In 1949, Gellhorn adopted an Italian orphan, Alessandro (Sandy), but this relationship, too, was often an anguished one. As her son struggled with his weight, with drugs, with a direction for his life, she struggled with impatience and a critical nature. They reconciled eventually, but the bond lacked the closeness she’d had with Hemingway’s sons, whom she was essentially exiled from until after Hemingway’s death, in 1961, and also her stepson, Sandy Matthews, with whom she kept a tender correspondence for over twenty years, and whom she later left in control of her papers and estate.
Gellhorn would hate that there’s lingering gossip about her—that she was a dilettante, a clotheshorse, a pursuer of other women’s husbands (while reportedly hating sex). But she had no patience for small-mindedness in any form. She hated liars and cowards, and also nostalgia. Looking back saddened her, so she plunged forward instead, setting off for far-flung destinations where she could swim alone in strange seas. She loved her friends, and good whiskey neat, solitude and dizzying vistas, and words stripped to the bone, so they could tell the truest version of the truth.
Her most enduring passion (apart from her mother, Edna, her True North) was her work. In 1998, at the age of eighty-nine, she was nearly blind, and also struggling with cancer, and couldn’t read the page in her battered typewriter any longer. Getting her affairs into meticulous order, she burned piles of old papers to ash (including letters from Hemingway) and, using a special pill she’d held on to for such a moment, took her own life, as Hemingway had done nearly forty years before.
I wish I’d known her—that “1,500-watt bulb,” as one friend described her, beaming “vitality, certainty, total courage.” I admire her voice and vision, the way she railed against injustice, telling the stories of ordinary people, and doing it impeccably, with absolute conviction. She was outspoken and tenacious, a straight shooter and a world-beater. She lived all the way out to the edges of herself, no matter the risks or what she lost along the way. We can’t have enough heroes like her, if there ever was another like her at all. And if I’ve lifted my pen to find her, I lift a glass of whiskey now—neat, of course—to her matchless life.
—Paula McLain
Cleveland, Ohio
For Julie Barer
Acknowledgments
When I had the idea for The Paris Wife ten years ago, my career changed completely. I went from having three part-time teaching jobs and stealing time away from my family at a nearby coffee shop to being a full-time writer with a home office, readers who were as passionate about my characters and stories as I was, and an entire team of people doing their damnedest to make each book a success. All of this is to say how grateful and lucky I am to have the encouragement, support, and faith of many, many talented and remarkable people.
My agent, Julie Barer, has been with me from the beginning of this wonderful ride, and even before. Her instincts, guidance, and friendship mean everything. This book is dedicated to her for a thousand reasons, including the day she put on a killer red suit and went to bat for me when the stakes were high. Julie, you are irreplaceable. Thank you.
A shout-out goes to the entire team at The Book Group, which is an extraordinary operation and family: Nicole Cunningham, Brettne Bloom, Elisabeth Weed, and Faye Bender. Rock stars, every one, as is the marvelous Jenny Meyer.
Susanna Porter has been my editor for many years, but never stops impressing me with her insight and level of investment. She’s in this book elbow deep, on every page. She’s made me a better writer, too. Thank you doesn’t really suffice, but I’ll begin there.
So many folks at Ballantine Books and Penguin Random House need to be thanked (and thanked and thanked) for their enthusiasm, support, and excellent work. Kara Welsh, Kim Hovey, Susan Corcoran, Jennifer Garza, Allyson Lord, Quinne Rogers, Benjamin Dreyer, Steve Messina, Anastasia Whalen, Caitlin McCaskey, and Emily Hartley. Sue Betz did a wonderful and thorough job of copyediting the manuscript, and Dana Blanchette has come through again with an absolutely stunning design. Thanks to Paolo Pepe, Robbin Schiff, and the top-notch art department for their ongoing excellent work and to Anna Bauer Carr and Debra Lill for this magnificent cover, Gina Centrello for her ongoing investment in my work, and the entire sales force for getting my books into the hands of booksellers and readers, and out into the world.
I owe much to Ursula Doyle at Fleet, my brilliant editor in the UK; Susan de Soissons and David Bamford at Virago/Little, Brown UK; Caspian Dennis of Abner Stein; Michelle Weiner at Creative Artists Agency, and my wonderful team at Penguin Random House Canada and Doubleday Canada, especially Lynn Henry, Kristin Cochrane and Sharon Klein.
While working on this book, I made an essential trip to Cuba for research, masterminded by my longtime friend and sometime travel assistant, Brian Groh. Luly Duke of Fundación Amistad was instrumental in putting us in touch with all the right people, including Esperanza García Fernández, curator of the Hemingway Room at the Ambos Mundos in Havana; America Fuentes, granddaughter of Gregorio Fuentes, captain of the Pilar; and Gladys Rodriquez Ferrero, Hemingway scholar and former director of the Museo Hemingway Finca Vigía. Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, current director of the Museo Hemingway, was incredibly generous with me during my visit, as was her patient, helpful staff. My translator and guide, Aixa Roche Pozas, was a complete gem and made every day a pleasure. Further excellent translation of interviews and help in perusing archival documents came from Alejandro Jose Acosta.
