The second Mrs Hemingway’s afterlife

In recent years three writers have attempted to rehabilitate Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.  The first of these came in 2009, when her son and grandson published a radical revision of his autobiographical work A Moveable Feast that tried to change her negative image. Since then there have been two further attempts to exonerate her.

Who was Pauline Pfeiffer (1895-1951)? She was born in Iowa and grew up in Piggott, Arkansas.  Her father Paul owned the local bank, the land office, the cotton gin company, and ruled the region like a feudal lord.  Her Uncle Gustavus Adolphus Pfeiffer (named after a Swedish warrior-king) was a multi-millionaire who owned several worldwide pharmaceutical corporations that were finally bought by Pfizer.

Pauline was sent to a Catholic high school in St. Louis and graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri.  She worked on two newspapers and the magazine Vanity Fair, and had been engaged in New York to her cousin Matthew Herold.  After graduating from Harvard Law School, he became the attorney for the Pfeiffer companies.  Pauline and her younger sister Jinny went to Paris in 1921.  She worked for Main Bocher, editor of the French Vogue, attended fashion shows and sent in reports.

Small and dark, with a boyish figure, bobbed hair and cloche hat, Pauline was spoiled, self-assured and ambitious.  Like all the Pfeiffers she was used to getting whatever she wanted.  Like the acquisitive and demanding young woman in Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain” who insists—“I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles.  And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes”—Pauline wrote to Hemingway’s wife Hadley, “I’m going to get a bicycle and ride in the Bois.  I am going to get a saddle too.  I am going to get everything I want.”

There’s no information about Pauline’s sex life before she met Hemingway in Paris in March 1925.  But she was far from home and parents, moved in a sophisticated and sexually free society. So she was probably not a virgin at the age of thirty—rather late in those days to remain unmarried.  Bored with the matronly Hadley and eager for stimulating new experience, Hemingway was attracted to Pauline’s chic style and impressive wealth.  She was exciting, flattered and flattering, took the initiative and seduced him.

In January 1926 Pauline joined the Hemingways, who were skiing in Shruns, Austria.  In February, while Hemingway was en route to New York for publishing business, Pauline met him in Paris.  She disingenuously wrote to Hadley, who remained in Austria, “your husband, Ernest, was a delight to me.  I tried to see him as much as he would see me and was possible.”  She told her family, more frankly, “I feel he should be warned that I’m going to cling to him like a millstone and old moss and winter ivy.”  She showered praise on The Torrents of Spring (1926), his satire on Sherwood Anderson, at a time when Hadley, his friends and editors disliked the book.

They had few common interests.  Hemingway cared nothing about Piggott (her home town), the Catholic Church, women’s fashion, expensive men’s clothing, pricey restaurants, luxurious furnishings and Spanish antiques.  Pauline was not athletic but, like a good sport, went along with Hemingway’s passion for Austrian skiing, German bike races, Spanish bullfighting and African big-game hunting.  She disliked Caribbean deep-sea fishing and the rough life on his boat the Pilar. In the late 1930s Hemingway was deeply committed to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and risked his life while reporting from the front.  In a rare but damaging disagreement, Pauline (as a loyal Catholic) supported Franco’s fascists.

In Paris in 1925, just before he met Pauline, Hemingway had felt frustrated by his longing for the attractive and promiscuous Duff Twysden, and he turned to Pauline for satisfaction.  She knew that if she wanted to capture Hemingway she would have to sleep with him, and they became lovers when they met in Paris.  Her biographer Ruth Hawkins reports that in their hotel on the French Riviera in the summer of 1926, “Pauline, an early riser, came to the Hemingways’ bedroom each morning, wearing a robe over tomboy pajamas, and crawled into bed with them.  The three shared breakfast in bed along with a lot of playfulness that took on sexual overtones.”  These daily frolics were even more exciting when Hadley watched him fooling around with Pauline.  He liked the snake in the garden, the thrill, devotion and loyalty of his lover, and even claimed that his affair made him more kind and responsive to Hadley.

