The voices of Hemingway’s women

Hemingway has always been considered the quintessential macho writer, but his best fiction shows how sensitively attuned he was to women’s speech. He listened carefully to exactly how women expressed their feelings, and created their characters through suggestive dramatic dialogue, without the narrator’s comments. Though his women are always seen through the eyes of his male hero, their voices define the emotional scenes: they complain, provoke, flirt, adore and condemn. His women were based on significant people in his life: on his mother, his first wife Hadley, the Englishwoman Duff Twysden, his American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, his third wife Martha Gellhorn, the aristocratic Italian Adriana Ivancich, his lover Jane Mason and his former mentor Gertrude Stein. 

Hemingway’s mother is sentimental and misguided; Hadley is obsessively materialistic in one story and bitterly disillusioned in another. The fictional Brett Ashley, Catherine Barkley and Maria have been wounded and traumatised by war. Maria and Renata are teenaged Latin mistresses. Margot Macomber, like Brett, is ironic and bitchy. Gertrude Stein is dogmatic and self-condemned. 

Harold Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” (1925) has survived the war and come back to face his unpleasant mother, whose stifling love is even more difficult to bear than her nagging criticism of his postwar life. After her whining platitudes and religiose pieties, his mother wants her son to affirm his love for her and, despite his lack of faith, to pray with her. Her phony tears force him to suppress his undefined anger, betray his real beliefs and feel revulsion for himself as well as for her:

“Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?”

“No,” Krebs said.

His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.

“I don’t love anybody,” Krebs said.

It wasn’t any good. He couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t make her see it. . . . 

“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was just angry at something. I didn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.

“Can’t you believe me, mother?”

His mother shook her head.

“Please, please, mother. Please believe me.”

“All right,” his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. “I believe you, Harold.”

Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him.

“I’m your mother,” she said. “I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby.”

Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.

Krebs’ extreme reaction clashes effectively with his mother’s cloying sentimentality. Her attempt at emotional blackmail and reminder of his childhood dependence make him realise that he must escape from her clutches and find a newspaper job in Kansas City, just as he had previously escaped to war. The effective contrast of their two voices, of her speech and his thoughts, show her complete lack of awareness about what her son has suffered in war.

Hemingway was aware that many people deliberately repeat themselves to express their emotions, force their listeners to pay attention, emphasise a point and drive home their argument. In “Cat in the Rain” (1925), the bored and restless wife is dissatisfied with her self-absorbed and unresponsive husband George, who tries to ignore her and continues to read. Hemingway satirises the recently married Hadley as an acquisitive American woman who expresses her spoiled and compulsive character in a series of disparate desires and repeats “I want” no fewer than eleven times:

“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,” she said. “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.” . . .

“And 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.” 

“Oh, shut up and get something to read.” . . . 

“Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.”

Most of her personal wants, from long hair to silver and candles, are superficial yet tangible. But it’s impossible for her to summon up spring and difficult to have fun with George. “Anyway” continues her lament, despite his interruption. Stroking the cat and making a big knot she can feel have sexual connotations. The cat in the rain, which she fails to rescue, symbolises her isolation, need for protection and desire to have a baby. The childish Hadley, eight years older than Hemingway, got her wish. The story is set in a Rapallo (below) hotel in January 1923; their son Jack was born ten months later in November.

The woman in “Cat in the Rain” wants to have a baby. In “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), a more subtle and profound story about Hadley’s pregnancy, the man wants to get rid of it. Hemingway criticises the superficial woman in “Cat.” But in “Hills” he sympathises with the woman’s furious hostility to her unmarried lover, rather than with the selfish man. The bored and unhappy couple are waiting for a train in the desolate landscape of the Ebro (which suggests “embryo”) Valley in Spain. She thinks the dry white hills look like the skin of elephants. But the literal-minded man rejects her imaginative perception and their different visions separate them. He cannot understand what she would have to endure in an abortion—a word that’s never mentioned. She perceives the physical and emotional suffering all too well:

“Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t care about me.”

“Well, I care about you.”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.” . . . 

“And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

“What did you say?”

“I said we could have everything.”

“We can have everything.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”

“It’s ours.”

