Hemingway Adventure (1999) Read online

By midnight the party is beginning to break up and some people are actually talking of going home before tomorrow’s shoot.

  Alberto seems regretful.

  ‘There used to be some fun when everyone stayed here, eels in the bed, naughty pictures upstairs. No women,’ he adds wistfully.

  ‘No women at all.’

  *

  Up before dawn. It is bitterly, bitterly cold, but the skies are clear and the stars abundant.

  Slip a copy of Across the River and into the Trees into my pocket, for Hemingway’s descriptions of a duck-shoot on the frozen lagoon are amongst his most unforgettable images.

  Outside the casone the flat-bottomed boats are ready for the hunters. I’m to shoot with Alberto, though not literally, as I’m very fond of ducks and anyway the hunting party would surely not appreciate a novice in such a serious endeavour. Alberto shrugs. ‘Hemingway did not take it so seriously. He would bring a book to read and a bottle of whisky’

  Well, now I don’t feel so bad. Alberto checks his Beretta 12-gauge shotgun one last time and we clamber into the boat. A flock of wooden decoy ducks is gathered in the bows, and our boatman sits in the stern with his dog, which will later retrieve the fallen ducks.

  ‘In bocca al lupo!’ they shout to each other. For an alarming moment I think they may be calling for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In fact it means ‘In the mouth of the wolf,’ the traditional duck-shooters’ equivalent of the actors’ ‘Break a leg!’

  Our boats set out in convoy, through the tall grass of the marshes, towards the lakes where our hides are located. This lagoon area, called the Valle, was created and laid out for private duck-shooting and, unlike much of the Veneto, it remains unencroached, wild and mysterious.

  As the sun comes up we can see the snow-covered flanks of Monte Cavallo, fifty or sixty miles north, bathed in the rich pink glow of dawn. This makes Alberto uncomfortable. The air is too still, too clear. Duck-shooting is best done in foul weather when the wind out at sea drives the ducks back inland, over the lagoon.

  Meanwhile the boatmen are standing and heaving on their oars. I can see Hemingway’s words in Across the River springing to life.

  It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boat-man’s oar.

  I’d never been that comfortable with ‘rubbery’ ice, but this morning I can see how well the metaphor works. The new ice does indeed bend and flex, clinging on to the oar as it enters the water and sticking to it as it leaves.

  Having secured footage of oars and keels and picturesquely cracking ice, the director is happy and the boatmen are able to ship their oars and pull the outboards into life. I can see this pains a traditionalist like the Barone.

  ‘Motor-boats only came in the late sixties, you know.’ A smile flickers at the corner of his mouth. ‘Of course we all thought it was the end of the world. Like we did when the electricity pylons came in the fifties.’

  After about half an hour the narrow channel broadens into a lake, in the middle of which is a tiny artificial island with two plastic barrels sunk into it. Each one is around four and a half feet deep and allows room for the swivel-seat shooting stools.

  Alberto and I are put ashore and lower ourselves into our respective barrels. Our boatman throws the decoys into the water beside us then reaches into a cage and produces a number of real ducks which he drops unceremoniously overboard. These are the vivi, live ducks, tethered in the water, whose plaintive quacks will hopefully attract their over-flying colleagues within range of Alberto’s Beretta.

  Alberto is no mean gun - only last week he bagged forty or more. But today things are slow, and he produces his duck-whistle to augment the cries of the vivi. Though it looks deceptively simple the whistle can, in the hands of an expert, produce all sorts of different sounds for the different breeds.

  All we need now are the ducks. Everything else flies over - geese, swans, cormorant, but the ducks are giving us a wide berth. The one promising flock swings round and heads up from the south towards us.

  ‘Get down!’ cries Alberto. But the flock veers away at the last minute. ‘Probably mallard,’ comes Alberto’s disappointed voice from the barrel next to me.

