An interview with Paula McLain, author of the Paris Wife.

Sinclair, Gail

On 16 February 2012, Paula McLain, author of the bestselling novel The Paris Wife (2011) was the featured speaker in the Rollins College series, "Winter with the Writers." Hemingway scholar Gail Sinclair took the opportunity to interview McClain about her vivid fictionalization of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley Richardson and about the book's resounding success--Ed.

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Gail Sinclair (GS): Thank you for granting this interview, and congratulations on the success of your book. Ernest Hemingway is experiencing his own surge in popularity, so I'm curious about what you think is driving this?

Paula McLain (PM): Often it seems that people are interested in the same things at the same time. It's like tapping into the collective unconsciousness or hitting a mainline into a cultural Zeitgeist. It's interesting too, because I didn't know we were coming up to these big anniversaries. I had read the 1964 version of A Moveable Feast and didn't know there was a restored edition in the works until we submitted to Scribner's, who said, "Actually, we have a book in the pipeline, and we don't think we can take this book on because all of our energy is going into that book." I didn't know anything about the project at Cambridge to publish the Hemingway letters. All of this back-to-back was really surprising and quite coincidental.

GS: Your book has been out for over a year now (launched February 2011) and was on the New York Times Best Sellers List more than 30 weeks. Did this surprise you?

PM: Yes. I didn't expect such a reception, but surprisingly the readership was there from the outset. I think Random House knew that would be true, but I had no inkling. Love him or hate him, nobody is neutral about Ernest Hemingway. Everyone knows just enough to be interested. I think people like historical fiction because there are teaching moments, and they get a little history lesson along the way. There is enough of a lovely reminiscence about the 1920s and Jazz Age Paris to draw them in. Woody Allen's movie Midnight in Paris landed simultaneously with my book, and we understand suddenly that people want to be whisked back in time. The whole plot [in Allen's film] is that we are nostalgists, that we can't bear to live in our own time without reaching back and gently massaging this other era and thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if I could have been alive in that moment?"

GS: Allen pushes that theme further by inserting the provocative twist of a second time-traveling sequence.

PM: Exactly. One of the film's characters actually wants to go back to the Belle Epoque. That's when the movie hits gold for me, because of course this is something that is true about us. We recognize our desire to experience what can never be, which of course makes it all the more alluring.

GS: Some have identified The Paris Wife as historical fiction, fictional biography, revisionist narrative. How would you characterize the genre?

PM: Quite simply, it's a novel. I'm asked a lot, "Well why did you decide to do this as a novel instead of biography?" It never occurred to me, not for a white-hot minute, because I'm not a scholar, and I'm not an academic. And besides, those books have already been written and quite beautifully both about Hadley and about Hemingway, and Hemingway himself wrote so beautifully about that time. The places I wanted to go no biographer would ever presume to go, and I wanted to have the freedom to imaginatively access their interior worlds.

GS: It seems by declaring this you open space for great artistic license in putting together the details of an imagined life.

PM: I consciously framed, for instance, that scene where Hadley is thinking about all that's going to change when she tells him about the baby. I really liked the story "The Cat in the Rain," and so I took from that moment, that same frame--the husband on the bed reading, the female character in that story looking out the window--and gave them a script with all of this potential of horror. He's made it quite clear that this is his moment--that she'll have to wait. And she can't wait, or she doesn't in any case.

GS: The book is in Hadley's voice. You present her as a woman who holds her own with Ernest in many ways but is also submissive to his will even at the cost of the marriage. There are detractors who criticize your portrayal as somewhat flat or not defined deeply enough. How do you respond?

PM: It's funny because of course it's a novel. Particularly in the early reviews, for instance in The New York Times, Janet Maslin took issue with Hadley herself more than the writing. She just didn't like her. She didn't like how passive she was. Also, there's the argument that if she were not married to this famous person she would be the afterthought of an afterthought--that we wouldn't care about her. Well, here's the thing. I care about her. I wasn't thinking about the reception or how other women would find her. I was trying to accurately represent the person I was finding that interested me, and I liked her point of view, passive though it might be. I actually like that. This was a woman I thought I could understand. She had her own creative interests, but she was kind of a coward about them. I think that's a very human problem. Don't we all wish we were a little braver and a little more resilient and could stay the course? I like that she wrestled with how she was failing herself, too. I thought that was a real story.

