Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 4

  Today I’m going to try to recreate his journey to the trenches and back (without the getting blown up bit) to see what, if anything, is as it was.

  A good start. The farmhouse at which he was billeted still exists. It’s a long three-storey building standing at right angles to the road on the outskirts of Fossalta. A driveway leads to a pair of mossy stone gate-posts, with no gate, which give on to a friendly overgrown garden. Over a door is a shield embossed with an eagle carrying off a lamb, the coat of arms of the Botter family, who have occupied the house continuously since 1711. It’s not difficult to imagine Hemingway, wheeling his bicycle out into the heat of a high summer afternoon, checking one last time that he has everything he needs for the men in the front line.

  My bicycle is not quite the one Hemingway would have used, but not far off. It dates back to the 1920s and has been lovingly looked after by a local doctor. The road runs beside deep ditches with bare and spindly trees on either side, over a frozen canal lined with the shrivelled sinews of winter vines, through the forgettable streets of Fossalta and along the sunken road that runs below the embankment. I have to stand on the pedals to pull myself up to the top.

  There below me is the Piave River, about 200 feet wide and the water not blue, as Hemingway remembers it, but a milky green, only a shade darker than turquoise.

  I can see the bend in the river that Hemingway talks about, but there is a new bridge being built and much of the far bank has been stripped away. The trees that remain are festooned with plastic bags caught on the branches after the last flood. Today the river flows by without much effort, drifting beneath the rickety old pontoon toll-bridge whose days are numbered.

  I park my bicycle against a tall black steel slab with an inscription that marks this as the place where Hemingway was wounded. It displays a much more reverential approach to the past than that adopted by Colonel Cantwell, Hemingway’s hero in Across the River and into the Trees.

  The Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before.

  ‘A poor effort,’ he said aloud to the river and the river bank that were heavy with autumn quiet and wet from the fall rains. ‘But my own.’

  He then has his hero bury a ten thousand lire note. The burying of the note is generally considered to be what Hemingway himself did when he came back here in the 1940s. I try a bit of amateur archaeology and see if I can dig around and find it. I get lots of help from the locals, all of it contradictory. The daughter of the man who runs the toll-bridge points me down the slope and nearer the river. The father of the local journalist who has a collection of unexploded First World War shells in his back garden says this is all wrong and it’s actually buried at a site further up-river opposite a small island. As I’m scraping around in the sand, a lean and bearded local computer expert points unequivocally to the island itself. It’s mid-winter, and though a smudgy sun is reflected off the water, I’m not swimming over there.

  Then it occurs to me that if I really want to be true to the precedent set by Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, I should be burying, not digging.

  I look around for something suitable to leave by the banks of the Piave and there in my shoulder bag is the obvious choice.

  My contribution to the rich undersoil at Fossalta is the Penguin edition of A Farewell to Arms, which helped me to pass my English Literature A’ Level exam in 1959.

  ‘Chasing yesterdays is a bum show,’ Hemingway confided to readers of the Toronto Daily Star after visiting Fossalta in 1922.

  Hemingway was in his element when writing about war - not what caused it, but how it was fought. No wonder he found battlefields in peacetime such a let down. It must be like finding that your childhood home has become a car park - or the hospital where you first fell in love has become a bank.

  Hemingway never flinched from describing the brutality and the destruction of war but he could not write it all off as barbarity. War was a crucible in which something positive could be forged. In battle, acts of loyalty, bravery, and self-sacrifice were everyday occurrences.

  I can’t help thinking of all this as I climb up the vast terraces of the First World War memorial at Redipuglia, an hour’s drive east of Fossalta. Entombed in the hillside below me are the remains of a hundred thousand soldiers of the Italian Third Army who fought and died against the Austrians and Germans in the Great War. It’s been estimated that a million were killed on both sides.

  At the bottom is a monument to the Duke of Aosta, commander of the Third Army; behind him are five black granite blocks marking the remains of his five generals and behind them, rising up the slope, are twenty-two white limestone terraces, each one a hundred and fifty yards long and twenty feet deep. The remains of those who died are set into the walls of these terraces and the leading edge of each terrace is embossed with the endlessly repeated word ‘Presente’.

  It’s impossible not to be affected by it. It is as if the Third Army, far from dead and buried, is lined up on parade, each soldier answering his name, ‘Presente!’ Each one ready to follow his leaders into battle once again.

  It’s a con, but a very good one, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that, like Milan Central, this was commissioned by Mussolini, in an attempt to glorify a bloody past and to erase the uncomfortable memories of the massive defeat the Italians suffered at Caporetto in 1917 (and which is the background for A Farewell to Arms).

  The intention of the Fascist architects is obvious. Anyone climbing these massive terraces soon becomes a mere speck against the stonework, tiny and insignificant before the unifying might of the state.

  In an attempt to preserve my sense of identity I retreat to the cafe at the military museum across the road and order a cappuccino.

  Music is blaring out, but it’s not marching bands. It’s Sheryl Crow.

  After his formative experiences in the First World War, Hemingway didn’t return to Italy for nearly thirty years.

  When he did he was no longer the cocky teenager, he was a forty-something best-selling author and international celebrity.

