Hemingway at War by Terry Mort

Author:Terry Mort
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2016-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

To Hemingway, Paris was a city of memory and nostalgia, the place where he had served his apprenticeship as a writer, the place where he and his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Jack, nicknamed Bumby, had lived poor but happy, the place where cafés were indulgent to writers and let them sit with their pencils and notebooks for hours while nursing a café crème or a demi of beer. Of course, one’s memories are not always attentive to the truth, and the Hemingways were not so poor as he later described them in A Moveable Feast. After all, Hadley had a small but useful—actually essential—trust fund, and Ernest was for a time doing freelance work for the Toronto Star, until he quit that work to write fiction exclusively. Still, Hemingway’s version of his memories makes for better reading than a more unadulterated depiction, a less romanticized truth. What writer does not imagine himself or herself in Paris in the twenties? Oh, to be poor(ish) but young and hopeful on the Left Bank, knowing that the cafés were welcoming and cheap, so too the wine and baguettes, and that the exchange rate was favorable and that poverty was only a temporary condition that would soon be eradicated by a successful novel or book of stories. As much as anyone, Hemingway is responsible for a writer’s wistful daydreams of that other time, for in his case, those dreams came true.

And there is something else—there is congruence between his memories of Paris and his memories of Hadley, a woman he continued to love and correspond with all his life. Part of him, perhaps a very large part of him, regretted that he left her. (“I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”1) He wrote her affectionate letters long after they had divorced and she had remarried, long after he left Pauline for Martha, long after Martha left him for her career, long after Mary arrived to stay, albeit with some ambivalence. In some ways, Paris was Hadley, Hadley was Paris. She was always there with his memories—Hadley and the cafés, the chestnut trees, and the race courses at Auteuil and Enghien-Soisy, the food and wine, and the apartment above a sawmill—all memories mixed together and over time becoming his myth. And from a purely human point of view, his sentimental nostalgia surely can be forgiven. Who does not remember with affection the years of early struggles, especially (or probably entirely) if the struggles were rewarded with success? (No doubt few look back on early struggles with much affection or nostalgia, if they ended in failure.)

And so the liberation of Paris was important to Hemingway, both actually and symbolically. Paris was his past, most likely his most treasured past. A part of him perhaps was going back to recapture something, at least in his imagination. It was criminal that the detested Nazis should have infested and infected his city for four long years. He wanted to be there when Paris was liberated.

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