thisnewday

Before I opened its hardbound pages, I remembered her name from the thick biographies of Hemingway's life that I'd read years ago. I mean, I had to think about it for a minute, like I have to do about most things these days. But, yeah, it did come to me. Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife.

Not his first love, by any means. That would be Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse he met in the Milan hospital where he'd been taken to recuperate from wounds suffered as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front during WW I. The same Agnes von K. who both healed his body and broke his heart.

Which, one premise of The Paris Wife seems to suggest, was one of the things that both Ernest and Hadley brought to their initial meeting, through mutual friends, in the fall of 1920. Each had been emotionally damaged, it seemed, by a disasterously unrequited first love.

And there are other similarities that reveal themselves as the story develops, although none appear more consequential, in the early going, than the shared family dynamic of a domineering mother and weak father. That and the fact that both fathers are destined to commit suicide, Hadley's a few years before she met Hemingway and his about two years after he divorced Hadley.

But the really interesting thing about this story is that it's told from Hadley's perspective and in her voice, a choice by author Paula McLain which seems all the more striking because so much of what's previously been written about Hemingway has, I think mistakenly, deferred for factual content and emotional perspective to Hemingway's dominating literary voice.

Still, I can't resist saying that, fifty pages into it, I'm still struggling with the sheer incongruity of a woman living in contemporary Cleveland writing credibly about Paris in the 1920s. That, of course, being the opinion of one who was born in Erie, Pennsylvania only to live out his life in that noted haven of frustrated Francophiles, Syracuse, New York...

LPK
LiveJournal
2.25.2011