And this is how Hemingway Adventure was born. His centenary supplied the spur, the BBC and PBS supplied the interest and I finally had the chance to experience those places that had fermented in my imagination for so long.
At the end of it, well, Hemingway’s world remains his. Great writing survives because it cannot be replaced, and because the process that created it can never be unpicked and replicated. And anyway, nothing stays the same, not even a mountainside or a pine forest. But I feel I’ve come closer to him. I have met people he met and travelled the way he travelled. There have been high times: in Venice, and chasing marlin on the Gulf Stream off Havana, and low times: finding the remains of his crashed plane in a small, fly-ridden town in deepest Uganda, or walking through the house at Ketchum where he ended his life; but there was not a day on the road when I didn’t think of him, this irascible, egotistical, obdurate figure whose writing had such ability to inspire.
I don’t think Ernest Hemingway and I would ever have got along. I don’t have the requisite amount of competitive energy. I don’t really care about catching more fish or shooting more ducks or having more wives than anyone else. He didn’t have much time for the British and he called London, where I live, ‘too noisy and too normal’. And comedy was never his strong point.
Our common ground, other than a fondness for cafes and bars and writing about the weather, would, I like to think, have been a love of adventure. Hemingway was the sort of man who made things happen. He was always making plans and going off to places and coming back and making more plans, and not just for himself but for everyone around him. It was a great ride and very few people managed to hang on all the way. And when it ceased to be an adventure, when he could no longer play the Pied Piper, when other people started to make the plans, he lost interest and quit, in the way he wanted to.
When we started our filming we couldn’t believe our luck. An entire collection of Hemingway memorabilia, 275 items from the man’s life, including unpublished letters and poems, signed wine-bottles, his Remington typewriter, even one of Ava Gardner’s brassieres, was to be auctioned in England in the first-ever sale of its kind in the world.
The night before we were to film, we received word that the sale was off. The entire collection had been deemed a forgery.
The sale itself was testimony enough to the enduring interest in all things Hemingway but that it should have been worth someone’s time to forge the entire contents is surely confirmation of god-like status.
Michael Palin
CHICAGO/MICHIGAN
It’s mid-afternoon UK time. British Airways Flight 299 is taking me from London to Chicago on the first lap of the Hemingway trail which will, all being well, lead me across the globe from Europe to America and Africa to the Caribbean. We’re passing over southern Greenland
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Through breaks in the cloud I can see the polished white tablecloth of glaciers draped over the black spines of mountain ranges. There’s a tiny village far below. Find myself wishing Hemingway had been in Greenland, then I’d have to stop and investigate. Unlikely though, he didn’t like cold weather. Perhaps that’s why he left Chicago. The cluster of houses slips out of sight and ahead there is only ocean and ice
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One of a party of sixth grade schoolchildren is pointing at a photograph of a beatific child with long blond hair and a flowing white dress. ‘Who’s that girl?’
Her teacher answers patiently. ‘That’s Ernest Hemingway.’
Number 339 Oak Park Avenue, the birthplace of one of the most uncompromisingly masculine writers of the twentieth century, holds quite a few surprises. Apart from young Ernest in pretty dresses there is the revelation that his voluptuous mother Grace was a songwriter and his craggily handsome father, Clarence, was an amateur taxidermist. But for me, on this very first day of my journey into Hemingway’s world, nothing can quite compete with the discovery that Ernest acquired his name and a considerable number of his genes from a man born in Sheffield, England. My own home town.
I owe this frisson of affinity to a man called Ernest Hall who left Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century to seek his fortune in the United States. He fought in the Civil War and was wounded at Warrensburg, Missouri. He married the daughter of an English sea-captain, and in 1872 they in turn had a daughter, Grace. When she married Clarence Hemingway in 1896 they moved into Hall’s house where four of their children were born. The second of them, and the first boy, was given his grandfather’s name.
Whilst I get the impression that Hemingway heartily disliked being called Ernest, it’s also clear that he was fond of his grandfather who read him stories and instilled in him the importance of manly virtues and outdoor pursuits. Ernest Hall died when Ernest was six, and it was by all accounts a considerable loss. The reason I know all this is that, thanks to the efforts of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, Grandfather Hall’s house lives on and I can stand today, surrounded by American schoolchildren, in the very room in which Ernest Hemingway first drew breath.
It’s a rather fussy little room, full of frills and lace, but I’m told it has a profound effect on people. A man from Belarus broke down in tears when he saw it, and an Israeli Hemingway scholar who described herself as ‘not a goose bumps type of person’ was deeply moved by the thought that, as she put it, ‘This is where American literature was changed for ever.’
Maybe this is why there is a living author currently at work in the turreted attic of the house. His name is William Hazelgrove and he’s working on a book called Hemingway’s Attic. It’s a bit of a shock to find him there in the gloom.
‘I came here to find the ghost of a man who did not grow up on television, a man for whom commerce was a necessary stream, not the flood we find ourselves in now.’
I’m not sure I can take this. Another writer looking for Hemingway, and it’s only my first day.
Hemingway was born in the dying months of the nineteenth century and the first sounds he would have heard outside would have been of horses’ hooves and not the soft swish of traffic that is pretty much constant today. Inside, he would have become used to the sound of his musically gifted mother composing away in the parlour. She wrote songs like ‘Lovely Walloona’, a paean to the family retreat on Walloon Lake in north Michigan.
Oh! Lovely Walloona, fairest of all the inland seas,
Oh! Lovely Walloona, … thy laughing ripples kiss the shore
Hemingway inherited neither his mother’s literary style, nor her musical talent. However, his father’s and his grandfather’s love of nature permeates his birthplace as it permeated his life. There was nothing sentimental about this. Love of animals was not incompatible with hunting and killing them.
‘Ernest was taught to shoot by Pa when two and a half and when four, could handle a pistol,’ wrote Grace Hemingway on the back of one family photograph. In another, angelic Ernest stands at the end of a happy family group, looking the picture of innocence, hair cut in bangs and dressed like Lord Fauntleroy. You have to look quite carefully to make out the doublebarrelled rifle nestling by his side.
As we leave, a group of Hemingway fans from China arrives. They’re a little late and they shift around awkwardly at the door, all in dark suits like mourners at a funeral. Two departing visitors are enquiring about the recent announcement of a new range of furniture to be called The Ernest Hemingway Collection, which will include such best-selling lines as the Sun Valley Cocktail Table and the Kilimanjaro Bedside Chest.