A couple of doors down the street was the publisher of a remarkable book called Kiki’s Memoirs, the saucy reminiscences of the lover of Man Ray, illustrated with her own drawings and copious nude photographs. Hemingway was persuaded to write an introduction to the book (something he did very rarely). Disguised in his playful anti-grammatical style was a sharp epitaph on the life that had once drawn him to these busy streets.
Kiki became monumental and Montparnasse became rich, prosperous, brightly lighted, dancinged, shredded-wheated, grape-nuts-ed or grapenutted (take your choice, gentlemen, we have all these breakfast foods now) and they sold caviar at the Dome, well, the Era for what it was worth, and personally I don’t think it was worth much, was over.
That was written in 1929. By then Paris had gone sour for Hemingway. Many of his friends were alienated by their portrayals in The Sun Also Rises, and his own output had become bogged down by a novel, provisionally titled Jimmy Breen, which was never to be published.
Eight years earlier it was all optimism, and as I turn out of the rue Delambre and leave behind the celebrated cafes of Montparnasse - the Rotonde, Select and the Dome, I find myself in a place where Hemingway seemed unequivocally happy, the Jardin du Luxembourg, where in the winter ‘the trees were sculpture without their leaves’, and the fountains still blow in the bright light. Hemingway had so little money in those early years that he used to walk through here to avoid passing restaurants or cafes. Like much of the central area of Paris, it still seems anchored in the past.
I can reasonably believe, then, that Hemingway would have seen pretty much what I see around me as I walk the neatly brushed gravel paths, out of the western gate of the Jardin through a formidable girdle of black iron railings, across the rue Guynemer and run the gauntlet of six-storey apartment blocks that flank both sides of the rue de Fleurus. He would have stopped most times at Number 27, for this is where Gertrude Stein lived.
She was one of the contacts that Sherwood Anderson had given Hemingway when he left the USA for Paris just before Christmas 1921, and she proved to be the most influential. They became good friends and she provided him with the fresh, invigorating, modern ideas about art and life that he had never found in Oak Park. She encouraged a style of writing that relied less on traditional syntax and fluent, fully rounded sentences and more on the overall feel and emotion of language. (Not everyone was as taken with it as Hemingway. The writer Wyndham Lewis called it her ‘infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter’.) Literature, she felt, could learn from art and something like Cezanne’s technique of painstakingly applied repetition of line and brushstroke to build up an image could be applied to the written word.
‘He wanted to write like Cezanne painted,’ Hemingway has his alter ego, Nick Adams, saying in a short story called ‘On Writing’.
He took Stein seriously as a teacher (though he did tell Hadley, his wife, that he thought her breasts ‘must have weighed ten pounds apiece’) and she took him seriously as a writer, encouraging him to give up the journalism that was paying his way in Paris and concentrate on fiction.
It was Gertrude Stein who recommended he go to see bullfighting in Spain and taught him to cut his wife’s hair. It was at her soirees that he met writers like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and artists like Picasso and Juan Gris. But she paid scant attention to Hadley, and the relentless championing of her husband may have contributed to the tensions that broke up the Hemingways’ marriage four years after they arrived in Paris.
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 Hemingways’ 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 facade 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 Andersen, 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. Or PS100,000, or 150,000 euros or $180,000.
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.
Looking a little closer I can see that there are changes of detail. Where the goats were milked, there are car-parking spaces to let for $150 a month, and the Cafe des Amateurs, which Hemingway lovingly recalled as ‘the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard’, is now a decorous cafe full of students and tourists.
The rue Mouffetard itself is still cobbled and it follows a narrow, sinuous course down the hill from the Place Contrescarpe. This morning it is filled with a food market of such abundance that filming amongst the aromas of roasted almonds, crepes, coffee, fresh-baked bread, cheeses, hams, herbs, and fresh-cooked chickens is exquisite torture. The difference is that the fresh food on the street is no longer cheap and those Hemingway would have called the real Parisians are crowded into the supermarket on the corner.
Turn along by the river to the Place Saint-Michel where Hemingway sat in a cafe and drank Rum St James, ‘smooth as a kitten’s chin’. He recollects finishing a story here, which made him feel ‘empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love’, after which he ordered a dozen oysters and a half-carafe of dry white wine to celebrate.
Today the square is full of an odd mixture of policemen and people in white lab coats chanting and bearing placards. I’m told it’s a mass protest by dentists.