Ernest Hemingway - Going the Other Way From Home

Anyone who has been to Italy will know immediately why Hemingway loved the country – it’s the people, of course, and the beautiful countryside, naturally, and the eternal cities, especially Rome and Florence, and Venice …

Venice

… but above all else it’s the hotels, and the bars, especially the bars. And Hemingway loved hotels, and hotel bars, but best of all he loved small out of the way bars, which is why he loved Harry’s Bar in Venice. And if you’ve been to Harry’s Bar in Venice you’ll know why Hemingway loved it so much, because it’s like his writing: plain, well scrubbed, and wonderfully sophisticated.

Harry’s Bar came into being on May 13th 1931, and that wouldn’t have happened without the help of a quiet young American by the name of Harry Pickering.

This quiet young man was apparently suffering from the early signs of alcoholism, which concerned his family greatly, who, in there dim wisdom, packed him off on a world tour with an elderly aunt (and her snuffly Pekingese) who kept the young man very quiet indeed with her endless stories of her gay old times in New York, and San Francisco, and London, and Paris, and Rome, and the countless hotel bars she used to drink in, which is no way of weening a young drunk off the booze now is it.

Harry and his aunt, and the Pekingese, were staying in the Europa Hotel in Venice, which is a very pleasant hotel, with a very pleasant bar that, in the summer of 1928, had a barman by the name of Giusseppe Cipriani who, during the winter of 1927, had been working in the bar of the Bellevue Hotel in San Remo where a customer had persuaded Giusseppe to lend him all of his savings for a sure-fired bet. Naturally enough the customer vanished and Giusseppe returned to Venice wiser and very much poorer. But he was good at his job, and the young man and his aunt were pleasant people who spent and tipped well. He’d soon get his savings back.

Giusseppe spoke very good English too…

“ Madame, sir, what can I get you today?”

“ The usual, Giusseppe, and make ‘em good and strong,” came the aunt’s reply.

“ And for the dog, madame?”

“ Hell, the same, but take it easy on the 7UP.”

The ‘usual’, their ‘old faithful’ as they called it, was a double bourbon with 7UP.

Harry’s Bar in Venice

And they’d start the day drinking aperitifs before lunch on the hotel terrace (with a bottle or two of the finest Chianti, which the Pekingese loved) overlooking the Grand Canal, and not far from the Gritti Palace, then back into the bar in the afternoon for a stiffener or two, then a snooze, before starting all over in the evening. Needless to say they didn’t see very much of Venice, but then the aunt had seen it all before with the likes of Henry James, and the Pekingese and the quiet young American student weren’t too bothered one way or the other were they.

After a couple of months Harry fell out with his aunt for taking up with a gigolo, an argument that led to the aunt checking out of the hotel with her lover, leaving Harry on his own with the dog, who by this time was a member of Alcoholic Dogs Anonymous.

Harry wasn’t drinking so much – probably to impress the dog – which worried Giusseppe who, after a few days of serving fewer and fewer drinks asked Harry Pickering if he was short of money.

“ Just a tad, old son, just a tad.”

Suddenly Giusseppe heard himself offering to lend the quiet young American ten thousand Lire.

“ But why would you want to lend a perfect stranger so much money?” asked Harry.

“ Because you need it.”

So, Harry borrowed the money and with the dog fast asleep under his arm left the hotel and Venice and Italy, returning to America very much the wiser.

Weeks went by, then months, and Giusseppe heard nothing from Harry, not even a thank you note in the post. But the barman kept faith because Harry Pickering had an honest face – but even an honest face didn’t help much in Great Depression struck American.

And then, on a cold February morning in 1931 Harry Pickering walked into the bar of the Europa Hotel in Venice, thanked Giusseppe for the loan, then handed the startled Italian an envelope containing forty-thousand Lire.

“ Let’s open a bar together, Giusseppe.”

“ Okay, we’ll call it Harry’s Bar.”

“ Fine.”

And they did.

To Be Continued…

Hemingway couldn’t wait to get what was his now rather battered old Buik off-loaded from the steamer Jagiello and start exploring what he was already describing as “this wonderful country.”