  Apparently mallard, being a native of these parts, are canny and used to hunters, whereas other ducks, from the sticks of Eastern Europe, passing over on their annual migration to the lakes of Central Africa, are less likely to suspect the presence of men pretending to be small islands.

  As time passes, Alberto tends to embellish the qualities of his adversary - ‘Ducks are very intelligent, they see and hear well’ - at the expense of his own species: ‘Who is that by the camera wearing a red jacket? … Who is that idiot standing up?’ But most wounding of all is that the chicken millionaire in a nearby barrel has bagged four already.

  ‘His ducks are calling well,’ admits Alberto.

  Certainly our vivi, having got over their initial indignation at being thrown in the water, seem to be quite happy, dipping for fish and not attracting anyone.

  So we wait and call and wait and watch. Alberto turns out to be a good companion, and his wide and sympathetic knowledge of country matters bears out the point that no one knows or cares more about the habits of animals than those who kill them. I learn, for instance, that if the female of a pair of ducks is shot, the male will always come back to look for her, whereas a female will never come back for a male.

  Alberto likes me because I’m not impatient. I don’t like to tell him that I have followed Hemingway’s example and brought a book to read, as well as a hip-flask. And opened both.

  After an hour and a half there is sudden excitement. A flock is turning towards us, only fifty yards away and coming in low. To encourage them, Alberto is frantically giving his widgeon on the whistle. Then, just as they seem to be taking avoiding action, I hear a shot followed by the thwack of a bird skidding across the ice. A spent cartridge flies out of the magazine, narrowly missing my left ear. Alberto looks relieved. The duck flaps for a while and lies still.

  And that’s all we get. Though we remain in the barrels for a hopeful half-hour more, it seems the curse of Palin, that so frustrated our trout-fishing in Michigan, has struck again.

  Back at the casone the mood is subdued. No one in the party even shot double figures. Various theories are advanced. Weather too settled, end of the season, so ducks wiser. Alberto tries to make us feel better.

  ‘Hemingway was not so good, you know.’ He peels off a balaclava, smooths his hair back and goes on. ‘At the end of the shoot, all the ducks would be arranged in the yard in front of the house, so everyone could see what everyone had caught. And it was a little embarrassing sometimes, because someone would have sixty, another fifty, and Hemingway only four.’

  ‘Four?’

  Alberto nods, and I detect a hint of barely suppressed satisfaction. ‘He was not a good shot but he was a great character.’

  The newspapers this morning lead with stories of unheard-of weather conditions. Winds from Siberia, snow in Sicily.

  Oddly, the worst weather is in the south. Perhaps it’s too cold to snow up here. Instead we have bright, crisp sunshine as our train pulls out through the straggling northern suburbs of Milan, heading for the lakes and the mountains.

  Italy has been a revelation. I have seen where Hemingway shot and was shot at. I’ve drunk in his bars and sat in his hotel. I have walked the cities where he fell in love. I’ve seen where the legend of the warrior began and met those who saw the start of his final decline.

  But that is to jump ahead.

  When Hemingway first left Italy he was nineteen. A Farewell to Arms would not be written for another ten years. He was, however, already somebody special. He had been to war, he had recovered from a bomb blast that had left 227 separate wounds in his legs and he would go back to America as a war hero. ‘Worst Shot-Up Man in US Returns Home’ shouted the Chicago American as he arrived in New York. The beautiful woman who’d
nursed him was in love with him and the Italians had given him a medal. And all because he had followed his own gut instinct, made his own moves, wriggled out of the loving, stifling grasp of his family.

  He tried to adjust to life back home, but once the war-hero adulation had worn off and his beautiful nurse had written to tell him she’d found someone else, the old frustration set in.

  The next time Hemingway left for Europe it was not six months but nine years before he came back to live in America.

  Sudden blackness. Into the tunnel and under the Alps. We shall be in Paris in another four hours.

  PARIS

  ‘Then there was the bad weather.’