When Hadley finally confronted Hemingway and asked if he loved Pauline, he was not apologetic or contrite, acted as if nothing had happened and continued to see her.  Hadley recalled that he even blamed her for forcing the issue: “If she hadn’t brought the affair out in the open, it would not be a problem.  He saw nothing wrong with the status quo.”  Hadley then insisted that Hemingway and Pauline should separate for 100 days, and if they still loved each other after that time she would agree to divorce him.  She later thought she should have allowed him to burn out his passion for Pauline: keeping them apart merely increased their desire.

Pauline returned to Piggott.  During their separation and despite their lack of common interests, she excused their adultery by claiming their love was unique and that amor omnia vincit (love conquers everything): “We are the same guy. . . . You and I have something that only about two persons in one or several centuries get.  And having it . . . we can’t face life without each other.”

She felt that if someone must sacrifice and suffer it had to be Hadley, and even took responsibility for their affair: “We tried to be so swell (and who were swell) didn’t give Hadley a chance.  We were so scared we might lose each other—at least I was—that Hadley got locked out.  I don’t think you did this the way I did.  I think the times Hadley doesn’t hate me she must know that I was just blind dumb.”  In an unpublished story Hemingway’s hero rejects Pauline’s justification and believes that they were guilty: “She had thought it was a great sin, however, and it was only justified to her by how much they loved each other.  Even then it was not justified.  It was too great a sin.”

By September 1926 the unregenerate Pauline, unconcerned about her reputation, told Hemingway she’d proudly proclaim that she now possessed a lover: “I don’t care if you say to Hadley that we were living together in Paris.  I don’t care at all.  I mean this.  You tell anybody anything you want.”  It was difficult to reconcile her behavior with her Catholic beliefs, but Pauline wanted to please him sexually.  Since she feared pregnancy they must have used contraceptives before they married.  Once she had snared him, she became guilt-ridden and pious, and refused to use them.

But their precautions didn’t always work, and there are hints of an abortion in Hemingway’s letters and fiction.  In November-December 1926 he compared their separation to an abortion and revealed that Pauline had had that operation: “I think that when two people love each other terribly much and need each other in every way and then go away from each other it works almost as bad as an abortion. . . . Maybe we’ll have a little guts and not try self-sacrifices [and separations] in the middle of surgical operations.”

In “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), a man tries to persuade his reluctant lover to have an abortion.  In To Have and Have Not (1937), the furious wife mentions the disastrous effects of abortion pills and screams at her husband who’d forced her to take them:  “Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. . . . Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to.  Love is my insides all messed up.”

Hadley divorced Hemingway in January 1927 and, still in Paris, he married Pauline in May.  They moved into an elegant apartment in a high-windowed, four-story house with a courtyard at 6 rue Férou, a quiet narrow street off the Jardin du Luxembourg.  It had a large bedroom, living and dining rooms, small study, child’s room, two bathrooms and a well-appointed kitchen.  The outdoor toilet and old sawmill of his dreary flat with Hadley were left far behind.  (This change resembled Picasso’s transformation from humble to luxurious quarters after he married a Russian ballerina.)

Uncle Gus  advanced the money to pay for the flat, just as he later paid for their Ford car in 1929, the grand house in Key West in 1931 and $25,000 for their African safari during the Depression in 1934.  He created trust funds for Hemingway’s widowed mother and oldest son Jack, advised him about investments and in 1935 even offered to put up $800,000 to build a bullring in Havana.

The bountiful and generous Gus, who had no children, gave Hemingway the kind of creative and adventurous life he would have liked to have if he hadn’t devoted himself to making money.  (Hemingway slyly revealed that Gus made perfume for a few cents a bottle and sold it for a dollar.)  At Gus’ death in 195,  his estate was valued at $15 million.  In exchange, it must be noted, Hemingway dedicated A Farewell to Arms to Gus, and gave him the manuscripts of that novel and For Whom the Bell Tolls, “Fifty Grand,” “The Killers,” “The Undefeated” and two Esquire articles — all of  which became tremendously valuable as their author’s fame increased.

