| Hemingway's Paris and Pamplona, Then and Now
Chapter 29 - Echoes Along The Seine
Whenever
Hemingway wrote about Paris, the Seine River was always part of it, whether he mentioned
it or not. Anyone who has ever lived in Paris is aware of the important role the river
plays. It has been said that Paris makes love to the Seine. This is true. Parisians
embrace their river with intense affection. Artists and lovers have always found this
broad, meandering river with its wide stone quais, arched stone bridges, shade trees and
many marble benches for lovers and admirers one of the reasons Paris is such a romantic,
unforgettable feast for all the senses. Paris is the Seine is Paris even though Miss Stein
may never have said it. Yet, nothing is truer.
Over time, some things about this river have changed, but not
much. Its waters may still be polluted, but its pale greenness makes it look clean. The
steady stream of noisy automobiles, motor scooters and high-rise buses that whiz over the
bridges or get stalled on them, besmirches some of the pleasant scenery. But in the past
it was the slower, more prolonged noise of galloping hooves, smelly, horse-drawn carriages
and freight wagons with thundering wheels. Today’s clouds of gagging exhaust fumes
are health-threatening, and the people pollution is worse than ever. But that’s about
all that has changed. Thankfully, not too much else disturbs the Seine’s peaceful
natural beauty. With luck she may make it into the 21st Century relatively
intact.
To see the river and its trappings in its natural guise you have
to get up early in the morning and go look at it. Even if it’s just from your hotel
balcony. Best view however is at street level, perhaps from a bridge such as le Pont du
Carrousel looking toward the sunrise and L’Île de la Cité. If you are early enough,
most vehicles will still be doing what they do so well in the depths of someone’s
underground garage, or they will simply be curbed and quiet. Then if you are really lucky,
you may see what makes this Grande Dame of a city so special.
Seen in early morning mists on a bright morning in May, this is
the scene that artists have painted and poets have rhapsodized over from time immemorial.
It is the exact same scene, with slight variations of course, that young Ernest Hemingway
saw on many mornings he walked along the Seine wondering if he would ever learn to write
well enough to make a good living.
Nothing really has changed today. Writers and artists still walk
the Seine pondering these questions. The sun still rises over the River Seine and the
event is as spectacular as ever. As dawn turns the eastern sky a glowing pale rosé, the
morning mists rise up like slowly lifting gossamer curtains, curling and caressing the
black barges and rainbow-hued houseboats moored with armthick rough hemp hawsers to the
centuries old manhole-sized mooring rings embedded in the stone walled quai. Curling ever
upward past bridge abutments, up over gracefully arched stone bridges with their black
Parisian lamp posts, up over the black bronze mailed knight and rearing steed, up past the
flying buttresses, and glaring gargoyles to play with the upthrust towers and spire of
Notre Dame Cathedral. Then, the first strong clear sharp light appears, setting fire to
spire and tower edges, a halo of gold and rosé grows glowing and brilliant momentarily
silhouetting the entire scene, a masterpiece in all its brief glory for any artist, poet
or author quick enough to capture it.
Possibly no other people in the world take more sensual pleasure
in their river than Parisians. You see it everywhere. You see it in just the number of
occupied marble benches that are placed discretely where river lovers can see the
prettiest river sights. And speaking of lovers, they still unabashedly embrace each other
on these same benches as they did in Hemingway’s day and long before that, the same
way they will long after this. They are all in tune with and acutely aware of the nearness
of their romantic River Seine, but as you might expect they have eyes only for each other.
Even in adverse weather the river has charms. A windy, brisk gray
day in May the sky lays like a sodden wool blanket over the Pont du Carrousel where
cobblestones gleam from recent rain. A cold wind rips down the river. No bateau mouches
today. The backpack feels heavy and good, the straps tight against my shoulders. It’s
good to be in Paris again. Put out all your antennae, I tell myself. Remember everything.
It may be your last time. And later after the sun comes out and the day warms, I notice
that no matter how hot it gets, the marble slabs atop the Seine’s benches always stay
cool. And someone always has time to take a moment out of his or her busy day to stop and
gaze out upon the river.
That afternoon I hike far along the Seine, marveling at the
variety of things people can think of to add to the deck of their live-aboard houseboats
to make them look more homey, more like one’s backyard. I see an amazing assortment
of cats, dogs, furniture, awnings, hammocks, exercise equipment, kayaks, bicycles,
children’s Jungle Gyms or playpens, barbecue grills, artificial lawns, building
supplies, Tiki torches, rows of flower boxes usually containing bright red geraniums,
small vegetable gardens, various potted plants, and shrubs, including a few palm trees.
