The Trip to Echo Spring (11 page)

There are subtle variations to this account. Hemingway's friend A.E. Hotchner, who also claimed to have been in attendance when the locks were cracked, only counted one trunk, which ‘was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: “The notebooks! So that's where they were! Enfin!”' Carlos Baker, Hemingway's legendarily meticulous biographer, corrects the date of storage to 1928, the year Ernest and his then wife Pauline Pfeiffer left Paris for Florida. But despite these minor quibbles, the consensus tends
to be that the discovery of the notebooks inspired the creation of
A Moveable Feast.

Not everyone agrees, though. In an essay by the alluring title of ‘The Mystery of the Ritz-Hotel Papers', the academic Jacqueline Tavernier–Courbin picks away at the suitcase story's discrepancies. It seems from her account that Hemingway, that prodigious letter writer, left no record whatsoever of his momentous discovery, either at the time or after the event. Her suspicion is that the find was a fabrication, designed to give Hemingway a cast-iron excuse for writing about his former friends. Her essay closes with a sidelong quote from his papers:

It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars too it would cheer them.

I don't know whether the rusting, rotting suitcases existed or not, but what I'd begun to realise is that the legend concealed a different story about the conditions out of which
A Moveable Feast
arose. In her original essay on the discovery in the
New York Times,
Mary Hemingway mentioned that at the time her husband was ‘valiantly following a severely restricted diet which would reduce the cholesterol content of his blood'. Dig a little deeper, though, and it becomes apparent that the writing of the book also took place at a time when Hemingway was coming as close as he ever would to confronting the deleterious effects of alcohol on his own body.

A few weeks before he arrived in Paris in 1956, he'd been diagnosed by a doctor in Madrid, Juan Madinaveitia, with inflammation of the liver as well as raised blood pressure and cholesterol levels. He was put on a low-alcohol diet (five ounces of whiskey and one glass of wine a day, a letter reports), but this failed to achieve the desired effects. A few months later, back at his finca in Cuba, his own doctor prescribed an even stricter regime. From the evidence of his correspondence, it wasn't an easy process. In a letter to his friend Archie MacLeish dated 28 June 1957, he wrote:

On the corporal front the last examinations didn't turn out as well as hoped . . . So am now cut to one wine glass with the evening meal. Must cut it out entirely it seems but they do not want to treat the nervous system too violently. After all been drinking wine with meals since I was 17 or before. Anyway let's not talk about it. Makes you plenty nervous and very difficult to be with people you don't know . . . The good thing is that if I go through with it (haven't had a real drink for four months when we reach July 4th) and use no wine at all for three more then I will be able to drink wine again and test along to see how much I can drink without damage . . .

Trouble was all my life when things were really bad I could always take a drink and right away they were much better. When you can't take the drink is different. Wine I never thought anyone could take away from you. But they can. Anyway in about ten hours now I am going to have a nice good lovely glass of Marques de Riscal with supper.

By the end of the summer his remarkable constitution had begun to recover and he was drinking again, albeit more moderately than before. Still, I wondered how much the experience of confronting his own dependence informed the attack on Fitzgerald, the bulk of which (three hundred triple-spaced pages, according to Mary, who'd typed it up) was written in that dry year. After all, it's infinitely more comfortable to play doctor than patient. As Fitzgerald had put it years earlier in a rueful letter to Max Perkins: ‘I am
his
alcoholic, just like Ring is mine.'

Something else was bothering me, though. What was the line again? ‘Also alcohol, that we use as the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.' What did he mean by the Giant Killer? I'd read an essay by Alfred Kazin, a critic I admired, which said the giant was America, and the bitch goddess success and that drinking was a way of being better than everybody else. I didn't buy that though; not when I thought of Scott in his room at the Grove Park Inn, a jumper over his pyjamas, sweating out the alcohol almost as fast as he sucked it in. In the
Merck Manual
, the entry on alcoholism observes:

The maladaptive pattern of drinking that constitutes alcohol abuse may begin with a desire to reach a state of feeling high. Some drinkers who find the feeling rewarding then focus on repeatedly reaching that state. Many who abuse alcohol chronically have certain personality traits: feelings of isolation, loneliness, shyness, depression, dependency, hostile and self-destructive impulsivity, and sexual immaturity.

I thought the giant was all those things, and most of all I thought it was fear. In his sore and tender memoir of his father,
Papa,
Gregory Hemingway recalls lying in bed in the house in Havana in the summer of 1942 with what the doctors thought was polio, at the time a life–threatening disease. At night his father lay beside him on the cot and told him stories about fishing in the trout rivers of Michigan, and about the times he'd been scared as a boy. He recounted a recurring nightmare he'd had in those days, about a furry monster that would get taller every night, ‘and then, just as it was about to eat him, would jump over the fence. He said fear was perfectly natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. The trick to mastering it was controlling your imagination.'

Funny, that deep association with trout rivers as an antidote to fear, a thought to console a child who might be frightened in the night. Controlling the imagination is one thing, but what if as well as telling yourself soothing stories you found a substance, a magical substance, that could do it for you, providing what you might call
mechanical relief
from the
mechanical oppressions
of modern life? This is the practice Petros Levounis termed self-medication: the use of alcohol to blot out feelings that are otherwise unbearable.

