Hemingway Adventure (1999) Read online

  MICHAEL PALIN is a scriptwriter, comedian, novelist, television presenter, actor and playwright. He established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty Python, as well as The Missionary, A Private Function, A Fish Called Wanda, American Friends and Fierce Creatures. His television credits include two films for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, the plays East of Ipswich and Number 27, and Alan Bleasdale’s GBH.

  In 2006 the first volume of his diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years, spent several weeks on the bestseller lists. He has also written books to accompany his seven very successful travel series: Around the World in 80 Days (an updated edition of which was published in 2008, twenty years later), Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe. Most have been No 1 bestsellers and Himalaya was No 1 for 11 weeks. He is the author of a number of children’s stories, the play The Weekend and the novel Hemingway’s Chair. Visit his website at www.palinstravels.co.uk.

  Basil Pao began his photographic career in 1980 on his return to Hong Kong after ten years in the United States, where he was an art director for Atlantic, Polygram and Warner Bros. He first worked with Michael Palin on the design for the book accompanying Monty Python’s Life of Brian. They have since collaborated on the books based on his seven travel series. In 2007 he wrote and photographed China Revealed: A Portrait of the Rising Dragon.

  HEMINGWAY

  ADVENTURE

  MICHAEL PALIN

  Photographs by Basil Pao

  A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright (c) Michael Palin 1999

  Photographs copyright (c) Basil Pao

  The moral right of Michael Palin to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 2978 6354 0

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  To live in one land is captivitie

  John Donne

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  CHICAGO/MICHIGAN

  ITALY

  PARIS

  SPAIN

  KEY WEST

  AFRICA

  CUBA

  AMERICAN WEST

  Hemingway’s life

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Select Bibliography

  Author’s Note

  Hemingway Adventure was assembled from diaries and notes I kept during, before and after the filming of the television series. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a transcript of the series. The book has a life of its own.

  Introduction

  When I first heard of Ernest Hemingway I was a teenager living in Sheffield, an uncompromising industrial city without a hint of glamour, until recently, when the demise of its industry became the subject of a film called The Full Monty. A few days before my thirteenth birthday I was sent to a boarding school at Shrewsbury. When the time came to take my ‘A’ level examination in English, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea were the most, indeed only, modern works offered on the course. My teacher recommended them and, as a taster, I took them with me on the annual summer holiday to Southwold.

  As the grey North Sea rolled on to the wind-swept Suffolk beach I trudged through the unfamiliar prose, but at night I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  The sense of place, the intensity of smell and sound, the sheer physical sensation of being taken somewhere else was fresh and powerful and exhilarating.

  I would lie in bed and follow retreating armies down dusty Italian roads and feel the heat of Spanish squares and stare up into the wide skies of Castile and sense the cold at night in a pine forest.

  Hemingway’s world was close and uncomfortable and itchy and sweaty and frequently exhausting. It was, I felt, the real thing. To experience it would require the ability to absorb a little punishment, it would demand an open mind and a degree of recklessness. But it could and should be done. This stuff was too good to be wasted on exams, I must be bold and fearless and go out there and do it for myself.

  Unfortunately, in the late 1950s there wasn’t much call for provincial English schoolboys to carry mortars up Spanish hillsides, and though I had a goldfish I hadn’t fought for seven hours to land it.

  So boldness and fearlessness were put on hold and I packed the books into the back of the car and looked out at the Newark Bypass as my father drove us back to Sheffield, holidays over for another year.

  But something was different. After reading Hemingway I felt I’d grown up a little. Lost my literary virginity. Books would never be quite the same again.

  Life, on the other hand, was just the same.

  I passed the exams and never read Hemingway again for nearly thirty years. Then someone gave me a copy of his collected short stories. It took just one of them - ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ - to bring it all back.

  The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

  Nothing more than that. An image, clean and simple, which was to me as intense as opening a window and gulping in the air. And at that moment the phone rang. It was someone from the BBC asking if I would be prepared to take on a new sort of challenge. To travel round the world in eighty days, non-stop, no cheating, no aircraft.

  Well, of course it didn’t happen quite like that, but it is true that from the moment I started out on what became three long television journeys I realised that the pleasure I was getting from often uncomfortable and frustrating adventures was not a million miles from the buzz I had felt on those days on the beach when I first encountered Hemingway’s world.

  More recently, when it came to writing my novel, who should come muscling his way into it but Ernest Hemingway, and where was it set - in a small town on the Suffolk coast. It was clear that we were on a collision course. For my research I began to read more about him. His letters, his journalism, more short stories, biographies and memoirs and the less fashionable novels. And in everything I read, good, bad and indifferent, the same quality that attracted me thirty-five years before attracted me all over again - the unforced, unsensational, uncomplicated and magical ability to bring the world to life.

