The only real indication of the presence of Hemingway is in the asking price. One million francs. Or PS100,000, or 150,000 euros or $180,000.
The look of the surrounding neighbourhood which Hemingway brings to life in such scabrous detail in the first chapter of
A Moveable Feast
cannot have changed that much. The buildings have aged a little - they seem to be tipped back at a slant to the street, leaning towards each other at odd angles as if tired of standing upright, but they are the same buildings. Around the corner in rue Descartes there still stands the one-time hotel where a wall-plaque says Verlaine died and in which Hemingway took a garret room to write.
Looking a little closer I can see that there are changes of detail. Where the goats were milked, there are car-parking spaces to let for $150 a month, and the Cafe des Amateurs, which Hemingway lovingly recalled as ‘the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard’, is now a decorous cafe full of students and tourists.
The rue Mouffetard itself is still cobbled and it follows a narrow, sinuous course down the hill from the Place Contrescarpe. This morning it is filled with a food market of such abundance that filming amongst the aromas of roasted almonds, crepes, coffee, fresh-baked bread, cheeses, hams, herbs, and fresh-cooked chickens is exquisite torture. The difference is that the fresh food on the street is no longer cheap and those Hemingway would have called the real Parisians are crowded into the supermarket on the corner.
Turn along by the river to the Place Saint-Michel where Hemingway sat in a cafe and drank Rum St James, ‘smooth as a kitten’s chin’. He recollects finishing a story here, which made him feel ‘empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love’, after which he ordered a dozen oysters and a half-carafe of dry white wine to celebrate.
Today the square is full of an odd mixture of policemen and people in white lab coats chanting and bearing placards. I’m told it’s a mass protest by dentists.
Walking on, I pass L’Escorailles, the brasserie which used to be the famous Michaud’s, in whose toilets Scott Fitzgerald had shown Hemingway his penis, seeking reassurance because Zelda, his wife, had told him it was too small. No plaque on the wall to this effect, I notice.
Content myself with peering in the window as Hemingway and Hadley did the night they saw James Joyce and his family in there, tucking in, all speaking Italian.
Thirsty by now, I fetch up at an intimate little spot on the rue de l’Odeon by the name of the Dix Bar. The intimate peacefulness doesn’t last long as a group of enormous French rugby football supporters, well oiled by jugs of
sangria
, start belting out songs, as the French do at the drop of a hat. This reminds me that next to food, drink, writing and making love, Hemingway 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 in which he sleeps when his flat above is occupied by a visiting author.
We talk a little about Paris in the twenties and why it was such an attraction for people like Hemingway. George ticks off the reasons crisply. Prohibition, book-burning and a general repressive attitude to the arts in the United States after the war, and of course, a favourable exchange rate which meant Americans could live quite well on very little. And the traditional qualities of Paris: tolerance for the arts, an audience for the avant-garde, an indulgence of experiment. The scale of the city, big enough to encompass cosmopolitan groups, ideas and influences, small enough to be walkable, and intimate enough for people to keep in touch easily. George believes the ferment of ideas that followed the end of the First World War has died down. The city is no longer the artistic focal point it was then. It has different priorities now. Most of the young Americans have business degrees. But he has a regular turnover of would-be writers, helping around the shop in return for as many books as they can read and, if they’re lucky, a bed in an alcove in the Children’s Book department.
W
ake up, heart thumping and very anxious. Vivid dream that I had lost all the film crew’s baggage somewhere in the Alps. Could have been prompted by last night’s reading of the story of Hadley Hemingway who, early in 1923, lost almost every one of her husband’s original manuscripts, at the Gare de Lyon, on her way to join him in Switzerland.
I think I might have had a glimpse of how she felt.
It’s Chinese New Year today and at breakfast we toast Basil with coffee and croissants. He says it’s the Year of the Rabbit. Must remember to ask him under which animal Hemingway was born.
Today the plans so lightly entered upon over a
sangria
in the Dix bar are set to materialise. Brian, my Hemingway for the nineties, meets me in the Tuileries Gardens for a brisk run to start the day. Jogging through this spectacular park seems a wretchedly trivial activity, dwarfed as we are by magnificent gilded arches, monumental fountains and the massive grandeur of the Louvre.