“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

Hemingway expresses the women’s deepest emotions in the simplest sentences and monosyllabic words. The repetitive, contradictory dialogue suggests their alienation as he tries to convince her to have the operation that she doesn’t want. The woman’s self-sacrificial dissociation from her own feelings and well being is shocking. At one point he doesn’t hear or understand what she’s saying, she repeats herself but leaves out “make it more impossible” and he tries to convert her “could have” into an unconvincing “can have”. In the last line the undefined “it” — baby and love — is tragic. 

She finally begs him: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” because everything he says is a self-serving lie and proves that he doesn’t really love her. It’s not true that abortions are simple, safe and perfectly natural, and that many people have them. (This was the 1920s.) Paradoxically, if she agrees to have an abortion to regain his love, she will never be able love him again. The two Hadley stories suggest serious problems in their marriage, which ended in 1926 when Hemingway fell in love with Pauline Pfeiffer.

In The Sun Also Rises (1926) the volatile English Lady Brett Ashley is mannish and sexy, sophisticated and witty, bitter and pathetic. She drops in and out of the novel as she moves from France and through Spain, becomes serially involved with Jake Barnes, his friend Robert Cohn, her bankrupt fiancé Mike Campbell and the bullfighter Pedro Romero, and bounces back at the end to her hopeless relations with Jake. Brett, Hemingway’s most complex woman character, appears in his first and best novel. She’s introduced in Paris, appears with a group of homosexuals and asks to “give a chap a brandy and soda”. Provocative and witty, she teases Jake for spoiling things by bringing a prostitute into their social circle: 

“It’s a fine crowd you’re with, Brett,” [Jake] said.

“Aren’t they lovely? And you, my dear. Where did you get it?”

“At the Napolitain [café].”

“And have you had a lovely evening?”

“Oh, priceless,” I said.

Brett laughed. “It’s wrong of you, Jake. It’s an insult to all of us” . . . 

“It’s in restraint of trade,” Brett said. She laughed again.

“You’re wonderfully sober,” I said.

“Yes. Aren’t I? And when one’s with the crowd I’m with, one can drink in such safety, too.”

In this brief but telling exchange, Brett and Jake, old frustrated friends, taunt each other about having inappropriate sexual partners instead of being with each other. She laughs twice at her own witty remark about the whore’s “restraint of trade” and he comments on the unusual sobriety of his alcoholic friend. At the end of that scene she tells Jake, her sympathetic confessor, that despite her superficial jollity, “I’ve been so miserable.”

In the next scene the passionate, regretful and guilty Brett is frustrated by Jake’s sexual impotence. She still desires him, though she can’t have him, either emotionally or physically:

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Please don’t touch me. . . 

“I can’t stand it.” . . . 

“You mustn’t. You must know. I can’t stand it, that’s all. Oh, darling, please understand!”

“Don’t you love me?”

“Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” . . . 

“There’s not a damn thing we could do.” . . . 

“But, darling, I have to see you.” . . . 

“When I think of the hell I put chaps through. I’m paying for it all now.”

In the most subtle scene she manages to give him some sort of sexual satisfaction:

“Poor old darling,” She stroked my head. . . .

Then later: “Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any 

better?” . . . 

“Couldn’t we live together, Brett? Couldn’t we just live together?” “I don’t think so. I’d just tromper you with everybody. You couldn’t stand it.”

Jake is now unusually hopeful about the possibility of having chaste relations. Brett is more realistic. The self-confessed nymphomaniac confesses that she could never control herself and would always deceive and wound him.

In Pamplona during the feria Jake vicariously excites and humiliates himself by helping to arrange Brett’s affair with Romero. She thinks she loves him and admits that she’s habitually out of control. Though she’s not restrained by Jake’s rational warning, she still wants his blessing:

“Do you still love me, Jake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.

“How?”

“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”

“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”

After her brief affair with the teenaged Romero, Brett does the right thing and makes a gran rifiuto. Still childishly dependent, she confesses her first decent and moral act to Father Jake:

“Darling! I’ve had such a hell of a time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell. He only left yesterday. I made him go.”