  This is how Hemingway begins A Moveable Feast - his fond tribute to one of the world’s most beautiful cities. And it gets worse. In the sort of paragraph which puts travel agents out of business, he waxes lyrical over ‘the smell of dirty bodies’, ‘a sad, evilly run cafe where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together’, and leaves lying ‘sodden in the rain’.

  From such uncompromising beginnings Hemingway fashions one of the most tasty, tantalising and original glimpses of the city of Paris, without once having to resort to the word ‘romantic’.

  The irony is that a book which celebrates the promise of a young man with a life ahead of him was completed in the year Hemingway killed himself and published after his death.

  A Moveable Feast is a bittersweet legacy, but amongst the bitterness (directed almost entirely at those who were once his friends) is a fine evocation of what it was like to be young and starting out on an awfully big adventure. How much of it still rings true remains to be seen.

  As we unload our filming equipment outside a hotel in the rue Delambre on this fading February afternoon there is one thing he was absolutely right about. The weather is lousy.

  Our hotel is in the heart of Montparnasse where Hemingway sites are as frequent as the trees on the street. Almost anywhere Ernest blew his nose qualifies for a mention in one or other of the guidebooks.

  I decide this first morning to take an early orientation course, a Hemingway trail of my own. Trying to plan it on a map is like one of those children’s puzzles where you have to join up the dots to make a donkey so I give that up and simply turn right out of the hotel and head for the nearest breakfast.

  This being Paris, the first place of refreshment is about twenty yards away.

  Disconcertingly though, it’s Italian. Even more disconcertingly it’s called the Auberge de Venise, and its walls are decorated with gondolas and palazzos and views of the Grand Canal. I half expect to see Barone Franchetti lighting up on one of the balconies.

  In fact this espresso-fragrant establishment ties together Hemingway’s Venice and Hemingway’s Paris rather neatly, for this was once the Dingo Bar, and it was here that Ernest first met Scott Fitzgerald.

  He had come into the Dingo Bar in the Rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall pleasant man who was with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton baseball and had never heard of Dunc Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly and I much preferred him to Scott.

  A Moveable Feast

  I dip my biscuit into the cappuccino and shut my eyes and try to engineer some psychic link-up between myself and two of the most celebrated American authors of the century - and Dunc, of course - but all I get is the bronchial roar of the coffee machine and a request to move up as the place is getting busy and I’ve been here twenty minutes.

  Other ghosts linger in the Auberge de Venise a.k.a. the Dingo Bar. Hemingway used to drink here with an English aristocrat called Lady Duff Twysden (born Dorothy Smurth-waite) and her lover Pat Guthrie. They became his models for Brett Ashley, one of the best, least sentimental of Hemingway’s female creations, and Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises. Maybe these were the worthless characters he was referring to.

  A couple of doors down the street was the publisher of a remarkable book called Kiki’s Memoirs, the saucy reminiscences of the lover of Man Ray, illustrated with her own drawings and copious nude photographs. Hemingway was persuaded to write an introduction to the book (something he did very rarely). Disguised in his playful anti-grammatical style was a sharp epitaph on the life that had once drawn him to these busy streets.

  Kiki became monumental and Montparnasse became rich, prosperous, brightly lighted, dancinged, shredded-wheated, grape-nuts-ed or grapenutted (take your choice, gentlemen, we have all these breakfast foods now) and they sold caviar at the Dome, well, the Era for what it was worth, and personally I don’t think it was worth much, was over.

  That was written in 1929. By then Paris had gone sour for Hemingway. Many of his friends were alienated by their portrayals in The Sun Also Rises, and his own output had become bogged down by a novel, provisionally titled Jimmy Breen, which was never to be published.

  Eight years earlier it was all optimism, and as I turn out of the rue Delambre and leave behind the celebrated cafes of Montparnasse - the Rotonde, Select and the Dome, I find myself in a place where Hemingway seemed unequivocally happy, the Jardin du Luxembourg, where in the winter ‘the trees were sculpture without their leaves’, and the fountains still blow in the bright light. Hemingway had so little money in those early years that he used to walk through here to avoid passing restaurants or cafes. Like much of the central area of Paris, it still seems anchored in the past.

