IN A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoirs, he reminisces about Paris as the Eden where he and his first wife “were very poor and very happy”. Paula McLain’s novel, The Paris Wife, recounts Hemingway’s doomed first marriage and his struggles as a writer at the beginning of his career from the perspective of his wife, Hadley Richardson.
By making Hadley the narrator, McLain subverts the traditional mode of narration in which women are marginalised and the male perspective privileged. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that The Paris Wife is about Hemingway first and Hadley second.
Eight years her junior, Hemingway married Hadley in 1921 and moved to Paris with the help of her inheritance. McLain creates a fascinating picture of Paris where “to keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean’s worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of hope to hang yourself with.”
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway says, “Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed.” There he met the two great figureheads of high modernism, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, friendships that proved invaluable to his literary career. His chance meeting with Scott Fitzgerald also took place in that city and transformed into a unique friendship. The novel presents a brilliant contrast between Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, best known for its jealousy and resentment, and Hemingway’s marriage.
While Paris is stimulating for Hemingway’s creative genius, Hadley can not adjust to the new city. McLain shows how she is reduced to the role of an artist’s wife within their literary circle and finds it difficult to fit into the bohemian lifestyle. McLain quotes Hadley, “If the women in Paris were peacocks, I was a garden-variety hen”.
The novel also chronicles Hemmingway’s life-long struggle with his experiences during war: “He often said he’d died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest,” remarks Hadley.
In spite of the strains on the marriage, McLain shows Hadley never losing faith in Hemingway and believing that “he had writing the way other people had religion.”
McLain also beautifully captures Hemingway’s efforts to not blame his wife when she loses all his manuscripts, along with their carbon copies, on a Paris train, yet his inability to forgive her. An unwanted pregnancy further strains the already weak marriage.
After his involvement with Duff Twysden, who inspired the character of Brett in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway falls in love with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hadley’s friend. She goes on to become the second Mrs Hemingway. This marks the end of Hemingway’s first marriage, though his love and regret for the pain it caused never leaves him; he says in his memoir, “I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her.”
McLain introduces us to two Hemingways; the early Hemingway is shown to be a dreamer with an irresistible natural charm who attracts people wherever he goes while the other is a creative force to reckon with: “I’d never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light. He never stopped moving — or thinking, or dreaming apparently.” The other Hemingway emerges once success beckons and is portrayed as a selfishcareerist with a taste for recognition and the attention of beautiful women.
The Paris Wife helps us see Hemingway as a young energetic writer completely devoted to his work as well as a passionate lover. Although you cannot help but blame Hemingway for betraying Hadley, McLain takes great pains to show how different factors contributed to the tragic end of their romance.
McLain’s narrative is historically accurate and written in a style which has the irresistible charm of the Jazz Age. Covering the period when Hadley met Hemingway in America, the start of their unusual relationship, their unexpected marriage that most of their friends thought was doomed before it even happened, and their life in Paris, the novel dwells deep into a story that most of Hemingway’s fan would already know. However, it is the beautiful manner in which McLain turns the material into a romantic tale with powerful emotional moments that hooks the reader.
In fact, The Paris Wife can work as a complimentary study to A Moveable Feast and Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
The reviewer is a lecturer of English at GC University, Lahore
The Paris Wife(FICTION)By Paula McLainRandom House, ISBN 978-0345521309336pp. $25.00