The only disadvantage of being surrounded by such sumptuous display is that it takes your eye off the dog shit. This is plentiful, and avoiding it demands considerable agility, which probably adds an extra aerobic twist to the exercise.
We run on, past elaborate neo-classical statues which have an odd Hemingwayesque touch to them - elephants struggling with rhinos, lions devouring peacocks - and rest briefly before taking to bicycles near the Eiffel Tower. Hemingway became a devoted fan of French long-distance cycle races and an avid reader of the sport’s most influential organ -
Le Pedale
. After this an almost relaxing game of table tennis on a concrete public table beside the Canal Saint-Martin, until we are thrown off by some very small children, followed by proper tennis in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Hemingway often played, though not, according to Hadley, with great patience.
‘Whenever he missed a shot he would just sizzle.’ His racket, she went on, ‘would slash to the ground and everyone would stand still and cower’.
Brian has not yet run out of sports. In fact he seems to have invented a new one for me. It’s a US import called Ultimate Frisbee and, unlikely as it may seem, it’s played in the most magnificent of settings - in front of the Hotel des Invalides, the hugely imposing, gold-domed home for veterans of Louis XIV’s wars. When we get there the patch of grass on which they play has been turned into a scene reminiscent of a more modern war, with the participants wallowing in a sea of mud from which a grimy blackened object occasionally emerges and sails through the air.
There look to be about ten participants per team, though it’s quite hard to tell where the ground ends and a person begins. With wholly regrettable generosity one of the players comes off to enable me to play. I’m told that the aim is to move the frisbee up your opponent’s end and score a goal, but if you receive the frisbee you must stay still until you’ve delivered it. All this is academic as I spend most of my time just trying to stand up, whilst younger, fitter, infinitely dirtier people slither past me. It’s all taken with a seriousness of which Hemingway would surely have approved, though he might have been surprised to find that, once the layers of Parisian sub-soil are removed, at least half these sturdy competitors are women.
Best of all, Hemingway liked to box. He brought a pair of boxing gloves in his trunk with him to France and had barely unpacked before he was challenging Lewis Galantiere, a man of exquisite manners who was helping them find accommodation, to a fight in his hotel room. Hemingway smashed his glasses.
Not long afterwards, ever on the look-out for a potential opponent, Hemingway taught his new friend, the poet Ezra Pound, to box. He ‘has the general grace of the crayfish’, he wrote to Sherwood Anderson.
I have only boxed twice in my life, and both occasions were in the same school tournament. Having disposed of someone as inexperienced as myself in a messy first round scrap, I found myself catapulted into the final to face the only other competitor in my weight, a Junior Schools champion. He was a compassionate man who hit me so hard early on that the rest of the bout felt like having a tooth out under local anaesthetic.
So it is with mixed feelings that I find myself at a ninety-year-old iron-framed gymnasium off the Avenue Jean Jaures for the early evening boxing class. This takes place in a room off the main gym, which is presently full of middle-aged ladies with their hands in the air. This is the daily aerobics class for senior citizens and it looks much more suitable for me. But it’s too late now for, with a charming smile, the boxing teacher, Monsieur Chiche, begins to squeeze me into a pair of recently vacated, exceedingly sweaty, boxing gloves.
Monsieur Chiche is small and built like a barrel, but he must be in his sixties, and I worry that I might hurt him more than he hurts me. This proves not to be a problem as he is only putting on the gloves before turning me over to his son, who is also small but built like a whippet.
Apart from Monsieur Chiche senior I must be one of the oldest people ever to have climbed into this ring. All around me are young, wiry lads, many of them African, who look lithe and mean as they rain punches at each other.
Young Monsieur Chiche shows me the moves, how to protect the face and when to throw a punch. At first he is complimentary about my deft footwork but, after a few minutes of my Ali shuffle, a certain amount of impatience shows through.
‘Hit me! Hit me now!’
I close my eyes and think of Ernest and surprise myself with a few well placed hooks.
‘Good!’ he exhorts. ‘Hit me again!’
This time I obey his orders to the letter. One jab goes through his guard and connects with his head. I stop immediately.
‘Sorry!’
He smiles and I feel a bit foolish. With one word I’ve confirmed why an Englishman can never be a Hemingway.