Ernest Hemingway's Paris is not all 'true'

Ernest Hemingway has haunted me of late. I read a Slate article recently about his later years and suicide 50 years ago, saw Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" with its caricature of Hemingway in his 20s, and read "The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain, whose novel gives a voice to Hadley Richardson Hemingway.

When I was in college and Hemingway was not long dead, I fell in love with his stark, simple prose and read "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the '20s when he and Hadley were newlyweds and he was beginning his career as a writer. His descriptions of Paris and its international menagerie of characters, artists and writers were enthralling. Rereading the memoir as a young husband and father, I imagined myself where Hemingway had been, not in Paris, but in love with my wife and my child and working hard at writing one true sentence, and then another. I joked to my wife about calling our daughter "Bumby," the Hemingways' nickname for their son. We transplanted the romance of Paris to Washington, D.C., and then back to North Carolina, but my life was filled not with art galleries and cafes but with long hours working to support my young and expanding family. There seemed to be no time or inspiration for writing after long hours of work and no quiet cafe where I could sit like Hemingway with a pocketknife-sharpened pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

Years later, I reread "A Moveable Feast" for the third time and found it disappointingly self-indulgent, the nostalgic false memories of a writer in decline. The book had not changed, only my perception of it.

In "The Paris Wife," McLain fills in the truths behind Hadley's first husband's nostalgia. Yes, Paris in the 20s was a time and place like no other with expatriate writers and artists seemingly around every corner, with museums and galleries and quiet cafes and a monetary exchange rate that allowed Americans to live cheaply. But Hemingway was not yet an iconic literary figure, and he was, even then, plagued by emotional instability and depression that would eventually cost him his life. He drank heavily, worked at a manic pace at times, and caroused wildly. He went away without his wife often and cheated on her, subduing her considerable talent in music and literature to enhance his ego. In "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway claimed to be aiming for "true" words, and Woody Allen turned those simple sentences into buffoonish dialogue in his movie, but McLain's well-researched novel shows Hemingway's quest to be self-deluding. It is McLain who finds the "true" words to describe a crumbling marriage in Paris in the 1920s.

I still find Hemingway's simple, straightforward, stark prose beautifully sculpted, but I have a clearer, truer image of the man who wrote those words.