WITH THE HEMINGWAYS
Sometime in the Spring of 1926, Elinor Buckley decamped for Paris with Peter, her six-month old son. She left behind her husband, a New York attorney, for reasons she took to the grave with her. Thanks to a cousin, Blanche Hays, Elinor fell into a circle of expatriates that included Hadley and Ernest Hemingway, whose little boy, Bumpy, was just a year or so older than Peter. It was the beginning of Hemingway friendships that last to this day.
Peter and Bumpy (Jack Hemingway), Paris around 1930
Mary Hemingway, Peter, Margaux Hemingway, Jack Hemingway, Paris 1978 after lunch at Allard
In the 1950s Peter took his camera and went to Spain to follow the bullfights for a season. He ended up spending much of the decade photographing the bullfight world, a story he told in words and photographs in his book Bullfight, published in 1958. At the center of that world were bullfighters such as Antonio Ordonez, who became Peter’s close friend, and the hot center of the afficianados, Ernest Hemingway himself. It was at this point that Peter revived his childhood connection to Bumpy’s father. Theirs would be an up and down relationship as Ernest became more and more irascible in the late ‘50s, but Mary and Peter formed a warm friendship that would last for the rest of her life.
Camaraderie after lunch in Spain 1956
The cover and author note of Bullfighter
In the mid-1970s Peter stopped by Mary’s house one afternoon, to tell her he was thinking about combining words and pictures yet again, this time in a biography of Ernest. Mary went over to a cabinet, opened a drawer that was overflowing with photographs and said “Here….”
Ernest was published in 1978.
In Venice that summer, Peter had a copy of the book bound in beautiful Venetian paper.