Hemingway Adventure (1999) Read online

  I swivel round but there’s no one there. It’s a moment or two before I realise the voice is coming from a loudspeaker, broadcasting a radio talk-show from somewhere inside the building.

  Following the advice of my friend in Indian River I check the Chicago Yellow Pages for a gun range. This being the city of Al Capone, there’s quite a choice.

  With the help of a latter-day James Bond by the name of Peter Thomas (futures trader, weapon trainer to the stars, deep-sea diver, etc.) we select a place up by the airport.

  It’s a gun shop and shooting range combined. The shop appears to be run by two Labrador dogs, one cream, one chocolate, who tumble over each other in vaguely amorous fashion beside a display of holsters and magazine extensions.

  There are two people ahead of us, waiting to be served. He is big, and sports Ray-Bans, a pony-tail and a sweat-stained bandanna. She is very big and dressed in black.

  Attached to the wall behind the counter are newspaper clippings, with gung-ho headlines like ‘Gun Control Wrecked’, ‘Gun Control Dealt A Blow’, ‘More Women Packing Pistols’. Some of them look very old.

  The wall suddenly reveals itself to be a door from which another very large person waddles out. I feel like Gandhi in here. He appears to be the owner, and approaches the waiting couple.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘We need ammo and targets. We need four number 9 and four number 2.’

  I try to sound equally nonchalant when it’s our turn to order but when it comes to targets I’m a bit nonplussed. The owner shows me three black silhouette shapes to choose from. One is that of a hooded gunman, another a thick-set bad guy with oddly creased trousers and the third, unbelievably, is a fat lady.

  He lays them out and folds his arms.

  ‘Pick your offender,’ he says, without a smile.

  I choose the hooded gunman, and he takes me through into a small space at the back of the shop with a stained plasterboard ceiling, a big Coke machine and piles of reading matter ranging from Shooting Times to Handguns Magazine (‘Modernised Hi-Power from Bulgaria’), and the more academic Firearms Journal. This last has an advert for a Hemingway bush jacket, and a picture of bearded Ernest clutching a rifle and smiling contentedly. This seems too good to be true. My reason for being here summed up in one advert.

  There is a rending crackle of fire from the range next door. A hail of bullets, a grunt of satisfaction then silence. The owner comes through to tell me the second range is ready, and we move through. I’m on my own but it still feels very claustrophobic. Peter has set up the target and appears in the booth with ear protectors and a selection of weapons.

  ‘See which suits you best,’ he suggests.

  ‘What do you recommend?’ I ask, trying to sound like a contract killer, rather than someone buying toothpaste.

  The first gun he shows me is a .22 pistol. I step into the booth and take up position. Front foot forward taking the weight, arms straight, left hand on wrist to steady my aim. Just like the movies. He arms the weapon, calls out a warning and tells me to fire in my own time. Nice and relaxed.

  The .22 is easier to handle than I’d expected. It doesn’t buck or recoil, and I have to admit I enjoy firing it.

  ‘OK. Now try the .44 Magnum. This is the one Clint Eastwood uses.’

  As soon as I fire the Colt I’m aware of a difference. This barks as it shoots. It kicks up, like a snarling dog, and needs some strength to control it.

  Peter peers at the silhouette of the masked gunman and nods approvingly.

  ‘Six fives.’

  The shots are all grouped around the maximum ‘5’ part of the body. Heart and head.

  I think I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, for the third weapon, a 12-gauge pump action shotgun, nearly takes my arm off. Nothing slim and elegant about this one. The noise is like a thunderclap and instead of a neat hole, half the target is shredded by the time I’m through my six rounds. The shotgun removes whatever dilettante illusions I might have had about guns. This is brute force.

  Though he did precious little writing in Chicago, Hemingway made two very important friends. It was here in 1920 that he began his first real love affair after the unrequited romance with his nurse in Milan (the inspiration for A Farewell to Arms).

