Hemingway's Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway

Confession: this may be considered sacrilege in literary circles, but I've always liked books about Ernest Hemingway and his orbit more than books by him. Yet I suspect I'm not the only one. His life was so huge and colorful compared to that of most of us. At times his personal adventures seem larger than his literary creations. Fun fact: three of Hemingway's four wives were from St Louis (Hadley Richardson, war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn, and Vogue fashion writer Pauline Pfeiffer.) His fourth and last wife was the exception; she was from Minnesota. Mary Welsh Hemingway - also a war correspondent - was as complex as he was - talented and highly accomplished, courageous, likeable and unlikeable, magnanimous and petty, enjoying the world's favorable spotlight throughout her life, and ruined in the end by alcohol. This book is an incredible accomplishment by a retired Canadian civil attorney and law school Dean who spent many years tracking down and reading thousands of letters and documents and interviewing as many friends, family members and publishing world associates of Mary and Ernest Hemingway as he could locate. His voluminous findings have been integrated into a sensitively rendered interpretation of the last years of Hemingway's storied life and what it cost his wife Mary to spend these years with him as his mental health deteriorated. It wasn't only the writer that charmed the world who ultimately lost his mind. Though not the specific focus of this book, intergenerational, multigenerational mental and emotional health issues in this family are tragically evident in its pages. Depression, substance abuse, and suicide - all are expressed in various ways and patterns up and down at least four Hemingway generations and likely more. Gender bending was another multigenerational issue in the author's family. Hemingway was curious but also ambivalent about gender fluidity and sexual identity. In childhood his mother frequently dressed him in girls' clothing - perhaps planting a seed that bedeviled him into adulthood. He experimented with themes of gender switching in his writing as well as in his marital relations. Yet once his sons were grown, he angrily rejected the transsexual identity of one of them. Maybe that was a latent manifestation of how he felt about the clothes he wore as a little boy. Even if in close up you don't entirely like these people - Ernest and Mary - and you are especially repelled by their thoughtless destruction of animals and magnificent sea life, your heart is broken by the time you finish the book. Broken simply by the overall sadness of it. The Hemingways lived large, yet despite the richness of opportunity and life experience and the worldly glamour and respect they enjoyed, so many members of this family - including Hemingway's widow - came to sad and lonely ends. Reviewed by Marianne W