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Hemingway’s first wife finally emerging

The wrenching love story between Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway is one of the most poignant in American literary history. Aspects of Hemingway’s perspective on it are told in his beautiful memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” published in 1964. This month, Scribner released a new edition of the book, with some material left out of the original that is sympathetic to Pauline Pfeiffer, who became Hemingway’s second wife. For Hadley’s account of her famous marriage, however, we can mostly thank Alice Sokoloff, a musician and writer who played piano duets with her in the 1970s, when the two women were neighbors in Chocorua, N.H.

When I was preparing my 1992 biography, “Hadley,” I visited Sokoloff, a cultured, sophisticated grandmother then in her 70s, in her apartment in Katonah, N.Y. We spent a couple of hours talking, and when I got up to leave, Alice astounded me by handing me a box of tapes. “I think you’ll find these very interesting,” she said with a wry smile.

I stayed up late several nights in a row transcribing the tapes, all conversations Alice had with Hadley in the early ’70s. They were scratchy with age and in some places difficult to understand; still, I couldn’t stop listening. Here was the real Hadley — wittier and more astringent than the Hadley of “A Moveable Feast,” but also just as warm, melancholy and intelligent.

I expected Hadley, who died in 1979, to be bitter toward Hemingway; instead, on the tapes she is full of gratitude to him for giving her “the key to the world.” When she met him in 1920, she had been a timid spinster, who lived for years under the control of her dominating mother in a state of nervous collapse. Meeting Hemingway at a party in Chicago, she told Sokoloff, was a great “explosion into life.” He was the first person to see deeply into her true nature, and in a rueful irony, he helped her find the strong sense of self that sustained her through their break-up.

In his later years, Hemingway idealized Hadley as the perfect woman and their marriage as a kind of Eden. On the tapes, however, Hadley admits that she was far from his ideal consort. Hemingway believed that alcohol fueled his talent, and though Hadley had no trouble keeping up with the writer’s drinking — “We’d get so tight, we’d throw up together” — she told Sokoloff, she was never enthusiastic about modern literature. Once, when she told a newspaper reporter who was writing a profile of Hemingway that her favorite author was Henry James, Ernest “exploded,” she said. “James was a scurrilous word in our household.”

Some of Hemingway’s friends claimed that Hadley didn’t understand his work and that she took his talent too lightly. After she famously lost a suitcase in which she’d placed all his manuscripts, a few people accused her of trying to sabotage her husband’s career (never mind that her modest inheritance supported them). But she felt guilty about the lost manuscripts for the rest of her life. Even as an old woman she couldn’t talk about the incident without crying. “I felt so badly about poor Tatie,” she told Sokoloff, using one of the many pet names she’d given Hemingway nearly a half century before. “He was very brave about it,” and never rebuked her, she said, “but I could tell he was heartbroken.”

After Hemingway’s stories and poems began to appear in prestigious literary magazines, he fell in with a crowd of rich expatriates, led by Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose home on the Riviera became a gathering spot for artists and writers. Hadley, who was shy and badly dressed (Hemingway didn’t believe in spending money on clothes) felt uncomfortable with these people, especially the glamorous Sara Murphy, who Jack Hemingway — Hadley and Ernest’s son — told me looked down on his mother as being “from a lower class.”

At first Hemingway kept a cautious distance from this rich, worldly crowd, Hadley said. “He thought it was important not to sink back and accept all the amenities they were able to produce. They could take us anywhere for a gorgeous meal, yet he was just as happy eating red beans” at a simple inn. Eventually, though, “Ernest changed. He became terribly fond of the best of everything … the best in fishing gear, the best in guns and boats.”

As a chic writer for Paris Vogue and the daughter of a wealthy St. Louis family, Pauline Pfeiffer fit in perfectly with this crowd. Like Hemingway, Pfeiffer also “cared about the best of everything,” Hadley told Sokoloff. “And she knew how to get it — where to get pictures framed, and, later, the animals that Ernest shot stuffed. She knew about decorating and about entertaining. A certain amount of that is fine. But I’ve never been endowed with it.”

By the summer of 1925, when Hemingway began “The Sun Also Rises,” the novel based on experiences with Hadley in Pamplona, Spain, there were serious strains in the couple’s marriage. Hadley read the novel as Hemingway wrote it and told Sokoloff she was distressed “that I didn’t see anything of myself in it.” It was as if Hemingway had written her out of his life.

His affair with Pfeiffer, however, didn’t start until the following winter. As soon as Hadley found out about it, she says on the tapes, “I knew I’d lost the battle.”

Eventually, Hadley recovered from Hemingway’s desertion and went on to marry newspaperman and poet Paul Scott Mowrer. Like characters in a Hemingway story, they spent much of their time fishing and drinking.

After Mowrer’s death in 1971, Sokoloff suggested to Hadley that they work together on her memoirs. “Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway,” was published in 1973. It’s a slim volume that doesn’t make much use of the tapes, which are now part of the Hemingway archive at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Sokoloff, who died in 2006, told me she thought Hadley would be embarrassed by the taped material if she saw it in print and so left most of it out.

Hadley was thrilled by the book and slept with a copy of it on her bedside table. “I thought it was strange because she had ‘A Moveable Feast,'” Sokoloff said. “There was no greater tribute than that.”

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ctc-arts@tribune.com