  He met a woman called Hadley Richardson, eight years his senior. He was drawn to her both as attractive woman and uncensorious drinking companion and, according to Hemingway’s first biographer, Carlos Baker, she was impressed, among other things, ‘by the way Ernest made cigarette smoke pour from his nostrils’. They married in September 1921 and lived briefly in an unglamorous apartment on North Dearborn Street.

  Around the same time, Hemingway met and was befriended by a writer called Sherwood Anderson, fresh back from Paris, who persuaded Ernest that the French capital was the only place for an aspiring writer to be. Attitudes to life and art were much more liberal and, because of the post-war exchange rate, it was dirt cheap.

  Though it may well have been a desire to escape the close proximity of his mother that counted most in the final decision, Hemingway needed little more encouragement to head for Europe. On 8 December 1921, he and Hadley left New York for Le Havre on the Leopoldina.

  She was thirty, he was twenty-two. Hemingway’s travels had begun. He would be on the move for the rest of his life.

  ITALY

  Ernest Hemingway had first set foot on foreign soil at Bordeaux, France on I June 1918. He had been accepted as a volunteer driver for the American Red Cross Ambulance Service on the Austro-Italian front line. After a few days in Paris, sampling cultural delights like the Folies Bergere, he and his fellow volunteers took the overnight Paris-Lyon Mediterranee Express, across the French Alps and through the Frejus tunnel to Milan. His train steamed into Garibaldi Station on the morning of 7 June 1918.

  ‘They were watering the street and it smelled of the early morning.’

  A Farewell to Arms

  Eighty years on, the express from Paris, smooth as a missile, glides noiselessly into Milan Central, the station that was built in the 1930s to replace Garibaldi as the main international terminal. It is a mighty edifice, with soaring galleries, marble walls and classical friezes. If the Romans had ever got around to building a railway station (and, if decadence hadn’t intervened, it might have been only a matter of time), this is what it would have looked like. Which was, of course, the intention of Mussolini and his architects who resold the Roman Empire to the Italian people as a symbol of resurgent power and martial glory.

  Nowadays, its massive forecourt shelters the very people Mussolini and the Fascists were so anxious to get rid of — foreign immigrants, from Africa, Eastern Europe and, more recently, from Albania and Kosovo.

  As a young reporter, Hemingway met Mussolini. He recognised him as an act from quite early on, when he and a crowd of fellow reporters were summoned into Il Duce’s black-shirted presence at the Lausanne Conference.

  Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into the famous frown. He was registering Dictator … I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary — held upside down.

  Toronto Daily Star, 27 January 1923

  The imperial grandeur of the station is now a backdrop for vast and enigmatic black and white ads for Dolce and Gabbana, Versace and Armani - the new emperors. A stuccoed frieze of victorious Roman armies is half-obscured by a Pepsi clock informing us that our millennium has only 332 days, 13 hours and 6 minutes left to run.

  Considering it is such a centre of high fashion, Milan is remarkably devoid of architectural beauty. Dajna, a local who is helping us with our filming here, is philosophical. Milan is all about making money, she says. It’s in the blood and in the history. The city has never been much concerned with looking good. She points out a group of people gathered around a window peering intently at a television screen. They’re not watching football or the latest Madonna video but the rise and fa
ll of share prices.

  Yet in the centre of this hard, pragmatic city is one of the most sublimely rich and flamboyant buildings in Europe, the great Gothic cathedral, the Duomo. It’s a fairy-tale building, the roof a petrified forest of pinnacles, marble walls covered with three thousand carved statues, of beasts and saints and Popes and every creeping thing. Apart from anything else it’s a wonderful feat of story-telling. It’s just been restored and has a freshly scrubbed, born-again, pink glow.

  The mother of all shopping malls - the Galleria - finished in 1877, and a favourite place for Hemingway to stroll with his first love Agnes von Kurowsky, is still open for business. It stands, immensely tall, with domed and vaulted arcades of tiles and a rich stained-glass roof, from which the designer fell to his death on the day before it opened.

