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.

Movie Review: Hemingway, a documentary Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2021)

 

Poster for Hemingway, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2021.

Ernest Hemingway! Papa! The beard! The wives! The drinking! Key West! Cuba! Spain! The bullfights! Cocktails in Paris with Scott and Zelda! Oh, and in between all of that, I think he wrote some books, too, didn’t he? Something about an old man and a fish, right?

Ernest Hemingway’s enormous fame and celebrity have long overshadowed his actual accomplishments as a writer. His very name became synonymous with “writer,” the same way that Picasso was shorthand for “painter,” or “artist.” It isn’t Hemingway’s fault that he became such an icon. He didn’t ask to become one. But for whatever reason, he became the default “Great American Writer.”

Even now, as we approach the 60^th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, it’s difficult to separate the myth from the man, and the work that he left behind. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway is a 6-hour documentary that aired on PBS earlier in April and attempts to get past the myth of Hemingway. It’s a fascinating look at a gifted artist and a deeply troubled man.

I explored some of my mixed feelings towards Ernest Hemingway in a 2017 essay. To sum it up, I understand Hemingway’s importance as a major American writer of the 20^th century, but he’s certainly not my favorite American writer of the 20^th century. I prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe (white suit Tom Wolfe, not You Can’t Go Home Again Tom Wolfe) John Updike, and Truman Capote, to name a few of my favorites.

Unlike most other authors whose work I admire, should I acquire a time machine, I would have no desire to meet Ernest Hemingway. Sure, I suppose it might be entertaining to be in his company to observe the effect he had on people, tossing back cocktails at the Ritz bar or whatever. (I’ll pass on the bullfight, thanks.) While I admire Hemingway’s gifts as a writer, his personality is totally unappealing to me. 

It’s always a challenge to bring the creative arts to life on film, since so often, especially with writers, the real work of the art happens alone, with a writer hunched over a typewriter or a notepad, pounding the sentences into shape. Obviously, this is not the stuff that riveting documentaries are made of. But Hemingway does an excellent job of letting us in, through seeing drafts of Hemingway’s work, and through Jeff Daniels’ excellent narration of Hemingway’s writing.

Speaking of narration, Hemingway features an all-star cast as Ernest’s four wives: Keri Russell as Hadley Richardson, Patricia Clarkson as Pauline Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep as Martha Gellhorn, and Mary-Louise Parker as Mary Walsh. Personally, I found Meryl Streep’s mid-Atlantic accent a bit distracting and over the top, but that’s just me.

Like every Ken Burns documentary I’ve seen, Hemingway is a superbly crafted film, with a mixture of archival photographs, talking heads, and footage of places important in Hemingway’s life. Burns and Lynn Novick know how to capture and hold an audience’s attention. There’s never a time when you’re like, “Oh man, not this same Hemingway expert again,” or where you’re thinking, “Ah, geez, not more footage of Hemingway’s house in Cuba.”

Hemingway is okay with experts disagreeing about his writing. While the late Senator John McCain waxes rhapsodic about For Whom the Bell Tolls, Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa says it’s “probably his worst novel.” Llosa even gets the giggles when he’s describing the passage where Maria feels the earth move as she makes love with Robert Jordan. In a similar vein, Llosa has lots of praise for The Old Man and the Sea, while Edna O’Brien dismisses it as “schoolboy writing.”

It’s difficult sometimes to show how artists are different from those who have come before them. Hemingway might have benefited from a specific stylistic comparison between Hemingway and acclaimed American authors who came before him. I can’t think of a perfect example to compare Hemingway with, but generally speaking, 19^th century writing was just more florid and descriptive, whereas Hemingway wrote like he was at a Western Union office, conscious of not wasting a word.

Hemingway’s sentences can make his fiction seem so artless. Let me explain what I mean. He’s most famous for writing choppy, blocky short sentences. And you want to buy him that sentence combining workbook I had in high school. Or else he’s running the sentences on and on and on, combining them in a seemingly artless way of just using and—like the famous passage at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms. Both styles were deliberate, but it can be hard to see the artistry in them. It’s easy to assume he just wrote it that way in 10 minutes and then went to a bullfight. Of course, he didn’t. Hemingway worked hard on his craft, but his style can certainly fool you into thinking it was easy.

I wish Hemingway had spent a little more time on The Sun Also Rises. The film makes a much bigger deal out of A Farewell to Arms, and clearly pushes it as being Hemingway’s masterpiece. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read both those novels, so I can’t offer much of a comparison, but The Sun Also Rises was the book that made Hemingway a big name, so I was surprised it didn’t receive more attention in the film.

Ernest Hemingway is just the poster boy for toxic masculinity, isn’t he? The four wives, always having to prove how big his dick was, constantly playing the expert on every subject. To me, it seems so clear that Hemingway must have been incredibly insecure about every aspect of his life. What else could possibly explain the constant masculine, macho pursuits? All the hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing, searching for Nazi submarines off the coast of Cuba. I have no doubt that Hemingway did enjoy these pursuits, but at some point, it just became part of the myth, part of how he was supposed to behave. As Mary Karr says in the film, “It does seem a little wearying.” Amen.

