Hemingway Adventure (1999) (33 page)

But the light begins to go and there’s still no one down there in the marlin department. We head back to the Marina for the last time. For all his action writing, Hemingway understood failure pretty well. I re-read the opening lines
of The Old Man and the Sea
, and don’t feel so bad.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty four days now without taking a fish
.

Our American crew has been kind and generous with us. There’s little we can do but bid them farewell and promise to change our name to Albatross Productions.

Thunder rumbles and lightning flashes out over the sea as we ride home.

Any lingering dejection is dispersed by the hero’s welcome I receive back at the hotel. Thrusting a copy of
Granma
into my hand, Isis and Lilian gaze at me with new respect. ‘There, Mr Michael, in the television listings!’

I look for the column. There are only four pages in today’s issue so it’s not hard to find.

‘Griaturas Feroces,’
I read, ‘con Jamie Lee Curtis y Michael Palin.’

My stock has soared. I’m no longer a common or garden Hemingway fan. I’m Jamie Lee Curtis’s co-star.

And the towel on my bed tonight is in the shape of the letter’M’.

H
eavy rain in the night and, as I push open the windows of my room next to Hemingway’s, the roofs are steaming, and Hurricane George is creeping slowly towards us. With a bit of luck we’ll be out in time. George is moving out of Puerto Rico and heading for Dominica. Tomorrow we leave Cuba for the States to cover the last few Hemingway destinations.

Take a last walk around some of my favourite places. Like the Plaza de Armas, surrounded by fine colonial edifices, the most impressive of which is the grandly named Palace of The Captains General, now the City Museum. A tremendous colonnade of grey limestone walls and pillars, as massive and serious as anything in classical Europe.

The communists have been surprisingly generous with the monuments of imperialism, and the rooms of the museum are an eloquent evocation of the days when the colonialists lived well in Havana. The rooms are unbearably hot, and yet the be-wigged and overcoated grandees in the portraits appear to be dressed for a funeral in Greenland. Is this yet more evidence of global warming or did people still dress up for their portraits in those days?

For our last meal in Havana we go to the tiny Chinatown area to see if Hemingway’s favourite Chinese restaurant, El Pacifico, is still there. And it is, a monumental barn of a place, occupying several floors of a building in a narrow street in the Cayo Hueso area. They say that in the old days the restaurant occupied the ground floor and the floors above were arranged in ascending order of decadence - first: gambling, second: sex, and third: drugs. The penthouse presumably offered gambling, sex
and
drugs, and possibly donkeys as well.

There is no trace of dissipation in the darkened entrance where an unimpressive menu is advertised and no one on the staff seems to know or care if Hemingway used to bring his family here for Sunday lunch.

So we go across the road and eat our meal in the small back room of another Chinese establishment - not too small, however, for a six-piece band to squeeze in and supply ‘Guantanamera’ with the steamed rice.

A last round of
mojitos
at the Patio restaurant in the fine old Cathedral Square. Normally at this time the place is ringed with professional ladies weighing up business prospects, but tonight I’m told there has been one of the periodic police crackdowns and only the real die-hards are left.

T
o the airport in a vintage Chrysler. As it is precisely the same age as the black Chrysler that Hemingway used to drive, there is always a chance he swung this one round the same corners. Not always with much success.

In a letter to Maxwell Perkins from the Finca in July 1945, Hemingway describes yet another messy accident, ‘[It] was at noon and I was cold sober,’ before adding, more incriminatingly, ‘Fourth bad smash in a year. Fortunately only two got into print.’

Amazingly enough, in 1955, the most accident-prone man in the world was awarded the Order of St Christopher, for those who had driven exceptionally safely in Havana. Hemingway apparently regarded this as more precious than the Nobel Prize he’d won the year before. He passed the Nobel medal on to a church at Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. And there it resides to this day, in the Chapel of Our Lady of Miracles.

This seems typical of Hemingway’s life here. The bold, if eccentric, gesture of a man who knew that in Cuba, bold eccentric gestures were much appreciated in a man, along with any show of confident flamboyance. Hemingway hated limitation and constriction of any kind, especially social and cultural. If he had lived and worked in America, he would have been required to conform in some way to the expectations of a literary establishment. In Cuba he didn’t have to pay this price.

However, he had done himself lasting damage in the crashes in Africa, and, throughout the late fifties, his health, and the health of the island, declined rapidly. Castro’s revolution in 1959 was seen by most Cubans as a cure. For Hemingway, it was equivalent to a terminal diagnosis.

As Castro and the USA began to square off, he was forced into an agony of divided loyalties between home and homeland. On 25 July 1960, he took the ferry to Key West and sailed away from Cuba for the last time.

Thirty-eight years on, there is no ferry to Key West or anywhere else on the US coast. The country of Hemingway’s birth and the country he adopted are still squaring up, which is why I’m leaving Cuba on a Jamaican plane, heading
south
to the USA.

‘This is a cockeyed wonderful country,’ wrote Hemingway to his artist buddy Waldo Peirce, after two weeks in Wyoming in August 1928. Despite his close acquaintance with Italy, France and Spain, this was the first time the much-travelled twenty-nine-year-old had tasted the wide open spaces of his own country
.

The birth of his second son two months previously had brought him back from Europe and the need to get away and finish his new novel (which became A Farewell to Arms) had sent him out to the American West in search of peace and quiet
.

He returned many times to the Big Country on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. It was a safety valve, a place to hunt and shoot and fish and finish books and read proofs well away from the metropolitan literary environment he disliked so much
.

He never made a home here, that is, until the winter of 1958, when he and Mary first rented and then bought a house on a hillside in Ketchum, Idaho. But by that time the West was no longer the place where he could get away from his problems. It was the place where his problems finally caught up with him
.

