I finished reading The Paris Wife recently for my prison book club. The Paris Wife is the story of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, and her experience as his spouse while living as a member of The Lost Generation in Paris. The book was excellent: beautifully written, honest, and terribly tragic (as we all know how their relationship ends …). Because of The Paris Wife, I decided it was time to revisit Ernest Hemingway. And God help me.
I decided to pick up The Sun Also Rises, because the bull fight scenes in Pamplona were a huge part of The Paris Wife. I knew, thanks to Hadley’s first person account, that The Sun Also Rises is very true, featuring people who actually existed, who were “friends” of the Hemingway’s. I use the term “friends” loosely because honestly I’m not sure how much any of these people liked each other, which is made even more apparent in The Sun Also Rises.
A small novel, Sun took me way longer than it should have to complete. Not because the diction was difficult; obviously not—we’re talking about Hemingway, a master of using very few words to get across huge thematic points. No, Sun took me a long time to read because I was bored.
Granted, I want to give Hemingway his due. He is a genius with dialogue. He says so much by saying nothing at all. Most of the time, everything is subtext, but it’s brilliant! Brilliant! So dialogue: points! Many points. He understands human nature and is capable of creating an entire, fully realized character with nothing but his or her words. That is not easy.
Yet, I find his work to be boring. I can’t put my finger on it. I suppose, in the case of The Sun Also Rises, the repetition of “another bottle of wine” and “I’m tight” got a little old. They’re all drunk the entire book, which is why the ugliness comes out—why friends leave Pamplona as enemies.
Maybe his descriptions. I don’t like his descriptions. They’re not flowery enough for me. My favorite authors are European—Spanish mostly—and those romance language dudes know how to speak pretty. Hemingway? Not so much, which is part of his fame, part of his allure. Yet, this stagnant use of language was not alluring to me. BORED!
I have another theory: do you think Hemingway wrote for a male audience? Do you suppose, as a female, I just don’t relate? I mean, he was a Man’s Man. He was a a fighter, a drunk, a womanizer. Maybe if I had a set of balls, his work would resonate better, because as a woman, I find his female characters to be quite despicable—and maybe that’s what he intended. No matter how much he loved women in his life, he had a way of tossing them away when the next best thing came around. Perhaps he fits this philosophy into his work.
In conclusion, I gave Hemingway another shot. Did I enjoy myself? Eh. At times. There were brilliant lines: “I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.” Or: “I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.” Another: “Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.” My God, brilliant!!
That said I won’t be going back to good old Ernest. I still have flashbacks of the horror of The Old Man and the Sea from high school, and although The Sun Also Rises was better, I’m still not interested in tackling his body of work. Thanks, Ernest, for being you and for creating a new style of American writing. However, we’re breaking up. It’s not you; it’s me.
Sometimes I read what everyone else is reading. Always, I want to be persuaded. I want to see what it is that propels a big book forward. Get inside it, stand beside it, and marvel.
The Paris Wife has all the making of a great book. Inspired by the author's read of
A Moveable Feast, that great posthumously published Ernest Hemingway remembrance, and populated by the likes of Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein,
The Paris Wife tells the story of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife—who she is, how she meets Hemingway, and what happens when the two decide to marry. It's familiar terrain, those Paris years—romantic, historic, impossible, made confused and confusing by large amounts of liquor and by allegiances, both professional and personal, that bent in upon themselves. I, like countless others, wrote a research paper on Fitzgerald and Hemingway as a teen. I was obsessed with these authors' books, wanted to pierce the alluring madness, wrote like one and then like the other, never gave up my Gatsby habit, cry every time I read
The Old Man and the Sea. I was obsessed with Zelda and I have, at various times in my life, given myself over to Joyce, then over to Pound, then over to those parts of Gertrude that I have the brain cells to understand.
This is a book I should have loved.
I wanted, however, more than was here. Less explication, perhaps, more alivedness on the page. Less chunking in of familiar history and more of that exquisite and also inexplicable thing that happens, say, in Monique Truong's
The Book of Salt, which steals inside the Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas household by way of a Vietnamese cook. Truong, with her novel, dares to imagine, dares to create a whole and surprising story that illuminates the past but is not so strictly beholden to it. She reminds us that novels, in the end, are novels, not biographies, and so there is room to do far more than to place small wagers on undocumented in-bewteens.
In the case of
The Paris Wife, we know, from the outset, what happens to Hadley (if not from our own reading, then from the author's opening pages). It is imperative, then, that Hadley's inner life soar, that McClain go deep, that she surprise us, get to us, with the unanticipated detail, the original slice of talk, the something in the shadows, the something in the light. I kept looking for that, hoping for it, for this is such an admirable project and McClain herself is so entirely likable in the interviews I've heard and read.
But what, really, do I know?
The Paris Wife, like Nancy Horan's famous spurned wife story,
Loving Frank, is a huge bestseller, much beloved by a vociferous crowd. I have stood in the margins most of my life, and I recognize, always, that I look for other things in books than many do. Might I suggest that there is room for us all.
I read four books while I was away (beyond all that I read about Berlin). I reported on the first—
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black's crisp and smart debut short story collection—
here. I'll be reporting on the others (
The Paris Wife (hmmmmm) and
The Coffins of Little Hope (a marvel!)) in days to come.
