Pauline Pfeiffer and Ernest Hemingway

    The critical assault on Ernest Hemingway’s reputation as a hyper-macho, swaggering bully whose toxic character flaws show up on every page of his vast number of works seems to have abated somewhat in the last few years as more objective scholars and literary critics have recognized that an artist’s personal life and character and his or her work are two very different things.
    Yet while the sins and failings of other artists, from Caravaggio to Picasso, have had their apologists,  Hemingway’s harshest critics come down hard in an effort to show how his own surly character and love of manly blood sports seeped into his work so as to make the work itself socially reprehensible.  Furthermore, it was argued, any author so consumed with themes of masculine adventure is likely to be a closeted homosexual who deliberately leaves hints all over his books and stories that his upbringing and chromosome count overpowered his artistic restraint.
    Academic hounds sniffing around his leavings have centered on how his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing as a child (left), while admitting that this was common practice in families at the turn of the century. (Ernest’s brother Leicester Hemingway mentions nothing about this subject in his memoir, My Brother Ernest Hemingway.)
    Unless evidence suddenly turns up that young Ernest sought desperately to play Juliet in an Oak Park, Illinois, high school production of Romeo and Juliet, there simply aren’t any instances of cross dressing in his bio. (His mother also forced him to learn the cello, but his ill feelings for that experience never showed up in his work.)
    Nevertheless, critics’ accusations of submerged feelings of homo- or bisexuality without any solid evidence come in the form of the old dodge phrases like “Is it not likely. . .” and “What we do know would seem to suggest. . . .” 
    And then we get to his . . . thing . . . about his liking women with  short hair. Critics have rifled his work and his bio for instances where he dared express such a thought, culminating in the plot of his late experimental, unfinished, uncorrected novel The Garden of Eden, only issued in a highly truncated form in 1986. Hemingway’s supposed obsession with short hair “crops up everywhere in his writing,” insists biographer James R. Mellow.
    Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, ever on the lookout for what he calls “gender issues,” contends that “Throughout all those Oak Park years [1899-1921], it was always hair: his several sisters’ hair, his mother’s hair as long as Gertrude [Stein’s]. He remembered when [his sister] Marceline bobbed her hair and how his father looked at her across the table without saying a word. Remember his mother drying her hair in the afternoon sun at Windermere with only a slight breeze coming off the lake, long hair thinned out on the hillside blanket.”
    Those are Reynolds’s words (trying to sound Hemingway-esque), not his subject’s. Similar in their commentary are scholars like Debra Moddelmog (“Hemingway and Queer Studies,” State of the Field: Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Hemingway”)  Mark Spilka (Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny); and Carl Eby (Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood).  Richard Bradford in his provocatively titled The Man Who Wasn’t There, resorting constantly to “suggestions” and “possibilities” and “assumptions,”  sets out to show Hemingway as an inveterate liar who came to delude himself as to what was real and fiction.
    A far more judicious biographer, Mary V. Dearborn (left), wrote, “By definition, studying Hemingway is about the rough opposite, the cultural construction of gender – how sex roles are determined by the forces around us rather than our genes. It is through figures like Hemingway that masculinity gets defined – even if that same cultural construction affects him in turn.”
    When Dearborn plumbs the shallows of her subject’s fascination with hair, she calls it a “deep-seated preoccupation,” twice, an “obsession” and his fantasies about it “frankly pornographic,” but she believes Hemingway’s fascination with the way short hair feels and looks “should not be taken to suggest any homosexual impulse on Ernest’s part.”
    Perusing his letters published thus far by The Hemingway Letters Project (with sixteen volumes projected) will not turn up any. And within Hemingway’s huge oeuvre mentions of short haircuts are very few and far between and have little importance beyond the page on which they are referenced.
