In a Trunk at the Hôtel Ritz 1930

In 1956, Ernest Hemingway was having lunch at the Hôtel Ritz with his friend A.E. Hotchner. Charles Ritz, the chairman of the hotel, came to their table and mentioned that there was a trunk in the hotel storage room that the author had left there in 1930.

Hemingway didn’t remember leaving it there 26 years ago. He did recall a custom-made Louis Vuitton trunk that he had and misplaced. After lunch, Hemingway opened the trunk and found it filled with clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting, fishing and skiing equipment, and letters. But it was some notebooks at the bottom of the trunk that excited Hemingway.

Hemingway had been journaling regularly when he and his first wife, Hadley, had lived in Paris in the 1920s. These journals covered those years when he was a poor, struggling writer hanging out with other expatriate artists and writers. The crowd included Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein, who would call them collectively "The Lost Generation."

Hemingway didn't jump into using the journals right away. He had them typed in 1957, and then started working on what he referenced as the “Paris book” over the next years. It turned out to be his last book.

His physical and mental health was declining and he fell into depressions and tried suicide, finally succeeding in ending it all in 1961.

“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.”

His widow, Mary, arranged to have the memoir published posthumously. The publisher was calling it "Paris Sketches," which sounded like less-than-serious writing. Hotchner, who had been there when the trunk was opened, recalled that Hemingway had once referred to Paris as “a moveable feast,” and suggested that as a title. Mary agreed and A Moveable Feast became the book’s official title.

There were other posthumous books from the Hemingway estate that had been incomplete at his death, but A Moveable Feast was the book that was closest t finished at his death.

A revised version of the memoir was published in 2009 edited by Seán Hemingway, the author’s grandson from his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. Seán had issues with some of the changes Mary Hemingway had made to the manuscript.

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money,
nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing
of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Hemingway's book had a resurgence in popularity in Paris, after the November 2015 terrorist attack. Paris est une fête was selling as many as 500 copies a day and mourners left copies of the memoir along with flowers at informal memorials all around the Bataclan concert hall.

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.

But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring,
it was as though a young person died for no reason.”

Drinking Your Way Through Hemingway's Fiction

Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia, Cuba 1946

Alcoholic drinks and Ernest Hemingway go together in his life and his writing. What did Papa actually drink in real life? You'd think with his tough guy image there would be a lot of whiskey and beer, but he had a penchant for cocktails. Despite what they may have you think at Sloppy Joe's in Key West, he didn't like a mojito or sweet drinks. He did like daiquiris, at least during his Islands in the Stream period. Supposedly, he downed 17 in one sitting at the El Floridita in Cuba.

You could write a bartender's guide to hsi drinks - and someone did. To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion (playing off of Papa's novel To Have and Have Not which was made into a film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) is a kind of mixing manual for for Hemingway enthusiasts who might want to drink their way through his fiction along with the characters.

While reading Islands in the Stream, you can try the two recipes included for the Floridita's "E. Henmiway (sic) Special" and the "Papa Doble." Both are daiquiris minus the sugar. Thomas Hudson in that book also likes a gumlet.

Frederic in A Farewell to Arms liked a "civilized" martini. (1 3/4 oz. Gordon's gin to 1/8 oz. Noilly Prat vermouth)

    To Have and Have Another

In the Sun Also Rises, Jake goes with a Calvados-and-gin combo called a Jack Rose.

Nick Adam in the short stories like "Three Day Blow" drinks plain old whiskey, which, according to the guide, is probably scotch. Scotch and soda was a favorite of Hemingway. Bourbon doesn't show up in the fiction but EH drank some Old Forester in real life. Author Greene speculates that he "decided to leave bourbon to Faulkner."

There are plenty of boozy myths about Hemingway's drinking. Hemingway did not invent the Bloody Mary, though a story persists that it was a drink he favored because it hid the booze from "that bloody wife, Mary,'

And he liked the un-Hemingwayish White Lady (gin, Cointreau, lemon juice) and champagne and champagne cocktails (scotch & champagne).


The book is full of background on the various drinks, ingredients, their histories and the fictional or characters connected to them.

On this cold, winter day, I might just go on an armchair gondola ride in Venice with my imagined Italian countess and sip a few Negronis while rereading Across The River And Into The Trees. As straightforward as a Hemingway sentence - one part gin, one part sweet vermouth, and one part Campari, stir, and serve over ice.