  He was particularly susceptible to the attentions of Italian aristocrats and in the winter of 1948 he went shooting at the private reserve of Baron Nanyuki Franchetti. Here history began to repeat itself as, thirty years after his love affair with his nurse in Milan, his attention was caught by the only woman at the shoot, an eighteen-year-old called Adriana Ivancic.

  She was wet through and miserable at the end of an unsuccessful day’s shooting and after drying her hair found she had nothing to comb it with. Hemingway produced his own comb (by then he was quite vain about his thinning hair), broke it in two and handed half to her.

  So began, if not a love affair, certainly an infatuation with Adriana, which led to the writing of probably his worst novel, Across the River and into the Trees, which tells the story of an American soldier returning to his old stamping grounds in Italy and falling in love with a nineteen-year-old girl called Renata. The relationship is consummated in a gondola.

  In the New Yorker, E. B. White parodied the book’s style under the title Across the Street and into the Grill’:

  This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Pirnie as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Pirnie, but I commute good.

  I’m told that the son of Baron Franchetti still lives in the family palazzo in Venice, and that is where we head for now.

  Anyone driving into Venice these days knows that it is a journey bereft of visual delights. It can look sensational from a plane, or from the top of the old tower on the island of Torcello, or even from the steps of the railway station, but if you’re in a car you must be prepared to be pushed around the industria
l extremities and squeezed over the bridge from Mestre and into the hell of the multi-storey car park at Piazzale Roma, before you catch a glimpse of anything remotely resembling a canal, Grand or otherwise.

  On this our first night we make a bee-line, as Hemingway used to, for Harry’s Bar.

  Now bars can be good or bad but they are always a hundred times better if you know the barman and he knows you. When Ernest Hemingway entered Harry’s he was doubtless received by Harry himself, shown to his favourite seat (‘They were at their table in the far corner of the bar, where the Colonel had both his flanks covered’) and served a double martini without ever having to ask. From those days come the classic Harry’s Bar stories, such as that of the elderly customer who, having waited an hour for a table, sat down, heaved a sigh of relief, and declared, ‘Now I can die.’

  Harry’s Bar today is merely busy, full of people trying to be Hemingway. Drinks are pre-mixed and served with a dash of boredom. The room itself is small and, when full, is like an overcrowded cabin on a 1950s liner.

  Harry’s Bar has become a global brand - a clock on the wall shows ‘Harry’s Bar time’ in Venice, Buenos Aires and New York, and there is a book for sale called Legends of Harry’s Bar. And that’s maybe the problem. Harry’s Bar was a legend. Now it’s a legend that knows it’s a legend, and that’s very different.

  Breakfast at the Gritti Palace. Or, more accurately, breakfast-time at the Gritti Palace. Guests at this most exclusive of Venetian hotels are filling their faces in the dining-room whilst we, who have feasted more economically at our hostelry opposite the station, are setting up to shoot on the terrace.

  Someone shows me a copy of Il Gazzettino, one of two Venetian morning papers, which carries a report of our filming activities up in Fossalta. The Italian language bathes our mundane efforts in a Dante-esque glow. I come out as ‘Il cinquanta-cinquenne attore Inglese’. It may only mean ‘fifty-five-year-old English actor’, but it makes me sound like the Renaissance.

  We are here to recreate the true story of Hemingway sitting on this very terrace forty-five years ago, reading newspaper reports of his death after a plane crash in Africa. I put down Il Gazzettino and pick up a copy of the New York Daily Mirror for 25 January 1954 with the banner headline: ‘Hemingway Wife, Killed In Air Crash’.

  He wasn’t killed but he was badly hurt, sustaining injuries to his skull, shoulder, spine, liver and kidneys. As soon as he was well enough to travel he took a boat to Europe and, for the second time in his life, found himself recovering from serious injury in Italy.

  Once installed in the best room in the Gritti Palace - first-floor, on the corner, with balconies - he set about his treatment with a vengeance. The treatment consisted of a little luxury and a lot of champagne. But though Hemingway was an expert at recovery, his friend A. E. Hotchner, summoned to see him at the Gritti, could see that this time, things were different.

  When I came into his room he was sitting in a chair by the windows, reading, the inevitable white tennis visor (ordered by the dozen from Abercrombie & Fitch) shading his eyes … What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months … some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out of him.

  It didn’t stop Hemingway playing baseball with friends in his room. The ball, a pair of tightly rolled woollen socks, was hit so hard that it smashed clean through one of the windows and out into the street. According to Hotchner, the manager pointed out that no one had ever played baseball in any of the rooms throughout the 300-year-old history of the Gritti. For this reason he had decided ‘to reduce Signor Hemingway’s bill by ten per cent’.

  Baron Franchetti, the man who can tell me more about Hemingway’s return to Italy, has agreed to see me. The address is as it should be, a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal.

