I would
like to add a little bit of Hemingway's personal background to help understand the unsettled,
and unsettling, conclusion, of "Hills."
Hemingway had to deal with
the problem of abortion when he was married to Hadley Richardson.David Wych explains in his 2002
article from "The Hemingway Review":
Before Hadley's second
pregnancy proved a false alarm, Sally Bird urged him to "[s]top acting like a damn fool and
crybaby" and offered him the obvious ultimatum: "Either you do something about not
having it, or you have it" (McAlmon 277). Reynolds, noting that "[t]hey all knew
abortions were available in Paris," nonetheless asserts that "a boy raised in Oak Park
did not easily accept that solution" (The Paris Years 219). Just how Hemingway did think of
abortion is reflected in letters he wrote to Pauline Pfeiffer in the fall of 1926, some eighteen
months prior to the completion of "Hills" when the lovers were expecting to remain
apart for one hundred days. The separation was imposed by Hadley, according to an agreement
under which she would grant Hemingway a divorce at the end of the prescribed period. To his
future wife he wrote, "when two people love each other terribly much and need each other in
every way and then go away from each other it works almost as bad as an abortion" (Lynn
363). With this statement, Hemingway set a precedent for using the termination of a pregnancy as
afor the pain of separation between lovers.
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