The letter arrived in March 1919, and it nearly killed him. Agnes, the nurse he’d fallen for while recovering in a Milan hospital, wrote to say she’d met an Italian officer. She was engaged now. Hemingway had spent months planning their future, imagining her joining him in America, and she broke it off in a few cold sentences.
The shrapnel wounds in his legs had healed. This never did. He carried that betrayal with him for the rest of his life, and he made sure every woman he met paid for it. It started long before Agnes, though.
As a boy in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway’s mother, Grace, treated him like a doll. She dressed him in frilly Victorian gowns and refused to cut his hair until he was three, all so he could pass as his older sister’s twin. The family looked respectable from the outside, but Grace was domineering and controlling, and young Ernest grew to hate her with a passion that never cooled. A friend later said Hemingway was the only man he ever knew who truly despised his mother.
By eighteen, he was desperate to prove his masculinity. He boxed, he hunted, and he wanted to fight in World War I, but the Army rejected him for poor eyesight. So he signed up with the Red Cross and went to Italy as an ambulance driver. Months later, mortar fire tore through his legs while he carried supplies to the front line.
Even wounded, he dragged other men to safety. He was patched up in a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with Agnes. But Agnes was seven years older, and once he was sent home, she found someone else. The rejection poisoned something inside him.
He spent the rest of his life seeking revenge on her memory through a string of failed relationships. Back in Chicago, he met Hadley Richardson, a shy, nurturing redhead who also had an overbearing mother. She was eight years older than him—nearly the same age gap as Agnes—and that seemed to be exactly the point. Hemingway decided almost immediately that she would be his wife.
They married in the fall of 1921, and soon moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and rubbed shoulders with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He had a wife who loved him, a son named Jack, and a future full of promise. He also had a growing ego. Hemingway spent his nights drinking with Joyce, who would pick bar fights and then hide behind him shouting, “Deal with him, Hemingway.
” The writer was happy to oblige. He developed a macho persona, and his friendship with Stein soured into rivalry. Then came the catastrophe. In 1922, Hadley was carrying a suitcase full of his manuscripts through the Gare de Lyon when she set it down for a moment.
It vanished. All those pages, gone forever. Hemingway published a small book of what was left, but the loss made him bitter and reckless. He took up with Zelda and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, whose partying was notoriously destructive. On one infamous night, Zelda mocked her husband’s manhood, insisting he could never satisfy a woman. Hemingway offered to inspect the situation himself in the men’s room and then reported that Fitzgerald was perfectly satisfactory. The friendship was a tangle of admiration and jealousy.
When Fitzgerald finished *The Great Gatsby*, Hemingway was consumed by envy. He swore he’d write a novel and do better than Gatsby. That novel cost him his marriage. Hemingway became obsessed with bullfighting and dragged Hadley and a group of friends to Pamplona.
Among them was the beautiful, unstable Mary Duff Sterling, who’d recently divorced her husband and was juggling two lovers. Hemingway chased her too, fought a fistfight over her, and wrote it all into *The Sun Also Rises*. His wife watched him humiliate her for the entire trip. When they returned to Paris, their family friend Pauline Pfeiffer started giving Hemingway writing advice.
Hadley sensed something and tried to steer him away, but it was too late. He was already having an affair. The next time they went to Pamplona, Hemingway insisted Pauline come along, and everyone knew what was happening. Hadley asked for a separation.
When the divorce came through in early 1927, Hemingway married Pauline four months later. His second marriage began with disaster. In 1928, in a Parisian bathroom, Hemingway pulled what he thought was a flush chain and brought an entire skylight crashing down on his head. The scar left him mortified.
When they moved to America, things didn’t get better. Pauline’s delivery of their son Patrick was agonizing, and the couple moved constantly, exhausted. Then came the worst news. Hemingway was about to board a train with his son when he received a cable: his father, Clarence, had taken his own life.
Hemingway had just sent his father a telegram saying he would always be there for him—it arrived only minutes too late. He reportedly accepted the news and said, “I’ll probably go the same way. ”
He was right. But there was more misery to come first.
Hemingway grew restless and threw himself into the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, where he began an affair with the reporter Martha Gellhorn. He left Pauline to shack up with Martha in Cuba, divorced her, and married Martha in 1940. She soon regretted it. Hemingway’s appetite for destruction didn’t stop.
He married his final wife, Mary Welsh, in 1946, and tragedy followed. She suffered an ectopic pregnancy, his son Patrick survived a terrible crash, and his friends started dying off—Fitzgerald in 1940, Joyce in 1941. By the 1950s, Hemingway was walking wounded. Then came the ordeal that nearly broke him forever.
In 1954, he and Mary were in Africa. He’d bought her a chartered flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present. While flying toward Murchison Falls to take photos, the plane hit a utility pole and crashed. They survived, but Hemingway had a serious head injury and Mary broke two ribs.
They were stranded in the middle of nowhere and had to trek a full day to find help. When they finally made it to a small town, they chartered a second plane to reach a medical facility. Just as it lifted off, the plane burst into flames. Miraculously, they survived that too, but Hemingway suffered a severe concussion and cerebral fluid leaked from his head.
The man who had survived war, shrapnel, multiple crashes, and four marriages was falling apart. His health deteriorated, his memory faded, and the macho facade crumbled under the weight of a lifetime of rage and loss. Years later, haunted by his father’s fate and tormented by his own demons, Hemingway did exactly what he once predicted.
He took his own life, following the same path he swore he’d take on the day he learned his father was gone.
