“I never knew Hemingway was that witty,” my friend Allan said as we chatted in his apartment in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. I was reading aloud to him from Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir about his early days as a struggling writer, A Moveable Feast. In it, Hemingway describes meeting the then much-more famous writer, Ford Madox Ford.
The two of them are drinking at a table on the pavement outside a café known as La Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse. It was a place where writers, artists and poets met frequently. Both men were clearly drunk, and Ford was holding forth on the relative merits of American and British values. According to Ford, only very few Americans — ambassadors and so forth — might possibly have qualified as being worthwhile citizens.
“Was Henry James a gentleman?” An exasperated Hemingway finally asked. A somewhat drunken Ford hesitated for a moment. “Very nearly,” he replied.
La Closerie des Lilas still stands at the southern end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, just beyond the prancing horses and sparkling water of the fountains on the Avenue de l'Observatoire. The poets, artists, and writers are long gone from these parts — few of them would be able to afford to eat or drink there today — but it is not too far a stretch to imagine what it might have been like in the 1920s when they inhabited this part of the city.
That is the beauty of Paris: it endures. You can walk through the streets and neighbourhoods and know exactly that the Communards tore up the flagstones in the Latin Quarter, that the American and Free French columns marched up the Avenue d’Italie, or that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the Café Les Deux Magot on Boulevard Saint Germain.
It is this enduring nature of Paris that Hemingway captures so poignantly. Much of his early, and best, work was done there and Paris appears in so much of his writing. In a side street just a few blocks from the famous Montparnasse cafés La Rotonde and Le Dôme is a small restaurant called Auberge de Venise. Inside is a magnificent wooden bar where Hemingway first met F Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway, at 25, was still unpublished. Fitzgerald was 29 and at the height of his fame, but Hemingway awed him. One of Fitzgerald’s regrets was that he had just missed serving in World War 1. Somehow, all his life, he felt less of a man and less of a writer because he had missed the war that defined his generation. Hemingway had been a volunteer ambulance driver with the Italian army, and had been wounded on the front lines. The younger writer’s bluff, outward persona, coupled with his genuine war record, was something Fitzgerald wished he had.
ONE TRUE SENTENCE
Hemingway’s Paris is layered with memory. As you walk through the streets, you can almost sense his presence. The area around the medieval Rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement is perhaps the area most redolent of Hemingway’s early years. He and his first wife, Hadley, moved into 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the winter of 1922. It was cold and dark with stinking toilets on each landing. But Hemingway loved it. He rented a small room nearby on the Rue Mouffetard to write in. It was the hotel that poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) had died in. Hemingway wrote alone and kept himself warm by burning bundles of twigs.
It was here, the doorway on the street marked today by a modest, almost inconspicuous, plaque, that he began a literary revolution. “All you have to do,” he decided, “is to write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know... without scrollwork or ornamental language of any sort.” With this simple aim he transformed 20th-century literature.
BOULEVARD ENCOUNTER
One of my favourite stories is in Walks in Hemingway’s Paris by Noël Riley Fitch. On a spring day in 1957, Gabriel García Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, spotted the older writer wearing a checked shirt and baseball cap among the crowds on the opposite side of Boulevard Saint Michel. Marquez cupped his hands and shouted across the traffic “Maaaeestro!” Hemingway turned and waved and called back “Adios amigo!” Fitch says that this may well be the last recollection of Hemingway in the streets of Paris.
Nearby is the Place Contrescarpe, still today a lively open square, just a little off the tourist track, where locals and visitors mingle easily. In Hemingway’s day it was where the poor and many damaged soldiers from World War 1 gathered to drink and find some hope in each other’s company.
Today, no-one knows exactly which was the Café des Amateurs, but Hemingway described it as the “cesspool of Rue Mouffetard”, where the men and women who frequented it “stayed drunk all of the time”. He preferred to walk past the Pantheon and the Cluny Museum to “a good café on the Place Saint Michel”. Here he would take out a notebook and pencil, and, somewhat ironically, drink Martinique rum while he wrote.
It was among these streets and cafes that the origins of his genius and the pain of his eventual downfall first began. The habit of heavy drinking was born here. He also left Hadley alone for long periods of time, and slowly they became estranged. Even the birth of his first child, Bumby, could not save their marriage from his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer.
Hemingway was the master of the short, “true” sentence. But his writing about Paris is layered with illusion and invention. His writing reveals and hides at the same time. In the pale half-light of the church of Saint Sulpice, with its breathtaking frescoes by Delacroix, we catch a glimpse of the man at his most vulnerable. Haunted by guilt, perhaps, over his betrayal of Hadley, he found himself unable to perform in bed with Pauline. She suggested he kneel alone in the church and say a short prayer. It worked, apparently.
FIGHTING AND DRINKING
He left Paris in the late 1920s with Pauline, now his second wife, to live in the US. As he became more famous, the hopeful days of his residence on the Left Bank must have seemed a lifetime away. It is at the Ritz, at the Place Vendôme on the Right Bank, that we see him at the height of his hard-drinking, reckless lifestyle. He had, at the urging of his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, left his comfortable home in Cuba and come to cover World War 2. After landing behind the troops on D-Day he made his way to Paris with the US forces. Along the way he assembled a weird group of French irregulars, along with his American driver and an enigmatic young Spanish girl who finally disappeared in the confusion of skirmishing near the Arc de Triomphe. He led them in sporadic incidences of fighting against the retreating Germans — totally contravening the rules for war correspondents. But, by now, he was a literary celebrity; the generals loved him. They turned a blind eye to his antics and he, in turn, loved their war.
Hemingway’s war record was controversial. His actions were bizarre, and unethical. He exaggerated the stories of what he had witnessed and done. The drink and fame were beginning to exact their toll. Still, according to men who were with him on the road that summer of 1944, his courage under fire was never in doubt.
He arrived in Paris with his irregulars on August 25 1944, in the middle of the Paris uprising. After having been involved in some brief skirmishing, they arrived at the Ritz. Legend has it that the hotel was empty. The manager recognised Hemingway, who immediately ordered “73 dry martinis!”
For the next seven months Hemingway lived in and out of the Ritz while he covered the war. He sojourned there with Marlene Dietrich and his lover, Mary Welsh, the journalist who was to become his fourth wife.
It was the beginning of the end. His behaviour became increasingly narcissistic and erratic. He drank heavily, filled the room with rifles, guns and hand grenades. At one point he shoved a picture of Mary’s husband in the toilet and blasted away at it with a pistol.
There were still more than 15 years to go before the final ., but Hemingway was never able to turn his World War 2 experiences into anything that resembled his early genius. The Nobel Prize still lay ahead, but his best years were over. There was ever more drinking, plane crashes in Uganda, and the growing depression that led to his suicide with a shotgun in 1961.
There are many sides to Hemingway, many stories to read about his adventures, but one thing is certain: Paris was the city he loved the most. No other city appears as often in his writing. Towards the end of his life, he wrote: “There is never any ending to Paris ... we always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed ... Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it.”