From Genoa they drove (the Hemingways had quickly hired a chauffeur) north to Milan where they were treated like visiting royalty, with Alberto Mondadori, one of Hemingway’s publishers, assuring the author that his books had out-sold any other author since the end of World War II.

“ Everyone is reading you, Ernesto, everyone from the common sailor to the nobility.”

Hemingway just smiled, hugged, and kissed his jubilant publisher on the head.

Such was Hemingway’s popularity in Italy that he left all of his Italian earnings in a Milan bank, using the money to finance all his future trips to that country – it made good economic sense in a post-war world where there were stringent restrictions on transferring money between countries.

To quote from Carlos Baker’s biography, Hemingway’s pleasure…

“… mounted as they drove from Stresa through Como, Bergamo, and up the winding road to Cortina d’Ampezzo. Although the village itself had grown, the contours of the pink and red peaks had not changed since Ernest and Hadley and Renata Borgatti had wintered there in 1923. Most wonderful of all, said Ernest, forgetting his intermediate trips, was the chance to rediscover the North Italian countryside, which he had seen before only from crowded military camions or through the dust goggles he had worn driving the Fiat ambulance…”

The Hemingways soon settled into their Cortina hotel, where the hotel’s secretary, Mizzi Springer, told Mary and Ernest how she had lived in Australia in the 1930s, but had felt so lonely she’d returned just before the outbreak of war, a war which claimed both her son, who was killed in North Africa, and her husband, killed in Sicily. In 1944, with the retreat of the Germans, Mizzi was arrested by local guerrillas (who were crawling out of the woodwork) and thrown into prison (she had worked in an Italian Army officer’s mess so was no doubt thought of as a collaborator); but with the arrival of American forces, who wanted to interview Mizzi as she had once been an interpretor, the guerrillas moved her to another prison where, late one night they shot dead thirteen Italian women prisoners, including a sixteen year old girl. Bravely, and no doubt loudly, Mizzi told the guerillas what she thought of them, and then, unconcerned with her own safety, tried desperately to stem the bleeding from several bullet holes in the sixteen year old’s chest, but without success. The ‘brave’ guerillas, hearing the Americans were near, now fled; only later did Mizzi realise she had been shot in the leg, and was lucky to have been left alive. According to Mary Welsh Hemingway, when Mizzi sought medical treatment in Rome in the 1950s she told the doctors how she once met Ernest and Mary Hemingway in Cortina, and that they had become friends (the Hemingways helped her out financially too), but the doctors wouldn’t believe her story until Ernest himself confirmed it in writing, insisting she be given the best treatment possible, which they did.

In October 1948 Ernest and Mary decided to rent a house in Cortina for the winter, finally settling on the ‘Villa Aprile’ on the outskirts with views across gently sloping hills that would give good skiing.

Then, having made all the arrangements the Hemingways headed for Venice, which, soon after arriving, Mary describes, in her book How It Was, as a…

“ …city of exquisite bridges, the moon just after full, coming up grandly over the Grand Canal, a wonder challenge in its ‘myst ère’ but Papa falling asleep soon after dinner, 9:30. Night is the best time to approach an unknown city, so your first explorations are in semi-darkness and mysterious. But we dined in the room and went to bed.”

They were staying in the exclusive Gritti Palace Hotel, overlooking the Grand Canal, which had, in the late 15th century been the home of the Doge of Venice, Andrea Gritti. In 1948, as now, the Gritti Palace Hotel was one of the finest hotels in the world, and described by Hemingway as “…the best hotel in a city of great hotels.” In many ways Ernest’s and Mary’s trip to Italy, and especially their stay in Venice, was the honeymoon they never really had at the end of the war.

And they acted like good tourists too (albeit rich and well connected), drinking in the Caf é Florian, where Casanova used to spent a good deal of time, visiting St Mark’s, the Piazza San Marco, with Mary taking a photo of Ernest standing beside Sansovino’s statue of Neptune. They even took a tourist boat trip across the lagoon, “…past Murano, the glass-blowing island, Burano, the lace island, to lunch at the inn on Torcello, owned by the Cipriani family who also owned Harry’s Bar in Venice.

Being well connected also meant they went duck shooting with Nanyuki Franchetti at “his big place” on the lagoon north-east of Venice, and then back to Harry’s Bar.