GS: How tempted were you at points in the writing process to take liberties with real-life details in order to shape them for the fictional arc you wanted to create?

PM: A Canadian reviewer said, "Here's a writer who missed an opportunity to take the facts and then twist them so at the moment that Hadley loses the manuscripts, we could see that as a clearly subversive act." Hadley as saboteur willfully taking him down; Hadley with an edge. Well, Hadley didn't have an edge. That would have been an entirely different book, but more than that, it wasn't the book I was interested in writing. It would be taking obnoxious liberties by saying, "I think this is a story that will read better with a feminist leaning." It's opportunistic. People often ask me, "Was she trying to sabotage his career?" Well, of course she was jealous because she felt abandoned. The most important thing in the world to him was his work, and the most important thing in the world to her was him. There is no balance there, and that can be devastating. People also don't like--women don't like--the timing of the loss of the manuscripts and then her becoming pregnant. I don't like that either. It feels slightly manipulative, and yet a woman hearing the pounding of the biological clock, we get it.

GS: In some ways, though, you have to take liberties in order to fill in the blanks, and in doing so you emulate what Hemingway does in his own writing by translating elements of reality into fiction.

PM: Exactly, though in many ways his style is as unlike my own as it could possibly be. I have a background in poetry. I actually love ornamentation. I love description. I think that description is my superpower. It's my comfort base. And of course, I'm stripping it all down and playing to the power underpinning the leanness of Hemingway's prose. Obviously it's what he's not saying. But it's also his subject matter. So I get to put him in this bar with a woman and have him throw a punch and then to go back to her room. And of course I'm psychologizing him. I'm obviously interested in this moment where he's in a war for the first time since he was near-fatally wounded and what it would do to him psychologically--where he would go, the choices he would make. He was feeling under siege from his own memories. Shell shock, you know.

GS: You write in the book "Everything could be snarled all to hell under the surface as long as you didn't let it crack through and didn't speak its name." This rings true to Hemingway's rhythms. How did you get into the groove of his voice? Of hers?

PM: I had the benefit of time in really living with these characters, living with everything I was reading, and I felt it was sort of a process of osmosis. At the beginning there was a stiffness that loosened up, and it's almost like this is Hadley loosening up, and also the voice and the style change, and it becomes more and more like him. Actually, that was me loosening up.

GS: Tell me about the third person italicized chapters centered on Hemingway.

PM: The first time this occurs is set up in Michigan the night before the wedding and is in conversation across space and time with his story "Summer People. There is all this speculation. "When did he lose his virginity? Was it Marjorie Bump? Did he really sleep with Kate Smith?" He's not talking. She's not talking. I know Hadley was deeply insecure about Kate and about all sorts of women at that time, and rightly so. He was wildly attracted to other females and seemed to like knowing he got their attention. He'd kind of preen and strut and all of that. I liked that the triangle with Kate would foreshadow the triangle with Pauline, that Kate and Hadley were friends, that there's this moment for which of course I don't have any details. Those sections were an opportunity to work out things I didn't know, couldn't know.

GS: At one point in the novel Hadley and Ernest are talking about the Michigan-centered writing he is working on in Paris, and you have him say, "But it's not just the real place. I'm inventing it too, and that's the best part." That must have struck home for you as well. In many ways your book has a strong sense of verisimilitude, and its invented details ring true to the flavor of the characters. What sources did you find most deeply informed your own work?

PM: The most useful thing related to creating Hadley was to have her letters, and for Ernest, to have his work. And I particularly love the Denis Brian book, The True Gen. What he does instead of a standard biography is get together all the folks in the know: the wives, siblings, biographers, colleagues, Morley Callaghan, people along the way, some kid that went to high school with him, and then of course later psychiatrists and psychologists, critics, editors, friends, colleagues, children. He takes a moment and says, "Let's talk about the way he was wounded. What's the story he tells?" He lets them cross-talk about very specific moments to point the way into an enigma wrapped in an enigma.

