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.

Book Review: Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a Memoir by A.E. Hotchner (2015)

 

The cover of Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, a memoir by A.E. Hotchner, 2015.

The author A.E. Hotchner, 1917-2020.

After reading A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his life in Paris during the 1920’s, I picked up A.E. Hotchner’s 2015 book Hemingway in Love: His Own Story. Hotchner was a writer who became friends with Hemingway in 1948 and he traveled extensively with Hemingway during the last decade of his life. Hotchner wrote the famous 1966 memoir Papa Hemingway, a huge best-seller that showed the writer’s life up close. Hemingway’s widow Mary Walsh Hemingway sued Hotchner in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the publication of Papa Hemingway, claiming that Hotchner had violated her privacy. Mary was also upset that Hotchner made it clear in the book that Hemingway’s death was a suicide, while she was still claiming that it was accidental. (The lie about his death being accidental allowed Hemingway to have a Catholic funeral service.)

Hotchner was also friends with Paul Newman, the impossibly handsome actor, humanitarian, and race-car driver. Hotchner and Newman were the co-founders of Newman’s Own, the non-profit food company. Hotchner died in 2020 at the age of 102.

Hotchner helped with the editing of A Moveable Feast, and he provided the book with its title, based on a conversation he and Ernest had about Paris. Hemingway in Love contains material that was too sensitive to be included in A Moveable Feast. At the time A Moveable Feast was published in 1964, Hemingway’s widow was still alive, as was his first wife Hadley. By the time Hemingway in Love was published in 2015, everyone was dead, except for Hotchner.

Hemingway in Love is largely comprised of conversations that Hotchner had with Hemingway in 1954 and 1955. Hotchner kept copious records of his conversations with Hemingway at the time, and the story Hotchner tells is in keeping with the wistful nostalgia of A Moveable Feast.

The Ernest Hemingway of Hemingway in Love comes off as a much more sympathetic character than the Ernest Hemingway presented to the reader in A Moveable Feast. For one thing, we don’t have Hemingway constantly lording his information and expertise over us. Hemingway is often guilty of what we would now call “mansplaining,” and he strikes me as the type of person who knows three facts about a subject and then suddenly thinks he’s the world’s leading expert.

The book presents a more nuanced look at Hemingway’s friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway actually says some nice things about Fitzgerald, rather than just damning him with faint praise, or lobbing a passive-aggressive insult towards Scott. Hemingway tells Hotchner about Fitzgerald “there was a sense of bonding from the very beginning, a sense of brotherhood.” (p.28) In another passage, Hemingway says of his relationship with Fitzgerald, “Affectionately criticizing each other was the bond of our friendship.” (p.86)

We learn that Hemingway met Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife, through the Fitzgeralds. (p.30) At that time, Ernest was married to Hadley, and much of the book details with Hemingway’s conundrum as he found himself in love with both women at the same time. As the love triangle developed, Fitzgerald emerged as a sensible voice of reason, a role that Hemingway did not allow him to play in A Moveable Feast. When Scott and Ernest were at a café on the Riviera, Scott confronted Ernest about the situation, saying of Pauline “She’s going to bust up your marriage if you don’t get rid of her.” (p.39) Ernest protested that he was enjoying being the object of affection of two women. Scott’s reply was: “A man, torn between two women, will eventually lose ‘em both.” (p.40) Hemingway also tells us that “Scott said I was a sad son of a bitch who didn’t know a damn thing about women.” (p.40) For those of us who are Fitzgerald fans, it’s rather refreshing to hear Scott say that to Ernest, rather than the other way around.

Finally, as the situation came to a head, Hadley got Ernest to agree to not see Pauline for 100 days. If at the end of the 100 days he was still in love with Pauline, she would grant him a divorce. Hadley also didn’t see Ernest during the 100 days. To hear Hemingway relate it to Hotchner, he was in crushing agony during this time, and he was strongly considering suicide during the 100 days: “I decided the best way would be to jump off an ocean liner at night.” (p.93) During the 100 days, Fitzgerald again emerges as a voice of clarity, telling Hemingway “You need the shining qualities of Hadley. Her buoyancy. Neither Pauline nor her money can provide that.” (p.88)

After 71 days, Hadley had enough and wrote a letter to Ernest saying that she was going to divorce him. Ernest got what he thought he wanted: the freedom to marry Pauline. Hemingway converted to Catholicism for the devout Pauline. Fitzgerald, who was raised Catholic but left the church when he was an adult, chided him about his sudden conversion. “Well, old Mackerel Snapper, wolf a Wafer and a Beaker of blood for me,” Fitzgerald wrote in a letter from July of 1928. (By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, by Scott Donaldson, p.226) Hemingway in Love tells us the information that after a bout of impotence with Pauline, Hemingway was “cured” after praying in a Catholic church. (p.117-19)

To hear Ernest tell it to Hotchner, his marriage to Pauline was not much fun, even from the beginning. Of course, it’s tough to say if this was really how Hemingway felt in 1927, or it was more reflective of his mood in 1954 and 1955, when he was discussing these events with Hotchner.

