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A NOVEL BASED ON HADLEY HEMINGWAY
MARCH 23, 2011
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TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of Tom McNaught, who's the Executive
Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation
colleagues, I welcome you to this wonderful Forum.
Let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library
Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute,
Raytheon, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe, WBUR
and NECN.
We're pleased to host this Forum for a number of reasons. First, because we often
celebrate great literature here, and The Paris Wife is certainly that, as well as a bestseller
currently climbing the charts.
Second, because we're fascinated with all things Hemingway, being home to the
Hemingway Archives, the world's largest collection of Hemingway materials. And we're
proud to collaborate with PEN New England on the PEN Hemingway Award. And this
kicks off actually almost a week of programming. We hope a number of you will be back
this weekend for our program with past PEN Hemingway Award winners, and then we
actually give out the 2011 PEN Hemingway Award at a ceremony on Sunday.
And third, because we like to support those who do research here in our Archives,
including Paula McLain, who spent time in our Hemingway Room, reading through the
letters between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley, the woman for whom
Hemingway famously stated, "I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her."
I hope I'm not stealing any thunder by reading a couple of sentences from the book's
opening.
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Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed
in the future and in the past, too – that history and tradition and hope could
stay knit together to hold you up. But the war had come and stolen all the
fine young men and our faith, too. There was only today to throw yourself
into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever.
But some of us, a very few in the end, bet on marriage against the odds.
And though I didn’t feel holy, exactly, I did feel that what we had was rare
and true – and that we were safe in the marriage we had built and were
building every day.
The words of Paula McLain's, but the voice of course is Hadley's.
In her review, Margaret Flanagan writes, "The real star of the story is Hadley, as this time
around, Ernest is firmly relegated to the background as he almost never was during their
years together. Though eventually a woman scorned, Hadley is able to acknowledge
without rancor or bitterness that 'Hem had helped me to see what I really was and what I
could do.' Much more than a woman-behind-the-man homage," continues Flanagan, "this
beautifully crafted tale is an unsentimental tribute to a woman who acted with grace and
strength as her marriage crumbled."
Paula McLain is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir, Like Family, and a
novel, A Ticket to Ride. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of
Michigan, and was a resident of the MacDowell Colony, in neighboring Peterborough,
New Hampshire. She lives in Cleveland with her family.
Our moderator is Jennifer Haigh, the author of numerous novels, including The
Condition, Bakers Towers and the PEN Hemingway Award-winning novel, Mrs. Kimble,
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the story of a man, Ken Kimble, and his three wives. Haigh describes the main character
of that novel as "a serial husband who marries again and again and again."
Which reminds me of a line attributed to Hadley by one of Hemingway's biographers:
"The trouble with Ernest is that he feels he needs to marries his affairs." [Laughter]
Of The Paris Wife, Helen Simonson writes, "This novel moves beyond the dry bones of
biography or skewed personal vision of memoir, and takes a leap into the emotional lives
of these characters. It is a leap of faith for those readers who think they know
Hemingway, but McLain’s voice sticks close enough to historical material, and to the
words and tone of Hemingway's own writing, to be convincing."
And while I paused in my reading, unsure of whether I was reading a biography or a
novel, I was quite certain that the words I was reading were beautifully written. Please
join me now in welcoming Jennifer Haigh and Paula McLain to discuss this fascinating
new novel, The Paris Wife. [Applause]
JENNIFER HAIGH: All right, well, thank you, Tom. And thank you to the Kennedy
Library for having both of us here today.
I'm delighted to be here with Paula McLain to discuss this fascinating book. I read it just
in the past week and really couldn't put it down; I found it completely gripping. And I'm
sure many of you who know the book have had the same experience.
I want to talk to Paula a bit about the book and the writing of the book, and then ask her
to read a couple of passages for us. Finally, at the end, we'll have a question-and-answer
period. I like to give audience members a head's-up at the beginning so that our time will
be used well. So start thinking of questions now, and we'll get to those shortly.
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Okay, well, Paula, welcome back to Boston, back to the Kennedy Library.
PAULA McLAIN: Thank you.
JENNIFER HAIGH: I know you've done research here at the Hemingway Room. My
first question, I guess, is the obvious one: Why Hadley? What about this woman did you
find so compelling?
PAULA McLAIN: Well, I don't think I went looking for Hadley. I mean, I felt that I
discovered her in the pages of A Moveable Feast, which I was rereading, looking for
inspiration, hoping to God that I would find something to write about. I was helplessly
lost in the throes of trying to write a second novel and having no ideas. And I thought I
might write a book set in the '20s, so I thought I should reread A Moveable Feast.
I had read it before, and for some reason it had never kind of stuck. I don't know why
certain books call out to us at certain times, but when I read it this time, the moment I
cracked the spine, I was just in its throes. It was unbelievable. I mean, there I was with
the young Hemingway in a café, eating oysters, in the rain, and feeling sad about
something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I mean, he just really had me.
So two things happen in that book. If you haven't read it, and I'm sure most of you have,
it's the charting of the literary life, his literary life, from very late, sort of looking back
with tenderness, and also regret. But his portrayal of Hadley and of their marriage, I
thought, was just so tender and so moving that I couldn't stop thinking about it.
