(page 41 - 1919 - referring to Agnes von Kurowsky's jilting of Hemingway) The trauma of her betrayal, for that is how he interpreted it, forced him into instinctive self-protection. For the rest of his life he guarded himself against betrayal and loneliness by conducting a liaison with a future wife during his current marriage; when he had ensured his own emotional security, he abandoned his wife before she could leave him.
(page 92) Hemingway had a short fuse and a bad temper, liked to be considered a tough guy rather than a writer. He wrote that a man in a rage is like an animal, that bullying is the first step toward cowardice, but he himself preyed on the weaknesses of others.
(page 110) Hemingway's experience as a European reporter influenced but did not entirely account for the evolution of his distinctive style and values. To a large degree, his technique, tone, themes and code of honor came from his early reading of Rudyard Kipling.
(page 132) A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's portrait of the artist as a young man, charts his movement from innocence to experience. It is actually a fictionalized memoir, loosely based on fact but not strictly true.
(page 202) Hemingway's adult life was characterized by emotional turmoil, constant travel, frequent illness and accidents. ... There were both physical and psychological reasons for Hemingway's numerous accidents. He was a huge, clumsy man with defective vision in one eye and very slow reflexes. He had a bad temper, behaved recklessly and irrationally, drank heavily and was frequently out of control. He deliberately placed himself in risky situations ...
(page 209 - 1928 - in reference to his father) Ed Hemingway killed himself, despite his religious beliefs, because he had lost a good deal of money, was seriously ill and psychologically depressed.
(page 217) ... Hemingway's alter ego Nick Adams ...
(page 236 - 1932-33 - Carol, his youngest sister) Hemingway took an instant dislike to Gardner, considered him priggish and domineering ... Hemingway swore he would never see Carol again if she married Gardner and, when she disobeyed, cut her completely out of his life. She later made overtures to see him-sent him Christmas cards and photographs of her children-but he kept his oath and never saw her again.
(page 262) Fantastic recall. He quoted what I said word for word years later ...
(page 271) Hemingway believed that fiction must be based on actual experience . The knowledgeable writer, he felt, always begins with reality but produces something more significant than the original facts.
(page 298 - 1936-1938) Hemingway's affair with Martha had an uncanny resemblance to his affair with Pauline ... She too insinuated herself into the household, courted the passive Hemingway ... When Hemingway married Martha, he felt guilty about abandoning his wife ... After his divorce from Pauline, and from Martha, he turned for consolation to Hadley and recalled the sentimental memories of their marriage.
(page 345) One significant and recurrent pattern of behavior in Hemingway's life was the revision, in his own mind, of what actually occurred and the selection of a scapegoat to relieve himself of any guilt. ... he could perceive this revisionist tendency in others ... but he could not see it in himself.
(page 351) Like many modern American writers- ... - he suffered from alcoholism. Like the others, he found liquor an instant relief from the oppressive strain of writing as well as an anodyne for the even greater torments of creative sterility. It was always easier to drink than to work. His drinking noticeably increased after 1940, after the hardships of Spain and the exhausting effort on his novel.
(page 417) To Scribner and Perkins, he emphasized his desire to write a novel about the war he had followed and survived for seven months: from the landings and breakthrough at Normandy to the
penetration of the Siegfried Line and the empty victory at Hürtgenwald.
(page 418) Mary was Hemingway's wife during the years of his greatest fame and most radical deterioration, of the Nobel Prize as well as the Mayo Clinic.
(page 448) Mary's surpassing love, her devotion merging into martyrdom, her humiliating masochism, her unlimited capacity for suffering and endurance, made her the most tragic heroine if Hemingway's life.
(page 453) By 1950 Hemingway was much more than a novelist: he was a cultural presence, a larger-than-life public figure, an object of admiration and envy. The incongruity between the heroic ideals of his early work and the unpleasant details of his private life was well known.
(page 463) Despite his tough image, Hemingway was a soft-hearted man.
(page 489)
In May 1952, a month before he left for Europe and Africa, The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize ...
(page 502 - 1953 - Africa - comments by Denis Zaphiro) ... the safari went off very well indeed, particularly when Hemingway, Mary and myself were alone. Ernest was not all that interested in shooting-except lion. ... After everyone had left ... he preferred to drive around and look at the animals. ... He loved Africa. He loved to sit in it and watch it. ... He was always reading, reading. Carried soft covers and papers and magazines in his pockets all the time. He read whenever the pace slowed.
(pages 503 - 507 - 1954) The two plane crashes that took place in January of that year ... battered him physically at a time when he was drinking heavily, shooting badly and acting foolishly. They caused permanent damage and were (like his war wounds) a major turning point in his life. ... The second crash was much worse than the first ... He suffered internal bleeding, nausea and watching, burning pains in his back, severe headaches, and trouble with his liver and kidneys that would plague him for the rest of his life. ... If Hemingway had died violently in an African plane crash ... He would have gone out in a literal blaze of glory ... and before he began to decline and waste away through accidents, alcoholism, physical disease, paranoia, electric shock treatment and depression. By surviving the two near-fatal air crashes, he strengthened the image of the indestructible tough guy and lived up to the legend of the mythical Papa.
(page 509) On October 28, 1954, Hemingway was awarded the $35,000 Nobel Prize for Literature.
(page 533) A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's nostalgic memoir of his life in Paris during 1920-26 ... was mainly written in Cuba and Idaho from the fall of 1957 to the spring of 1960. ... After his death the book was edited and prepared for press by Mary.
(page 535-37) "Moveable Feast" is an ecclesiastical term which applies to holidays, like Easter, that are not fixed to a specific date. ... in the Preface ... "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." ... A Moveable Feast is fictionalized autobiography, loosely based on fact but heightened by the imagination. ... The memoir decisively showed that Hemingway had arrested his decline and regained the full force of his literary power only months before he entered the Mayo Clinic.
(page 538) Hemingway's last decade was a period of disintegration. ... A fatal combination of physical and mental illness during the last year of his life accelerated his tragic decent ...
(page 558-559) ... he had lost his memory during medical treatment at the Mayo. He suffered from weight loss, skin disease, alcoholism, failing eyesight, diabetes, suspected hemochromatosis, hepatitis, nephritis, hypertension and impotence. His body was in ruins, he created a decline into invalidism and a lingering death. He could no longer remember, he could no longer write, he was severely depressed. ... On July 2 (1961), two days after he came home from the Mayo ... he was able to get a loaded gun ...