The Paris Wife

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Chicago and a fast courtship
2. A freezing flat above Paris
3. The lost suitcase
4. Bumby and a year in Toronto
5. The Fitzgeralds and the fiesta
6. Pauline steps closer
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

A friend pressed this one on me years ago by saying it was the sad Hemingway book where you end up rooting for the wife. That sounded about right, and it stuck in my head. I finally read it because I wanted the Paris part, the cold apartment and the cafes and the famous friends, and I stayed for Hadley. She is the whole reason the book works.

McLain published it in 2011 with Ballantine Books, and she tells the story in Hadley's voice, from Chicago in 1920 through the divorce in 1927. It follows a real marriage. Hadley Richardson was Ernest Hemingway's first wife. He was twenty one when they met and she was twenty eight, which mattered a lot at the time. The book stays close to letters and known events, but it reads like someone remembering, not like a textbook.

Chicago and a fast courtship

Hadley starts the book stuck. She lives in St. Louis and then Chicago, living with family, playing piano, looking after her mother, feeling like the younger sister who never quite launched. Her sister Fonnie is the social one. Hadley describes herself as shy and a little old for the party scene, which at twenty eight felt ancient to her then.

She meets Ernest at a party at Fonnie's friend's place in Chicago in the fall of 1920. He is loud and funny and full of war stories from Italy, where he drove an ambulance and got hurt. He is handsome in that cocky way and he talks about writing as if it is already decided. Hadley is charmed before she can talk herself out of it.

What I liked here is how normal their early dating feels despite the legend around him. They write letters constantly when apart. His are intense and flirty and sometimes a little much. Hers are careful and then less careful. He calls her Hash and Kitty and a bunch of pet names. She worries she is too old, too plain, too inexperienced. He tells her she is exactly what he wants. Her family worries about his drinking and his temper and his lack of a steady job. His family, especially his mother, worries about other things.

They marry on September 3, 1921, out at Horton Bay, Michigan, near where the Hemingway family had a cottage at Walloon Lake. It is small and sweet in the book. Then they decide to move to Paris. Everyone tells them to go. Sherwood Anderson, who Ernest hero worships at this point, gives them letters of introduction and tells them Paris is the place to live cheap and write well. They sail in December 1921 with almost no money and huge plans.

A freezing flat above Paris

The Paris section is my favorite, at least at first. They rent a small walk up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter. No hot water to speak of. A wood stove. A shared toilet down the hall. Hadley learns to shop with her schoolgirl French and to count francs and to pretend she is not cold. Ernest writes in cafes to save fuel and to be around people, though he claims he hates being interrupted.

McLain fills these chapters with the people they actually knew. Gertrude Stein holds court in her salon on rue de Fleurus with Alice B. Toklas pouring the tea and the big modern paintings on the wall. Stein reads Ernest's work and tells him to cut and to start over and to write true sentences. Ezra Pound, in a cape, takes Ernest to concerts and boxing matches and tells him what to read. Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company lends them books and gossip and mail. James Joyce shows up at parties, quiet and watchful.

Hadley is often on the edge of these scenes. She likes Stein but feels judged by her. She likes Pound's wife Dorothy. She loves wandering the Luxembourg Gardens and the markets. She is lonely a lot. Ernest is out reporting for the Toronto Star, covering conferences in Genoa and Lausanne, and she stays home with a book and the stove. When he is home he is working on short stories and getting rejection slips, and he swings between confidence and gloom.

They are poor but they have fun too. They drink cheap wine at the Closerie des Lilas. They go to the horse races. They dance in their tiny room to a neighbor's accordion. They take cheap trips to the mountains. In the winter they go to Chamby in Switzerland to ski, staying in a pension where Hadley learns to love the speed downhill even though she falls constantly. You can see why she thought this life, hard as it was, was worth it.

One small thing McLain gets right is the language gap. Hadley never becomes fluent. She can order food and chat a little, but long French conversations leave her out. That adds to her isolation in a way that feels honest rather than staged. She depends on Ernest to translate the world, and he likes that more than he should.

