It was an era of "open" marriages, although the openness was often one-sided, as McLain pointedly shows male artists such as Pound, Ford and, eventually, Hemingway, trying (often successfully) to install their mistresses in the same home as their wives. McLain atmospherically evokes the garret apartments in which they lived the notorious trip to Lausanne during which Hadley lost all of Hemingway's drafts, three years' work the outings to the Paris races, skiing in Austria and bullfighting in Pamplona – the trips that would inspire The Sun Also Rises.
Modernism was taking flight: in February 1922 Sylvia Beach would publish Joyce's Ulysses, and in December 1922 TS Eliot and Pound published The Waste Land. The young Hemingways were soon befriended by Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, James Joyce, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They married in September 1921 and within months had moved to Paris, the magnetic centre of artistic life in the west in the 1920s, in part because it was comparatively cheap for expatriates just after the first world war. McLain's story opens in Paris, before an extended flashback in which Hadley remembers her early years in St Louis, her meeting with Hemingway, and their brief courtship. Though his marriage to Richardson was brief, it deeply influenced Hemingway, inspiring what many consider his best work: the early In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises, or Fiesta (1926), and the late A Moveable Feast itself, posthumously published in 1964. McLain retells Feast from Hadley's perspective, in the tradition of novels such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, giving voice to a pivotal and yet comparatively silent woman from a classic book. Feast was written some 30 years after Hemingway left Hadley for her friend Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become the second of his four wives.
The story of The Paris Wife is familiar to anyone who knows A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of "how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy". In fact, The Paris Wife also shares in the current fashion for biographical fiction, including Jay Parini's The Passages of Herman Melville, David Lodge's A Man of Parts, about HG Wells, and David Miller's Today about the death of Joseph Conrad. And now comes McLain's The Paris Wife, the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, and their heady days in jazz age Paris. T he 1920s is back in vogue: Baz Luhrmann is remaking The Great Gatsby, a staged reading of Fitzgerald's masterpiece proved a big success off-Broadway last year, and HBO's 1920-set Boardwalk Empire is the flagship programme of the new Sky Atlantic channel.
0 kommentar(er)
