Written by Paula McLain, and published in 2011, The Paris Wife works beautifully as an audio-book. Carrington MacDuffie's narration (recommended by AudioFile) is terrific; she excels not only at reproducing accents, but also at rendering the different tones, pitches, and paces of the characters' voices, so the dialogue comes across very effectively.

Aside from the quality of the narration, I really enjoyed this book. It was the perfect complement to A Moveable Feast.

In fact, it came in the same Five Books recommendation, by Wai Chee Dimock. Mostly written in the voice of Hadley (1891-1979), the first wife of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), it chronicles their romance, their wedding (in 1921), their move to Paris (then awash with literary and artistic talent), the beginnings of Hemingway's serious writing career, and finally (in 1927), the disintegration of their marriage (the first of four for Hemingway). It's a novel, but Dimock says it sticks pretty close to the documented sources.


Hemingway, by Henry Strater (1896-1987)

It's hard to like this man. His ambition and determination lead to boastfulness, recklessness, and aggression (as well, of course, as a place in the literary history books). He seems determined to stab his best friends in the back, is frankly a cad towards the patient and long-suffering Hadley, and often comes across as an obnoxious spoilt child. But then his insecurity kicks in; fearful and depressed, he's desperate for company, reassurance, hand-holding -- and alcohol .

But McLain, through Hadley's eyes, offers us a beautifully nuanced picture. You might not grow to like him, but at least you understand him better. Hadley, it seems, though desperately hurt by his forming a relationship with Pauline Pfeiffer, a woman she regarded as his friend, ultimately forgave him.


Pere-Lachaise cemetery, Paris, 2019. Again, we're in the realm of tombs...

It seems very likely Hemingway suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his experiences in the First World War, and that, for sure, wrecked many people's lives (including, possibly, my grandfather's).

But Hem was pretty messed up even before then. He had a highly troubled relationship with both his parents. His father "suffered from unpredictable and dramatic mood swings characterized by episodes of depression and irritability", and was prone to meting out physical punishment (to the extent that the young Ernest fantasized about shooting him); and his mother was domineering and massively confusing. She kept little Ernest in girls' clothes way longer than was considered appropriate, and persisted in presenting him as the identically dressed twin of his older sister, Marcelline; she captioned one of his photos "summer girl", and referred to him as "Dutch dolly" (with the result that, at the age of two, he's on record as rejecting that epithet, and pretending to shoot his mother). No doubt this treatment not only goes a long way towards explaining his later attempts to come across as hyper-macho, but also fuelled the snowballing psychological disaster that eventually led to his suicide at the age of 61. It is likely he "suffered throughout his adult life from a bipolar affective disorder", exacerbated by his abuse of alcohol, and a series of head injuries.

McLain touches very delicately on all this, never allowing hindsight to take over, or the narrative to become unrelentingly glum, but sticking close to the relationship as it developed -- first thrilling Hadley, and then increasingly burdening her. When it creaks to its inevitable, heart-breaking end, you find yourself wishing this tough, sensible young woman had fought a bit more aggressively for the man she still loved, despite his faults and idiocies (including his apparent belief in the viability of a menage a trois...). But then you reflect that she probably did the right thing... She'd have continued to suffer if she'd stayed yoked to this volatile man, and she seems to have been happy with her second husband, journalist Paul Mowrer. They married in 1933, and stayed married until his death in 1971. (Ernest, by contrast, married Pauline in 1927, but was divorced by 1940; he married Martha Gellhorn that same year, but they divorced in 1945; and he married Mary Welsh in 1946, and stayed with her until his suicide in 1961.)

Suicide... There's such a lot of death in this book... Hadley's sister died as a result of a house fire. Her father committed suicide (in 1903). As did Hemingway's father (in 1928), Hemingway himself, and two of his siblings (Ursula, in 1966, and Leicester, in 1982). This latter mention is anachronistic, actually, as Hadley herself would have been dead by then (which is why she also can't point out that Hemingway's granddaughter Margaux killed herself in 1996).



The mutual jealousy of writers and artists comes across in The Paris Wife, just as it did in The Fraud and Magnificent Rebels. As a result, it's sometimes hard to know the exact genesis of things. Whereas A Moveable Feast denies that F. Scott Fitzgerald had much influence on Fiesta (Hemingway's break-out first novel), McLain's sources indicate his input was much more influential. Also very evident is the sheer struggle that writing involves. Sometimes it's hard to wring out as much as a sentence. And even success is not unalloyed. There's great jubilation when Hemingway's first book of stories (In Our Time) is accepted, but Hadley reflects: "He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy."

The whole Fitzgerald connection is fascinating. The mutual antipathy between Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald comes across in both books. Hem immediately thinks Zelda is mad, and begins to wonder if she has "infected" Scott. But Zelda's most intriguing barb draws its dark inspiration from her jealousy of the (admittedly slightly weird) relationship between Hem and Scott (which is, I'm sure, the subject of other books). She thought Ernest was a "phony, putting on macho airs to hide an effeminate center". And one night she puts this out in the open:

"'I think you're in love with my husband.'...
"'Scott and I are fairies? That's rich,' he said.
"Zelda's eyes were hard and dark. 'No,' she said. 'Just you.'"

That's an interesting one, given the homophobia he expresses in A Moveable Feast. There were certainly rumours, but according to Hemingway biographers, it was complicated. Mary V. Dearhorn is clear that Hemingway was not gay, but admits "he shook up people’s expectations about sexuality and the behavior of men and women". Paul Hendrickson says "he was heterosexual, but with many contradictory feelings concerning his sexuality".



What else? Well, as in A Moveable Feast, you meet an entire who's who of figures from the writing and painting set that had gathered in Paris during those years. Some are starting to be familiar by now (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach). But translator Lewis Galantiere, who was instrumental in helping many of the big names of the day, was one I didn't know. Artist Dorothy Shakespear Pound makes regular appearances, and it has been interesting to look up her work:


Etruscan Gate


Vorticism-inspired cover art, 1915

Then there are artists and hosts extraordinaires Sara and Gerald Murphy; artist and Hemingway boxing-partner Henry Strater; humorist, screen-writer, and genuinely nice guy Donald Ogden Stewart; author John Dos Passos; and Harold Loeb, another writer. Hemingway subsequently featured some of these characters, not at all flatteringly, in the novel Fiesta. The person he didn't mention at all in that work, says McLain, was Hadley, and she felt pretty miserable about this. Ultimately, though, he dedicated the novel to Hadley and Bumby, and signed the royalties over to her.

So now I have to read Fiesta again, as I'll understand it way better than I did when I read it in my late teens/early twenties. I've already downloaded it. In Spanish, just to make a change...