Jeffrey Meyers

The Education of Hemingway’s Wives

Stung by Hemingway’s attack on her character and writing, Gertrude Stein retaliated with a notorious wisecrack, ‘anyone who’s married three girls from St. Louis hasn’t learned much.’ Stein sneered at Hemingway for choosing provincial women, but St. Louis also produced T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Walker Evans and William Burroughs. Hemingway, who did not go to a university, was attracted by the wealthy background, ladylike demeanour and superior education of his series of wives – classy consorts for a young journalist who became a prominent writer. His first three wives took years of French at school, which gave them a headstart in Paris. Hadley Richardson was the nicest wife, Pauline Pfeiffer the richest, Martha Gellhorn the most beautiful and independent. Hadley became a housewife and good sport; Pauline, who graduated from the Journalism School of the University of Missouri, became a fashion journalist; Martha Gellhorn became a war correspondent and novelist. Hemingway, who divorced three all increasingly young wives, left Hadley for Pauline and abandoned Pauline for Martha. After Martha left him, he followed the pattern and married Mary Welsh, another Protestant Midwestern journalist.

Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women and the books on Hadley and Pauline paid very little attention to their education; the biographies of Martha were more thorough. Unpublished material generously sent by the schools they attended illuminate a crucial aspect of their lives, and show how their education shaped their character and foreshadowed their future.

Hadley attended the Mary Institute. The pamphlet published in 2009 on its 150th anniversary states that William Greenleaf Eliot – minister, Harvard graduate and grandfather of the poet-founded the school in 1859 based on the radical idea that women’s intellectual abilities were equal to those of

men. He named the Institute after his oldest daughter, Mary, who died at the age of sixteen. The original six-member faculty taught English, French, natural history, music, drawing and calisthenics. Girls could also take courses in mathematics and science at nearby Washington University. In 1891 the school moved away from the ‘almost exclusive focus on rigorous, strenuous scholarship and embraced the virtues of a full, well rounded life for young women that included entertainments, exhibitions, festivities, recreations and pastimes.’ The girls were mainly trained to be wives and mothers.

Hadley, born in 1891, entered the Institute in 1902, studied there from the 5th through 12th grades and graduated with honours in 1910. In a photo that appeared in the senior yearbook she has a gentle smile and wears a white jacket, blouse and large satin bow around her neck. A gigantic furred, feathered and billowing turban-like hat covers her brow and drops down to the left. She went to her mother’s college, Bryn Mawr near Philadelphia, but poor health forced her to drop out after a year. Later on, the glamorous actress and wartime pin-up Betty Grable graduated from the Mary Institute in 1934, and after a hiatus the study of Greek was reintroduced in 1956.

In an obscure lecture published in the Centennial Issue of the Mary Institute (December 1959), T. S. Eliot reminisced about his early memories of the school, which was adjacent to his home, and said, ‘but for the difference of sex my brother and I would also have graduated from Mary Institute.’ He fondly recalled the school janitor, who possessed a parrot, ‘was reputed to have been a runaway slave and certainly had one mutilated ear.’ He also appropriately stressed the importance of education, and read ‘The Dry Salvages’ – ‘I think that the river / Is a strong brown god’ – from the Four Quartets ‘because it’s about the river and the sea, the Mississippi and the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of New England, the two great natural forces which impressed my childhood imagination.’

Pauline Pfeiffer, whose devout mother had her own private chapel at home, entered the Academy of the Visitation in 1901 when her younger sister Virginia was also a student. The name of the convent school refers to the

visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56), which brings divine grace to Elizabeth and her unborn child, John the Baptist. The Order of the Visitation was founded in France in 1610 by St. Francis de Sales and introduced to America in 1799. The St. Louis Academy was founded in 1833 and located in the countryside half an hour from the city centre.

The Annual Announcement of 1912-13, Pauline’s senior year, explained that:

The object of the Academy is to provide for the students a thorough, systematic, Christian education, training not only the minds of its pupils, but also their hearts, that they may go forth, ‘Great, strong, valiant women, to stand for virtue, to stand for God.

