Reviewed by: The Paris Husband by. Scott Donaldson Ron McFarland The Paris Husband. By Scott Donaldson. Simply Charly, 2018, 141 pages. $11.99. Some might maintain that the phrase "popular literary scholarship," like "military intelligence," rings oxymoronic, but most of the titles among the thirty plus listed by Simply Charly, a website and publisher which describes itself as "the brainchild of the online education division of Carlini Media … founded by musician and entrepreneur Charles Carlini," would qualify. Most of the print titles so far available employ the word "simply," as in Joan Klingel Ray's Simply Jane Austen (2017) or Philip Weinstein's Simply Faulkner (2016). Many of the writers boast impressive academic pedigrees and accomplishments, but Donaldson might be inclined to blush at Mark Cirino's blurb, which would place him on a putative "Mount Rushmore of Hemingway scholars." The departure of Donaldson's title from others in the series may owe to the presumably forthcoming book by Mark P. Ott, Simply Hemingway. The cover illustrations of other books in the series feature caricatures of the famous authors or of such greats as Darwin, Freud, and Chopin, but Donaldson's cover (designed by Scarlett Rogers) depicts Paris and the Eiffel Tower. On the Simply Charly website one may purchase a t-shirt for $25 featuring Ms. Rogers's caricatures of many of the personalities, but I did not see one available to match the image of Ernest Hemingway shown on the site. Donaldson's title offers a wink at Paula McLain's popular 2011 novel, The Paris Wife, of which cinematic rumors have bounced about for several years. Coincidentally or otherwise, Gioia Diliberto produced a fresh edition of her 1992 biography, entitled simply Hadley, the same year as McLain's novel, but with a rather flashier title, Paris Without End, which echoes an oft quoted passage from A Moveable Feast. Donaldson commends Diliberto's biography as "first-rate" and describes her as "the unquestioned expert on all matters pertaining to Hadley." One might make something of a feast of subtitles here, starting with Alice Sokoloff's Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway (1973) and including Diliberto's subtitle, The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife, and Donaldson's subtitle, How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway. [End Page 104] It may be hard to compete, however, with Bernice Kert's subtitle, The Hemingway Women: Those Who Loved Him—The Wives and Others (1983). Meanwhile, adding further fuel to the bonfire of fiction pertaining to Ernest Hemingway's wives, comes Paula McLain's sequel to The Paris Wife (dealing with both Hadley and Pauline), Love and Ruin which focuses on Martha Gellhorn, and which Jessie Burton in her 7 May 2018 review for The New York Times describes as a "propulsive" and "highly engaging novel" using "impressive primary and secondary sources." Is a trilogy in the offing? From the perspective of fictional appropriations, one might argue that Naomi Woods covered the ground Bernice Kert explored in more scholarly fashion (bibliography, index and all) with Mrs. Hemingway (2014), which deals with all four of the wives and which has also drawn favorable reviews. How many cottage industries will Ernest Hemingway have fostered before the end times? All the above presumably leads us to reflect upon where Scott Donaldson's deftly written book fits in. He might justly have titled it "Simply Hadley." About the length of a healthy novella, The Paris Husband rambles over territory familiar to Hemingway scholars and aficionados. The three-page introduction cuts straight to the notorious case of the lost valise of 3 December 1922, when Hadley, still suffering from flu, lost the manuscripts of nearly all the writing her husband had accomplished during the past year. Married on 3 September 1921, the original Hemingway couple arrived in Paris on the 22nd of December. The valise episode, which has attracted so many novelists, occupies more than twenty pages at the center of Donaldson's book, and in his introduction, he mentions Joe Haldeman's award-winning fantasy (sci-fi) novella, The Hemingway Hoax (1990). Other notable appropriations drawing on the lost valise include Vincent Cosgrove's The Hemingway Papers (1983), MacDonald Harris's Hemingway...