LOVE AND RUIN (2018)
By Paula McLain
Penguin Random House,
432 pages
★★★
Novelist Paula McLain has been on a quest to write about
intrepid women. For Circling the Sun,
her subject was Beryl Markham; in The
Paris Wife, it was Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife
(1921-27), who introduced the then little-known writer to important literary
figures. Love and Ruin could be
considered a sequel to Love and Ruin,
except Hemingway had a second marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer (1927-40) before he
hooked up with Martha Gellhorn, his third wife (1940-45) and the main subject
of McLain’s latest novel.
Hemingway was a
difficult man: reckless, egoistic, bullying, and demanding. He was sometimes
referred to as a man’s man and was most comfortable in the company of fawning
comrades. He was also insecure in many ways and whenever he shed one wife, he
quickly remarried. (When he divorced Gellhorn in 1945, he married correspondent
Mary Welsh the next year and stayed with her until his suicide in 1961.)
McLain’s take on “Marty” Gellhorn is that “Papa” Hemingway
didn’t like competition! He was already famous when he met Gellhorn in 1937 and
convinced her to travel to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. This took
some finagling, as Gellhorn was a relative unknown at the time. She soon proved
her mettle as correspondent and mistress. Both she and Hemingway ran on
adrenaline, and one might conclude that in Hemingway’s case, a mistress fit him
better. Although Hemingway initially encouraged Gellhorn’s writing, he tried to
make her into a doting wife who’d play hostess at his Finca Vigia homestead in
Cuba, where he entertained drinking buddies and hangers-on. In McLain’s
telling, Gellhorn simply wasn’t cut from domestic cloth. Although she was with Hemingway
when he completed his masterpiece, For
Whom the Bell Tolls, he became increasingly jealous of Gellhorn’s
assignments during World War II. (He was also an alcoholic and irresponsible
with money.)
Gellhorn is the heroine of Love and Ruin, but an imperfect one. It took her a few years to
realize that she could not have it all: marriage, career, domesticity, and
respect. We see her struggle to be taken seriously on her own terms, not as
Ernest Hemingway’s wife. McLain's Gellhorn seesaws between conformity in one
moment and a lioness on the hunt for what she wants the next. This made her as complicated
and contradictory as Hemingway. It also made it impossible to sustain her
marriage. For his part, it’s hard to determine which flowed more freely in
Hemingway, testosterone or booze. Like Gellhorn, McLain shows him as a volatile
mix of fragility and fierce independence. Mostly, though, Hemingway’s ego only
allowed women to shine in his reflected glow.
McLain’s sprawling novel takes us from Key West and Cuba to
Madrid, Finland, and Germany. In some ways, it’s about two people seeking
unconditional love who spend much of their time setting conditions. The
relationship only worked when Papa and Marty were in the midst of danger and on
the move. The title says it all: love and ruin. No one will ever write a book
about either figure titled Stasis and
Happiness.
I am a big fan of McLain’s novels and love the idea that she
puts strong women at the center of her tales. Yet despite the fact that Love and Ruin features two powerful and
fascinating characters, it’s not up to McLain’s usual standards. It’s a good
book and worth a read, but it feels flat in ways that are hard to describe.
Perhaps the very thought of a sustainable relationship between these two
individuals is so absurd that that we feel what must happen long before McLain
describes it. How does one explain abortive domesticity without taming two
individuals whose very natures rebel against that ideal? Would we believe it
were we treated to moments of mundane wedded bliss? McLain gives us a woman who
ultimately refused to be either a goddess or a victim, but once we know this,
the rest of the story is telegraphed.
I seldom feel this way about historical figures, but for
once I favor a film over a novel. The 2012 movie Hemingway & Gellhorn–with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the
title roles–tells the same story as McLain’s book, but we have visuals to
flesh out the details and provide a dramatic backdrop. I wouldn’t call Love and Ruin a misstep–McLain is too
good a writer–but I did find it less than the sum of its parts.
Rob Weir
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