On 21 July, literature lovers around the world celebrate the writer’s 125th birthday anniversary. Despite having lived in many countries around the globe, it is the city of Paris that Hemingway is probably most associated with.
Arriving as a young man with his wife of three months Hadley, he was poor, but ambitious. Calling Paris home between 1921 and 1928, it is the artsy Rive Gauche, the Left Bank of the Seine, which was his preferred haunt. Initially living in a bedsit at Rue du Cardinale Lemoine 74, just off Place de la Contrescarpe, at the top of the market street Rue Mouffetard in the Latin Quarter, without running water, he unsurprisingly spent many hours in the nearby cafés.
As it so often happens with life as an expatriate, you tend to meet people with similar stories and dreams as yours, but introductory letters from American author Sherwood Anderson to a slew of well-known personalities in Paris certainly helped getting him settled in the scene. Hemingway became a firm part of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of writers and artists living and working in Paris in the 1920s, which included illustrious names such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
While Hemingway rented a room at Rue Descartes 39 to write in, he started to frequent cafés such as La Closerie des Lilas, on Boulevard Montparnasse, just by the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he reportedly stocked up his meagre food cupboard occasionally by catching wild pigeons, and other cafés such as the Dôme, and La Rotonde, steps away at the corner of Boulevard Raspail. In the 1920s, café culture in Paris was cheap, and you could spend hours discussing your creative ideas with fellow artists over a cup of coffee or a bottle of wine. La Closerie des Lilas still has metal plaques on the tables to commemorate favourite seats of famous people, such as those of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Satre, with Hemingway’s plaque located firmly at the bar.
Another favourite spot, of Satre and de Beauvoir, as well as the Hemingway set were the cafés on Boulevard Saint Germain. A regular spot was Les Deux Magots, but he also frequented the Café de Flore next door, and, when he had money, Brasserie Lipp, on the opposite side of the road, where he loved the Alsatian sausages with potato salad.
Working as a European correspondent while trying to write fiction, Hemingway not only travelled widely throughout Europe, but also wrote regularly about Paris, covering news stories as well as expatriate gossip. Ironically, in one story for the Toronto Daily Star, he famously lambasted the café culture of Paris, and particularly that of La Rotonde, bad-mouthing the artistic expatriates of Paris hanging around cafés, all while having his place firmly among them.
Hadley and Hemingway welcomed their first child, John, nicknamed Bumby, in 1923 in Toronto, and upon their return to Paris, Hemingway not only published his first novel in 1926, The Sun Also Rises, a semi-biographical story about American and British expats in Spain, but also collections of previously published short stories. After briefly moving in with Ezra Pound and his wife at Rue Notre Dame-de-Champs 70, the Hemingway family relocated to Notre-Dame-des-Champs 113, living above a sawmill, an address that no longer exists today.
With Hemingway’s literary success came the breakdown of his first marriage, with the pretty much immediate onset of his second marriage, this one to Vogue journalist, and reason for the divorce, Pauline Pfeiffer. They started off life together in her apartment at Rue Ferou 6, which would have lain right en route between his apartment and the cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and, after the wedding, they moved into Rue Froidevaux 69, south of Montparnasse Cemetery, but still within steps of his favourite cafés, and sticking to the Left Bank.
Hemingway left Paris in 1928, no longer a poor man, and stored a couple of custom-made Louis Vuitton trunks at the Ritz Paris, one of his few regular spots on the other side of the Seine. In 1944, after the end of WWII, he came to ‘liberate’ the Ritz, and reclaim his cases. Inside where the hand-written notes he took during his life in Paris, which became the basis of A Moveable Feast. Sadly, the book, one of his most famous ones, was only published posthumously in 1964.
Further Hemingway addresses to search out in Paris:
- Shakespear & Co, the original store, opened by Sylvia Back, was at Rue de l’ Odéon 12, but today’s store still sells all of Hemingway’s and his fellow Lost Generation books.
- Hôtel d’Angleterre (then Hôtel Jacob), is where Hadley and Hemingway stayed on their first night in Paris. Room 14 is still the Hemingway room, and you can book it.
- Musée du Luxembourg, was where Hemingway wandered, to while time away and get over his hunger pangs.
- Square du Vert-Gallant, one of the most romantic spots in Paris, at the tip of Île de la Cité, under the iconic willow tree, is where Hemingway often fished.
