The old literary pugilist’s posthumous career has been busy: lost books (I discovered two, The Dangerous Summer and The Garden of Eden, when I was an editor in the 1980s); hulking biographies; acquaintances’ memoirs. Hemingway in Love is an atypical addition, a series of conversations about his first two marriages, recorded in the 1950s by his friend A E Hotchner.
The subject is riveting. “A man, torn between two women, will lose them both,” Scott Fitzgerald warned his friend when Ernest, married to his first wife, Hadley, fell for the carelessly rich Pauline Pfeiffer. For the rest of his life, Hemingway regretted his greed, and his divorce by Hadley. As a sequel to the memoir A Moveable Feast, this confessional of love not lost but thrown away adds fascinating details (how he cured his impotence in a church, his falling out with James Joyce), but it is the tone of intimate, sorrowful humility in place of boastfulness that moves most.
