Timothy Christian - Hemingways Widow : The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway

The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway

Hemingways Widow

Timothy Christian

HEMINGWAYS WIDOW

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2022 by Timothy Christian

First Pegasus Books cloth edition March 2022

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Front cover image: Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Jacket design: Studio Gearbox

Author photo: Kathryn Dykstra

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-883-1

Ebook ISBN: 9-781-64313-880-0

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

To my family

This is the Hemingway book weve all been waiting for so long.

H. R. Stoneback

T oday is one of those sudden-sun-glory afternoons in the Hudson Valley when the chill finally lifts and you can see the first hints of spring. It is the perfect weather to spend the afternoon sitting in the unshaded spot near the head of my driveway and read while I wait for the mail. I greet neighbors and other people taking advantage of the quiet side street in our small village leading downhill to the Hudson River. It has been a pleasant ritual during this strange pandemic year of various states of isolation and conversational quarantine.

My last public lecture on Hemingway was on a ship sailing the Caribbean in February of 2020, a ship that barely made it home to port before the lockdowns started. Since then, about a dozen of my Hemingway lectures worldwide, from New York to New Orleans to Wyoming, from Florida to Ireland to France, have been canceled. I miss the passing conversations about Hemingway with strangers in far places. In this strange year of Covidian metamorphoses, my travels have mostly been to my mailbox and my conversations have mainly been with passersby.

Ive lived quietly and mostly anonymously in my village, but some neighbors have seen announcements of my public lectures or reviews of my books in local newspapers. They know Im a professor and some kind of writer, and some of them seem to think Im so ancient that I used to hang out with Hemingway in Paris or Cuba or some old war or sporting glory. Neighbors are not to be held accountable for their flawed chronology. Most know me only as the writer-guy or the Hemingway professor or the old writer-dude that lives in the big haunted house above the river and loves to garden and talk about his garlic and leek crops and give his garlic and leeks away to neighbors. That is fine with me; it reminds me of long ago when I lived in a French village where people still believed what they read in the newspapers, and still gardened, and respected writers, and the only American writer theyd heard of was Hemingway.

I have long observed that our first reading of really good books is mysteriously and inextricably bound up with the place where we did the reading. All good things are suffused with Place, and it is as if the Deus Loci summons us to read certain good books in certain numinous places. Today then, I was sitting by my driveway reading what had come in the mail two weeks beforea large fat heavy manuscript of 623 pages in the form of a spiral-bound Staples print-job. I lost the first week after the manuscript arrived to the vaccine-quest runabout and other daily necessities and interruptions. I lost most of the second week to urgent round-the-clock communications with editors about the publication of my Memorial Ode for Jerry Jeff Walker, the legendary Texas singer-songwriter and my old hitchhiking buddy in the early sixties, and working out my role in the grand Jerry Jeff Memorial Show in Luckenbach later this year, where I will take the stage and sing with the likes of Ramblin Jack Elliott, Emmy Lou Harris, Jimmy Buffett, Steve Earle, and other music legends who love Jerry Jeff as I do. My life and work is not all Hemingway all the timeit never has been. However, delightful crossovers do occur, such as the historic occasion when Mary Hemingway met Jerry Jeff Walker, described later in this book.

With other pressing matters settled, I started reading the manuscript slowly, in the after-midnight hours, jumping around in the text checking sources, doing the sideways scholarly recon often deployed in approaching a book. It was the final draft of another Hemingway book, a biography. I had known every Hemingway biographer since Carlos Baker; and even before Carlos and his first full-dress biography of Hemingway, I had known A. E. Hotchner and his Papa Hemingway meditation. I was still in mourning for Hotch since we lost him, aged 102, last year as the pandemic started, and lately regretting that I had to cancel my last invitation to visit Hotch again at his home in Connecticut. I personally knew many of the primary sources, Hemingways family and friends. And I knew the main character of the manuscript entitled Hemingways Widow: The Life of Mary Welsh Hemingway. I knew Mary Hemingway not as a subject for academic inquiry and scholarly interviews, but as a social friend to be cherished. Nothing written before brought to life the person I knew. That conviction, together with the more than forty years spent on the front lines of the Hemingway lit-critical wars and scholarly skirmishes, led to a certain jaded and glutted feeling of satiety at the frontier of ennui; a place where there is nothing new under the sun (when it came to all Hemingway books). This made my first approaches to this manuscript peripheral. I started at the back, jumping around here and there, source-checking, writing brief marginal annotations, taking the temperature of the book, seeing if it tested negative or positive. But thats no way to read a good book. A good book deserves and demands more than circuitous post-midnight perambulation, or even the more devout higher circumambulation. Besides, I prefer to read in natural light.

Seeing that the forecast called for two consecutive warm sunny days, I canceled everything, turned my phone off, and started really reading the book straight through. The first long afternoon, on my porch and in my mail-awaiting driveway, I read 253 pages. I stopped when the natural light dictated and resisted reading into the night because the feeling of reading outdoors seemed right for this book that was a rare breath of fresh air in Hemingway studies. Then in the bright clean early spring light of the second day of plein air reading, I finished the last 311 pages of the narrative without even a coffee break. I closed my eyes in the late afternoon sun and thought, there is something new under the sun. This is a stunning achievement. Perfectly organized, impeccably paced, well-written in clean crisp prose, free from academic jargon and critical gibberish and psychoanalytical balderdash. My eyes still closed in meditation, I thanked my grandmother for that wordshe was the only person I ever knew who could say the word balderdash five times in a conversation and give the word its appropriate authority and forceand Mary Hemingway reminded me of my tough, enduring, librarian-teacher grandmother who dealt admirably with the complexities and burdens of marriage to a talented husband who drank too much, among other excesses. I kept thinking about the heavy manuscript in my lap: