At midnight in our quiet square the local queen of the Fallas lights the fuse that starts the last act of this extraordinary festival. Lines of firecrackers and flame race towards Aladdin’s buttocks and other strategic flashpoints. For a while the figures prove resistant but gradually the flames take hold and the figures are stripped to their wooden frames and for a half-minute or more the surge of the fire is frighteningly intense.
We make our way towards the main square. Over the heads of the crowd by the market I can see Steven Spielberg’s glasses melting. At the end of one street fire licks round a Harlequin, at another, a Roman Emperor and several naked ladies are engulfed in flames.
It takes most of one hour to make our way the short distance to the main square. A figure of Gulliver fifty feet high towers over us and is duly ignited (this time via a main fuse which runs straight into his fly). As the final conflagration takes hold Gulliver’s head collapses, sending his rather soppy Hollywood-style grin crashing on to the street. The bomberos (firemen) spray the nearby palm trees as the flames leap and the heat intensifies and once again we hold our breath not knowing which way it will go.
Two-thirty in the morning on the streets of Valencia. The bulldozers and trucks are moving into the main square to remove the remains of Gulliver.
The brushes are revolving on a squadron of natty little cleaning vehicles. A line of orange-clad street-sweepers, with gleaming new brooms and shovels, stands ready to follow them.
Though the celebrations still go on, the party’s over. A sense of loss hangs in the smoke-shrouded air, a muted feeling of anti-climax, a sudden acknowledgement that the city of Valencia is dog-tired.
I know I shall miss being woken by les despertas, I shall miss being able to stroll round Spain’s third biggest city as if it were my own living-room, and when in the morning I hear the noise of a city returning to normal - the car alarms, the police sirens - I shall probably miss the explosions too.
There is something intoxicating and dangerous and reckless in the way the Spanish celebrate, which is what must have drawn Hemingway to their way of life. It is physical and hard and colourful and noisy and yet has a rare sense of historical continuity.
Throughout his adult life, with the exception of the darkest years of General Franco’s dictatorship, Hemingway kept coming back to Spain. In a drawer in the house in Ketchum, where he shot himself on 2 July 1961, were tickets to the Pamplona bullfights that were to begin a week later.
CHICAGO/MICHIGAN
‘Who’s that girl?’ Early photos of young Ernest confuse visitors at his birthplace.
Ernest Hall, Sheffield-born grandfather of Ernest (with weapon), Ursula and Marcelline.
The front of 339 Oak Park Avenue looks naked with its porch removed for Hemingway centenary restoration.
Marcelline, Madelaine, Clarence, Grace, Ursula and Ernest (still to come, Carol and Leicester). Oak Park 1906.
The Red Fox Inn, where Hemingway’s fishing mentor lived.
The public library on Mitchell Street, Petoskey. Here in 1919 Hemingway read the papers, borrowed books and gave speeches about his war experiences to delighted female audiences.
Windemere, the Hemingway holiday home today.
Horton Bay, Michigan, inspiration for Hemingway’s earliest published stories and very little changed.
Kewadin Casino, Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan - which earns 50 million dollars a year for the Chippewa tribe.
At a gun shop in rural Michigan I test drive a Wheatherby doublebarrelled over and under muzzle-loader and try to pretend I know what that all means. The array of weapons is fearsome, the people who sell them quite the opposite.
Picture postcard time. On Horton Creek, one of the shallow streams of north Michigan, Hemingway perfected his fishing technique and Palin abandoned his. You can almost hear the steelhead trout sighing with relief as my canoe comes towards them.
Crossing the Chicago River, leaving behind the glossy corporate skyscrapers on the less than glossy train to Oak Park.
Ernest and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. He was twenty-two when they married, twenty-eight when they divorced in Paris.
The oldest modern city in the world. Chicago at sunset from the ninety-sixth floor of the Hancock Center.
ITALY
Milan Central, my gateway to north Italy. Completed in 1931, with a 700-foot-long concourse that’s more like a cathedral. Decor is Art Nouveau with Fascist triumphalism thrown in.
Winged horses and mighty human athletes decorate the front of the station. On his first night young Hemingway walked beneath the soaring glass roof of the Galleria - the world’s first great shopping mall.
Many subsequent nights, recovering after his injury, were spent falling in love with his American nurse, one of the few women known to have jilted Ernest.
The wounded hero, Milan 1918.
The Piave river at Fossalta. The Italian positions were on the left bank, Austrian on the right, when battle began at midnight on 8 July 1918.
Hemingway borrowed a bicycle to take him up to the front line. He would have travelled roads like these.
Redipuglia. Mussolini made sure the First World War dead would not be forgotten with a memorial that takes up an entire hillside. The memorial commemorates over a hundred thousand Italians killed on the Eastern front in the First World War.
Venice carnival in full swing in St Mark’s Square. Masks traditionally disguise social differences and serious celebrants order theirs a year early. In 1646 diarist John Evelyn described it as ‘folly and madness’.
The Old Man and the Mask.
Barone Alberto Franchetti looking out from his family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where parking is a problem at carnival time.
Duck-shooting in the marshes east of Venice. Clear skies and frozen water as we leave the hunting lodge at first light. Later in a barrel with the Barone. Most ducks ignored us.
A farmhouse in the flatlands of the Piave valley at Fossalta.
Paris
An apartment near the rue Mouffetard was Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s first real home in Paris in 1922.
Hemingway’s passport.
The Lost Generation: Hemingway and the circle of ex-pat friends he immortalised in The Sun Also Rises.
