Ernest Hemingway

Yesterday I went on a walking tour that took me to important historical sites pertaining to Ernest Hemingway. I followed this walk outlined in a guidebook (something I’m kind of embarrassed about). I had the whole day to myself, though, and wanted to give it some kind of structure. As it turns out, the map in this book kind of sucked. Though it told me which Metro stop to start at, it didn’t really tell me how to get from the stop to the first point of interest. I think I made about three circles around the Metro stop before finding Marche Mouffetard, an open-air street market Hemingway described in his autobiography.

The best part of the tour was seeing the different apartments that Hemingway lived in during his times of expatriation. Standing in the rainy street, I could only see the windows of the upper-floor apartments, but still I imagined the great American writer coming in and out of the building. Ernest Hemingway had to eat somewhere. Ernest Hemingway had to hang his clothes somewhere. The cuffs of Ernest Hemingway’s pants soaked up rain just as mine were doing then.

Random thoughts and facts about Hemingway made their way to the front of my mind. In a Farewell to Arms, Catherine hates the rain because she sees herself dead in it. When writing, Hemingway would be sure not to exhaust an idea; he would stop work with a few things left to say so that he would be guaranteed to have material to start with in the morning. When explaining how he began work on a new story, Hemingway said, “I try to write one true sentence.”

I walked along in the rain following roughly the path laid out for me for the rest of the afternoon. I wished that I could transport myself to that time when so many American writers came to Paris. I wanted to see what they saw and feel that same feeling, but I didn’t really know where to begin imagining.