That was the background to Hemingway’s displays of manliness in his life and work. His upbringing stirred confusion in him about gender, identity and the boundaries between one person and another. His younger sister Ursula said that when he came back from the First World War, they shared a bed so she would not be lonely in the night. She was seventeen.
To Gertrude, as to Sylvia Beach, he recounted his injuries by trench mortar in Italy in July 1918 when serving as an ambulance driver. In his novels he wrote of Spanish bullfighting, aeroplane crashes, big game hunts, deep sea fishing, hard drinking, hard fighting. ‘Killed my 2 buffalo with the 30-06 Springfield – also all lions. Got some beauties and some wonderful heads,’ he recorded in January 1934 when hunting in Nairobi. Of Gertrude, he wrote:
She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and it was a good healthy feeling and made more sense than some of the talk.
Gertrude’s view was:
We are surrounded by homosexuals. They do all the good things in the arts and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was because I thought he was a secret one… I like all the people who produce and Alice does too and what they do in bed is their own business and what we do is not theirs…
Emerald Cunard, when she met Hemingway in 1944, said:
I was startled. Not a bit what I expected. You may think it bizarre of me but he struck me as androgynous… It is not the mot juste perhaps but that’s how he struck me. Distinctly emasculated.
‘Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers,’ Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson in 1922. It is unusual to wonder how much each of your brother’s breasts weigh and to want to fuck him, knowing he is lesbian.
Gertrude, too, pondered the ideas about gender in currency from sexologists and psychologists. She was interested in the theory of the Viennese psychologist Otto Weininger that:
all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability reveal some of the anatomical characters of the male, some bodily resemblance to a man.
Weininger thought women who were attracted to and by other women were themselves half male. Havelock Ellis had a similar theory about the ‘congenital sexual invert’. But Hemingway, the macho man, wanted to fuck the city’s most famous lesbian whom he viewed as his brother, and Alice, who boasted the moustache, was the wife who did the cooking and sewing. Sigmund Freud might have tried to unravel the confusion felt by a son whose mother had treated him as the twin of an older sister, or that of a girl like Bryher who felt she should have been born a boy. It seemed that male and female, brother and sister, homosexual and lesbian meant different things to different people in the early twentieth century, as at all other times.
Gertrude, Hemingway felt, understood both him and his work. ‘It was a vital day for me when I stumbled upon you,’ he told her. He said he loved her and she was godmother to his son ‘Bumby’. Alice was frosty about their closeness. ‘Don’t you come home with Hemingway on your arm,’ she told her. Gertrude had ‘a weakness for him’, she said, and she did not like it. For months after first meeting her, Hemingway called Alice Miss Tocraz. He described her as dark, with a hooked nose, a Joan of Arc haircut and a lapful of needlepoint on which she worked non-stop. He particularly liked her fragrant colourless alcohols that tasted of raspberries and blackcurrants but packed a fiery punch.
Hemingway said Gertrude ‘ruined him as a journalist’ and helped create him as a novelist. She encouraged his early fiction, his short stories and debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. He read ‘a lot of her new stuff’ and took her advice. He said if you mentioned Joyce more than once in her presence, you would not be invited back.
She and Alice visited Hemingway and Hadley at their lodgings in rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Gertrude sat on their mahogany bed while he read aloud from his Three Stories and Ten Poems. She said the poems were ‘direct and Kiplingesque’ but she did not care for the prose. ‘There is a great deal of description in this and not particularly good description. Begin over and concentrate,’ she told him. Contact Editions published this first work of Hemingway’s in 1923.
‘I’ve thought a lot about the things you said about working’, Hemingway wrote to her from Rapallo on 18 February 1923. When he got a block about writing, she told him to try free association and automatic writing, and let things flow and leap onto the page without critical censor. Hemingway came up with:
Hadley and I are happy sometimes. Her friends call her Hadley. We are happiest in bed. In bed we are well fed. There are no problems in bed. Now I lay me down to sleep in bed. There are no prayers in bed. Beds only need be wide enough.
That summer, before he and Hadley left for Canada, Gertrude wrote one of her special portraits for him:
Among and then young.
Not ninety-three.
Not Lucretia Borgia.
Not in or on a building.
Not a crime not in the time.
Not by this time.
Not in the way.
On their way and to head away. A head any way. What is a head. A head is what every one not in the north of Australia returns for that. In English we know. And is it to their credit that they have nearly finished and claimed, is there any memorial of the failure of civilization to cope with extreme and extremely
