The Banks Of The Seine

The Pont-Neuf, Paris

The Pont-Neuf, one of Hemingway's regular walking routes as he explored the Seine and its inhabitants. He loved the Notre Dame area, it was close to the booksellers and then he might sit on the grass and eat his lunch as he watched the fishermen.

Hemingway The Young Journalist

Ernest's passport from late 1921. He was going to Paris with Hadley and the passport was provided by the Toronto Star newspaper. He was going to be their foreign correspondent in Paris.
Ernest had been a writer for the Kansas City Star newspaper for seven months in 1917. Learning to write "newspaper style" seemed to be to his liking. He adhered to the Kansas City Star's style guide which begins: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." This style of writing was also called "cablese" by journalists because of the sparse style that sending telegrams required. Telegrams were expensive and journalists cut down their transmissions to the bare essentials. He carried these lessons over to the Toronto Star.
(Telegrams were called "cables" because they were transmitted on wires - usually running between railroad stations. Almost any town of any importance had a railroad station. If there was a fire in Boston, for example, the story would be sent from there to telegraph receivers up and down the rail line. The story was said to have "moved on the wire." The first reporter to telegraph the story is said to have "broke" the story and "scooped" the competition. Cables could also be sent by radio -"wireless", as the British called radio - anyone who has seen a movie about the Titanic is familiar with radio telegrams. Radios and the necessary large antennas were not very practical or common in the 1920s.)
It was in his newspaper work for the Toronto Star that Hemingway developed not only his stylistic quirks (his famous terse, staccato style of writing), but also his hard-boiled dialogue, his comedic structure, major themes and sense of plot and character.
When he arrived in Europe he was slow in beginning his work for the Star. It took him two months to mail in his first articles. That soon became about two a week. He wrote about Swiss tourism, German inflation, tuna fishing at Vigo, the election of Pope Pius XI, Clemenceau's place in French history, a book review ( his first) of a novel set in Africa; about thirty articles from february untill the end of March, 1922.

First Novel Published

Fired with the fictional possibilities that he saw during his visit to the Pamplona bullfights in 1925, Hemingway started translating them into a novel, initially titled, Fiesta, soon after leaving the Spanish town. Within roughly two months, the first draft of what would eventually be titled The Sun Also Rises was done. Although this work is a classic today, one reviewer charged, at its publication in 1926, that Hemingway was hiding his talents "under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality." Many others, however, disagreed. One critic claimed that its "lean, hard narrative prose" put a good deal of "literary English to shame," and yet another noted that the novel contained the best dialogue to be found in contemporary fiction.
The celebrity that the novel brought him marked the beginning of the end of the early innocence of the Paris years.

The Little Book of Sketches

A fine example of "A Moveable Feast". I love the artwork on the dustjacket. It's hard for me to say exactly when this edition came out, but 1964 was the first publication date. Hemingway worked on AMF from the fall of 1957 to the spring of 1958. He worked primarily at his home in Cuba. It centers on the Paris years of 1921 -1926. It was called the Paris sketchbook as he worked on the chapters, digging up the memories from years ago. His fourth wife edited it after his death. It was published by Scribners.

A Favorite View For Hemingway

Photo courtesy Carlos

Lisbon Weekly Photo

A routine part of Hemingway's Paris years was walking down the Boulevard du Montparnasse to the intersection of rue de L'Observetoire where the La Closerie de Lilas cafe is located. It was one of his favorite spots to write, eat and drink. Hemingway would sit outside after a good days work or to be alone with his thoughts. He would often gaze at the statue of Marshal Ney. He admired the courage of Ney and writes quite often about him and the Lilas in "A Moveable Feast."

Hemingway Preferred This One

The second of Henry Strater's portraits of Hemingway. Ernest preferred this one.
Photo is courtesy of the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library, Boston.

Portrait Of Hemingway in Paris

Shortly after arriving in Paris, Ernest met Henry Strater, another American expat with literary interests.
Strater was interested in boxing and tennis as was Hemingway. He was a Princeton graduate and he had already become a friend of F. Scott Fitzgeralds. So, another connection to the "Lost Generation."
It was only natural that Hemingway and Strater should become friends.
Strater painted this portrait in 1922, although Strater claims in was 1923. Hemingway didn't like it very much.

