BELLES’ TOLL
He was good and mostly he was true and they loved him.
F ROM Hadley to Fife, Fife to Martha, and Martha to Mary, Ernest Hemingway’s four wives would all carry the title Mrs Hemingway as both crown and cross, enslaved by the author’s grand narrative. Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemingway is a tale of grand narratives or, more accurately, the intersections of grand narratives, as each Mrs Hemingway watches Ernest slip from her to the next Mrs H.
Based on meticulous research, which Wood neatly embeds so as not to overshadow her fictional account of the Hemingways, this multiple-voice narration allows the reader to experience four very different sides of Ernest.
Wood begins her tale with Hadley Richardson, Ernest’s first bride, but sets the scene where Fife — Pauline Pfeifer — has already become Ernest’s lover. But Fife is not a foe; she is Hadley’s best friend and has come on holiday with her and Ernest at Hadley’s insistence. Much more boyish than Hadley, Fife falls madly in love with Ernest and is set on becoming the second Mrs Hemingway. She ultimately wins his affections and becomes his second wife in May of 1927.
Fife’s 12 years with the author mark an important phase in the Hemingway narrative, but it comes to an acrimonious end when Martha Gellhorn meets her hero in Key West during December of 1936. “All she wanted to do was talk books with him. Perhaps pick up some tips,” writes Wood. But it seems Ernest needed to marry his muses. Where Hadley had conceded, Fife fought, but in the end, the spirited Martha reluctantly took the accursed title.
It’s through Martha that we become familiar with the faltering Ernest. For both Hadley and Fife, Ernest was a legend. But Martha is his equal. A writer and war correspondent in her own right, she matches him in stature and so they become known as the couple made of “flint and steel”. This is what finishes them in the end.
When Mary Welsh met Ernest in Paris during the war in 1944, Martha finally reclaimed her independence. The Welsh-Hemingway alliance proved to be the perfect exit strategy and Mary married Ernest in Cuba in 1946, becoming the last Mrs Hemingway. Ernest was writing less and drinking increasingly to stave off depression and paranoia. But there were some golden moments: He published The Old Man and the
Sea to great acclaim and was awarded the Nobel Prize. But despite a few good years, Ernest couldn’t face the world any longer and took his own life in 1961. “This is it, he might have thought. And the world is done.”
This is a remarkable retelling of the marriages of the most famous writer of his generation.
They become known as the couple made of ‘flint and steel’