  There is an older part of town where red brick takes over from marble and banks give way to clubs and bars and stalls selling jewellery, joss sticks and penis-shaped candles in various life-like colours - green, yellow and midnight blue.

  Sea bass ravioli and goose at an excellent old town restaurant, then back to my hotel in bank-land.

  Hemingway, still a month off his nineteenth birthday, had a less comfortable introduction to Milan. On his first night in the city he was called out to the scene of an explosion at a munitions factory. The carnage was grim. He found himself picking human remains from the perimeter wire. He used the experience later in a clinically gruesome short story called ‘A Natural History of the Dead’, in which he admits, uncharacteristically, to being shocked, not so much at the extent of the injuries but at the fact that most of the dead were women.

  By my bed tonight is A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s famous story of love and war in Italy. It’s an orange and white Penguin paperback edition of 1959, price two shillings and sixpence, which I was issued with at school as part of my A’ Level English Literature course. It’s dog-eared and coming apart at the spine, but I wouldn’t part with it. This was the book that introduced me to Hemingway and, in a sense, introduced me to Italy as well.

  In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled the ambulances he drove on the Austro-Italian battlefront in the summer of 1918:

  I remembered how they used to burn out their brakes going down the mountain roads with a full load of wounded and braking in low and finally using the reverse, and how the last ones were driven over the mountainside empty, so they could be replaced by big Fiats with a good H-shift and metal-to-metal brakes.

  Their 1999 versions are still made by Fiat, but they are sophisticated affairs with lots of gears and PS20,000-worth of equipment in the back alone. Which may account for the nervousness with which the Italian Red Cross has acceded to my request to drive one. I’m sent out to the main depot, given a uniform, and directed to an ambulance. Piero, the regular driver, has a mournful face and a dark beard line. He hasn’t had an accident in twenty-five years’ driving, and looks at me dubiously, as if the record might be in jeopardy today.

  ‘These Fiats must be pretty tough?’ I ask him. I think he takes this the wrong way, for behind the nod of agreement is a hint of anxiety at my motive for asking. The Fiats are fine, he says, but they’d rather have Mercedes. However, they’re government funded so they have to buy Italian. We drive around the streets until Piero finds one wide enough, straight enough and empty enough for him to entrust me with the wheel. Empty streets are not easy to find in Milan but we find comparative peace and quiet on the approach roads to San Siro Stadium.

  If Central Station was Mussolini’s temple for the 1930s then San Siro is Italian football’s temple for the 1990s. It’s a functional building of enormous size - it seats a hundred thousand spectators - but in its grace and elegance is an outstanding example of the Italian talent for turning engineering into an art form. Piero answers questions about it somewhat tersely whilst giving me instructions on where to go next.

  ‘Left here, please! OK, OK, yes, right is good.’

  I want to set his mind at rest by telling him that I’ve driven vehicles under many testing circumstances. Whilst making the Monty Python series I had to drive an E-Type Jaguar through the Scottish countryside whilst dressed as the front half of a pantomime horse. If you can change gear with a hoof you can do anything. But I don’t know quite how to phrase this in Italian.

  After a while he lets me sound the alarm and press the button that sets off the flashing blue light, which could be very addictive given the swathe of space it immediately opens up in the traffic ahead. And gradually he eases up and we talk about things like his four-year-old son and how he has moved out of Milan because he hates it there and because he wants to be somewhere his boy ‘can wake up and see trees’. When we finally say goodbye, he tips me off as to where I can gain a little more Red Cross experience.

  This turns out to be a first-aid class at the Maggiore Hospital in the centre of the city, the very same place to which Hemingway was sent for physiotherapy after his injuries at the Austrian front. (The Red Cross hospital in Via Manzoni where he was treated for his wounds and where he fell in love with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky also still exists, but the building is now, surprise, surprise, a bank.)

