Hemingway Adventure (1999) (9 page)

Eat tonight at the Closerie des Lilas, ten minutes’ walk from our hotel, and once Hemingway’s favourite Paris cafe. He came here to write and worked on short stories and what was to become the novel,
The Sun Also Rises
.

Hemingway liked the clientele at the Closerie: ‘They were all interested in each other and in their drinks or coffees, or infusions, and in the papers and periodicals which were fastened to rods, and no one was on exhibition.’

He later wrote with some disgust of the treatment of the waiter who was forced by the management to shave off his moustache when the Closerie went up-market. Though Hemingway’s name is immortalised on yet another piece of metal, attached to the bar next to the dining-room, I don’t think he himself would still be sitting there. Not at today’s prices.

On the way back to our hotel we pass 159 Boulevard du Montparnasse, formerly the Hotel Venitia where, four years after his arrival in Paris, Hemingway slept with a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer, whilst his family waited for him in Austria.

And I remember to ask Basil about Hemingway’s Chinese birth sign. It was the Year of the Pig.

E
ight-thirty in the morning and I’m in an operating theatre at the American Hospital of Paris lying on a hospital trolley, my head bandaged with toilet paper. This is not the result of yesterday’s sporting feats, it’s an attempted recreation of one of the most bizarre accidents of Hemingway’s accident-prone life.

It happened in March 1928. In the previous nine months Hemingway had sustained an anthrax infection in a cut foot, grippe, toothache, haemorrhoids, several ski falls as well as having the pupil of his right eye cut open by the playful finger of his son. On the night of 4 March he had gone to the bathroom at his flat in the rue Ferou and pulled what he thought was the lavatory chain only to find it was the cord attached to the skylight above him. The skylight came crashing down, slicing into his head. Two weeks later he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: ‘We stopped the hemmorage [Hemingway’s spelling] with thirty thicknesses of toilet paper (a magnificent absorbent which I’ve now used twice for that purpose).’

Which is why I’m lying here in the American Hospital at Neuilly, where he lay seventy-one years ago before being given nine stitches in the forehead. To Professor Michael Reynolds, one of Hemingway’s biographers, this was more than just another injury. Reynolds suggests that when the skylight split Hemingway’s head open, the pain and the spilling of blood caused him to relive memories of his wounding in Italy which he had desperately sought to suppress: ‘When the pain dulled … he knew exactly what he should be writing … the story was the war, the wound, the woman.’

Or, as it became,
A Farewell to Arms
. Which, let’s face it, is a much better title.

Reynolds’ thesis is borne out by a remark Hemingway made years later, to Lillian Ross: ‘I can remember feeling so awful about the first war that I couldn’t write about it for ten years. The wound combat makes in you, as a writer, is a slow-healing one.’

Within two weeks of the injury which left him with a lipoma, a lump of hardened skin, permanently disfiguring his forehead, Hemingway was writing to Perkins that the new novel ‘goes on and goes
wonderfully’
.

As I lie staring up at the doctors and the light and the needle and the anaesthetic mask coming towards me, I can’t help thinking that there must have been easier ways of dealing with writer’s block.

O
nce Hemingway had been in a place where he was happy and had worked well, he regarded it in some sense as his property. So, in August 1944, not long after he’d suffered another mangling car accident in the London black-out, he was back in Paris under contract to
Collier’s
magazine to play his part in liberating what he called ‘the city I love best in all the world’.

Whilst more conventional Allied troops were busy flushing out the remaining pockets of German resistance, Hemingway and an ill-assorted guerrilla band went on to conduct his own personal liberation of Paris, including the Cafe de la Paix and the Brasserie Lipp, as well as Sylvia Beach’s bookstore and the Ritz Hotel, where the barman asked Hemingway what his men would like and received the answer, ‘Fifty martini cocktails!’

In the interests of historical research I have been given a chance to experience my own liberation of Paris. We have permission for me to ride up one of the approach roads to the Arc de Triomphe in a World War Two American tank.

Unfortunately the tank is stuck in rush-hour traffic. A chilly, insidious drizzle has descended, as we look in vain among the Renaults and Peugeots of the commuters for the reassuring sight of a gun barrel. When, an hour later, our tank does arrive, it’s smaller than I expected - the sort of tank you might use to do the shopping.

An anxious bespectacled face peers apologetically from one of the forward hatches. This is Patrick, the French owner of the tank, an M8 Greyhound with a stubby 37 mm cannon, made by Ford in 1944. After introductions all round, I climb aboard, inserting myself like a shell into a mortar barrel at the hatch next to Patrick. Choosing our moment, we make a slow but spectacular pull-out into the traffic.

Unlike 1944, our progress is almost completely ignored. Though tourists wave and point, the first French people to acknowledge a tank in their traffic are two gendarmes who bring us to an undignified halt half-way up the Avenue Hoche and demand to see our papers.

The good news is that the papers are in order. The bad news is that the tank won’t start again. Patrick and his assistant tinker around for a while before diagnosing a failure in the fuel supply. It might take an hour or two to get it fixed, so they suggest we try and kick start it. Just how easily the filming process can turn human beings into automatons is that we all without question agree to Patrick’s suggestion that we push the tank.

In 1944 he would doubtless have had thousands of willing volunteers, but today there’s half a dozen of us and we manage to shift it only as far as an old lady crossing the road, who shrieks at us in a most un-liberated way.

Patrick notices a tow-truck about to hitch itself to a trailer full of builder’s rubble. He races through the traffic and manages to persuade the driver to hook up to the tank instead. He agrees with remarkably good grace and after a moment the M8’s engine is conjured into life with a puff of smoke and a flash from the rear exhaust.

