Hemingway’s Paris​

It’s easy today to forget that the Ernest Hemingway who arrived in Paris with his first wife Hadley was an unknown. The couple spent their first night in the city in Room 14 of the Hotel Jacob, now the Hotel d’ Angleterre. The room is unchanged and has to be reserved far in advance. The Hemingways quickly had to adjust their lives to a very meagre budget and moved to the Hotel’s polar opposite, a cheerless apartment at 74 Rue Du Cardinal Lemoine, which had neither hot water or a private toilet. If Hadley ever complained about their surroundings to family or friends, it’s not recorded.

In Paris, Hemingway went hungry for the first time in his life. He’d arrived in Paris with a reverence for the Russian novelists, especially Tolstoy, the action stories of Jack London, the works of Conrad, which he said he saved up like wine, and James Joyce, who he was anxious to meet. He had also his training as a newspaperman, who’d been molded in the newsroom to write short, declarative sentences that briefly told the reader all without wasting words. The irony of a news account, he realized, was more powerful when it was implied.

A hungry man in Paris avoids streets with bakery smells and Hemingway often walked in the Jardin du Luxembourg, or went to view works by Cezanne at the Louvre. Hunger gnawing at his stomach, he wondered if Cezanne had painted, and succeeded with a canvas because the artist was hungry. He rented a small room atop a hotel near his apartment, to write. It was unbearably cold.

Warm in winter was the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, then located at the 12 Rue De l’Odeon. In “A Moveable Feast”  Hemingway remembers his first meeting with its owner Sylvia Beach, who had founded the bookstore in 1919 and lent him all the books he wanted, despite his shabby address. He won her with his shy, Midwestern manners.

To write decently and with some comfort, he frequented cafes where he would be left alone to work with an order of cafe au lait. Then as now, the French revere artists and writers and give them a place in society that Americans can only dream of. I was at a dinner party once and the woman to my left asked me what I did for a living. When I told her I was a poet, she asked, “But what do you do?”

Hemingway loved Les Deux Magots, and especially La Closerie des Lilas where:

“I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.​”

The Hemingways left France briefly – Hadley wanted their infant  born in North America – then quickly returned ​to Paris, with their son, Jack, called Bumby. His father  was on fire: while Gertrude Stein sat s​p​hin​x​-​like in her apartment​, while Zelda and Scott  Fitzgerald caroused all night, Hemingway planted himself at the Closerie and in a six week sprint, finished his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises”. Overnight, he was famous. Americans were intoxicated by its account of The Lost Generation, in post-war Paris, and women in New York imitated its heroine Lady Brett Ashley in dress and manners. Hemingway had wrung the necks of pigeons in the Jardin Du Luxembourg, and hidden them in Bumby’s pram. Now he and Hadley could dine where Joyce did, on oysters and pheasant.

​Among the cafes​, Hemingway met Pauline Pfeifer, a Vogue editor newly assigned to Paris. The two fell in love, and in 1927, Hadley requested a divorce.  Ernest and Pauline settled in Key West. Hadley remained in Paris until 1934.

Ernest dedicated “The Sun Also Rises” to Hadley and their son, and assigned her its royalties, including film rights. Not until 1964 did the then 73 year old Hadley read “A Moveable Feast” and its close: “I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her”.

With the publication of “A Moveable Feast” the city of Paris affixed a plaque where the Hemingways had lived. The bar at the Ritz became the Hemingway Bar. And successive waves of visitors come to visit Hemingway’s Paris, the ancient city the author had captured:

“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.”