Read Online Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael Palin
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liked Paris most for its sports, both as participant and spectator.
Get talking to a young American called Brian who, lured to Paris by the enduring Hemingway myth, gave up his job producing a TV chat show for NBC to become a writer. He’s been here a couple of months and so far Paris has exceeded his expectations. Art and aesthetics are acceptable terms here - not an afterthought, but a first thought, as he puts it. I agree. Where else in the world would you find a cafe marking its bills ‘rendezvous de l’elite intellectuelle’ as does the Deux Magots, or a country which, in the nineteen thirties, issued a special postage stamp in aid of The Unemployed Intellectuals Relief Fund.
‘You can do just about anything in Paris you can do elsewhere,’ he enthuses, ‘but somehow things tend to be more interesting here.’
We decide there must be a guided tour exploring the physical side of Hemingway’s Paris in what one biographer described as ‘the sport-crazy Twenties’. Brian agrees to make a few enquiries and work out a sort of Hemingwayathon later in the week.
On the way out of the Dix Bar, run slap bang into another ghost of Ernest. The shop next door, which sells cheap Chinese imports, was once Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and library which became a regular hang-out for Hemingway. It was run by an American called Sylvia Beach, one of the very few people he never fell out with. ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’
T hough neither Sylvia Beach nor the original Shakespeare and Company are still going, a bookshop bearing the same name and run on affectionately eccentric lines by an American called George Whitman, has been open for business down by the Seine since 1964.
There has grown up quite a fashion lately for bookstores to provide ancillary services such as food and drink and reading rooms, but George, a handsome man of mature years with a tweed jacket and a mop of chalk-white hair, is way ahead of the game. Shakespeare and Company is the only bookstore I know where you can sleep overnight, be brought a cup of tea in a bed set in an alcove in the middle of the Children’s Book department and have Notre Dame cathedral as the view out of your window. The shop is open every day of the year, including Christmas Day, and if you turn up on any Sunday George and his interns will serve you tea.
George welcomes me this morning and apologises for not being a great Hemingway fan. He thinks
The Sun Also Rises
his best book by far, but reckons he was not a patch on Theodore Dreiser.
Apparently Hemingway’s behaviour when he visited the old shop was not always the best. When he idly picked up a magazine and found a critical review of his work headlined ‘The Dumb Ox’, he grew so angry that he punched a vase of tulips, smashing the vase, decapitating the flowers and sending water pouring over the book display - thus neatly endorsing the title of the review. He was also, says George, very bad at returning library books.
‘Mind you, Henry Miller was worse.’
We climb up a precarious ladder to George’s office on the first floor, passing so many shelves, so densely packed, that it seems as if the shop may actually be held together by its books. It’s conceivable that if you remove one strategically placed volume, you might bring the lot down and vanish for ever beneath an avalanche of literature.
For George Whitman this would doubtless be the perfect way to go. George’s life is lived around, in, among and on top of books. Pausing only to show me how to turn the light on by pressing a Wittgenstein biography on a shelf beside the door, he shows me into his office. Of course it looks quite unlike any conventional office. It’s lined with books, open books are spread three deep on what might be a desk, if you could see it for books, the walls are covered with posters about books, and there is a bed
Get talking to a young American called Brian who, lured to Paris by the enduring Hemingway myth, gave up his job producing a TV chat show for NBC to become a writer. He’s been here a couple of months and so far Paris has exceeded his expectations. Art and aesthetics are acceptable terms here - not an afterthought, but a first thought, as he puts it. I agree. Where else in the world would you find a cafe marking its bills ‘rendezvous de l’elite intellectuelle’ as does the Deux Magots, or a country which, in the nineteen thirties, issued a special postage stamp in aid of The Unemployed Intellectuals Relief Fund.
‘You can do just about anything in Paris you can do elsewhere,’ he enthuses, ‘but somehow things tend to be more interesting here.’
We decide there must be a guided tour exploring the physical side of Hemingway’s Paris in what one biographer described as ‘the sport-crazy Twenties’. Brian agrees to make a few enquiries and work out a sort of Hemingwayathon later in the week.
On the way out of the Dix Bar, run slap bang into another ghost of Ernest. The shop next door, which sells cheap Chinese imports, was once Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and library which became a regular hang-out for Hemingway. It was run by an American called Sylvia Beach, one of the very few people he never fell out with. ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’
T hough neither Sylvia Beach nor the original Shakespeare and Company are still going, a bookshop bearing the same name and run on affectionately eccentric lines by an American called George Whitman, has been open for business down by the Seine since 1964.
There has grown up quite a fashion lately for bookstores to provide ancillary services such as food and drink and reading rooms, but George, a handsome man of mature years with a tweed jacket and a mop of chalk-white hair, is way ahead of the game. Shakespeare and Company is the only bookstore I know where you can sleep overnight, be brought a cup of tea in a bed set in an alcove in the middle of the Children’s Book department and have Notre Dame cathedral as the view out of your window. The shop is open every day of the year, including Christmas Day, and if you turn up on any Sunday George and his interns will serve you tea.
George welcomes me this morning and apologises for not being a great Hemingway fan. He thinks
The Sun Also Rises
his best book by far, but reckons he was not a patch on Theodore Dreiser.
Apparently Hemingway’s behaviour when he visited the old shop was not always the best. When he idly picked up a magazine and found a critical review of his work headlined ‘The Dumb Ox’, he grew so angry that he punched a vase of tulips, smashing the vase, decapitating the flowers and sending water pouring over the book display - thus neatly endorsing the title of the review. He was also, says George, very bad at returning library books.
‘Mind you, Henry Miller was worse.’
We climb up a precarious ladder to George’s office on the first floor, passing so many shelves, so densely packed, that it seems as if the shop may actually be held together by its books. It’s conceivable that if you remove one strategically placed volume, you might bring the lot down and vanish for ever beneath an avalanche of literature.
For George Whitman this would doubtless be the perfect way to go. George’s life is lived around, in, among and on top of books. Pausing only to show me how to turn the light on by pressing a Wittgenstein biography on a shelf beside the door, he shows me into his office. Of course it looks quite unlike any conventional office. It’s lined with books, open books are spread three deep on what might be a desk, if you could see it for books, the walls are covered with posters about books, and there is a bed
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