Customer Reviews

The Hemingway Women

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This book, written with style and interest, is a sound ,balanced and well documented research on the lives and marriages of Ernst Hemingway with this four wives , Hadley Richardson (portayed in A Moveable Feast), Pauline Pfeiffer (Green Hills of Africa), Martha Gelhorn -a writer herself- (The fifth column) and Mary Welsh (A dangerous summer), inteligently ilustrated, amusing and covering also his famous lovers: Adriana Ivancich (his Renata in Across the river and under the trees) and Jane Kendall Mason (Brett Ashley herself in the Sun Also Rises) and the affairs that ended and started his marriages leaving a lasting pattern in his literature. It's an amusing and interesting book for those who love, hate or ignore Hemingway. It also explores his difficult and influencing relationship with his mother.

This is a brilliant biography of a man whose name is, to many, synonymous with all things deeply, simply, brutally mannish. By telling the stories of Hemingway's relationships with women throughout his life- mother, wives, girlfriends, colleagues- Bernice Kert reveals the true smallness of the man with heartbreaking clarity. Yet, make no mistake, this is a thoroughly romantic book, albeit in all the saddest ways possible. Kert is not trying to smash the Hemingway legend,though after reading this book you will never see a Hemingway novel in quite the same way. Some people have commented that the individual stories of these women are insignificant because they did not lead notable lives "of their own", but any fan of Hemingway himself would be fascinated to see how much of these women and their lives were taken by Hemingway and retold in his most famous stories, always casting himself in a favorable light while reducing the woman to a fantasy of sexuality or revenge .... he being the famous author, whose story will we read? Whose myth will we believe? And how tragically familiar is the tale of one who gives up their "own life" to stand by their husband's side, only to see themself 'immortalized' with such coldness and cruelty?

This is as much fun to read as a great novel and has all the ingredients of a great read, as they say: love, hate, success, adventure, etc. For the most part, Ernest Hemingway is remembered as a mans's man, an adventurer who loved bullfights, safaris, hunting, shooting, fishing. But at heart he was a man who needed to be taken care of, but resented every woman who tried. All of his wives were from the same basic mold: adverturers and writers (was Hadley a writer?) and all of them wanted nothing more than to be with this exciting man who loved and adored her. That is, until they got married. Then the fun for him was over and he resented being taken care of by a woman who he thought of as a sex object, and he couldn't fathom that they might be able to cohabit the same body. In his letters he pleads for his women to always love him and take care of him, but in reality he resented them for doing just that. He admired Martha Gellhorn, the wife with by far the most spunk, for being a good journalist, until they were married. He wanted her to stay home with him, but she resisted his control. So what does he do? He meets another journalist, Mary Welsh, and immediately, on first sight, falls in love with her and begs for her to take care of him and to always love him. Which she did. And he immediately hated her for it. And it destroyed her.

It is so ironic that the man who professed to hate his father for committing suicide (albeit blaming his mother for it) would in the end take his own life. Of course, by that time he was a shell of the adventurer/writer/lover, and was beset by illness, both psychiatric and otherwise, none of which he would allow treatment for.

Although Hemingway lived and loved in the early to mid 1900s, it seems a long time ago; the world has changed so much! No longer do we see artists and writers living as paupers in France, as expats and proud of it! It was a different time and place, to be sure. But it's fun to read about.

I have not read a lot of Hemingway's novels (The Old Man and the Sea enthralled me when I first read it), but you don't have to be familiar with his writing to love the man and this book. This book, like no other biography I have read, shows the man through the eyes of the women he loved, and resented, and ultimately betrayed, beginning with his mother and continuing on through four wives and several beautiful women who he chased and wooed but for various reasons never made lasting connections with. Please read this book. It is important and entertaining and scholarly all at once.

Bernice Kert has given me my first true understanding of who Hemingway was and why he did the things he did. His choice of women, more so the women he married and the woman who gave birth to him are phsycoanalysis at it best. I now see the "Peter Pan" in Hemingway, not the masculine adventurer,hunter and "man's man". I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly.

Update after second reading: Author obtained primary material from the subjects themselves; this may be the most important "new" biography of Hemingway to date. Highly recommend it after you've read earlier biographies of Hemingway; this can be read as first bio of Hemingway, but I think you will enjoy it more if you've read others first.

Earlier review: This book will save you the trouble of reading the autobiographies, the biographies, and selected letters of Ernest Hemingway and these five women (his mother and four wives).

But you will enjoy reading the autobiographies and selected letters first, and then coming back to this book to fill in the gaps.

The writing is stilted -- often reads like a PowerPoint presentation -- compared to the writing actually done by its subjects. Specifically, "How It Was" by Mary Welsh Hemingway is a joy to read, and I recommend that before reading "Hemingway Women."

As a reference to fill in the gaps, this is an important book for the Hemingway fan(atic).

I listened to the audio of this book and I really enjoyed it. Honestly, I am not a fan of Hemingway's books and stories but he sure was a complex man. For some reason, I find fascinating the events of the first half of the 20th Century. Living in Miami and having been to the Key West and the Hemingway House several times, made this book so real. If we ever end the ridiculous travel ban to Cuba, I would love to see his house there. This book flows well and the audio narration works.

I really enjoyed this book on many different levels. Following his travels from the 20s through the 50s presents a good review of history , while watching his personna develop with fame and fortune, gives an interesting look at the struggle within the creative process.

I was inspired to read this book after reading The Paris Wife. Hadley Richardson was such an interesting woman in her own right, and reading The Paris Wife made me want to read about the other three wives and what they were like. What I loved most about this book was the picture it paints of Hemingway himself. He could be a real brute, but at the same time what a fascinatingly flawed human being. Nothing I didn't love about this book. Very well written and hard to put down.

As an aficionado of literary biographies, I was intrigued by this one's unique concept. In the end though, I can't say it's more than an honorable failure.

If the idea was to enrich our understanding of Hemingway by examining him from these feminine angles, it simply doesn't work. The portrait of the author that emerges is less focused and cohesive than that available from any of several orthodox biographies. (Kenneth S. Lynn's seems to me the best single volume study, although some of his theories are less persuasive than others.) And if the real subjects are the women, one has to ask: what was the point? Except for Martha Gellhorn, an intrepid war journalist who has been given her own biography, none of them ever did anything of real interest (or have anything much in common) except become involved with Hemingway. There is a fascinating book to be written about the psychology of literary "groupies" but that doesn't seem to be what the author had in mind.

I also wonder if her bias in favor of the women hasn't distorted some facts. While her three-dimensional portrait of Hemingway's mother is a much-needed corrective to his rabid antipathy, she seems to place an unprecedented amount of faith in the credulity of Adriana Ivanich's memoir. (i.e. Kert says, apparently on its authority, that Adriana's drawings for Hemingway's dust jackets were so good that Scribner's selected them without even knowing who she was. Others say that they were so inept that they had to be professionally redrawn before they could be of any use.) Also, she refers to Zelda Fitzgerald's death as taking place in a "hospital", as if she were recovering from an appendectomy rather than having been institutionalized as insane.