All the accouterments of most people’s backyards compressed neatly into the
rectangular confines of an elegantly kept, brightly painted highly livable river barge on
the river Seine parked in front of the romantic city of Paris. Each family’s
"Island in the Seine." Or as some Frenchmen might say with passion: "Voila!
Mon Ark!"And I would have to add just as passionately, "Ah, oui,
c’est la vie!"
Whenever the sun comes out, the river walkers are not far behind.
Everyone seems to wear a backpack, young and old alike. They are as common in Paris as
businessmen’s briefcases in New York. Unless, of course, you happen to be a musician.
They seldom wear a backpack. They carry an instrument. You see them here and there along
the Seine. Solitary soloists playing their cornet, their French horn, their flute to no
one in particular. Just playing while everyone else stops momentarily in the shade of the
plane trees to listen.
An artist and his easel here, a cello player there, maybe some of
it is inspired by the nearby Pont des Arts, the no frills people-only bridge where a
popular thing to do is to carry bongo drums with friends down to the riverside quai, sit
on grass in the late afternoon sun and beat out a rhythm. On the bridge overhead, street
artists paint painting after painting of the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame Cathedral to
sell to tourists. They can paint this scene in their sleep. No one tires of it.
I stop to rest on the Pont Neuf, the oldest and most famous
bridge in Paris. It may be named "New Bridge" but it is Paris’ oldest. King
Henry III laid the cornerstone for it in 1578 and his successor Henry IV galloped his
horse over the completed structure in 1605. You can still see him astride his charger in
all his glory from atop his tall statue on the Right Bank.
This bridge was made for river watchers and nature lovers. Large
half-moon-shaped stone bench balconies are built into the side of the bridge so that they
bulge out over the river like the broad stern of a steamboat. They overlook the
river’s beauty and the Musée du Louvre When not watching the river, people just sit
in these balconies to rest, as I was doing. A moment later a French woman sat down
opposite me to enjoy a banana that she took out of her purse. I watched her carefully peel
it, and knew at once what might have happened had I been watching the same scene
elsewhere. Upon peeling the fruit there would be a short, swift movement and the peeling
would disappear into the river. But not this woman who was completely unaware of my
surreptitious watchful eye from the corner of my sun shades. The banana peeling was
quickly folded and put back into her purse. That simple gesture suggests the kind of pride
Frenchmen have about their river and their city.
Each evening at sunset, Pont Neuf is crowded with watchers lining
its west side balcony boxes and railing, all waiting for the spectacular moment when the
sun slides down in an orange ball of fire among the Left Banks’ painted barges and
then into the Seine.
At the precise moment it occurs, everyone on the bridge holds
their breath as though expecting to hear the sizzle. But what everyone hears are low
murmurs of pleasure.
Like French women, all of Paris’ bridges are beautiful in
their own right. But certainly one of the most striking is six bridges downstream from
Pont Neuf called Pont Alexandre III. Everything anyone ever loved about the baroque is
here attached to this bridge. Wildly rearing winged horses, four on each side balance atop
columns on each side. A host of cherubs and bearded gods cavort along the bridge
balustrades over the water. Where appropriate, thick layers of gold-gild emblazon the
flying horses, and any other scrolls, angels or ornaments that need this Midas touch.
Thirty ornate black lamp-posts with all the curlicues and glass globes an artisan can
imagine march across the arched bridge in magnificent splendor. Indeed, this gentle
354-foot-arch was the longest single span ever attempted until then. This architectural
spectacle was created as a centerpiece for the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 in the hope
of surpassing the none too beauteous architectural feat of the 1889 fair, the Eiffel
Tower.
No indeed, nothing has changed. Hemingway saw it all. In A
Moveable Feast he wrote that he often walked the stone quais along the riverbanks when
he was trying to think something out. Just being there on the Seine seemed to help. He
found it easier to think while he was walking, or doing something, or watching people
doing something that he understood such as fishing.
In his Islands in the Stream Hemingway has one of his
characters telling another that he can name all the bridges over the Seine from Suresnes
to Charenton, the latter outside the center of Paris about 4 miles southeast of Notre Dame
where he used to sometimes fish. Then, by way of his character he tells us that he really
can’t name all of the bridges but he’s got them all in his head. He remembers
that part of the river is ugly and many of the bridges are too. But that he had lived
there a long time and he used to walk the whole river, both the ugly parts and the
beautiful parts as well, that he has fished a lot of it with different friends of his. He
says he used to fish it sometimes at Charenton and often walked the river when he finished
work until he got too tired and then he would catch a bus part way back. Once he had money
he said they used to take taxies or horsecabs.
