photograph courtesy wikipedia / public domain
Ernest and Grace Hemingway, 1899.
Dear Vance: The new Ken Burns documentary on Ernest Hemingway (released earlier this year) mentions that the author’s mother lived in Memphis with her daughter for several years, and his mother actually died here. Where did they live, and why were they here? — K.B., Memphis.
Dear K.B.: I’m glad I wasn’t the only person watching that program who was surprised by that information — but no one would have told me about the Hemingway family anyway, knowing how I feel about them.
Over the years, the Lauderdales and Hemingways had a relationship that even Gertrude Stein described as “tense.” We were jealous of Ernest’s literary honors, of course, especially that Nobel Prize thing, and from what I heard, he threw a tantrum every time friends told him my family had won yet another trophy for bowling, roller-skating, badminton, and oboe. He couldn’t compete with our “macho” ways, and he knew it. I can’t say with absolute certainly that Ernest himself never came to Memphis, but if he did so, he never paid a visit to the Lauderdale Mansion.
I don’t need to tell the story of one of the most famous authors in the world — I mean Ernest Hemingway, not me — because you can find that information anywhere and everywhere. But to answer K.B.’s question, a bit of biography is necessary, so I’ll summarize the key points.
Let’s start — as most lives do — with the mother. Grace Earnestine Hall (left) was born in Chicago in 1872, and her father, a wealthy merchant, soon moved the family to the fashionable suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. A prodigy with the piano and violin, as a young woman Grace also became an accomplished singer, making frequent appearances at Madison Square Garden in New York City. She was even invited to join the Metropolitan Opera, but one biographer claims she turned down the role because an illness weakened her eyes and she couldn’t tolerate the stage lighting.
Teaching singing and music lessons from the spacious family home, she had so many pupils that she was earning more than $1,000 a month — an astonishing sum in the early 1900s. What’s more, she directed the Oak Park Choral Society, the Oak Park Orchestra, and the choir at her church. In her spare time, she took up painting, and by the end of her life had completed some 600 landscapes.
In 1896, she married one of Chicago’s leading physicians, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, and over the years, they had six children: Marcelline (born in 1898), Ernest (1899), Ursula (1902), Madelaine (1904), Carol (1911), and Leicester (1915).
Every member of the family displayed remarkable talents, from music to literature to business, but that didn’t save them from a shadow that seemed to darken their lives. The Ken Burns documentary points out that of the eight members of this family, four would eventually take their own lives.
So what happened to Madelaine, known to friends and family as “Sunny”? This “former Memphian” — I guess we can call her that — was as talented as her siblings. My pal Wayne Dowdy with the Memphis Room shared a 1950 Commercial Appeal article, which says Madelaine was “well-known in Memphis for her harp-playing and recently expanded her accomplishments to include the pipe organ.”
Ernest’s own father did so in 1928, the doctor shooting himself with an antique pistol one afternoon, after coming home from his clinic saying he was tired. In letters to friends, however, Ernest made it brutally clear that he blamed his mother, who had constantly disapproved of his family’s wild ways, accusing her eldest son of being “morally bankrupt,” and, as far as his writing went, “bastardizing a laudable art.” At any rate, after the death of his father, he distanced himself from his mother — another reason it’s unlikely he came to visit her in Memphis.
Even so, in the 1920s, he definitely had Mid-South connections. During one of his many trips to Paris, he met — and married — Pauline Pfeiffer. She came from a wealthy family, who owned some 60,000 acres outside the town of Piggott, Arkansas, north of Jonesboro. Whenever she and Ernest visited the Pfeiffer farm, they stayed in the family’s two-story house and eventually transformed the large barn on the property into a spacious writer’s studio. It was here that Ernest wrote several short stories and completed the final chapters of A Farewell to Arms, considered by many to be his finest novel.
Ernest and Pauline divorced in 1940, however, and that brought an end to his Arkansas days. In 1950, another family purchased the property and deeded it, including the barn-studio, to Arkansas State University. Today the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Education Center is open to visitors, fully restored to the way it looked when Ernest and Pauline lived and worked there.
But what about the Hemingway-Memphis connection? Look, I’m getting there. In 1938, his younger sister, Madelaine, married Kenneth Mainland, a successful attorney with the American Insurance Company in Chicago. They moved to Memphis in 1942 when he became a “casualty agent” for the Fidelity & Casualty Company of New York, with a branch Downtown in the old First Tennessee Bank Building on Madison.
photograph by vance lauderdale
Madelaine and Kenneth Mainland’s former residence on Linden.
For a while, the Mainlands lived on the second floor of a red-brick apartment building at 1855 Peabody. In 1946, they moved to a nice house at 1771 Linden (above), a half-block east of Grace-St. Luke’s Church, where Kenneth served as a deacon. Both of their old residences have survived, little changed over the years.
I believe the PBS documentary suggests that Grace Hemingway lived in Memphis with Madelaine, Kenneth, and their young son, Ernest Hemingway Mainland, for several years. I’m hardly qualified to argue with Ken Burns, but two things contradict that. On June 15, 1951, at the age of 79 she died of a cerebral hemorrhage after falling ill at the home on Linden. The official death certificate has a box for “Length of Stay in This Place” and the coroner filled in “1 month.”
What’s more, the obituaries for Grace that ran in newspapers in Chicago and Oak Park say that she died here at her daughter’s home, “with whom she had been visiting.” Visiting, not living. She was laid to rest in Forest Home Cemetery in Oak Park.
Madelaine and Kenneth Mainland didn’t stay in Memphis long afterwards. In 1952, they and their 14-year-old son, identified in the newspaper as “one of Memphis’ finest sopranos,” moved back north to Riverside, Illinois. Just five months later, at age 49, Kenneth died of a heart attack and was buried in a cemetery in that city.
So what happened to Madelaine, known to friends and family as “Sunny”? She lived until age 91, passing away in 1995 at her home in Petoskey, Michigan. This “former Memphian” — I guess we can call her that — was as talented as her siblings. My pal Wayne Dowdy with the Memphis Room shared a 1950 Commercial Appeal article, which says Madelaine was “well-known in Memphis for her harp-playing and recently expanded her accomplishments to include the pipe organ.”
Another newspaper article mentioned that “Madelaine was active in the Little Theater, played the harp with the Memphis Symphony, and was a fine painter.”
She was also an author. In 1975, she wrote Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister “Sunny” Remembers, which “gave a personal, affectionate look at her famous brother.” In it, she provides details about her mother’s last days. “On her last visit to us in Memphis,” she wrote, “she seemed not to know who I was.” She consulted a local doctor, a Dr. Clarke, who noted that Grace believed her daughter was a nurse, “a lovely lady who is taking care of me.”
Madelaine was heartbroken. “From that time on,” she wrote, “I knew she was in the senile dementia sickness we had dreaded” — dreaded because it had struck so many members of her family, including her famous brother. Within a few weeks, Grace Hemingway was moved to the Shelby County Hospital, where she died in her sleep.
I realize that it’s a terribly sad ending for such a remarkable woman. But did you really expect a happy story with a column about Ernest Hemingway?
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Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101
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