I was unfamiliar with the story of The Paris Wife, not having read A Moveable Feast which is Hemingway's memoir of the Paris he knew in days when he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy." A Moveable 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'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. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship they married in September 1921 and within months had moved to Paris, the magnetic centre of artistic life in the west in the 1920s, in part because it was comparatively cheap for expatriates just after the First World W. The young 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.
McLain's account is true to known facts, whilst at the same time she employs some fictionalisation. She conjurs up the atmosphere of 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. McLain resists the facile idea that such ménages 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.
McLain portrays Hemingway's legendary charisma, whilst at the same time revealing his tendency to bully and boast. But the book is principally about the Paris Wife and McLain attempts to flesh out her character by imagining Hadley's feelings, and depicting facets of her character. For example she describes Hadley's enjoyment of accompanying Hemingway to Spain to attend bullfights whilst at the same time sewing baby blankets between the fighting. .
The Paris Wife was popular with readers, and made the top of the New York Times best-seller list soon after its release in 2011. Reviews however were mixed: Sarah Churchill of The Guardian and Helen Simonson, an Amazon reviewer, praised the book. The latter wrote "I loved this novel for its depiction of two passionate, yet humanly-flawed people struggling against impossible odds—poverty, artistic fervor, destructive friendships—to cling on to each other." However the New York Times criticised McLain's characterisation of Richardson, writing, " She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore."
I came across a short biography of Hemingway by Anthony Burgess. In Ernest Hemingway and His World Burgess writes from a position of authority and brings insight into a life which moves from a happy childhood into the reality of the First World War, and later his experiences in the Second. We learn of his literary life in 1920s Paris, his reporting of the Spanish Civil War and the excitements of African safari and finally to the sombre last years in Cuba. Hemingway was rich and successful from an early age, but yet public acclaim for his writing and even the Nobel Prize could not disguise the fact that he was a moody, suffering, and sometimes vicious figure -- a man who, in the view of Burgess, was finally unable to live with his own image. 
No comments:
Post a Comment