  Though it has turned cold, and there are ominous reports of the worst winter weather for a decade heading this way, the Venetian sunlight, low and strong, highlights the delicate details on the buildings as we head up the Grand Canal. I’ve always found Venice absurdly theatrical and today it’s more like a stage-set than ever. Above us, figures in eighteenth-century tricorn hats, black cloaks and snow-white face masks are crossing the Accademia Bridge. This is the first day of the two-week carnival, an ancient festival that disappeared for 200 years, before being revived in 1975. Those in full costume are, sadly, a small minority compared to those wearing anoraks, sweat pants and floppy jester hats bought outside the station.

  The palace of the Franchettis is approached via a narrow courtyard from which rises the world’s smallest elevator, which disgorges the occupant into a cramped passageway, which gives on to a long, gloomy room at the far end of which is a pair of glassed doors which open on to a huge and dazzling panorama of the Grand Canal.

  Alberto Franchetti is a slim, slope-shouldered man around my own age. The word languid could have been coined for him. He speaks softly and moves with a feline grace and an unmistakably aristocratic lack of urgency.

  I ask him what I should call him. Should it be Signor Franchetti, or perhaps Alberto? He purses his lips gently, as if acknowledging some distant, unspecific pain.

  ‘Perhaps, Barone?’ he suggests.

  After this opening skirmish he is courteous and helpful. He lights a cigarette and we stand on the balcony and talk about Venice until it’s too cold and we have to come in. The Grand Canal has changed, he says, registering distaste. Not one of the hundred or so palazzos along it is still occupied by the family who built it. It’s noisy with all the boats and the continuous activity. His mother was the last person to keep her bedroom on the Grand Canal side of the palazzo.

  Aware of the short time we have, I try to deflect him from the plight of the nobility and in the direction of Hemingway. He recalls him with faint amusement, protesting regularly that he was only ten at the time.

  Hemingway was ‘very informal, very American’, he tells me. He wore clothes that seemed marvellously exotic to a European war baby, albeit a nobleman’s son, flying-jackets and big fur-lined boots and check shirts. He would be totally at ease with the servants and throw his arms round any pretty girl in a way which was unheard-of in structured Italian society.

  ‘He drove around in a limousine. A big Buick! In that time, no one in Italy, not even Giovanni Agnelli [the head of Fiat] drove around in a limousine.’

  The Barone pauses, leans forward, extinguishes his cigarette and speaks with soft intensity.

  ‘He lived the legend, you see, he lived the legend.’

  After an hour together we not only part on Michael and Alberto terms but he has invited us to come to the last duck-shoot of the season and see for ourselves what Hemingway liked so much about this particularly Venetian activity. He impresses upon me that duck-shooting is a serious business, with rituals and traditions stretching back five centuries. Its rules and regulations are essentially feudal, rural and zealously observed. Shooting takes place at dawn but the preparations begin the night before. I am given an address, driving instructions, and warned to bring very warm clothing, and a jacket and tie. Oh, and no girlfriends, it’s male only.

  We find ourselves driving once again across the flat, gridlike scenery east of Venice, beyond the Piave, and across the Livenza, before turning off the autostrada towards the town of Caorle on the Adriatic coast.

  Just before the town we turn into a narrow road which becomes a track which follows a network of irrigation ditches through an increasingly deserted agricultural landscape until it fetches up at a gabled, red-brick two-storey building that looks like a country railway station. This is the casone, the hunting lodge, at which the shooting party will soon assemble.

  Before we left Venice the Barone briefed me about the formalities. Guests arrive around seven in the evening, drink and talk until it’s time to eat and drink, then, after eating and drinking, gather around an open log fire to play card games, tell jokes and drink. After that there are late-night drinks followed by various manly pranks, like making ap
ple-pie beds for fellow guests, followed by maybe two hours’ oblivion before being woken at four for breakfast. After the morning shoot, the party returns to the casone to eat and drink before going home.

  I am the first guest to arrive. The staff flit about adjusting, preparing and table-laying. I nose around. The buildings have been quite extensively tarted up in reproduction rustic style with shiny new brick and timber-clad walls on which hang old prints of hunters at work or lovingly painted depictions of the various kinds of duck they kill. The gun-rack in the hallway is predictable but not the stuffed black bear (shot in Romania) that rears up at the bottom of the stairs, nor the leopard skin stretched across one wall. I learn later that these were both victims of Alberto’s father, Nanyuki, who used to own this lodge and estate.

  Car wheels crunch on the gravel outside and the guests begin to assemble. They are not as intimidatingly correct as I had feared, in fact our host is not a nobleman but a chicken millionaire from Vicenza.

  There are ten of us for dinner and we barely fill half the great oak dining table. We eat by candlelight. All three courses are fish - apparently, it is not good luck to serve red meat before a shoot. Everything is locally caught and absolutely fresh, my host assures me, apart from the prawns which turn out to be from the USA. (They’re actually a lot more palatable than the rubbery local squid which defy all attempts at mastication.) The sea-food risotto and the local eel and gilt-head are beautifully prepared and Pinot Grigio is liberally poured. A local millionaire called Giuseppe, who has in his time shot everything, including polar bear, waxes wonderfully indignant about the Green movement and is apoplectic about our own royal consort.

  ‘Prince Philip,’ he shouts, veins bulging, banging the table, ‘head of World Wildlife Fund, kills two hundred pheasant in a day!’