Still lost in Paris

Meg and I spent all this time trying to coordinate a phone call so we could talk about The Paris Wife.  Why?  Because this book is haunting.  It's well researched, well written, and so damn disturbing that I cannot seem to stop thinking about it.  A woman whose taste in books I trust implicitly said, "When I read it I had to keep telling myself it was fiction--it got that real to me. I had just seen Midnight in Paris so I had that back story. Do all talented (powerful) men have weak characters? Am I glad we're not talented, rich and therefore corrupt? Things to ponder...."  Throw in the relationship factor that Meg and I could not fully understand - how do you stay in a marriage like that?  How do you justify to yourself that someone loves you when they are sleeping with someone else and then coming to your room asking for your body and your heart and everything that you are?

There are many quotes that I could have pulled from this book to reference, but here are few that I keep coming back to. 

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important. 
~Gertrude Stein (the Ms. Stein - not the character)

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
~Ernest Hemingway (the Hemingway - also not the character)

"It was the end of Ernest's struggle...He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy." (195)
~Hadley

"What's wrong with all of us? Can you tell me that?"
"Hell if I know," he said. "We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don't we?"  (216)
~Hadley & Bill

"She chatters on about Chanel too much, but she's smart about books. She knows what she likes, and more than that, she knows why." (232)  [Let's be honest - I just liked this one because it articulated something I hadn't been able to put words to before.]
~Ernest

"Drink this," he said, filling the tumbler and passing it across the table. "You could use it."
"Yes, let's get stinking drunk."
"All right. We've always been good at that." (261) [This alone is insignificant, but it's the end of a conversation between Ernest and Hadley.  This is their way of coping with an impossible situation, an impossible conversation about the state of their marriage - the third party that is creeping into every sacred space Hadley clings to and worse, everyone the Hemingways know knows about what's happening.]

"It also didn't surprise me that he was feeling sorry for himself. There are men who love to be alone, but Ernest was not one of them. Solitude made him drink too much and drinking kept him from sleeping, and not sleeping brought the bad voices and bad thoughts up from their depths, and then he drank more to try and silence them." (264)
~Hadley

"And even if he didn't admit it to me, I knew he was suffering because he'd hurt me badly with the affair. Knowing he was suffering pained me. That's the way love tangles you up. I couldn't stop loving him, and couldn't shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him--but I also didn't have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me." (264)
~Hadley

"He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn't help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow? Was it reaching for the gun or sitting with the pain and shaking and the terrible fear?" (277)

"Even if I didn't want to live this way anymore, I also didn't want to die." (285)

"You've changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That's one thing I've learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost." (307)
~Ernest

That's more than a few I guess, but like I said, I'm so caught up in the disfunctionality, the random glimpses of beauty, passion, and brilliance, and the voice of one of America's most prolific writers.  I know, I know - I'm a nerd to the core and it's only because I have something I want to look up that I am stopping now. 

As always, happy reading!

--Jac

Jaclyn's Paris Wife

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew very little of the premise of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife when I started reading it.  I thought it was just about the writers and artists living in Paris in the 1920s.  Not quite a “Midnight in Paris” storyline in book form, but I thought it was more of a nostalgia piece. Probably should have read the book jacket – and yet, would I have read on so voluntarily? Don’t get me wrong, stories of failed marriages and disappointed dreams make for great literature (can we say Gatsby?), but McLain’s novel is not a work of pure fiction.

The Paris Wife is based heavily on the lives Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley.  So almost against my will I fell in love with their love and felt Hadley’s starry-eyed excitement over the tempestuous, young writer who was destined to become one of America’s most distinct voices. But I knew from the beginning that Ernie had fallen in love with a beautiful nurse during World War I, that she had broken his heart, and that as the boy had grown into a man, he turned to drinking in failed attempts to mend what had been broken.  Hadley came next, and it was she who was there as Ernest went from being merely in the shadows of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald and the other brilliant writers who made Paris their home in the 1920s to being a reputable and sought-after writer.  Everyone in Hadley and Ernest’s circle drank too much, wanted too much, and in the end, had to run from the scene or be drowned in it.

McLain’s portrayal of Hemingway is uncanny. His voice that we have come to know in writing rings so clear that it adds an air of reality to what might have felt just like another overly-romanticized piece of historical fiction. And so while I knew from the beginning that Hadley was destined to be the first of four wives, I was drawn in to the carefully crafted details, to the authenticity of the characters, and to the hope that as Ernest said, “No one you ever love is truly lost.”

I can’t say you should read this book.  While it’s well-written and gives fantastic insights into some of the greatest creative minds of the last century, it is a book without a happy ending.  And it’s a book full of details that someone uninterested in English literature or history might find tiresome. I, as you well know, am a lover of both and am also so in love with Paris that I just couldn’t help but read on and try to find the fleeting truth that Hemingway was so desperate to find.

--Jac