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Ernest Hemingway’s Memphis Ties Our history expert solves local mysteries: who, what, when, where, why, and why not. Well, sometimes.
DEAR VANCE: The new Ken Burns documentary on Ernest Hemingway (released earlier this year) mentions that the author’s mother lived in Memphis with her daughter for several years, and his mother actually died here. Where did they live, and why were they here?
— K.B., MEMPHIS.
above: Ernest and Grace Hemingway, 1899
I’m glad I wasn’t the only person watching that program who was surprised by that information — but no one would have told me about the Hemingway family anyway, knowing how I feel about them. Over the years, the Lauderdales and Hemingways had a relationship that even Gertrude Stein described as “tense.” We were jealous of Ernest’s literary honors, of course, especially that Nobel Prize thing, and from what I heard, he threw a tantrum every time friends told him my family had won yet another trophy for bowling, roller-skating, badminton, and oboe. He couldn’t compete with our “macho” ways, and he knew it. I can’t say with absolute certainly that Ernest himself never came to Memphis, but if he did so, he never paid a visit to the Lauderdale Mansion. I don’t need to tell the story of one of the most famous authors in the world — I mean Ernest Hemingway, not me — because you can find that information anywhere and everywhere. But to answer K.B.’s question, a bit of DEAR K.B.:
biography is necessary, so I’ll summarize the key points. Let’s start — as most lives do — with the mother. Grace Earnestine Hall (left) was born in Chicago in 1872, and her father, a wealthy merchant, soon moved the family to the fashionable suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. A prodigy with the piano and violin, as a young woman Grace also became an accomplished singer, making frequent appearances at Madison Square Garden in New York City. She was even invited to join the Metropolitan Opera, but one biographer claims she turned down the role because an illness weakened her eyes and she couldn’t tolerate the stage lighting. Teaching singing and music lessons from the spacious family home, she had so many pupils that she was earning more than $1,000 a month — an astonishing sum in the early 1900s. What’s more, she directed the Oak Park Choral Society, the Oak Park Orchestra, and the choir at her church. In her spare time, she took up painting, and by the end of her life had completed some 600 landscapes. In 1896, she married one of Chicago’s leading physicians, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, and over the years, they had six children: Marcelline (born in 1898), Ernest (1899), Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904), Carol (1911), and Leicester (1915). Every member of the family displayed remarkable talents, from music to literature to business, but that didn’t save them from a shadow that seemed to darken their lives. The Ken Burns documentary points out that of the eight members of this family, four would eventually take their own lives. Ernest’s own father did so in 1928, the doctor shooting himself with an antique pistol one afternoon, after coming home from his clinic saying he was tired. In letters to friends, however, Ernest made it brutally clear that he blamed his mother, who had constantly disapproved of his family’s wild ways, accusing her eldest son of being “morally bankrupt,” and, as far as his writing went, “bastardizing a laudable art.” At any rate, after the death of his father, he distanced himself from his mother — another reason it’s unlikely he came to visit her in Memphis. Even so, in the 1920s, he definitely had Mid-South connections. During one of his many trips to Paris, he met — and married — Pauline Pfeiffer. She came from a wealthy family, who owned some 60,000 acres outside the town of Piggott, Arkansas, north of Jonesboro. Whenever she and Ernest visited the Pfeiffer farm, they stayed in the family’s two-story house and eventually transformed the large barn on the property into a spacious writer’s studio. It was here that Ernest wrote several short stories and completed the final chapters of A Farewell to Arms, considered by many to be his finest novel. Ernest and Pauline divorced in 1940, however, and
WIKIPEDIA PHOTOGRAPH OF ERNEST AND GRACE HEMINGWAY / PUBLIC DOMAIN
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