Bestselling author Paula McLain has never piloted a plane, though the character in her new novel, Circling the Sun, is famed aviatrix Beryl Markham (part of the love triangle at the core of Out of Africa). She’s never met Ernest Hemingway, for that matter, but her novel The Paris Wife imagines a more central role for Papa’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, in the City of Light in the romantic 1920s.
Historical novels are big literary game. They involve tons of research, but also a willingness to make imaginary leaps. The payoff, sometimes, is a huge bestseller. McLain visited Manila last weekend for the Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, put on by National Book Store and Raffles Makati. Like Hemingway did, the author still writes in cafés, though she tends to use a Mac instead of a Moleskine. Her childhood involved another parallel, one with the adventurous Markham: she, too, was abandoned by her mother at age 10, a figure who reentered her life at age 20. She and her sisters lived in foster homes for 14 years.
And like Markham, who said of Africa’s tough landscape, “It made me,” McLain drew strength from being underestimated. “There’s a feeling of power I get by pushing back against all that I didn’t have, the fact that I didn’t get any favors from the universe, and that it was tough for me to make my way in the world.” Part of making her way, finding herself, involved plunging deep into fiction. “I still feel like I’m an underdog,” she says as we talk in Writers Bar, though she’s smiling. “That’s my core identity.”
PHILIPPINE STAR: With The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun, you’ve focused on historical novels featuring strong women. How do you start diving into that history?
PAULA MCLAIN: Part of my process started with The Paris Wife. It was forcing myself to imagine the place without having the real place compete. I’d never been to Paris; I wrote it all in a coffee shop in Cleveland, because I had two little kids and a mortgage.
There was an intensity because I couldn’t go there, so I had to go there. It really felt like I was falling down through a rabbit hole and out again to 1920s Paris. I was learning about the time and place at the same time I was writing, and I tell people sometimes I wrote the book really fast so I could find out what happens next.
Historical novels are tricky to pull off. You have to be meticulous as a biographer, but creative to an almost visionary level. How do you avoid the pitfalls?
Part of the meticulous for me is the personal: getting closer and closer to the character until I feel I have the authority to say what they think and feel. Because all of that is invented. There’s the groundwork of the research — I read my face off — but then you have to launch into the imaginative realm and say, “This is what Hadley Richardson was feeling when Ernest Hemingway sat down beside her on a piano bench at a party in Chicago in 1920.” Who knows? Well, I’m her; so I know.
How did you first get interested in Beryl Markham as a character? Was it because of Out of Africa (which focused on the love triangle between hunter Denys Finch Hatton, Baroness Karen Blixen and Markham, resulting in Isak Dinesen’s book)?
‘You have to launch into the imaginative realm and say, “This is what Hadley Richardson was feeling when Ernest Hemingway sat down beside her on a piano bench at a party in Chicago in 1920,”’ says author Paula McLain. ‘Who knows? Well, I’m her; so I know.’
Yeah, but also because she was really unlike Hadley. (Laughs) Here’s this Victorian holdout, and then suddenly there’s this, like, Thelma and Louise character. She’s a badass, she takes no prisoners. I didn’t have to read much of West of the Night (Markham’s memoir) to know I would follow her anywhere, just to see what she would do. There was the adventure part of the story that was pretty intoxicating.
Then there was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, another memoir.
That’s the other magic string. It got the engine turning. There’s the fascination with character but also the voice; I was kind of channeling Hemingway too, not really competing with him but running alongside him on a parallel track, describing her experience that came out of his work, his fiction.
Hadley seemed very much a background figure in A Moveable Feast.
Yet I also think there’s some power she had, not just as a helpmate, but as a muse, a staunch emotional supporter of his work; she wasn’t just a dishrag, a doormat — I get that a lot. But I love the irony of that: here’s this old-fashioned girl who meets Hemingway at a party and is flung into Paris and it changes her life forever. I love that; it’s Cinderella, with a dark edge.
What did you learn about Hadley that didn’t end up in the book?
All kinds of fun stuff. Not all details fit into the story. Like I listened to an interview her best friend Alice Sokoloff did, it was 100 hours of recorded interviews I found at the John F. Kennedy Library. And here are these two old girls just sitting on a porch, talking. Hadley was telling her about this time she and Ernest were in a German village, and there was this beer-drinking contest, and she won it, out-drinking everyone in the village! And as her prize, she got a cow. (Laughs) So how do you work in the cow?
And there was very little written about the summer of their ménage a trois in the French Riviera. Hemingway doesn’t talk about it, the Carlos Baker biography, it’s like a doorstop but that subject takes up so little space. Yet it was the heart of my story.
Why is there such an interest in historical fiction right now?
Well, readers are mostly women, and women read mostly fiction, as opposed to nonfiction. My readers have said the genre is like reading a “living wax museum.” It’s a way to get history, but on a human scale, from the inside out by being inside the mind of character. We get all the intel, like a fly on the wall, but the real story is relationships.
It doesn’t hurt that you get to set it in romantic 1920s Paris.
Oh, sure. (Laughs) Oh, yeah, super fun for me. Because I had never been there. And I was writing in a café in Cleveland, and Hemingway was writing in a café in Paris, that was one difference. But we were both doing the same: making fiction the center of our lives, and hoping it worked out.
Did you ever get to pilot a plane?
I didn’t. I hate to fly. But I was in back of a biplane in Kenya, visiting her family’s farm. It was amazing to be in her country and see the cottage where she grew up and that horse country that’s still there, Karen Blixen’s farm and Denys Finch’s grave, and their ghosts are still there; and to meet people who knew them and had stories to tell. It makes me feel connected in a metaphysical way. Some of it was fangirly, to touch the banister of the stairs that she touched. Or to see the Murphy bed in Chicago that Ernest and Hadley had. I got chills.
Even when most of the book is already written, it’s a way of filling in all the space, and also of paying tribute to the experience of shadowing their lives and appropriating their experiences. My story touches Beryl’s story, in a way. I’m part of her story now. There’s a benediction in that.
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The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun are available at National Book Store.