The Paris Wife - Paula McLain

     I am a Hemingway fan, so The Paris Wife called to me.  I couldn't resist hearing from the woman of whom Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, said, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."  He did love others, however, as any Hemingway follower knows.  He married three times after he and Hadley divorced.  So, the story is set before it even begins:  the marriage will fall apart.  It says much for Paula McLain's research and writing that the novel, written in Hadley's voice, is touching and captivating none the less.
    The novel provides insight into Hadley Richardson's childhood.  She was raised by a domineering woman (like Ernest) and a passive father who committed suicide (as did Ernest's later on).  She was 28 when she met Hemingway who was eight years younger.  She was quiet and unsure and was drawn to the self-assured Ernest who was determined to produce a new kind of literature.  As Hadley says, "I had never met anyone so vibrant or alive.  He moved like light.  He never stopped moving - or thinking, or dreaming, apparently."  But we also see the vulnerable Hemingway through Hadley's eyes- the wounded soldier who couldn't sleep without a light and who still heard silkworms over his head at night, the result of a night spent in a silkworm factory in the war.  They fall in love and Hadley becomes the constant support for the needy young artist.
     They marry and move to Paris, the hub of culture in the 1920's, and are drawn into the world of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henry James and many others.  It is a hard drinking, fast living world where mistresses and wives often lived in the same apartment.  Hadley was unprepared for this world and says, "But some of us, a very few in the end, bet on marriage against the odds."
     They live in meager apartments, one in which the sounds of sailors and whores floats upstairs through their windows and another over a sawmill where the air is filled with sawdust.  They struggle with the lack of money and Ernest's attempts at writing.  Hadley remains very much in the background, playing the supporting role to Ernest.  The famous story of how Hadley lost all of Ernest's manuscripts on a train is told through her eyes and her guilt over the loss and Ernest's anger over it and her subsequent unplanned pregnancy begin the decline in the marriage.
     While Hadley adjusts to impending motherhood she says, " Marriage could be such deadly terrain.  In Paris, you couldn't really turn around without seeing the result of lovers' bad decisions.  An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliche, but no one seemed to mind.  As long as your were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.  What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child."  She is told by Ezra Pound "mark my words, this baby will change everything.  They always do.  Just bear that in mind and be very careful."
     The stage is set.  Shortly after the birth of their son, who they call Bumby, Pauline Pfiffer walks onto the scene wearing "a coat made of hundreds of chinchilla skins sewn painfully together."  She's chic, works for Vogue, and sets her sights on Hemingway.  After the fact, Hadley warns herself, "Keep watch for the girl who will come along and change everything."  As the marriage devolves into its inevitable end, the reader can't help but feel for Hadley as she struggles to hold on to her sense of self and the remains of the marriage.
     The novel is well-researched, elegantly written, and provides insight into the first Mrs. Hemingway.  For Hemingway's voice, read A Moveable Feast, where he speaks of Hadley and the broken marriage with tenderness and regret.

     The book jacket contains a blurb by singer Mary Chapin Carpenter who wrote the song "Mrs. Hemingway":  "After nearly a century, there is a reason that the Lost Generation and Paris in the 1920's still fascinate.  It was a unique intersection of time and place, people and inspiration, romance and intrigue, betrayal and tragedy.  The Paris Wife brings that era to life through the eyes of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, who steps out of the shadows as the first wife of Ernest, and into the reader's mind, as beautiful and as luminous as those extraordinary days in Paris after the Great War."  You can listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter perform the song here.





- Frances