Mary's Museship

By Melvin Maddocks

HOW IT WAS by MARY WELSH HEMINGWAY 537 pages. Knopf. $1 2.50.

The earthly Muses of literary men tend to follow a certain succession. The first wife gets to bear the babies. The next wife or two come in on the money and the fame. The poor last wife is left to serve as practical nurse to the Great Man's aches and pains and, as widow, play keeper to his flame.

Mary Welsh Hemingway, the fourth and last wife of Ernest Hemingway, was 36 and already twice married when she bumped into Papa, then 44 and Jeep-bouncing in journalistic pursuit of World War II. The place was Paris, in the summer of 1944. The third time they met he declared, "I want to marry you," adding: "You're beautiful, like a May fly." Mary, a war correspondent for TIME, turned in her uniform and her press card to become Hemingway's "Pickle" or his "Kitten," as he referred to her in the mellow moments.

There were other moods. Even before they were married Hemingway also called her a "goddamn, smirking, useless female war correspondent." In the course of 17 long years (and these 537 long pages) he pronounced her a "camp-follower," a "scavenger" and a "slut," smashed her typewriter to the floor, threw wine in her face before friends, and hit her ("a slight slap to the jaw").

Charming Ruin. By 1950 Mary had had enough of "being swallowed" by her husband's voracious ego--of being merely an "appendage." In a letter to him she judged them both failures, blaming herself because "somehow I have lost your interest in me, your devotion and also your respect," blaming him for being "undisciplined."

But Hemingway could also be charming, especially when they were apart. During one month's absence he wrote her 20 letters and half a dozen cables. He profoundly needed his well-bruised Muse, and as a Muse, as well as a wife, Mary clearly was hooked. At Finca Vigia, Hemingway's "charming ruin" of a house in Cuba, she typed his manuscripts, answered letters, checked receipts, and ran a household that numbered four gardeners, a cook, a butler, a maid, a chauffeur (not to mention the dogs and cats). On the Pilar, Hemingway's beloved 38-ft. yacht, she was his fishing buddy. Everywhere--in the bullfight arenas of Spain, on safari in Africa, at Toots Shor's celebrity saloon in Manhattan--she was audience to an endless cycle of war stories and constant repetitions of his philosophies and jokes, including such trying catch phrases as "truly" (spoken in a "solemn voice") and "how do you like it now, gentlemen?"

Mary Hemingway's story, compiled from diaries and unpublished letters as well as memory, is often as jumbled as her life with Hemingway. A good deal of the time the author appeared to be running away from his worktable and the fearful knowledge that, increasingly, he was not the wordman he used to be. When all else failed, it seemed, he staged another accident. Broken bones, his and hers, are painfully scattered through the book, from ski spills in Italy to the famous plane crash in Africa in 1954. In the intervals of self-awareness Hemingway described himself as a "desperate old man."

Bad News. During Mary's muse-ship Hemingway wrote four books of fiction. One good: The Old Man and the Sea. One soso: Islands in the Stream. One pretty awful: Across the River and Into the Trees. (Mary recognized this as a disaster at the time, she reports. But Muses aren't hired to bring the bad news, and she didn't.) The last book, yet to be published, is The Garden of Eden, a story of a writer and his "triangular domestic arrangements," set mostly on the Riviera in the 1920s, which Mary describes cautiously as "containing some spots of excellent narrative."

The only real compensation for keepers of the flame is that they have the last word. In the beginning Mary exiles Hemingway from her book--for 93 pages--while she details her childhood in Minnesota, her first two marriages and her decade and a half of journalistic exploits. In an "I-was-somebody-too" tone she relates how Lord Beaverbrook gave her a dry kiss on the forehead and tried to persuade her to accompany him on a trip up the Nile; how she talked her way into Neville Chamberlain's suite in Munich (the toilet paper was pink, the wallpaper was blue).

The long-suffering, long-distance reader can hardly begrudge the lady her self-indulgence. She paid her dues. Once when Hemingway was diverted by a 19-year-old Italian nymphet (the model for Colonel Cantwell's love in Across the River), Mary moaned, "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." Hemingway counterpointed, "Nobody knows but Gellhorn." But Martha Gellhorn, wife-Muse number three, was a successful novelist and had been married (for less than five years) to a younger, less desperate Hemingway. Mary, not Martha, was there when the Nobel prize arrived, late as usual. Mary was also there on the morning of July 2, 1961, coming downstairs to find "a crumpled heap of bathrobe and blood, the shotgun lying in the disintegrated flesh."

How It Was tells little about the consummately gifted writer and tormented man that has not been reported before.

Mary often confuses the superficial with the significant and, even by standards less strict than Hemingway's, flunks in prose style. Yet she is an indispensable witness. Nobody else could record that even when things were at their best during the writing of The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway confessed: "I can cheer up everybody except me." She reveals his pain together with her own--which was sharpened by the knowledge that she could not help. Even so, Mrs. Hemingway has also written a decisive chapter in the history of women who do time as artists' handmaidens As usual, her husband had the taut phrase for it: "You hired out to be tough, didn't you?"

Melvin Maddocks

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