The advantages of Gus’ wealth were simultaneously undermined by the drawbacks of Pauline’s Catholicism, a crucial factor in her character, her affair with Hemingway, their marriage and their divorce.  She felt guilty before her marriage and penitential after it.  She adjusted her religion to suit herself, embraced or abandoned it according to her needs, and risked her soul to get Hemingway.  She was an observant Catholic, yet committed adultery and broke up the marriage of a close friend who had a small child.  At the same time she encouraged Hemingway to attend Mass.  Since the Church did not recognize his Methodist marriage (which made Jack a bastard), she was able to marry a divorced man in church.  She insisted that Hemingway had indeed become a Catholic when, wounded and unconscious in a wartime Milan hospital, he was baptised by an Italian priest.  Hemingway cynically remarked, “Hell, any man could become a Catholic for a million bucks.”  He hated the prohibition of contraceptives, which (he believed) made many women, including Pauline, risk death by going through a dangerous pregnancy soon after a difficult childbirth.  Pauline later regretted her intransigence and told Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary, “If I hadn’t been such a bloody fool practicing Catholic, I wouldn’t have lost my husband.”

Pauline later confessed to Gregory, “Gig, I just don’t have much of what’s called a maternal instinct, I guess.  I can’t stand horrid little children until they are five or six—though they’re still pretty awful then.”  She always put her husband before her children.  In 1928 she left the infant Patrick with her parents and followed Hemingway for hunting in Wyoming; in 1934 she left the baby Gregory at home with his fierce nanny Ada Stern and went on the African safari.

Jack and Patrick both hated Ada, who had a violent temper and called Greg “a little shitsky.”  A silent, tyrannical, blue-eyed Prussian spinster from Syracuse, New York, Ada had a disastrous effect on Greg’s personality and later life.  Her rages terrified him and intensified his emotional dependence.  He wrote that in his childhood “any infraction of her innumerable rules would cause her to fly into a screaming fit . . . . She would pack her bags and go hobbling down the stairs with me clinging to her skirts, screaming, ‘Ada, don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’ ”  Patrick confirmed that Ada had serious emotional problems and was a secret drinker, a lesbian and a “pretty monstrous woman.”  Indifferent to Ada’s cruelty, Pauline failed to rescue Greg from her clutches and give him the maternal love he desperately needed.

In July 1932, eight months after Greg’s birth, another marital crisis erupted when Pauline became pregnant again.  The panic-stricken but still joking Hemingway wrote to Dr. Carlos Guffey, who’d delivered their second baby in Kansas City: “I could not believe she was pregnant as have either practiced withdrawal or used Havana’s best Safeties and withdrawal. . . . Frankly I do not see how she could be starting to be pregnant as have never relaxed vigilance. . . .  However a certain amount of semen gets splattered around and this of mine seems very virulent.  Pauline’s religion prevented her from taking precautions.  To hell with religion in this respect.”  It seems that she would not take precautions, but would allow him to use several kinds of birth control.  This time Pauline took abortion pills again, resumed her periods and had no more children.  The next month Hemingway told Pauline’s devout Irish-Catholic mother that he had driven a 372 mile round trip to get the guilt-ridden Pauline to the nearest Catholic church in Montana for Easter service.

Hemingway once warned Pauline’s Key West friend Lorine Thompson, “You must not get too attached to things and people in life, you know, because of the disappointment in having to give them up eventually.”  He had an affair in Havana with the wild and stunning Jane Mason in the early 1930s; and with the dazzling journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn, whom he’d met in Key West, when they were reporting the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Hemingway’s affair with Martha had an uncanny resemblance to his affair with Pauline.  Like Pauline, Martha was a youthful, attractive, glamorous and fashionably dressed woman.  She too insinuated herself into the household, courted the passive Hemingway, who became her athletic instructor while his wife was preoccupied with domestic duties, and wrote endearing letters thanking the wife for her kind hospitality.  In both cases the affair was conducted secretly and at a safe distance.  When Pauline discovered it, she (like Hadley) remained tolerant, struggled to hold onto her husband and maintain her marriage.  But the lover eventually displaced the wife.

Hemingway often unloaded his own guilt onto convenient scapegoats.  He blamed his mother for his father’s suicide, Pauline for the breakup of his first marriage, Greg for Pauline’s death.  When Martha threatened their marriage, Pauline’s betrayal of Hadley justified Martha’s betrayal of Pauline.  Hemingway fatalistically declared, “If you deceive and lie with one person against another you will eventually do it again.”  Though Pauline chose to be a wife more than a mother, she lost both her husband and the affection of her younger son.  Lorine Thompson thought that if they had remained married, Pauline’s spoiled and self-indulgent character would have prevented her from taking proper care of the sick and depressed Hemingway: “it would have been very difficult for Pauline, because of the type of person she was, to live with Ernest in his last years.”