“Why didn’t you keep him?”

”I don’t know. It isn’t the sort of thing one does. I don’t think I hurt him any.” . . . 

“He wanted me to grow my hair out. Me, with long hair. I’d look so like hell.” . . .

“He wanted to marry me, finally.” . . .

“Maybe he thought that would make him Lord Ashley.” . . . 

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” . . . “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

Brett, with her fashionably boyish hair, notes that long Spanish hair is out of the question. But she is justly proud (in an iambic pentameter last line) of her selfless renunciation. Jake, unimpressed and knowing she’ll return to her usual reckless behaviour, dismisses her decent decision with a far-fetched joke about her husband’s title. But the pagan enchantress, who’s been compared to Circe and refused entry to a church, has followed her idiosyncratic religious beliefs. Hemingway’s dialogue captures the ironic voice of the fascinating Duff Twysden. He lusted after Duff and transformed his sexual frustration with her into a bitterly romantic novel with an impotent hero.

Both Brett and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms (1929) are British and worked as assistant nurses in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. Both women have been mentally deranged by the traumatic loss of their lovers killed in the war, but respond in different ways. The sexy Brett, experienced and sophisticated, predatory and bitchy, seeks a replacement in a series of unsatisfactory affairs. Her terse, sharp dialogue swirls from brash to sad to morally triumphant, yet she ends as hopeless and miserable as she began. The sex scenes in Hemingway’s novels emphasise physical attraction and the last chance for love before impending death. But the suggestion of degrading sex in the empty glasses on the dirty café table, which Jake sees after Brett has left with Romero, is more effective than realistic descriptions of sex. 

The virginal Catherine, though sometimes a “bit crazy,” is a good nurse. Innocent and devoted, passive and benign, she withdraws into herself, falls deeply in love with Frederic and surrenders her individual identity. Her voice, though occasionally witty, is submissive and sentimental. After The Sun Also Rises Hemingway’s increasingly egocentric fictional heroes want adoration rather than rivalry and the women become mere adjuncts to the men, who accept their love as their due. In their first significant meeting the still traumatised Catherine confuses Frederic Henry with her dead lover and tries to reestablish her identity through him. He accepts his new therapeutic role, dutifully repeats her instructions and has to lie about love in order to cure her: 

“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.

“And you call me Catherine?”

“Catherine.” We walked on a way and stopped under a tree.

“Say, ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.’ ”

“I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”

“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I love you and it’s been so awful. You won’t go away?”

“No. I’ll always come back.” 

In the end, however, she’s the one who “goes away”. 

After offering more reassurance, the man—as in “Soldier’s Home” and “Hills Like White Elephants”—must reaffirm his love. Though Catherine seems to overcome her delusions and regain her sanity, her fragile condition foreshadows her tragic fate.

“You don’t have to pretend you love me. That’s over for the evening. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

“But I do love you.”

“Please let’s not lie when we don’t have to. I had a fine little show and I’m all right now. You see I’m not mad and I’m not gone off. It’s only a little sometimes.” 

During their first sexual encounter she questions him about his past lovers, which he falsely claims were unimportant. She then alludes to Hemingway’s favourite passage about the faithful wife from Ruth 1:16: “Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” 

“I’ll say just what you wish and I’ll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?” She looked at me very happily. “I’ll do what you want and say what you want and then I’ll be a great success, won’t I ?” . . . 

“I do anything you want.”

“You’re so lovely.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at it yet.”

“You’re lovely.”

“I want what you want. There isn’t any me any more. Just what you want.”

Her rhetorical questions suggest her uneasiness about his love and their future. Like the tormented woman in “Hills” who doesn’t “care about me,” Catherine willingly surrenders her selfhood and submerges herself in Frederic. Though a sexual novice, she also changes from the future “I’ll do” to the present “I do” and offers to gratify all his sexual desires. 

Frederic seeks pleasure and excitement with her hair, which could make them look like twins and merge their identity in a kind of tonsorial orgasm. (The hair theme reaches full growth in his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden.) But when Catherine becomes accidentally pregnant, she’s afraid that Frederic feels trapped and angry, and promises not to cause trouble—though her death is big trouble. Catherine’s unwanted pregnancy foreshadows her disastrous fate, and she and Frederic must pay for illicit sex with death. Hemingway’s fictional women long for a child, resist an abortion and die like Catherine with her stillborn baby. Their unborn children represent the truly lost generation. 

