The 1920s is back in vogue: Baz Luhrmann is remaking The Great Gatsby, a staged reading of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece proved a big success off-Broadway last year, and HBO’s 1920-set Boardwalk Empire is the flagship program of the new Sky Atlantic channel. And now comes Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, the story of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, and their heady days in jazz age Paris. In fact, The Paris Wife also shares in the current fashion for biographical fiction, including Jay Parini’s The Passages of Herman Melville, David Lodge’s A Man of Parts, about HG Wells, and David Miller’s Today, about the death of Joseph Conrad.
The story of The Paris Wife is familiar to anyone who knows A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of “how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” Feast was written some 30 years after Hemingway left Hadley for her friend Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become the second of his four wives. McLain retells Feast from Hadley’s perspective, in the tradition of novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, giving voice to a pivotal and yet comparatively silent woman from a classic book.
Though his marriage to Richardson was brief, it deeply influenced Hemingway, inspiring what many consider his best work: the early In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises, or Fiesta (1926), and the late A Moveable Feast itself, posthumously published in 1964. McLain’s story opens in Paris, before an extended flashback in which Hadley remembers her early years in St Louis, her meeting with Hemingway, and their brief courtship. They married in September 1921 and within months had moved to Paris, the center of artistic life in the West in the 1920s, in part because it was comparatively cheap for expatriates just after World War I. The Hemingways were soon befriended by Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, James Joyce, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Modernism was taking flight: In February 1922 Sylvia Beach would publish Joyce’s Ulysses, and in December 1922 TS Eliot and Pound published The Waste Land. Hemingway absorbed it all.
McLain atmospherically evokes the garret apartments in which they lived; the notorious trip to Lausanne during which Hadley lost all of Hemingway’s drafts, three years’ work; the outings to the Paris races, skiing in Austria and bullfighting in Pamplona — the trips that would inspire The Sun Also Rises. It was an era of “open” marriages, although the openness was often one-sided, as McLain pointedly shows male artists such as Pound, Ford and, eventually, Hemingway, trying (often successfully) to install their mistresses in the same home as their wives.
McLain resists the facile idea that such menages were a jolly party in the first era of free love: As Hadley gradually becomes aware that Hemingway might be unfaithful, first with Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett Ashley, and later, much more seriously, with her friend Pauline, she must decide how “modern” she’s prepared to be.
While persuasively imagining these familiar events from Hadley’s perspective, McLain is faithful to the known facts, fictionalizing only slightly. Thus a letter Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway, advising him to cut the first 15 pages of Sun, becomes a meeting between the two writers during which Fitzgerald offers an inspired suggestion. In fact, Fitzgerald helped Hemingway professionally much more than McLain acknowledges, and Hemingway’s ambition meant that his betrayals were rarely arbitrary.
“Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up,” Fitzgerald later acidly observed; it was also Fitzgerald who accurately predicted, in 1929: “I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book. There was [Hadley] for the stories and The Sun Also Rises. Now there’s Pauline. A Farewell to Arms is a big book. If there’s another big book I think we’ll find Ernest has another wife.” He was quite right: twice.
McLain captures Hemingway’s legendary charisma, and his fatal tendencies toward bullying and boastfulness. She also manages to evoke his hypnotic, infectious cadences in her own prose without straying into parody: Hadley remembers “The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.” Some might wish McLain had given Hadley a voice more distinct from the highly stylized prose of Feast — but for anyone steeped in that book its idiom is an undeniably effective way of making the story feel good and simple and true.
McLain writes with vivid, memorable touches: the pregnant Hadley, game to the last, sewing baby blankets between bullfights; Hemingway declaring that Pound can’t be “the devil,” because “I’ve met the devil ... and he doesn’t give a damn about art.”
Fitzgerald assures Hadley the first time they meet that he’ll write something new if she will “promise to admire every word extravagantly”; McLain has a similarly good ear for Zelda’s imagistic language, having her describe a flapper as “decorative and unfathomable and all made of silver.”
The Paris Wife sings with such pitch-perfect renderings of famous voices, grounded in a tale made all the more poignant for our knowledge of how sad all the young men and women will turn out to be, how the bright young things will tarnish and disintegrate.
In drafts cut from the first edition of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway explains: “This is about the first part of Paris ... That Paris you could never put into a single book.” Maybe not — but McLain has come impressively close.
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