And that line, that "I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her," it just, I think
it's a killer. It's a killer! And it just really had me. So I started asking myself these
questions: Who was Hadley Richardson? And where did they meet? And what was it like
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to be married to Hemingway before he was himself? He was a whippersnapper when they
met. I mean, he was a baby.
And so, I was just fascinated and sort of led in that way. And then I searched out
biographies of her life and his life. And then when I learned, from reading a biography
that her letters were here, I made time to come and sit with them and be with them. They
just ripped up the postal lines between St. Louis and Chicago in 1920 and 1921.
And to have access to her voice, it made all the difference in the world. I felt like that was
the thing, that was the magic string that kind of pulled me in and made the story available
to me. And I don't know what we would do now with text messages and tweets. But I'm
so happy that these letters exist, that they survive, and are so lovingly cared for here.
JENNIFER HAIGH: They are. So when you think of this relationship between the very
young Hemingway and the slightly older Hadley Richardson, what was the attraction
between these two people? What was it that clicked?
PAULA McLAIN: I think they were attracted to each other variously. First of all, he– I
know why she was attracted to him. He was stunning. I mean, he was a beautiful,
beautiful young man, and, more than this, had, as everyone said who knew him at the
time, this electric, electrifying energy. He was charismatic, he was magnetic. I mean, she
said later that everyone was attracted to Ernest, women and men and children and dogs.
[Laughter] But he drew people into his orbit.
I mean, the summer before they meet, and this is important, I think– for those of you who
don't know about Hadley's life, her early life was marked by a great deal of pain and
suffering. Her father committed suicide when she was 13 years old, and that changed her,
as it would. When she was six years old, she falls out of the second-story window of her
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nursery and injures her back to the degree that her family wonders if she'll ever walk
again.
Even when she makes a complete recovery, she is marked in this way by her family as
fragile. And she needs to be protected. And she needs to be cloistered. And, "Don't
outreach yourself, Hadley." And, "Be sensible, Hadley." And in the summer before she
meets Ernest, her mother dies. She nurses her mother on her deathbed. And I think she's
freed in that moment and can begin to think that she might have another kind of life.
So I know why she's attracted to young Ernest Hemingway.
And I think for his part, her substance, that she is this tremendously kind of grounded,
warm, generous, she has a kind of a realness about her. I think it matters, too, that he just
recently had his heart broken by Agnes von Kurowsky, who's a bit of a flibbertigibbet.
And Hadley is not that; Hadley is absolutely not that.
And he later said, "The moment I saw her" – everybody always says that, right? – "the
moment I saw her, I knew that I would marry her." And she later said, "Oh, I don't know
about that. I did wear a nice dress and I had good legs."
JENNIFER HAIGH: So you've had the experience of writing a novel that is wholly
fictional, and now the experience of writing a novel about people who really lived. As a
novelist, I am fascinated by the difference in the process. How would you characterize
the difference? How was it different to make this kind of work?
PAULA McLAIN: Well, I think because I had never written a historical novel and
didn't set out to write one, I felt like this book came looking for me. And once I found her
voice and, like I said, felt like I had that mainline to her consciousness and became so
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interested in her, and that their story kind of captivated me from the beginning, I thought
it was wildly romantic.
I also thought that it was a ready-made novel just kind of waiting to be plucked. I mean,
not just Paris in the '20s, which was just an incredible time in history, and in literary
history. But the bullfighting. And then the alpine skiing. And then there's Scott and
Zelda. And there's Picasso walking down the street. And there's Gertrude Stein's salon.
And oh, by the way, there's a ménage à trois in the French Riviera. It's like, if I couldn't
write this novel, what was wrong with me? [Laughter]
The challenges were many, of course, because there has to be a balance, it seemed to me,
and the right balance – and that was the struggle – between following the very welldocumented historical record, particularly his life is so well-recorded and so known, and
there are Hemingway aficionados far and wide; they're probably all here.
So to use the historical record as a kind of scaffolding, right, "this happens on this day,"
but then not to be so overwhelmed by it that there wouldn't be the story, the story under
the story, the intimate details, the things that biographers would never know, nor presume
to know about their love life. You read A Moveable Feast and there are vignettes; you
don't know what's going on once he's at home and the door is closed.
So that was my job, then, to imagine those moments. And I would take some little bit,
something that I had read from an interview, or something I had read from a letter –
Carlos Baker interviews Hadley and she says something like, of their summer in Entebbe,
Hadley and Pauline Pfeiffer and Ernest, "And that was the day that Pauline tried to teach
me how to dive. Well, that didn't go very well."
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And so, then it was my job to imagine from that, from she was saying, and also not
saying, what was restrained, what she was holding back, and to project myself into the
scene and to be with them. You know?
JENNIFER HAIGH: Yeah. Very interesting. So then the events that you know for sure
happened become this sort of container. And your job then is to fill in the kind of
emotional content, the emotional life–
PAULA McLAIN: Exactly.
JENNIFER HAIGH: –of these people. So were there any events in the story that you
invented entirely? Or were you always working within that scaffolding?
PAULA McLAIN: Well, I mean, I invented lots of things and conversations that didn't
take place that I projected into these moments. I knew about Ezra Pound being fired from
Wabash College for seducing an actress, and I just thought that was so fun. And then I
put– [laughter] I mean, it's fun in its way, I suppose.
