Depression
1946, Mary became the fourth Mrs. Hemingway, but things started going downhill for the family. Papa “smashed his knee” and sustained a “deep wound on his forehead” in a 1945 car accident, while a 1947 car accident left his son Patrick severely ill. Hemingway also sank into the Depression as his literary friends were dying left, right, and center: in 1939, WB Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941, James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson; in 1946, Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Hemingway’s long-time friend and editor, Max Perkins, died.
During his Depression, he suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and diabetes. These were the result of many accidents and years of heavy drinking. 1946, he began work on The Garden of Eden, finishing 800 pages by June. In 1948, Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice, where Hemingway fell in love with 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich. The Italian became his latest muse, and their spiritual love affair inspired his 1950 novel Across the River and Into the Trees.