Bumby Is Born

Harry Hindmarsch



Hadley, "Bumby", and Ernest in Schruns, Austria, in 1926. The family was in Schruns for their winter vacation. They preferred the alpine climate to Paris in the winter.
Bumby was born John Hadley Niconor Hemingway, in October, 1923. The baby was named in honor of his mother and the Spanish matador Villalta.
Hadley wanted the baby to be born back home because she disrusted European medical proceedures and it would be psychologically more comfortable for her. Ernest thought that with the baby on the way he had better get a regular job and decided on trying for a position at the Toronto Star. They sailed to Canada from Cherbourg on August 26, 1923 on the Cunard liner Andania. It took ten days to reach Quebec. Bumby was born on October 9, 1923 in Toronto, while Ernest was rushing home from a journalism assignment in New York. Ernest never forgave the editor of the Toronto Star, Harry Hindmarsh, for sending him on that assignment.
Gertrude Stein is babysitting "Bumby" in the Luxembourg Gardens in the last photo.

Losing All

Gare de Lyon Station

In December of 1922, Ernest was in Lausanne for The Star covering the peace conference trying to settle a dispute between Greece and Turkey.

He was trying to get Hadley to come down. She didn't want to fly through the mountains in the winter so she took the train from the Gare de Lyon station.
She decided to take all of Ernest's manuscripts except for "Up in Michigan" which was in a drawer somewhere in the apartment, and "My Old Man" which was in the mail to a publisher. She thought this would be a wonderful surprise for Ermest - she wanted to break up the tedium that he usually felt at conferences.

She grabbed all of his fiction and poetry that she could find. She hoped to please him by bringing his manuscripts so he could have something to work on besides his journalism.
A porter carried her bags to the train from the taxi and the bag with the manuscripts was stolen in that brief space of time. All of Ernest's work - including the carbons; his only copies - were lost. He had to start all over again from memory. Scholars still hope that the suitcase will be found with the original manuscripts intact.

John Dos Passos

The top photo is a passport photo for John Dos Passos. Then a photo portrait from the 1920s.
In the winter photo from Vorarlberg, March, 1926, left to right: Frau Lent, Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Gerald Murphy.
The bottom photo is a book jacket of "Three Soldiers," a book published in 1921 about the First World War.
John Dos Passos was another American of "The Lost Generation." He was an ambulance driver in Italy like Hemingway in World War I. They actually met and chatted in the Piave campaign, but they didn't keep in touch.
He spent time in Paris where he met Hemingway again and the other American expat writers and artists. He was always travelling, looking for adventurous situations to observe and write about. He is believed to be "the pilot fish" that hemingway mentions in "A Moveable Feast." The person that showed up before "the rich" came & spoiled a relatively unknown place. Dos Passos was a pilot fish for the Murphys.
He is said to have travelled more to seek out adventure in conflicts and in social situations than even Hemingway. He wrote 42 books and was quite a painter with over 400 works of art to his credit.

Some Paris Color

Aux premieres loges I

Transatlantic Review

Ford Madox Ford's little magazine. Hemingway was both a contributor and editor.

Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson was one of the most influential people in Hemingway's early years as a writer, before he left for Paris.
Ernest was living with a friend, Y.K. Smith in a seven room apartment house in Chicago.
He landed a job editing a monthly magazine called The Cooperative Commonwealth.
Anderson lived near the apartment and was a welcome visitor. When Hadley and Ernest were thinking of getting married and going to Italy, Anderson said they ought to go to Paris instead. Anderson wrote letters of introduction for Ernest to Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co.
Anderson even recommended the Hotel Jacob for when the Hemingway's landed in France and an introduction to Lewis Galantiere who helped them find the apartment at 74, rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound in Paris.
Ford believed in Hemingway's talent and made him a contributor and then an editor of The Transatlantic Review.
In "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway doesn't seem to be too pleased
with Ford's physical appearance or personal hygiene. It appears to
have been an odd relationship.