Pauline’s biographer wrote, ‘The rigorous academic program included a philosophy based on “Gospel virtues of optimism, gentleness, joy, humility and inner freedom.”’ The school had its own ornate chapel, and some of the girls later became nuns and joined the convent. Pauline took her First Communion in May 1907. The more worldly girls were escorted to the spectacular St. Louis World’s Fair, which opened in April 1904.

Tuition was $350 year, with extra charges for music, art, chemistry and a private room. The rules about dress and visitors were strict. The students wore at all times a deliberately unfashionable black serge uniform. The Annual Announcement stated, ‘The young ladies receive visits on Sundays and Thursdays, but these visits must be authorized by parents, as well as sanctioned by the Directress. . . . Letters written or received by pupils are subject to inspection.’

Most of the classes were taught by Sisters, and the students recited Dante and studied Shakespeare, Dickens and Longfellow. In addition to academic subjects, as well as music and art, the girls mastered sewing, mending and embroidery. As Yeats observed in ‘Among School Children,’ ‘The children learn to cipher and to sing, / To study reading-books and history, / To cut and sew, be neat in everything.’ Handwritten entries on a ledger

for Pauline’s last years record additional charges for soap, needles, thread, stamps, books, reading glasses, violin strings and candy.

The Academy bountifully bestowed awards, prizes and medals so that most girls would get something to please them and gratify their parents. Pauline received awards for neatness and order, improvement and application, polite deportment, pen[wo]manship, French recitation and good grades (91 out of 100%). She graduated in June 1913 when she was eighteen, and seven of her classmates came from Missouri. Her graduation photo shows her, with eight other girls, standing at the end of a row and tilting her head toward the centre. Dressed in white, she wears a full-length gown and frilly blouse, tight sash, long gloves, with the tip of her shoe pointing out beneath her hem.

In 1921 Pauline wrote the Alumnae Association that she was ‘continuing her journalistic work in New York and is now a member of the Vogue writing staff.’ She made a six months’ tour of Europe in 1922-23 and spent the winter of 1925 in Paris. In 1930 she was listed as Mrs. William ( sic) Ernest Hemingway of Key West, Florida.

A letter to her former teacher Sister Alexis Phelan, sent while Pauline was working for Vogue, describes her life in Paris. Published in the school magazine, it was prefaced by a gushing editorial comment that exaggerated her influence: ‘had we foreseen her then as the future arbitrator of American fashions how we would have aped her variations of that old black uniform!’ Pauline tells the Sister that she feels a little desolate as Virginia has just left to spend the winter with the family. She’s so busy with work on Vogue that she thinks she might be in Paris for the rest of her life. But, she adds, ‘unless you are in a convent, you can’t always be sure you are anywhere for life, can you? I thought I should always live in New York four years ago.’ She’s had some difficulty adjusting from schoolgirl to Parisian French and confesses: ‘not speaking it fluently gives me a feeling of being robbed all the time. And I can understand none of the jokes in French farces – which you would say perhaps is just as well.’

She then criticises lax French Catholics and implicitly contrasts them to the properly bred convent girls at Visitation: ‘They are a genre to themselves. I fear their consciences were not prudently formed when they were children, for they follow their own inclinations in all things. They eat meat on Friday, arrive at Mass at any time, if at all.’ However, she hastens to assure Sr. Phelan that she’s staying with a strictly observant Catholic family and has received ‘nineteen rosaries blessed by the Pope, all given me by fervent pilgrims to Rome.’ Pauline tells the Sister what she wants to hear and is tactfully silent about her social, drinking and sexual life (if any) in that depraved city of sin. Hadley, sealing her doom, befriended Pauline when they met in Paris in 1925. Two years later, after her secret affair with Hemingway, Pauline married him.

The current Prospectus of the John Burroughs School, which Martha (born in 1908) attended, idealistically states that it ‘was founded in 1923 by a group of parents who sought to establish a new type of school in St. Louis. It was to be coeducational, nonsectarian and college preparatory. Our founders believed in simplicity, service, concern for nature, democracy, individuality and the highest academic standards.’

On September 21, 2017, the current headmaster, Andy Abbott, wrote me about the origin of the school:

Martha Gellhorn not only attended Burroughs, but she is often cited as one of the reasons for the school’s existence. . . . The school was founded by a group of parents in 1923 and her father was one of the founders. They were all parents of girls, and at the time the only schools for girls were very traditional--the two most popular and well regarded were Mary Institute where Hemingway’s first wife attended and Visitation, a parochial school, where his second wife went to school.