  And this is how Hemingway Adventure was born. His centenary supplied the spur, the BBC and PBS supplied the interest and I finally had the chance to experience those places that had fermented in my imagination for so long.

  At the end of it, well, Hemingway’s w
orld remains his. Great writing survives because it cannot be replaced, and because the process that created it can never be unpicked and replicated. And anyway, nothing stays the same, not even a mountainside or a pine forest. But I feel I’ve come closer to him. I have met people he met and travelled the way he travelled. There have been high times: in Venice, and chasing marlin on the Gulf Stream off Havana, and low times: finding the remains of his crashed plane in a small, fly-ridden town in deepest Uganda, or walking through the house at Ketchum where he ended his life; but there was not a day on the road when I didn’t think of him, this irascible, egotistical, obdurate figure whose writing had such ability to inspire.

  I don’t think Ernest Hemingway and I would ever have got along. I don’t have the requisite amount of competitive energy. I don’t really care about catching more fish or shooting more ducks or having more wives than anyone else. He didn’t have much time for the British and he called London, where I live, ‘too noisy and too normal’. And comedy was never his strong point.

  Our common ground, other than a fondness for cafes and bars and writing about the weather, would, I like to think, have been a love of adventure. Hemingway was the sort of man who made things happen. He was always making plans and going off to places and coming back and making more plans, and not just for himself but for everyone around him. It was a great ride and very few people managed to hang on all the way. And when it ceased to be an adventure, when he could no longer play the Pied Piper, when other people started to make the plans, he lost interest and quit, in the way he wanted to.

  When we started our filming we couldn’t believe our luck. An entire collection of Hemingway memorabilia, 275 items from the man’s life, including unpublished letters and poems, signed wine-bottles, his Remington typewriter, even one of Ava Gardner’s brassieres, was to be auctioned in England in the first-ever sale of its kind in the world.

  The night before we were to film, we received word that the sale was off. The entire collection had been deemed a forgery.

  The sale itself was testimony enough to the enduring interest in all things Hemingway but that it should have been worth someone’s time to forge the entire contents is surely confirmation of god-like status.

  Michael Palin

  CHICAGO/MICHIGAN

  It’s mid-afternoon UK time. British Airways Flight 299 is taking me from London to Chicago on the first lap of the Hemingway trail which will, all being well, lead me across the globe from Europe to America and Africa to the Caribbean. We’re passing over southern Greenland.

  Through breaks in the cloud I can see the polished white tablecloth of glaciers draped over the black spines of mountain ranges. There’s a tiny village far below. Find myself wishing Hemingway had been in Greenland, then I’d have to stop and investigate. Unlikely though, he didn’t like cold weather. Perhaps that’s why he left Chicago. The cluster of houses slips out of sight and ahead there is only ocean and ice.

  One of a party of sixth grade schoolchildren is pointing at a photograph of a beatific child with long blond hair and a flowing white dress. ‘Who’s that girl?’

  Her teacher answers patiently. ‘That’s Ernest Hemingway.’

  Number 339 Oak Park Avenue, the birthplace of one of the most uncompromisingly masculine writers of the twentieth century, holds quite a few surprises. Apart from young Ernest in pretty dresses there is the revelation that his voluptuous mother Grace was a songwriter and his craggily handsome father, Clarence, was an amateur taxidermist. But for me, on this very first day of my journey into Hemingway’s world, nothing can quite compete with the discovery that Ernest acquired his name and a considerable number of his genes from a man born in Sheffield, England. My own home town.

  I owe this frisson of affinity to a man called Ernest Hall who left Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century to seek his fortune in the United States. He fought in the Civil War and was wounded at Warrensburg, Missouri. He married the daughter of an English sea-captain, and in 1872 they in turn had a daughter, Grace. When she married Clarence Hemingway in 1896 they moved into Hall’s house where four of their children were born. The second of them, and the first boy, was given his grandfather’s name.

  Whilst I get the impression that Hemingway heartily disliked being called Ernest, it’s also clear that he was fond of his grandfather who read him stories and instilled in him the importance of manly virtues and outdoor pursuits. Ernest Hall died when Ernest was six, and it was by all accounts a considerable loss. The reason I know all this is that, thanks to the efforts of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, Grandfather Hall’s house lives on and I can stand today, surrounded by American schoolchildren, in the very room in which Ernest Hemingway first drew breath.

  It’s a rather fussy little room, full of frills and lace, but I’m told it has a profound effect on people. A man from Belarus broke down in tears when he saw it, and an Israeli Hemingway scholar who described herself as ‘not a goose bumps type of person’ was deeply moved by the thought that, as she put it, ‘This is where American literature was changed for ever.’