I
n November 1930, when Archie MacLeish flew out to Montana to see his friend Ernest hospitalised in Billings after a serious car crash, it took him two days to get there and he called it ‘the most hair raising flight of my life’.

My first trip to Montana is not much better. Huge thunderstorms in the Mid-West empty the clouds and fill the airports, and by the time we reach Bozeman there is snow on the ground and hardly a room to be had because of parents’ weekend at the university.

I’m told that though Montana is the fourth largest state by area, it has a population of less than eight hundred thousand. This should make for wide open spaces, but tonight downtown Bozeman is like Times Square. The only difference is that they treat you better here. However hectic is the bar or the baggage-hall, no one but yourself is going to hurry you.

By the time I get to bed I haven’t seen a single wide open space but already I feel a deep and inexplicable sense of relaxation.

When he and his friend Bill Home first came out west in 1928, in a yellow Ford runabout provided for him by Pauline’s ever-generous Uncle Gus, Hemingway found it hard to settle. Though he thought it ‘damned lovely country’, he couldn’t find a dude ranch (a ranch that took paying guests) which suited him. The first one, Folly Ranch, had fifteen girls staying, which was not what he wanted at all (though Bill Home married one of them). In another he found the peace and solitude too much, and once again confided in Waldo Peirce. ‘Am lonely as a bastard, drank too much last night and feel like anything but work now.’

When he returned with Pauline two years later, they hit upon a ranch called the L-Bar-T on the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, just south of the old mining town of Cooke City, Montana. It was run by a Swede, Lawrence Nordquist, who offered them a cabin in the woods with a view of the mountains. Hemingway loved the fishing in the nearby Clarks Fork River and he and Pauline and the family returned to the Nordquist ranch throughout the thirties, until fame and another divorce lured Hemingway to the lusher pastures of Sun Valley, Idaho.

This morning, early, we load up and head south to see Yellowstone Park for ourselves. I can’t match Hemingway’s yellow Ford, but given the nature of the weather, have accepted the kind offer of a Ford F250, a big bruiser of a pick-up that, literally, weighs a ton.

The day looks promising, a big, largely clear sky with licks of grey cloud on the Bridger mountains to the north-east. At Livingston we swing south and follow the Yellowstone River, past turn-offs to places whose names tell you all the essentials of local history. Pray, Emigrant and Miner.

The valley road, bordered by pale and ghostly stands of silver birch is still dark, but the snow-covered slopes of the high mountains ahead of us shine gloriously in the first brightness of the rising sun. Highway 89 feels like the road to heaven.

Once we’re inside the park boundaries, there’s a dramatic change of scenery. A third of Yellowstone Park was burned by multiple fires in 1988 and we pass through a desolate and depressing landscape of slopes strewn with scorched and broken pine trees.

But where the grass grows there is plenty of life. A wolf, businesslike and preoccupied, trots off into the trees, a herd of elk passes more slowly, the females calling to each other in high-pitched whinnies. Every now and then the bull elk lets out a high, pumping cry which is known, accurately enough, as a bugle. A solitary bison with its huge head and spindly back legs grazes beside an old cavalry post. He looks vaguely incongruous, as if he’s been put there by the tourist office, but once he and his kind had this land pretty much to themselves. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the explorers Lewis and Clark made the first overland crossing of America, they reported that it took them ten days to ride through one bison herd. There are now fewer than three thousand left in the three and a half thousand square miles of Yellowstone Park.

High point of the day’s journey is the Craig Pass on the Continental Divide. Not only are we up above eight thousand feet but there’s something about the name and the concept of a continental divide that has always appealed. Like the North or South Pole or the source of the Amazon, it’s a place that is far more significant than it looks.

Spend a while turning my head one way and then the other, trying to take in the fact that rain falling on one side of me drains east to the Mississippi, and rain falling on the other side of me may well end up coming out of a lawn sprinkler in Beverly Hills. We return home past the thermal wonders of the Park like the Old Faithful Geyser and the bubbling Fountain Paint Pot hot springs. I toy with the idea of a documentary on such places called This Flatulent Earth.

But the big sights are full of people and that was what Hemingway came out west to get away from. He came to write and hunt and I must try and find some of his present-day counterparts.

B
reakfast at Big Sky, an hour’s ride from Bozeman up the dramatic Gallatin Valley, with rugged vertical rock faces on its east bank and a fast, bustling river. This is skiing country and the buildings are raised on stone pilings against the winter conditions.

This time of year, October, is, I’m told, about the best time to visit. Less busy than the summer, more accessible than the winter, and beautiful too, with the sun hitting at dramatically low angles.

Hemingway enjoyed driving across America. In his sixtieth year, he drove through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, keeping himself going, according to his biographer Carlos Baker, by listening to the World Series and ‘stopping at grocery stores in the smaller towns to buy apples, cheese, and pickles, which he washed down with Scotch and fresh lime juice.’ Eurghh.

At the side of the road just before Big Sky resort there is a long single-storey building with a log-cabin finish called the Corral Bar. It’s a folksy, friendly place with a good smell of bacon and fresh coffee and, I like to think, just the sort of spot where Hemingway would have found the company he liked. The rest-rooms are called ‘Bucks’ and ‘Does’ and the decoration favours things like bleached deer skulls. A huge moose-head hangs out over one of the tables. It bears an expression of amused tolerance and the curly-haired bison next to it looks positively angelic. Man, beast and breakfast in perfect harmony.

The elk-shooting season begins today, and the bow-hunting season ends. I get talking to a group of hunters, all around thirty or forty, with very big moustaches, who are about to leave for three or four days of elk-hunting in the outback.