Pauline’s younger sister Jinny was the longtime lover of Laura Archera, the wife of Aldous Huxley, both before and after her marriage.  Patrick recalled that “Jinny was lesbian and she was quite keen on getting my mother to be homosexual as well.”  After her divorce in November 1940 Pauline lost interest in sexual relations with men.  In 1946 she turned to her own sex for consolation and had affairs with the poet Elizabeth Bishop and several other women.

In Los Angeles in late September 1951 Greg, wearing ladies’ clothing, was arrested in a women’s bathroom.  When Pauline phoned Hemingway with the evil tidings, he blamed her for Greg’s condition, they quarreled bitterly and she sobbed uncontrollably.  On October 1 she had an agonizing hemorrhage and died unexpectedly on the operating table.  Hemingway wounded Greg by blaming him for her death, and they never met during the last decade of his life.  When Greg became a doctor he read Pauline’s autopsy report and was relieved to find that he had not been responsible.  She died, in fact, from a rare tumour of the adrenal gland.  Since Pauline’s marriage had ended in divorce she could not, as she wished, be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

Greg had a disastrous life.   He suffered from alcoholism and manic depression. He went through four broken marriages, transvestism, mental breakdowns, confinement in asylums, scores of self-prescribed shock treatments and unsuccessful sex change operations.  After the latter he married a woman who used to be a man.  In September 2001 Greg (now renamed Gloria), while walking naked in public and carrying women’s clothing, was arrested in Florida for indecent exposure and had a fatal heart attack in a women’s prison in Miami.

In 2012 Pauline’s biographer and first defender Ruth Hawkins (who says nothing about her Vogue articles or lesbian affairs) claimed that the worldly fashion reporter was quite innocent and argued that she was unable to distinguish between good and evil: “Rather than Pauline being the shrewd man-hunting female who calculatedly took Hemingway away from his first wife . . . she was a naïve woman, inexperienced with men, who became enamored with Ernest beyond all ability to judge or care about right or wrong.”

In Vogue of June 8, 2016 Lesley Blume, who wrote a poor book on Hemingway, insisted, “What gets overlooked, however, are Pauline’s own hard-earned accomplishments . . . as a successful fashion journalist for Vogue.” Pauline’s accomplishments, such as they are, have nothing to do with her treacherous behaviour towards Hadley.

Blume maintains that Pauline was “smart, witty, stylish,” but offers no examples of her wit.  She quotes Pauline emphasizing the liberating break with her background by stating, “I certainly never expected that I should become a new woman.  No one in my family was ever anything new.”  Her frenetic existence, Blume writes, was “filled with reporter’s notebooks, fashion shows, boutique visits and copy: she covered accessories, apparel and general trends and happenings in the world of la mode.” Blume claims that Pauline and Hemingway “spoke a common language and lived in overlapping spheres of high-stakes journalistic pressure.”  But his work as a foreign correspondent and war reporter was completely different from her gossipy, trivial and cliché-ridden reports for a women’s magazine.  Blume compares Pauline’s description of a fashionable Italian shoemaker, which silently quotes Thomas Carlyle’s definition of genius in his Frederick the Great, to Hemingway’s superb achievement.  The shoemaker  “gives the impression of great energy and tremendous earnestness—both excellent qualities for a creator.  Untold labor is involved in his designs.  Genius still remains an infinite capacity for taking pains.”  “This” (writes Blume) “was the same sort of summary pronouncement that Hemingway specialised in when describing his own journalistic subjects” (italics mine).  But Blume’s tin-eared comparison is absurd.

She concludes with a weak argument: “Pauline as husband bait, Pauline as predator: This is how she has been portrayed. . . . But it takes two to participate in a successful seduction.”  But Hemingway’s obvious involvement in their affair does not excuse Pauline’s behaviour.

