WHO INSPIRES YOU?

**

The ghost of Ernest Hemingway was glum last week.

As he sat beside me on my rare blood runs, he talked about Hadley, his first wife.

"She inspired my first short stories you know.  On this date today in 1925, I finished the first draft of THE SUN ALSO RISES."

He rubbed his face wearily. 

"A little more than a year later, it was published, and I dedicated it to her.  But in those months I  had strangled our marriage by my affair with Pauline Pfeiffer."

I nodded silently.  I didn't know what to say.  I knew from earlier times with him

how Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway were the golden couple of Paris in the twenties.

 They had been the center of an expatriate community boasting the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and James and Nora Joyce.

In his haunting accounts of he and Hadley, he explored their passionate courtship, their family life in Paris with baby Bumby, and their thrilling, adventurous relationship —

a literary love story scarred by Hadley’s loss of the only copy of Hemingway’s first novel and ultimately destroyed by a devastating mÉnage À trois on the French Riviera.

Hadley was the remarkable woman who inspired his passion and his art—the only woman Hemingway never stopped loving.

As I drove the night through, the interstate grudgingly giving up only a few feet of its surface under the feeble headlights, Hemingway sighed like the evening's lost winds.

"Fifteen years later, on this day in 1942, Hadley wrote me to ask if I wanted a stack of letters from the old Paris days which she had just found in her basement.

At that point, I was beginning a new marriage —

in five weeks I would divorce Pfeiffer,

in eight weeks I would marry Martha Gellhorn.

I remember my reply to Hadley. I asked for the letters, and I foolishly tried to turn back the clock. 

I read and re-read that passage so often before I mailed it that it remains fixed in my mind even now when I am but a shade --

'Imagine if we had been born at a time when we could never have had Paris when we were young.

Do you remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves and that wonderful boat the Leopoldina and Cortina D’Ampezzo and the Black Forest?

Last night I couldn’t sleep and so I just remembered all the things we’d ever done and all our songs—

“A feather kitty’s talent lies
In scratching out the other’s eyes
A feather kitty never dies.
 Oh immortality.”

We have three good cats here…. When I can’t sleep at night I tell them stories about F. Puss [Feather Puss, our Paris cat]….

Good bye Miss Katherine Kat.

I love you very much. It is all right to do so because it hasn’t anything to do with you and that great Paul.

 It’s just untransferable feeling for early and best Gods. But I will never mention it if bad. Thought you might just be interested to know.'
 
Beside me in the dark of the van, Hemingway squeezed shut his eyes and his meaty fists, murmuring, "The dirt is my lover now."

{If you wish to read an amazing account of Ernest and Hadley's Paris love, read PARIS WITHOUT END:  (A great read for $6)

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062108824/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=todayinliter-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062108824  }

Who inspired or inspires you, my friends?

**
This photgraphic image is from the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (JFK Library). This image was originally created and/or owned by Ernest Hemingway and/or his wife Mary Hemingway.

After Ernest Hemingway's death, his widow Mary donated many of his papers, photographs and other items to the JFK Library, and transferred the copyright for images she owned to the JFK Library.

The JFK Library is part of the National Archives, an agency of the United States Federal Government, and has released the photos into the public domain. This photo is marked "Public Domain" on its web page at the JFK Library. 

Don't miss Donna Hole's shout-out for my GHOST OF A CHANCE HALLOWEEN CONTEST: http://donnahole.blogspot.com/2012/09/roland-yoemans-ghost-of-chance-giveaway.html

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