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On My Watch: Greenwich’s Hemingway Connection Revealed

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Ernest Hemingway (photo courtesy of Horton O'Neil)
Ernest Hemingway (photo courtesy of Horton O’Neil)

By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Columnist

July 21 was the birthday (1899) of one of my literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway. In his hometown of Oak Park, Ill., they were celebrating him—gone from us now 55 years—at the 17th Biennial International Hemingway Society Conference with a “Victorian evening.”

The only celebration I found here was at Greenwich Library, with the long waiting list for the new book “Everybody Behaves Badly (EBB), The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece ‘The Sun Also Rises’” (with similar long holds for “The Sun Also Rises”). It’s all about those early Paris years when Hemingway was busy “redefining modern literature.”

Finally getting a copy of EBB in Stamford (Diane’s Books was sold out), I was keen to know if the O’Neil family was mentioned. The David O’Neil family, formerly of Lia Fail, Cos Cob, is the Greenwich Hemingway connection. David, who made a fortune in lumber and was a published poet from St. Louis, had taken his family to live in Paris in those fabled years from 1922 to 1926, before settling in Cos Cob. Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, also from St. Louis, was fast friends with the O’Neils.

For a brief spell I lived in the Lia Fail neighborhood, near Horton O’Neil, one of David’s three children, and Horton’s wife, the incomparable Madelyn O’Neil. It’s not often one has a friend who has designed and built in his back yard a marble Greek amphitheater seating 500. Over the years of our friendship (Horton died in 1997, Madelyn in 2011) there was lots to talk about—but those years in Paris and hanging out with Hemingway never came up.

The truth hit me like a lightning bolt when I opened a secondhand paperback not long ago entitled “Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife,” and there was this smashing photograph of the young Hemingway in his bathing suit with his young son on his shoulders, and below it, “Photo courtesy of Horton O’Neil.” What?!

The story was all there in the book. I subsequently read Horton’s journal, kindly shared by his son, David, about those days. The astonishment and wonderment of what I learned propelled me to address the late Horton in a letter.

Dear Horton: How could you do this to me! There you were in Paris, age 16, living in a townhouse with your older brother George, and younger sister Barbara (who I know grew up to play Scarlet O’Hara’s mother in “Gone With The Wind”). Your father was having spectacular literary dinner parties with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the struggling young writer Hemingway and his new wife, Hadley—dining on “steamy lobsters tied with satin ribbons”!

You and George and Ernest were skiing together, boxing together, and tobogganing together. You were on that winning Bobsled Club of Lausanne toboggan team with brother George, Hemingway and Ernest’s First World War soldier friend, Chink Dorman-Smith, making the big win—coming in first. (Hadley and sister Barbara had their own two-man sled and managed to finish second in a top race.)

You shared some of that excitement with your son, David. “An ambulance sat waiting at each corner of the racing track,” recalled David. “With their sleds traveling at daredevil speeds, the turns were sharp angled and the ambulances were there if disaster struck.” Thank goodness, Horton, you survived to share at least those daring bobsledding racing days with your children.

And remember that Christmas you spent with the Hemingways in the Swiss Alps? You recorded that magical day of cross-country skiing—the four of you, George, Ernest and Hadley when you paused only “for a sandwich and muscatel wine in a dark hut half buried by a drift.” And then, “As our eyesight adjusted to the gloom of this windowless place we discovered ourselves in the company of herdsmen seated against the walls stolidly munching away.” Ernest then pulled out sketches of writings he was working on and read them to you, as he often did.

Horton, you were there when Hemingway was “inventing and reinventing himself, discovering, as a New York Times reporter has written, “just what kind of writer he wants to be.” As Hemingway wrote home to his parents, “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.”

These were the seminal years when Hemingway was fine-tuning his craft, writing on anything he could find. You never told us this! And it’s in there why you didn’t!

Hemingway was contemptuous of your father’s wealth and his poetry. “A poem to Dave (David) is a combination of words about something he doesn’t understand,” Hemingway wrote.

“Ernest treated my father as badly as anyone,” Horton wrote. “He was so poisonous. But my father felt he was in pretty good company, because everyone got dropped by Ernest eventually.”

That would sadly be the fate of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley. But in those first married years, when you were in Paris, their happiness with each other was there for all to see, even when Hemingway was rocked by that historic loss of his many manuscripts on the train that Hadley had chosen to bring to him in Switzerland. You recorded how you viewed the pair in your journal: “Ernest and Hadley’s marriage was like ‘two solitudes that protect and touch and greet each other,’” quoting the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

You were there in 1924 when the Hemingways returned from a five-month stay in Toronto with their newborn son, little Bumby, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway—Nicanor for that bullfighter Nicanor Villalta that Hemingway was entranced by on his first bullfight at Pamplona, Spain, in 1923. Your sister Barbara would often babysit Bumby.

By then Hemingway had given up reporting for The Toronto Star newspaper to concentrate fully on fiction writing. He had also published his first book, “Three Stories & Ten Poems.” But, Horton, was he reading aloud sketches of “The Sun Also Rises,” which was published in 1926? Do you know that today that book, 90 years later, is said to sell upward of 300,000 copies worldwide every year?

You don’t mention the Pauline Pfeiffer episode that would bring an end to Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley. But you do confide years later your entanglement with Hemingway’s to-be third wife, Martha Gellhorn. “Dad was crazy about Martha,” your daughter, Joellen, has shared.

Gellhorn, also a St. Louis girl, invited you down to her “finca” in Havana. You had imagined, you wrote, that “Ernest had decided to let Martha’s interest in me run its course,” as it did.

But Horton, now I know where your passions for archaeology and architecture began. It wasn’t long after your trip to Cuba that you and your dad were scouting about for the different kinds of marble you would use to build that Greek amphitheater. But that’s another story.

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