The “Paris when art really mattered” post on view at Dali House came out of a Google Earth tour of the City of Lights’ artsy side, and a big part of it was spent following Ernest Hemingway all over the goddamned place.

Tracking Hemingway is easy because he’s everybody’s Papa. There are numerous websites pondering his wandering around the planet. For his rummage through Paris I used Michael Palin’s witty tour for PBS and the Hemingway Resource Centre. The former, I’ve since discovered, is played out somewhat larger at Palin’s Travels, which also has the Python comic’s north-to-south and west-to-east globetrotting.

ooooooooOOOOO PAPA OOOOOooooooooo

Hemingway is 29 years old and newly married when he first arrives in Paris in 1921. He and Hadley have scrimped for the trip, the destination recommended to him by an older writer, Sherwood Anderson. Anderson has filled a pouch for him with letters of introduction to some of the bright literary bulbs helping illuminate the City of Lights, including poet Ezra Pound, the salon-keepers Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, and Lewis Galantiere, head of the International Chamber of Commerce.

The Hemingways show up on December 20 and check into a hotel at 44 Rue Jacob. Hem-hunting tourists get confused right off the bat because this was called the Hôtel Jacob at the time, and yet, still before World War II, it was also the Hôtel d’Angleterre, home to many expatriate Americans, which would seem to imply Ernest as well. (Thomas Jefferson roomed here 150 years earlier, but Hemingway cares less).

Plus, there’s a Hôtel d’Angleterre Champs Elysées today that’s not exactly on the Champs Elysées but on Rue La Boétie. People take photos of it and say, “This is where Hemingway stayed”, which of course he didn’t. It claims to be luxurious too, but you should see some of the nasty comments on those pointless travel-trade websites!

Many of those same tourists will also be thinking that the Champs Elysées Angleterre is the one that used to be the English embassy in the 18th century, where Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams hammered out the Treaty of Paris with America’s former motherland in 1783, long, long, long after the fighting was over back in the States.

But no, that was the little (40-room) Angleterre on Rue Jacob, where Ernie and the missus are now bunking in Room 14 (apparently still available for paying guests), when suddenly a knock at the door announces the arrival of Galantiere of the Chamber of Commerce.

They let him in and have a few drinks and the men get to talking about boxing, a subject on which Hemingway is downright pugilistic. Ernest actually challenges his guest to a few rounds right then and there, and ends up smashing his eyeglasses.

This boxing business will swiftly become a motif for Hemster in Paris, culminating in a great routine by Woody Allen when he was still a stand-up comic in the New York of the 1960s.

Is the debate over les deux Angleterres necessary? Not a bit, but it’s fun to be confused in a foreign land! People are mixed up about Hemingway’s second address in Paris too, but I think I’ve managed to sort out the “Papa was here first” argument fairly.

The Hemingways find dingy but permanent-ish digs at 74 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine and move in on January 8, 1922. Their fourth-floor coldwater flat is a humbling environment, but Ernie assures his family by letter that he’s in “the best part” of the Latin Quarter. That may have been true at the time.

He also writes (though not to his family) about goats being herded past his front door and horse-drawn tankers coming round at night to empty the cesspools.

“Home in the Rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container,” he enthuses in “A Moveable Feast”, “not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat.”

Today there’s a plaque on the building saying, “Oui, this is it”, but confusion rears its ugly head once again over another plaque on another building, around the corner at 39 Rue Descartes. That’s the one in the photo. As Michael Palin reported, the plaque here is erroneous in its timespan, and anyway it’s dwarfed by the one that claims the poet Paul Verlaine died there in 1896.

I found a pathetic geek who had the answer. In fact, PatheticGeek.net has actual pix of these places if actually anyone reading this is actually going to Paris. The website explains that Hemingway rented this apartment just to do his writing.

“I had a room on the top floor where I worked. It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold.”

It’s not clear why Hemingway needs a second place. He and Hadley are at this point still childless and he hasn’t yet begun fooling around behind her back, and anyway if it’s a quiet place to work he needs, the Café Pré aux Clercs is close, at the intersection of Rue Bonaparte and Rue Jacob.

But before we launch the pub crawl, it’s worth noting that the couple are only in their new lodgings one day before they take off to Switzerland. They spend the rest of January in Chamby sur Montreux, likely skiing and other forms of goofing off. It’s so much fun that they’ll be back again in May to hike over the St Bernard Pass into Italy, possibly accompanied by large dogs with barrels of cognac strapped to their necks.