So I thought that I would have them in a café, drunk on absinthe, and there's Hadley
wanting to eat the waiter's mustache or whatever, and Ezra Pound's telling this story, and
it's all incredibly delicious. It didn't happen, probably, but I make it happen from just,
again, this little bit of something.
I didn't invent any characters, but I built up characters. I saw Kitty Cannell for instance,
Harold Loeb's on-and-off-again girlfriend, as an opportunity to draw out certain elements
in Hadley's character. And so, I made her a bit more of a character than she actually was.
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And I also invented a lot about Kate Smith, because I saw an opportunity to shadow or
foreshadow later triangles. So she was– I didn't really know– I didn't have the goods on
Kate Smith. I'm not sure many people really know whatever happened between Ernest–
JENNIFER HAIGH: So you don't know actually what sort of relationship she had with
Ernest, if any.
PAULA McLAIN: No. I know what he dreamed might happen from his story Summer
People. And I know from Hadley's letters that she was quite jealous of Kate Smith, and
also threatened by the fact that Kate was probably in love with Ernest and what happened
between them. She says in a letter once, "Do you think I'll ever really know what
happened?" That sort of thing, yeah.
JENNIFER HAIGH: Were there junctures in the story where you felt frustration with
the Hadley character? I know as a reader, I did at certain points.
PAULA McLAIN: Where you wanted to shake her?
JENNIFER HAIGH: Yeah! Did you?
PAULA McLAIN: [Laughter] Yes, I did sometimes want to shake her. Or I wanted her
to zig when she really zagged. I kind of wanted her to stand up and put her foot down, or
to do this and that.
But I'll tell you one thing that happened with the research. And this is something that
doesn't happen, I think, with a novelist who's just writing sheer fiction, pulling it out of
the sky or out of the ground, or wherever we pull fiction; I have no idea. I felt a
responsibility to her, the woman who I was getting to know intimately from her
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correspondence. And I felt that I had an obligation to represent her with the context as I
was discovering it.
And a recent reviewer said something like, "Okay, so she loses those manuscripts on the
train. Isn't this an opportunity for McLain to make her more edgy and to give her some
shading? And she's just remorseful." And I found myself getting a little irritated because
the real Hadley was remorseful. And she wasn't so edgy.
And again, whatever I would have had her do– it's almost like acting, right? If you're
going to be inside a character and climb inside their skull, you can't also judge them. Or
there are too many layers of distancing kind of that happen. And it doesn't work. It ends
up being a hot mess.
So I felt like I had to take what I knew, again, even if it's a presumption, or some
amalgamation of me and her and what I was reading and what I was discovering and
what I was inventing. But yes.
JENNIFER HAIGH: One of my favorite aspects of this novel is this fantastic portrait
of literary life in Paris during this period. There's Ezra Pound, there's John Dos Passos,
there's F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, and so on. There are also several scenes kind of
early in the novel between the Hemingways and another famous couple, Gertrude Stein
and Alice B. Toklas. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about the relationship between
those two couples.
PAULA McLAIN: Well, I mean, I think I see Stein as a really powerful and important
mentor to the young Hemingway, that he was ready to absorb the religion of literature
and to sort of take everything that was falling off her tongue the way he was with Pound
at the time. Hadley was frustrated that– and it's interesting that the demarcation was not
men in one corner and women in the other. It was artists in one corner and non-artists in
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the other corner. And although Ernest really admired Hadley's talent as a pianist, she
wasn't a professional, and therefore she wasn't an artist, she wasn't making anything
extraordinary. And so, she wasn't invited to that particular table.
And yet, she was electrified by– I mean, it was an intellectual and creative hotbed. I think
that was the most exciting part about being in Paris for her, even if she was off in the
other corner with "the friend," in the "wives' corner."
JENNIFER HAIGH: I thought at this point we would have Paula read a bit from her
novel. And I've chosen a couple of scenes that I was utterly charmed by, and I'd love to
hear them, and I'd love for all of you to hear them.
The first one concerns Ernest Hemingway's first-ever meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald
and his wife. So if you would read that scene.
PAULA McLAIN: Sure. So this takes place in May of 1925, at the Dingo Bar. And
Gatsby had pubbed in April, so even Fitzgerald didn't really know what he had at that
point. And Hemingway himself had read no Fitzgerald. So that's the context.
Scott stood up as we approached their table, and Zelda smiled strangely,
narrowing her eyes. She wasn't beautiful, exactly, but her voice was – low
and cultivated.
"How do you do?" she said, and then quickly turned to Ernest. "Scott says
you're the real thing."
"Oh? He says you're spectacular."
"Aren't you just darling, my darling?" she said, running her hand along the
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side of Scott's sculpted head. With this gesture, which could have been
extravagantly silly, she and Scott slipped behind a private net into their
own little world. Their eyes locked and they weren't with us anymore, or
with anyone in this café at all, but only with each other, awash in a long
secret look.
Later we watched them dance the Charleston and the effect was the same.
They didn't bounce wildly like the other couples; they were smooth as
glass, their arms arcing back and forth as if on strings. Zelda's dress
bubbled up as she moved and every so often she reached to pull it up
farther, past the tops of her garters. It was sort of shocking, but it didn't
look as if she meant to shock anyone. She danced for herself and for Scott.
They moved in one another's orbit, incredibly self-possessed, their eyes
locked on each other.