    In “The Last Good Country” Nick Adams’s sister, Littless, cuts her hair off so she can be just like her older brother, which is not so hard to imagine of many younger siblings, especially tomboys. In the story “Cat in the Rain,” the wife says she wants to grow her hair out because she’s tired of it, “looking like a boy.” The husband, whose reading in bed she has interrupted, says nothing more than that he likes it the way it is—a similar moment repeated in the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) when the character of Catherine, whose hair is luxuriously long, so that when Frederick removes the last two pins, “it all came down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind of falls. She had wonderful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light that came in the open door and it shone even in the night as water shy and sometimes just before it is really daylight.”  It is Catherine who says,  “I’m tired of it,” she tells him, “It’s an awful nuisance in the bed at night,” and suggests that if they both cut their hair, “We’d be just alike except only one of us is blonde and the other one dark,” noting “It would be fun.” Frederick doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, saying “I like it the way it is.” None of which seems to rise to the level of obsession on either his characters’—or Hemingway’s—part. In the film version made in 1932, Catherine, played by Helen Hayes (above, with Gary Cooper) had curly short hair. The woman Catherine was based on was a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky (right), with whom he had a romance while recovering from his wartime wounds.
        In For Whom the Bell Tolls American expatriate Robert Jordan asks Maria, whose hair had been cruelly shaven off by the Fascists,  to leave it short and he will cut his to be like hers so that “I am thee and thou art me,” which can be read as a very caring man’s way of assuaging his lover’s shame—especially in a country where long hair was a mark of a young woman’s femininity—while also stating precisely the sentiment of  the Catholic wedding ceremony that man and wife are being joined together to form a “mystical union.” It is a sentiment Robert expresses again at the end of the book when Maria is carrying their child and he is about to face certain death.  At left is Ingrid Bergman as Maria, with Gary Cooper, in the 1943 film version.
    The fact is that in the 1920s and 1930s, short haircuts were so ubiquitous on women and so much a coy rebellion against the long hair of the first two decades of the 20^th century when the Gibson Girl’s abundance of hair massed atop her head (right) was the fashion, that Hemingway, who upon arriving in Paris wore his own hair long, would have seen nothing but bobs on the women of Paris. Any suggestion that he was sexually obsessed by the look of a woman with a bob would only make sense if he actually had a wide range of women’s hairstyles to choose from.
        In The Sun Also Rises (below), with Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power in the 1957 movie) Brett Ashley’s short hair “brushed back like a boy’s” was simply the style every woman in the 1920s sported, just as did Hemingway’s fist wife, Hadley, (right) and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer (below, left). It would have been highly unusual and individualistic on Brett’s part had she run around Paris with long hair. No woman would.
        Various claims have been made as to who the first stylist was to create what became known as “the bob.” In 1908 couturier Paul Poiret’s dress collection showed women with short hair (below), but it was based on the women’s hairstyles, with ringlets, of ancient Greece to complement his clothes. Credit for the bob has gone to dancer and fashion icon Irene Castle (left), who in 1915 sported a curly short haircut that came to be called the “Castle bob.” Burgeoning French couturier Coco Chanel claimed she cut her hair short as of 1917 that made her look like “a young boy, a little shepherd” (right) which, along with her jackets, slacks and straw hats, overnight became the rage of young women in Europe and America.
    On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” at the start of the Roaring Twenties. In the story a teenage girl named Marjorie suggests her friend Bernice bob her hair: "‘I think it's unmoral,’ affirmed Bernice gravely. ‘But, of course, you've either got to amuse people or feed 'em or shock 'em.’ Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde. It was greeted with a ripple of laughter from the men and a series of quick, intent looks from the girls.”
   The “New Woman” (a term coined in 1894 by an Irish feminist Sarah Grand and popularized by American novelist Henry James)  embraced the new radical hairstyle and the provocative sobriquet of “the flapper,” as portrayed in Fitzgerald’s 1920 short story collection Flappers and Philosophers  and boosted that same year by the movie The Flapper. Requisite to the style of the flapper was bobbed hair, an unconstructed dress that just touched the knee and a cloche hat—exemplified in the couture designs of Coco Chanel; a cigarette and cocktail glass completed the look.
    The bobbed flapper made illustrator John Held Jr. famous  and wealthy for his satirical depictions of her, spindle thin in her short dresses and long necklaces in magazines like Life and College Humor. 
    In 1925, a story in the Washington Post was headlined “Economic Effects of Bobbing” about how the style had increased the number of hairdressing shops in the U.S. in 1920 from 5,000  to 21,000 shops by 1925, and that number did not include men’s barbershops, which the article said did “a rushing business with bobbing.”  The cut would be kept in place by bobby pins.    
