Hemingway’s Paris still pulls at the heartstrings

When good Americans die, wrote Oscar Wilde, they all go to Paris. Of course, Americans can be impatient people, and quite a few, hoping to beat the queues, don’t wait for death. Many good American writers, plus quite a few British and Irish writers, have made their way to Paris with the idea that in the City of Light they will be able to find their literary voice in a way that would not be possible in Des Moines or Darlington or Dublin. Or at least get a seat on the terrasse of Café de Flore.

A hundred years ago, Ernest Hemingway, arguably the most famous of the American literary expatriates, first climbed the stairs with his wife Hadley, past the shared toilets on each landing, to their cramped fourth floor flat in 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The apartment, Hemingway wrote to a friend back home in Chicago, “would not be uncomfortable to anyone used to a Michigan outhouse”. Hemingway was only 22, and hadn’t yet written anything of note. The couple were sustained by Hadley’s small trust fund and by news stories that Hemingway filed to the Toronto Star.

In the long procession of expatriates to Paris, the 1920s, what the French called les années folles, or “the crazy years”, was the high-water mark. A cavalcade of young writers were making their way to the city, aided by a favourable exchange rate and prompted by the notion that it was simply the place to be.

Hemingway was soon moving in a remarkable literary world that included Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Morley Callaghan, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald, all orbiting round Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Stein would call them the Lost Generation, scarred by the experiences of the first world war, and now culturally adrift.

But even beyond these expatriate literary circles, Paris in the twenties seems now to be the foundation of our modern cultural world. Abstract art, surrealism, existentialism, American jazz, all were bubbling furiously through the cafés of the Left Bank.

For Hemingway, they were wonderful years, “when we were very poor and very happy”. A lifetime later, long after fame had consumed him, Hemingway wrote a memoir of his time in Paris. The book is rich in nostalgia, an old man looking back on his young self, when everything was new and promising and a whole world was unfolding, before he became, in the words of his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, “the swaggering hero of the thirties, the drunken braggart of the forties, and the sad wreck of the late fifties”. A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, three years after Hemingway had shot himself on the porch of his house in Ketchum in Idaho.

I rarely go to Paris without the book in my hip pocket. I love Hemingway’s love of the city. I love his pleasure in the physical sensation of Paris, and the way so much of it, a century on, still echoes. I love the descriptions of the coming of autumn, the leaves stripped from the trees in Place de la Contrescarpe, the steamed windows of the cafés, the visits to galleries to see the Cezannes and the Manets, the crunching gravel paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the grey light of the dusk slowly changing, the bridges at night as you gaze down on the dark water, and the plate of oysters and the carafe of crisp white wine in a clean well-lit café. I was happy to set off again for Paris, a century after Hemingway’s arrival, with my daughter. She attends a French lycée, and believes Paris is not just the centre of the world but the centre of the universe.

Paris in the twenties seems now to be the foundation of our modern cultural world

The Hemingways lived in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, which was rapidly supplanting Montmartre as the artistic and intellectual centre of Paris. George Orwell, who lived round the corner, described the narrow streets of the district as ravines of “tall leprous houses lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse”. Far from collapsing, the whole area has been gentrified. The “evilly run” café full of drunks in the Place de la Contrescarpe is now a happier place with a large terrasse, while Rue du Cardinal Lemoine is a bourgeois street of expensive flats. A plaque on the façade of the building remembers Hemingway’s stay.

The cramped flat was impossible for work so Hemingway rented a room in Rue Mouffetard, ten minutes away, on the sixth floor of a cheap hotel. He said it was the hotel where the poet Verlaine had died, but that was an invention to make it sound romantic in letters home. In the winter he burnt bundles of split pine to warm the room as he gazed over the rooftops of Montparnasse and away down to the river where you could see the elegant bulk of the Louvre and the golden dome of Les Invalides. If the work had gone well, he had a drink from a bottle of kirsch that they had brought back from the mountains before heading happily downstairs to La Mouffe, as the Rue Mouffetard was known to locals.

It is a fine street, its winding course indicative of ancient origins. These days, close to Place de la Contrescarpe, it is more touristy with some tacky shops and cheap places to eat. But towards its southern end, it comes into its own, a traditional Parisian market street, narrow, cobbled, with fruit and vegetable stalls in the mornings, serious cheese and wine shops, and a couple of old-fashioned market cafés — Le Verre à Pied and Le Mouffetard, all chalkboards and marble-topped tables and long bars with stools and brusque waiters who need to be subtlety charmed in order to get the best experience. We sat outside to enjoy the “theatre” of the street, the parade of people, the comings and goings. The comic relief of the evening was provided by an itinerant salesman with copies of the International New York Times, who passed hustling the news like the Jean Seberg character in A Bout de Souffle. “Monica Lewinsky pregnant by Obama,” he cried, proffering the latest edition with a wink. “Read all about it.”

