Books & Java

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

by A.E. Hotchner 

 

Synopsis: 

In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade.

In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the real part of each literary woman he'd later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which he stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him: humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.


To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife, Mary - also a close friend - Hotch kept the conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. "Hemingway in Love "puts you in the room with the master as he remembers the definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and dogged him until the end of his days.

My Review:

I am sincerely and deeply fascinated by the life of Hemingway and those that had the opportunity to somehow engage with him. A.E. Hotchner is a writer and journalist who got to do just that and in a very intimate way that pals and friends do. Sharing stories over good food and drink. Sharing experiences filled with excitement and sometimes an element of peril. That was his relationship with A.E. Hotchner whom Hemingway trusted with much of his true feelings about love and life without reservations.

Fantastic book and if you love Hemingway as I do, you will do so with even more fervor after reading this honest and candid peek into a literary great.