Hemingway also had this dumb, competitive relationship with other authors. The film highlights this by quoting from an extremely obscene letter Hemingway wrote to his own publisher in 1951 about James Jones’ debut novel, From Here to Eternity. I’ll spare you all of the grim detail, but in the letter, Hemingway completely trashes the novel and expresses his hope that Jones will commit suicide. Here’s the most famous writer in America writing a letter excoriating an unknown writer publishing his first novel. What was the point in being so toxic? Why did Hemingway feel the need to be so competitive with Jones? Insecurity. Ego. Whatever you want to call it, this negative quality tarnishes Hemingway, as he seemed unable to admit that other authors might actually be talented too.

Hemingway’s relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald fell prey to this same competitiveness as well. As Scott Donaldson shows in his excellent 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, every time Fitzgerald’s posthumous reputation rose, Hemingway felt the need to attack and belittle his former friend. These episodes reflect poorly on Hemingway’s character.

Fame did not help Hemingway, or the demons he was battling. John Updike warned of the dangers of fame for an author in his 1989 memoir Self-Consciousness:

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer.” (Self-Consciousness, p.266)

That’s certainly the trajectory of Hemingway’s career, and indeed, of many American writers.

Hemingway makes it seem as though the writer’s creative drive left him after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which provided the inspiration for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. That certainly fits with my own thoughts about Hemingway. I remember as a teenager reading Hemingway’s preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories. It begins: “The first four stories are the last ones I have written.” What? The last ones? You’re not writing any more short stories, ever? Did you retire? No, he just means “latest.” Hemingway closes the preface with, “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.” And you think, is this guy sick, does he have some disease that might shorten his life? And then you look over at the date underneath the preface, which reads “1938.” And you figure out he was only 39 years old, and he was seriously worried that he might not live another ten years? Yikes, that’s some serious fatalism. And how many more novels did Hemingway publish from 1938 until his death in 1961? Three: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across and River and into the Trees, and The Old Man and the Sea. And how many more short stories did Hemingway write from 1938 until 1961? He only published 9. Of course, since Hemingway’s death, his estate has flooded bookstores with numerous posthumously released works that were in varying stages of completion at the time of Hemingway’s death.

One of the most interesting commentators in Hemingway is Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s son that he had with Pauline Pfeiffer. I had seen Patrick Hemingway on screen before, in the excellent 2013 documentary Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen, which documents Hemingway’s friendship with the screen icon Gary Cooper. But since Cooper and Hemingway features interviews with lots of people who died before the documentary was released, I didn’t really think much of Patrick Hemingway’s participation. But when I saw him in Hemingway, I Googled Patrick Hemingway and discovered that he’s still alive! He’s 92 years old! It’s just kind of crazy to think of someone that closely related to Ernest Hemingway still being alive. And Patrick Hemingway proves to be an insightful commentator on his father. Whatever bad blood had passed between them has long since been forgotten, and it’s Patrick who provides us with one of the few examples of Ernest Hemingway acting unselfishly. In 1947, Patrick had a mental breakdown, and it was his father who slept outside of Patrick’s room and helped get him back to a healthy mental state.

At the very end of Hemingway, we get to see one of the original Hemingway experts: A.E. Hotchner, who died in 2020 at the age of 102. Hotchner hung out with Hemingway a lot in the 1950’s, and his 1966 biography Papa Hemingway was one of the first books about Hemingway. (Hotchner also was a co-founder of Newman’s Own, with his good friend, the brilliant actor and all-time hunk Paul Newman.) Hotchner sheds some light on Hemingway’s sad last days.

Hemingway doesn’t interview Andrew Farah, author of the 2017 book Hemingway’s Brain, in which he puts forth the theory that Hemingway suffered from CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease usually associated with NFL players and others who have suffered numerous concussions and major head trauma. However, the film makes much of the many head and brain injuries that Hemingway suffered throughout his life—including accidentally pulling a skylight down on his own head and battering his head against an airplane door in order to escape from his second airplane crash. The film doesn’t mention this, but in 1944, during Hemingway’s only meeting with John Steinbeck, Hemingway broke John O’Hara’s walking stick over his own (Hemingway’s) head. Hiroshima author John Hersey was also present during that evening. That’s a lot of literary talent around one table.

Suicide casts a pall over the life of the victim in a way that few other forms of death do. It’s hard not to read every work of art through the lens of knowing that the creator ultimately took their own life. We don’t do that for people who die in other ways. No one reads John Steinbeck and looks for premonitions of heart disease. We don’t scour John Updike’s writing and search for hints of lung cancer. With Hemingway, there’s much to read through the lens of his suicide. The discussion about suicide between a doctor and his son at the end of the short story “Indian Camp,” is made more poignant by the heartbreaking knowledge that both real people that these characters are based on, Ernest and his father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, known by his nickname Ed, will both commit suicide. Then there’s the ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Robert Jordan’s inner dialogue about whether to commit suicide or not.

The film doesn’t talk about how Hemingway’s widow Mary claimed his death was accidental rather than a suicide. In an interview to Associated Press reporters on July 8, 1961, a week after Ernest’s suicide, Mary was still insisting that Ernest had been in such good spirits that he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide. The story that Mary had first put out was that Hemingway had been cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged. Since no gun cleaning equipment had been found nearby, Mary backpedaled and said that he was just looking at the gun when it had gone off. Mary deferred questions about Ernest’s health to Dr. Hugh Butt of the Mayo Clinic. I’m sure she was serious, but that really sounds like a joke.

Hemingway is a powerful documentary, and you can’t help but have sympathy and empathy for this great artist who was obviously in pain so much of his life. Hemingway has done what all good works of biography and criticism should do—it’s sent me back to the source material, as I finally started reading A Moveable Feast, which has been on my list of books to read for a long time.