II

Craft

A young Ernest Hemingway, in the early 1920s, honed his skill as a master of prose through his intention to create suggestive, highly personal, and intensely emotional writing through his disciplined work ethic. He found inspiration in cafés, along the banks of the Seine, on long walks, and living among the greatest modernists of the Twentieth Century. Hemingway filled his creative spirit by being a part of a city that afforded him a life and a community in which he was able to begin to perfect his craft and wrote what most scholars believe to be his finest and most considered work. There is no disputing the fact that Ernest Hemingway was an innovator of Twentieth Century prose, and that it all began to take shape in the early years of his Parisian experience.

The steep eight-spiraled flights of stairs leading up to the rented room where Hemingway wrote, in the tired Hotel Midi, were worn and rich with age. In the morning, he would make this climb while contemplating the story he was about to create–one that would express a deeper truth. It is clear from the unbalanced nature of the stairs and the height to which they reached that only a youthful man, without much money, would make this kind of climb to work each day. Hemingway once reported that during this time in his life, when he returned to this room from climbing in the Austrian Alps, Paris seemed small and distances shorter. When his work was done, that time when the writing was going along well and he had a deep understanding of what he would write the following day, Hemingway would walk down this long flight of stairs into a city he loved, a city that would refill his well.

Stairs to Hemingway’s rented room

This is the view Ernest Hemingway would see as he spent his days working in his eighth floor room at 39 rue Descartes. It was the Panthéon that Ernest had omitted when, in A Moveable Feast, he told the story of standing in his rented room and looking out over the rooftops of Paris. It was the view of the Panthéon—the very place where the souls of French literature rest—that consequently inspired Hemingway to dismiss all ornament from his writing and to write the truest sentence he knew. In this cramped space high above the Left Bank, Hemingway learned to focus and describe the telling details of the scenes he would compose through his prose, those details which conveyed the purest emotion. This took an intense concentration, and this was the view that helped drive him to create and express a deeper truth.

Rooftops and Panthéon looking west from Hemingway’s room

Omission. This is considered one of Hemingway’s greatest gifts to literature. While in Paris in those early years, he wrote many short stories as well as his book, The Sun Also Rises, a novel that stirred the literary community and became his first major success. His unique prose developed and matured, becoming more suggestive, and he theorized that one can omit anything one knows and the story will be strengthened and felt, profoundly, by the reader. Not unlike Hemingway’s writing, these moorings found along the Seine are surprisingly strong yet simple, and one can feel the depth of the stories they quietly suggest.

Mooring along the Seine

Hemingway felt at times he needed to be around other people in order to be alone. In his rented workspace on the rue Descartes, he learned how to concentrate fully and this allowed him to work anywhere. The lively cafés of Paris afforded him a less expensive place to work, and when he was in one, he could write, drink café crèmes and, being somewhat superstitious, hope for luck. Even today, one can easily spot a writer hunched over paper or laptop in one of the many cafés throughout this city. This unspoken invitation comes from Hemingway himself.

Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain

Three years before Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin died. It seems that there are always new and inspired artists to fill the shoes of those that walked the city of Paris before them . . . one great artist passes and another is there to discover what has yet to be shown. While walking through the grand museums or wandering the city, Hemingway would find that his search for new and meaningful experiences far outweighed his quest for knowledge. Many people merely touched the glass over the picture of Paris, while Hemingway lived deeply within it.

Woman in the Musée Rodin

Discipline and observation are the hallmarks of genuine artists–any who practice their craft with deep intention. Art, in and of itself, is the state of constant decision making. Hemingway admired people that took their profession seriously, those that approached their craft through interested eyes. Hemingway never compromised his work ethic, and through his writing, he kept his focus on the human spirit and not simply on appearances, trying always to reach the essence of his subject. He was a man that lived hard and worked hard, and surrounded himself with those that did the same.

Café de Flore

What was Hemingway connected to in Paris? To learning? To language? To simplicity and clarity? To living life? To simple food and fine wine? To the art and to the events, and to his acquaintances and colleagues that filled the streets and cafés and his time there? Hemingway knew well that writing requires a full soul, an abundance of experiences, and those periods of quiet and solitary reflection in which to recreate them on paper.

Le Nemours near Le Palais Royal

Walking within the gardens, Hemingway was synonymous with his surroundings, trying to capture the images before him clearly and simply. Cézanne, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Manet, Gauguin—they were all in him as he painted his prose. He created his own landscapes impressionistically, trying not to reproduce nature, but to represent it through careful construction. Hemingway thought visually as he wrote and would, at times, break free from short declarative sentence structures by setting images, all connected by ands, in motion–thereby presenting human experience in a new and alluring way. The goal of his writing was to invite his readers in, to surround them with his story, and to make them a part of his experience.

