She slept here too, Ernest Hemingways women

Ernest Hemingway is a much-admired, much-discussed person of note in Northern Michigan, and, for those of you who have been vacationing in a cave, he was also the author of many classic books and an important member of the 1920s expatriate community of artists, writers and intellectuals in Paris. 
Many books and articles have been written about Hemingway, who spent his youth in Petoskey and Walloon Lake - but few have delved beyond the surface regarding the women that shared Hemingway’s turbulant yet productive life.
Married four times - and involved in plenty of additional romantic relationships and dalliances throughout his life - Hemingway was known as part of the “Lost Generation” - a term he popularized. It was a fitting term because he also couldn’t seem to keep from losing his ladies.
Yes, Ernest Hemingway, for all of his talent, had many, many difficulties with loyalty and monogamy. Many theories surmise that Hemingway’s complicated relationship with his controlling mother - whom he often referred to in, to put it mildly, less than flattering terms - was at the base of the sometimes caustic way he dealt with women in real life and in his writings.  But, regardless of his approach, 
the emotionally and physically sloppy wri-ter still managed to attract a large range
of ladies.
 
FIRST LOVE
One lady that made an early mark - a scar, even - on Hemingway’s heart was nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who attended Hemingway during his hospital stay in Italy, where he was sent in 1918 after being wounded delivering supplies to soldiers during World War I. 
Hemingway fell in love with Agnes and they made plans for her to follow him to the U.S., but Agnes never followed through after Hemingway returned to the States; instead she took up a romance with an Italian officer. His experience losing Kurowsky inspired one of Hemingway’s early novels, “A Farewell to Arms,” and perhaps set the groundwork for his future failures to fully commit to a relationship. (Of note, the fictional nurse in “A Farewell to Arms” dies in childbirth after escaping the war with a fictionalized Hemingway.)
 
PARIS MATCH
In the early 1920s, Hemingway met Elizabeth “Hadley” Richardson, who wound up sharing much of Hemingway’s Paris years and also bore him a son, John Hadley, sometimes also called Jack or Bumby, who was born in 1923. 
“The world’s a jail and we’re gonna break it together,” was Hadley’s romantic declaration to Ernest; Hemingway later suggested that Hadley was the only woman that he ever really loved. Although he liked the idea of romance, he still couldn’t follow through for long. 
With the demise of Hemingway and Richardson’s marriage – caused when Richardson found out about Hemingway’s affair with fashion reporter Pauline Pfeiffer–Hemingway’s love affair with Paris also temporarily ended.
So it was off to Florida with Pfeiffer at the suggestion of a friend. Before the Roaring Twenties were out, Hemingway had married Pfeiffer (in 1927) and had two more sons with her–Patrick and Gregory. 
Pfeiffer, with the help of her Uncle Gus, who gave them a house as a wed-ding gift, helped Hemingway establish his Key West home base.  But the main draw to Key West for Hemingway wasn’t Pfeiffer; sadly, it was the plethora of booze that was available, from smuggled Cuban liquors to bathtub stills. 
 
SON #3
Pfeiffer had Hemingway’s third son in November of 1932, but Hemingway–who would’ve rather stayed out on the fishing boat The Anita with his pal, bar owner Joe Russell–was unhappy about the extra child. Not to mention his feelings of obligation to Pfeiffer for the financial help she brought to the relationship. So, unceremoniously ignoring Pfeiffer, he sailed to Havana, Cuba with Russell for a two-day fishing trip that turned into a four month stay.
Inbetween dalliances with a Havana girl or two, Hemingway, who had by then taken up extended residence in Havana at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, allowed his marriage to Pfeiffer to unravel. When she tried to visit him in Havana by bringing his first son to see him, he made her feel desperately unwelcome, so she returned to Key West alone. As a devout Catholic, she refused to divorce Hemingway until 1940. (Her fictionalized character and Hemingway’s antipathy toward his sons is portrayed in “Islands in the Stream.)

A NEW CONQUEST
When Hemingway finally returned to Key West, Pfeiffer was no longer his main concern.  Now, his fickle attentions were turned to Martha Gellhorn, a new conquest that he became friends with 
back in 1936 in yet another Key West
bar. They shared a hotel room in Madrid during their joint coverage of the Spanish Civil War.  Once his divorce from Pfeiffer was final, he immediately married Gellhorn - but she would only last five years in Hemingway’s company.
Gellhorn, who was herself an acclaimed journalist, would go down in Hemingway history as the only wife who left him, as opposed to the other way around.  At the beginning, not wanting to live in the Pfeiffer-gifted house, Ernest and Martha took a Hawaiian honeymoon and then headed over to Havana to establish their new home. 
Hemingway, already a heavy drinker, now added a fondness for blood sports such as cockfighting and bullfighting to his pursuits, and gave up so many of his personal grooming habits that Gellhorn finally nicknamed him “Pig.”  Where Hemingway could’ve cared less about living in his small, stuffy, untidy room at the hotel, Martha wasn’t having it, so she spent her own money to locate and renovate a 15-acre farm estate just out of town. 

BACK TO THE BAR
At first Martha and Ernest rented the estate, but after the duo were married, Hemingway bought it with his own money, making it the first home he owned that hadn’t been given to him by someone else.  He now had Gellhorn’s support, a spa-
cious place to work, his own tennis court and pool, and a whole pack of cats and dogs;  but he still didn’t appreciate his good fortune. 
It wasn’t long before he was back spending much of his time at Havana’s Floridita Bar, where he soon acquired his own reserved bar seat and alienated Gellhorn, who eventually gave up on their marriage because she had become tired of Hemingway’s bullying, his expectations of her to be his housekeeper, and his temper - often heightened by his drinking - among other things. 
While Gellhorn was off covering World War II for Collier’s Magazine, Hemingway, who had been talked to by Gellhorn herself into going to London to also cover the war, met yet another female journalist - Mary Welsh. He took up with Welsh, putting the final nail in the coffin for his marriage to Gellhorn.  In spite of the fact that it was his affair that ultimately drove Gellhorn away, Hemingway was said to have never forgiven Gellhorn for being the only wife to reject him.
Finally, Welsh, a Time magazine war correspondent, would become his fourth and final wife.
It’s interesting how Hemingway’s wives were fairly strong women, as opposed to the faint approximations of women that often appear in Hemingway’s novels. Are the fictional, weaker ladies how he wanted women to be, hence his frustration with the real thing? Or was he so disillusioned by his romantic experiences that he couldn’t muster up any fire for his female characters?  Either way, Hemingway remains a source of speculation and historical interest, and his wives, for the most part, remain mostly a mystery; but given all that Hemingway’s literary works have contributed to the world, it’s a shame that his personal life wasn’t a
little happier.
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