The romances in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) are intensified by the psychological wounds and the pressure of war. Catherine has been traumatised by the death of her fiancé; Maria by her brutal rape by the fascists. Regenerative love helps to heal and obliterate both tragedies. Frederic replaces Catherine’s lost fiancé; Robert Jordan’s love cancels the rape, imaginatively restores Maria’s virginity and triumphs over his rivals in the band of guerrillas. Jordan’s sexual encounters with Maria, brief peaceful interludes during the war, mark the passage of the three nights in which the book takes place. Like Jake with Brett in The Sun Also Rises, Pilar vicariously participates in the love life of Jordan and Maria. 

When they first meet, Jordan immediately notices Maria hair, which had been shaved in prison by the fascists, has recently grown out and now merges into the Spanish landscape: “Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that had been burned dark in the sun but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt. . . . He looked at her hair that was as thick and short and rippling when she passed her hand over it, now in embarrassment, as a grain field in the wind on a hillside.” After defying Pilar, and with his swelling throat and thick voice suggesting an erection, he boldly “ran his hand over the top of her head. He had been wanting to do that all day and now he did it, he could feel his throat swelling. . . . ‘Do it again,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to do that all day.’ ‘Later,’ Robert Jordan said and his voice was thick. ‘And me,’ the woman of Pablo said in her booming voice. ‘I am expected to watch all this? I am expected not to be moved?’ ”

On their first sexual encounter in Jordan’s sleeping bag, Maria is first shy, then eager. He commands her and tenderly calls her “rabbit”— conejo in Spanish and slang for “pussy”:

“I am ashamed,” she said, her face away from him.

“No. You must not be. Here. Now.”

“No. I must not. I am ashamed and frightened.”

“No. My rabbit. Please.”

“I must not. If thou dost not love me.”

“I love thee.”

In a delightful question when they’re kissing, she innocently wonders, “Where do the noses go?” He erases her past to suit the present: “if we do everything together, the others maybe never will have been.”

On their second encounter Maria asks, in a famous phrase, “Did the earth never move for thee before?” The literary source may have been T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935): “The heaving of earth at nightfall.” The real-life inspiration was the bombardment of the Hotel Florida in Madrid while Hemingway was in bed with his future wife, the blonde Martha Gellhorn. Martha’s vagina was narrow and she found sexual intercourse painful; Maria feels “great soreness and much pain” from her rape, but is “thankful too to have been another time in la gloria”. Like Catherine, the ultra-submissive Maria says, “I will do anything for thee that thou should wish” and offers to pleasure Jordan in another way: “Is there not some other thing that I can do for thee?”

In one of her longer speeches Maria, always eager for sexual and practical tuition, plans their future and declares in her awkwardly translated speech:

“I will learn from Pilar what I should do to take care of a man well and those things I will do,” Maria said. “Then, as I learn, I will discover things for myself and other things you can tell me.” 

But, shifting from the future tense to the subjunctive, she’ll also be prepared for the worst:

“If you will teach me to shoot either one of us could shoot the other and himself, or herself, if one were wounded and it were necessary to avoid capture.”

Maria’s foreignness, rape and threat of death intensify their brief love affair. Her slightly archaic (“dost not”) speech has youthful innocence and charm. In the end, the mortally wounded Jordan persuades Maria to escape without him.

Hemingway’s women reveal recurrent themes in his fiction. In The Sun Also Rises Brett is 34, Romero 19; in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) Richard Cantwell is 50, Renata also 19. The fascists have killed both Maria’s father and Renata’s father. Maria speaks Spanish using the familiar tu, Renata is learning English, and both are comparatively inarticulate. Like Brett, Catherine and Maria, Renata, like an actress on stage, makes a dramatic appearance. As always, Hemingway emphasises the woman’s full-grown, wind-blown “dark hair, of an alive texture, that hung down over her shoulders.” 

