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Friday, July 29, 2011

The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

The Paris Wife was recommended to me as a non-fiction.  And it is, somewhat.  We could probably more accurately say “based on a true story.”  Generally, it’s the biography of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, told in her voice.  Still, the author cannot possibly have been privy to all the detailed goings-on in Hadley’s mind as written, so she offers this disclaimer: “Although...people who actually lived appear in this book as fictional characters, it was important for me to render the particulars of their lives as accurately as possible, and to follow the very well documented historical record.”  So I in turn give you, my readers, this disclaimer of my own:  While I admit that I may have mildly cheated in allowing The Paris Wife as my non-fiction, I accept that the main events are factual, and I therefore choose to be graceful to myself and let it slide.

If you’re not into art and literature, the story itself is thoroughly compelling as it describes Hadley and Ernest’s immediate fixation on one another, their ill-advised long-distance courtship, their passionate marriage, mostly in poverty, and finally the fatal love triangle in 1920’s-era bohemian Paris.  If you’re at all familiar with the literary scene of that time and place, you’ll love the intimate and dirty little look at not only the Hemingways, but also at the greats with whom they socialized, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and his loony wife, Zelda, Gertrude Stein and her lesbian partner, Alice, along with plenty and diverse mistresses and scorned lovers.

McLain portrays Ernest Hemingway fairly, I think, not as a hopeless drunk or a lecherous slimeball.  Instead, she illustrates alcohol’s role as a social fixture and mutual coping mechanism, and discloses Ernest’s depressed and desperate mindset and as he grapples with his affection for both Hadley and his eventual second wife, Pauline, in an environment where monogamy is not the norm.

This text had me so intrigued with Ernest that, when I finished, I decided to chase it with a selection from his short stories.  I found “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” in an anthology on my shelf and went into it blindly.  Be warned:  If you’re as mush-hearted as I am, don’t do what I did.  Don't read this right before bed.  Why not?  Because a big game hunt goes terribly, terribly wrong.  Hemingway’s trademark sparse and brutal treatment will demand at least an hour of nerve-regathering.  Best read it by broad daylight.


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