HEMINGWAY'S PARIS AND PAMPLONA,
THEN AND NOW
ISBN: 0595089534

Robert F. Burgess who met Ernest Hemingway during his last Pamplona fiesta, describes those events. He tells of Ernest's early Paris and Pamplona years, then returns to Europe to revisit Hemingway's haunts today. He buses and back-packs into the Spanish Pyrenees to retrace the route described by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. Finding everything exactly as he described it, including where Jake and Bill cooled their wine bottles while trout fishing, he realizes that Hemingway often wrote more fact than fiction into his novels. From new interviews and perspectives of those who knew him we see a clearer view of the man behind the legend, a man who just before the end knew what he valued most and when he had been the happiest. Burgess shows us where and how Hemingway's legacy still lives on in Paris and Pamplona today. 392 pages, includes never before published pictures of Hemingway, and many others. Paperback: 6 x 9-inches. © Jan. 2000 Published by iUniverse.com.

       $19.95

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If you've ever wondered why Ernest Hemingway returned to Pamplona each year, or if his novels were often lightly disguised truth, then Robert F. Burgess' latest book, HEMINGWAY'S PARIS AND PAMPLONA, THEN AND NOW will answer these questions. Burgess, an American free-lance writer living in Madrid at the time, met Ernest Hemingway in 1959 during his last Pamplona fiesta. Papa took a liking to the bearded author who had just back-backed through North Africa, and he invited him to join his "mob." Burgess describes these events in a way that enables the reader to vividly relive them as they occurred. How well he accomplishes it will leave you turning pages to a book readers have found hard to put down. As internationally acclaimed Hemingway authority, Professor Emeritus, Robert E. Gajdusek, author of Hemingway's Paris, said in a letter to the author: "Your writing is...at its best in intricately lovely and powerful descriptions of landscape, place, and event... you weave in incidental details against a steady continuing undercurrent of changing time...You again and again do a very Hemingway thing — 'see it from their viewpoint' feeling it, the grabbing air, the pounding of the cobblestones, smelling the smells... Boy, you do play with echoes and resonance's and overtones. Best of all, for me, is the way your encounter with Hemingway was forged in silence seized out of surrounding noise. 'What an odd thing!'"

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

FROM THE BOOK:

    "Looking up and seeing him standing beside me inside the yellow portico of Pamplona’s bullring is more than a little surprising. I’m surprised to see him standing there by himself, and surprised to see that he’s really less of an imposing figure than he seemed from across the plaza, surrounded by people.
    His broad face, white hair and beard set him apart from everyone. His slightly mussed white hair contrasts sharply with his broad tan brow and slightly pink cheeks. His face looks fuller from the bushy beard that squares his features. He’s about my height, six feet, but he’s hunched up a little like a boxer with no neck showing, just white head perched on broad shoulders. He’s all shoulders and barrel chest, red-checkered shirt open at the collar, his bulk enclosed in a loose-fitting tan vest. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses he looks at his tickets and then glances up at the numbers over the concrete aisles. Oddly, no one is crowding us. People flow around us but keep their distance. We’re alone.
    Without really intending to speak to him, I hear myself in a low voice saying, "I guess you know you’re to blame for all this."
    He looks at me. His lips hardly move but his voice rolls out of the depths of his barrel chest, "Whatdayamean by that?"
    "If you hadn’t written The Sun Also Rises, we wouldn’t be here."
    He glances at my beard, old army bush jacket, faded GI bill cap and grins. "Who’re you, one of Castro’s boys?"
    "They thought so last week in Tunisia." We shake hands and I introduce myself. Too gun-shy to tell him that I’m a freelance writer working for a Madrid magazine I tap the Rolleiflex hanging from my shoulder and tell him I’ve come to photograph the bulls.
    He shakes his head. "Hope you find some worth photographing. What you doing in Tunisia?"
    "Backpacked in with a buddy trying to find Hill 609 where his brother fought in the war. With our beards and gear the locals took us for Cubans."
    "What American outfit was that?"
    "894^th Tank Destroyer Battalion."
    He nods slowly. I notice the raised scar high on his left forehead where he once accidentally pulled a skylight down on himself.
    "Landed at Oran," he says.
    "That’s right." I start to say something else but a sudden flood of sound and people drowns it out. Out of the crowd appears a small wiry woman with bright, sharp blue eyes and deeply tanned, deeply creased features. I recognize Miss Mary, his wife. She focuses totally on him, grabs his arm just above the elbow and says, "Okay, let’s go."
    Without hesitation she plunges into the crowd dragging him sideways. He still looks back at me with that fixed grin on his face, the grin slightly askew now. His hand lifts and waves as if in apology. "I’ll see you later," he says. Then the crowd swallows them."

    "Brain-numbing decisions. Seeing them from behind the safety of the barrier was one thing, but seeing them without the safety of the barrier was to know the heart-throbbing, mouth-drying, prickly-skinned dull ache of utter fear. If you made it, if the terror thundered past and for some miraculous reason left you intact, then the sudden overwhelming blissful realization that you had been spared was so knee-buckling sweet that it sapped your strength faster than a double-barreled orgasm. Hemingway never wrote about that, but he knew it the same way he knew what was below an iceberg."

    "... as the bleachers empty in front of me, I see Hemingway striding purposefully up through the middle of them, up through the empty sombre section, climbing the steep grade from concrete seat to seat. He sees me standing alone and angles toward me...
     As he comes up he smiles in recognition and stops to talk.... "My wife and I come here to enjoy ourselves and everyone pesters us." As he speaks he turns toward me and suddenly throws an arcing clenched right fist punch at my stomach, stopping it just short of my shirt.
    Being fake-punched by Hemingway is so unexpected I don't flinch but instinctively tense my stomach muscles. Hemingway must approve; he doesn't even break stride in his sentence, "But I don't mind." he says with a grin... 'C'mon and have a drink with me and my mob.'"