Hemingway’s hero Lord Byron, his 19-year-old Italian lover Teresa Guiccioli and her young brother Pietro Gamba were the prototypes of Hemingway, his adored Venetian Adriana Ivancich and her younger brother Gianfranco. Unfortunately, Renata and Cantwell have nothing significant to say to each other and talk endlessly about food. Her persistent questions provide an excuse for his egoistic lectures, she nods her head in tacit agreement and even falls asleep as he continues to talk. She concentrates on meals, sex and Cantwell, lives in the present moment and insists: “Please let’s not think of anything, or anything, or anything.” Yet she can sometimes be quite sharp when she says:

“What is your great sorrow?”

“Other people’s orders,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“You.”

She’s even surprisingly witty when, learning to speak American, she exclaims (in Hemingway’s self-parody): “Put it there, Pal. This grub is tops,” and “Listen, Mac. You hired out to be tough, didn’t you?”

As in the two previous novels, the young woman wishes to serve the experienced older man who initiates the virgin into the pleasures of sex. Renata and Cantwell have difficulty in finding a private place before performing precariously in a gliding gondola. Renata contradicts herself by swearing, “I have never cared what anyone thought, ever,” but she also wants to protect her reputation and refuses to go to his hotel room because “Everything is known in Venice anyway. But it is also known who my family are and that I am a good girl. Also they know it is you and it is I.” Hemingway’s novels compensated for his sexual frustration. Both Agnes von Kurowsky and Adriana Ivancich were angry that though they did not sleep with Hemingway in real life, the characters they inspired had sex with the hero in the novels. Duff Twysden didn’t give a damn.

Like Maria with Jordan, Renata bids farewell to Cantwell just before his death, and like Catherine with Frederic she becomes extremely emotional:

“Can’t I ride with you to the garage?”

“It would be just as bad at the garage.”

“Please let me ride to the garage.” . . . 

The girl was crying, finally, although she had made the decision never to cry. . . . 

“I’ve stopped,” she said. “I’m not an hysterical.”

There’s a striking contrast between the poignant, hopeless conclusion of The Sun Also Rises,

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” . . .

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

and Cantwell’s rather stilted and affectless goodbye:

“There are some things that a person cannot do. You know about that. You cannot marry me and I understand that, although I do not approve it.”

He’s too old and sick; she’s too, young and innocent, and her aristocratic family would never allow her to marry him.

Hemingway must have been deeply wounded by the end of his affair with the model for Margot Macomber, the exceptionally wild and beautiful Jane Mason, who went on her own African safari. His brilliantly repetitious dialogue is better in his stories and memoir than in his later novels. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) returns to the terse and ironic speech of the 1920s, and Margot’s voice is more like Brett’s than like Catherine’s and Maria’s. This bitter tale of a predatory, treacherous and murderous female emphasises the connection between shooting and sex, and shatters the possibility of romantic love in the glamorous setting of big-game hunting in Africa. Wilson, the white hunter, tries to exclude Margot from their hunt,, but she insists on joining them and mocking them:

“We’ll put on another show for you tomorrow,” Francis Macomber said.

“You’re not coming,” Wilson said.

“You’re very mistaken,” she told him. “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.” . . . 

“Why not let up on the bitchery just a little, Margot.” . . . 

“I suppose I could,” she said, “since you put it so prettily.”

After Macomber reveals his cowardice by running away from the lion, Margot, moving in for the kill, taunts and humiliates him by shamelessly sleeping with Wilson. Her satiric barbs, while she holds power over Macomber, are devastating. When Margot returns to their tent after sex with Wilson, she’s mendacious, defiant and unregenerate, and assumes that only the brave deserve the fair:

“Where have you been?”

“I just went out to get a breath of air.”

“You did, like hell.”

“What do you want me to say, darling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Out to get a breath of air.”

“That’s a new name for it. You are a bitch.”

“Well, you’re a coward.” . . . 

“There wasn’t going to be any of that. You promised there wouldn’t be.”

“Well, there is now,” she said sweetly.

Macomber gains a slight advantage by challenging Margot, who’s dependent on his wealth, but won’t give up Wilson:

“If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling,” Margot said quietly.

