AE Hotchner has been writing books about his friendship with Ernest Hemingway for 50 years: Papa Hemingway (1966) was later revised as Papa Hemingway: The Ecstasy and Sorrow; then came Hemingway and His World and other celebrity memoirs, including Doris Day: Her Own Story and Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story. Hotchner also intervened in various public debates about Hemingway, especially around the editing and posthumous publication of A Moveable Feast, the memoir of Hemingway’s idyllic early years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, left unfinished when Hemingway killed himself in 1961. The much mythologised, often retold “true” story behind A Moveable Feast forms the basis of the latest addition to Hotchner’s oeuvre.
Lest one wonder how firm a purchase Hotchner has on the concept of someone’s “own story”, he reassures his reader that he has absolute recall of his conversations with Hemingway 60 years ago, in which the writer recounted with equal accuracy his conversations from 30 years earlier. Hotchner recorded their conversations (on tapes that quickly disintegrated, he admits) and wrote them down afterwards (the pair were drinking heavily, but never mind). The conversations were intermittent and interrupted, stretching over several years, and formed the basis of Papa Hemingway; however, Hotchner claims that out of deference to Hemingway’s fourth wife and widow, Mary, he withheld significant aspects of the story, which he now shares as what the blurb describes as“the intimate and repentantly candid chapter missing from the definitive biography of a literary giant”.
However candid it may be, very little in this “chapter” – an apt word for so brief a reminiscence – was missing, and none of it is remotely surprising to anyone familiar with the story of Hemingway’s years in Paris. Setting aside doubts about the reliability of memories, Hotchner also airily dismisses such bagatelles as subjectivity. Hotchner’s view of Hemingway is true, while everyone else’s is “mythical”: “The more our friendship grew, the more I realised that the stories that had circulated about his gruff, pugnacious personality were a myth invented by people who didn’t know him but judged him by the subjects that he wrote about.” The idea that Hemingway couldn’t have had a “gruff, pugnacious” side because Hotchner didn’t see it (or chooses not to remember it) is belied by the equally firsthand accounts of dozens of people who knew Hemingway quite as well as Hotchner.
Nor does Hotchner bring updated perspectives to bear on our understanding of his friend. Discussing Hemingway’s well-documented paranoia and suicidal depression in the final years of his life, Hotchner explains: “the roots of this suffering had not been uncovered, if, indeed, they ever would be. I had tried to reason with him, attempting to help him overcome some of his destructive phobias.” Hotchner seems unaware of the fact that, since 1961, we’ve learned that depression and paranoia are not susceptible to reason, and may not develop from “root” causes that can be uncovered. Nor does he mention, even in passing, the question of heritable mental illness, or the fact that Hemingway’s father took his own life, as later did his sister, his brother and his granddaughter. Instead, Hotchner triumphantly finishes his story by revealing the widely reported fact that Hemingway was under surveillance by the FBI, which he seems to feel acquits him of charges of paranoia. But J Edgar Hoover wasn’t biased against the paranoid: he spied on them, too.
Hemingway in Love pitches a very familiar story in a slightly different key, adding only a few grace notes that I don’t recall seeing before, such as when Hadley tells Hemingway she should have known he was having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife: “When you laugh, she laughs. When you take umbrage, she’s your umbragette.” Or there is the superb line Hemingway reports from Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Many have speculated about whether Hemingway and Duff had an affair; according to Hotchner, Hemingway said they came close, but Duff refused, explaining: “I don’t have much in the way of scruples or beliefs or religion, but what I have in place of God is my rock-solid resolution not to fuck married men.” This, presumably, is the source for Brett Ashley’s noble pronouncement: “I will not be one of those bitches that ruins children.”
On occasion Hotchner gives us a more honourable, and honest, Hemingway than generally circulates, one who finally admits that for all his later high-minded insistence about the artistic purity of poverty, he probably enjoyed Pfeiffer’s wealth. But we also get the familiar, tiresome, self-exculpating charges from Feast that blame Pfeiffer entirely for their affair: she employed “schemes and ruses, subterfuges and connivances” to seduce helpless, naive Hemingway. His self-pity and egotism remain overpowering: he recalls receiving a distressed letter from Hadley, which “made me feel her pain, her exclusion, the loss I had inflicted on her, and my thoughts became very concerned about my soul”. So much for worrying about Hadley.
Perhaps the most surprising, and welcome, aspect of this version is the way in which it puts Scott Fitzgerald in the more central place he should properly take in Hemingway’s Paris years, rather than in the marginalised, foolish position he occupies in the original Feast. It was Fitzgerald who introduced Hemingway to Duff Twysden and her circle, as well as to Pfeiffer. Of more literary significance is the useful professional and editorial advice he consistently gave Hemingway, which is not always popularly recognised, largely because Feast notoriously includes only three spiteful poison pen letters to Fitzgerald. (This despite Hemingway’s having written to his publisher three months before he died that the manuscript of Feast that Hotchner had delivered to them was not to be published because it was not fair to Fitzgerald, or to his first two wives – a detail that Hotchner omits from this book.) Fitzgerald convinced Hemingway to cut the first third of The Sun Also Rises, vastly improving the manuscript; here Hotchner has Hemingway admitting that Fitzgerald similarly improved his classic short story “Fifty Grand”: it “was damned good,” Fitzgerald said, “but would be better if I shucked the first page and started on page two … the story had more muscle that way.” Hemingway also shares the useful tip that Italian red wines don’t need to breathe, adding: “I got that bit of Bacchanalian wisdom from Fitzgerald,” possibly the first time in history Hemingway has ever been quoted crediting Fitzgerald with knowing more about drinking than he did.
But there are also long stretches of the narrative in which the chronology of Hemingway’s infallible memories becomes entirely muddled. He informs Hotchner that his notorious split with Gertrude Stein over the publication of her book The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas immediately followed the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, implying that she was jealous of his novel’s success. But Toklas wasn’t published until 1933, as Hotchner surely knows. Then “Jim Joyce” unexpectedly jumps in, attacking Stein and defending Hemingway: “That’s the way to deal with her, Hem. Lies are her staff of life, sitting fatly in her salon.” Suddenly we are in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, encountering all the legendary figures in one convenient room: I was surprised Scott and Zelda weren’t doing the Charleston in the background. Lines from A Moveable Feast even appear verbatim in Hemingway’s conversation: “At that moment I wished I had died before loving anyone else,” he declares. Of course, Hemingway might have spoken these words to Hotchner: if he did, it shows how rehearsed and mythologised the story of Feast was already becoming in his mind by 1954. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone either, for mythmaking was always the story of Hemingway’s life.
• Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby is published by Little, Brown. To order Hemingway in Love for £11.99 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
