Hemingway Had and Had Not : HADLEY <i> By Gioia Diliberto</i> , Ti<i> cknor & Fields: $24.95; 342 pp.) </i>

The first wife has it tough. Usually she is underpaid, overworked and unappreciated; consigned to ignominy or bad jokes. Unless of course she outshines her successors, who are usually younger than she is, or richer, or both. Even if she manages this feat, the prize is rarely the guy. Instead, she becomes her ex’s female ideal. Belatedly.

This was the fate of Hadley Richardson, the first of Ernest Hemingway’s four wives and the subject of Gioia Diliberto’s juicy biography, which adds to the lore about the copper-haired, boyish, all-American beauty who was the love of Hemingway’s life and the inspiration for much of his best work.

She was also the source of his worst regrets. “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” he wrote at the end of his life in his memoir, “A Moveable Feast.” Long after their divorce he told Hadley, “The more I see of your sex, the more admiration I have for you.”

No wonder. Only a love-besotted saint in need of assertiveness training could have put up with Hemingway’s egomania, moods and demands with kindness and grace, which Hadley did.

As a husband, the novelist surely belongs with Odysseus and Bluebeard in the ranks of world-class cads. This proclivity was obvious early on, when he failed to show up for his and Hadley’s engagement party, and insisted on inviting his old girlfriends to the wedding. On the honeymoon, he took her to visit their homes, to impress her with the women he had rejected in her favor. He enjoyed being surrounded by women, and flirted compulsively, sometimes reducing Hadley to tears.

The marriage ended after five years, when Ernest had an affair with Hadley’s best friend, Pauline, who soon became the second Mrs. Hemingway. Ernest never forgave her for destroying his first marriage.

What a guy! And what an old-fashioned modern romance. Despite the Sturm und Drang , Hadley and Hemingway adored one another; their life together was a passionate adventure that had a storybook quality.

She was 29 and he was 21. Despite the difference in their ages, they had a surprising lot in common. They were both from the Midwest and had domineering mothers and fathers who became suicides. Both were troubled and given to depression. Art was their highest value.

A few months after her mother’s death, Hadley traveled from her home in St. Louis to Chicago for a taste of her new freedom. On her first night there, she met Hemingway. Soon they were saving their money to go to Italy, but after their marriage in 1921, they decided to go to Paris instead, on the advice of Sherwood Anderson.

There they improvised the Jazz Age, along with fellow expatriates Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Archibald MacLeish.

The Hemingways lived penuriously, largely off Hadley’s trust funds. With his income from writing for the Toronto Star, they could have lived better than they did, but Ernest felt that squalor authenticated the young artist.

He and Hadley both preferred to spend their money on travel. They skied in Austria and went to Spain for the bullfights, where once a 19-year-old matador dedicated a bull to Hadley, presenting her with its ear. (Hemingway bestows this honor on Lady Brett Ashley in “The Sun Also Rises.”)

It was a golden time and they were a golden couple. Ernest was the genius, Hadley was his muse. She considered herself “too near to being (an artist) to be happy . . . but too far (from being one) to be productive.”

She lacked confidence, though she was an accomplished pianist. She understood the artistic impulse and encouraged Ernest’s gifts, identifying herself with him. “Why I can practically go out and say to anyone, ‘No, I don’t write novels and stories n’so forth but Ernest does, and that’s practically the same thing.’ ”

Not quite.

In one of the most famous parapraxes of modern literature, Hadley lost all of Ernest’s manuscripts when she left them unattended in a suitcase on a railroad luggage rack in 1922. Though Hadley still wept when she spoke of this incident 50 years later, it is a textbook example of passive aggression

Ernest’s bouts of impotence and his preference for athletic, androgynous females have given rise to speculation about his sexual identity. Diliberto doesn’t buy Hemingway as latent homosexual, contending that “his art springs from a deeply heterosexual sensibility.”

Be that as it may, Hadley told a friend that overall, her sex life was better with her second husband than it had been with Ernest, who was often distracted in the middle of making love, sometimes grabbing a book from his night table and reading it over her shoulder.

The Hemingway described here would bring out the Andrea Dworkin in Marabel Morgan, but presumably his enormous charm and magnetism offset his less endearing qualities.

I guess you had to be there. In any event, Hadley Richardson never became embittered. She never forgot that Ernest was her great “explosion into life,” and told their young son Bumby that she and his father had never ceased to love one another.

Their divorce was idyllic, marked by mutual generosity and affectionate letters from Feather Kat to Wax Puppy. Unlike Ernest, Hadley remarried happily, and lived a quiet and satisfying life.

The woman who emerges from these pages is nothing short of noble, despite her submissiveness and passivity. This famous 20th-Century romance is rooted in the Victorian gender arrangements in which the lovers were reared, and is an eloquent argument against carrying these old-fangled ideas with us into the future.