“No, you won’t.”

“You can try it and see.”

“You won’t leave me.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you and you’ll behave yourself.”

“Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.”

“Yes. Behave yourself.”

“Why don’t you try behaving?”

“I’ve tried it so long. So very long.”

“I hate that red-faced swine,” Macomber said. “I loathe the sight of him.”

“He’s really very nice.”

As “I’ll leave” subtly merges with “you’ll behave”, Margot, having bed-tested Wilson, puts the knife in by praising his character. Hemingway, who does not want to be distracted from his rapid-fire dialogues, almost always uses “said” instead of variants to identify the speakers.

When Wilson sees Margot murder her husband, who’d redeemed himself by confronting a lion, he now has her in his power:

“That was a pretty thing to do,” [Wilson] said in a toneless voice. “He would have left you too.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Of course it’s an accident,” he said. “I know that.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but . . . You’re perfectly all right.”

“Stop it,” she said. . . . 

“Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.”

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it,” the woman cried. . . . 

“Oh, please stop it,” she said. “Please, please stop it.”

“That’s better,” Wilson said. “Please is much better. Now I’ll stop.”

Having lost her advantage, Margot is reduced to eight frantic repetitions of the monosyllabic “stop” and, like the woman in “Hills,” to three utterances of “please”—both words repeated by Wilson in the last sentence of Hemingway’s greatest story.

Hemingway may have taken the title of A Moveable Feast (1964) from Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942). His posthumously published memoir retaliates for Gertrude Stein’s attacks on him after they’d left Paris and uses her own voice as he remembered or imagined it. Dogmatic, censorious and speaking ex-synagoga, she orders him not to “argue with me.” She insists that the sex scenes in his early story “Up in Michigan,” like a painting that is too obscene to hang, cannot appear in print—though he had published it in 1923. Not content with criticising his fiction, she lays down the law about how he must live as a writer. Ignoring the needs of Hadley, whose trust fund supported the family, Stein declares that he has to follow her example: “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. No one who is not very rich can do both.” 

Like Hemingway’s attacks in Across the River, from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground to works by D’Annunzio and Sinclair Lewis, Stein tries to defend her turf by attacking authors greater than herself. She claims that “Huxley is a dead man” and that the tubercular D. H. Lawrence is “impossible. He’s pathetic and preposterous. He writes like a sick man.” In a swingeing mood, she also condemns Hemingway and all his companions: “You are all a génération perdue. . . . You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.” He liked this well enough to use it as an epigraph in The Sun Also Rises.

In a feeble but nasty attack, Stein castigates homosexuals as “criminals and perverts. . . . Those people are sick and cannot help themselves and you should pity them.” She also calls the unnamed Jean Cocteau a truly vicious man who “corrupts for the pleasure of corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well. Drugs, for example.” In a blatant, self-serving defence of her own lesbian relations, Stein exclaims, ”the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. . . . In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.”

Hemingway completely demolishes her absurd argument in a savage passage when he accidentally overhears Stein and Alice Toklas having a degrading, disgusting and extremely unhappy sexual quarrel. His devastating sentences parody Stein’s crude mode of repetition, which he had refined into an infinite superior style: “I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy, Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please, don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’ ” Stein’s words recall Maria’s “I will do anything” as well as the woman in “Hills” pleading and begging the man to stop talking. By not revealing the reason for the quarrel, Hemingway intensifies our curiosity about what Toklas, addressed as a “pussy,” threatened to do to the supposedly dominant but actually subservient Stein. As Hemingway writes in “Macomber,” he “suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful.”

Hemingway satirised his mother (born 1872) and Stein (born 1874), who both had an imposing statuesque appearance and a formidable overbearing personality. The portrait of Stein in Paris in the mid-1920s returns to the start of his career when he wrote the two Hadley stories and The Sun Also Rises (all set in Europe). As his novels progress, the women with alluring hair change from bold and assertive to adoring and submissive, and frequently plead with the men to confirm their love. 

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (1982), Hemingway: A Biography(1985), Hemingway: Life into Art (2000) and 80 articles about him.