Many friends have supported me in crucial ways over the years, and honestly I can’t thank them enough: Lori Keene, David French, Greg D’Alessio, Sharon Day, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Brad Bedortha, Steve Reed, Beth Hellerstein, Michelle Lipp, Patti Henry, Laura McNeal, Eleanor Brown, Sarah McCoy, Becky Gaylord, Denise Machado and John Sargent, Terry Sullivan, Heather Greene, Jim Harms, Chris Pavone, Scott and Cherie Parsons, Karen Rosenberg, and Nan Cohen. The East Side Writers—Terry Dubow, Sarah Willis, Toni Thayer, Charlie Oberndorf, Karen Sandstrom, Neal Chandler, Lynda Montgomery, and Justin Glanville—have always been on my side. I miss you guys!
Charlotte Fowler and Allie Lustig kept things running smoothly on the home front. Bless you both! My son Connor stepped in as nanny, cook, dog walker, and all-around superstar at a tough time, and made life actually doable. Every day he would come into the kitchen where I was working, and where the same William Fitzsimmons record was on over and over. “You should thank him in your book,” Connor said one day, so here you go: Thanks to William Fitzsimmons for being the soundtrack to literally thousands of hours of writing time.
Love and thanks go to my mother, Rita Hinken, and also to the dazzling Tom Persinger, for the fireflies, the music, the moon on a string, and for generally arranging to be found. What have we done? My children, Beckett, Fiona, and Connor, are the most extraordinary people, and I feel lucky to know them. They and my sisters have been, and will always be, home.
A Note on Sources
My work is always a blending of fact and fiction. For the past ten years, as I’ve been completely absorbed in writing about incredible women from history, I have trusted my gut response to lead me to a particular life that inspires me, or, rather, completely obsesses me. Then I begin the difficult but also joy-filled task of sifting through the historical facts on record to find the story within the larger story that I want—and need—to tell. That part is pure intuition, too. I follow my heart, and then trust my imagination to jump on board. And away we go.
But I know I couldn’t get to the dreaming, feeling part of my process without the concrete, absolutely essential source material that grounds my research. For that I am indebted to many fine writers and biographers. I want to especially acknowledge Caroline Moorehead for her remarkable biography Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, and for curating and assembling Gellhorn’s correspondence in Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, both of which were crucial in bringing MG’s voice and story to life for me. Bernice Kert’s The Heming
way Women was also instrumental, as was Hemingway and Gellhorn by Jerome Tuccille.
Reading Gellhorn’s own work was a pleasure and a revelation, particularly The Trouble I’ve Seen, A Stricken Field, Liana, The Honeyed Peace, The Heart of Another, The Face of War, The View from the Ground, and Travels with Myself and Another. I also discovered a wonderful play, Love Goes to Press, which Gellhorn co-wrote with Virginia Cowles, and which really helped illuminate the life of female war correspondents. It’s also hilarious, and the dialogue is tops!
There were many texts that helped me understand the very complex political terrain of the Spanish Civil War, and also what it meant to be there, fully part of that crusade, including The Education of a Correspondent by Herbert L. Matthews, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain by Josephine Herbst, Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild, Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill, This Time a Better Earth by Ted Allan, and Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles.
For important insight into the arc of Hemingway’s life and the man himself, as much as can be understood, I need to acknowledge Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael Reynolds, The True Gen by Denis Brian, and the gorgeous and utterly affecting Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson.
I’m always reading and rereading Hemingway, and learning more all the time. For this particular novel, I’m indebted to For Whom the Bell Tolls, Islands in the Stream, The Fifth Column, and To Have and Have Not.
Finally, I think it’s important to say that my Gellhorn isn’t the Gellhorn, for how could she be? That woman is a mystery, the way we’re all mysteries, to our friends and family and loved ones, and even to ourselves. And yet the woman I discovered, in trying deeply to understand her, I couldn’t admire more. Whatever her flaws, she was incandescent, a true original, and I won’t ever forget her.
In the course of my research, there were many moments when biographers contradicted each other, and places where Gellhorn herself made errors of memory. Some were quite small. For instance, she went over to Finland on a boat called the Westernland, as we know from passenger manifests, but she wrote Westenland in letters. It would be easy to correct her on this count and others, and no doubt many writers would choose to do just that. I’ve decided that it’s more important, and means more symbolically for me, to tell an embodied and emotional truth about her life rather than to be “correct.” Whatever my own errors and failings and idiosyncrasies, I hope my fondness, admiration, and empathy for her—and for Hemingway, too—ring through.
BY PAULA MCLAIN
Love and Ruin
Circling the Sun
The Paris Wife
A Ticket to Ride
Like Family: Growing Up in
Other People’s Houses: A Memoir
About the Author
PAULA MCLAIN is the author of the novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and A Ticket to Ride, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, O: The Oprah Magazine, Town & Country, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.
paulamclain.com
Facebook.com/paulamclainauthor
Instagram: @paula_mclain
To inquire about booking Paula McLain for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at
[email protected].
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Paula McLain, Love and Ruin
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