Fictional novel sees ‘ruin’ in Hemingway’s third marriage
Paula McLain can’t let “Papa” Hemingway go.
The towering ego and allure of the great American writer is once again on chest-puffing display in McLain’s latest novel, “Love and Ruin,” in which Ernest Hemingway’s third wife — war correspondent and author Martha Gellhorn — shares center stage.
Gellhorn narrates this historical novel, as Hemingway Wife No. 1, the neglected Hadley Richardson, did in McLain’s 2011 bestselling book-club fave, “The Paris Wife.”
“Love and Ruin” is a lovely, lyrical departure of a title. (“The War Correspondent Wife” doesn’t exactly sing.) And anyone familiar with Hemingway’s biography knows that “Ruin” is in store for this marriage as well, for there was one last wife to come (Mary Welsh, also a war correspondent).
If love and war are two of the greatest themes in literature, they’re both here as McLain fashions her portrait of “Marty” Gellhorn. She’s a maverick, a young woman not afraid to break the rules (e.g., sleep with married men) and break away from “Women’s Pages” fluff as a journalist.
She led an incredible, bravery-filled life (1908-1998), and one of the most compelling scenes comes late in the novel when Gellhorn, kept from the front lines as a female journalist, smuggles herself aboard a hospital ship so she can land at Normandy to cover DDay. (This really happened.)
I wish there were more you-arethere, front-line moments with Gellhorn in “Love and Ruin.” She rang the alarm bell early on Hitler and was committed to describing the personal stories of those caught up in conflict.
But domestic drama holds more appeal for McLain, and the real battleground in “Love and Ruin” is the home front. There’s much dithering as Gellhorn suffers insecurity about the novels she’s trying to write. Who wouldn’t be worried about being subsumed by Hemingway’s imposing shadow, but this hand-wringing becomes annoying.
As in “Circling the Sun,” her historical novel about early aviatrix Beryl Markham, McLain delineates the challenges of trying to be a “modern woman” in a distinctly man’s world. Book-club chatter fodder, indeed.
It can be weird, if titillating, to eavesdrop on imagined, intimate conversations between famous people, but McLain’s dialogue, is, as Hem might say, good and true. She captures the passion Gellhorn and Hemingway feel for each other, and the slow erosion of trust on both sides.
Gellhorn seems to suffer little guilt about breaking up Hemingway’s second marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. She meets the famed author of “The Sun Also Rises” in Key West by chance while on vacation with her mother in 1936, and soon she and an intrigued Hemingway are making plans to travel to cover the Spanish Civil War, which will inspire his classic “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (which he dedicated to Gellhorn).
McLain captures the alternate joy and angst both writers experience as they wrestle with their work and with their competing agendas. Ultimately Papa, who is now drinking heavily and fighting bouts of depression, is not happy that Wife No. 3 keeps running off to war zones.
The Martha Gellhorn of “Love and Ruin” is an ambivalent figure, heroic in public and often tentative at home. I’m not sure I buy it, but like McLain, I can’t get enough of the complicated, flawed, fascinating man and literary giant who, for a time, captured and dominated Gellhorn’s heart and soul. That’s the strange paradox of “women’s” historical fiction.