The Hemingway Patrol

Hemingway on Pilar

Today is the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, IL

Hemingway's longtime publisher, Scribner, reissued all his novels a few years ago and books continue to be published about him. The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats Aboard the Pilar was one I read a few summer ago. It is about that time in his life when he was itching to play a part in World War II.

Using his his own ship, the Pilar, which was designated by the military as a Q-Ship, he and his crew set out to monitor German submarine activity off Cuba and the Florida coast.I don't know exactly what anyone would have expected them to do if they actually encountered a sub with this fishing boat. There's a section of Islands in the Stream (the novel and the movie version) that deals with this period in his life.

Hemingway did get to be a war a war correspondent for Collier's magazine, and observed the D-Day invasion from offshore on a landing craft. (Apparently, his wife of that time, Martha Gellhorn, upstaged him by making it on shore on June 7 disguised as a nurse. I read more recently about his meetup with J.D. Salinger during that time.

I also reread A Moveable Feast which was re-released in a Restored Edition. It's not a novel but it is one of my favorite Hemingway books. When Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, the manuscript of this memoir wasn't finished. (No title, introduction, or final chapter.) and it wasn't published until 1964 after his fourth wife, Mary, and an editor put together the pieces.

It's about when he was young and writing in the Paris of the 1920s. When I first read it in college, I loved the talk about writing and Paris and the food and the drinking, but hated his unkind treatment of his "friend" F. Scott Fitzgerald who was another literary hero of mine.

Actually, he's also pretty rough on Gertrude Stein and Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He had it in for rich people then and he seemed still attached to his first wife Hadley.

In reading about this new edition, I discovered that the new editors are Pauline's grandson, Sean Hemingway, and his uncle, Patrick Hemingway (Pauline's son). I'm guessing that Pauline gets better treatment this time out, though I don't know if that was Ernest's intent.

On the Amazon website, they link to two pdf files of the original handwritten manuscript. I like this section that contains his idea about writing "one true sentence."

see the full pages

I know a number of people who really dislike Hemingway as a man and as a writer. Most of them are women who have issues with his macho image and his female characters. I have liked his writing, especially the short stories, since I was about 14 and wanted to be a writer.

I actually feel bad for Hemingway. I think he was really misunderstood. I think he became a victim of his own celebrity and began to play the role of Hemingway in the same way as other celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe.

He was a heavy drinker, an alcoholic in his later years, suffered from manic depression. He was actually given electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic which he blamed for his memory loss. It saddens me to think that for someone like him who loved to write, who needed to write, could not go on if he could not write.



Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, but on a memorial outside town overlooking Trail Creek is a eulogy he actually wrote for a friend (Gene Van Guilder) but that applies well to his own life.

Best of all he loved the fall

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

Leaves floating on the trout streams

And above the hills

The high blue windless skies

Now he will be a part of them forever

Looking for a Happy Ending to Hemingway's 'A Farewell to Arms’

Page 1 draft by Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 and made a comment that has either  inspired or frustrated frustrated novelists ever since. He said that the final lines of his wartime classic, A Farewell to Arms, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.” When asked in the interview with George Plimpton what had eluded him, Hemingway said, “Getting the words right.”

We didn't know what those other endings looked like (and some may have suspected that he made the whole thing up) but the newest edition of A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition is the 1929 classic plus all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book.

I'm not sure if the new edition would have helped Pat in the very fine film (and the book The Silver Linings Playbook: A Novel).  Pat is on a plan of self-improvement that includes reading the works of American literature that his wife teaches her students. A Farewell to Arms pisses him off and he takes it out personally on Hemingway (also Sylvia Plath). He wants happy endings. 



I know Pat would have been more pissed with the nada ending: ”That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”

One ending (#34 of the actual 47 that have been found) was suggested by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The world breaks everyone, and those it does not break it kills. It kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

At Home With Writers

one of Hemingway's work spaces

I have always had a fascination for the spaces that authors use for their writing. The rooms, the desks, the tools and the things that surround them are interesting to see. I think it was the old Saturday Evening Post magazine that ran a regular page on writers' desks at one time. I suppose that when I was younger, I thought that some secrets about their writing must be hiding in those spaces.

Devers

I discovered at least one other person who is interested in this. A.N. Devers is the founder and editor of Writers' Houses, a website dedicated to exploring writers’ spaces and the literary pilgrimage.

She says that she created her site dedicated to documenting writers’ houses because of "a growing obsession, since childhood, with books, travel, and making connections between a writer’s work and place. It also came from a realization that there wasn’t a comprehensive resource online, or in print, that helped literary pilgrims find their way."

