Hemingway and Hadley go to Paris.
Quotes from ‘The Paris Wife’ by Paula McLain
I had a dream to read a book on Paris while in Paris. So when I finally got there last autumn, I took all the pleasure in reading this book at a cafe in Latin Quarters, a place known to attract the likes of Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds and hosting the store Shakespeare & Company. Fantasies kept cropping up in my head, and I felt I was standing on hallowed ground, hoping some inspiration would rub off me. Even with all the coffee purchases and long walks, I didn’t get honoured with the blessings of artists in Paris’ golden era. I did, however, read a book that was reaffirmed the reality of hard work and struggle, and the complicated nature of relationships. With Hemingway written as a character, I enjoyed the realm of his life, the everlasting damage war had on him, and his incapability to be monogamous. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that Hemingway needed a woman for every big book of his life, and till Hemingway’s dying day, that statement was correct. It is still heartbreaking to read a relationship wither and suffer with the rise of literary success against the backdrop of the roaring 20s. There is a sense of authenticity that McLain creates in her book. Paris seems broken and dirty, attracting hordes of people who bet their lives on ‘making it’ in that city. The fashion, decadence, fads and the glory in dancing till the wee hours, whiskey and smoke reeking off people, one may imagine holding a wine glass and watching the drunk ones slipping in to cabs and going home. Most importantly, this book gives context to the time that led to Hemingway’s book ‘The Sun Also Rises’. Often it is easy to ignore the lives that writers lead that take them to places unknown till they write of them, and this book does a wonderful job at painting a picture of Hemingway on a typewriter lashing out that novel. Relish the Parisian setting and enjoy the self destructive characters take pleasure in their lives and suffer still the same.
On Paris
“Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”
“Nearly anyone might feel like a painter walking the streets of Paris then because the light brought it out in you, and the shadows alongside the buildings, and the bridges which seemed to want to break your heart, and the sculpturally beautiful women in Chanel’s black sheath dresses, smoking and throwing back their heads to laugh. We could walk into any café and feel the wonderful chaos of it, ordering Pernod or Rhum St. James until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together.”
“In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.”
“Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he’d died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place.”
“…vague tussling, I was a woman. On the rooftop, all the veils fell away, and when there wasn’t a diaphanous scrap of fantasy left, I think I was most surprised by my own desire, how ready I was to have him, the absolute reality of skin and heat.”
“How unbelievably naïve we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn’t keep and should never have spoken aloud. That’s how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I’d ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.”
“Fossalta, when we finally arrived, was worse than Schio because there wasn’t a single sign of ravage. The trenches and dugouts had vanished. The bombed houses and buildings had been changed out for new. When Ernest found the slope where he’d been wounded, it was green and unscarred and completely lovely. Nothing felt honest. Thousands of men had died here just a few years earlier, Ernest himself had bled here, shot full of shrapnel, and yet everything was clean and shiny, as if the land itself had forgotten everything.”
“Time was unreliable and everything dissolved and died — even or especially when it looked like life. Like spring. All around us, the grass grew. Birds made a living racket in the trees. The sun beat down with promise. From that moment forward, Ernest would always hate the spring.”
“Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”
“Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,” I said. “And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.”
“Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian word that meant “walled garden.” I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn’t have real freedom unless you knew where the walls were and tended them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.”
“Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.”
“She was also incredibly confident, with a way of moving and talking that communicated that she didn’t need anyone to tell her she was beautiful or worthwhile.”
“But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”
“I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.”
“But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”
“Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn’t. You’re either tied down or you’re not.”
“Are you always this wise, Ruth?”
“Only when it comes to other people’s lives.”
“Men hear what they like and invent the rest.”
“He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. “Isn’t love a beautiful goddamn liar?”
“I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats — the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size.The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time — but under this, I knew he was still lonely.”
“What’s wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?’
‘Hell if I know’, he said. ‘We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don’t we?”
“I want to write one true sentence’, he said. ‘If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I’ll be satisfied.”
“The accordion and the whores and the retching,’ he said. ‘That’s our music.”
“Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”
If you have a book recommendation, definitely share that with me. I would be delighted to expand my palette. And if you do end up reading this book, share with me what you thought of it.
Till next time, enjoy reading.