Jardin du Luxembourg

While writing in the Closerie Lilas one day, Hemingway looked up from his work to see a woman sitting alone. In his mind, he believed he had seen beauty, and that it belonged to him now—that she belonged to him and that all of Paris belonged to him. Then, looking down to his notebook, he was back in the wilderness of upper-Michigan with his alter ego, Nick, in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Hemingway knew very well during this period of time that, above all else, he belonged to his pencil and to his notebook.

Bar 228 in Le Meurice

Hemingway has said that by studying nature, and by studying those whose art was filled with nature’s beauty, his writing was strengthened. Through viewing the work of Cézanne and others, he learned how light was reflected through trees or upon buildings, or the way it fell upon a face. Hemingway set out to achieve this through his suggestive and innovative style. His sentence structures were like the rapid, bold strokes of a painter’s brush, and, by limiting his words, he could portray the same sense of clarity and importance that Cézanne’s work held. Capturing the purity of nature helped form the writing and the literary imagery for which he is known.

Quai Voltaire

The players in 1920’s Paris could be spotted, quite by intention, at the Rotonde. This was the café in the city from which to be seen. Hemingway, though, preferred only to look in and not stop. He chose to be an outsider, to move past the Rotonde quickly, often varying his routes to avoid falling into lazy habits. He liked the anonymity and honesty less public cafés afforded him, for in those places he could be himself and lose himself in his stories—stories that were written by a man yet untouched and yet unburdened by fame.

La Rotonde on Boulevard Montparnasse

As Hemingway would walk from the Left Bank over the Pont de la Tournelle, he could circumnavigate the Île Saint-Louis by way of the scenic Quais: heading east, the Quais’ de Béthune, d’Anjou, de Bourbon, and d’Orleans. This walk captures what was strikingly real and pure in Hemingway’s Paris of the 1920s. Many of his favorite walks around Paris are found within the pages of A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. After all, there was a travel writer within Hemingway that simply wished to share the places he loved most.

Île Saint-Louis

This was and remains to this day, the home to the literary crowd in Paris, the devote book-lovers who stop and spend time at Shakespeare and Company. With talk of teaching and travel—London, India, South Africa and beyond—someone once said, “There is nothing, just truth. And books.” Another said, “Just give me a book, any book, for twenty hours.” Hemingway made Sylvia Beach’s sanctuary his home away from home. He loved the honest appreciation of literature and the support he received in this small but important Left Bank bookshop on rue de l’Odéon. Shakespeare and Company was, in part, what made Paris exceptional for Hemingway.

Present day Shakespeare and Company

Surrounded by the art and culture of this great city, Hemingway’s spirit and soul were transformed. While far from the United States, he discovered his ability to write about the wilderness of his childhood and was able to capture the simplicity of his own personal, and very American, landscape. Hemingway learned to believe that stories only become whole when the writer’s words—the people and places, and their remorse and sorrow—are allowed to collide with the reader’s own experiences and interpretation.

Jardin des Tuileries

Hemingway instinctively knew that the best of life is found in sparse, small details. His profoundly considered yet simple descriptions make the pages of his work come alive. He believed writing was not served well by embellishment, or through the use of adjectives and adverbs. With Hemingway, it was the wine, a Côte de Brouilly. The bread, and the dish baked in an oven hot with six escargots. The deep drink of red before each bite. And the candles and dim lamps that lit him were just enough to illuminate everything he needed or wanted.

La Testevin on Île Saint Louis

Book Talk. Monday, March 8th, 1923: The intimate crowd that gathered for the evening readings asked, “What about craft?” “What was the process like?” “What did you discover about writing?” “What about language?” “Is it about the city, or is it about the narrator?” You want all those that end up in a place like Shakespeare and Company to ask these questions. Hemingway knew the answers—he knew them because he immersed himself in the intricacies of his work. He believed in his art, trying to make the English language new by changing the rhythms of writing and by creating a minimalist approach to prose that would affect and impact generations to come.

Second floor of Shakespeare and Company

Forty years later, while trying desperately to find the right words to complete A Moveable Feast in Ketchum, Idaho, a broken Hemingway used his ability to emotionally transplant himself to one of his cherished cafés on the Left Bank. By doing so, it brought him closer to his time in Paris, the time when he and Hadley were in love and when his writing was new and untarnished by years of complexity. By being as close to his time in Paris and in his youth as he could be, Hemingway put himself at great risk. In the end, this risk proved to be too much for him.

La Closerie des Lilas

Craft. Repetition. Brevity. Voice. Clarity. All aspects of his art for which Ernest Hemingway is known and revered. As Hemingway looked north in the evening from his rented room at the Hotel Midi toward the illuminated Sacré-Cœur, he could watch the sun set upon this city from the place he worked. Life evaporates and people make choices. Like Hemingway, some choose to create. It is what they do. To make things that will stand another day. Since the days his eyes fell over the Parisian landscape, many writers have said it is impossible not to work in Hemingway’s shadow.

North view from Hemingway’s room

Fontaine Saint-Michel

Pont Alexandre III