    Short hair was just about the only length any woman wore for two decades, when flappers and vamps were the “it” girls, epitomized by the cleanly cropped, helmet-like bob of seductive actress Louise Brooks (left);  Colleen Moore (right) became an overnight star in Flaming Youth (1923) and The Perfect Flapper (1924). The type persisted in a new star of whom Fitzgerald wrote, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living” (left).
    Unless they were playing historic characters like Scarlett O’Hara or Maid Marian the Hollywood  actresses on the 1930s all wore short hair, on and off-screen, including Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Myra Loy and Claudette Colbert.  The shortest cut, the “Eton,” was worn by entertainer Josephine Baker (right).
    There was no question that the bob had an androgynous suggestiveness about it—Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola (below, left) in The Blue Angel (1930) blatantly made that clear—and no woman of the 1920s and 1930s was more ravishingly alluring for that suggestion than Amelia Earhart, who, with her curly, cropped hair, might have shared genes with Charles Lindbergh. As naturally pretty as she was handsome, with sky gray eyes and high cheekbones, Earhart’s look gave her a unique tomboy innocence and androgynous sexiness all at once.  She would dress in a flying man’s no-nonsense work clothes: Baggy khaki pants, worn leather jacket and a flowered scarf jauntily knotted around her slender neck.  In her white flight suit with cap and goggles she exuded the Jazz Age chic of a Vogue cover girl. And she carried it all off with the dexterity of a long-limbed cat leaping onto the wing of an airplane. Indeed, she might well have had a major career in Hollywood. In 1935 actress Myrna Loy copied her style as a woman aviator with a curly bob in Wings in the Dark in which she wore a glamorous white flight suit.
         An adventurer like Hemingway would certainly be fascinated by such a daring and independent woman as Earhart, short hair and all, as the  epitome of “grace under pressure.” As one obituary put it,  “She had helped make all women less afraid. For hers was a deeply feminine valor that could look life and death in the eye as unflinchingly as any man.” Hemingway could not have said it better.
     Women’s hairstyles became far more varied in the1940s; the severely cropped bob had become passé, but women in the movies and fashion magazines by and large still wore their hair above their shoulders, as evidenced by stars like Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, Merle Oberon, Lena Horne (left), June Allyson and Jane Powell. Onscreen, a highly sexualized new kind of woman emerged, one with hair below the shoulders that came straight from the sexually charged covers of pulp fiction novels and pin-up art. Actresses were coiffed to be as seductive as Delilahs (whom Hedy Lamarr played) and Salome (played by tress-tossing Rita Hayworth); Maureen O’Hara (right) was the fiery redheaded Irish woman, and Jane Russell the voluptuous brunette;  Dorothy Lamour was the Polynesian fantasy girl  in  a sarong with long Gauguin-esque black hair. Veronica Lake’s sultry blonde trademark peekaboo wave over one eye (left) was so copied by American women that government officials asked her to cut it, lest women in the wartime factories catch their hair in machinery; she obliged.  Women in the military had no choice but to wear their hair down to the uniform collar.
     Two actresses of the period whom Hemingway knew well were Lauren Bacall, who played a seductive nightclub singer with long wavy blond hair (right) in To Have and Have Not (1944), and Ava Gardner, who burned through the screen as a gangster’s moll in The Killers (1946) with feline black hair that tumbled below her shoulders (below). She would also appear in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) as short-haired Cynthia and was a perfect (bobbed) Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises (1957). She  became good friends with Hemingway, who even visited her bedside while she was passing gall stones, one of which he asked to keep. Of those movies Hemingway told her, “The Killers was okay. But the only good thing in Snows of Kilimanjaro was you and the dead cat.” (In her autobiography Gardner insisted Hemingway said it was the hyena, which makes more sense.) He was also good friends with Ingrid Bergman, who had played Maria in the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but who off screen wore more of a pageboy style.  Joan Bennett’s hair as Margot in The Macomber Affair (1947) was just to her shoulders  (right), and the  beautiful socialite “Slim” Keith, with whom Hemingway was infatuated, never wore her hair short.
        For a man charged with being obsessed with short hair there is simply no pattern of hair styles at all in the women he married or loved. His third wife, Martha Gelhorn (left), who wrote for Collier’s, wore her much-admired wavy hair at a moderate length to be easily manageable, as did all female wartime reporters like Margaret Bourke White of Time, Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle of American Home and Janet Flanner of The New Yorker. His fourth and last wife, Mary Welsh (right), wore her hair in several styles in the 1950s, looking more like Judy Holliday or Deborah Kerr than Jean Seberg.            
