The Paris Wife in The Dusty Bookshelf

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

Shelves: great-literary-fiction, permanent-library, 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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