Book Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain (2011)

 

Paperback cover of The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, 2011. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

Author Paula McLain

When I started my latest Ernest Hemingway kick by reading A Moveable Feast, I knew I’d have to read 5 books: the 1964 version of A Moveable Feast, the 2009 “restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love, Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband, and Paula McLain’s 2011 novel The Paris Wife. Now I’ve finished all 5 books, and I can move on with my life and continue reading about my other obsessions, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Dick Tracy, and baseball.

The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s relationship with Hadley Richardson, his first wife, from their first meeting in 1920 to their divorce in 1927. It’s written in the first person, from Hadley’s point of view, and Paula McLain does a terrific job of capturing Hadley’s spirit.

McLain never attempts to imitate Hemingway’s distinctive writing style, and that’s a wise decision. There are a few short sections written from Ernest’s point of view, but they’re all written in the third person, not the first person, and they work well as part of the novel.

A challenge about writing about this time in Hemingway’s life is that almost all his friends were famous writers as well. How do you render realistic dialogue for Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald? McLain doesn’t exactly imitate these writers, but she does an excellent job of capturing their essence as she describes them and presents us with dialogue they could realistically have spoken. At their first meeting, McLain has Fitzgerald say to Hemingway about Jay Gatsby, “I know him so well, it’s as if he’s my child. He’s dead and I’m still worried about him.” (p.202) I think it would be very much in Fitzgerald’s character to feel that way about Gatsby.

The Paris Wife offers a convincing portrayal of the young Ernest Hemingway, with all of his charisma and all of his faults on display. Hemingway had a habit throughout his life of breaking off friendships, and McLain nails this tendency in several passages. Early in the novel, McLain writes of Hemingway “sacrificing {a} friendship as if it meant nothing.” (p.67) Hemingway’s own exacting standards for other people meant that “Once you were tarnished for him, he could never see you any other way.” (p.149) This becomes a problem for Hadley in late 1922, when she leaves Paris to meet Ernest in Switzerland and a valise she had filled with his writings gets stolen at the train station. On this same journey, Hadley also inadvertently left her diaphragm behind in Paris. Needless to say, Ernest was not thrilled about either of these developments.

Hadley is attuned to Ernest’s strong individualism, as McLain writes “It was so hard to watch Ernest pushing these mentors away, as if striking deep blows was the only way to prove to himself (and everyone else) that he’d never really needed them in the first place.” (p.241) Exactly! This is the tone that Hemingway takes throughout A Moveable Feast, one of arrogant superiority towards every other artist. It comes across in Hemingway’s accounts of his early encounters with Fitzgerald, with Hemingway denigrating Fitzgerald’s working habits, when at the time—Spring 1925—Fitzgerald had published three novels, two books of short stories, and a play, and Hemingway had published two very short books with a tiny independent press, and no books in the United States.

The Paris Wife is a beautiful novel, and a tribute to those often unknown people who stand beside and behind great artists, and oftentimes take a lot of abuse in the process. Finally, in The Paris Wife, Hadley gets her proper due.