          In his later fiction Hemingway’s women characters had a variety of haircuts, or they were not remarked on at all. Francis Macomber’s wife Margot, a former model, is only described as an “extremely handsome and well-kept woman of  beauty,” with no mention of her hair, though it would be ridiculous for a woman to go on an African big game hunt wearing anything but short hair. So, too, the wife on safari in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is only referred to as “still a good-looking woman. . . and she had a pleasant body.”  Hemingway’s post-war 18-year-old heroine Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), supposedly based on his infatuation with a long-haired woman named Ariana Ivancich (left)  has long hair  that blows in the wind. In all of his work there are less than half a dozen references to short hair, Indeed, there are probably more dancing bears in John Irving’s novels than hair references in Hemingway’s.
    But then, there is The Garden of Eden, begun in 1945 but never finished, after some 800 manuscript pages. The book was published  posthumously in 1986 in a highly truncated form of 247 pages, a shrinkage that was roundly criticized.  E.L. Doctorow wrote in his review of the book, “This cannot have been the book Hemingway envisioned as the most ambitious moments of his struggle to realize it, a struggle that occupied him intermittently for perhaps 15 years.”
    Whether Hemingway ever intended to publish it at all, is unknown; nor is it known if he intended for the world to know that he —as opposed to his characters—had a consuming interest in transgender role playing based on short haircuts.
    When George Plimpton, who had no knowledge of the existence of the Garden manuscript, famously interviewed Hemingway for the Paris Review in 1954, he asked, “Have you ever described any type of situation of which you had no personal knowledge?” to which Hemingway answered, “That is a strange question. By personal knowledge do you mean carnal knowledge? In that case the answer is positive,”which, without mentioning Garden, meant that he could, if he wished, write about transgender sex without having personal “carnal” knowledge of it.
    What Garden shows, in a discombobulated and rambling form, is that Hemingway did find the subject of trans-gender well worth exploring. Set on the Riviera and in Spain, the plot begins with the honeymoon of David and Catherine Bourne, with David as narrator. One day Catherine announces she has a “big surprise” that is both “very simple but it’s very complicated.” She returns from town with her hair “cropped as short as a boy’s”— as David’s already is— and that night in bed tells him she does not want to be called a girl and to “Please love me David the way I am,” insisting that David should change into her “girl Catherine.” She then convinces him to dye his hair blond so that they look like androgynous  twins. The whole idea is hers, not David’s, who is clearly not enthusiastic about his wife’s wanting to try gender-bending.
     Later, the couple meets a woman named Marita and both sleep with her, but David is finding the demands for gender roles increasingly difficult (his secret name for her becomes “Devil”), and Marita becomes more closely his wife than is Catherine. The marriage deteriorates,  Catherine taunts David’s work as "worthless” and burns the manuscript of his book-in-progress.
     It is certainly not uninteresting to read of such escapades in Garden, however eviscerated it was in print, but what reasonable conclusions can we come to regarding Hemingway and hair? First, that he was a man who apparently liked women with short hair, as others do redheads or women with bangs, though never to the exclusion of women in his life who had long hair. Second, that none of the women he married or had affairs with had ever been coerced by Hemingway to cut their hair short or bleach it blond. Third, he might well have had fantasies about transgender sex or switching around positions in bed, but that would only make him the average male. I find it odder, or perhaps just plain silly, that he called his much younger women friends and lovers “Daughter,” including the fictional Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees.)
    Every man who gets together with male friends will occasionally say what physical attributes of a woman he finds most appealing, and hair is no exception, which is why call girls draw on a variety of wigs in their business. What that says about their clients is, usually, not much.     How much an artist’s personal history invests his or her subjects or themes depends wholly on the artist. Were Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Coca-Cola bottles in any way expressive of his deep-seated mental issues? Was Praxiteles’s character manifest in his sculptures of perfect human forms? Was Ravel a little bonkers to compose something as sensational as “Bolero?”
    Pinning a pseudo-sexual rap on Hemingway for something as trivial, even adolescent, as liking women with short hair indicates the degree critics and scholars will go to dissect a writer’s brain to explain a writer’s work or a writer’s work to  explain the writer’s brain. If art is said to hold a mirror up to life, the life it mirrors is not necessarily that of the artist himself.

