Abstract
Any merely factual account of Hemingway’s marrying Pauline Pfeiffer omits the emotional nuances of the pair’s relationship once Hadley had bowed out. Just as Hemingway had considered suicide before his wedding to Hadley, so he wrote to Pauline in November of 1926 that he was feeling very low, depressed, guilty, and he was not sure that he had the right to marry again. Part of his angst seemed to come from Pauline’s assertion that she was returning to New York (from Arkansas) to resume her work for Vogue: in his mind, the only reason she would leave Arkansas would be to join him.
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Notes
- 1.
Diliberto quotes from his November 12 letter to Pauline that he would commit suicide in order “to remove the sin out of your life and avoid Hadley the necessity of divorce” (Hadley, 240).
- 2.
Ernest Hemingway, page 13 of “James Allen,” (529a), Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 3.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 4.
Ibid., 17.
- 5.
Pauline Pfeiffer to Hemingway, March 20, 1927, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 6.
Hemingway, “James Allen” (529a), Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 7.
Pauline Pfeiffer to Hemingway, Dec. 3, 1926, Hemingway Archive, John F. Kennedy Library.
- 8.
Hemingway to Max Perkins, Dec. 6, 1926, The Only Thing That Counts, 53.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Hemingway to Hugh Walpole, April 14, 1927, Hemingway file, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.
- 11.
Hemingway, “My Own Life,” New Yorker, 11 (February 27, 1927), 23–24.
- 12.
See Hemingway’s February 5, 1927, letter to Grace Hall-Hemingway, where he tells her she does not understand his work, and has no right to criticize it (Letters, 243–44).
- 13.
Hemingway, “Now I Lay Me,” Collected Short Stories, 281–82.
- 14.
Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders (1994), 35–36. Perhaps the best-known earlier commentary on Hemingway’s “feminism” is Robert E. Gajdusek’s essay, most recently included in his 2002 Hemingway in His Own Country, 331.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). Marriage in the Midst of Men Without Women. In: Ernest Hemingway. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86255-8_7
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