Passion Followed by a Train Wreck
Paula McLain has followed up her “The
Paris Wife” a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson, with
novel about his third wife, Martha Gellhorn who would become a world famous
journalist. Just as in the earlier novel
she writes in voice of Hemingway’s wife. Gellhorn is the daughter of a
prominent OB-Gyn father and social activist mother in Saint Louis, which is
also Richardson’s hometown. Her mother has a strong connection with Eleanor
Roosevelt and that will ultimately give Gellhorn access to the White House.
Gellhorn, while vacationing with her
mother, meets Hemingway in a Key West bar in 1936. They become fast friends and
Hemingway convinces her to go to Spain to cover the civil war. Although
Hemingway is married to his second wife Pauline, Gellhorn and Hemingway soon
become lovers in the hothouse of civil war Spain. For a person who was reputed
not to like sex, Gellhorn sure has a lot of it in Spain and later in Hemingway’s
Cuban home. They marry in 1940, but not before Gellhorn goes off to cover the
Czechoslovak crisis and the Russo-Finnish War.
However things change after they are
married. Hemingway is a hard person to live with and he begins to drink
excessively. But that does not stop him from writing his greatest novel, “For
Whom the Bells Toll.” Gellhorn also writes a novel “A Stricken Field (I previously
reviewed it and it is not bad.), which hardly compares to that of her husband’s.
In short they become rivals and in and in McLain’s telling they begin to
separate along personal and professional lines. Simply put, Gellhorn no longer
can stand to be in Hemingway’s shadow, a 1960s feminist before her time.
Although I liked “The Paris Wife” better,
Paula McLain has done a pretty good job into getting into Martha Gellhorn’s
head and the book offers an interesting insight into a very tempestuous relationship.
For the full Amazon Url see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1IXL9RVKWLPAT/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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