The liberation of Paris is never quite the same after this, but trundling across the cobbles towards the Arc de Triomphe, encased in inch-thick steel, is not a bad way to remember the place.

All that’s missing are the martinis.

As we prepare to leave Paris I have the same feelings I always have when I leave Paris. I have been happy here and I’m full of admiration for this well-run city and the way it respects and displays its heritage of antiquity, elegance and culture. But Paris is impossible to thank. It will not soften and allow itself to be hugged around the shoulder as you say goodbye. Unlike Venice, or Chicago, or even New York, it has no sentimental side. It outlasts and outshines everyone, and Hemingway recognised this too.

‘Paris’, he wrote in a piece for
Esquire
magazine in early 1934, ‘was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man’s education … But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now.’

By that time there was another place Hemingway had fallen in love with. It was, along with Italy and France, the third, and most important of that triumvirate of European countries in which he felt truly happy. Gertrude Stein had pointed him in its direction and he had already used it as a setting for the novel that had made him famous. It was Spain and the Spanish way of life that were to remain the greatest influence on him from now on.

In December 1921 the
Leopoldina
, en route from New York to Le Havre, put in at Vigo in the province of Galicia on the north-west coast of Spain
.

‘You ought to see the Spanish coast,’ Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson. ‘Big brown mountains looking like tired dinosaurs.’

And in a letter to his childhood friend Bill Smith, he compared Galicia with north Michigan. ‘We’re going back there. Trout streams in the mts. Tuna in the bay. Green water to swim in and sandy beaches … Cognac is 4 pesetas a litre.’

Though he was only there four hours, he came up with an article on tuna fishing for the
Toronto Star Weekly
. In it, apart from an uncanny foretaste of a later book, is the essence of all that attracted him to Spain
.

‘The Spanish boatmen will take you out to fish for them for a dollar a day … It is a back-sickening, sinew straining, man-sized job … but if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish when your muscles are nauseated with the unceasing strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified …’

Struggle, peasant pride, redemption through physical pain, the confrontation with nature that strips away sham and compromise. This is what comfortable, bourgeois Oak Park Ernest saw in Spain and it drew him like a magnet
.

P
amplona, capital of the proud and ancient Spanish province of Navarre, is a sturdy walled town girdled with modern housing blocks and the gleaming factories and assembly plants that are the rewards of belonging to a greater Europe.

Its name is known all over the world for the running of bulls through its streets at the festival of San Fermin. Though there are seventy such bull-runs all over Spain, this is the one everybody knows about. That’s because Ernest Hemingway came here.

So I can’t help thinking about him with mixed feelings as I arrive late on a cool afternoon, with a light drizzle falling on me as I push my way through an army of Hemingway-driven celebrants back-packing their way into town.

Pamplona is preparing to receive this army. Barriers are going up on the roads, and prices are going up in the bars. Few will have booked far enough ahead to find a room. Most search out doorways, park benches, traffic roundabouts or simply sleep where they fall. Hemingway’s part in establishing the international reputation of the fiesta is celebrated by a series of red wall-posters showing his venerable bearded likeness, which are attached to any building with which he was connected.

There is one on the wall of the hotel in which I have a room - the Hotel La Perla, tucked away in a corner of the big central square, the Plaza del Castillo. The Hotel Quintana, which was cheaper and where Hemingway preferred to stay, is no longer in existence.

La Perla manages to be discreet and at the centre of the action at the same time. Inside it exudes an old-fashioned respectability. The lobby gives on to a dimly lit salon filled with long-case clocks, gilt-framed mirrors, crystal chandeliers and two stunningly incongruous bulls’ heads thrust lugubriously out of one wall on either side of a portrait of the bullfighter Lalo Moreno, brother of the hotel owner. He looks grave, as matadors tend to do.

When Ernest and Hadley first discovered the fiesta, they reckoned they were the only English-speaking people in town. Nowadays you can barely find a table outside La Perla that is not occupied by a hard core of world-wide fiesta addicts who return here every year. There is a strong Swedish contingent. One of them, Hans Tovote, known to everyone as ‘To-To’, has written a novel about Pamplona, and another, Alf Tonnesson, has booked room 217, the one Hemingway stayed in, until the year 2040. There are Norwegian, French and British groups, with their own clubs and insignia. There are numerous bearded Americans who look like Hemingway and many more pretending to
be
Hemingway.

I walk through the arcades of the square to the Cafe Iruna, which displays another Hemingway poster. He and his friends would hang around here watching the action and drinking absinthe (now considered too strong to be legally served). It features heavily in
The Sun Also Rises
and, with the help of a jug or two of
sangria
, you can slip quite effortlessly back into the Lady Duff Twysden era. Only when you look more closely at the passing crowd, do you realise that time has moved on.

A procession approaches, demonstrating for the release of ETA (Basque Nationalist) prisoners, still held for terrorist activities. Then they in turn are gone, swamped by the crowd of lanky, baseball-hatted international youth slowly taking over the Plaza before the big day.

I catch sight of a copy of
El Mundo
. It has a page devoted to San Fermin on the Internet. The headline reads ‘Gracias a Hemingway’.

‘A
t noon of Sunday July 6th the festival exploded, there is no other way to describe it.’ Hemingway’s description in
The Sun Also Rises
(published as
Fiesta
in Europe), captures the moment but hardly does justice to the build up.

The streets at the heart of the city are cordoned off to all but essential traffic - drink deliveries, street-sweepers, ambulances - as we join the tide of humanity flowing inexorably down cobbled streets with boarded-up windows, towards the Town Hall where the opening ceremony takes place.

The correct outfit for San Fermin is a white shirt, white trousers and a splash of red - a neckerchief, a sash - in memory of the blood spilt by the saint himself when he was beheaded, or, some say, killed by bulls, over a thousand years ago.