pauline’s alimony was $500 monthly, and he figured his income tax at something over 62 percent of his net. In May of 1943, for instance, he wrote to Perkins that he had “had to pay $160,000 to the government for writing For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
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Notes
- 1.
Hemingway to Perkins, February 25, 1944, Letters, 557.
- 2.
Ibid., May 18, 1943, The Only Thing That Counts, 323.
- 3.
Ibid., August 26, 1941, The Only Thing That Counts, 310.
- 4.
Ibid., May 18, 1943, The Only Thing That Counts, 324.
- 5.
Ibid., November 16, 1943, The Only Thing That Counts, 327.
- 6.
Susan Beegel, “Hemingway and Hemochromatosis,” Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism (1998), 375–88.
- 7.
Hemingway to Gellhorn, January 31, 1944, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 8.
In conversation with Gellhorn at a 1987 Michigan State University conference on the Spanish Civil War, I was told that she had believed that most of Hemingway’s narratives were intentionally inflated. Once she started to see that he believed much of his storying, she saw the extent of his illness: she cut her losses and began to think of separating. (Some of Gellhorn’s comments were about my recent biography of Sylvia Plath, just published that autumn, in which she wondered why Plath had stayed with a man who obviously made her unhappy. Gellhorn stated that she would have left long before the infidelity.)
- 9.
See Matts Djos, “Alcoholism in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: A Wine and Roses Perspective on the Lost Generation,” Casebook on The Sun Also Rises (2002), 139–52. Another section of the Djos’ essay also applies: “alcoholics have a higher level of anxiety, dependence, and defensiveness … a remarkable degree of moodiness, impulsivity, hostility, and distrust.”
- 10.
Hemingway to Edna Gellhorn, September 21, 1944, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library. In an August 28, 1940, letter from him to Martha, he analyzed her personality after she began taking thyroid (“there is a time when you are almost crazy”), and then she thinks their life is “worthless, you enchained, me a son of a bitch.” Hemingway Archive.
- 11.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 393–98.
- 12.
Ibid., 404–410, and see Baker, 428, for description of the charges against Hemingway for taking military action although he was a correspondent; eventually, charges were dropped.
- 13.
Moorehead, Gellhorn, 225.
- 14.
Hemingway to Patrick, September 14, 1944, Letters, 571.
- 15.
Moorehead, Gellhorn, 230.
- 16.
Kert, The Hemingway Women, 414–16; see Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 440–42.
- 17.
Mary Hemingway, How It Was, 102–03. That Martha Gellhorn includes a similar speech in her play, Love Goes to Press, between Philip and the character named Jane Mason—when he falls in love at first sight—suggests that she had also heard this line from Hemingway.
- 18.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 436–38.
- 19.
Ibid., 443; Diliberto, Hadley, 269.
- 20.
Moorehead, Gellhorn, 245.
- 21.
Gellhorn to Hemingway, August 13, 1945, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 22.
Ibid. See Kert, The Hemingway Women, 422–23.
- 23.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 439 & 443; Mary Hemingway, How It Was, 147.
- 24.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 444.
- 25.
Pauline Hemingway to Hemingway, March 17, 1945, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 26.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 447.
- 27.
Marcelline to Hemingway, April 7, 1945, At the Hemingways, 356–57. The letter was particularly irritating to him because in 1937, he had written vituperatively to Marcelline about what he had misread as her request to use the cottage. Luckily, she had replied tactfully, but Hemingway’s insults about the family and herself were hard to forget. He later apologized (At the Hemingways, 349–50).
- 28.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, said May 2, landing in Havana; Mary Hemingway said early June, landing in Miami. Both agree that the meeting was tense, with Hemingway scrubbed and slimmer, nervous about whether or not Mary would like his Cuban life. Mary recalled a lot of anxiety, and her gradually learning to keep quiet about anything that troubled her (How It Was, 154–57; Ernest Hemingway, 448).
- 29.
Mary Hemingway, How It Was, 156.
- 30.
Ibid., 160.
- 31.
Gregory Hemingway, Papa, a Personal Memoir, 95; see Norberto Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 23.
- 32.
Mary Hemingway, How It Was, 166 & 168.
- 33.
See Gellhorn-Hemingway correspondence at both Boston University (the Gellhorn Archive) and John F. Kennedy Library (the Hemingway Archive). As Hemingway had written to her on August 28, 1940, she doesn’t have to marry him if she has changed her mind. He gives her permission to have as many men friends as she wants “and go anywhere with them;” she doesn’t have to come West to hunt with him; she can go on all her trips. However, there is a financial text to this letter as well. If Gellhorn has decided not to marry him, he needs to know quickly so that he can “pare back Pauline’s settlement” (Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library).
- 34.
See Hemingway to Mary, April 19, September 7, September 9, September 13, September 15, September 17, 1945; Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 35.
Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 454.
- 36.
Hemingway, How It Was, 183.
- 37.
Kert, The Hemingway Women, 423.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). The Fourth Mrs. Hemingway. In: Ernest Hemingway. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86255-8_15
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