GS: The part you can't get to; the one true kernel.

PM: Right. You can't get to it, and of course Brian never makes that point. He just lets them talk. He never summarizes anything for us, and he never comes to conclusions or tries to.

GS: It's very modern; or postmodern.

PM: It's fantastic, and I think it's the perfect vehicle to get at some of this material. Again, you have to be comfortable with the fact that there are no answers, which is perfect. But the story became such a part of me that I started to dream about Hemingway. I had actually the best dream of my life about him at the end as I was writing ten pages a day in the thick of it, completely inside the machinery. I was reading him obsessively. I believe that any success of my dialogue is a direct result of the obsessiveness with which I was reading Hemingway, in particular The Sun Also Rises, but also the stories of In Our Time. I could not have written this book without those.

GS: He became part of your subconscious, and you were dreaming about Hemingway, not Hadley?

PM: I was dreaming about Hemingway. So this is the dream. I'm inside sort of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, so I must have been thinking about Oak Park, and walking through this house, very low, brick, and then at one point a whole wall dissolves, and it's a lily pond. So who knows--Monet? Paris? And then he walks toward me, and it's Papa Hemingway, older, sixty something, with crinkly eyes, kind of Santa Clausey. He looks at me, and says, "I like you. You're a person." I was so surprised and touched, and I blushed and responded, "Well, I like you too. You're a person too." He said, "Sometimes I feel like I'm 300 years old," and I added, "That's how you know you're a person." That was the end of the dream, and when I woke up I was just suffused with warmth. It felt like a benediction, of course not from him, but from some part of myself that had self-compassion for all the process and the flaws and the failings.

GS: To say that you had done justice to him.

PM: Exactly. Not everybody buys this. They think, "Oh crazy writer people talking about dreams." But it was really a spectacular dream. If you think about it, it spotlights the messy human goo, the thorniness of human experience in a way.

GS: The quandary of being human epitomized in Hemingway.

PM: Precisely. And we're so ready to take him down because he's such a big target and because he seems deliberately to expose himself to scrutiny and to attack. I want to exclaim, "Oh my goodness!" He was twenty-five when he was making these mistakes with Hadley. Would I want to be held accountable to the actions of my twenty-five year old self? He was just living his life and making his mistakes the same way we all do.

GS: In the Prologue you write in Hadley's voice, "He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul 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." So how much did you get into the soul of Hadley and Ernest in writing this book?

PM: People often say, "You must believe you knew her to the degree that you could speak for her." Well, yes and no, because of course I'm not actually saying this is Hadley. This is an amalgamation of her, which of course can't be her. I was making up what seemed to be pertinent and made a good story. But of course, I did believe there was something in me that attached to something in her. I also think it's a very contemporary story--being anxious or insecure about not being able to keep up with the competition. I think that's a woman's story in any age. So, did I get to her soul? I don't know. I got to a soul. Maybe it was a collective soul, but I feel like when I got to the deeper, more difficult bits of the story--the difficult triangle with Pauline and Hadley and Ernest, and that double betrayal--I felt close enough to the story and inside of it--the story I was making and the story I was finding, those two things stitched together. It did feel like I had tapped into something true and right and profound. It's like sending your bucket down a well. You know the sound when the bucket hits, and I feel like in the most difficult bits of the story I had arrived at some of that. The sections in the third person in Hemingway's point of view were terrifying to write, and I often have people say, "So, are those bits of short stories and things that you found or diary entries or letters? How did you arrive at those moments?" Of course I made them up. But I was going back through the stories. The scene on the night before his wedding when he's in the lake, and he's thinking about Kate Smith and about Hadley--all of that is in conversation with "Summer People" or other bits of the work. But I felt too that I wrote those sections because I had these big questions about him that couldn't be answered.

GS: As one still does about Hemingway.

PM: As one still does. As if we can ever really arrive at insight. And so it was a writer's trick, almost a creative writing tool.

GS: Your working title, as you've discussed before, was The Great Good Place from the Henry James short story. You have said that Ballantine and Random House suggested the change to The Paris Wife. What are your thoughts about that shift, and do you think it has had an effect on the book's popularity?