You can search on the site by author, city or state. In my own NJ, there were only two listed. One is the Walt Whitman house (which I have visited) and the other is the home of James Fenimore Cooper (which I have not seen).

I wouldn't call my trip to Whitman's home a "pilgrimage" though I suppose that's what these trips might be for some people. I went with my friend Steve and the docent guide mistakenly assumed we were gay because, according to him, the house is a kind of pilgrimage stop for gays.

I found a piece Devers wrote online about two literary home visits. First she describes a visit in Georgia to Flannery O'Connor's home.

This past August, I bought, for two dollars, a small plastic jar of dirt from the gift shop located inside Flannery O’Connor’s house in Milledgeville, Georgia. For the same price I also bought a jar of pond water. At some point, the dirt and pond water had been procured from the grounds of Andalusia, the O’Connor family’s 544-acre farm. On my way to the car after my tour, I picked up a small feather from a peafowl. The Andalusia Foundation recently acquired three peafowl: two peahens and a peacock, no doubt because their visitors were clamoring for them. The peafowl are not descendants of O’Connor’s original forty to fifty birds. Even though I knew this, I placed the feather on my car’s dashboard. Andalusia was the sixth of fourteen writers’ houses I visited on a ten-day road trip across the American South. At some point during the trip, the feather blew out of the car window. I regretted not being more careful with it.

Before I raided the gift shop, I stood behind a rope looking into Flannery’s first-floor bedroom, which was also her writing room. Her crutches were the first things I saw—they are the first things the visitor is meant to see. It is an evocative tableau: her desk and typewriter are situated close to the window, her crutches propped up against a wardrobe behind the desk. But unlike much of the decor in the house, the desk and the typewriter weren’t Flannery’s. I only know this because earlier that day I had seen the real artifacts down the highway a few miles in an exhibit room at her alma mater, Georgia College & State University. It didn’t matter much to me that the desk and typewriter weren’t authentic. Perhaps I didn’t care because I had already seen them. But more likely it’s because I’ve grown used to the reproduction furniture and other anachronisms of the houses of dead writers open to the public. I suppose in that way I am a sympathetic literary pilgrim.

So why visit the homes of the literary departed? She mentions some reasons: hope for proximity, epiphany, trivia and biographical data, an attempt to pull images from our memory of favorite novels, stories, and poems and match them to rooms and objects, to ask questions about the person and place and to separate fact from myth.

One author I would make the pilgrimage for is Ernest Hemingway. He offers several places to visit. His Key West home is the most popular writers’ house in America.

...the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, plays fast and loose with stories and anecdotes from Hemingway’s life. The house is a privately owned and operated business that has brilliantly capitalized on three things in the following order: people love cats, people love Ernest Hemingway, and Ernest Hemingway loved cats. The story goes like this: the scores of cats that have lived over the decades on the property in Key West are direct descendants of Hemingway’s original cats, including Snowball, a six-toed cat who was given to Hemingway as a gift from a sea captain. When I visited in 2008, the Key West guide showed off a picture of Hemingway’s young son Patrick, holding a snow-white kitten in the yard. But in a 1972 Los Angeles Times article by Charles Hillinger, Ernest Hemingway’s last wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, states, “Ernest…never kept animals at the Key West house during the last twenty years of his life. He never stayed at Key West long enough to bother with animals after his divorce from Pauline.” In a 1994 interview with the Miami Herald, Patrick Hemingway stated the cats in the picture were his neighbors’ who wrote in to the paper to confirm. The cat myth began with Bernice Dickson, who bought the Hemingway house in 1964 and opened the estate as a tourist attraction. At some point she started breeding and selling six-toed cats, even sending them through the mail, and claiming, “they are a special Asiatic breed that Mr. Hemingway had when he was here.”

EH reading in Cuba

Supposedly, Hemingway’s family had "sour grapes because they’d failed to keep the lucrative property." Hemingway wrote letter from abroad asking about the animals at Key West - but was referring to his peacocks (which Flannery O’Connor also owned - maybe I should get a few of those...)

I could also make the journey to his birthplace in Oak Park, IL.

When the Hemingway family left that house, they built a new family home at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue, where Ernest spent his high school years. (This second home, while owned by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation, is not yet open to the general public. Possible stop #4)





video of his birthplace in Oak Park, IL

Papa's beloved Pilar

The third stop would be tougher to get to, but might be the most interesting. Hemingway loved his Havana home, La Finca Vigia, and would have stayed there till the end of his life if it wasn't for the political issues (and the big fish becoming harder to find in the Gulf). His beloved boat, Pilar, is kept there.