Certainly Hemingway was not one to pass up finding out what kind
of fish the Seine River anglers were catching and exactly how they did it. In A
Moveable Feast Ernest describes that in more detail, telling about walking down the
stone steps from the park in Paris and watching the fishermen there under the big, broad
bridge, probably near L’Île de la Cité. He said the better spots for fishing seemed
to change with the different flood stages of the river. And that the fishermen knew where
those spots were. He said that they all fished with long cane poles, sometimes they were
jointed so they could be taken apart. And, everything about their end-tackle was light.
The leaders were very fine. For bobbers they used quill floats, which of course would
upend with the slightest tug on the hook, and very small hooks with tiny pieces of bait
because what they were trying to catch were not large fish, they were not much larger than
minnows.
Ernest said they were a tiny dace-like fish called goujon
(From the Old French word goujon suggesting that the tiny fish resemble the small
metal pins used to hold two pieces of stone together.) He said that when they were fried
whole they were so good he could eat a plateful of them. The plump, sweet-flavored fish he
found tasted better than even fresh sardines because they were not oily and you ate them
bones and all.
In his book Secret Life of the Seine, [Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, New York, 1994] Mort Rosenblum describes living aboard a houseboat on
the Seine for several years. He soon knew the river from one end to the other. He said
there are some forty species of freshwater fish native to the river and a dozen more that
were added. Thanks to the influence of dams and pollution, by the time the river reaches
Paris, nine fish out of ten are either tiny chubs or roaches, and he couldn’t even
imagine anyone being interested in catching something called a "roach." As
Rosenblum said, in most places of the world when you see a fisherman you almost always
ask, "Are they biting?" But on the Seine River today, the question most often
asked is: "Are you really going to eat that?"
In the early 90s when he lived on the Seine the pollution was so
bad that a Frenchman told him that you really don’t have to commit suicide by jumping
off a bridge into the river, all you have to do is the backstroke.
Over the years since then, however, there have been considerable
efforts by the French to clean up the river and restore its lost oxygen. Still, it’s
a constant uphill battle. Seine fish that have survived are undoubtedly hardy souls.
Industrial pollution may make them glow in the dark, but by golly they’re still
there, a tribute to evolution!
Saltwater cousins of these fish are popular around the
Mediterranean. In Spain they are called "los boquerones" which translates
to mean "anchovies." In English they would be called "whitebait"
commonly caught by commercial netters along our northeastern seaboard and the California
coast. Considered a delicacy, these fish are largely tiny herring and sprat fry but the
generic term takes in all small minnow-like fish.
In Spain you buy them from the market by the kilo and the small
fish are deposited into a quickly shaped cone of newspaper. You hurry home, wash them and
they were ready to cook. If you are in a hurry, you lightly salt the lot, toss them in a
paper bag with flour, and then deep-fry them like French fries. The more fastidious cooks
may clean the catch simply by breaking the head downward toward the tail and pulling it in
that direction removing the head and entrails. This procedure takes but a moment and makes
the fish taste sweeter.
To me they all taste much like the freshwater smelt caught in
fast moving cold clear northern Michigan streams in the springtime. Hemingway certainly
knew about these Michigan fish and how they tasted which might explain his fondness for
the gujon of Paris.
Papa never met a stranger. He said he knew several Frenchmen who
fished certain productive parts of the river between the Île St. Louis (The island just
east of L’Île de la Cité containing Notre Dame Cathedral) and the Place du Vert
Galant. He said that travel writers often thought that the fishermen along the Seine were
completely crazy because they never seemed to be catching anything. The impression was
that they were just fishing for the fun of it. Which to some observers suggested that they
were engaged in an activity that was about as worthwhile as meditating on your navel.
Papa quickly pointed out to them that not only are these Seine
River fishermen quite serious, but they are also quite productive. He said that many of
them were men that lived on small pensions, which had grown virtually worthless from the
inflation. They weren’t fishing for the fun of it, they fished for food. Others, who
had jobs, still needed that extra help feeding their large families. So they fished when
they had half days off from work.
Summing it up, Hemingway thought there was better fishing at
Charenton, several miles upriver where the river Marn came into the Seine, and on either
side of Paris. But it was also fine fishing right in the city itself.
Today, I would be interested in his opinion of what has happened
to the Seine fishing. He probably would chalk it up to pollution. He surely wouldn’t
chalk it up to overfishing. During the month I was there in May and early June I saw only
one lonely Seine fisherman sitting with his long cane pole on the stone quai fishing
practically in downtown Paris. He looked like any one of many I once saw there years ago
except that he was a young man. Perhaps too young to know there were no fish to be caught.
