Hemingway, Mary Welsh (1908- ).

Mary Welsh Hemingway (1908-1986), journalist and author, was the wife of Ernest Hemingway. She grew up in and around Bemidji, Minnesota, where she attended public schools. Her fondest childhood memories were of canoe trips with her father in the lake country. "Up to the late teens of our century we lived in a world that was then remote and has now vanished at the insistence of lumbermen, plowmen, and road-builders," she wrote in her autobiography, How It Was (1976). Her father''s business declined while she was in high school, and the family moved from a gracious house to an apartment. After her high school graduation in 1926, she attended classes for a year at the local state teacher''s college in Bemidji. Determined to become a journalist, having been impressed with the local newspaper editor when she was a child, Mary enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She left the university in 1930 after less than two years to edit a magazine, The American Florist, aimed at Chicago''s retail florists. She was married briefly to Lawrence Miller Cook, whom she had known as a classmate at Northwestern and whom she divorced in 1933. In 1932 she became a reporter for a company that published five weekly neighborhood newspapers on Chicago''s North Side, but later in the year she joined the Chicago Daily News, where she worked until 1937 as a society reporter. She longed to cover news but later was thankful she had been trained by the demanding women''s editor, Leola Allard. In 1936 Mary traveled overseas for the first time and saw London and Paris, an intoxicating vacation that made her determined to work abroad. She called the powerful London newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook and asked for a job on his London Daily Express, the largest newspaper in England. She charmed the elderly man, and a year later he summoned her to New York for a meeting at which he proposed that she become his assistant. She persisted in her attempts to become a reporter in London, however, and in the summer of 1937 she started working for the Daily Express. In 1938 she met and married an Australian journalist, Noel Monks, who was then covering the Spanish Civil War for the London Daily Mail. They lived apart for much of their marriage, their war-related assignments separating them, and the couple divorced in 1945. A highlight of Mary''s work was her coverage of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, in which Great Britain and France agreed to Adolf Hitler''s annexation of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. She covered Germany''s march into Czechoslovakia in 1939. In 1940 Mary was the first woman correspondent with the British Royal Air Force in France; she slipped back to London as France fell. Later that year Mary went to work for Time and Life. She wrote about, and lived through, the Luftwaffe''s bombing of London that killed some 30,000 people and left more than a million homeless. Some of her war dispatches were published in Their Finest Hour (1941) and I Can Tell It Now (1946). "Whenever I was caught in the streets by bombs sounding too close for comfort, I flopped face downward with my arms around my head," she later wrote. In the whirlwind of wartime London she met and socialized with diplomats, politicians, military leaders, and famous writers, including J. B. Priestley and William Saroyan. Mary, then thirty-six, met Ernest Hemingway, forty-four, for the first time as she lunched with Irwin Shaw at the White Tower in 1944. The next day she lunched with Hemingway, who was covering the Royal Air Force for Collier''s; he struck her as lackluster compared with her lively friends. At their chance third meeting, in the bar of the Dorchester Hotel, she was saddened by his anger toward his mother. "In subsequent years I saw in many strangers'' faces signs of the same disapproval I was feeling and not understanding," she recalled in How It Was. Later that night Hemingway (then married to Martha Gellhorn) visited her apartment and told her he intended to marry her. In July 1944 she toured the Normandy invasion site and battlefields and reported on army surgeries for Life. On a subsequent trip for Time into newly liberated Paris, she reunited with Hemingway in the Hotel Ritz. They cele brated, drank with friends, and visited Pablo Picasso. One time she found herself the surprised victim of his anger, a "whipping boy" role she would play "from time to time for years," and in another incident she returned fire over his drunken friends. (In response, she said, he slapped her jaw, later sending emissaries, including Marlene Dietrich, to apologize and plead his case before showing up himself to praise her spunk.) Despite reservations about losing her work and about the "complicated and contradictory" Hemingway, Mary decided to put her career on hold after the war and settle into Hemingway''s home in Cuba. Their mutual divorces final, they formally completed a Cuban marriage contract in March 1946. In How It Was, published fifteen years after Ernest''s death, Mary Hemingway reconstructed from her detailed diaries and her correspondence their active social life, their Gulf Stream fishing trips and hunting trips in Africa and the American West, their rambling travels in the Alps and to Spain, their fights, and their passion for each other. She frankly reported Hemingway''s periodic mistreatment (he once threw wine in her face in front of friends) as well as his tenderness (he wrote faithfully during separations, sometimes multiple letters daily). In the summer of 1946, she reported, he saved her life on the operating table during an emergency surgery in Casper, Wyoming, for a burst fallopian tube; he coolly forced plasma into her collapsed veins, although doctors had given up hope. She was with him in his waning years, when he published his shakiest novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), nevertheless a best-seller and dedicated to her; she was his first audience when he rallied with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won the Pulitzer Prize; she was beside him when they narrowly escaped death in two back-to-back plane crashes in East Africa in 1954; and she shared his pride when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature that year. In her autobiography Mary chronicled Hemingway''s professional decline and his paranoia and depression, which culminated in his suicide; she discovered his body in the foyer of their home in Ketchum, Idaho. (They had purchased the house in 1959 after Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba.) Critics were annoyed by the lack of analysis and the vast minutiae in the 537 pages of How It Was. Walter Clemons wrote in Newsweek (27 September 1976) that he felt as if he were "floundering through a giant issue of House and Garden," and added, "Approximately 25 pages of How It Was are moving and revealing." Melvin Maddocks grumbled in his Time (18 October 1976) review that the book was "often as jumbled" as her marriage, although he also said that Mary Hemingway was an "indispensable witness" to Hemingway''s torment and a decisive contributor to the "history of women who do time as artists'' handmaidens." Mary Hemingway comes across in her book and in other accounts as a likable, competent, and down-to-earth woman who learned to love drink, sophisticated travel, and the celebrity life during her busy reporting career and later in her equally eventful marriage to Hemingway. After his death she brought forth his three unpublished manuscripts--A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir, and Islands in the Stream (1970) and The Garden of Eden (1986), both novels. These posthumous books led to a new appreciation and to critical reevaluation, especially for The Garden of Eden, a mammoth typescript pared down to a focused novel about a couple''s sexual experimentation with another woman and with gender-role reversal. She also published three collections of Hemingway''s writing: By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967), The Nick Adams Stories (1972), and The Enduring Hemingway (1974). Mary lived in Manhattan after Ernest Hemingway''s suicide. She wrote for Vogue and other magazines. In 1976 she established the Ernest Hemingway Foundation to give a prize for the best first novel by an American. Mary had no children.

From the description of Hemingway, Mary Welsh, 1908-1986 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration). naId: 10679498

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