Cat in the Rain

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American journalist, novelist, and short story writer. His writing style was marked by an economical use of language, vivid imagery, and brief dialogue, which often created an ambiguity that left his stories open to interpretation. This style had a large influence on both the Modernist writers of his generation and fiction writers throughout the 20th century. A prolific writer for three decades, Hemingway published seven novels, six short collections, and several nonfiction works. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway spent much of his life outside of the United States, beginning in his early years when he lived throughout Europe following the First World War. Throughout the 1920s, Hemingway wrote numerous short stories based loosely around his many adventures and love affairs while an expatriate. Many of Hemingway’s longer works, including For Whom the Bells Toll and A Farewell to Arms, deal more specifically with his wartime experiences as an ambulance driver and a journalist.

Hemingway’s experiences as an expatriate shaped many of the themes in his work, including isolation and a longing for connection. While Hemingway was always a foreigner outside of the United States, his novels describe numerous sentimental and intimate relationships with European people. However, many of these relationships also depict characters’ struggles for authentic connection.

“Cat in the Rain” is based on Hemingway and Hadley’s experiences as expats in Europe in the early and mid-1920s. Carlene Brennen, author of Hemingway’s Cats (Pineapple Press, 2005), describes Hadley’s loneliness once they moved to Paris in 1921. With her husband spending hours away from their apartment so he could write, Hadley apparently asked for a cat to keep her company. Though he “loved cats as much as she did,” he thought they were “too poor to own a cat” (15-16). In February 1923, the couple visited Rapallo, Italy, where Hadley “coveted a kitten she saw crouching under a terrace table in the rain” (Diliberto, Gioia. Hadley. Ticknor and Fields, 1992, 174). Both anecdotes offer credible inspiration for the story, but, in 1925, Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Cat in the Rain wasnt [sic] about Hadley. I know that you and Zelda always thought it was. When I wrote that we were at Rapallo but Hadley was 4 [sic; two] months pregnant with Bumby. The Inn Keeper was the one at Cortina D’Ampezzo and the man and the girl were a harvard kid and his wife that I’d met at Genoa. Hadley had never made a speech in her life about wanting a baby because she had been told various things by her doctor and I’d—no use going into all that (Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Scribner, 2003, 180).

Though Hemingway denied that “the American wife” is based on Hadley, Diliberto notes, “It’s not hard to see Hadley’s vulnerability and loneliness in ‘Cat in the Rain’” (174). Hemingway also implies that the cat represents the woman’s wish for a child—regardless of whether he based the character on Hadley.