In Hemingway’s time, the ground floor of 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine was a dance hall, a bal musette, and in the evenings the sound of the accordions would drift up to the American couple in their fourth floor flat. You will struggle to find a dance hall now in Montparnasse, but traditional bal musette has survived. On a Sunday afternoon, we took the train to Joinville-le-Pont where bal musette has been thriving on the riverside since the 1880s.

At Chez Gégène we ate mussels overlooking the banks of the Marne as a band of accordions and violins whirled through tangos and waltzes and javas. The dancers had dyed hair and gold necklaces, and that was only the men. The women wore full skirts and frilly blouses and the kind of elaborate hair styles that I thought had gone out with Charles de Gaulle. But among the older couples was a younger generation enjoying the retro vibe of traditional French music. We laughed and danced and bumped into people and drank a wonderful Sancerre all afternoon, and I can’t remember how we got home. For a moment Paris seemed unselfconscious, unconcerned about style or fashion or making a fool of itself. 

At Chez Gégène we ate mussels overlooking the banks of the Marne as a band of accordions and violins whirled through tangos and waltzes and javas

One afternoon we went to the racetrack at Auteuil, one of Hemingway’s favourite destinations. Small groups of serious men in caps stood about the grandstands, drifts of betting slips eddying around their feet. In the parade ring, the horses were long-legged and smooth-flanked and snorting hot breath into the chill afternoon. It was Degas come to life. In the final furlough, the horses stretched for the line, and for the moment, hanging in the autumnal air, was the realisation that everyone’s luck, here and always, was arbitrary. 

But happily in the four o’clock our horse romped home at 7-1. It only made up for the losses in the other races, but we treated it as a great victory and dined out at Le Balzar on the illusion of profit as Hemingway and his wife did after a good afternoon at Auteuil. Le Balzar is one of Paris’s great Art Deco brassieres with leather banquettes and globe lights, wood and mirror-lined walls, tables of linen and silverware, framed paintings that might well date from the restaurant’s opening in 1894 and serious waiters in black waistcoats and long white aprons who seem to have been here at least half that long. I dodged the calf’s head with gribiche sauce and had the cassoulet. It was a splendid evening. Had James Joyce and his family been seated at a corner table, as Hemingway had seen them one evening as he peered enviously through the window at Michaud’s, they would not have seemed out of place.

The next morning I followed the gravel paths through the careful pollarded symmetries of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Hemingway used to claim he fed himself in Paris by shooting pigeons in the park. It was and is the heart of the Left Bank, an oasis, a retreat and a playground for children and senators. The park is home to the French senate whose tables are graced every autumn by the pears from the elaborately espaliered orchards in the south-west corner. For all its formality, there is something dreamlike about the Luxembourg — the little boys with their toy boats on the octagonal Grand Bassin, the senators puffing their chests like pigeons, the marionette performances, the mothers daydreaming on metal chairs while their toddlers play, the lovers entwined on lawns. The Fontaine de l’Observatoire sits astride the 0° meridian from which the world is measured. Except it’s not. That too was a French dream. In 1914, they finally relented and agreed to recognise Greenwich as the standard. 

Hemingway followed the Luxembourg’s gravel paths to visit two friends who both lived on the other side of the park in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs — Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Pound took Hemingway under his wing, guiding his writing, reminding him that prose was like architecture. Joyce and Hemingway went on drinking sprees together. When the feeble and timid Joyce would get into a row with some stranger in a bar, he would turn to his burly friend and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.” Though their work could not have been more different, Hemingway was a huge admirer of Joyce and always championed his books. He loved and admired Pound as well, and tried to protect him in later years as his mental state deteriorated. 

Hemingway and Hadley would eventually live in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs themselves, in a flat above a sawmill. I knew the street, and had spent a lovely week in a flat there many years ago with a woman I loved. Looking for Joyce, I found myself suddenly looking up at the tall windows of the house. Her loss had been heartbreaking. Love, lost and found, is one the great of themes of Paris. 

And it is central to the narrative of A Moveable Feast — the young couple, newly married, embarking on their lives together. But four years after their breathless arrival in Paris, the Hemingway marriage was over. Writing at the end of his life, and then on his fourth marriage, Hemingway’s nostalgia is both for Paris and for Hadley. He remembers arriving to join her and their young son in Vorarlberg in Austria, where they were staying in the mountains, after being unfaithful in Paris. When he saw her waiting on the railway platform, he thought, “I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her . . . I loved her and I loved no one else . . . I thought we were invulnerable.” But they weren’t; no one is. Heartbreak too is an emotion that connects us to this city. 

Paris has a way of belonging to everyone. We dream about the city, we fall in love with it. Paris is always much more than a destination. It becomes a stage, a setting for some part of our lives, even if it was only a week, and we store those memories like treasure. Paris stays with us for the rest of our lives, Hemingway wrote, like a moveable feast.

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