The Young Hemingway by Michael Reynolds

Author:Michael Reynolds [Reynolds, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary
ISBN: 9780393345322
Google: kqF7IHfSHJMC
Amazon: 0393317765
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1998-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

“I know it,” Marjorie said happily.

“You know everything,” Nick said.

“Oh, Nick, please cut it out! Please, please don’t be that way.”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “You do. You know everything. That’s the trouble. You know you do.”3

More than one of Hadley’s good lines showed up in his fiction, but then she wrote a lot of letters during their eleven month courtship. Together for less than three weeks of that year, their relationship grew more on paper than in the flesh. During the first two months Hadley’s tone was cheery but cautious, certainly not over-eager. Their age difference bothered her; it also bothered her sister, Fonnie, who, married and mothered, felt she must protect her fragile younger sister now that their mother was dead. For years Hadley had been treated like a semi-invalid. In her youth a fall from a balcony had put her in bed for some months with a strained back. Ever since, she had been told how delicate her health was, how fragile her bones. Fonnie, that is Mrs. Roland Usher and mother of two, was all too eager to take her mother’s place in protecting Hadley, who would live past ninety. Hadley, who came to believe in her fictional fragility, returned from Chicago noticeably changed, happier than she should have been, more color to her cheeks, a little less submissive.

For the next month Hadley answered the letters that bombarded her from Chicago. Her tone was friendly but not infatuated; however, she always asked questions that encouraged answers. Particularly she asked about Ernest’s writing. That was the best bait. Better educated and better read – sometimes almost too well read – Hadley had the good sense not to flaunt her education. She gathered that Hemingway was sensitive about not having gone to college. She had finished her freshman year at Bryn Mawr in 1911 but had gone no farther. Her eight years at Mary Institute, a private girls’ school founded by T. S. Eliot’s grandfather, had been somewhat more demanding than Hemingway’s public-school education. Graduating with honors, Hadley’s 88.5 grade point average placed her fourteenth in a class of fifty-four. She took eight years of French and Latin, compared to Hemingway’s three years of Latin.4 She did not have his facility for picking up a language from the streets and the newspapers, but her textbook French was excellent. Later Hemingway would say that he taught himself French from reading sports coverage of events he had seen.5 He did not say that Hadley also taught him about the language. That was the nice thing about words on paper: he could create his life exactly as he wished it to be, and eventually come to believe it.

Like Hemingway’s high-school reading, Hadley’s education concentrated on classic British writers: Chaucer, Bunyan, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Both knew Chaucer’s General Prologue and Knight’s Tale well enough to allude to them. But in her senior year Hadley read for two semesters in the British authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereas Ernest knew only a few of the classic British novels.

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