“Hemingway led a glamorous life filled with travel, adventure and famous people, but he always reserved a special place in his memory for the simple summers he’d spent up north.”
Those are the words of writer John U. Bacon, who wrote a beautiful portrayal of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds on upper Michigan’s Walloon Lake in the Ann Arbor Chronicle.
Here’s a sampling. Read the full story here …
The Hemingways’ cozy cottage is now dwarfed by million-dollar homes, but Walloon Lake is just as cold, clear and captivating as it was one hundred years ago, with the cool morning mist burned off by the sun each afternoon, exactly as Hemingway described it in a high school poem.
A few months before his wedding to Hadley Richardson in 1922, he confessed his fear that married life would keep him from his boyhood paradise. “Guy… loves a girl and the goddam (sic) streams can dry up for all he cares,” he wrote a Michigan friend. “Only the hell of it is that all that country has as bad a hold on me as ever … and you know how it’s always been… At night it comes and ruins me – and I can’t go.”
His fears proved correct. After their honeymoon at the family cabin, Hemingway never returned to his favorite place.
He should have.
The Finca.
Sure, I’m walking in Hemingway’s footsteps, but it would be a lot easier to walk in his shoes.
Thomas Raymond & Co. has released a line of Hemingway-inspired shoes. These are shoes inspired by Papa and by Papa’s places. Slip on the Sun Valley. Pull on the Petoskey.
“Styles that pay tribute to his experiences,” says the Portland, Ore.-based company.
No surprise, these comfy-looking leather shoes have attracted more ink than your average loafer, with articles appearing in publications from the New Yorker to the Guardian.
The shoes got a thumbs-up (to mix metaphors) from son Patrick, who turned out at the big rollout in Bozeman.
“Hemingway was very fond of loafers,” Patrick told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “A lot of celebrity endorsements are phony, but not in this case. Hemingway had a great sense of style. He especially loved leather boots from Madrid.”
I don’t know what Hemingway would say, but I’ll take a pair.
Cristina and I step off the Metro at Chateau Rouge and step into the sunlight and into another world. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is market day. The streets are filled with vendors in bright African clothes selling mangos and papayas, fish and lamb, African prints and pirate DVDs.
“It’s hard to say this is France,” Cristina says.
Continue reading →
Sean Penn in All the King's Men
One more big Hollywood picture could feature Hemingway.
The latest is a biopic on the legendary editor Max Perkins, who helped shape the words of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Word is, Sean Penn is in talks for the lead role in the film, called Genius.
“Who gets to be Hemingway?” asks Entertainment Weekly. Continue reading →
Felix Nono. David Frey photo.
Hemingway’s Paris is for sale on the banks of the Seine, where the boukanistes sell vintage-looking Cinzano advertisements and Josephine Baker posters alongside Eiffel Tower postcards and used Dennis Lahane novels.
“The new Paris is different,” says Felix Nono. He is selling old Paris. Cafes in Montparnasse and Montmartre come alive on painted tiles he sells at an impromtu stand he sets up in front of the Musee d’Orsay, the former train station that now houses the great Impressionist paintings Hemingway used to relish in the Tuilleries.
“This is only souvenir,” says Nono, gesturing to his work, “but a lot of people like that from anywhere in the world. USA. Africa, too. People from Cameroon buy this here.”
Nono himself came from Cameroon to Paris 30 years ago, first to study then to work. “But there was no job for me, here or in Cameroon. You know the problem in Africa, people who come to study here, when they go back, they don’t find a job. Only French have job in Cameroon.” Continue reading →
The streets are tiny and quiet, lined by stately white buildings that resist time. Although the horses have been replaced by squat little Smarts and Fiats, these streets must look must the same as they did then, with flowers arranged neatly on tiny iron balconies beneath open white shutters.
It’s dinnertime when we pass by, and the street fills with the sound of silverware and French music playing on a distant stereo. It’s magic, and it’s magic because of the way it is today, not four generations ago.
Cristina and I make our way to La Cloiserie des Lilas, perhaps the most Hemingway of all Hemingway haunts. We thread our way through well-heeled, well-dressed patrons into the dark wood bar.
“Where’s Hemingway’s favorite barstool?” I ask. Continue reading →
A couple exciting Hemingway film projects are on tap.
On the big screen, Anthony Hopkins is cast to star as Papa alongside Andy Garcia in the upcoming film Hemingway & Fuentes.
The film, which also stars Annette Bening, chronicles ‘Hemingway’s life in Cuba and his friendship with his fisherman Gregorio Fuentes, inspiration for the 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea. Continue reading →
A bullfight in the Spanish city of Teruel. David Frey photo.
In a thought-provoking piece, the Christian Science Monitor notes that even as Catalonia has banned bullfighting, Hemingway is still regarded as the sport’s champion.
“What would Ernest Hemingway say?” asks writer Marjorie Kehe. “The American author has long been identified with the violent tradition, which he celebrated as a glorious display of courage.
Even in his time, she notes, opposition to bullfighting was growing. Hemingway, she says, viewed bullfighting not as a sport but a tragedy.
After seeing my first bullfight, I agree. It’s a tragedy. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I suspect Catalonia is just part of the gradual death of the culture of the bullfight in Spain. It will die a slower death than the bulls in the bullring, but it will die.
The write-up in New West has produced some great suggestions for other Hemingway outposts in the American West. Here are a couple:
Maybe David Frey should visit Sunlight Basin and Crandall in northwest Wyoming , and Cooke City MT before he tops off that global Hemingway piece.
Then again , maybe we’d like to keep our local history secrets a few decades longer….
And …
Hemmingway loved Red Lodge. He spent a lot of time there drinking in the bars. Then, he spent seven weeks in St. Vincent Hospital recovering from a broken arm he recieved in a one car accident by Park City. The nurse that attended him became the inspiration for the short story, The Gamble, the Nurse, and the Radio, or some such. He knew Montana well.
Thanks for the tips, folks.
“Hemingway led a glamorous life filled with travel, adventure and famous people, but he always reserved a special place in his memory for the simple summers he’d spent up north.”