To Be Continued…

When Lillian Ross first saw Hemingway he was…

“…standing on the hard packed snow, in dry cold of ten degrees below zero, wearing bedroom slippers, and no socks, with Western-style trousers with an Indian belt that had a silver buckle, and a lightweight Western-style sports shirt open at the collar. He had a greying moustache, and looked rugged and burly and eager and friendly and kind.”

The interview went well with Hemingway telling Lillian story after story about bullfighting and his time in Spain. He made the young writer stay for lunch and then gave her a signed copy of Death in the Afternoon. She went away happy but none the wiser about Sidney Franklin.

Hemingway entered 1948 feeling bad, and told Ingrid Bergman at a New York party that

“…this is going to be the worst year we have ever seen.”

He didn’t explain to Bergman why.

When the Hemingways left Sun Valley for Florida in the February they managed to avoid the worst of a whole series of blizzards by heading due south as far as the Rio Grande.

Ernest loved his new tower and got to work immediately on both novels, with the old black Labrador, and a new Springer Spaniel called Blackie, at his feet. The cats preferred to sun-bathe with the naked Mary on the roof outside the window of Ernest’s writing room. He adored just looking at Mary’s nakedness, and the way she absentmindedly scratched at her short blonde pubic hairs which made him feel good, very good.

The spring of 1948 went well with the critic, Malcolm Cowley - who Hemingway liked - staying at the Finca, with his wife and son, for two weeks, to gather information for a long article on Hemingway he was preparing for Life magazine. Ernest was also writing long letters to Lillian Ross, who was now writing for The New Yorker. Ernest was now calling her ‘Daughter’ and considered her a first class writer. Cowley and Ross, in effect, became Hemingway’s first real chroniclers, and by so doing helped create the Hemingway myth.

Another writer, Aaron Hotchner, was now sent by Cosmopolitan to interview Hemingway. Hotchner was in his middle twenties and had been an admirer of Hemingway since his schooldays, and was awed by the prospect of meeting his literary hero. Ernest met the young reporter at the Floridita in Havana and poured umpteen frozen daiquiris down his unsuspecting throat and gave him a long lecture on the perils of literature until Hotchner collapsed onto the floor dead drunk.

The following day Hemingway took a very ill Hotchner out fishing on the Pilar, plied him with beer and tuna sandwiches and promised to write Hotchner’s article for him. When Hotchner flew back to the States his liver hurt but his hero worship had increased ten fold.

On his forty-ninth birthday Hemingway was presented with a cake, and presents from Mary, and the cats, and the dogs, and Hemingway’s wine merchant in Havana presented him with a case of Champagne which Hemingway, Mary, and a couple of friends finished off during the day.

In the late summer Hemingway made plans for a trip to Italy. He wanted to cross via the Sargasso Sea, and then straight across the Atlantic to Funchal, Lisbon, Gibraltar, and then lazily across the Med to Italy.

Then came the news that his lawyer, Maurice Speiser, had died. Hemingway took it as a bad sign and went into a deep depression that lasted all the way to Italy. Only when the ship docked at Genoa did he begin to cheer up.

Apart from a couple of trips back in the 1920s with Hadley this was the first time Hemingway had set foot on Italian soil since 1918. When the Buick had been unloaded Hemingway set off with Mary to explore his past.

To Be Continued…

By August of 1947 Hemingway’s headaches had come back, plus, the inside of his head had begun to buzz and hum, “…like the sound made by telephone wires along country roads.” Doctor Herrera discovered that Hemingway’s blood pressure had risen to 215 over 125, with his weight having risen alarmingly to nearly twenty stones. Herrera advised a strict diet. Hemingway only told Mary about this, and assured her that the holiday he’d promised himself in Sun Valley would do him good.

Hemingway set off in September in a new Buick Roadmaster, with Otto Bruce - a man who’d been on Hemingway’s staff off and on for years - as driver. Once they got onto US soil they two men headed for Walloon Lake, and the cottage at Windemere that was now owned by Hemingway’s sister Sunny. After a stay-over at the lake Otto pointed the huge Buick westward and headed out across the great plains toward their destination in the foot hills of the Smoky Mountains.