  I can reasonably believe, then, that Hemingway would have seen pretty much what I see around me as I walk the neatly brushed gravel paths, out of the western gate of the Jardin through a formidable girdle of black iron railings, across the rue Guynemer and run the gauntlet of six-storey apartment blocks that flank both sides of the rue de Fleurus. He would have stopped most times at Number 27, for this is where Gertrude Stein lived.

  She was one of the contacts that Sherwood Anderson had given Hemingway when he left the USA for Paris just before Christmas 1921, and she proved to be the most influential. They became good friends and she provided him with the fresh, invigorating, modern ideas about art and life that he had never found in Oak Park. She encouraged a style of writing that relied less on traditional syntax and fluent, fully rounded sentences and more on the overall feel and emotion of language. (Not everyone was as taken with it as Hemingway. The writer Wyndham Lewis called it her ‘infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter’.) Literature, she felt, could learn from art and something like Cezanne’s technique of painstakingly applied repetition of line and brushstroke to build up an image could be applied to the written word.

  ‘He wanted to write like Cezanne painted,’ Hemingway has his alter ego, Nick Adams, saying in a short story called ‘On Writing’.

  He took Stein seriously as a teacher (though he did tell Hadley, his wife, that he thought her breasts ‘must have weighed ten pounds apiece’) and she took him seriously as a writer, encouraging him to give up the journalism that was paying his way in Paris and concentrate on fiction.

  It was Gertrude Stein who recommended he go to see bullfighting in Spain and taught him to cut his wife’s hair. It was at her soirees that he met writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and artists like Picasso and Juan Gris. But she paid scant attention to Hadley, and the relentless championing of her husband may have contributed to the tensions that broke up the Hemingways’ marriage four years after they arrived in Paris.

  I try to ignore the February drizzle as I walk, early on a Saturday morning, along one of the streets, huddled in by apartment buildings, that runs up the hill from Notre Dame and the River Seine to the once poor and anonymous area which was the Hemingways’ first permanent address in Paris.

  Thanks to A Moveable Feast we know quite a bit about their home at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine. We know it was on the third floor, and was what they called a cold-water flat, with a squat toilet outside on the landing. This was not connected to a main drainage system and the sewage had to be p
umped into a horse-drawn tank and taken away. Coal-dust bricks called boulets had to be carried up the stairs for heating and cooking. It had a view on to cobbled streets along which goats were led by a goatherd with a pipe, with which he alerted those wanting fresh milk.

  There are no cobbles any more on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine, or goats, as far as I can see, but the tall, plain murky white facade of Number 74 is still there. It’s no longer anonymous. A sign hangs above a ground floor doorway announcing the presence of ‘Agence de Voyages - Under Hemingway’s‘ (Under Hemingway’s Travel Agency). There is a plaque on the wall marking Hemingway’s presence here, though it was not put up until 1994, thirty-three years after his death.

  We’re admitted by a stout old concierge with wispy hair, a floral apron and a tired old dog. She says her parents knew the Hemingways, and produces a photo. Then she indicates a steep corkscrew of a staircase, on which we, like Ernest and Hadley before us, toil up to the third floor.

  The Hemingway apartment is once again occupied by an American in his twenties. John, a Bostonian who works for the business consultancy firm Arthur Andersen, is friendly, if a little weary of welcoming devotees. He says that around a dozen people ring the doorbell every week and the Tokyo Broadcasting System has beaten us to it by three days.

  He lets us come in and look around the tiny area which, thanks to tongue and groove boarding on the walls and Artex cement work on the ceiling, has absolutely no semblance of period atmosphere. I do get quite excited when he tells me it’s up for sale, though I have to remind myself that it is no more than a room, oblong and quite cramped, with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom.

  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.