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The Women Who Shaped Hemingway’s Life and Work影响海明威生活和工作的女性

2019-09-10刘莉

英语世界 2019年7期
关键词:欧内斯特爱德哈德

刘莉

Ernest Hemingway has often been described as a “notorious man’s man” whose prose is rife with depictions of men engaged in bull fights, boxing, hunting and warfare. Though women also play key roles in his fiction, numerous scholars and literary critics (not to mention casual readers) have taken him to task for1 creating female characters who were, too often, stereotypes and projections rather than authentic, flesh and blood women. But the real women who influenced his writing—his wives, girlfriends, colleagues, family members and friends—were anything but stereotypes; they were complex, independent women who played an outsized role in shaping Hemingway’s life and work.

In her 1983 book The Hemingway Women, author Bernice Kert examined the lives of some of the most important women in Hemingway’s life. They include:

Grace Hemingway, Ernest’s mother. Her father worked in a wholesale cutlery business, and her mother encouraged Grace’s interest in music, arranging for her to take violin, piano and voice lessons. When Grace was a teenager, the family moved to Oak Park where she met Clarence “Ed” Hemingway. They struck up a friendship, and Ed, who was studying medicine, was interested in marriage. But Grace was not ready to give up on her musical career. She traveled to New York to study voice and audition at the Metropolitan Opera. But work never materialized and Grace returned to Oak Park to marry her boy next door, Ed. The couple had six children—Ernest was the second born. They spent summers in Michigan, and Grace, when not occupied with the children, spent time planning for a lavish 8-bedroom “dream” home. Years later, Ernest Hemingway would blame his mother’s reckless spending and selfishness for his father’s death. Suffering from financial troubles and physical decline, Ed shot himself with his father’s Smith & Wesson revolver at age 57. Kert argues that his father’s suicide set off in Hemingway a “continuing search for a villain ... [and] he cast Grace in that role.”

Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife. Hadley was badly injured as a child after falling from a second-story window and afterward her mother became extremely protective. After high school she attended Bryn Mawr College, but dropped out after her mother convinced her that she was too delicate to be on her own. She spent the next decade taking care of her mother; after her death the now 30 year-old Hadley accepted an invitation from a friend to visit Chicago, where she met a 21 year-old aspiring writer named Ernest Hemingway. The two were married less than a year later. They moved to Paris and met members of the “Lost Generation” like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1923, Hadley, then six months pregnant, traveled with Ernest to Pamplona for his first visit to the Festival of San Fermin. Their son John was born later that fall. The couple returned to Pamplona the next summer, this time joined by a group of American and British ex-pats including journalist Pauline Pfeiffer; it was this trip that inspired his first novel The Sun Also Rises. By the time Hemingway started writing and revising the book, his marriage to Hadley was ending—she discovered he was having an affair with Pauline. They divorced in January, 1927; Hemingway granted her the royalties to The Sun Also Rises in the settlement.

Pauline Pfeiffer studied journalism at the University of Missouri and worked for newspapers in Cleveland and New York before landing a job at Vogue as the assistant to their Paris editor. On her first trip to Paris, accompanied by her sister Virginia, she met Ernest and Hadley Hemingway. She struck up a friendship with the couple and traveled with them to Pamplona as well as Schruns, Austria, where she and Ernest began an affair. After a tumultuous period Ernest and Hadley separated and he and Pauline were married months later. When Pauline became pregnant with their first child, they moved back to the U.S., settling in Key West. Their son Patrick was born in 1928 as Hemingway was in the midst of writing his novel A Farewell to Arms. The character Catherine—in particular her difficult labor—was inspired in part by Pauline. Three years later she gave birth to their second child, Gregory. The couple remained together until 1940, three years after Hemingway began an affair with Martha Gellhorn.

Martha Gellhorn was already an accomplished author by the time she met Hemingway in December, 1936. Originally from St. Louis, Martha worked as a foreign correspondent in France before returning to the U.S. to research and write about the impact of the Great Depression on working people. Her findings were the basis of a well-received collection of short stories titled The Trouble I’ve Seen, published in 1936. After they struck up a friendship in Key West, Ernest and Martha traveled together to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War and began their affair. During this time Hemingway wrote his first (and only) play, Fifth Column. While Ernest and Pauline didn’t formally separate until 1939, he and Martha lived together off and on from 1936 until they were married in 1940. Martha covered the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day and was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by Allied Troops. Resentful of Gellhorn’s long absences, Hemingway once wrote her from Cuba asking, “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?” By the end of the war Martha had had enough and ended the relationship—though not before Ernest had already begun a relationship with the women who would become his fourth and final wife.