Throughout the two day journey Hemingway regaled Otto of his boyhood adventures in the forests around the great lakes, and probably of his escapades in France just three years earlier. They reached Sun Valley late on the evening of the 29th September - when yours truly was just eight days old - and were given a suite at the Lodge.

Mary and Pauline had stayed behind at the Finca so that Pauline could help Patrick through his final weeks of convalescence, and for Mary to organise, with a local builder, a new tower for Hemingway to work in on his return, and a private roof space for Mary, and the cats, to sunbathe. Mary joined Ernest in Sun Valley in early November, but then set-off again to spend Thanksgiving with Pauline, Jack, and Patrick in California. Hemingway wasn’t sure whether he should be pleased, or hurt, that his fourth wife wanted to spend so much time with his second.

But Hemingway was feeling much better, and had lost nearly two stones in weight, with his blood pressure now down to 150 over 104. Hemingway felt on top of the world, and spent his days shooting and fishing, and his evenings eating sensibly, and drinking only wine. Life was good as he waited for Mary to get back for Christmas.

Then the bad news started coming in.

Of course, the bad news had started a few months earlier with the death of his editor, and mentor, Max Perkins. News now reached him that Katy Dos Passos ( who may have been Hemingway’s lover in Chicago back in the 1920s when he was engaged to Hadley), the wife of his old friend, the novelist Jon Dos Passos, had been decapitated in a motor car accident on the 12th of September, the day he and Otto had set off from Cuba. John Dos Passos had been driving the car and lost an eye in the accident.

Then Hemingway heard that two of his former comrades in Spain had died, one from natural causes, the other from political assassination. Then came the dreadful news that his cook at the Finca, Ramón had died from a heart attack. And if that wasn’t enough Hemingway received a telegram from Hollywood telling him that Mark Hellinger had died suddenly, aged forty-four. That was bad enough but Ernest had only been paid half of the $50,000 Hellinger had guaranteed him for a three story deal they’d negotiated as a result of the success of The Killers, and that Hemingway would have to wait until Hellinger’s estate had been settled before he received the balance. Hemingway now had to borrow $12,000 off Scribners to help pay his tax bill for 1947.

Then, just before Christmas, a young woman by the name of Lillian Ross ‘phoned Hemingway asking if she might interview him with regard a magazine feature she was writing about the American bullfighter, Sidney Franklin.

“ Sure, honey.”

“ Thanks.”

To Be Continued…

Although work went well on the novels Hemingway was, throughout 1947, in a bad way both mentally and physically. Look at photographs of the man from this time and there is a far away, dreamy look in his eyes.

But the novelist and Mary pretty much had the Finca to themselves in the early part of that year and were looking forward to Ernest’s two youngest sons arriving. But on a visit to their mother both Patrick and Gregory were involved in a car crash. Although Gregory recovered quickly Patrick began to complain of headaches. Soon after the boys arrived in Cuba Mary was called away to Chicago where her father had been taken seriously ill with prostate cancer.

On the morning of the 14th of April Patrick was feverish and delirious, and by the evening had turned violent. Ernest quickly turned the Finca into a hospital and his staff into a team of nurses with each of them taking turns to watch over Patrick, with Hemingway himself taking the midnight watch. On the 16th Pauline arrived and took control of the Finca, and her son’s health. Hemingway reported to Mary that his ex-wife was “behaving admirably.” Pauline stayed until the 10th May when Patrick was well enough to be left.

Mary returned to Cuba on the 18th of May completly exhausted. She just wanted to sleep. Five days later Pauline reappeared, and much to Ernest’s surprise the two Mrs Hemingways got on very well and amused him with “…some girlish banter about their attendance at the Hemingway University.”

But it was becoming obvious to both Mary and Pauline that Hemingway was exhausted, and showing signs of nervous strain that exploded into rage when he read in the press that fellow novelist, William Faulkner, had called him a coward.

Faulkner had said nothing of the sort of course. When talking with some students at the University of Mississippi Faulkner had said that Wolfe, Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Hemingway, and himself were the best modern novelists around, but that they were all victims of what he called, “splendid Failure.” According to Faulkner Thomas Wolfe had made the best failure because his courage was greatest, and had risked clumsiness, and even dullness, in order to “shoot the works, win or loose, and damn the torpedoes.” Jon Dos Passos had sacrificed some courage, said Faulkner, “…to the demands of style…” and that Hemingway stood last on the list “…because he lacked the courage to get out on a limb of experimentation…” as the others had done.

