Woman who poisoned Hemingway with wealth
Falling for a flat-chested heiress proved a VERY costly mistake
THE YEAR’S BEST BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS
HEMINGWAY IN LOVE: HIS OWN STORY
by A. E. Hotchner
(Picador £14.95)
THIS slim book of confession may be regarded as something that Hemingway left out of his memoir of Paris in the Twenties, A Moveable Feast. it is his confession at how sorely he came to regret wrecking his first marriage to Hadley, an ideal wife, by falling just as powerfully in love with poisonous Pauline, who became his second.
These passages were removed by lawyers from the biography Papa Hemingway, written by his old friend A. E. Hotchner.
now 95, Hotchner says he is the only person who remembers what Papa said, relying only on his ‘strong memory’.
living over a saw mill with a baby son, on scarcely enough to eat, Ernest, yet to be recognised as a writer, is happy. He loves his wife, Hadley, a fresh-faced, long-haired, outdoor girl, a good sport with bow or rod or ski.
into this menage stalked Miss Vogue herself: flat-chested, lipsticked and perfumed Pauline Pfeiffer. She was one of the rich Americans who roved France husband-hunting.
She met Hemingway at a literary party and decided he was her target, never mind the wife and small son. She was a girl who always got what she wanted. But once she got him into bed, he didn’t see why he couldn’t have both women. Hadley only put up with it for so long.
The lovers of the Hemingway-Paris merry-goround will enjoy another slug of it with the usual characters, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who warned Ernest: ‘A man torn between two women will end up losing them both.’
Hemingway did, after a million- dollar wedding and a period of discovering how boring it could be being rich in Piggott, Arkansas. later, he said, he grew to see the rich as a blight, like fungus that kills tomato. Just two weeks before he shot himself, Hotchner saw Ernest who was in hospital for depression.
He was still tormenting himself with the question: ‘When a young man falls in love for the first time, how can he know it will be the one true love of his life?’
STALIN’S ENGLISHMAN: THE LIVES OF GUY BURGESS
by Andrew Lownie
(Hodder £25 % £18.75)
GUY BURGESS has been fated to be classed as the lightweight, the playboy of the Cambridge spy-ring, who ran off to Moscow to escape his scandal and regretted it. Here is the first thorough examination of his acquaintances and the released KGB archives.
it comes up with two surprising conclusions. one — that he was the most effective spy of the Cambridge Five. And two — that his motives were quite genuine; he was and remained a sincere utopian communist.
Communism seems such a dead and dreary belief nowadays that we cannot revive the thrill of the total change it seemed to offer to young intellectuals — particularly those at Cambridge in the Twenties and Thirties. There it flourished among the daringest of dons, as well as agin-thegovernment undergraduates.
For all his louche lifestyle, his drunkenness and unclean linen, Guy was a brilliant student of blazing good looks, considerable wit and buckets of charm.
no wonder dons like Anthony Blunt fell hopelessly in love with him and his ideas. He offered the equation of cleverness with homosexuality, and there was no lack of takers in his upper-class set.
Guy was always in hot water for drunken misbehaviour, during which he often announced that he was a spy for uncle Joe, but he was never in serious danger of the sack. He had too many wellplaced friends and protectors.
For all his idealism, Burgess did not intend to defect with Maclean — merely to deliver him to Soviet agents in Prague. He was trapped by his own side and had to settle for a life in Moscow’s grim government flatland.
He remained loyal, but two sad confessions to visitors were: ‘My life ended when i left london’ and ‘it’s bloody lonely here.’
This superb biography captures the ambiguity Burgess always inspires: he was an absolute rotter
— a cheat, a liar, a betrayer, rotten to the core . . . but, dammit, one always feels a sneaking sympathy for him.
MY HISTORY
by Antonia Fraser
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20)
LaDy ANTONIA, or perhaps we should say Dame antonia, is honest enough to admit to the ‘lift of the heart’ she felt at boarding school when the title ‘The Hon’ first appeared before her name on an envelope. She left the letter uncollected on the table for days. nobody said anything until a girl told her, for heaven’s sake, to collect her beastly mail.
The reason was that her father, Frank Pakenham, had succeeded to the family’s Irish title of Longford.
So much of her childhood was affected by her father’s innocence and eccentricity that this is almost a book about him, rather than her.
Frank Longford’s inability to boil a kettle, let alone an egg, is legendary. on the first night of their married life, he asked his wife how they would wake up in the morning. ‘Won’t they bring us a cup of tea?’ His wife had to explain: ‘Darling, we are they.’
antonia’s own life began as one of the very few female pupils at oxford’s Dragon School. This involved playing rugby. ‘How intoxicating the experience was!’ she avers. She must have learned early the joys of a rough and tumble. Though she admits that, at oxford, ‘I was not very wild . . . but I rather wished I were.’
Then, soon, the burden of her book becomes her discovery and passion for history. She found herself as a pupil of her father as unofficial tutor. ‘Suddenly, my beloved but abstracted parent . . . was transformed into a vigorous, argumentative historian.’
Her course was set. In 1969, her biography of Mary Queen of Scots was published, greeted by a bad review, but astonishing success on the book stalls.
TAKE SIX GIRLS: THE LIVES OF THE MITFORD SISTERS
by Laura Thompson
(Head of Zeus £25)
‘ THESE girls are prize exhibits in the Museum of englishness,’ declares their latest chronicler, Laura Thompson. What was that? Do you know, or are you ever likely to meet, ordinary, everyday english girls whose behaviour and tastes are so extravagant or extreme?
It is their range of extremism, politically and socially, with the nerve of a Mitford to kick over the traces, that makes their fans love to imagine being one. It is partly an illusion that we think of them as a gang when, in fact, 16 years separated their birth.
Undoubtedly, they had a generous serving of talent and individuality for one family whose parents, the redesdales, seem to have been born boring reactionaries.
I knew, and admired, Jessica, a joker with a serious purpose (such as exposing the american funeral racket). She never hit it off with Diana, the wife of fascist Mosley.
But both, you have to admit, showed guts in their flamboyant public stances. It was family policy to admire Hitler. The besotted Unity met him 140 times, usually for tea.
It’s curious that the Fuhrer’s talent for dominating huge gatherings of men was accompanied by a gift for charming small groups of women.
These are a few of the many reactions one always feels to the Mitfords and this is a careful, realistic assessment of their virtues, follies and charm. now they are all gone, will we continue wanting to hear their stories? I suspect so — the kinkiness of aristocrats seems to provoke endless curiosity, even on the level of Downton abbey.