Interestingly enough, Hemingway married three writers after his divorce from Hadley: Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Walsh. Hemingway complained to Hotchner in 1955 that Mary was bugging him about wanting to write more, comparing her complaints to Martha Gellhorn’s. “Martha was just as bad, constantly drumming me about her writing, how we had to make time to fit her schedule, where and when we had to go here and there for her assignments. She was a pretty good writer, I’ll give her that, but also as a writer, I wasn’t about to put her needs before mine.” (p.79) Well, that sounds like a fun marriage, doesn’t it?

There is an inaccuracy from Hemingway regarding Fitzgerald. Hemingway claims “I never use actual names in what I write,” saying that he gave Scott a cover name in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” (p.97) This is incorrect—in the original Esquire magazine text, the narration mentions “poor Scott Fitzgerald,” and how Fitzgerald’s admiration of the rich had wrecked him. (To add insult to injury, Hemingway also gets the quote from Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy” wrong.) Only after repeated badgering from Maxwell Perkins and Fitzgerald himself did Hemingway agree to changing it for book publication to “Julian.”

Hemingway in Love also has Ernest recalling a scene with Fitzgerald in Paris where both writers were at a low ebb. Zelda has had mental breakdowns, and Ernest says that Pauline is about to divorce him. The last time the Fitzgeralds were in Europe was September of 1931, so it’s possible such a meeting occurred then, but Ernest and Pauline wouldn’t actually get divorced until 1940, so 1931 seems to be too early for this scene. But maybe Pauline was just thinking about divorcing Ernest in 1931?

One other timeline oddity, which we can probably just put down to the vagaries of memory, is when Hemingway says about Hadley, “What threw me was how quickly Hadley had married.” (p.129) Hadley married journalist Paul Mowrer in July of 1933, six years after her divorce from Hemingway. Contrast that to Hemingway’s haste to wed Pauline: Ernest and Hadley were divorced in January 1927, and he and Pauline were married in May of 1927. Six years hardly seems “quickly” compared to less than six months.

Hemingway in Love is a fascinating little book, and if you’re interested in Ernest and Hadley, it’s a must read.

Book Review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (1964, Restored Edition 2009)

 

My paperback copy of A Moveable Feast. It's by Ernest Hemingway, the author of Islands in the Stream, according to the cover. That's not how anyone refers to Ernest Hemingway. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

My paperback copy of the 2009 Restored Edition of A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. The Paris Wife is next on my list to read.

A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of Paris during the 1920’s. It’s been on my list of books I should read for a long time and watching Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary about Hemingway pushed me to finally pick it up. It’s an entertaining book comprised of short sketches that detail Hemingway’s life as a young writer with his first wife Hadley.

Is A Moveable Feast meant to be read as a work of fact or fiction? In the Preface, Hemingway wrote, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” What is that supposed to mean? Does that mean that everything in it is a lie? Or is Hemingway referencing the notion that truth is subjective, and his recollections will inevitably differ from someone else’s? It’s an interesting statement to make for a writer as concerned as Hemingway was with getting the truth down on paper, even when he was writing fiction. As he famously wrote at the beginning of A Moveable Feast:

“’Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.” (p.12)

A Moveable Feast was written in the late 1950’s, after Hemingway rediscovered a trunk of his that had been left in storage at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The trunk contained notebooks that Hemingway had kept during his time in Paris in the 1920’s. This fortuitous rediscovery spurred Hemingway on to revisit this material for a possible book. Hemingway worked on the material off and on for the rest of his life, until his suicide in 1961. Hemingway’s provisional title was “The Paris Sketches,” and the book would not acquire its famous title until writer and Hemingway pal A.E. Hotchner recalled a conversation he had with Papa about Paris.

Hemingway used A Moveable Feast to settle old scores, and despite the interest inherent in reading about great artists in Paris, I was left with an overwhelming sense of bitterness after finishing the book. The only people who come off well in the book are Hadley, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach. Perhaps coincidentally, they were the only major characters in A Moveable Feast who were still alive when Hemingway was writing the book in the late 1950’s.

The prevailing attitude of Hemingway’s voice throughout the book is one of a smug superiority. He presents himself as a hard worker who is also very poor. Hemingway hits so hard on the theme of “I was working very hard all of the time.” And maybe he was. But maybe part of the reason he hits this theme so hard is because during the time he was writing this, he was not able to work that way anymore. Being a Midwesterner, Hemingway is very adept at the art of the passive-aggressive half-compliment, half-insult, and these crop up throughout the book.

As you keep reading the book, you wonder what in it is true. You start to wonder if he really was that poor. (According to biographers, no, he wasn’t that poor—Hadley’s trust fund paid some of the bills.) And you wonder if he had any close friends that he actually liked and was he really ever fast enough to catch a pigeon in the Luxembourg Gardens and did he ever learn Alice B. Toklas’s name.

