Love and Ruin: Another Mrs. Hemingway

In May, when Paula McLain appeared with Charles Frazier to be interviewed by Ann Patchett at Nashville Public Library's Salon @615, she said that after writing Paris Wife, the story of Hemingway's first wife Hadley, she hadn't planned to write about any of the other Hemingway women. In a dream though, she saw a woman she recognized from her earlier research as Martha Gellhorn, the fiercely independent journalist who became wife number three. The story would not let her go.

Taking available facts and imagining the missing lives of historical figures is nothing new for McLain. After Paris Wife, she wrote the novel Circling the Sun, based on the life of female aviator and adventurer Beryl Markham, a missing piece of the puzzle in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa.

In this latest novel, McLain introduces readers to a young woman, an aspiring writer, who meets Hemingway, already famous, during a visit to Key West with her mother. When he heads to Spain to cover the civil war there, she gets a commission from Collier's to do the same. While there, his mentoring, almost fatherly attitude toward her transforms into a love affair.

The story follows them as they build a home together in Cuba and travel together--often with his sons--while waiting out his contentious divorce from second wife Pauline. Hemingway's patterns of serial marriage are no surprise to most readers familiar with the novelist, but Marty Gellhorn is something of a surprise. She stands out as the only wife who ever left Ernest. The story reveals their ups and downs, resulting in part from his drinking and from his resentment of her independent insistence in having a life and career of her own.

Marty has to deal with critics' refusal to take her writing at face value. Instead, they persist in comparing her writing to Hemingways' and focusing on their relationship, implying that he has opened doors for her. As he is basking in his best successes, she continues trying to find her own voice in her fiction while covering war in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.

Even though their divorce and his remarriage aren't news to anyone even remotely familiar with Hemingway, some may be surprised to learn in the afterword that Gellhorn continued to write, covering war zones into her eighties. McLain gets into the mind of a unique character, showing her as much more than a footnote to a bigger literary life.

Love and Ruin: Another Mrs. Hemingway

Charles Frazier Returns to the Civil War Period

Charles Frazier's first novel Cold Mountain is on my short list of favorite books. I read it the week it debuted on the recommendation of Donald Secreast during his appearance at the Writers Symposium at Caldwell Community College in 1997. I went on to teach the book in my senior English APP and AP classes, even taking a couple of groups to find and climb the real Cold Mountain after we finished reading.

I loved Thirteen Moons as well, so when I heard he had a new book set--at least in part--in the Civil War South, telling the story of Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, I ordered the copy from Parnassus Books before its release. When I picked it up, I was even happier to learn Frazier would be coming to Nashville for the library's Salon@615. He appeared with Paula McLain, who is promoting her new novel Love and Ruins (next on my reading list), interviewed by Ann Patchett.

I was especially curious to see how much of the book was fiction and how much was researched. I remember the book I, Varina in my high school library, but I hadn't remembered much of the history of this woman who played a secondary role in history. In this novel, Frazier brought together his title character and James, a grown African American man who had been raised alongside the Davis's own children, but who was separated from the family when the Davis's fled at the war's end.

Frazier explained that James is based on a real boy, but that no record survives of his life after separated from the Davis family. He just imagined a future for him, providing an effective structure for the novel. Piecing together his own memory and finding mention of himself in a book about the Davises sends him in search of Varina, now an older woman living in New York at what is evidently a hotel for "rest cure." His questions provide the avenue for flashbacks that tell the story of V, as she's called in the novel, before she met Jefferson Davis, still a grieving widower and throughout their not-always-happy marriage.

Because Frazier writes novels, not history, he deftly uses the historical fact to weave together a powerful story. As he admitted in the interview, he wasn't interested in writing about Civil War battles. Just as in Cold Mountain, the focus stays on the individual characters, providing plenty of rich details and dwelling in the grey areas.  The novel also has the advantage of Frazier's rich prose, engrossing dialogue, and description that readers are not tempted to skim.

And once again, he's omitted quotation marks.

Charles Frazier Returns to the Civil War Period

Circling the Sun: In, Not Out of, Africa

I had limited knowledge of Beryl Markham before reading Paula McLain's new novel based on this amazing woman's life. I'd read excerpts from Markham's West with the Night, but I knew nothing about her life other than her flying feat. However, I had read McLain's Paris Wife, her fictional account of the life of Hemingway's first wife, and I knew that she could make a work of literary art based on heavy research.

While reading this book, I caught Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac one morning and learned that it was the anniversary of her famous transatlantic flight in 1936. His brief clip told me things about the flight I didn't learn from McLain (such as that her maps flew out of the plane early in the flight, seriously hampering her navigation efforts), but Circling the Sun is about so much more than the best-known event of Beryl Clutterbuck Markham's life.

Beginning in her protagonist's childhood, McLain recounts the departure of her mother, taking her son, when Beryl was young. In her afterword, the authors acknowledges that since her mother, too, had abandoned her when she was young, that she felt a stronger connection to her than she had to Hadley Hemingway. Undoubtedly, though, Beryl belonged in Kenya, with her father, where she roamed with the native children until a new "housekeeper" intervened and sent her away to school to attempt to civilize her.

Growing up at their farm Green Hills around her father's thoroughbred horses, Beryl goes on to become the first woman licensed as a trainer--at a younger age than most men.  The story goes on to describe her early ill-fated marriage, which seemed her only option when her father suffered economic failure that cost him his farm. Beryl's own strong will and independent streak often made her a target of gossip, especially as she began to move in a new social circle.

One of the biggest surprises to me was the major role of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesin) in Beryl's life, especially the strong friendship the two develop despite Beryl's attraction to Blixen's lover, Denys Finch Hatton (the Robert Redford character in Out of Africa). Most interesting, too, was the note that when Karen wrote her story, Beryl is completely absent.

While Markham is probably best known for her flying feat (first woman flying west to east across the Atlantic), aviation comes late in the novel, and her interest develops only after other life events take away her joy in her horses. It seems even more surprising that her own flying begins in earnest after losing people close to her in plane crashes.

Through the novel, McLain brings to life a woman whose life of contradictions and conflict drew the attention, criticism, scandal and admiration across England, Africa, and the U.S. and whose memoir made an impression on Ernest Hemingway, whose praise led to the rediscovery of the book many years after its publication.

After reading McLain's two novels based on the lives of real women from this period of history, I look forward to learning where her research leads her next.

Circling the Sun: In, Not Out of, Africa