The lost suitcase

About a third of the way in comes the famous incident, and McLain handles it without turning it into a thriller. In December 1922 Hadley agrees to bring Ernest's work to him in Lausanne, where he is covering a conference. She packs up nearly everything he has written, the originals and the carbons, into a valise so he can show it to Lincoln Steffens or work on it between sessions. Different accounts argue about exactly what was in the bag. In the novel it is basically all of it.

She sets the bag down at the Gare de Lyon in Paris and it gets stolen before the train leaves. When she gets to Switzerland she has to tell him. He does not believe her at first, then he goes white. They rush back and search and ask the police and the porters, but the bag is gone. Years of stories, gone.

Hadley carries guilt about this for the rest of the book. McLain does not let Ernest rage for pages. He is stunned and then flat. He says it was his fault for letting her carry it. But the loss sits between them. Hadley replays what she should have done. She held the strap, she looked away, she trusted a moment. Ernest has to start over with nothing but the one story he had left behind, a story about Nick Adams fishing that had been out for consideration.

Historically people still argue about how much was lost and whether copies survived. McLain picks the version where it was almost everything, and where the loss forced Ernest to write leaner and fresher. That may be generous to him. Critics of the novel sometimes say Hadley blames herself too neatly here. I thought it rang true though, because she already felt like the older wife who was supposed to take care of things. Losing the work confirmed her worst fear about herself.

Bumby and a year in Toronto

Hadley gets pregnant in 1923. They are still broke. They decide to go back to North America so the baby can be born near family and so Ernest can take a real staff job with the Toronto Star. Their son, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, called Bumby, is born on October 10, 1923, in Toronto.

Toronto is a strange pause in the novel. They have a decent apartment. Ernest writes features and covers crime and has a boss who likes him. Hadley stays home with a colicky baby in a cold city where she knows no one. She loves Bumby fiercely but she is exhausted. Ernest hates the routine and the office hours. He wants Paris and his stories back.

McLain uses this stretch to show how different their needs have become. Hadley wants stability for the baby. She likes having regular meals and a nurse now and then. Ernest feels his writing drying up. He quarrels with his editors. He drinks more. He starts talking about going back as if Toronto is a trap. Hadley agrees to return because she wants him happy, and because she believes his talent needs Paris, but part of her dreads starting over with an infant in that cold flat.

They sail back in January 1924. They settle this time in a slightly bigger place on rue Notre Dame des Champs, over a sawmill that coats everything in dust. Bumby gets a pram and a cat to stare at. Hadley hires a French nursemaid when they can afford it. Ernest writes in the bedroom while the saw screams below. It is louder and dirtier than before, but Ernest is producing again, and that lifts the whole house.

This is also where Ford Madox Ford enters with his magazine the transatlantic review, publishing Ernest and arguing about commas. McLain keeps Ford comic and a little sad, a big man with a big voice who wants to be at the center. Hadley watches Ernest learn politics, literary politics, and get better at saying no.

The Fitzgeralds and the fiesta

In 1925 the Fitzgeralds crash into their lives. Scott Fitzgerald is already famous for This Side of Paradise and about to publish The Great Gatsby. Zelda is bright and restless and drinks like she is trying to prove something. They meet at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse and Scott immediately latches onto Ernest as a younger brother and rival. He wants to fix Ernest's stories by cutting and rearranging. Ernest admires Scott's success and resents his money.

Hadley sees trouble fast. Zelda needles her about being older and about breastfeeding and about letting Ernest stay out all night. Scott tells Ernest that Hadley is holding him back, that married writers go soft. Ernest repeats some of this at home, testing it out. Hadley pushes back, but it lands. She starts to wonder if she is the problem, if a better wife would throw parties and charm publishers.

The centerpiece here is Pamplona. In the summer of 1925 and again in 1926 they go to Spain for the fiesta of San Fermin with a mixed group that includes Lady Duff Twysden and her crowd. They drink from wineskins, watch the bulls run through the narrow streets, sit in the sun at the cafe tables until late. Ernest is gathering material for what will become The Sun Also Rises. He watches how the English expats talk and fight and love badly, and he takes notes in his head.

