In Search Of Ernest Hemingway

With the premiere of the latest Ken Burns epic documentary series, attention will be turning once again to one of America’s most celebrated writers: Ernest Hemingway. Though in Hemingway’s case, attention has never really left him. Loved, loathed, imitated, mocked, reinterpreted, the Hemingway myth only grows and deepens as time passes. In a country that has produced Nobel prize winners including Faulker, Steinbeck, Bellow, Buck, Singer, O’Neill and, of course, Bob Dylan, the fascination with Ernest Hemingway is enduring and unique. What makes him so endlessly attractive?

For one thing, Hemingway was undeniably physically attractive, more movie star than tortured artist. He moved easily among the beautiful people. He had a knack for being at the right place in the right time—the midwest in the teens, Italy during the war, Paris in the 20s—even Cuba during the revolution. Hemingway moved in tandem with the zeitgeist in an almost chameleon-like way. 

Hemingway was an inveterate traveler. He seemed to fear domesticity and embraced life as an expatriate. He could be considered a great travel writer as well as a great novelist, immersing himself in the life of his milieu while bringing a part of his own personality to it. More than other great authors, Hemingway inspires fans to make pilgrimages to his locales, in a way that enhances the traveler's journey as well as their understanding of the author. There’s something ineffable about reading A Moveable Feast while walking on Rue Cardinale Lemoine, Hemingway’s first address in Paris. 

I’ve had the chance to travel to at least six of Hemingway’s haunts. Here are some quick impression for fellow travellers.

Hemingway first came to light as a short story writer, which featured the rugged outdoor exploits and bildungsroman of Nick Adams, his recurring alter-ego, who lived, fished, and loved in Northern Michigan. Hemingway’s family summered at a cottage on Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan, and he came back to this setting again and again in his early work, in his first published collection of stories In Our Time, as well as a later compilation The Nick Adams Stories. 

Hemingway came back to Northern Michigan after he was injured in World War I, living in a rented room in a house in Petoskey, and speaking at the local library, all still there. He married first wife Hadley in 1921 in nearby Horton Bay, Michigan, close to where he fished as a boy. His family’s cabin, Windemere, is still intact and privately owned on Walloon Lake.

After a brief stint in Toronto as a newspaper reporter, Hemingway and Hadley moved to Paris. Their early days are brilliantly recounted in A Moveable Feast, one of the finest author memoirs. You can do a walking tour of many of the locations today. Hemingway’s apartments at 74 Rue Cardinale Lemoine and 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. His cafe haunts, including Les Deux Magots at 6 place Saint-Germain-Des-Prés, where he recounted writing about a blustery day in Northern Michigan. The walk from his apartment across the Luxembourg Gardens to 27 Rue De Fleurus where Gertrude Stein lived, and finally, the original location of Shakespeare and Company bookstore at 12 rue de l'Odéon, where Hemingway, James Joyce, and other ex-pat Lost Generation writers would borrow books from bookseller Silvia Beach.

Hemingway spent time in Spain, famously in Pamplona during the festival of San Fermín which features the running of the bulls through the streets and provided the setting for his first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises. He journeyed to Madrid where he frequented the restaurant Sobrino de Botin, originally opened in 1725 and considered the oldest restaurant in the world. He mentions the restaurant’s specialty roast suckling pig towards the end of the novel.

Hemingway left Europe in 1928 settling in Key West, Florida, where his home still stands as a museum. Here he wrote A Farewell to Arms and was visited by the rich and famous. He moved on to Cuba in 1940 where he lived until 1960, when the storm clouds of the imminent revolution drove him back to the U.S. He left in such a hurry that his possessions remained on the island. Only the efforts of the Kennedy administration enabled his wife to get them back after his death, which forever indebted the family to the Kennedys. That’s why his personal effects were donated to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum by Mary Hemingway.

Hemingway’s final home, in Ketchum, Idaho, continued his pattern of choosing to live in highly desirable areas that were playgrounds for the rich and famous. While Hemingway chose the area for its notable hunting and fishing, he had already experienced the nearby resort, having completed his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls while staying at the Sun Valley Resort in 1939. His hearty wooden home still stands in a neighborhood in Ketchum (and is owned by The Community Library), and his grave is in a nearby cemetery.

More than any other modern author, Hemingway’s love of adventure as well as literature and art crafted a life that invites and intrigues. He didn’t just write about life. He lived it.