Mary Welsh attended Northwestern University, majoring in journalism, where she supported herself through a series of part-time jobs. During the Depression she worked as a copy editor for trade publications, eventually landing a job as a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. Coincidentally her boss was Paul Mowrer, who just moved back to Chicago from Paris with his new wife Hadley, the former Mrs. Hemingway. In 1936 Mary traveled to London where she was hired by the London Daily Express and married an Australian journalist named Noel Monks. Not long after England declared war on Germany, Mary was hired as a correspondent for Time. She and her husband both took on assignments covering the war and the couple grew apart; by 1943 Mary found herself in the center of a group of American artists and intellectuals living in London—people like photographer Robert Capa and writers William Saroyan and Irwin Shaw. Shaw introduced Mary to Ernest Hemingway, who pursued her immediately, though they were both still married. On their third date he drunkenly declared, “I don’t know you Mary. But I want to marry you.” Two years later they married in Cuba. She soon discovered she was pregnant, but it was an ectopic pregnancy and she nearly died after her Fallopian tube ruptured in her sleep. Ernest’s quick intervention saved her life. According to Bernice Kert, after that “Mary’s appreciation for Ernest seemed to swell into an everlasting and unshakeable trust. Nothing he could do to her, either inadvertently or with premeditation, would destroy that gratitude.” After his suicide in 1961, Mary became his literary executor and was responsible for the publication of A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden and other posthumous works. She died in 1986 at age 78; in her will, she stipulated that she be buried in Idaho next to Hemingway.

欧内斯特·海明威在其作品中大量描写了斗牛、拳击、狩猎和作战的男人,故而常常被描述为“猛男一辈”。虽然女性在他的小说中也起着关键作用,但是许多学者和文学评论家(更不必说寻常读者)却责备他塑造的女性角色往往刻板且带有主观臆测,而不是有血有肉的真实女性形象。不过,现实生活中影响他写作的那些女性——他的妻子、女友、同事、家人和女性朋友们——却绝非刻板之人。她们是复杂的、独立的女性,在海明威的生活和工作中对他产生了深远影响。

在1983年出版的《海明威的女人们》一书中,作者伯尼斯·克尔特探究了海明威一生中最重要的一些女人的生活。她们包括:

格雷丝·海明威,即海明威的母亲。父亲从事餐具批发生意,母亲则鼓励她学习音乐,让她上小提琴、钢琴和声乐课程。格雷丝十几岁时,全家搬到了橡树园镇。她在那里邂逅了克拉伦斯·“爱德”·海明威,两人开始交往。当时正在学医的爱德很想结婚,但格雷丝却还没准备好放弃她的音乐生涯。她前往纽约学习声乐,并参加大都会歌剧院试唱,但却一直没有找到工作。于是格雷丝便回到了橡树园镇,嫁给了住在隔壁的爱德。这对夫妻生育了6个孩子——欧内斯特排行老二。他们一家人在密歇根度过了无数个夏天,每当格雷丝不用忙着照顾孩子时,她就筹划一个豪华的八居室“梦想”家园。因此,多年以后,欧内斯特·海明威会将父亲之死归咎于母亲胡乱花钱、自私自利。在经济困窘和身体变差的折磨下,爱德57岁时用父亲的史密斯威森牌左轮手枪自杀了。克尔特提出,父亲的自杀使海明威开始“不断寻找一个恶人……(并且)让格雷丝扮演了这个角色”。

哈德利·理查森,即海明威的第一任妻子。哈德利儿时曾从二楼窗户上跌落,身受重伤。此后,她的母亲就对她百般保护。哈德利高中毕业后进入布林莫尔学院求学,却在母亲的说服下认为自己太纤弱而无法自立,最终退学。之后10年,她都在家照顾母亲。母亲去世后,时年30岁的哈德利在朋友的邀请下前往芝加哥,遇到了雄心勃勃的21岁的作家欧内斯特·海明威。两人认识不到一年便结婚了,搬到巴黎后遇到了格特鲁德·斯泰因、爱丽丝·B.托克勒斯、埃兹拉·庞德、F.斯科特·菲兹杰拉德等“迷惘的一代”。1923年,怀孕6个月的哈德利与海明威一起去了潘普洛纳,陪他参加人生中第一次的圣费尔明节。那年秋天,他们的儿子约翰出生了。这对夫妇于第二年夏天回到了潘普洛纳,这一次是与一群英美侨民一起,其中就包括记者保利娜·法伊弗。海明威正是在这次旅行中获得灵感,创作出了第一本小说《太阳照常升起》。他开始写作和修改这本书的时候,与哈德利的婚姻也走到了尽头——她发现海明威与保利娜有染。两人在1927年1月离婚,海明威在离婚协议中将《太阳照常升起》的版税留给了女方。

