Hemingway in Love | Hacker News Reader

Hemingway in Love

smithsonianmag.com

36 pointsableal14 comments

Wonderful article. But it's a hell of a lot less fun if you consider it from the perspective of Hadley or Pauline, or, worse, his kids.

Life must be so hard for Ernest. What with having to decide which of two devoted women he prefers. If he wasn't able to distract himself with living in a series of beautiful locales, and a few other affairs, it would be nigh intolerable.

Meanwhile, some kids probably just wish they could know their dad.

Hemingway was quite aware he was not a great father and it killed him.

He was a selfish guy, a raging alcoholic and one of the most talented American writers of all time. His books to this day reflect that moment in time. They stand the test of time well.

I'm not sure he would be the artist he was without all his flaws.

Presumably, Pauline met some need for a time. He seems to have not really avoided her at first. He takes the easy way out of blaming her, even though his friend Fitzgerald was quick to tell him "Be rid of her.", advice he disregarded and even rebutted. Granted, she was obnoxiously aggressive. But when he really was tired of her, he divorced her as well. So when he really wanted to be rid of her, he was. It is a matter of convenience to pin the blame all on her during the time when he didn't really want to be rid of her.

It can be really hard to say whether it was a good thing he got his needs met through her or a bad thing. I mean, it can be a hard judgement call even if you are one of the people involved in such a situation. Outsiders generally have no real idea what is going on behind closed doors. A report like this, long after his death, really hard to judge. People will tend to judge based on their own prejudices, in essence.

This story sounds sad and beautiful, but love lost really is the most worthless, horrible thing in the world. Makes you want to crawl into a hole and die a hundred times.

This is really good writing because it captures the romance without focusing on all the bleak.

I can't agree that it's the most horrible worthless thing in the world, having just come out of a relationship. I would have agreed with you prior to that.

I managed to get over it relatively quickly, with several realizations.

The hurt I felt, wasn't that love was lost, but that I no longer had a place for all the love I had. This leads to the understanding that love cannot be lost, it's a resource inside us all, and we just have to find other means to redirect it.

To think of love, from the perspective of a single entity, leads to the kind of thinking of it being worthless. But the shared love that we think of romantically is coming from a multitude of entities, it isn't lost but as a resource redistributed elsewhere.

In death love is truly lost on one side, but is also somewhat immortalized on the other. This solidification of love, is similar to the concept of heartbreak, we don't want to share that love, but the easiest way to free ourselves of the pain is to love.

Love is something you create and give. It can't really be lost, because every day is another day to create or find something to love. You have to separate the concept of love from the entities and relationships.

I still love her, always will, but I had to say goodbye to the friendship because trying to hold onto her was doing exactly what you said. It was killing me, trying to hold on to the relationship, as she started moving on with another. I realized that they deserved a chance, she was chosing to move on with her life and love. That hurt, but what hurt the most was that I couldn't share my love with her any more without possibly alienating him and the love he gave.

I realized those things about love coming from inside and being okay with moving on and focusing on things and others. Accepting that love and care sometimes require sacrifices of ourselves for the good of others.

For those that enjoy this story, I'd strongly recommend A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's autobiographical tale of his time in Paris. It feels more "real" coming from him directly, even though he claims that much of it is fiction.

He specifically speaks mournfully about loving two women at the same time, and it's clear in the writing how much it impacted him -- even many years later. A Moveable Feast is the last thing Hemingway wrote before he took his own life.

Wow. Pauline comes across as scummy and Hemingway comes across as weak. I'm not a religious person, but this is exactly what the word "sin" was invented for: an action that is tempting but morally wrong and also makes you worse off.

Like many people, I've been in a similar situation. My girlfriend's "best friend" decided that she wanted me for herself. After a few very unpleasant months of the same "double love" as described in the article, one day me and my gf just decided to cut off the "friend" completely, no contact through any channels. I thought it would hurt, but actually it felt great.

That's a fairly shallow and judgmental way of putting things, and you managed to insert some bragging at the same time. "Hemingway is weak, Pauline is scummy, but I did the right thing when two women both loved me."

Jeez. They were just people, and we're people. Imagine you have a male friend and he tells you this story. "Hey man, I'm in this difficult situation, I got a wife and a baby but there's this other lady chasing me too. We tried to get away from her and went to a resort, but she came to the same resort! I love my wife but I think I love that lady too."

What would you do? I'd tell him to forget the love bullshit and cut that lady out of his life ASAP. I think that's the only sane decision. There's no point trying to be non-judgmental here.

I guess my issue here is that the comment doesn't really offer anything besides judgment. It's okay to be judgmental, but the comment didn't have any substance to it.

Yeah I see. It was actually intended as advice for people in similar situations. Giving an example from my life was just to lend some weight to the advice, otherwise people would say "it's not so easy and you don't know what you're talking about". Sorry if it came across as a humblebrag, I didn't realize that at the time.

I agree, we're all people. We should all try our best to be good people but at various times we have all been weak, scummy, etc.

The good person reflects on those times and tries to improve.

And in a win for irony, you also manage to be judgmental...

Monogamy is a meme that has been propagated to preserve property rights and rules of inheritance. To make moral judgements of artificial constructs is invalid. Human beings, specifically women, are hypergamous. So the most logical regime is actually one of polyamory and polygamy, rather than monogamy.

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