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Writer's pictureLucian@going2paris.net

Hemingway’s Paris

Charlottesville

April 10, 2024


From the NYT:


There is an old familiar saying: "Everyone has two countries, his or her own -- and France." For the Lost Generation after World War I, these words rang particularly true. Lured by favorable exchange rates, free-flowing alcohol, and a booming artistic scene, many American writers, composers, and painters moved to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Ernest Hemingway among them. Hemingway arrived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, in December 1921 and made for the Rive Gauche -- the Hôtel Jacob et d'Angleterre, to be exact (still operating at 44 rue Jacob). To celebrate their arrival the couple went to the Café de la Paix for a meal they nearly couldn't afford.


Hemingway worked as a journalist and quickly made friends with other expat writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. In 1922 the Hemingways moved to 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, a bare-bones apartment with no running water (his writing studio was around the corner, on the top floor of 39 rue Descartes). Then in early 1924 the couple and their baby son settled at 113 rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Much of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first serious novel, was written at nearby café, La Closerie des Lilas. These were the years in which he forged his writing style, paring his sentences down to the pith. As he noted in A Moveable Feast, "hunger was good discipline." There were some particularly hungry months when Hemingway gave up journalism and tried to publish short stories, and the family was "very poor and very happy."


They weren't happy for long. In 1926, just when The Sun Also Rises made him famous, Hemingway left Hadley and the next year wedded his mistress, Pauline Pfeiffer, across town at St Honoré-d'Eylau, then moved to 6 rue Férou, near the Musée du Luxembourg, whose collection of Cézanne landscapes (now in the Musée d'Orsay) he revered. You can follow the steps of Jake and Bill in The Sun Also Rises as they "circle" the Île St-Louis before the "steep walking…all the way up to the place de la Contrescarpe," then right along rue du Pot-de-Fer to the "rigid north and south" of rue St-Jacques and on to boulevard du Montparnasse.


For gossip and books, and to pick up his mail, Papa would visit Shakespeare & Co., at 12 rue de l'Odéon, owned by Sylvia Beach, who became a trusted friend. For cash and cocktails Hemingway usually headed to the upscale Rive Droite. He collected the former at the Guaranty Trust Company, at 1 rue des Italiens. He found the latter, when he was flush, at the bar of the Hôtel Crillon, or, when poor, at the Caves Mura, at 19 rue d'Antin, or Harry's Bar, still in brisk business at 5 rue Daunou, with photos of Papa gazing down from the walls. Hemingway's legendary association with the Hotel Ritz, where there is now a bar named for him, was sealed during the Liberation in 1944, when he strode in at the head of his platoon and "liberated" the joint by ordering martinis all around. Here Hemingway asked Mary Welsh to become his fourth wife, and here also, the story goes, a trunk full of notes on his first years in Paris turned up in the 1950s, giving him the raw material to write A Moveable Feast. Paris loves naming streets after adopted sons, and it is only fitting that Hemingway has a plaque of his own, heralding short rue Ernest-Hemingway in the 15 arrondissement. This, after all, was the man who wrote: "There is never any ending to Paris."

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