I would have talked to him about it but he was accompanied by a large black mastiff. The
dog was not interested in what his master was doing. He sat with his back to his master
glaring eyeball to eyeball at me. And he wasn’t smiling. I never blinked, just kept
walking. I’ll always wonder if that Seine fisherman ever caught anything, and if he
did, whether he ever dared eat it.
As soon as Bumby was old enough to enjoy the pleasures Ernest
found along the Seine, like any doting father, Papa taught his son to enjoy the more
meaningful things in life. In fact even at Bumby’s tender age they shared their own
kind of thing together. It was quality time, long remembered by his son. No wonder Bumby
came home with an ice cream ring around his mouth and telling everyone how
"beau" life was with Papa. After all, Papa was teaching him "neat"
things. Fun things about which mothers might disapprove. Bumby never told anyone about
them until long after he was a grown man. Then, Jack wrote of his early memories of Papa
in his own book: Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman My Life With and Without Papa
[Taylor Publishing Company, Dallas, Texas, 1986]
The book is good reading, especially the fishing parts. He
recalled that his first fishing experience was as a spectator with Papa. What he saw and
what they later did made enough of an impression on Jack that he become an avid sport
fishing fan for life.
He said that when they lived in Paris and he and Papa went out
for walks together, there was always some kind of fishing going on along the quaisides and
river embankments. Papa may have started out intending to look for some good reading
material, but it often ended up with them looking over the fishermen of the Seine. On his
first trip, Bumby said that Papa was intent on visiting the bookstalls that lined the
sidewalks along certain parts of the river. One after another these black metal boxes sat
permanently attached to waist-high walls over the quais beside the Seine. Most are about
the size of a small steamer trunk. Called "boites," (boxes) their lids
can be unlocked and propped open to display a treasure-trove of exciting old books and
memorabilia.
These bookstalls along the Seine are fascinating. From them you
can buy anything from old etched prints to long forgotten maps and leather-bound books, or
cheap paperbacks, old Parisian playbills, artists’ prints and reproductions of famous
oil paintings of all sizes; naughty postcards and touristy ones, plus an enormous amount
of unusual bricabrac of interest to almost everyone enjoying a casual promenade along the
river walk in the dappled shade of the plane trees.
Papa’s moves on the bookstalls were more thought out that
most casual perusers. He sought quality merchandise. Some "boites" turned
out better quality books than others did. Consequently Papa had certain ones that he
preferred over others. For example he enjoyed searching those opposite the hotel that was
right next door to our apartment: Hotel Voltaire on Quai Voltaire, for a definite reason.
He said it was because there were several bookstalls along there that sold books purchased
from hotel employees "especially Hotel Voltaire, which had a wealthier clientele than
most." When you are out looking, you might as well shop for the best.
No matter where they went to these bookstalls, Jack said that
they always stopped to watch the fishermen along the Seine. From Papa he learned to
recognize these dedicated anglers as a totally unique breed of fishermen. They were men
with weather-beaten faces, shabby clothes and boundless patience. They fished with long
bamboo cane poles and goose-quill bobbers. They looked as permanent a part of the scenery
as the old trees. Jack thought that the fishermen of the past along the Seine caught more
fish than they do today, recalling that some caught so many they sold them to riverside
restaurants who deep-fried them for customers. He always considered them a fine treat and
a favorite with him and his father.
Jack recalls that sometimes the two of them would take these
paper-wrapped servings of small fried fish to one of the benches on the Henry IV bridge
overlooking the Seine. After they feasted on the fries, father and son had a contest to
test their skill. Papa demonstrated. The object of the sport was to lean over the stone
bridge rail and try to spit down the moving funnels of the fleet of passenger steamboats
called bateaux mouches passing under the bridges. These long, broad sightseeing boats
lined with passenger benches work the river from dawn to dusk and some continue into the
night, serving dinner guests. All of them ply the river almost year around except in times
of floods.
Hopefully most were oblivious of the Hemingway game which really
was tame considering a similar form of it mentioned in Rosenblum’s book about bateau
life on the Seine. His greatest dislike were the drunks who when they saw him coming in
his houseboat, liked to line up on the bridge he was forced to go under and see which one
of them could as the French euphemistically like to call it "Faire pépé"
on his boat as he passed under. Maritime life on the River Seine isn’t all bonbons
and potted red geraniums.