"What do you think of her?" I asked Ernest.
"She’s not beautiful."
"No, but she has something, doesn't she?"
"I think she’s crazy."
"Not really?
"Really," he said. "Have you looked into her eyes?"
At the end of the evening, they invited us to their flat in a fashionable
Right Bank neighborhood off the Étoile. It was a rich building, you could
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see that right away, but when we got inside, the apartment itself was all
chaos, with clothes and books and paper and baby things strewn
everywhere. We pushed a great heap aside to make a place for ourselves
on the sofa, but Scott and Zelda didn't seem embarrassed at all. They went
on entertaining each other just as they had in the café, but more loudly.
Things got so noisy, in fact, that we heard a child's crying from deep in the
apartment, and then an English nanny came out bearing Scottie, their
plump daughter. She was dressed in an elaborate bedtime costume with a
fat bow listing to the side of her fine blonde hair. Her face was prettily
rumpled from her pillow.
"Oh, here's my precious," Zelda said, rising to scoop the girl up. "Aren’t
you just a little lamb stew?" The girl smiled sleepily and seemed pleased,
but the moment Zelda sat with her in a gilded but shabby wing chair, she
became so preoccupied with trying to catch whiffs of Scott and Ernest's
conversation that the girl plopped right off her lap and onto the floor.
Zelda didn’t even seem to notice it happened. The nanny swooped in and
spirited the now-wailing Scottie off, and Zelda turned to me and said,
"What were you saying?" Her eyes were scattered looking and strange, as
if her mind were on another plane entirely. "I'm dying for my Scottie to be
a flapper, you know. Decorative and unfathomable and all made of silver."
"She's adorable," I said.
"Isn't she? She’ll never be helpless. You can see that, can't you?" Her
intensity was sudden and alarming.
"Yes," I agreed and wondered if Ernest had been right. But who could
separate real madness out from the champagne, which was ongoing and
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everywhere?
As near as I could tell, the party never stopped for those two. Less than a
week later, they showed up at the sawmill apartment at six o'clock in the
morning, still drunk from their night out. We were sound asleep when they
started banging on the door and singing our names out loudly. They didn't
seem to care that we were in our pajamas. We made coffee, but they didn't
drink it. They laughed, and swore allegiance to some ballet artist they'd
met in the café the night before but that we'd never heard of.
"Zelda's very sensitive to art, you know," Scott said. "She’s not really of
the earth at all, my girl."
Zelda's face grew dramatically stricken. "You’re not going to tell them, are
you?"
"Maybe we should, darling. They'll guess anyway."
"Well, then." Her eyes widened. "A short time ago, I fell very much in
love with another man. It nearly killed me and Scott, too."
Scott stood over her and made a motion as if he was smoothing her hair
without actually touching it. "It nearly killed us, but it did kill the fellow.
So horrible. It was in all the papers. You must have read something of it."
I shook my head and said, "I'm so sorry you had to go through all of that.
It does sound awful."
"Yes, well," Zelda said, snapping out of the moment as if an invisible
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director had called Scene. "The man did want to die for me. And it's made
Scott and me so much closer."
Ernest flinched and stared into his coffee cup, saying nothing. I could tell
that he hadn't quite made up his mind about these two. They certainly
didn't seem our sort, but I wasn't sure I knew what our sort was anymore.
The rules seemed to be changing all the time.
[Applause]
JENNIFER HAIGH: That's a great scene.
PAULA McLAIN: Aren't they fun? They're fun! They're so much fun!
JENNIFER HAIGH: They are. So what did Hemingway think of Fitzgerald? How
would you describe their relationship as writers?
PAULA McLAIN: Oh, I mean, I think they were incredibly important to one another.
But they were not often in the same place. I mean, they wrote a lot of wonderful and
essential letters to one another. And then there's what we know of Fitzgerald from A
Moveable Feast. And everybody says– should I not be profane here? I should probably
not. When people read A Moveable Feast, they're like, "Do we really need to have
Fitzgerald wondering if his penis is large enough? I mean, if they're good friends, how
could he have done that to his friend?"
But then I've read other sort of writers, reviewers and critics saying, never before has
Fitzgerald been made so human as when Hemingway writes of him in those scenes, that it
wasn't just a bitter kind of, I don't know, vengeful gesture. That he, Ernest, saw the drama
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and the opportunity, do you know?, the real sort of story, and what was working in those
scenes, and not just like a way to plunge in the dagger.
JENNIFER HAIGH: This very much comes across in your novel, that so much of life
was, for Hemingway, material, regardless of his feelings about the people involved. And
there's one section I particularly appreciated. It's the time they spent in Pamplona with
this group of friends, and there's a great deal of tension. There are infidelities and
jealousies and longings beneath the surface. And it is, you see very much sort of the
template for The Sun Also Rises.
PAULA McLAIN: Exactly.
JENNIFER HAIGH: And you write about Duff, who ultimately was the inspiration for
Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. And you can't help but think he saw Fitzgerald
in the same way. And writing about him in A Moveable Feast was just the same thing,
really. It was working with what life put in front of him in whatever form.
PAULA McLAIN: Right, and seeing what could be made of that. What's interesting for
me, too, about that summer is that Hadley was there for all of it, and yet she's the one
person who was there who doesn't appear in The Sun Also Rises. She's not transformed
via fiction. He left her well enough alone [laughter], which I know is probably a favor.