I found it ridiculous how in the chapters about Gertrude Stein, Hemingway very pointedly does not refer to her partner Alice B. Toklas by name, instead calling her “the friend who lived with her,” or “her companion.” I felt like shouting at him, “Her name is Alice B. Toklas! She invented marijuana brownies, Ernest! Her name is in the title of Gertrude’s most famous book, for crying out loud! If you know Gertrude’s name, then you should know Alice’s name! They’re like the Simon and Garfunkel of 1920’s Paris!” (Okay, so the internet is telling me that Brion Gysin actually wrote the infamous recipe for marijuana brownies.)

Hemingway was friends with Gertrude Stein for a while, and then eventually the friendship soured. He writes of Stein in the chapter about the end of their friendship: “There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.” (p.115) Ouch.

As a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I can’t help but be annoyed at the way Hemingway has chosen to present Fitzgerald in the pages of A Moveable Feast. Everything Hemingway writes about Fitzgerald is meant to make Fitzgerald look like an idiot. Scott can’t hold his liquor! His wife is crazy! He’s wasting his time writing trashy short stories! He isn’t a good speller! He never drinks wine straight from the bottle! He’s worried about the size of his penis!

However, despite all of Hemingway’s slanders against Fitzgerald, I’d argue that Scott is the only character in the book who jumps off the page and resembles a real person in all of his complexity. I’m not going to defend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s behavior during his escapades with Ernest Hemingway. Anyone who has read anything biographical about Fitzgerald is aware that he could behave terribly at times, mostly when he was under the influence of alcohol. But Hemingway makes little attempt to show us other dimensions to Fitzgerald, and he deliberately withholds information from the reader that would paint a fuller portrait of their friendship.

At the end of the first chapter about Scott, Hemingway even needlessly insults the dust jacket of The Great Gatsby. “It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction…I took it off to read the book.” (p.174) Congratulations Ernest, you just trashed one of the most famous dust jackets of all time! Ernest would no doubt be chagrined to know that Scribner’s most recent edition of The Great Gatsby still has that same cover, all these years later.

Hemingway is careful to give Fitzgerald no credit for any assistance during the editing of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway writes that Scott wanted to read a manuscript of the novel in progress, but Ernest didn’t let him see the book until very late in the process. Hemingway makes no mention of the fact that it was Fitzgerald who persuaded Hemingway to switch publishers to Scribner’s, and it was Fitzgerald who alerted the editor Maxwell Perkins to Hemingway’s talent and promise.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Scott Donaldson offers proof of Fitzgerald’s contribution to the editing of The Sun Also Rises in his excellent 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. Using Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway about the beginning of the novel, and Hemingway’s subsequent letters to Maxwell Perkins, Donaldson shows that Fitzgerald’s criticism convinced Hemingway that the beginning of the novel was flabby and should be trimmed down.

In the “Restored Edition” of A Moveable Feast, published in 2009, there’s an additional passage concerning Fitzgerald and the editing of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway writes of Fitzgerald and the novel’s proofs, “We discussed them. But I made the decisions. Not that it matters.” (p.158) Of course it doesn’t matter, old sport. For whatever reason, Hemingway finds it so painful, if not impossible, to acknowledge anyone else’s talent as a writer. To me, this shows his fundamental insecurity.

In Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, Scott Donaldson also points out how Hemingway’s comments about Fitzgerald became more and more denigrating as the 1950’s went on and Fitzgerald’s literary reputation began to quickly rise. Donaldson writes of A Moveable Feast’s criticisms of all of Hemingway’s friends: “For every fault singled out and satirized, Hemingway by implication assumes the opposite virtue. It is, finally, too much to believe.” (p.271)

The “Restored Edition” of 2009 isn’t that much different from the original version of 1964. I read the 1964 version and then thumbed through the 2009 version page by page to see what was different. There is additional material included in the “Restored Edition,” including an interesting bit about Ernest and Hadley growing their hair to the same length, which is echoed in scenes in Hemingway’s novels A Farewell to Arms, and The Garden of Eden.

The biggest difference in the “Restored Edition” is that part of the last chapter, titled “There is Never Any End to Paris” in the 1964 edition, and now retitled “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” has been moved to the “Additional Paris Sketches” section of the 2009 book, after the main text of the book. In that chapter, Hemingway writes about a “pilot fish” who led the rich to Switzerland, where Ernest and Hadley were spending the winter skiing. The pilot fish is meant to be the writer John Dos Passos, and the rich are Gerald and Sara Murphy, a wealthy American couple who were patrons of the arts. (The Murphys were partial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.)

So, why move the section about skiing in Switzerland to the very end? Well, this is the part of the book where Ernest meets Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy American woman who will become his second wife. And Pauline just happens to be the grandmother of Sean Hemingway, who edited the Restored Edition of A Moveable Feast. However, there is additional material included in this section in the Restored Edition, and that material sheds more light on Ernest’s dilemma as he fell in love with two women, and ultimately decided to leave Hadley for Pauline.

A Moveable Feast is a fascinating book, although it needs to be read with a large grain of salt.