Paula McClain has an enviable way with a story that makes you lean forward fully engaged (you say, Hadley, that you lived across from a sawmill in Paris? I'm strangely fascinated.)
Here are a few passages I liked:
This is from the Prologue and about Pauline Pfeiffer, the Vogue writer who befriended Hadley and then had an affair with Ernest. She became his second wife and was treated poorly in the original version of
A Moveable Feast. She was also a devout Catholic-although that didn't seem to prevent her from banging her friend's husband-and supported the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. So, she was kind of an all-around asshole and fittingly, Ernest would later cheat on her with Martha Gellhorn and meanwhile Hadley would say years later in an interview that divorcing Ernest turned out to be
a huge relief. It's the Lee Krasner story all over again.
This isn't a detective story-not hardly. I don't want to say, Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything, but she's coming anyway, set on her course in a gorgeous chipmunk coat and fine shoes, her sleek brown hair bobbed so close to her well-made head she'll seem like a pretty otter in my kitchen. Her easy smile. Her fast smart talk-while in the bedroom, scruffy and unshaven and laid flat out on the bed like a despot king, Ernest will read his book and care nothing for her. Not at first. And the tea will boil in the teapot, and I'll tell a story about a girl she and I both knew a hundred years ago in St. Louis {Katherine Smith}, and we'll feel like quick and natural friends while across the yard, in the sawmill, a dog will start barking and keep barking and he won't stop for anything.
Hadley's musings in Paris where she's very lonely much of the time while Ernest goes to his second apartment (!) to write.
A cold wind sliced through my thin coat, but just beyond was the Ile St.-Louis with the beautifully preserved houses and elegant streets that made it an oasis. I walked all the way along the island until I found a park at the tip, thick with bare chestnut trees, and then followed a little staircase down to the river. Fishermen were stringing their lines for goujon, and frying them up on the spot. I bought a handful wrapped in newspaper and sat on the wall watching the barges move under Pont Sully. The nest of fish was crisp under a coarse snow of salt and smelled so simple and good I thought it might save my life. Just a little. Just for that moment.
Ezra Pound, who not surprisingly comes across as only semi-likable, offers Hadley some advice when she becomes pregnant.
"I like him the way he is. Surely you believe me."
"Of course. That's how you feel now. But mark my words, this baby will change everything. They always do. Just bear that in mind and be very careful."
"All right, Ezra, I promise," I said, and moved away toward Ernest and our train. Pound was Pound and given to speech-making, and I didn't take him seriously that day. I was far too optimistic about everything to heed any warnings, but years later his parting remarks would come back to me sharply. Pound was Pound, but about this one thing he had been dead right.
Ernest takes Hadley away for a ski vacation in Austria as she desperately needs to get away from Ernest's new friends in Paris-too much of the fame monster. He's even fighting with Gertrude Stein.
After three days, we came back down the mountain to find two telegrams waiting for Ernest. One was from Sherwood {Anderson} and the other was from Horace Liveright and both said the same thing: In Our Time would be a book. They were offering a two-hundred-dollar advance against royalties and were sending a contract soon.
It was an epic moment, one we'd never forget-and somehow the skiing seemed ineluctably part of it, as if we had to trek up nearly to the sky and fly back down to get this news. If was the end of Ernest' struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.
The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.
One of those beginning of the end moments, Ernest ignores Hadley at a party and flirts with Duff-evidently the inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley in
The Sun Also Rises-and Hadley comforts her friend Kitty who is being left by Ernest's writer friend, Harold.
I stayed by Kitty's side for the rest of the evening, but kept one eye on Ernest, too. This Duff character was just too lovely and too familiar. She and Ernest talked so freely you'd think they'd known each other for years, and I felt newly vulnerable after hearing Kitty's news. The wrost events always have the threst of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective. Kitty was blindsided, but Harold had likely been plotting his escape for months. I couldn't help but wonder if this could happen to me, too. just how long had Duff been in the picture anyway?
This sequence ends by Hadley telling Ernest she's ready to go home and him suggesting someone walk her then.
Outside I started to cry quietly.
"I'm so embarrassed," I said.
Kitty gave me a firm, buck-up sort of embrace. "He's the one who should be embarrassed, darling. Her, too. They say she has to keep scores of men around because she can't pay her own bills."
"Duff," I said. "Who calls themselves such a thing?"
"Exactly. I'd be good money that even someone with as little sense as Hem wouldn't leave a woman like you for that number. Cmon. Chin up."
"You've been so good to me, Kitty. I can't tell you how much Ill miss you."
"I know. I'm going to miss you, too, but what choice do I have? all I can do is run off to London and hope Harold chases me."
"Will he?"
"I honestly don't know."
Hadley discusses Pauline, when they were on better terms.
If Kitty was too decorative, Pauline would be as well. She was the type of professional beauty he generally despised. Not only did she talk endlessly about fashion, she was always maneuvering her way toward the most interesting people and sizing them up to see how they might be of use to her, her dark eyes snapping, her mind's wheels turning shrewdly. There never seemed to be any spontaneity with Pauline. if she saw you, she meant to. if she spoke to you, she'd already planned what to say so it came out sharply and perfectly. I admired her confidence and was a little in awe of it, maybe. She had that sense of effortlessness that took, int he end, a great deal of effort. And though I never knew quite what to say around other women like her-Zelda, for instance-under Pauline's fine clothes and good haircut, she was candid and sensible, too. I knew she wouldn't unravel on me at any moment and quickly came to feel I could count on her.
I also love the scene where they meet the Fitzgerald's (which I can't find for the life of me) and Hadley asks what Ernest thinks. "She's crazy. Look at her eyes."
Here's a fascinating bit about The Sun Also Rises, as Hadley reads it for the first time.
...when he gave me the pages to read, it took me no time at all to realize that everything was just as it had happened in Spain, every sordid conversation and tense encounter. It was all nearly verbatim, except for one thing-I wasn't in it at all.
Duff was the heroine. I'd known and expected this, but it was troubling just the same to see her name over and over. He hadn't changed it yet to Lady Brett. Duff was Duff, and Harold was Harold and Pat was a drunken sot, and everyone was in bad form except the bullfighters. Kitty was in the book, too-he'd lied about that-in a very unflattering role. Ernest had made himself into Jake Barnes and made Jake impotent, and what was I supposed to think of that? Was that how he saw his own morality or cowardice or good sense of whatever it was that had kept him from sleeping with Duff-as impotence?
Damn it. I will have no choice but to re-read that book now.
The most squirmy part to read is watching Pauline Pfeiffer parasitically attach herself to the Hemingways and they take a truly awkward vacation together in Juan Les Pins (in Antibes on the Cote d'Azur.) :
At our hotel, there were three of everything-three breakfast trays, three terry-cloth robes, three wet bathing suits on the line. On the crushed rock path along the windward side of the hotel, three bicycles stood on their stands. If you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars-one,two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.
...
When the sun grew too hot, I went into the water, which always hit you cold and was wonderful that way. I ducked my head and then surfaced, and swam out several hundred yards, where things were still. I treaded water and let the swells buoy me. At the top of one, I could look back at the beach and see them small and perfect, my husband and child and the woman who was now more to us than we could manage. From that distance, they all looked equal and serene and I couldn't hear them or feel them. At the bottom in the trough of the wave, I could see only the sky, that high white place that seemed not to change much for all of our suffering.