McLain writes the fiesta scenes with a lot of pace. There is dancing and jealousy and sunburn and bad sleep. Hadley feels sidelined while Ernest stays up with Duff and the men. She likes Duff but sees how Ernest looks at her. She gets her own small flirtation, nothing serious, just enough to remind her she is still attractive. The trip ends with everyone tired and a little sick of each other, and Ernest full of a novel he has to write fast.

When The Sun Also Rises comes out in 1926, Hadley understands she is reading about their friends with the names changed. She is proud and uneasy at once. The book will make him. It also shows how he uses people. That double feeling never quite leaves her after this.

Pauline steps closer

Pauline Pfeiffer arrives as a friend first. She works for Vogue in Paris, chic and Catholic and funny, with good clothes and good jokes. Hadley likes her. They ski together, they gossip, they look after Bumby. Ernest likes her too, and then more than likes her. McLain stretches this over months so you watch the lines blur.

It starts with letters and long talks about writing while Hadley is out or resting. Then with a trip to the south of France with Gerald and Sara Murphy at Antibes, where everyone swims and drinks and stays up late and shares rooms in casual ways that make Hadley uncomfortable. Pauline is always there, tanning on the next towel, laughing at Ernest's jokes a beat longer than needed. Hadley tells herself she is being jealous and old fashioned. She tries to be modern about it because everyone in their circle claims to be modern about marriage.

By late 1926 the affair is open in practice if not in words. Ernest is torn and drinking heavily and writing well and hating himself. Pauline is patient and sure she can give him a different life, with money from her family and access to a Catholic marriage. Hadley offers him a strange deal that people still talk about. She says she will give him a separation of one hundred days, and if he still wants Pauline after that, she will step aside. In the novel this comes from exhaustion as much as pride. She wants to stop waiting for the ax.

The ax falls anyway. Ernest and Pauline spend time apart, but absence helps them, not the marriage. Hadley waits in Paris with Bumby, trying to keep routines, taking him to the park, answering letters from friends who have picked sides. Stein sides with Hadley, which costs Ernest a mentor for a while. Scott is little help, drunk and tangled in his own marriage. Pound is kind in his distant way.

They divorce in January 1927 in Paris. Hadley keeps Bumby and gets a small settlement and the royalties from The Sun Also Rises for a time, which McLain notes with dry irony since the book that hurt her helps keep her afloat. She moves on quietly. She will later marry the journalist Paul Mowrer in 1933 and build a steadier life in Chicago. Ernest marries Pauline in May 1927. The last pages quote, in spirit, what Hemingway wrote years later in A Moveable Feast, that he wished he had died before he loved anyone but Hadley. McLain lets that line land without milking it.

If I have a complaint, it is that the middle sags a little when Ernest is away and Hadley is waiting. Some chapters repeat the same loop of worry and letter writing. And Pauline can feel a bit thin, more symbol than person, though that may be the point since we only see her through Hadley's eyes. The book also softens Ernest at times, making his cruelty sound like boyish confusion. Readers who know his later life may want a harder edge.

Still, I came away thinking Hadley got a fair hearing here. She was not a saint and not a bore, despite what one famous review called her at the time. She was a woman who chose a risky life young, paid for it, and kept her dignity. The Paris details never felt pasted on. The cold, the hunger, the noise of the sawmill, the taste of oysters when they could afford them, all of it stayed with me longer than the famous names.

FAQ

Is The Paris Wife based on a true story?

Yes. It follows Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway from Chicago in 1920 through Paris and divorce in 1927, using real people and events shaped into fiction.

What happened to the lost suitcase?

At the Gare de Lyon in 1922 her bag holding nearly all of his early manuscripts was stolen and never found, so he had to start over.

When was The Paris Wife published?

Ballantine Books published the first US edition in 2011 in a 336 page hardcover.