Paddock’s Picks: The Paris Wife

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock
[email protected]

When I was in my late teens, I was enamored with Ernest Hemingway. I skipped school to go to the Joy Theatre in Fort Smith to see the movie, “Farewell to Arms” which starred Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. I wanted to see if the movie was as good as the book. It was a lesson I learned early: Seldom is a movie as good as the book.

The author of “The Paris Wife,” Paula McLain, says the idea to write a novel about the first Mrs. Hemingway came after she read Hemingway’s memoir, “The Moveable Feast,” which told of his early years in Paris. Of Hadley, his first wife, The Paris Wife, Hemingway wrote: “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” That line inspired McLain to search out biographies of Hadley and research their brief courtship and marriage through pages and pages of letters written between them.

This novel captures the love between Ernest and Hadley and their young son. It also describes Hemingway’s ambition to be a great writer and paints a picture of the fascinating world of Paris in the 1920’s where writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein lived the lives of the Lost Generation.

The novel opens with Hadley Richardson, a 28-year old spinster, meeting and falling in love with Ernest Hemingway, a cocky and extremely ambitious 21-year-old journalist  from Chicago who had already been injured in Italy during the Spanish War.

Hemingway is drawn to her quiet strength and she to his charismatic personality. They have lots of nicknames for each other that they use throughout their marriage.

Both were raised by forceful mothers and weak fathers. Hadley’s father had already committed suicide when she met Ernest, and his father would eventually do the same thing.

Neither one particularly liked their families, even though they lived a nice upper-middle class life.

When Ernest asked Hadley to go with him to Paris, she quickly agreed. He would work as a foreign correspondent, and she received a small trust fund. She was devoted to him and championed his writing talents. She proved a devoted supporter as they made their fast and furious ways among jazz and gin in the Paris of the twenties and the bull fights in Spain.

Throughout the book, the reader is privy to Hemingway’s tempestuous ways and ambitious climbs over the backs of men and women he called friends. It’s told from Hadley’s point of view, which invites the reader to see this man through her eyes. We find that Ernest had to sleep with a light on, and he emphatically did not want children, and he kept track of Hadley’s periods with much more zeal than she did. When Hadley did become pregnant with their son, Bumby, the reader already knows “this ain’t gonna work out.”

I found myself disliking Ernest Hemingway because of his womanizing and boastful ways, but I admired his dedication to his ambition of becoming one of America’s greatest writers.

I also admired him because he didn’t kill Hadley after she lost all of his manuscripts.  Thinking she would surprise him, she packed every sheet of his writing in a valise and brought it along with her to visit Ernest while he was on a journalistic assignment. She carelessly left it under her seat on the train, and when she returned it was gone.  Everything he had written was gone.

Hadley feared he thought she was sabotaging his career by becoming pregnant and losing his manuscripts, so she became even more of a doormat to her husband. When a new woman, a fashion writer named Pauline Pfeiffer, entered the picture as a friend to both, Hadley welcomed Pauline as a confidante. But Pauline and Ernest had already begun an affair, and she soon proposed that all of them go to Piggott, Ark., where her father owned 60,000 acres of land in northeast Arkansas. Ernest would have two women and a son who loved with him by his side while he worked on his new novel.

Hadley finally stood up to Ernest and demanded he choose the woman he wanted to be with. He refused and she and Ernest were divorced. Ernest and Pauline married and he did, indeed, write most of “Farewell to Arms” in a restored barn in Piggott. His second wife would give him two more sons.

Hadley remarried and had a happy life. Ernest had three sons and four wives in all. After his memoir came out, he called Hadley. He told her she was all over the pages of the new book and asked her if she thought they wanted too much from each other. They once again called each other by their long-ago nicknames. That was in May of 1961. By July, Ernest Hemingway was dead by his own hand.

•••

All the time I was reading this novel, I was thinking, “Damn, I wish I could go to Paris.” And then I started thinking about all the people I knew who had actually gone to Paris. P.J. Williams, a friend and co-worker for the Fort Smith Public Library system, took an 11-day trip to Paris. She loved the art museums, the food, the wine, the architecture, and, of course, the shopping. An avid photographer, she took more than 1,500 pictures.

Before P.J. went to Paris, she planned her trip by consulting guide books including “Quiet Corners in Paris” and “24 Great Walks in Paris.” The one thing she did not want to miss was the book store, Shakespeare  and Company, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce hung out and was closed by the Nazis in 1941. The store a tourist can visit today is owned by an American  book seller who evokes the memory of the previous store.

Most of Hemingway’s Paris of the twenties is gone, P. J. explains.

“It’s been torn down or prettied up past recognition, so you’re forced to read about it in books.”

Reading books has long been a favorite pastime for P.J. Her earliest memories are of listening to her sister, Judy, read her Superman comic books. By the time she was in fifth grade she was reading novels such as “Gone with the Wind” and beginning a 20-year fascination with Science Fiction.

She also discovered Broadway scripts at the old Carnegie Library. Her parents were big fans of Broadway musicals, so the soundtracks of the musicals were always playing in her home.  She remembers seeing “The Music Man” at the 1958 Texas State Fair and singing all the words — to the annoyance of her family.

Asked if she is a fan of Hemingway, she confesses she isn’t. She says she didn’t like his macho sensibilities, but she certainly does understand his fascination with Paris. She hopes to return someday. Soon.