  Tonight’s class is devoted to the cause and prevention of cardiac arrest. This is a tricky one for someone whose Italian is confined to ordering pasta, but I nod comprehendingly as we’re told how to check pulse, size of pupils, colour of lips and nose. Italian is such a lovely language that even parts of the body sound exciting - like very fast cars or interesting ways to cook veal. When it comes to the particularly mellifluous respirazione bocca a bocca I’m aware that the lecturer and everyone in the class is turned towards me, smiling in anticipation. Apparently I’ve nodded once too often and volunteered myself for a demonstration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  In these hygienically correct days the victim is not one of the blondes attending the course but a unisex polystyrene torso with a pink head, yellow rubber hair and no arms. Even the dummy lips are protected by a square of white gauze which remains stuck to the end of my nose as I straighten up. (Much laughter.)

  Worse is to come. I am asked to join two others in showing how to lift an inert body. The instructor appeals to the class for anyone weighing around sixty kilos to be the body. Due to a misunderstanding, a man who is sixty years old but a lot more than sixty kilos is laid on the floor in front of us. I get the middle section. It gives a whole new meaning to bottom of the class.

  Still, it’s nice to know that after two years of this I could become a fully qualified Red Cross Ambulance Driver.

  Hemingway took two days.

  We leave Milan today to try and locate the place where Hemingway was wounded. It’s complicated because though he portrays his own real injury as the fictional injury sustained by Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway locates the event in a part of the battlefront that he’d never seen - the Isonzo River, now the border between Italy and Slovenia.

  This is mountainous, dramatic country, where a milky-green river scours steep, wooded gorges. There was heavy fighting here, but Hemingway never saw any of it. He himself was hit and wounded on the banks of the Piave River in the low, flat farmlands only twenty-five miles from Venice.

  The journey out there from Milan is straight and uncomplicated and pretty boring, both road and railway slicing across the rich plains of Lombardy with the snow-capped Alps away to the north a constant, if not always visible, presence.

  Romantic cities like Verona, Padua, Vicenza and Venice are nothing more than names on overhead gantries as the autostrada curves to avoid them. Open country is quickly snuffed out by development. The wide plain is in danger of becoming one long industrial estate.

  East of Venice the landscape patterns change. Dead straight roads, canals, power cables and the fresh-ploughed furrows of the fields bisect, criss-cross and converge on each other like lines on a Mondrian painting.

  We put up at a hotel in Noventa di Piave, a tiny town with the second tallest bell tower in the Veneto outsi
de St Mark’s Square, a pizzeria called ‘Smack!’ and a smoky cafe where the old men gather to play cards. Eat good plain food washed down with jugs of prosecco, the local sparkling white wine, in a busy local restaurant.

  Later, before bed, read a few more pages of A Farewell to Arms with a keener pleasure than usual, knowing that I am now only one and a half miles from the tiny town of Fossalta, the place where the story was born.

  On the afternoon of 7 July 1918, exactly one month after arriving in Italy, Hemingway set off on a bicycle from the farmhouse where he was billeted and rode a mile or so through the village of Fossalta to the Italian front-line trenches where he distributed morale-boosting supplies of chocolates and cigars.

  Rumours were rife that an offensive was about to begin and Hemingway, impatient to see some action, returned to the lines that night. He talked the soldiers into letting him move up to a forward listening post beside the river. Half an hour past midnight, just after the offensive had begun, an Austrian mortar shell hit the post. In A Farewell to Arms, written ten years later, Hemingway describes the moment of impact:

  There was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind.

  One of the men with him had his legs blown off and died from loss of blood. Though some biographers dispute exactly what happened next, it seems that Hemingway dragged the second wounded man back to the trenches, and was hit in the legs by machine-gun fire as he did so. He was taken to the town hall and then to a dressing station at the local school, before being moved by Fiat ambulance (so uncomfortably he vomited) to a field hospital in Treviso and finally back to Milan.