But this very early morning, I'm reflecting on the scouring brilliance of Paula Fox's
Desperate Characters. It's a book I'd always meant to read, an author whose story I have followed. That doesn't mean that I was prepared for the hard, bright smack of Fox's sentences, the relentless disintegration of a domestic arrangement that may or may not hold. We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for helping to bring
Desperate Characters back into print and wide circulation. We have, in the Norton edition, his essay that suggests that the book is, "on a first reading," "a novel of suspense."
As the novel opens, Sophie Brentwood is bitten by a stray cat; Sophie's hand swells. Sophie should have the hand checked, but she is afraid. She can imagine dire consequences—rabies, even death—but other underlying fears persist and complicate. Three days will go by, and the wound will keep molting, oozing, disfiguring, haunting, and this is the running tension—this cat bite, this not knowing, this unwillingness to find out, this false hope that comforts lie elsewhere (in drink, in friendship, in secrets, in lashing out). Into this strange, unsettling frame Fox inserts the fractures of a marriage in naked near stasis. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are childless. Otto is abandoning a business partnership with a long-time friend, Charlie—bating him, hating him, feeling abandoned and abused by him. Brooklyn, finally, is scathing and scabrous and ill-equipped, in these late 1960s, to wrap this couple in a numbing sheen.
Sophie and Otto know too much. They see too much. They both despise excessively and love forlornly. Is this all that marriage is? All it offers? Is there refuge among the refuse? In whose arms can one trustingly take shelter?
Desperate Characters is a brutal book, a lacerating book, and if that makes it a hard book to read, it also makes it an impossible book to put down. I, for one, read the bulk of it while being jostled about during a long wait at the Berlin airport.
There are easy books, and there are hard books, and I will be honest: I prefer the latter. I want to be tested. I want to think. I want to study a book and ask, in awe, How in the world was this made?
Desperate Characters has me asking.
I decided to pick up The Sun Also Rises, because the bull fight scenes in Pamplona were a huge part of The Paris Wife. I knew, thanks to Hadley’s first person account, that The Sun Also Rises is very true, featuring people who actually existed, who were “friends” of the Hemingway’s. I use the term “friends” loosely because honestly I’m not sure how much any of these people liked each other, which is made even more apparent in The Sun Also Rises.
Maybe his descriptions. I don’t like his descriptions. They’re not flowery enough for me. My favorite authors are European—Spanish mostly—and those romance language dudes know how to speak pretty. Hemingway? Not so much, which is part of his fame, part of his allure. Yet, this stagnant use of language was not alluring to me. BORED!
I don’t like him either. His macho schtick gets on my nerves and puts me off. Have you seen the movie Midnight in Paris? It has a brilliant satire of him. I love your closing line in this post.
(FYI, I clicked over here from the blog thread on AW.)
yeah I mostly agree. also, so much of Hemingway is about distance and direction — like ahead 200 yards, rising to the left from the road blah blah — which is so confusing to me because I can’t compute that information. He’s pretentious in his unpretentiousness. When’s the last time you read Fitzgerald? That’s a writer I can, and have, read over and over and over. The difference between, IMO, a mechanic and poet (Hemingway and Fitzgerald).
Oh my gosh, I love Midnight in Paris! Such a perfect look at the guy–a perfect look at the entire Lost Generation, really. Glad you enjoyed the blog post
He’s pretentious in his unpretentiousness.
Ha! Perfect!!
Yes, I love Fitzgerald. Love, love, love. The Great Gatsby is one of the best books of all time and a novel I hold very dear to my heart. Their differences, despite their shared era, are immense.
It’s all right not to join the choir, really. “Papa” was an original stylist in his day, and this will always be a mark of distinction.
I have the opposite problem- *loving* books no one heard of. That’s all right, too.
As long as we love some random book, it’s all good. Preferably, several books
Sara – I KNEW I’d like your review of “Sun.” I also enjoyed some of the comments it engendered. Other than the short stories,I can’t find time to re-read any of his work anymore. Actually, because of Papa, I created one of the better laughs of my lifetime. It’s February, 1972,and I’m living in Los Angeles, awakened early one morning by a very serious earthquake that took down my chimney and half-emptied my swimming pool. Now this was a time before email, before computers, and Western Union was a logical way in which to connect with people. That afternoon I drove to the nearest Western Union office and sent to a good friend—and my comedy-writing partner for TV—a telegram which read,in its entirety: “The earth moved. Truly.”
Girl, Hemingway is an acquired taste for sure! I definitely gravitated toward his work in college, but I think that was because I wanted to learn from the brevity of his prose. My fiction writing as a freshman (God help us) was incredibly verbose and WAY too flowery. Reading Hemingway taught me to create meaningful dialogue and how to edit my own work so it wasn’t overdone. So, for that, I’ll always hold a soft spot in my heart for his work…I, however, enjoyed The Paris Wife much more than The Sun Also Rises…And the satire of him in Midnight in Paris is truly fabulous!
Ahhhahahahahaaaa! I love that we can at least use Hemingway for comic references
Wonderful! And I’m sure much appreciated by your friend!
But I LIKE your flowery prose. You’re right; you are an excellent editor, however, so we’ll thank him for that. I’m just glad you didn’t turn into a Hemingway minion; we would have lost out on some of your most beautiful and impressive talents!