Book Review: The Paris Husband: How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, by Scott Donaldson (2018)

 

Cover of The Paris Husband, by Scott Donaldson, 2018. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Literary biographer Scott Donaldson, 1928-2020.

The Paris Husband: How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, published in 2018, was the last book published during Scott Donaldson’s lifetime, before his death in December 2020. (Donaldson’s obituary states that a volume about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night will be published posthumously.) Donaldson wrote several books about Ernest Hemingway: a 1977 biography, By Force of Will, the excellent 1999 volume Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, which examines the sometimes contentious relationship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and 2009’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, a book that collected Donaldson’s numerous articles about the two authors.

The Paris Husband examines Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. Ernest and Hadley were married from 1921 to 1927, a formative time in the young writer’s life and career. Donaldson’s expertise on Hemingway shows in his deft use of Hemingway’s unpublished writings, in which the author often reveals more of his inner emotions. Throughout the book, Donaldson attempts to set the record straight about Ernest’s marriage to Hadley.

Donaldson knows that Hemingway himself was not always accurate in his descriptions of his own life and actions. To cite just one example, after the theft of a valise from a Paris train station that contained nearly all his early writing, Hemingway claimed in his memoir A Moveable Feast that he took the first train back to Paris when Hadley told him what had happened. Donaldson provides evidence to the contrary, writing that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until a month and a half later.

The reader is given evidence of Hemingway’s habit of duplicity, as he wrote journalism articles under a pseudonym for a news service, even though he was under exclusive contract at the time to the Toronto Star. Not surprisingly, Hemingway’s duplicity was eventually discovered by his boss at the Star.

Donaldson corrects errors or misstatements by others—in A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love, Hotchner informs the reader that Hemingway met his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer through Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Donaldson reports that Ernest met Pauline for the first time in mid-March of 1925, about two months before he met Fitzgerald for the first time. (p.93) To be fair to Hotchner, he often took Hemingway at his word, and Hotchner didn’t always do the extra work to report Ernest’s inaccuracies to the reader.

We learn that Ernest acquired his nickname of “Papa” from Gerald Murphy, due to Ernest’s “instructive attitude.” (p.110) In other words, Ernest was a mansplaining expert who thought he knew everything.

Hemingway was ruthless in every aspect of his writing career. When F. Scott Fitzgerald convinced Hemingway that he should try to change publishers in order to join Fitzgerald at Scribner’s, Hemingway figured out a way out of his contract with Boni & Liveright. If Boni & Liveright rejected a book that Hemingway submitted to them, he would become a free agent. Hemingway then rushed through writing a novella The Torrents of Spring, that was a parody of Sherwood Anderson, who had been a benefactor of Hemingway’s, and provided Ernest with letters of introduction when he and Hadley moved to Paris. Anderson was also one of Boni & Liveright’s leading authors. Predictably, they rejected The Torrents of Spring, and thus Hemingway was free to move to Scribner’s. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, was willing to publish the sub-standard The Torrents of Spring in order to be able to publish Hemingway’s first real novel, The Sun Also Rises.

It’s interesting to me that Hemingway didn’t seem to care about what effect publishing The Torrents of Spring would have on his own literary reputation. Hemingway had published a successful book of short stories, In Our Time, and he was in the build-up phase to the all-important first novel, which would be The Sun Also Rises. Wasn’t he worried that publishing a mean-spirited satirical novella would blunt the momentum of his career? Or was he just filled with such overconfidence that it didn’t matter? I strongly suspect the latter. It ended up being a moot point, as The Torrents of Spring didn’t damage Hemingway’s career at the time, and subsequent critics have paid little attention to it.

By the time The Sun Also Rises was published, Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley was on the verge of breaking up. Hemingway was filled with remorse about his affair with Pauline, and as a gesture of kindness to Hadley, Ernest wrote Scribner’s that all the royalties to The Sun Also Rises should be given to her. I’d be fascinated to know how many millions of dollars that gift was worth over the years.

Donaldson offers perhaps the best succinct summary of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of Paris during the 1920’s, writing: “A Moveable Feast is an odd book, half fond reminiscence and half ill-tempered attack.” (p.133) It’s an accurate judgement, as throughout the book Hemingway veers between romanticizing his poverty and attacking anyone who isn’t Hadley or Ezra Pound. (Hemingway’s poverty was overstated, as he and Hadley had a yearly income of about $2,000 from her trust fund, at a time when most Americans made less than $800 a year.)

In one of the drafts for A Moveable Feast that never made it into either the 1964 edition of the book or the 2009 “restored edition,” Hemingway wrote: “If you deceive and lie with one person against another you will eventually do it again.” (p.135) That piece of self-knowledge was hard won through the collapse of Ernest’s first two marriages. For a writer as committed to documenting the truth as Hemingway was, that line should have made it into the book. Oh well, for devoted Hemingway fans, it’s in Donaldson’s book.

The Paris Husband is an interesting examination of Ernest and Hadley’s marriage, and it’s a good corrective to read after the self-mythologizing A Moveable Feast.