In the last chapter of the posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway blamed the breakup of his first marriage on Pauline, who (he says) was encouraged by his treacherous friends John Dos Passos and Gerald and Sara Murphy.  The title of his memoir, which refers to the shifting dates of feast-days such as Easter in the Church calendar, alludes to the “Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immovable Feasts” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549).  In The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus called the different times of lunch “a moveable feast”. Hemingway subtly changed the title from a positive to a transient and evanescent meaning.  In Across the River and into the Trees (1950) he wrote, “Happiness, as you know, is a moveable feast” that’s likely to disappear.  In True at First Light (published posthumously in 1999), he repeated that “Love . . . is a moveable feast” that could vanish at any time.

Patrick Hemingway, who controls Ernest’s Estate, has authorised extreme changes in the original text of A Moveable Feast.  In The Restored Edition of 2009, Patrick, Pauline’s son (in an irrelevant Foreword that compared different versions of the Bible) and Sean Hemingway, her grandson (in an Introduction) attempted to whitewash and rehabilitate Pauline.  Ignoring her behaviour, responsibility and guilt, and placing the blame on Hemingway, Sean wrote of “his betrayal of Hadley with Pauline . . . the remorse that Hemingway expresses and the responsibility that he accepts for the breakup. . . . He comes across in the posthumous first edition as something of an unknowing victim, which clearly he was not”—though his role as victim is not at all clear.

Sean deleted the last chapter of the 1964 edition, so the incomplete and misleading text of The Restored Edition ends with a satire on Scott Fitzgerald — instead of the original final chapter that concluded by criticizing Pauline and praising Hadley.  Sean then shifted the original last chapter to a new section called “Additional Paris Sketches,” but his reasoning fails to justify the radical change: “[Hemingway] decided that it was not the ending he wanted since he considered his marriage to Pauline a beginning, and this ending clearly left the heroine of the book, Hadley, abandoned and alone.”  But Ernest Hemingway himself gave a very different meaning of Hadley “alone” at the end of that chapter: “I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone.”

Hemingway’s unpublished passage on A Moveable Feast in the Kennedy Library in Boston, not quoted by Sean, contradicts his grandson’s distorted view and reveals Hemingway’s intention to tell the truth about Pauline:  “[The memoir] could be a good book because it tells many things that no one knows or can ever know and it has love, remorse, contrition, and unbelievable happiness and final sorrow.”

The deleted and shifted last chapter contains, paradoxically, some new passages that emphasize Pauline’s betrayal of Hadley.  The unnamed Pauline first demanded that he choose between them and give her all his love: “The new one says you cannot really love her if you love your wife too. . . . The one who is relentless wins.”  Referring to their skiing holiday in Austria, he describes Pauline’s diabolical deceit, her apparently

innocent betrayal of Hadley and the separation that intensified his passion: “sometime in the middle of winter she began to move steadily and relentlessly toward marriage; never breaking her friendship with your wife, never losing any advantage of position, always preserving an appearance of complete innocence, going away elaborately but only being away at any time long enough so that you would miss her too  badly.”  He disapproved of Pauline’s cunning maneuvers but admired the love that inspired them.  Hemingway concludes by stressing Pauline’s deep-rooted guilt that could not be extinguished and helped destroy their marriage: “[She] made only one grave mistake.  She undervalued the power of remorse . . . so the black remorse came and hatred of the sin and no contrition, only a terrible remorse. . . . For the girl to deceive her friend was a terrible thing.”

To answer Pauline’s unconvincing defenders and conclude the case against her:

In a prolonged and deliberate deception she befriended Hadley and her little boy, stole her husband and had an adulterous affair with him.  She became a zealous Catholic while attempting to assuage her sin and guilt, forbade the use of contraceptives, spoiled their sex life and damaged their marriage.  She made him accept his involuntary baptism, invalidated his first marriage and persuaded the sceptic (who carried a lucky rabbit’s foot) to attend church.  She left Greg for many months with a cruel nanny, never rescued him and ruined his life.  She protected Hemingway instead of helping Greg when he was arrested.  No amount of tinkering with a well-established text, in print for nearly 60 years, can change these facts.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has recently published Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real (2016) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).  His book on his friend James Salter will be out in spring 2024.

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