But I think it was painful for her to see that he made something of everything and that she
didn't appear in that novel.
So it was very gratifying for me to write about that same time and those people, and that
extraordinary circumstance, except from Hadley's point of view. Because she was there.
JENNIFER HAIGH: Okay, now I want to have you read yet another Scott and Zelda
scene, because I can't get enough of these people. [Laughter] You couldn't invent these
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people, really. So this is another scene. This takes place on the French Riviera. The
Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways are there with another couple, the Murphys, Sara and
Gerald Murphy. And Sara is the first character mentioned.
PAULA McLAIN: They are really fun. I mean, it was kind of all I could do to not
immediately begin a book about Scott and Zelda, because I think they're fascinating. But
then I thought then I'd really get stuck in time forever and perhaps I wouldn't ever recover
again.
Sara was a natural beauty, with a thick, tawny bob and clear, piercing
eyes. Scott and Ernest both longed for her attention, and Zelda couldn't
stand the competition. She grew edgier and bolder by the day, but she
wouldn't direct any ire at Sara. They were friends and confederates, after
all – so she reserved her sharpest barbs for Ernest.
Zelda and Ernest had never liked each other. He thought she had too much
power over Scott, that she was a destructive force and probably half mad
to boot. She thought he was a phony, putting on macho airs to hide an
effeminate center.
"I think you're in love with my husband," she said to Ernest one night
when we were down at the beach and everyone had had too much to drink.
"Scott and I are fairies? That’s rich," he said.
Zelda's eyes were hard and dark. "No," she said. "Just you."
I thought Ernest might hit her, but she had laughed shrilly and turned
away, beginning to take off her clothes. Scott had been talking intently to
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Sara, but he came to full attention then. "What on earth are you doing,
dear heart?"
"Testing your nerve," she said.
To the right of the beach was a towering cluster of stones. The highest
point stood 30 feet or more above the waves, and the current below was
always choppy, swirling over hidden jagged points. This is where Zelda
headed at a steady swim while we all watched with a horrible curiosity.
What would she do? What would she do? What wouldn't she do?
When she reached the base, she scaled the rocks easily. Scott stripped and
followed her, but he'd barely reached the outcropping when she let out an
Indian cry and plunged off. There was a terrible moment when we
wondered if she'd killed herself, but she bobbed to the surface and gave an
exhilarated laugh. The moon was very bright that night and we could
easily see the shapes their bodies made. We could also hear more wild
laughter as Zelda clambered up to do it again. Scott had a go at it, too,
both of them drunk enough to drown.
"I've seen enough," Ernest said, and we went home.
The next afternoon at lunch on the terrace, things were quietly strained
until Sara finally said, "Please don't scare us like that again, Zelda. It's so
dangerous."
"But Sara," Zelda said, batting her eyes as innocently as a schoolgirl,
"didn't you know, we don't believe in conservation."
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And I don't do the Southern thing, obviously, "but Say-rah"–
JENNIFER HAIGH: This is sort of a geeky, crafty question, but as a novelist I have to
ask it. I'm intrigued by these few italicized chapters that appear in the book. The book is
written almost entirely from Hadley's point of view, but a small handful of these short,
italicized chapters that are from Ernest's point of view. And my question, I guess, is why
you did this, and how you chose those particular moments.
PAULA McLAIN: So that just came out of the process. And I think a couple things
happened that were quite important for me. And one was coming here and reading some
of his intimate correspondence and feeling, if I'd had an agenda before, that it needed to
change because the more I studied their courtship and their love story, and the more I
became identified with her and began to see him through her eyes, I mean, I sort of fell
madly in love with Ernest Hemingway. God help me, right?
And then I started to deeply sympathize with him, and yet there were these big questions
I had, like: How could he have betrayed her if he deeply loved her? And I believe that he
did. And admired her. And so, I had these– and they were unanswerable questions. And I
feel like in order to get closer, to be able to answer them, I had to be in his skull.
And so, I started to write these little passages, almost as a writing exercise, a geeky,
crafty thing. It was a trick. And I didn't imagine that they would end up in the book. And
I started with– there's a scene when he goes to Turkey. And it's the first time he's
surrounded by war since he himself was wounded in the war. And to be in his person and
his consciousness in that moment, and did he or did he not betray Hadley for the first
time.
And I was working, too, with material from his collection, In Our Time. And I was also
working with some little fragments in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. So I'm kind of in a
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conversation and sort of taking these threads from the past. And then I could get closer. It
was like an exercise in knowledge.
And then I also wondered, so why does he marry Hadley if he's terrified of marriage? So
that's why I wrote that scene, the night before they're married. And then I get to have him
think about Kate, and we have these questions that we have as readers answered as well.
And then the same is true, there are two sections late in the book with the arrival of
Pauline Pfeiffer. So what happened between them? How did it begin to become too
seductive for him to walk away from?
JENNIFER HAIGH: I wanted to save some time now to let some of the audience ask
your own questions of Paula McLain. So if you have a question in mind, please step up to
one of the microphones here in the aisle, and we'll hear from some of you.
__: Who's Kate Smith?
PAULA McLAIN: So Kate Smith is a friend of Hadley's from her girlhood in St. Louis.