Here's the rub. As we have seen, a drink, whether it's a nice good lovely glass of wine or whiskey or one of those little yellow plum liqueurs taken in Gertrude Stein's sitting room in Paris, affects the central nervous system, creating that euphoric surge of what Hemingway described as
well-being and happiness and delight,
followed by a diminishment in fear and agitation. But then, as one becomes dependent on it, the brain begins to compensate for alcohol's inhibitory effects by producing an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters. What this means
is that when one stops drinking, even for a day or two, the increased activity manifests itself by way of an eruption of anxiety, more severe than anything that came before. As an ADAM report on the subject elegantly explains:

When a person who is dependent on alcohol stops drinking, chemical responses create an overexcited nervous system and agitation by changing the level of chemicals that inhibit impulsivity or stress and excitation. High norepinephrine levels, a chemical the brain produces more of when drinking is stopped, may trigger withdrawal symptoms, such as increasing blood pressure and heart rate. This hyperactivity in the brain produces an intense need to calm down and to use more alcohol.

What a mess. What a bloody mess. I thought of Hemingway in Paris then, right back in the autumn of 1926. Lying rigid in his bed, listening to the sound of rain. Making up a man who makes up rivers and sits beside them with a rod, fishing for trout and sometimes losing them, until the sun comes up and it is safe to close his eyes.

In Alabama the earth was red and there was wisteria in the trees. Somewhere deep in the country the train stopped in a pine forest. It was very quiet. A needle dropped lazily through the warm air. The woman beside me was on the phone again. ‘We're stopping at Tuscaloosa. We should be there by one-fifteen I think. I'll see you at
three. Okay, baby.' Another goods train came rumbling past, the cars painted once again in those muddy browns and reds.

Between Tuscaloosa and Meridian we ran through uninterrupted miles of forest. The hills were covered in bone-grey timber, split and weatherworn into fantastic shapes. Then open country with cows grazing, or a clearing in the woods filled with corrugated iron houses painted white or mint green or left zinc-grey, with spreading spots of rust the size of dinner plates.

I got talking to the waitress. She was from New York, and had blonde streaks in her hair. ‘When we get into New Orleans,' she said, ‘we all go out for chicken in a box.' More goods trains came clattering by. There were sand-coloured cows asleep on sand-coloured grass. The other waiter, Michael, stopped by my table and whispered meaningfully: ‘Look out for bears.' I kept seeing houses I coveted: houses swagged in wisteria with swings on the porch, or fishing shacks on stilts like the one in
Walk the Line.
There was a graveyard in a field under a big live oak; bunches of dirty silk flowers scattered beneath the headstones.

I looked away, looked back. A clearfell, melancholy as a whale graveyard. It ran on almost as far as the eye could see, with a line of Christmas trees beyond. Next time I turned there was a run of wooden houses beside the tracks. Each had a porch out front, and they were painted in seaside colours – white and cream, tangerine, sky blue. One had green carpet tacked to the steps, another a wreath of artificial pink flowers hung on the front door.

At 18:30 Central Time we pulled into Picayune, Mississippi. The sun was backlighting water towers and gas stations, a train stopped on the opposite track. After that, the land began to change. We were heading into bayou country. The trees grew up out of pools and
stagnant streams, casting dark reflections on a surface coloured in a dazzle of silver, blue and pale gold, so that it seemed there were splashes of light all through the forest floor.

The girls behind me were chattering, animated now the journey was coming to an end. ‘I know a lot of men who prefer girls' deodorant,' one said. Later they got talking to a little dark-haired boy. ‘Do you like to fish? What do you catch, little sir? What was the biggest one? Seven pounds, wow!' All of a sudden there was water outside the windows. We were crossing what I thought at first was the Gulf of Mexico, though days later I realised it must have been Lake Pontchartrain, which breached its banks so cataclysmically in the days after Katrina.

The bridge was very long. The sun was setting now, and because I was on the right I had a ringside seat. Two men in shades were fishing with rods under the tracks. I could see smoke in the distance and then what I thought was an oilrig far out to sea, a grey smudge on the rosy skyline. Or perhaps it was the far coast, because when I looked again there were three or four of them: pleasure domes or palaces. How lovely they looked from here, like the outposts of some floating city. It took a good ten minutes before I realised I was looking at New Orleans, which is after all nearly marine, rising up from the Mississippi Delta, in the swampland between the lake, the river and the Gulf.

By the time we reached the shore the sky was putting on a real show. The clouds were mauve on their upper parts and a mottled orange underneath. There was a violet cast to the shadows and the palms were printed very sharply against the rose-coloured sky. An odd thing happened then. A single starling had appeared, and as it stuttered and weaved through the air I saw a boy standing on the tracks holding a
cardboard box in one arm and gesticulating with the other. His mouth was moving, but there wasn't a soul else in sight.

We passed Metairie cemetery. ‘How come they don't sink?' the girl behind me asked, and her friend replied, ‘They put pilings in. There's like water two feet down there.' Then we were unmistakably on the outskirts of a big city. The freeways were up on piers, and I caught a confused glimpse of red taillights and stop signs. Everyone got up out of their seats and began bustling about in the gangway, reaching down bags and pulling on jackets. The Mexican boy in front still had his Yankees shirt on. I felt a swift uprush of excitement. The air coming in through the open door was warm and damp as taffy. ‘If I can be said to have a home,' Tennessee Williams once wrote, ‘it is in New Orleans, which has provided me with more material than any other part of the country,' adding to this ambivalent praise Stella's line in
Streetcar:
‘New Orleans isn't like other cities.'