The Paris Wife in The Dusty Bookshelf

May 19, 2011 Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: permanent-library, great-literary-fiction, winter-2011-12

For over half of my life I have had a tremendous crush on Ernest Hemingway, and after reading THE PARIS WIFE I am half in love with him. Paula McLain writes beautifully the story of the late author’s first marriage from Hadley’s POV. She captures their beautiful, but doomed love affair perfectly. They both needed the other in a very deep way. For him, I think he needed Hadley to stave of the darkness of his war experience and that lost love in Italy during WWI. He needed adulation from a love on For over half of my life I have had a tremendous crush on Ernest Hemingway, and after reading THE PARIS WIFE I am half in love with him. Paula McLain writes beautifully the story of the late author’s first marriage from Hadley’s POV. She captures their beautiful, but doomed love affair perfectly. They both needed the other in a very deep way. For him, I think he needed Hadley to stave of the darkness of his war experience and that lost love in Italy during WWI. He needed adulation from a love one to balance his psyche and Hadley gave him that. But the pretty, shy young woman had strengths of her own that he could see, when she couldn’t until after their marriage fell apart. Long after Pauline, Martha Gelhorn, and Mary Hemingway, he said of Hadley: “I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her. She was the best and truest and loveliest person I have ever met.”

And she was. She had such an influence on “Papa” throughout his life that he called her mere weeks before his death in 1961. Paula McLain paints a beautiful portrait of “the Paris wife, so much that I cried when Hadley lost the valise that held all of her husband’s works on the train. When she found out she was pregnant with “Bumby” my heart broke for her. These events really signaled the beginning of the end for her relationship to Ernest. I agreed with Hemingway that she should have stayed away from Kitty. If she had, then Pauline Pfeiffer might not have entered the Hemingways’ life.

It was also striking to see the characters from THE SUN ALSO RISES in real life: the true life lost generation. Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein irked me here in Hadley’s story as the pair have all through my adult life. But McLain has done more than tell a beautiful tragic story; she has awakened a new interest in Ernest Hemingway. I’ve always studied his Key West and Cuba years with a passion that has always been reserved for my favorite author. Now I find the same passion for Hadley Richardson. I can’t wait to read more about her and Hemingway’s early years into their Paris years!
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Mar 30, 2011 Beth rated it liked it

Hadley Richardson Hemingway was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain is Hadley’s first-person account of their life together before, during, and after they were married. But this is a novel, not an autobiography.

Hadley and Ernest met when her friend Kate invited Hadley to Chicago, where Kate lived. It was party, party, party all the time there. Poor little Hadley from St. Louis, where her life was dull, boring, and anything but a party, was happy to return again and agai Hadley Richardson Hemingway was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain is Hadley’s first-person account of their life together before, during, and after they were married. But this is a novel, not an autobiography.

Hadley and Ernest met when her friend Kate invited Hadley to Chicago, where Kate lived. It was party, party, party all the time there. Poor little Hadley from St. Louis, where her life was dull, boring, and anything but a party, was happy to return again and again, particularly because Ernest was there. He was 8 years her junior, but he was full of life, and she yearned for that now because she had missed out on so much when she was younger. So, although most 29-year-olds might have thought a 21-year-old was too immature for them, Hadley was attracted to Ernest right away.

Eventually, Hadley and Ernest began writing to each other between visits. When Ernest’s letters told Hadley about his intention to go to Europe to further his career as a writer, she was disappointed. Then he told her that he wanted her to come with him as his wife, and she jumped at the chance with little thought to what she might be getting herself into.

So not long after they married, they went to Paris. They met and interacted with various writers and other artists there and became friends with the likes of Gertrude Stein and her partner and Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Although Hadley liked them, they bothered her, too. My opinion: they were a strange gang. They partied and drank all the time and hoped they’d sell books. How did they do it? They were either independently wealthy or, like Hemingway (“Hem”), they shared their wife’s trust fund.

But Hadley had assured Ernest before they were married that she’d never stand in the way of his writing career. She told him that she would only be his partner and encourage it. So she didn’t usually complain but went along with everything. That even included threesomes for a time. No kidding. Hadley was miserable but felt one with Ernest and didn’t know how to live without him.

Ernest’s actions were not a result of Hadley’s neediness, though; I think they were because of Earnest’s association with the eccentric (read self-centered and hard-drinking) writer community in Paris. Their marriage was doomed from the beginning of their lives there.

McLain says that this book of fiction is mostly fact. That makes THE PARIS WIFE interesting. Still, I couldn’t take it in large doses because of my disgust with Ernest and the rest of those expatriate writers in Paris and also with Hadley. While I could understand how a wife could be a sap for her husband, I couldn’t sympathize with her plight when she was putting up with threesomes every day, even in her bed.
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