(Barrels strapped to the dogs’ necks, not dogs strapped to the Hemingways’ necks.) (Just to be clear in case anyone is using this for a thesis.)

Enough of the good life. Hemingway is a correspondent for the Toronto Star but he’s keen to be a proper writer. Back in Paris in mid-February he invokes his billets doux from Sherwood Anderson to call on Ezra Pound at his apartment at 70 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

Pound introduces Hemingway to Ernest Walsh, who agrees to publish some of his fiction, and Ernest repays Ezra for the favour by teaching him to box. This would be Round 2. No evidence of injury.

On March 8 the Hemingways finally get to meet the literary-notions generator Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), likely at her home at 27 Rue de Fleurus.

From 1903 to 1937, Stein and her brother Leo, and later Stein and Alice B Toklas (that’s the girls in the wild photo by Man Ray), host bookish salons at which they serve liqueurs made from plums and raspberries to the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, TS Eliot and, alright Ernest, come on in but don’t break anything.

Stein gives tremendous support to the lot (Picasso did a swell painting of her), and wicked good ideas too. Hemingway gets the evocative expression “the lost generation” when he hears a garage owner explain to Stein that he can’t fix her car because all the best young mechanics have been killed in the Not-That-Great War.

With typical minimalism, he writes of Gertrude in “A Moveable Feast”:

“My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we loved the big studio with the great paintings … It was easy to get into the habit of stopping in at 27 rue de Fleurus for warmth and the great pictures and the conversation.”

Ah, the warmth. The Hemingway flat is freezing cold this winter, as we’ve seen, and with a dire shortage of cash they’re hungry all the time too. So Ernest gets this brainstorm to ignore the fact that he’s starving by avoiding the aroma of food altogether. It’s not easy in Paris, of course, but he discovers that if you go for a stroll in the Jardin du Luxembourg, you see and smell “nothing to eat from the Place de l’Observatoire to the Rue de Vaugirard”.

This he recalls for his friend and eventual biographer AE Hotchner, who joins him on a grand tour of the old haunts in 1950. Hem tells Hotch that he’d have a look at the Cézannes that used to be on display in the Musée de Luxembourg and sometimes played tennis, but mostly he’d roam the grounds pushing his baby Jack around in a pram.

“Bumby”, as the tot was called, comes in handy on the garden perambulations. Hemingway waits for the park cop to go for his 4pm aperitif, then produces corn from his pocket for the pigeons, grabs the fattest one, wrings its neck and chucks it in the buggy to take home for dinner!

Bumby will be officially arriving in a bit.

As well as Gertrude Stein’s salons, the Hemingways spent evenings at those of Natalie Barney.

One of those vivacious free spirits you’re always reading about when you should be doing something more worthwhile, Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) is a long way from her native Ohio but has taken a cue from her mother, a one-time student of Whistler, and delved into the Parisian art crowd. The 1897 painting “Natalie in Fur Cape” is by Alice Pike Barney. I’m guessing that’s her proud mum.

Multi-talented in her own right, she has tongues wagging with her lesbian affairs as well as the Friday evening literary salons she hosts at her posh home at 20 Rue Jacob, where the garden features a Doric temple.

Among the guests at her soirées, which are organised around readings and concerts, are James Joyce, Edna St Vincent Millay, Stein and Toklas, TS Eliot, Isadora Duncan, Pound, Peggy Guggenheim, Sylvia Beach, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and Truman Capote. Legend has it that Mata Hari once rode naked through the garden on a white horse.

This is a photo of Natalie late in life when she was living at the Hotel Meurice. There’s a lovely website about her here.

An iconoclast who can be by turns generous and self-serving, Barney is witty and charming but never easy to know, and sometimes abrasively pedantic. She becomes a character in other people’s novels and a heroine in their memoirs.

Ernest, having stuffed himself with her hors d’oeuvres, nevertheless gives her short shrift in “A Moveable Feast”: “Many American and French women with money enough had salons and I figured very early that they were excellent places for me to stay away from, but Miss Barney, I believe, was the only one that had a small Greek temple in her garden.”

Wow, Ernie. Have another glass of chardonnay.

ooooooooOOOOO PAPA OOOOOooooooooo

Continue to Part 2.