2: The Paris Wife

By: Paula McLain
Finished: January 10
Pages: 314

A word of advice, my friends. When you are feeling blue, if you don't want to sink deeper into that despair, to let your feelings of sadness and loneliness and general blah surround you, do not, I repeat, do not read a book that you know ends in divorce and suicide. It's just not smart.
If however, you do want to sink into that pit, at least read a book like this one, so that the sadness and the divorce and the suicide are well written.
The story of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, who married him when he was nobody and divorced him when he became somebody new. When success had driven him to think that he could be a person that she was not able to be with him. I would like to say that I have never felt as much kindness towards Mr. Hemingway as I did while reading this book. For, although I pretty well dislike him for a number of reasons, I didn't dislike this man that she describes. I could see why she would fall in love with him, and I could see why she would stay longer than maybe I would. I could see what drew all four of his wives to him.
Although fictional, the story is very well researched and you can feel it, but not in a Dante Club kind of way. McLain's turn of phrase is quite nice at times. When in Paris, poor and lonely while Ernest works, Hadley buys fish from a street vendor "The nest of fish was crisp under a coarse snow of salt and smelled so simple and good I thought it might save my life. Just a little. Just for that moment" (79). I can certainly connect myself to a girl experiencing the world for the first time. I remember eating baked potatoes in London and thinking the same thing.
Hadley is there when Hemingway meets F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and although she has met countless other famous people, she still has the same nervous shyness that any normal person would have, and Fitzgerald is as charming and asinine and ridiculous as any biographer would want him to be, the big baby. "An hour or so later, Ernest and I poured Scott into a taxi. 'I don't like a man who can't hold his liquor,' he said when the car had pulled away" (202).
The true tragedy of the story is that Hadley is friends with the woman who will eventually become Ernest's second wife and with whom he has an affair right under her nose. While talking with a mutual friend, I think they come up with a rule all girls should certainly follow: "'Love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.'
'I still love Pauline, God help me, but she's very wrong in this. Freedom is one thing, but you draw the line at a friend's husband. You have to'" (263).
Hemingway doesn't necessarily come out on top in this novel, Hadley certainly is luckier in her relationships in the end, but he does seem to be much more human, rather than the mythical hard-drinking, lion-shooting, death-defying man that I had through of him as. "He was such an enigma, really-fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true" (311). Hadley certainly got the best of him, or at least the fictional Hadley seemed to. Like so many people, once fame and celebrity hit, it is hard to ignore all the things that people say about you and continue to be the same person. Having an artistic temperament certainly doesn't help in that regard, and Hemingway, with his war-scarred psyche and inevitable mental instability would have been hard placed to defy it.

Good Reading,
Caitlin