You were the one he really loved”

First, I want to welcome the hundreds of new readers coming to the blog to find out more about Hadley, the Paris she lived in, and the young man she fell in love with, Ernest Hemingway.

I am delighted that Paula McLain’s book has sparked so much new interest in Hadley. As readers are discovering, the story of Hadley and Ernest’s five year marriage has every ingredient you could ever hope to get from a story including heartbreak and adventure set in an enthralling time and place. Hemingway’s hauntingly beautiful book A Moveable Feast captures those years with quiet luminosity, and has inspired countless readers to discover Paris for themselves. If you haven’t read it, be sure to.

For new readers, you will find interviews and research about Hemingway’s life, interspersed with audio clips and essays about Hadley here. As you can see, I am quite fond of Hadley and admire her wit and magnanimity as she remembers Ernest and other great figures from the Lost Generation. Because I am posting a clip today, I thought I would repeat a bit of the background on the audio clips.

In the winter of 1971, Hadley was 80 years old and her friend of fifteen years, Alice, was 59. These two women began a conversation that became the basis of Alice’s 1973 biography, Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway. These conversations gave Hadley, late in her life, the opportunity to talk about the wonder and the pain of events that happened fifty years earlier in Paris. Alice was the first person to consider Hadley worthy of a biography and much of what we know about Hadley comes from these conversations. This conversation between Hadley and her friend is the centerpiece of this blog, alternating with other conversations about Ernest Hemingway, the Lost Generation, and interviews with scholars and fans from all over the world.

The best way to search through the material on this blog is to go to the menu at the top, (Hemingway Project, Hadley Richardson, etc. . . ) click on the category you want and then scroll through the titles. This directory will help you find the interviews and articles you want to read.

Now – about this clip. In this conversation, Alice is asking Hadley about her last summer with Ernest, when Pauline showed up in Antibes and their marriage crumbled. Hadley knew it was time to let go. “They were very much in love” she tells Alice, “and there is nothing nicer than that.” This clip illustrates Hadley’s gift for seeing the good in everyone and it shows how deeply Alice understood and cared about Hadley.