Dr. Gellhorn, according to legend, wanted a school for girls that “taught biology below the neck” and that embraced John Dewey’s ideas of progressive education. He and the other parents approached

the existing schools about making their curricula more progressive, but they all refused and so the parents decided to start their own school. They reached out to the presidents of some of the top women’s colleges in the East to ask about progressive education for women, and those presidents said that if the school wanted to be truly progressive, they should be co-educational, and so Burroughs was co-ed at the outset.

Martha Gellhorn [who transferred from the Mary Institute] was a student when the school opened in October of 1923 and she was in the first graduating class of seniors in the spring of 1926.

Named after the American naturalist John Burroughs, the school began with seventy-five pupils and ten teachers. It was located in the countryside near St. Louis and emphasised outdoor life and individual development. A long-winded peroration in the Announcement of May 1924 declared it was ‘founded upon the conviction that each normal child has latent possibilities of power, and that it is the chief purpose of the school to cooperate with parents in discovering, fostering and developing that power in order that, in adulthood, he shall perform his satisfying work, and that he shall make his contribution to the improvement of human society.’ The prosperous parents also had to make a considerable contribution of $1,000 a year tuition, almost three times the cost of Visitation.

Martha, involved in all the activities of the school, was an energetic leader. She was Speaker of the Assembly, President of the Athletic Association and member of the Hockey Team. As President of the Dramatic Association she played a leading role in John Masefield’s The Locked Chest which, her biographer Carl Rollyson writes, portrays ‘a woman who leaves her cowardly husband for refusing to shelter a relative falsely accused of murder.’

She was also on the board of the John Burroughs Review, where she published several works. With strained humor she praised an old hat that was remodelled as an Easter bonnet. In an ironic defence of her young life,

‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua,’ she rebelled against social conventions and argued that good intentions could lead to bad results. She concluded by vowing: ‘I will prepare my lessons, and someone else may receive the master’s scorn. I will seethe loudly and furiously when next my desk mate mutilates my eraser. I will get the car every morning and cause some innocent person to be uncomfortable. I will eat only half my brother’s candy, leaving enough for him to get sick on.’ The following year, aged seventeen, she apologised to her mother for the faults she had described in her story: ‘My extreme selfishness . . . made me indifferent to you and to everyone except myself.’ The Senior Annals that year politely but inaccurately praised her as ‘the magnificent Martie . . . sane and sweet-tempered.’ Her untitled ‘Poem’ of 1926 was more mature and accomplished. Her chromatic and overwrought paean to the power and beauty of the sun repeats ‘I have watched’ at dawn, noon and evening, and concludes with the hope ‘That Life will be / As strong, and proud, and beautiful, / As the magnificent Sun.’ Martha, like Hadley, also followed her mother to Bryn Mawr, but became bored after her third year and left college to pursue her career in the real world.

Hemingway’s wives had a superior education in three elite but very different institutions in St. Louis. Hadley – a pleasant, conventional, slightly dowdy wife—had a son with Hemingway. But when he felt she was not a suitable wife for a successful author, she reluctantly agreed to a divorce. She then had a happy second marriage to the journalist Paul Mowrer, and died at the age of eighty-seven in 1979.

Despite her strict Catholic upbringing and studies, Pauline conducted a predatory adulterous affair with Hemingway and stole her best friend’s husband. Yet the guilt-ridden convent girl continued to be a strict Catholic and tried unsuccessfully to convert Hemingway to the faith. She had two sons with him, but her refusal to use contraceptives (he later said) hurt their sexual life and ruined their marriage. Pauline’s sister Virginia was a lesbian, and after her divorce Pauline also had lesbian liaisons with the poet Elizabeth Bishop and other women. She died, aged fifty-six in 1951, during a minor operation.

Martha fulfilled her early promise, fought for many just causes and had a distinguished career. In 1998, at the end of her long life, the ninety-twoyear-old Martha, stricken by liver cancer and nearly blind, committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill. Hadley’s school was traditional, Pauline’s parochial, Martha’s progressive. Hadley and the more ambitious Martha were positively influenced by their education, Pauline rebelled against and then returned to her Catholic background.