Pamplona

This photo is from 1925, Ernest is in front of the bull; in the white pants and dark sweater.
He first went in 1923 after Gertrude Stein mentioned the Festival of San Fermin in Northern Spain as a good change of pace for him. He went for the second time in 1924 & again in 1927.

Ezra Pound

Top photo: Ezra Pound;
Next, a book jacket of Pound's poetry;
Then a photo of Pound, John Quinn, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce in Ezra Pound's studio.
Ezra Pound was a poet by profession, but he was a generous adviser by instinct, and many a writer, among them T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, benefited from his artistic counsel, encouragement, and editing. Pound met Hemingway early in 1922 and quickly took him on as a protégé. From Pound, Hemingway learned "to distrust adjectives" and received valuable guidance in how to compress his words into precise images. Many years later, Hemingway called Pound "a sort of saint" and said he was "the man I liked and trusted the most as critic."With a recommendation from Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford let Hemingway edit his fledgling literary magazine: The Transatlantic Review. In recommending Hemingway to Ford, Pound said "...He's an experienced journalist. He writes very good verse and he's the finest prose stylist in the world."
Ford published some of Hemingway's early stories, including "Indian Camp" and "Cross Country Snow" and generally praised the younger writer. The magazine lasted only a year and a half (until 1925), but allowed Hemingway to work out his own artistic theories and to see them in print in a respectable journal.

The Seine

The Seine, Paris

In "A Moveable Feast" Hemingway has a chapter called People of the Seine. This is the same chapter where he talks about the sellers of used books on the quais.
He mentions that he likes to walk from 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs down to the park on the Seine at Notre Dame. He would buy a bottle of wine, some bread and a sausage, and eat and relax watching the fisherman.
They fished for anything but a good catch was a sardine-like fish called coujon. He said they were delicious fried whole and that he could eat a plateful. They were called fritures cooked that way.
When he had the money he would go to a restaurant called La Peche Miraculeuse and eat coujons served with a white wine. He said the scene was right out of a Sisley painting and a story by Maupassant.

Hemingway In 1925

This was the rear cover
of "The Sun Also Rises."
He wrote the first draft
In two months after their
trip to Pamplona to see
the bullfights in the Festival
of San Fermin.

A Sidewalk Cafe

Paris As Art

Paris

Hemingway Publicity Photo

Hemingway, 1928, in a photo taken by Helen Breaker. This was one of a group of publicity photos that his publisher - Scribners - wanted taken. According to Dorothy Parker, women who saw these pictures turned "all of a quiver," and she worried that their publication drew too much attention away from Hemingway's virtues as a writer.

They Wintered In The Alps

Gstaad, Berner Oberland

Almost as soon as they found their first Paris apartment
the Hemingways traveled to the Alps for a few weeks of skiing.
This became a ritual, wintering in the Swiss and Austrian
Alps to escape the dreariness and dampness of Paris in the winter.

Looking Out From The First Apartment

A photo taken out of the
window of 74 rue du Cardinal
Lemoine; possibly Hemingway
took this shot himself.
His work room was around the
corner at 39 rue Descartes.

Hadley

Hadley Richardson in 1928. Married for less than 6 years to Hemingway, she was 8 years older than he and had a yearly income of approximately $3,000 from a trust fund. It was a comfortable income considering the lifestyle of poverty they lived in Paris.

Books Sellers On The Seine

Hemingway would walk the river's edge when he was through with work or needed to think something out.
It was also a good place to find books written in English that were very cheap. A lot were left behind in hotels by Americans and sold very cheaply since many were given to the booksellers for nothing by workers in the left bank hotels. They thought the bindings were badly done and how good could the content be if it was in English?

The Luxembourg Gardens

The Jardin du Luxembourg was one of Hemingway's
favorite retreats. The Gardens comprise sixty acres in the center of montparnasse. It was on the way to the Musee de
Luxembourg where he went to admire the Cezannes.
He would occasionally run into Gertrude Stein there
as she walked her dog.

Cycling Replaced The Horses

After he gave up betting on the horses,
a friend, Mike Ward, told him about
the excitement of cycling. Hemingway
became a huge fan of the indoor and
outdoor cycle races and the motorcycle
races. He tried to write many stories
about cycling, but said it could only be
written about properly in French.