保利娜·法伊弗曾在密苏里大学修读新闻学,并在克利夫兰和纽约的报社工作过,后来成为巴黎版《时尚》杂志主编的助手。她在姐姐弗吉尼亚的陪同下第一次前往巴黎,遇到了海明威夫妇。保利娜与这对夫妇成为了朋友,与他们一同前去潘普洛纳和奥地利小镇施伦斯,并在那些地方与海明威私通。经历了一段波折后,海明威与妻子分手并于数月后与保利娜结婚。当保利娜怀上头一胎时,夫妇俩搬回了美国,定居基韦斯特。他们的儿子帕特里克于1928年出生时,海明威正在创作小说《永别了,武器》。书中的角色凯瑟琳——尤其是她的难产情节,正是受到了保利娜的一些启发。3年后,他们的第二个孩子格雷戈里呱呱墜地。这对夫妇的婚姻一直持续到了1940年,也就是海明威出轨玛莎·盖尔霍恩3年后。

玛莎·盖尔霍恩于1936年12月邂逅海明威,当时她已经是一位颇有成就的作家。来自圣路易斯市的她曾在法国担任外国通讯记者,后来又回到美国研究、撰文记述经济大萧条对劳动人民的冲击。基于自己的研究成果,她创作了一系列反响颇佳的短篇小说,并于1936年集结为《我所见的困苦》一书出版。海明威与玛莎在基韦斯特开始来往后,便一同前去西班牙报道西班牙内战,并且开始了恋爱。海明威在那期间创作了他的第一部也是唯一一部戏剧《第五纵队》。虽然海明威与保利娜直到1939年才正式分手,但是从1936年起他便断断续续地与玛莎同居,直到两人于1940年结婚。玛莎不仅报道了阿道夫·希特勒在德国的掌权,也是唯一一位在进攻日当天登陆诺曼底的女性,还是盟军解放达豪集中营后第一批从营内发出报道的记者之一。由于妻子长期驻外,愤恨的海明威曾从古巴写信质问她“究竟是一名战地记者,还是我床上的妻子?”二战结束后,忍无可忍的玛莎终结了这段关系。不过在此之前,海明威已然与他未来的第四任也是最后一任妻子谈情说爱了。

玛丽·威尔士曾就读于西北大学新闻学专业,做各种兼职养活自己。经济大萧条时期,她曾担任贸易出版物的文字编辑,最终在《芝加哥每日新闻》报找到了一份记者的工作。巧的是,她的上司保罗·莫勒与新婚妻子哈德利正好从巴黎搬回了芝加哥,这位哈德利正是海明威的前妻。1936年,玛丽搬到了伦敦并任职于《伦敦每日快报》,嫁给了一位名叫诺埃尔·蒙克斯的澳大利亚记者。英国对德国宣战后不久,玛丽成为了《时代》杂志的通讯记者。她和丈夫都承担了报道战争的任务,于是便分居两地。1943年,玛丽发现自己身边围绕了一群生活在伦敦的美国艺术家和知识分子,包括摄影师罗伯特·卡帕、作家威廉·萨洛扬和欧文·肖。在欧文·肖的介绍下,海明威认识了玛丽并立刻展开了追求,尽管当时两人都已结婚。第3次约会时,海明威醉醺醺地宣告:“玛丽,我不了解你。但是我想娶你。”于是两年后他们在古巴结婚了。玛丽很快便发现自己有了身孕,不过却是一次宫外孕。在睡梦中,她的输卵管突然破裂,几乎要了她的命,多亏海明威迅速处理才逃过一劫。根据伯尼斯·克尔特的说法,在那次事件后,“玛丽对海明威的欣赏似乎扩大成了一种永恒的、不可动摇的信任。不管有意还是无意,无论他对她做什么,都无法摧毁那种感激之情。”1961年海明威自杀后,玛丽成了他的遗稿保管人,负责《流动的盛宴》《海流中的岛屿》《伊甸园》等遗作的出版。1986年,78岁的玛丽与世长辞。她在遗嘱中明确要求将自己葬在爱达荷州,与海明威相伴长眠。

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