The game Hemingway and Son were embarked on was far tamer than
that. The goal of the game was quite elusive. To be able to spit spittle down a moving
target such as this was extremely difficult. According to his son, it was rare that either
of them were successful but when lightening did strike and they succeeded, they rewarded
themselves at the closest café, usually a beer for Papa and a flavored sherbet or bright
red Grenadine for him.
Just watching the fishermen made Jack want to try it some day but
he never dreamed it would be possible so soon. In those early years living in the flat
above the sawmill over the courtyard on Notre-Dame-des-Champs, he remembered it as just a
short walk from his godmother Gertrude Steins’ large commodious apartment where she
lived with her friend Alice B. Toklas. Jack felt that they lived in quite a luxurious
place on Rue de Fleurus.
From the Hemingway’s small apartment he remembered the
Closerie de Lilas was hardly a block away and in those days it was still just a simple,
inexpensive café with no frills. When the Hemingway’s took off on a winter vacation
he remembered being carried along on ski trips to Schruns where both Ernest and Hadley
were trying to perfect their skiing. Eventually Ernest got confident enough in his ability
to pack Jack along with him in his rucksack.
Being a single mother now was a challenge for Hadley. She met it
with amazing grace and equanimity. Jack felt the change. He said his life changed
immediately because from then on he no longer had an everyday father. Just one he saw
usually on special occasions or on his vacations.
It was after his parent’s divorce sometime later that the
young Jack had a chance to learn something about fishing for himself. At the time they
were staying at the villa of Paul Mower, a newspaperman from Chicago whom Hadley would
later marry quite happily. Now, however, while they and their friends were out walking one
Sunday afternoon, Jack, the family cook, and the family cat ventured out the back garden
gate to the riverbank.
Named the Grand Morin it was a quiet little meandering waterway
with weed beds along shore and a nearby mill-dam. From a small dock that went out over the
water, Jack glimpsed schools of minnows swimming in the current and immediately remembered
how interested the Seine River fishermen had been in this small type of fish.
It didn’t take him long to fashion a hook from a bent safety
pin, with a pair of pliers and a hammer. Cutting a three-foot willow shoot and scrounging
up some thin black string he soon fastened everything together in the same manner as his
father had when he was a youngster. Shaping tiny dough balls from his sandwich bread and
skewering one of them on his barbless hook, Bumby cast it out upon the waters to try his
luck. He had no bobber but he needed none. He could easily see the fish he wanted to
catch.
The minute one of the minnows inhaled the bait, Jack yanked the
willow and flipped the catch up flopping on the dock beside him. Kimi the cat pounced
happily on the catch and enjoyed the feast. And more of the same that soon came his way,
eating the little fish as fast as the boy could catch them. But a jubilant Bumby did
manage to cram a few of them in his pockets and get home with them where the maid showed
him how to clean them. That evening his catch was prepared as a treat for the family.
The thrill of that moment never faded. However, the young angler
was admonished not to keep using his pocket as a fish creel. A flour sack became his creel
from then on and that was the moment when another radical change occurred in his life. He
never forgot the thrill of fishing. From then on he was as hooked as the fish. In later
life he pursued the sport until he became an outstanding fly fisherman, which made Papa
proud. And it had all started on the Seine!
Hemingway was fortunate to be able to see the Seine and Paris at
different times of the year and to remember details of how it made him feel. The way he
described it sometimes had to do with the way it looked and sometimes with the way he
felt. Three days before Christmas l923, The Toronto Star Weekly published his
article titled, "Christmas On the Roof of the World," in which he described a
Christmas in Paris:
"It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the
Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up
the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where
Notre Dame squats in the dusk. It is very beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas
time."
In A Moveable Feast, he found a way to solve his
loneliness by watching the fishermen and life on the river with its colorful barges and
the active families aboard them. He watched the large black working barges that plied this
waterway, fascinated by their smoke-stacks that folded backwards so they could pass under
the bridges. Often these tugs towed long trains of loaded black barges, moving slowly past
the stone quais of the river, past the plane trees, the poplars and large elms that grew
along the quais. After seeing that he knew he would never be lonely as long as he was
along the river.
Years later, A. E. Hotchner, accompanying Hemingway on a
nostalgic return to Paris in 1950 said that to Papa, Paris was synonymous with happiness.
As always it was Paris and the river. Paris, the Seine, and the value of what he had found
there:
"To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to
read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how
poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you."
And in summing up, the author of The Secret Life of the Seine
expressed it this way:
"For all the beauty and drama of details that might be put
to words, the power of the river is the spell it casts. Those who love it feel a part of
something indescribable, a secret source for the soul. Monet and the Impressionists did
not define the Seine, or get beneath its surface. They simply helped us feel it for
ourselves."
Amen to that. |