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by Suzanne Buchert
From “ Shakespeare & Company” by Sylvia Beach: “My father, the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, D.D., was a Presbyterian minister who for seventeen years was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey.” From “Hadley” by Gioia Diliberto: "Elizabeth Hadley Richardson grew up in the bosom of upper-class St. Louis, a society whose stiff Victorian manners were starting to creak under turn-of-the-century industrialism.”
A couple of years ago, my friend and travel companion, Linda, the Aarde Moder of Tri-state Woman fame, and I decided to visit my daughter in Portland, Oregon. Linda, being the consummate travel guide, did her usual research, and put forth a trip we should embark upon during part of our stay in Oregon. She had found a quaint hotel on the beach in Newport, Oregon, called the Sylvia Beach Hotel. We would go there for the weekend and see what that part of Oregon looked like. We picked Paula up from work on Friday afternoon, raced down the inland freeway, cutting over to the coast just as dusk was falling and wound our way through canyons and over hilltops to our destination. We all loved the Sylvia Beach. It was an old, blowsy building brimming with atmosphere. It had second floor rooms named for famous and some not so famous authors, a library-lookout on the third floor, a basement dining room where breakfast and by-reservation-only fresh seafood dinners were served and it looked out from its cliff top perch onto the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean, only yards away. It had resident cats who purred their way into our room to drink from the slightly leaky faucet of our sink. And, it reminded me that I had always meant to read about Sylvia Beach, her Paris bookstore and its famous patrons known as “The Lost Generation.” Fast forward a year or so and while browsing my book club magazine what do my wondering eyes behold but a reissue of Beach’s book about her store, “Shakespeare & Company”. Naturally, I bought it. As an avid reader and a student of literature, I have long been fascinated by certain writers. One of the biggies was Ernest Hemingway. After making his acquaintance in High School English classes, I named him my favorite writer, a designation he continued to hold for decades after. I read many of his books, some of his short stories and lots of books about him, his contemporaries and his times. To me, the nabob of the Lost Generation was Hemingway. He was a complicated, fascinating mans man, a man who lived life large and for the most part on his terms. He took part in some of the most important events of the first half of the last century and when everyone said he was washed up, came up the “The Old Man and the Sea”, wowing old fans, finding new fans, and winning a Pulitzer Prize to boot. Of course, I expected Hemingway to figure prominently in Beach’s book. After all, Hemingway lived in Paris during the twenties, frequented the bookshop, as well as the cafes and bars where all the famous American and British expatriates hung out. However, Beach, having known another influential writer or two, and being the publisher of the (in)famous James Joyce book “Ulysses”, a book banned in both England and the United States, churned out a lot of pages telling the story of that undertaking. I was introduced to Joyce in a way that reading “The Dubliners” in college English hadn’t, I found it an interesting and worth while book. Hemingway appeared here and there in the pages along with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others, known and not. Near the end, when recounting the last days of the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, Beach tells of Hemingway roaring up in an army jeep, clearing out a nest of Nazi snipers and declaring he was off to liberate the cellar (as in wine) at the Ritz. That was the Hemingway I had been waiting for! That ending led me to pursue another book I had been looking for on and off for a number of years. It was a book about Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife and the woman who famously lost the complete and only manuscript of Hemingway’s first novel. Left it on a train so the story went. That is about all I knew about her, but from reading “Shakespeare & Company” I knew that Hadley had been with Hemingway through those early Paris years. I had run across a review of the book “Hadley” by Diliberto, thought it sounded like something I would like to read and then moved on to other books. I don’t remember if I put it on my list or not, but when I was somehow reminded of it and tried to find it, it had disappeared. Not on book store shelves, in sale bins, nowhere. Then I did a Google search last year for a book for my daughter, Paula, and when successful with that one, also a very obscure book, I searched for a couple of others I had been hunting for. One was “One Man’s Owl” by Bernd Heinrich (you know how I love Heinrich, and this is the unabridged edition of this very funny book), and “Hadley”. I struck on both of those books. Evidently this site, www.abebooks.com , has a connection around the world, finding books, some of which are being let go by libraries. I purchased both these long sought books for under $10, total. I was pretty pleased with myself, especially since the book I found for my daughter was in the $85 range and this for a book in Japanese, “Japonism in Fashion”. So, finally to “Hadley”. It didn’t take me long to see that the author definitely liked Hadley and definitely did not like Hemingway. OK, he had an affair with another woman while married to Hadley and then wrote about it years later in one of his last books “The Garden of Eden”. He often behaved like a spoiled child, while Hadley played the devoted mother, both to him and their son, Jack, known as a child as Bumby. And, after all the book is called “Hadley”, not “Ernest.” But, I draw the line when she dismisses “The Old Man and the Sea” as second rate. I have to differ with her on that one. When entering the first lines of these books at the beginning of this review I was struck by the fact that both these women, coming from somewhat normal, upper middle class backgrounds, lived pretty unusual lives. Their lives were anything but humdrum. I still don’t know exactly what happened with Hemingway’s first novel, but Diliberto assures me that it wasn’t very good anyway and his writing really improved after that so it probably wasn’t such a tragedy anyway! Keep reading.
Suzanne Buchert and her husband, Keith, own several restaurants.
sbuchert@hotmail.com
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