Library Director’s Notebook       November 2011 I wonder what is harder...

Tue, 11/01/2011 - 11:44am -- KChin

            
             Library Director’s Notebook
       November 2011

I wonder what is harder for a writer?  Creating a character “from scratch”, or taking a well known character from the past and imagining his or her daily life?  In The Paris Wife, writer Paula Mclain takes the latter approach, writing about the Paris years of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson.

Their brief, intense marriage has been chronicled before, most notably in Hemingway’s bittersweet autobiographical work  A Moveable Feast.  In his book Hadley is presented as a warm, beautiful, supportive wife, yet Hemingway leaves her anyway, for one of her friends.  Although I really love A Moveable Feast and have read it several times, I never could quite grasp how such a successful relationship could have come crashing down so quickly and brutally. Hemingway gives very little explanation. 

Now in The Paris Wife, we hear Hadley’s side of the story;   and although this is a work of fiction, it seems to correlate perfectly with what non-fiction accounts say about the first Hemingway marriage.

The meeting of Hadley and Ernest takes place at the very start of the jazz age, soon after the end of World War I.  Hadley comes from a very sheltered background, but she is not the first middle class miss to find herself drawn to the allure of all night speakeasies, hot jazz, and unheard of new freedoms.

From the beginning, Hadley is drawn to the intensity and confidence of Hemingway, 9 years her junior, the heartthrob her friends continually warn her against.  But when has a young woman ever allowed herself to be warned away from a “bad boy”?  Within a very short time the two are in love, married, poor but happy, saving every penny  to live in Paris.

Paris in the 20’s was such a Mecca for talent and creativity,  it has almost become a cliché to talk about who discovered whom there. The Hemingways were soon absorbed into the heady mix. Hemingway quickly found support and encouragement. His ego was fed, his talent stimulated, his ideas taken seriously.  Meanwhile Hadley took her place among the wives and later still among the mothers, content to see Ernest shine and to endure without complaint the poverty and the many times he left her alone in their cold and drafty apartment ,while he sat snugly in overheated cafes writing.

But Hadley, though she adored her husband, was no doormat.  Together the couple talked and argued and made many decisions and many mistakes. According to most accounts, they loved each other in a way that often silenced the most jaded cynics around them and made them the envy of their many friends.  Bad changes came in the form of Hadley’s rich friend Pauline, who seems to have had her eye on Ernest, well before either Hadley or even Ernest suspected it.

It’s hard to read this book without realizing that although Hadley suffered terribly at the time of their breakup, Hemingway was the one who could not ultimately get over the loss and was to write about it many years later, with unflinching regret.  As he wrote at the very end of A Moveable Feast:  “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

The Paris Wife is a sensitive and compassionate look at the rapid rise and fall of a marriage ,  as  while as a scintillating peek at the creative pressure cooker  known as Paris between the wars.

Blog Category: 
chat loading...