According to Lesley M.M. Blume from Town & Country, this is the true story of how Ernest Hemingway, his wife Hadley, his mistress Pauline Pfieffer, his son Bumby, and the nanny spent a summer on lockdown… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!
Last week, a letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald—quarantined due to the Spanish Flu in 1920—made the social media rounds. In it, Fitzgerald states that he and Zelda had fully stocked their bar, and called Hemingway a flu “denier” who refused to wash his hands. This letter went viral.
The only problem? It was not written by Fitzgerald; its true author is Nick Farriella, who had written it as a parody for McSweeney’s earlier this month. However, for those of you who crave an actual Lost Generation quarantine story, you’re in luck. Please allow me to entertain you with the true story of how Ernest Hemingway was once quarantined not only with his wife and sick toddler, but also his mistress. He actually took quite nicely to it.
In the summer of 1926, Hemingway was still married to his first wife, Hadley Hemingway, and they had a three-year-old son Jack, whom they called Bumby. Hemingway and Hadley had arrived in Paris a few years earlier so Hemingway could pursue his dream of becoming a world-famous, groundbreaking writer. That summer he was on the brink of a breakthrough, accumulating the lifestyle trappings he felt a celebrity author must have—including a fashionable mistress, Pauline Pfeiffer.
Whereas Hadley was church-mouse–poor, Pauline was an heiress; while Hadley was homely and docile, Pauline was a sleek Vogue editor with a commanding personality. When Hadley had, just weeks earlier, learned of the affair and confronted Hemingway about it, he had grown furious and told her that she was the true offender. He raged that everything would have been just fine if she hadn’t dragged the situation into the open.
The couple decided to carry on, but it became clear that Hemingway had no intention of giving up Pauline; nor did his mistress intend to bow out. Rather, she made herself omnipresent. It was just going to take Hadley a while to get used to her new normal.
Read full post in Town & Country Magazine