Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. A Memoir by A. E. Hotchner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. A Memoir by A. E. Hotchner Linda Patterson Miller Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. A Memoir. By A. E. Hotchner. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 192pp. $19.99. A. E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love: His Own Story comes fifty years after Papa Hemingway, a book that recounts Hotchner’s relationship with Hemingway between 1948 and Hemingway’s death in 1961. Hotchner had been commissioned by Cosmopolitan in 1948 to convince Hemingway to write an article on “The Future of Literature,” and Hemingway had agreed to meet him at the La Florida bar [also known as La Floridita] in Havana to talk about the project. As “the daiquiris kept coming” during that first encounter, Hotchner maintains that he somehow managed “to make some notes on our conversation,” which was “the beginning of a practice I followed during the entire time I knew him. Later on I augmented these journals with conversations recorded on pocket tape transistors that we carried when we traveled” (9). These notes and recordings, along with his own memories, provided the backbone for the 1966 memoir. The book was both compelling and controversial, for it rendered in precise detail and often within quotes, speech and descriptions directly attributed to Hemingway. To my knowledge, no one has ever claimed to have seen or heard Hotchner’s tapes, and he acknowledges in Hemingway in Love that the tapes ultimately “disintegrated” (xi). The publication of Carlos Baker’s Selected Letters (1981) followed by the Hemingway Letters Project, which is now publishing all of Hemingway’s extant correspondence, has allowed scholars to see how extensively and perhaps disingenuously Hotchner drew on Hemingway’s letters as the basis for Hemingway’s dialogue and the vivid rendering of events. The publication of Papa enraged Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary Hemingway, who felt that Hotchner had violated his relationship with Hemingway, and with her, for the sake of self-promotion. Now comes Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a memoir that Hotchner claims will embellish the earlier book by reinstalling key material that Random House had required he omit for legal reasons, particularly as related to individuals who were still alive, including Mary Hemingway, who would be hurt by learning of Hemingway’s true feelings about his earlier wives. Hemingway’s supposedly true feelings about his first two wives provide the overarching thematic focus for this new book. Hotchner claims that Hemingway’s plane accidents in Africa in 1954 triggered in Hemingway a radical change both physically and emotionally such that he wanted to tell the “true gen” for the sake of posterity. In particular, it prompted him, almost [End Page 135] compulsively, to tell Hotchner “about a painful period in his life that he had never discussed but that he wanted me to know about in case he never got around to telling about it” (xiii). Hemingway’s confessions (as Hotchner sees them) establish the narrative structure for this slim new book, some of which derives from Papa almost word for word. As events progress chronologically between 1954 to 1961, Hotchner brings the narrative back to where Hemingway had previously left off in retelling of “the agony of that period in Paris when he was writing The Sun Also Rises and at the same time enduring the harrowing experience of being in love with two women simultaneously, an experience that would haunt him to his grave” (xiii–iv). Hotchner believes that Hemingway designated him to be “the custodian” of that account and that before Hemingway “ended his life, it was important to him that his final words explain the self-inflicted pain of letting the only true love of his life [Hadley] slip away” (14–15). Hotchner intersperses Hemingway’s love story throughout the text by prompting Hemingway repeatedly to pick up where the story left off. “Now that he was talking about Martha and Pauline, I thought this was a good time to get Ernest back to talking about the hundred days [of Hadley’s imposed separation on Ernest and Pauline]” (75); or, on another occasion, “I reminded him that before lunch he had been telling me about the hundred days...