Hemingway's Paris - An inspiring view..
 

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast"

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, loved Paris. He lived in the capital of France through most of the 1920s; here is where he wrote his first published novel - "The Sun also Rises" - went bar crawling with the Irish author James Joyce, got into countless fights, divorced his first wife and married his second, and became the author that years later would win the Noble prize for literature. Here are some of the places that "Papa" Hemingway used to hang around in those days.

The first time Hemingway visited Paris was on WWI, on his way to the Italian front, in the beginning of 1918. Hemingway and a friend came from America on a ship named "Chicago", while the city was under heavy German bombardment. Hemingway's friend wanted the two to drive straight to the safe hotel, but Hemingway asked the taxi driver to take them as close to the place where the bombs were falling as he can. One of the bombs landed very close to the taxi, chipping away a piece of the facade of Madeleine
Church.


Images and full story at http://tipter.com/trips/hemingway-in-paris

Thanks Paul! Really interesting.

Yes, interesting, I hope you're going to post more.

more more more su ga ve.

Enjoyed your essay and photos. This anecdote was in the NYT yesterday.

"On the day Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation, two trucks screeched to a halt in front of the Ritz. Out jumped several dozen French Resistance fighters, armed to the teeth and led by a burly American with a large mustache. The French “irregulars” were so in awe of the man they referred to as “le grand capitaine” that they had taken to copying what the photographer Robert Capa called his “sailor bear walk” and machine-gun diction, “spitting short sentences from the corners of their mouths.”

The leader swaggered up to the hotel bar and placed his order: “How about 73 dry martinis?” Ernest Hemingway went on to liberate the Ritz of a great deal of alcohol. “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” recalled one of his men."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/bo...ref=books&_r=0

<i>Hemingway's Paris - An inspiring view..
Posted by: paul_mckallouge on May 27, 13 at 6:02am
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast" </i>

Thanks Paul. I needed that today. I am one of the lucky ones. I lived a few blocks from Whitman's Shakespeare and Co. Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" is my favorite of his writings.

Please share more! You sound like a student of Hemingway. Many years ago; okay decades ago, I took a sophomore class on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The focus was on their biographical influences and I would love to know more about Hemingway's time in France.

Love it....Had to go back and re-read A Movable Feast again after finishing The Paris Wife.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the link to that interesting piece about Hemingway – love all those apocryphal details. Last summer I took the PARIS WALKS “Hemingway Walk” which is offered every Friday at 10:30, leaving from the Cardinal Lemonie Metro. This offering became quite popular after the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS.

The English-speaking guide was excellent and also referred to the haunts of James Joyce, George Orwell, and other literary greats along the way. Highly recommended. I describe this walk in my 2012 Paris trip report.

A while back a Fodorite suggested that a great remembrance of Paris is a copy of Hemingway’s A MOVEABLE FEAST purchased at Shakespeare & Co. with their book stamp. Neat, eh?

Closing with that great quote again:

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast"

Pair up "A Moveable Feast" with "The Paris Wife" and you will have an exceptionally enjoyable summer read!

I also read a biography of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife along with A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife. I just wanted to beat the man for leaving her. She sounds lovely. On another note, the new book on Zelda Fitzgerald called Z a novel of Zelda was quite good also.

<i>
latedaytraveler on May 29, 13 at 3:39pm
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the link to that interesting piece about Hemingway – love all those apocryphal details. Last summer I took the PARIS WALKS “Hemingway Walk” which is offered every Friday at 10:30, leaving from the Cardinal Lemonie Metro. This offering became quite popular after the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS.
A while back a Fodorite suggested that a great remembrance of Paris is a copy of Hemingway’s A MOVEABLE FEAST purchased at Shakespeare & Co. with their book stamp. Neat, eh?</i>

Great suggestion. I bought my copy there, used, but don't recall if it had the store stamp. I loaned it to another American expat. She still has it, or has passed it on.

I recently bought another copy subtitled "The Restored Edition" which purports to be more authentic than the original. ?? For those interested it was published in 2009 by Scribner, ISBN 978-1-4165-9131-3.

I just opened it randomly to chapter 8, titled Hunger Was a Good Discipline. The first sentence is "You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people are outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food."

I always had enough to eat when I was in Paris but I can just feel the empty hole in his belly. This book is an epic.

Thanks for the “Hemingway Walk” note. I'll do that on my next visit.

Loved it. Thanks for the link.

