There look to be about ten participants per team, though it’s quite hard to tell where the ground ends and a person begins. With wholly regrettable generosity one of the players comes off to enable me to play. I’m told that the aim is to move the frisbee up your opponent’s end and score a goal, but if you receive the frisbee you must stay still until you’ve delivered it. All this is academic as I spend most of my time just trying to stand up, whilst younger, fitter, infinitely dirtier people slither past me. It’s all taken with a seriousness of which Hemingway would surely have approved, though he might have been surprised to find that, once the layers of Parisian sub-soil are removed, at least half these sturdy competitors are women.
Best of all, Hemingway liked to box. He brought a pair of boxing gloves in his trunk with him to France and had barely unpacked before he was challenging Lewis Galantiere, a man of exquisite manners who was helping them find accommodation, to a fight in his hotel room. Hemingway smashed his glasses.
Not long afterwards, ever on the look-out for a potential opponent, Hemingway taught his new friend, the poet Ezra Pound, to box. He ‘has the general grace of the crayfish’, he wrote to Sherwood Anderson.
I have only boxed twice in my life, and both occasions were in the same school tournament. Having disposed of someone as inexperienced as myself in a messy first round scrap, I found myself catapulted into the final to face the only other competitor in my weight, a Junior Schools champion. He was a compassionate man who hit me so hard early on that the rest of the bout felt like having a tooth out under local anaesthetic.
So it is with mixed feelings that I find myself at a ninety-year-old iron-framed gymnasium off the Avenue Jean Jaures for the early evening boxing class. This takes place in a room off the main gym, which is presently full of middle-aged ladies with their hands in the air. This is the daily aerobics class for senior citizens and it looks much more suitable for me. But it’s too late now for, with a charming smile, the boxing teacher, Monsieur Chiche, begins to squeeze me into a pair of recently vacated, exceedingly sweaty, boxing gloves.
Monsieur Chiche is small and built like a barrel, but he must be in his sixties, and I worry that I might hurt him more than he hurts me. This proves not to be a problem as he is only putting on the gloves before turning me over to his son, who is also small but built like a whippet.
Apart from Monsieur Chiche senior I must be one of the oldest people ever to have climbed into this ring. All around me are young, wiry lads, many of them African, who look lithe and mean as they rain punches at each other.
Young Monsieur Chiche shows me the moves, how to protect the face and when to throw a punch. At first he is complimentary about my deft footwork but, after a few minutes of my Ali shuffle, a certain amount of impatience shows through.
‘Hit me! Hit me now!’
I close my eyes and think of Ernest and surprise myself with a few well placed hooks.
‘Good!’ he exhorts. ‘Hit me again!’
This time I obey his orders to the letter. One jab goes through his guard and connects with his head. I stop immediately.
‘Sorry!’
He smiles and I feel a bit foolish. With one word I’ve confirmed why an Englishman can never be a Hemingway.
Eat tonight at the Closerie des Lilas, ten minutes’ walk from our hotel, and once Hemingway’s favourite Paris cafe. He came here to write and worked on short stories and what was to become the novel, The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway liked the clientele at the Closerie: ‘They were all interested in each other and in their drinks or coffees, or infusions, and in the papers and periodicals which were fastened to rods, and no one was on exhibition.’
He later wrote with some disgust of the treatment of the waiter who was forced by the management to shave off his moustache when the Closerie went up-market. Though Hemingway’s name is immortalised on yet another piece of metal, attached to the bar next to the dining-room, I don’t think he himself would still be sitting there. Not at today’s prices.
On the way back to our hotel we pass 159 Boulevard du Montparnasse, formerly the Hotel Venitia where, four years after his arrival in Paris, Hemingway slept with a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer, whilst his family waited for him in Austria.
And I remember to ask Basil about Hemingway’s Chinese birth sign. It was the Year of the Pig.
Eight-thirty in the morning and I’m in an operating theatre at the American Hospital of Paris lying on a hospital trolley, my head bandaged with toilet paper. This is not the result of yesterday’s sporting feats, it’s an attempted recreation of one of the most bizarre accidents of Hemingway’s accident-prone life.
It happened in March 1928. In the previous nine months Hemingway had sustained an anthrax infection in a cut foot, grippe, toothache, haemorrhoids, several ski falls as well as having the pupil of his right eye cut open by the playful finger of his son. On the night of 4 March he had gone to the bathroom at his flat in the rue Ferou and pulled what he thought was the lavatory chain only to find it was the cord attached to the skylight above him. The skylight came crashing down, slicing into his head. Two weeks later he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: ‘We stopped the hemmorage [Hemingway’s spelling] with thirty thicknesses of toilet paper (a magnificent absorbent which I’ve now used twice for that purpose).’
Which is why I’m lying here in the American Hospital at Neuilly, where he lay seventy-one years ago before being given nine stitches in the forehead. To Professor Michael Reynolds, one of Hemingway’s biographers, this was more than just another injury. Reynolds suggests that when the skylight split Hemingway’s head open, the pain and the spilling of blood caused him to relive memories of his wounding in Italy which he had desperately sought to suppress: ‘When the pain dulled … he knew exactly what he should be writing … the story was the war, the wound, the woman.’
Or, as it became, A Farewell to Arms. Which, let’s face it, is a much better title.
Reynolds’ thesis is borne out by a remark Hemingway made years later, to Lillian Ross: ‘I can remember feeling so awful about the first war that I couldn’t write about it for ten years. The wound combat makes in you, as a writer, is a slow-healing one.’
Within two weeks of the injury which left him with a lipoma, a lump of hardened skin, permanently disfiguring his forehead, Hemingway was writing to Perkins that the new novel ‘goes on and goes wonderfully’.
As I lie staring up at the doctors and the light and the needle and the anaesthetic mask coming towards me, I can’t help thinking that there must have been easier ways of dealing with writer’s block.
Once Hemingway had been in a place where he was happy and had worked well, he regarded it in some sense as his property. So, in August 1944, not long after he’d suffered another mangling car accident in the London black-out, he was back in Paris under contract to Collier’s magazine to play his part in liberating what he called ‘the city I love best in all the world’.
Whilst more conventional Allied troops were busy flushing out the remaining pockets of German resistance, Hemingway and an ill-assorted guerrilla band went on to conduct his own personal liberation of Paris, including the Cafe de la Paix and the Brasserie Lipp, as well as Sylvia Beach’s bookstore and the Ritz Hotel, where the barman asked Hemingway what his men would like and received the answer, ‘Fifty martini cocktails!’