Hemingway had, not unusually, got hold of the wrong end of the stick ( understandable in his condition) and thought Faulkner was talking about his physical courage. Faulkner should also have known better when we remember that Hemingway, along with Faulkner, were the two greatest experimental American literary stylists of the 20th century. Faulkner should have acknowledged this.

Hemingway immediately sent the newspaper clipping to Buck Lanham asking the general to write to Faulkner and tell him the truth about his behaviour under fire in 1944. Lanham did as he was bid and gave Faulkner a long account of Hemingway’s bravery which he concluded by saying that

“…without exception he ( Hemingway) was the most courageous man I have ever known, both in war and peace. He has physical courage, and he has that far rarer commodity, moral courage.”

Faulkner sent a letter of explanation to Lanham, and one of apology to Hemingway. Ernest was satisfied, and it probably never occurred to him, or Faulkner, that they had both interpreted things incorrectly. Such is the ego.

On June the 13th 1947 Hemingway was awarded the Bronze Star at the US Embassy in Havana. The citation read:

“ Mr Ernest Hemingway has performed meritorious service as a war correspondent from 20 July to 1 September, and from 6 November to 6 December, 1944, in France and Germany. During these periods he displayed a broad familiarity with modern military science, interpreting and evaluating the campaigns and operations of friendly and enemy forces, circulating freely under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions. Through his talent of expression, Mr Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat.”

When Hemingway arrived back at the Finca he received news that Max Perkins had died.

To Be Continued…

Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure.

In 1999 Michael Palin’s travel book Hemingway Adventure was published and is not, as Palin points out, a transcript of his television series of the same name, but is a book that “…has a life of its own.” And it does. I’d recommend it to anyone interested Hemingway to read it, and then go and watch a DVD of the TV programme.

Like me Palin came to Hemingway as a teenager, as he describes in his introduction to the book…

“ When I first heard of Ernest Hemingway I was a teenager living in Sheffield, an uncompromising industrial city without a hint of glamour, until recently, when the demise of its industry became the subject of a film called The Full Monty. A few days before my thirteenth birthday I was sent to a boarding school at Shrewsbury. When my time came to take my ‘A’ level examination in English, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea were the most, indeed only, modern works offered on the course. My teacher recommended them and, as a taster, I took them with me on the annual summer holiday to Southwold.

“ As the grey North Sea rolled on to the wind-swept Suffolk beach I trudged through the unfamiliar prose, but at night I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

“ The sense of place, the intensity of smell and sound, the sheer physical sensation of being taken somewhere else was fresh and powerful and exhilarating.

“ I would lie in bed and follow retreating armies down dusty Italian roads and feel the heat of Spanish squares and stare up into the wide skies of Castile and sense the cold at night in a pine forest.

“ Hemingway’s world was close and uncomfortable and itchy and sweaty and frequently exhausting. It was, I felt, the real thing. To experience it would require the ability to absorb a little punishment, it would demand an open mind and a degree of recklessness. But it could and should be done. This stuff was too good to be wasted on exams, I must be bold and fearless and go out there and do it for myself.

“ Unfortunately, in the late 1950s there wasn’t much call for provincial English schoolboys to carry mortars up Spanish hillsides, and though I had a goldfish I hadn’t fought for seven hours to land it.

“ So boldness and fearlessness were put on hold and I packed the books into the back of the car and looked out at the Newark Bypass as my father drove us back to Sheffield, holidays over for another year.

“ But something was different. After reading Hemingway I felt I’d grown up a little. Lost my literary virginity. Books would never be quite the same again.

“ Life on the other hand, was just the same.

“ I passed the exams and never read Hemingway again for thirty years. Then someone gave me a copy of his collected short stories. It took just one of them – ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ – to bring it all back.

“ ‘ The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.’