They were schoolmates at Mary Institute. Kate Smith is also a friend of Ernest's. Her
Aunt Charles had a cottage in Horton Bay. Ernest's family had a cottage a few miles
away on Walloon Lake. And again, the summer before he meets Hadley, he sort of starts
to pal around with Kate and her two brothers. And it's her brother, YK, who he goes to
Chicago and boards with YK Smith. It's Yeremya Kenley. I call him Kenley in the book
because it's easier than saying Yeremya. And because I just like that name.
When Hadley's mother dies, it's Kate who writes and says, "You poor creetch, you've had
a terrible ordeal. Why don't you come to Chicago and take your mind off of all of this
trouble." And Ernest has literally only been in Chicago a few weeks, and it's Hadley's
first night in Chicago when she meets Ernest.
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__: Does she introduce them?
PAULA McLAIN: Kate introduces them.
JENNIFER HAIGH: And Kate is Hadley's age? They're both quite a bit older than
Ernest?
PAULA McLAIN: Yes, right, exactly. In the book, I sort of bend the truth a little and
say that Kate and Ernest have known each other for years, because I like the idea that he
has admired Kate from afar and kind of been dying to get nearer her. Sort of that
narrative was more interesting to me than that they had just met. And I also, yes, was
kind of making use of various things. But that's Kate. And Kate Smith went on to marry
John Dos Passos. Much, much later.
JENNIFER HAIGH: Any other questions for Paula? Would you mind coming to the
microphone?
PAULA McLAIN: So sorry. I think it's about them recording it for posterity. I'm sorry.
Really, it'll all be worth it in the end. [Laughter] Everyone will clap for you. Thanks for
being a good sport.
__: I just wondered if you restrained yourself in having Hadley have more anger towards
Pauline.
PAULA McLAIN: [Laughter] Did I restrain myself? You mean Hadley seems awfully
civilized to you? Yeah. I think she was blindsided. But also that she was a pretty– I see
her as a very even-keeled person. And also because I read interviews with her very late in
her life. So she had distanced herself quite a bit, I think, from that experience.
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I do know that in the '40s, she went down and had lunch, she and her then-husband Paul
Mowrer went down and had lunch with Pauline at her house in Key West. And this was
after Ernest had left Pauline for Marty Gellhorn.
The fact that she would do such a thing, and that they had a correspondence, Pauline and
Hadley, late in their life– again, Jennifer, you're like "did you ever want to shake her?"
like, really? Would you go and have lunch? But they did. And Pauline at the time said,
among other things, "Boy, I hate him now!" And Hadley felt sorry for her, because she
didn't feel that way.
I'm not saying that Ernest didn't devastate Hadley when their marriage ended, but I do
know that Ernest and Hadley had a deep and abiding affection for one another, until the
end of their respective lives. And that wasn't always true of Ernest's wives.
__: When did he marry Mary?
PAULA McLAIN: Oh, my goodness. Somebody probably knows. I think it was maybe
'46? Sounds about right. Yeah, she's not my wife. I have the good wife. No, no, I know
Mary has many fans here.
__: Are you tempted to write about the other wives, the other Paris wife, the Key West
wife?
PAULA McLAIN: Yes, exactly. It's been suggested. And my editor actually, right after
I finally delivered the book said, "I had the most marvelous dream. [Laughter] I was
looking at my bookcase, and lo and behold, there was not one book there, there were
four! And we had a book for every wife, and wouldn't that be something!" I laughed and
said, yes, wouldn't that be something. [Laughter]
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I think it would require me to– I don't even know. First of all, I can't imagine going on to
write from Pauline's consciousness because she broke up my marriage! [Laughter] That
would be very difficult. I think I'd have to do it from his point of view, and then that
would be its own difficult thing.
But then each wife, I mean it's so fascinating to me that with each wife– first of all, his
life was so large. And then each wife added her own chapter. She was so physically
located; I mean, the fact that Hadley kind of lives contained in Paris, I mean that's the
irony of the title, right? And that Pauline lives contained– although there were these
forays to Bimini, Africa, et cetera, right?
And that Martha found the Finca, and that she's really kind of there, kind of located and
lodged there. And Mary is in Idaho. And isn't that interesting? I find it fascinating.
And there's the joke about the shifting administration, or what have you, right? But I
think it would be more challenging than rewarding, too. And then I would just be that
writer who writes about Hemingway's wives. [Laughter] And, "What's wrong with that
woman? Is she obsessed?" Okay, the answer is yes.
__: Last question; my original question in fact, how long did this process take you?
PAULA McLAIN: Well, the first draft came really very, very, very quickly. And I have
said, and I felt this to be true, that I sort of wrote it as if I were strapped to the side of the
rocket ship. Again, I'd never written a historical novel before. I thought the research
would be daunting, but in fact it was delicious. I thought it was invigorating, and every
day I was sort of like finding new information that fascinated me even more than the
previous day's.
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And I wrote it in a Starbucks near my house. And it was the first time that I had written
full-time. I had quit my teaching job to work on this book, because it was just too– there
was too much to do and I wanted to know if I could do it.
The first time I wrote a novel, I was eight months pregnant and I had a two-year-old. And
I worked on it an hour a day. And I knew I could not write this book an hour a day, that I
would be 72 by the time I finished it [laughter], or what have you. So I needed to know if
I could do it. So I wrote it very quickly, in about seven months.
