Read Online Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin - Free Book Online

a novel, provisionally titled
Jimmy Breen
, which was never to be published.
    Eight years earlier it was all optimism, and as I turn out of the rue Delambre and leave behind the celebrated cafes of Montparnasse - the Rotonde, Select and the Dome, I find myself in a place where Hemingway seemed unequivocally happy, the Jardin du Luxembourg, where in the winter ‘the trees were sculpture without their leaves’, and the fountains still blow in the bright light. Hemingway had so little money in those early years that he used to walk through here to avoid passing restaurants or cafes. Like much of the central area of Paris, it still seems anchored in the past.
    I can reasonably believe, then, that Hemingway would have seen pretty much what I see around me as I walk the neatly brushed gravel paths, out of the western gate of the Jardin through a formidable girdle of black iron railings, across the rue Guynemer and run the gauntlet of six-storey apartment blocks that flank both sides of the rue de Fleurus. He would have stopped most times at Number 27, for this is where Gertrude Stein lived.
    She was one of the contacts that Sherwood Anderson had given Hemingway when he left the USA for Paris just before Christmas 1921, and she proved to be the most influential. They became good friends and she provided him with the fresh, invigorating, modern ideas about art and life that he had never found in Oak Park. She encouraged a style of writing that relied less on traditional syntax and fluent, fully rounded sentences and more on the overall feel and emotion of language. (Not everyone was as taken with it as Hemingway. The writer Wyndham Lewis called it her ‘infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter’.) Literature, she felt, could learn from art and something like Cezanne’s technique of painstakingly applied repetition of line and brushstroke to build up an image could be applied to the written word.
    ‘He wanted to write like Cezanne painted,’ Hemingway has his alter ego, Nick Adams, saying in a short story called ‘On Writing’.
    He took Stein seriously as a teacher (though he did tell Hadley, his wife, that he thought her breasts ‘must have weighed ten pounds apiece’) and she took him seriously as a writer, encouraging him to give up the journalism that was paying his way in Paris and concentrate on fiction.
    It was Gertrude Stein who recommended he go to see bullfighting in Spain and taught him to cut his wife’s hair. It was at her soirees that he met writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and artists like Picasso and Juan Gris. But she paid scant attention to Hadley, and the relentless championing of her husband may have contributed to the tensions that broke up the Hemingways’ marriage four years after they arrived in Paris.
    I try to ignore the February drizzle as I walk, early on a Saturday morning, along one of the streets, huddled in by apartment buildings, that runs up the hill from Notre Dame and the River Seine to the once poor and anonymous area which was the Hemingways’ first permanent address in Paris.

    Thanks to
A Moveable Feast
we know quite a bit about their home at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine. We know it was on the third floor, and was what they called a cold-water flat, with a squat toilet outside on the landing. This was not connected to a main drainage system and the sewage had to be pumped into a horse-drawn tank and taken away. Coal-dust bricks called
boulets
had to be carried up the stairs for heating and cooking. It had a view on to cobbled streets along which goats were led by a goatherd with a pipe, with which he alerted those wanting fresh milk.
    There are no cobbles any more on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine, or goats, as far as I can see, but the tall, plain murky white facade of Number 74 is still there. It’s no longer anonymous. A sign hangs above a ground floor doorway announcing the presence of ‘Agence de Voyages - Under Hemingway’s‘ (Under Hemingway’s Travel Agency). There