Paula McLain Returns to ‘The Paris Wife’ Territory
After the success of “The Paris Wife” — which gave the floor to Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer, the first two wives of Ernest Hemingway — Paula McLain has returned with a novel about wife No. 3, the reporter and novelist Martha Gellhorn. The book is fueled by her questing spirit, which asks, Why must a woman decide between being a war correspondent and a wife in her husband’s bed? If we ignore the white whale that is Ernest, this novel questions how to combine romantic desire with a drive to live for yourself; to work. It’s a quandary, both for McLain and her fiery protagonist, and the solution isn’t easy.
McLain has employed impressive primary and secondary sources, including Gellhorn’s letters, before letting loose her fictionalized heroine. In a propulsive novel filled with acts of writing a war-torn century, Gellhorn’s life gets the narrative lion’s share, yet Hemingway competes for our attention — which is ironic, because it seems the intention of this book was to center her, not him. But here’s another irony: Gellhorn’s growing dilemma over her husband’s behavior is the novel’s most interesting strand, partly because it throws her need to write into stark relief.
After struggling with a failed affair, bad reviews for her novel and a dying father, Gellhorn meets Ernest. He’s the sun that also rises; he’s seen death in the afternoon. He’s more trouble than he’s worth, but Gellhorn falls in love anyway. He’s encouraging about her writing, until he’s not. Aside from the twists and turns of their stormy marriage, McLain does an excellent job portraying a woman with dreams who isn’t afraid to make them real, showing her bravery in what was very much a man’s world. Her work around the world — particularly her presence on the Normandy beaches on D-Day — is presented in meticulous, hair-raising passages.
But Hemingway! Hem, Rabbit, Hemelstein: Call him what you want, he’s always there, the architect of his own ruin although he tried to blame his wimmins. Just as the reviews of Gellhorn’s novels focused on her as a famous man’s wife, sometimes McLain can’t quite decide where to lay the heartbeat of her own novel. Maybe that’s the point, because this version of Gellhorn doesn’t know where to put her heart, either. What’s more interesting: Martha, bold and blithely unaware of her self-interest in pursuing civilian misery for good stories (always feeling terrible but moving on regardless — “Spain was a chance to find my voice as well as my compass”) — or Martha and Ernest together, him irritable and irritating, daiquiris seeping in like floodwater under the door of their Cuban paradise?
McLain’s descriptive style is occasionally a little pedestrian and generalized for Gellhorn’s unusual life, at times her voice not as searing as the spectacles she witnessed. It’s a sparkier read when they’re together, McLain handling the plot of a literary love affair with pace and skill, careful to give both parties credit despite neither being natural fits for wedded bliss. The scenes with Hemingway’s sons add a touching domestic dimension, showing how both of them were more than capable of love. Ernest initially encourages Martha to seek the missions she craves, and helps with her writing — “Ernest and I gave each other guts and roots, and a bright horizon … I could never do any better, or have what amounted to more.” In turn, Gellhorn helps him in the wake of the success of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” But he’s drinking too much, collecting stray cats, sharking for German U-boats in Cuban waters. Gellhorn recognizes his avoidance tactics, but her hunger has always had to be sharper than his — he’s disciplined, but she’s had to fight harder for her place at the table.
897yuIndeed, this is a novel about a struggle for space, psychological and physical. Hemingway has a movable kingdom — his hotel suites, Havana bars, ranches — yet he also dominates abstractly, in column inches, bank accounts, the collective imagination of an adoring public. Gellhorn defends her autonomy — in her intellect, in the body she inhabits, in the places she goes and the words she writes. He views his needs as important; hers are merely selfish. When Ernest leaves home, Gellhorn says she feels “lighter” and the house is “more expansive … I didn’t have to think of anyone else’s needs or entertain or compromise or stretch to accommodate … and it was wonderful.”
jInevitably, Gellhorn does reach for more. “You’re iron and I’m steel,” she thinks. When Hemingway blocks her press accreditation, denying her passage to France to report on D-Day, she refuses to be cowed, hiding in a hospital ship toilet for an entire night before approaching the beaches with the soldiers. She will not break for him. (It would have been fascinating had McLain chosen to probe even deeper the psychological effects, upon a woman of Gellhorn’s gifts, of enacting perceived humiliation on a man accustomed to female surrender.) Existential eclipses aside, in this highly engaging novel, McLain finds an uncomfortable answer to the dichotomy in her title: Leaving behind the ruin of love is better than contorting yourself to fit inside it, and never more so than if you are a woman.
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