“ Nothing more than that. An image, clean and simple, which was to me as intense as opening a window and gulping in the air…”

And, as Palin goes on to describe, it was then that the ‘phone rang. It was someone from the BBC asking Palin if he would like to do a new sort of TV programme – to travel around the world in eighty days in the footprints of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. Naturally he said yes, and created the first in a series of TV shows that sent the ex-Monty Python around the globe in all sorts of directions, including one that took in virtually all of the places made famous by Hemingway. And what a damned good series that particular jaunt turned out to be, as is the book.

My own introduction to Hemingway came in 1960 ( a year before Hemingway shot himself) when, like Palin, I was holiday with my parents, not in Suffolk, but in a cottage in North Wales, which had a well stocked bookcase that included a pre-war edition of The Fifth Column & The First Forty-Nine Stories. It was the red and cream cover that attracted me first, and the castle-like pattern of Hemingway’s name, which promised much, and gave so much more, including ‘A Clean Well Lighted Place’, and ‘Cat In The Rain’, two of the finest stories ever written.

Unlike Palin I didn’t give Hemingway up for the next thirty years, but read everything he’d ever written, and every biography that came out, with the small memoirs written by those who’d known him the best, most especially Kurt Singer’s Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Giant, Morley Gallaghan’s, That Summer In Paris, A.E.Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, Jed Kiley’s superb, Hemingway: A Title Fight In Ten Rounds, Peter Viertal’s 1992, Dangerous Friends, and, of course, Mary Welsh Hemingway’s somewhat underrated The Way It Is.

I enjoyed the biographies too, with Carlos Baker’s the best, although it’s still hard to tell if he really likes Hemingway as a writer. I somehow doubt it.

So where does Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, fit in to all this?

Well, Palin’s book, although not written by someone who knew Hemingway, does have the same feel, and is far superior to the large biographies; but in true Monty Python style Palin often tries desperately to suggest he isn’t really that bothered about his subject’s life, that it was all a bit too macho and messy for him, until he really gets caught up in writing about him, as this passage about Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920s suggests…

“ 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 Hemingway’s 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 pumped 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 fa?ade 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 Anderson, 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 [ this is before the dreaded euro was adopted by France]. Or £100,000, or 150,000 euros, or $180,000.” Which, in 2007, would probably be closer to $300,000.

“ 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…”

Like Hemingway Palin is a superb observer of detail, of time and place, and not least later in the book when he’s writing about Hemingway’s home, the Finca Vigia, in Cuba…

“ The house, which his third wife Martha Gellhorn found through the small ads in 1939, was left to the Cuban government by Hemingway when he decided to leave his adopted island following Castro’s revolution twenty years later.

“ It is looked after with meticulous care. Every object is noted and catalogued and located, as far as possible, in the same place it had when the Hemingways left. Nine thousand of his books remain on the shelves, each one hand-cleaned by the loyal staff. The public is allowed only as far as the doors and windows, which are thrown open but roped off.

“ Hemingway’s ghost is in a mischievous mood today. In order to set-up filming, a small number of us are allowed over the cordon and into the precious interior. We fall silent. So perfect is the feat of preservation that it conveys the eerie impression that the Hemingways might have left the room only five minutes earlier. I stare at the armchair with its most un-macho pattern of leaves and blossoms and try to shift my imagination back forty years and put Hem in there and me opposite watching him pour a huge Gordon’s gin from the tray that is still there with all his bottles on it, when my reverie is abruptly broken by a clatter, followed by a sharp intake of breath. Our thorough, careful, utterly mortified director has dislodged a piece of Venetian pottery from its precarious stand and it now lies in several pieces on the floor. Shock, horror, apology. We expect to be sent home immediately.

“ The curator gives us a stern lecture, mercifully tempered by his admission that this particular piece has been broken once before. By Raisa Gorbachev. Our director, now a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, feels a little better…”

And it’s moments like that which brings Palin’s journey alive, and Hemingway’s, who we can imagine buying that small piece of Venetian pottery on one of his many visits there.

In Hemingway Adventure Palin takes us from Chicago, through Italy and Paris, Spain, Key West, Africa and Cuba, finally ending up in the American West. It is a journey of detail, of sights and smells — as would any journey taken with Hemingway himself — of new discoveries, not least Palin’s obvious love and respect for Hemingway the writer, and Hemingway the man.

Find out more about Hemingway Adventure.

To be Continued.