PM: Absolutely. That title was far too subtle and too literary, and it didn't sound like a "big book" There are people whose entire job is to say, "This sounds like a big book, and this does not. This looks like a big book, and this does not." They focused on things like the original draft of my cover. The red and blue cover had the banner straight across the front in this beautiful, very sophisticated font, and then somebody said, "Not quite right." They tilted it sideways, and put the lettering in italics and suddenly it's like, "Oh, that has zazz," and I wondered, "How does that have zazz and this doesn't?" And yet it's somebody's job to do that, so they knew The Great Good Place was not right. I was a little reluctant to let go of that title, which I liked because Henry James was Hadley's favorite writer, and there was a natural sort of organic quality to it. I also liked that people then called Paris "The Great Good Place." It was a way to use the vernacular to kind of touch this place in time. So they asked me to come up with lists, and they hated them all. That was discouraging because I thought, "Well, it's not organic anymore; it's not being built as the book is being built. It doesn't feel like it belongs to it." And so it just felt kind of random. The Paris Wife was one of the titles I came up with, and everybody hated it. My agent hated it because to have "wife" or "daughter" in the title is in itself not a fresh idea. There was another Random House book being published around the same time called The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, so The Paris Wife and The Tiger's Wife in the same week seemed somehow not right. Also, my editor thought the title had a chip on its shoulder. So if this is Hadley speaking of her own experience, does it sound bitter? Does it sound like she's being sardonic? But in the end when enough people got behind it they could say, "Not only does it sound like a big book, but it also sounds like a commercial success and like something people would embrace. It's just got enough enigma." But the question for me was, "Well, why The Paris Wife? Who is that and what is it talking about?"

GS: In some ways, I think of Pauline Pfeiffer more as the Paris-like wife.

PM: Ah, because she fit then.

GS: Right. Because she's more the City than Hadley is at this point.

PM: Right. She belongs there. She's really taken in. She has an ease there that Hadley does not have. But in the end I think it does describe the book, and it does describe Hadley, and I've said in interviews before that I like the way it gently turns. It's actually not bitter and not sardonic. It's her suggesting that even though from a distance it looks as if she's only one in a long line of women. And of course critics and biographers have no trouble dismissing her completely because there is a tendency to see her as a sort of nitwit or non-entity. She's just the early wife. There's no reason to take her seriously, and then of course she makes this terrible mistake with the manuscripts. Who does that?

GS: This sense that there must be some sort of subterfuge in what happened.

PM: That says a lot actually. But I really like what I believe in the end, which is that we could not have Hemingway the writer as we know him now without that early apprenticeship and without Hadley's absolute kind of support of him both financially and emotionally. She gave him the ability to take those risks. He could launch himself. He could find that voice that is so familiar to us now because he had her bolstering him, and he could pursue his genius and then come home and talk to her. I believe that. That's not what he needed later, but I think that's what he needed right then.

GS: What drew you to this Paris wife as opposed to Pauline, as opposed to Zelda Fitzgerald, or other wives in that period?

PM: It's because Hemingway was not my starting point. Hadley was. I read A Moveable Feast, and in that work was everything he wasn't saying about the end of that marriage. I'm a romantic, and I'm sort of a sucker for a great love story and for a great tragedy, and from the beginning I just thought, "Oh my God. This is Greek tragedy. How is it that these two young lovers don't get to keep one another?" And because I was in middle of the end of a marriage too, then immediately it struck a cord with me that it was an excavation to which I personally related. The tenderness and the poignancy and the clear regret with which he writes about his first marriage in A Moveable Feast was just the starting point activating my curiosity to search out the heart of this story, which of course he is not telling. I immediately knew Hadley was my point of view. I was actually truly interested in her and in the rise and fall of a marriage--how in the beginning we feel like we're invincible. There's actually nothing that can affect us. And Hadley and Ernest both said they got a little too cheeky, a little too cocky about their own solidity, and they didn't think that anything could touch them. Well of course, famous last words, right? Famous last words.

GAIL SINCLAIR

Rollins College

* A note of thanks to Rollins College, Winter With the Writers and its director Carol Frost, the Thomas E Johnson Fund, and the English Department for providing the opportunity for this interview.