Spaarne, here is a section from my Paris trip report describing the HEMINGWAY WALK:

“FRIDAY, JUNE 8: Under threatening skies I walked to the Odeon Metro on Boulevard Saint Germain. My destination was the Cardinal Lemoine station (only 3 stops away) from which the HEMINGWAY PARIS WALKS tour would start. Going from Point A to Point B was much easier than making messy changes. And, oh, the stairs! I don’t have a mobility problem (yet), but can understand how those Metro flights may be irksome to many.

About 30- 35 folks appeared at the appointed time, 10:30 AM. As our guide Chris collected our € 12, he took everyone’s family name and asked how we had heard about Paris Walks. Of course, I said “Fodors.” Correct change is appreciated – no credit cards.

We then proceeded across the street to a quieter space where Chris pointed out part of an old Roman wall and explained how this MOUFFETARD section of Paris in the 5th is one of the oldest parts of the city. Chris was really into Hemingway and opened with Papa’s famous quote:

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Although the MOUFFETARD area is now gentrified and pricey, it was a working man’s neighborhood when Hemingway lived there is the 1920s. The streets were not connected then to the city’s sewer system so green horse-drawn wagons came each morning to clean out the drains – a smelly process that the writer vividly describes in THE MOVEABLE FEAST.

Hemingway was young and in love, so he minimized the inconveniences of the Mouffetard neighborhood and concentrated on its charms away from Montparnasse and other up-scale sections where a more “phony” crowd of American ex-pats lived. According to Chris, some 30,000 Americans resided in Paris around this time, enjoying the good life because the dollar was strong and the booze was cheap - unlike at home during Prohibition.

Chris told us that the popularity of the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS accounts for the large number of people on these Hemingway Paris Walks tours of late. (A similar tour in French had left Cardinal Lemoine just before ours with another guide.) Walking up an incline, we found ourselves in front of the steps of the Church of St Etienne du Mont on the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Genevieve. In the film Gil, the protagonist, was sitting (rather tipsy) on these stairs when the vintage Peugeot drove up and whisked him away into the nightlife and hijinks of literary Paris in the 1920s. (All locations for MIDNIGHT IN PARIS are widely available online.)

When Hemingway returned to Paris in the 1950s, the bartender at the Ritz reminded him that there were several of his crates stored in the basement. These contained his notebooks about life in the 20s with his wife Hadley and such luminaries as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway took these materials and worked on them off and on until his death in 1961. With his fourth wife Mary at the helm, these notes were re-worked and appeared in 1964 as A MOVEABLE FEAST, an immediate success.

(Speaking of the Ritz, Hemingway in full battle dress – you gotta love this guy- accompanied Allied Forces into Paris in August, 1944 to “liberate” the Ritz and check on the security of his friend Sylvia Beach at SHAKESPEARE & CO.)

Chris continued to lead us through winding streets and hills of the Mouffetard, which he called “quintessential Paris.” Many streets are pedestrian only, particularly those around the colorful open air markets. Our guide had the key code to a private residential courtyard where James Joyce wrote much of ULYSSES (with Joyce, I stopped at PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST). Chris said that although Joyce was cantankerous, he and Hem got along famously. Joyce, puny with failing vision, would often start a fight in a café and then ask the robust Hemingway to finish off his opponent. Chris said that Paris Walks had access to the property because the owner realized its historical/literary significance.

From there we proceeded to a 6 Rue du Pot de Fer where George Orwell (one of my very favorite writers) lived when gathering materials for DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. By now we had been walking for about 2 ½ hours. Chris led us through the marketplace and bid us adieu near the Censier-Daubenton Metro – oh, how to return to the Cardinal Lemoine stop? ….”

latedaytraveler,
Thank you for a wonderful report. Do you have a link for the walk you did? There seems to be several that turn up in web searches.

Hi Spaarne,

Thank you for your kind words. Here is the website.

http://www.paris-walks.com/

The tour still starts at Cardinal Lemoine Metro station at 10:30 on Friday mornings. FYB, PARIS WALKS has fewer offerings than LONDON WALKS. But again, I really enjoyed the HEMINGWAY WALK.

In 2002, I returned to Paris for my first trip since 1972. In order to keep jet lag at bay, my first afternoon, no matter the rain, I went out walking and walking from my hotel just off Rue Monge. When I stumbled upon the memorial plaque on Rue Cardinal Lemoine noting Hemingway's apartment, I felt like a million bucks. This happy accident was why I had come to Paris, and why to this day that is my favorite neighborhood in the city.

Cynthia, that's a great memory.