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: 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.

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.