    "I open the door to the small room off the hallway where the piano is kept. Behind the door is the old, black upright piano with its lid locked. It is a very small room with an obscured window at the other end. The door to the room has to be closed to see the piano behind it. Opposite the piano is a door to a woman’s restroom.
    I catch Inaki going back-and-forth to the kitchen and ask if he will unlock the piano for me. He gladly does so. Inaki takes the time to turn back the cover over the keyboard exposing the yellowed ivory keys. Then he lifts the lid to the upright part of the piano and points to something. I lean over and look at the inside of the lid where he points. Scratched in the wood in one inch tall block letters is:

E. HEMINWAY
25-7-1923

    Inaki beams at me. All I can do is shrug and say, "Someone didn’t know how to spell Hemingway’s name!"

Read a sample chapter: Chapter 29 - Echoes Along the Seine

Moments of Truth: a unique photographic review of some of the Spanish bullfights Hemingway attended, as seen through the author's lens.

WHAT READERS SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK:

"I enjoyed [this book] immensely... It is full of fascinating detail, and Robert Burgess has done an admirable job of making it all accessible to Hemingway's readers. It is a joy to read, and it brought back many vivid recollections. The book is a thorough testament to the verisimilitude of Hemingway's fiction... I have already shared the book with my students in my graduation class on Hemingway and I am going to order more copies to share with my friends and colleagues..."
—Professor Douglas E. LaPrade, Department of English, TheUniversity of Texas-Pan American.

"What I loved about this book is the conversational tone. I felt as if I were sitting in a café in Paris sipping a Café Creme (or two) and listening to the author tell great stories about Hemingway in Paris and Pamplona - as the title says - Then and Now. The book retraces Papa's footsteps through the streets of Paris and Pamplona and weaves biography, history, and field notes into great stories about our greatest story-teller. I intend it as a high compliment when I say that the book is an easy read. (I had no problem staying up late the day I got it and finishing it the next morning over a few cups of coffee - except being late for work.) It is a great companion piece for Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," and I plan on bringing it with me when I make the trip to Paris and Pamplona myself."
—John R. Sullivan, Scottsdale, Arizona.

"A great place to start!
This book is an outstanding way to get acquainted with Hemingway's works and life. I have never read any of his books (I have seen several of the movie versions though) and know very little about Hemingway's life, so when it was recommended by a friend, I thought it might be like coming in on a football game at halftime. However, it turned out to be a very readable, enjoyable and accessible look into this great American writer's years in France and Spain and the friends and acquaintances that influenced his life and his writing. The author did an outstanding job of showing the real life connections between his life there and the characters and places he used in his first novel 'The Sun Also Rises'. In reading it, I was able to see in my mind's eye the street cafés of Paris and feel the excitement of the famous running of the bulls in the streets of Pamplona. I especially enjoyed the author's return visit to those places to see them as they are today. His descriptions of the changes that have occurred in the intervening years are what brought this book together nicely. I think now I'll go read 'The Sun Also Rises' and see how Hemingway saw it all."
—Doug Bogert, North Florida

"With this book, Burgess has made a permanent and invaluable contribution to the collective knowledge-base about one of history's most revered authors: Ernest Hemingway. With detective-like determination the author illuminates where Hemingway's fiction intersected with Hemingway's real life experiences. And with engaging style Burgess takes the reader to those famous places of long ago, and shows how they survive today. He even weaves in an interesting literary braid at one point, tying three different accounts together to complete the picture. A must read for anyone claiming to be a Hemingway fan."
—Eric Zillmer, Grand Rapids, Michigan

"More Than A Memoir-A Terrific Read!
I've read a couple biographies about Ernest Hemingway but they seemed stiff, as though the authors were just compiling facts. If Hemingway's Paris and Pamplona, Then and Now is considered a biography then it is one of the most interesting ones I've ever read. Mainly because Burgess' writing style makes it read more like a novel. From a look at the book's credits I believe the author has drawn on almost everything that has ever been written about Mr. Hemingway. He not only brings it all together very smoothly but I found myself learning things I never knew about the man on several different levels. Often they were either details of experiences the author saw himself with Hemingway, or they were personal accounts from people who knew Hemingway intimately. The author weaves them in with details of Hemingway's early Paris years along with personal memoirs that were written after the authors' death. He even retraces intimate details of Hemingway's real-life character for Robert Cohen from a biography written by Harold Loeb and published in 1959, the very year that Hemingway was last in Pamplona. For Hemingway it was his Last Hurrah. A last happy time with his old friends. Later, there is even an interview with a matronly friend who was only 19-years-old when Hemingway hired her in Pamplona to work for him as a researcher/typist in Cuba after they met at his last fiesta in 1959. Equally interesting to me was Burgess' description of Hemingway's final fiesta where everything seemed to come together there for him and he finally realized what was important to him. A year later he died. In the last half of the book Burgess revisits Hemingway's favorite places today and shows the reader what still remains of the author's legacy in Paris and Pamplona. Good stuff! I found the book a fascinating read on several levels, then and now. He hit the bull's eye both times!"
—Robert Hjellum, a Hemingway fan from San Francisco, November 28, 2000,

© 2000, 2001 Robert F. Burgess.  All rights reserved.