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“The Paris Wife” by Paula McClain (Ballantine Books, ISBN 9780345521309, $25.00) 

“We never know what waits for us, good or bad. The future stayed behind its veil...” And it’s a very good thing that Hadley Richardson didn’t know what her future with husband Ernest Hemingway would bring! "The Paris Wife," a heartbreaking portrayal of love and frayed loyalty, begins in 1920 when Hadley, a sheltered 28-year-old, meets Ernest, just 21 years old. After a whirlwind courtship, she marries him and moves to Paris, becoming a member of “The Lost Generation” of expatriates living there. But their relationship has its difficulties from the start. Hadley realizes after just a year of marriage that “He was always out for himself—whatever the cost.” As he begins to achieve success as a writer, Ernest seems determined to betray everyone who has loved him and helped him in his career, including Hadley. 

The beginning of the end of their marriage occurs when Hemingway wants to publish The Torrents of Spring, a mean-spirited parody of a Sherwood Anderson novel—the same Sherwood Anderson who had encouraged and mentored Ernest and helped him get published initially. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Hadley all advise against it, telling Hemingway it is not funny as he insists, but he refuses to listen to them and sends it to a publisher anyway. The manuscript is rejected as “unnecessarily vicious to Sherwood Anderson and not that funny.” But Pauline Pfeiffer (originally Hadley’s friend) tells Ernest that it is hysterically funny, and she uses her influence and wealth to get it published. She told him what he wanted to hear and “he loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved and even adored.”  

When Hadley begins to have opinions of her own, ones that differ from Ernest’s, he grows dissatisfied with her, especially when she tends to always see the good in people rather than the negative as he usually does. Pauline, on the other hand, worships Hemingway—as Hadley had once done—and boldly insinuates her way into their lives--and into Ernest’s bed! Hemingway tries to insist that he is in love with both women and  attempts to justify his betrayal of Hadley by offering up other writers who openly keep mistresses yet remain married: Dos Passos, Ford Maddox Ford. He even told Hadley that “nothing hurts if you don’t let it.” For Hemingway, their break-up becomes inevitable when Hadley confronts him about the affair. He had expected her just to keep quiet and accept the situation, even when he moves Pauline into hotels and rented cottages where they stay. Needless to say, the friendship between the two women ends—but not as abruptly as you’d expect! 

Hadley had naively believed that marriage was about “collapsing into one another until there was no difference between us... It would be the hardest lesson of my marriage, discovering the flaw in this thinking. I couldn’t reach into every part of Ernest and he didn’t want me to.  He needed me to make him feel safe and backed up, yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.” Thus, it was all on Ernest’s terms. 

For those of you who are familiar with Hemingway’s first major novel "The Sun Also Rises," it was a thinly-veiled account of his and Hadley’s experiences in Pamplona, Spain, where they travelled with their friends to see the bullfights. Lady Twysden, known as Duff to her friends, serves as the model for the character of Lady Brett in the novel, the result of Ernest’s—and every other man’s—infatuation with her. When Hadley reads the manuscript, she immediately notices that she is the only one of their crowd who is left out of the novel. Hurt by this, she confronts Ernest who tells her that she is too pure and good to be mixed up with the rest of them. And I’d agree! I do have an urge now to reread “Sun” again—just to see if I can recognize the characters from their real-life counterparts. Ernest, of course, made himself the main character, Jake Barnes, whose impotence seems to symbolize the fact that Ernest never consummated his desire for Duff. But don’t get the wrong idea about his being a loyal husband! He had already betrayed Hadley with a prostitute earlier in their marriage when he was sent to Turkey by the Kansas City Star to report on the war there. Hemingway had his demons, yet alcohol and sex and disloyalty never assuaged them—as much as he gave in to them as an escape. 

In spite of it all, Hadley felt “There was nothing like those years in Paris…” and in a sense, she’s right. All lovers of American literature are indebted to those years for having produced some great writing and writers. And Hadley, herself, grew as a woman and mother, and her life after Ernest turned out well; she had a long and successful remarriage. Ernest, however, would go on to marry three more times before leaning into the barrel of one of his favorite shotguns and pulling the trigger with his big toe.  

As well-researched a novel as literary critics could demand, "The Paris Wife" illuminates the woman behind the legendary writer and gives us a glimpse into their early days in Chicago and those heady days in Paris and Pamplona and San Sebastian. What makes their eventual break-up all the more poignant is that at the end of his life, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley. Highly recommended for those interested in American literary figures or 1920s Paris or just a bittersweet love-gone-wrong story.  

Review by Shirley Wells

The Paris Wife (Hardcover)

By Paula Mclain

$25.00

ISBN-13: 9780345521309
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Ballantine Books, 3/2011

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