                                NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

      This summer marked the earliest start of grape picking that anyone in Portugal’s Douro Valley can remember.  The Valley gets very hot every year, but the intense, enduring heat of 2026 showed the impact of global warming that is affecting all vineyards everywhere. Fortunately reports from the Douro’s wine makers are  positive as to the health and quality of the grapes this year, with good fruit and acidity.

      The Douro Valley (a World Heritage Site), in northeast Portugal, is best known for making Port, though only 26,000 out of 38,000 hectares are authorized for that fortified wine, the rest as table wine. I have, over decades, enjoyed Douro’s red wines aside from Port, but in recent tastings, always with food, I found them better than ever and now worth speaking of alongside Spain’s notable reds from Rioja and Priorat.

      The mountains of the Valley allow for cooler temperatures at higher altitudes and the Douro River itself offers reprieve from the heat, with the cooler vineyards located in the regions of Lamego, Vila Real, Alijó and São João de Pequeira, while Port is largely made in Cima Corgo. About 250 grape varieties exist, promiscuously, in the region, but the best for red wines are considered Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, and Tinta Roriz (known as Tempranillo in Spain). The best white grapes are  Rabigato, Gouveio, Viosinho, and Malvasia Fina. It should be noted that almost all Douro wines  are blended. 

       All the reds are robust and have good minerality, and in the hands of a modern vintner show more finesse than they have traditionally.

       But it’s really been just in the last twenty years that the wines have proved capable of international comparison and competition. The gauntlet was thrown in 2023 when a group of five noted producers who call themselves The Douro Boys (right) began promoting  not only their well-regarded Ports but also their still wines, putting all their experience and modern enology into focusing on the best grapes and plots on which to make still wines in the Valley. The group included the owners of Quinta do Vallado, Niepoort Vinhos, Quinta do Crasto, Quinta do Vale Dona Maria and Quinta do Vale Meão. I have not tasted examples from all these, but those I have were impressive, very clear indication of careful modern winemaking.

       I was delighted with Quinta Nova de Nossa Senhora Do Carmo’s Pomares 2022 ($22), first harvested in 2004, from the Cima Corgo Zone. Its body came from being unfiltered and nine months in French oak, yet it had a notable 13.5% alcohol that shows how much intensity you can get in such wines without a high alcohol level.

       Another wonderful Douro wine was from Inóspito Vinhas Veilhas 2023 ($13), a real bargain for such a substantial, easy-to-drink red .

       White Douro wines I’ve sampled have been more satisfying than distinctive, but I have to applaud a field blend (meaning several grapes were grown in the same vineyard and harvested collectively) called Lento Branco ($13), made from Rabigato, Gouveio, Viosinho,  Codega de Larinho, Siria and Folgasao, which had the expected complexity of flavors, with an easy-to-sip 12.5% alcohol.