  Maybe this is why there is a living author currently at work in the turreted attic of the house. His name is William Hazelgrove and he’s working on a book called Hemingway’s Attic. It’s a bit of a shock to find him there in the gloom.

  ‘I came here to find the ghost of a man who did not grow up on television, a man for whom commerce was a necessary stream, not the flood we find ourselves in now.’

  I’m not sure I can take this. Another writer looking for Hemingway, and it’s only my first day.

  Hemingway was born in the dying months of the nineteenth century and the first sounds he would have heard outside would have been of horses’ hooves and not the soft swish of traffic that is pretty much constant today. Inside, he would have become used to the sound of his musically gifted mother composing away in the parlour. She wrote songs like ‘Lovely Walloona’, a paean to the family retreat on Walloon Lake in north Michigan.

  Oh! Lovely Walloona, fairest of all the inland seas,

  Oh! Lovely Walloona, … thy laughing ripples kiss the shore

  Hemingway inherited neither his mother’s literary style, nor her musical talent. However, his father’s and his grandfather’s love of nature permeates his birthplace as it permeated his life. There was nothing sentimental about this. Love of animals was not incompatible with hunting and killing them.

  ‘Ernest was taught to shoot by Pa when two and a half and when four, could handle a pistol,’ wrote Grace Hemingway on the back of one family photograph. In another, angelic Ernest stands at the end of a happy family group, looking the picture of innocence, hair cut in bangs and dressed like Lord Fauntleroy. You have to look quite carefully to make out the doublebarrelled rifle nestling by his side.

  As we leave, a group of Hemingway fans from China arrives. They’re a little late and they shift around awkwardly at the door, all in dark suits like mourners at a funeral. Two departing visitors are enquiring about the recent announcement of a new range of furniture to be called The Ernest Hemingway Collection, which will include such best-selling lines as the Sun Valley Cocktail Table and the Kilimanjaro Bedside Chest.

  It seems it was not just a nine-and-a-half pound boy that was born at 339 Oak Park Avenue, but an industry and, quite possibly, a religion.

  Clutching my Hemingway-signed mug I step out into the leafy neighbourhood which he is said to have described as one of wide lawns and narrow minds. The wide lawns may still be there but Oak Park nowadays guards a zealously liberal reputation.

  An elderly man offers to show me around.

  ‘I’m a socialist,’ he declares proudly. ‘My wife has twice shaken hands with Paul Robeson.’

  The light is fading as we walk down to the end of Oak Park Avenue. A war memorial which bears Hemingway’s name stands in a postage stamp of greenery they call Scoville Street Park.

  ‘That’s so crazy,’ mutters my grey-haired guide. ‘They should rename it Hemingway Park.’
/>   *

  Chicago O’Hare. The busiest airport in the world. It doesn’t have a lot to do with Hemingway but it’s the quickest way to get to north Michigan, which has a lot to do with Hemingway.

  He never wrote much about Chicago but he wrote an awful lot about the life and adventures he had during eighteen years of summer vacations at Walloon Lake.

  By midday, I’ve negotiated the long slow check-in lines that are the price we pay for high-speed travel and am twenty-five thousand feet above the grey-green surface of Lake Michigan. The Hemingway family would have taken one of the lake steamers that ran out of Chicago and reached Harbor Springs in thirty-two hours. Today, by jet and rented car, I’m there in four.

  Harbor Springs, on the north shore of Little Traverse Bay, is a well-heeled and exclusive small town and the jetty at which lake steamers like Manitou or City of Charlevoix would have tied up is now occupied by dazzling white private yachts. The old station building from which the Hemingways and all their baggage would have been loaded aboard the train is still there. Except that there is no railway attached to it. And it sells women’s clothing.

  Looking inside, I have a momentary panic that I’ve stumbled upon a coven of transvestite train-drivers and that someone looking frighteningly like John Cleese might emerge from the back office, wiping greasy hands on a matching Donna Karan two-piece. This disturbing fantasy is not helped by the fact that the Depot boutique has, alongside the racks of dresses, a perfectly preserved ticket-office, complete with ironwork grille, wooden floor and wood-burning stove.

  The railway and the Lake Michigan steamer service enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. In their pre-war heyday they advertised together: ‘Upper Michigan - the Charmed Land Of Hiawatha’, ‘The Northland’s Blue Lakes - Far From Heat And Hay Fever’. But they couldn’t fight aeroplanes and automobiles. Once one died, so did the other and the only way to Walloon Lake now is to take the highway through Petoskey, like everyone else.