And then there was another year-and-a-half of fact-checking and more and more factchecking, and then other research to do. I mean, the very daunting thing is, because his
life is so well known, I just knew if I got anything wrong – and of course I have; forgive
me, all of you, for anything I got wrong – that I would just be lambasted, and it would be
horrible.
Sir? And I'm sorry, do you mind? I am sorry, if you could go to the mic.
__: First of all, it's a beautiful book.
PAULA McLAIN: Thank you very much.
__: I really enjoyed it immensely.
PAULA McLAIN: Thank you.
__: I'm somewhat of a Hemingway scholar, although I'm more interested in the Spanish
Civil War period than the one that you were dealing with. But I was struck by how
wonderfully you transposed many of the short stories of Hemingway.
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PAULA McLAIN: Thank you.
__: My question to you is, how did you liberate yourself from the powerful influence of
his own words in order to create a world that was more suited to your own purpose?
PAULA McLAIN: Ignorance, I suppose. [Laughter] That's a great question. I mean, I
did feel like I was in conversation with those stories and in dialogue with them. That is
one of the ways that we know Hemingway and can get closer to him, is through the work.
And so, I would find something from A Canary for One, say, or Summer People, or The
Snows of Kilimanjaro, et cetera, et cetera, and kind of pluck at those strings.
And as intimidating as that was, to believe– I mean, cheeky, right? Who are you to think
that you can deconstruct, make use of these things, but also to write in his voice? And
also, whose style is more recognizable to us than Hemingway's? Right? How easy it
would be to fall into caricature, or to parody, or to seem ridiculous. And what I was
hoping was that my deep admiration for the writing would come forward, because I was
in awe and not at all trying to compete.
But it was sort of like going in drag, writing in drag as Hemingway because it's so
masculine and muscular and stripped, and not at all my writing style. But it was
liberating, and it was more fun than anything I'd ever done.
And even though – Jennifer, I don't think I ever finally answered your question – I didn't
initially think those scenes that I wrote in his consciousness would make it into the book.
Once I had written them, I felt it was a much more balanced book and portraiture of a
marriage. I mean, is there ever one side of any marriage? And this way he's not just a
villain and she's not just a victim. And that's as it should be.
Yes, sir?
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__: Hi. I think like many of us, we know so much about Hadley in the 1920s, and then as
soon as their marriage is over, we really don't know much at all. I know that you
mentioned that she was married to Paul Scott Mowrer, I believe.
PAULA McLAIN: Yes.
__: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Hadley's life after Hemingway. I
know that she spent time with him up in New Hampshire. And I'd really be curious to
know what she did with the last 50 years or so of her life, how often she was in touch
with Hemingway, maybe relationships she had with Hemingway's other two children that
he had with Pauline.
PAULA McLAIN: Hadley gets to have a very happy life. And what does she do with
her time? I think she is happy. So she meets Paul Mowrer not long after they separate in
1926. And Paul, unfortunately – and I skirt this altogether in my book because I'm not
stupid – Paul is married at the time. And she is not at all anxious to get into another
triangle. So she says, hmm, she's attracted, and also is not kind of over the devastation of
her marriage to Ernest, and doesn't really know if she can love again. But he doesn't go
away. He doesn't forget. He thinks that she is remarkable. And Paul and Winifred, his
wife, have a kind of more a marriage of convenience.
In 1933, she marries Paul, and they're married for 35 years. Paul is a contemporary of
Hemingway's, that's how Hadley meets him at first in Paris. He goes on to win the
Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He's also the first poet laureate of New Hampshire. And
when people would come to interview Hadley about Ernest, she had all of Paul's books
stacked up on the coffee table. And she was enormously proud of him.
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She also loved that he was calm and quiet and that they lived a calm and quiet and lovely,
stable life. She later said to her biographer and very good friend, Alice Hunt Sokoloff,
that it was a great relief, in a way, because she's not sure she could have kept up with
Ernest, because of course he had great energy and great passion. And also because he was
a difficult man to love unconditionally, and yet he required that.
I don't know that she had much of a relationship at all with Patrick and Gregory. It was
more that Ernest's subsequent wives had relationships with John, Bumby, Jack, because
he would go and summer with Ernest wherever they were.
She lived in New Hampshire for a time. She lived in Chicago for a time. When they
moved back to Paris, Paul and Hadley, they were friends with Julia Child and Paul. And
so you can read Hadley's name in My Life in France, which I think is this great little
nugget.
When I was on tour in Denver a few weeks ago, a woman came up to me. Very late in
Hadley's life she lived in Lakeland, Florida, and that's where she died. And a woman
came up to me and said, "I knew Hadley. I cared for her at the end of her life, and she
was a wonderful woman."
Also, when I was on tour in St. Louis, which is Hadley's hometown, her family came. It
was the most remarkable experience. So her sister Vonnie's son was there, and he was so
warm and so appreciative and generous, and he cried and said he was so happy that her
life had been honored this way. And I do mean to honor her life and not to exploit it or
make use of her in this way. And it was lovely. It was lovely. He told me that she had
taught him how to dance. It was quite a moment.
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__: It seems to me that Hemingway himself obviously was a bit of a troubled soul,
maybe a personality quirk. Narcissism, perhaps? And he did commit suicide at the end of
his life.
