Hadley Richardson

St. Louis

Hadley Richardson was born on 9 November 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of six children in a prosperous family. She fell from a window as a small child, and her mother kept her at home and treated her as delicate for years afterwards.[1]

Her father died by suicide in 1903, when she was eleven; he shot himself after his business failed. Her sister Dorothea died in 1920 in a fire. Her mother died the same year.

She studied piano seriously and briefly attended Bryn Mawr College, leaving after a year. By twenty-eight she was living in St. Louis and playing the piano, older than most women of her background were when they married.

Meeting Hemingway

In October 1920 Hadley visited a friend in Chicago and met Ernest Hemingway at a party. She was twenty-eight; he was twenty-one and working for a trade magazine after being wounded as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy.[2]

They wrote to each other constantly for the next year — hundreds of letters — and married on 3 September 1921 at Horton Bay, Michigan.

Hadley had a trust fund from her family. It was not a fortune, but it was a steady income, and it is the reason the marriage could be conducted the way it was: in Europe, without either of them holding a regular job.

Paris, 1921

Sherwood Anderson persuaded the couple to go to Paris rather than Italy, and gave Hemingway letters of introduction, to Gertrude Stein and to Sylvia Beach. They sailed in December 1921 and took a cheap apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, in a poor part of the fifth arrondissement, above a dance hall.[2]

Hemingway worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Hadley kept the flat, managed the money, and went with him to Stein's Saturday evenings and to Sylvia Beach's bookshop. They travelled on his assignments — Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain — and wintered at Schruns in Austria, where he skied and worked on manuscripts.

Hadley was a trained pianist and kept at it, renting a cold practice room to play in while Hemingway wrote in cafés. They rode out to the racetracks with picnic lunches. After Bumby was born the household at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was the three of them and F. Puss, the cat that was left to mind the baby.

Writing in the late 1950s, Hemingway described these Paris years in A Moveable Feast as the happiest of his life. The book is largely about this marriage.[3]

The lost suitcase

In December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne covering a peace conference. He asked Hadley to come out and join him, and she decided to bring his manuscripts so he could work.[4]

She packed nearly everything: the finished stories, the poems, the novel in progress, and the carbon copies. At the Gare de Lyon in Paris she left the valise briefly in her train compartment; when she came back it was gone. Hemingway offered a reward. Nothing was ever recovered.[5]

Almost all of Hemingway's writing to that date was lost. He went back to Paris to check that the carbons were really gone. Only two stories survived, because they had been elsewhere — Up in Michigan, put away in a drawer, and My Old Man, which was out in the post to an editor.

Hemingway told the story many times afterwards, sometimes with anger and sometimes with something closer to gratitude, since it forced him to start again in the pared-down style he was then developing. The marriage did not break over it, and he returned to the loss in letters and in print for the rest of his life.

Bumby

Their son John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was born in Toronto on 10 October 1923, where the couple had gone for the birth and for a newspaper job. They came back to Paris in January 1924 and moved to 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, above a sawmill.[1]

The boy was called Bumby. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were his godmothers. Hadley did the work of raising him in a fourth-floor flat with no bathroom while Hemingway wrote.

Pamplona and The Sun Also Rises

In July 1925 the Hemingways went to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín with a group of friends: Lady Duff Twysden, Pat Guthrie, Harold Loeb, Bill Smith and Donald Ogden Stewart. The trip was tense — several of the men were in love with Twysden — and Hemingway began writing about it within days of getting back.

The book became The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, the novel that made his name. Hadley is not a character in it, although she was on the Pamplona trip it is drawn from and in Paris while he wrote it.

The end of the marriage

In the spring of 1926 Hemingway began an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris editor for Vogue who had become Hadley's friend and had travelled with the family. For part of that year the three of them lived and holidayed together.[2]

Hadley found out and eventually demanded that Hemingway and Pfeiffer stay apart for a hundred days. If they still wanted each other at the end of it, she would divorce him. They stayed apart, and they still wanted each other. The divorce came through in January 1927 and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.

Hemingway gave Hadley all the royalties from The Sun Also Rises, which he had dedicated to her and their son. He wrote to her that she had been better to him than he deserved.

Paul Mowrer

In 1933 Hadley married Paul Scott Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent who had won the first Pulitzer Prize for correspondence and who later became poet laureate of New Hampshire. She had met him in Paris. The marriage lasted forty years, until his death in 1971.

She lived a private life in Chicago and then New Hampshire, out of literary sight, raising Bumby and later welcoming grandchildren. She gave few interviews and never wrote a rival memoir. When Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker approached her in the 1960s she spoke to him, and her letters and recollections are the main source for what Paris was actually like for the two of them.

After Hemingway's death

Ernest Hemingway died by suicide in Idaho in July 1961, shooting himself, thirty-five years after the marriage ended. A Moveable Feast, assembled from his manuscripts, was published in 1964, and it is a book about Paris and about Hadley.

Its last pages describe the affair that ended the marriage. Hemingway blames himself and the rich friends who attached themselves to the couple in 1926, Pauline Pfeiffer among them. He wrote that he wished he had died before he loved anyone but her.

Hadley outlived him by eighteen years. She died on 22 January 1979 in Lakeland, Florida, aged eighty-seven.

Why Hadley Richardson matters

Hadley Richardson is usually described as the first of Hemingway's four wives. She was eight years older than he was, born in 1891 to his 1899. She was married to him from 1921 to 1927, the years in which he wrote his first stories and The Sun Also Rises, and her trust income paid for them.

She is also the subject of Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, which is historical fiction told in Hadley's voice rather than a record of what she said.

Her name is also attached to the loss of the suitcase. In December 1922 nearly all of Hemingway's early stories, his poems and an unfinished novel were stolen at the Gare de Lyon and never recovered; two stories survived because they were elsewhere. He rebuilt his work from almost nothing after that, and the style he arrived at was spare, cut back and built from short declarative sentences.

Hadley, illustrated

A few scenes from Hadley's Paris years — drawn illustrations, not photographs.

Discussed since

The years the first marriage came apart have been revisited often, including in a Hemingway Society panel, Ménage à Trois: From Hadley to Pauline, with Lesley M. M. Blume, Ruth Hawkins and Lynn Novick, moderated by Suzanne del Gizzo. Hawkins wrote the biography of Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman for whom the marriage ended.