PAULA McLAIN: Yes.
__: Was there anything you uncovered to explain why? What happened? What was the
downward spiral?
PAULA McLAIN: That's a big question. That's a really big question.
__: Maybe it's too big for here.
PAULA McLAIN: It might be too big for here. I mean, I think we love to psychologize
Hemingway because, again, he lived such a big life and there were so many wheels
within wheels within wheels. But many biographers believe that it was kind of a triple
play, a trifecta of trauma that began with his experience in World War I when he was
wounded. He was 18. Eighteen-year-old boys think they're invincible, and yet he wasn't
at all invincible. And I think it sort of changed his relationship forever to fear and to
courage, and the way those two things are in dialogue with one another.
And then not long after that, he was recuperating in Milan, and very famously fell in love
with his war nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. The thing about Hemingway is that he's
incredibly romantic, like sentimental, like in a girly way; believes in one true love, and
wasn't at all prepared to have his heart broken by Agnes. I mean, not at all. And if you
read his correspondence from that time, he was blindsided and he was devastated.
And then they believe that he was rejected by his mother and by his family. It was sort of
pushing back against all of that. I think that's what made Hadley so attractive to him, too.
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Not that she was his mother. I mean, she was eight years older, but she could not have
been more different from Grace Hemingway.
And then we have these questions about was there mental illness in that family? Was he
bipolar? Was he an alcoholic? At the end of his life there was the concussions, multiple
concussions, which John later said he believed that that changed his father's personality,
that he actually wasn't the same person at all after that. And then the shock treatments.
It goes on and on. It's all very sad. But I think you can point to any one of those things
and that might be enough. But then all of those things together.
__: Thank you.
PAULA McLAIN: You're very welcome.
__: Hi. I'm in a book club at UMass-Boston, and we had such a good time last week
pulling apart everyone, including you. [Laughter]
PAULA McLAIN: Well, thank you very much.
__: I don't know how it happened, but I'm the only person in the group who is divorced
and went through a lousy time, like Hadley did. Your words, or her words, your words
through her, saying how she wanted to freeze time, how she just wanted to shut the world
out was so meaningful. I had the rest of the group in tears saying how close that was to
how someone feels in that situation. So then I had to find out more about you. You're
happily married, so where did you get that? [Laughter]
PAULA McLAIN: Would it make you happier to know I'm not happily married?
[Laughter]
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__: No!
PAULA McLAIN: That was lovely, what you said about Hadley, the book and your
connection to it, and divorce. I think because I've been married twice, not unhappily, but I
think all of marriage is difficult. It's like the last frontier. It's like to do it well– I was
interested in this book, in the rise and fall of a marriage, and how a marriage in the tender
beginnings can be a very different thing from the marriage at the end. And the way that
we can be nostalgic for beginnings and what we don't know.
I think Hadley was overwhelmed by all she learned she had married, for better or for
worse.
__: Well, you've inspired us now, the next group– some of the members are here, by the
way.
PAULA McLAIN: Thank you for coming.
__: Our next book is A Moveable Feast. The first chapter I had to go and read was the
end of the marriage, the way he described it, which was so good.
PAULA McLAIN: It's so good, yes.
__: But he says that he couldn't understand why he wasn't appalled that his wife's friend
went after him. Why didn't he recognize the word no? [Laughter]
PAULA McLAIN: Good question. Would that he were here to answer.
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__: As you well know, Hemingway wrote biographically, by and large. And his second
posthumous book, Garden of Eden, which he did not agree to publish over 44 years from
when he started writing it, brings up a lot of questions about his sexuality and her
sexuality, if you–
PAULA McLAIN: If you read that as Hadley?
__: Yes. And so, I wondered, did that factor in your thinking at all in preparing this
book?
PAULA McLAIN: No. I mean, if you read Garden of Eden, which I love– I mean, not
everybody loves that book, but I do, I do love that book. Pauline and Ernest
honeymooned– I mean, there's a way to read this character not as Hadley at all, but as
Pauline. But I don't think you can do that. I don't think that you can even say this– they're
amalgamations. They're very complex renderings, and he takes bits of people and he
makes– I mean, he takes the best, sort of the most interesting way to spin or to construct
story and narrative.
I do know this, that in the time when Hemingway was in a wild flirtation with Jane
Mason when he was married to Pauline, that Pauline went through an experience, a little
spate of cutting her hair shorter and shorter, and dying it blonder and blonder. And I
know he made use of that material in that book.
And then, if you read the restored edition of A Moveable Feast, there's that vignette about
he and Hadley kind of talking about cutting their hair shorter and shorter and being the
same guy.
And it's funny, people come to my readings and ask me, they stand up and say, "Was
Hemingway impotent?" as if I would know, as if I were there. [Laughter] I think we like
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to look back at these moments, Oh, he married a woman eight years older; he must have
been marrying his mother. Oh, he writes about Jake Barnes being impotent; it must have
meant that he himself was impotent. Oh, he's writing about this sea change, sexual sea
change in a marriage; he must have been interested himself, or confused himself, et
cetera, et cetera. I don't think it's ever that easy. But it's interesting!
__: Thank you.
PAULA McLAIN: Thank you all very much. I appreciate your time and attention. It's
been a lovely evening. Thank you so much. [Applause]