Climbing the stairs to Hemingway’s first apartment.
Cezanne, another great influence on Hemingway’s writing.
Shakespeare and Company, Valhalla for book lovers. George Whitman believes in total literary immersion, including sleeping accommodation amongst the shelves, Sunday tea and Christmas Day opening.
La Closerie des Lilas was one of Hemingway’s favourite places to drink and write.
In the ring at a local gymnasium.
Hemingway, wounded by a falling skylight, left Paris in 1928 but returned to ‘the city I love best in all the world’ when it was liberated from the Germans in 1944.
Fifty-five years later, I storm up to the Arc de Triomphe in a Second World War American tank.
After being stopped by the gendarmes, unable to start again. Film crew try the impossible, pushstarting a tank.
SPAIN
The calm before the storm. Pause for reflection at the Hotel La Perla, with bulls who’ve already run their course.
Bulls enter the Calle Estafeta, as I watch from the balcony of the room used by Hemingway in the 1920s.
The Pamplona squeeze. Huge, soggy crowd cheers the start of an eight-day party.
A bull gets his man.
In Madrid, football supporters don’t care too much about the Hemingway connection.
Apprentice plays bull as I learn, far too late in life, to wield the muleta and strut like a matador.
Valencia’s Fallas Festival. Papier mache model of Spielberg looms over the Titanic and assorted Oscars.
Fallas processions.
Bullfighter Vicente Barrera is a trained lawyer and as clean-cut as a choirboy. Difficult to square his appearance with the fact that he kills over two hundred bulls a year.
> Every day at two o’clock a crowd engulfs Valencia’s main square to be blasted by the mighty explosive event they call Mascleta.
At the corrida (the bullfight) in Valencia. Vicente Barrera, bedecked in traje de luces, his suit of lights, completes a pass.
All that’s left of a year’s painstaking design and construction.
King of the Fallas - a fifty-foot-high model of Gulliver is the last of the city’s effigies to be torched.
Surreal moment. Gulliver has gone, but some of his companions have missed the flames.
KEY WEST
Marlin, the best game fish in the world, drew Hemingway to Key West.
Period postcard of the railroad which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935.
Modern tourist development. Mallory Square, Key West.
Seven Mile Bridge carries the Overseas Highway through the coral islands of the Florida Keys.
The newest Sloppy Joe’s celebrates Hemingway’s 100th anniversary.
Extra large security measures inside Sloppy Joe’s.
Shine Forbes, the man who slugged Hemingway and lived to tell the tale, shows me some of Hemingway’s tricks.
Shine’s front room, an Aladdin’s cave collected over eighty-three years.
Bill Clinton the seventoed cat at the Hemingway house.
Local aficionado at the Hemingway Look-Alike competition.
The men who would be Ernest. Kevin the cop (top row, extreme left) and the Look-Alike class of ‘99. Winner gets to wear a medal inscribed ‘In Papa We Trust’. The winner was local boy ‘Big Rick’ Kirvan, bottom row extreme right.
Schmoozing with the judges.
AFRICA
Big game drew Hemingway to Africa in the 1930s.
His old stamping ground is now Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Seeing game on foot is not an option for most tourists, but it was the way Hemingway preferred to do it. Thanks to my trusty escorts, Ali in the cap and Jackson in the Masai robe, I see more than most visitors to these plains.
The green hills of Africa - wooded slopes of the Chyulu Hills as seen from Ol Donyo Wuas. In the distance, a panorama of dry plains, dust rising from an approaching vehicle. Somewhere beyond that lurks the tallest mountain in Africa.
The inspiring first sight of Kilimanjaro from a light plane. Kibo, the 19,340-foot summit, is on the right.
With Richard Bonham (like Hemingway, an Honorary Game Warden), taking a look at the constipated cheetah. When it’s well enough Richard will release it back into the wild. It’s ‘half-tame’ according to Richard, but it turns half-wild when I try to pat it on the head.
The day of a circumcision ceremony at a Masai village.
The grandmother of the circumcised boy mixes blood and milk outside his hut.
Lighting a fire with sticks for the feast later in the day.
Blood is taken from one of the cows.
Comedy spear-throwing. Young Masai warriors cracking up.
Inside the hut: grandmother and mother tend to the boy (behind the curtain) who will take two weeks to recover.
Rescuers at the Hemingways’ plane after it crash-landed beside the Murchison Falls, Uganda.
Hemingway made camp on high ground beside the Nile to avoid local wildlife, such as sunbathing crocodile.
Hemingway after the second crash, when he suffered burns and internal injuries from which he never fully recovered.
On the Nile Francis picks his way through dangerous whirlpools and foam from the falls ahead.
Butiaba: at the site of Hemingway’s second air crash in two days. With Abdul and pieces of the wreckage.
At barber’s shop in Masindi I have a style, Number 8, named after me. On-the-spot portrait makes me look startlingly like Colonel Gaddafi.
CUBA
Havana hand.
The city is a transport time warp. I’m riding a motorcycle side-car taxi.
Private cars are a luxury and so there’s plenty of room for pedestrians on Havana’s famous seafront thoroughfare, the Malecon.
American cars seem to have survived Castro’s Communist revolution, though many of them now have Russian engines. Alfredo (filling the tank) remembers seeing Hemingway driving through Havana in a jeep.
Hemingway sits between his fourth wife, Mary, and Spencer Tracy at the Floridita, his favourite Havana hostelry. The daiquiri was its speciality, but Hemingway insisted on a stronger version which they called the Papa Doble.
Forty years on Hemingway’s gone, but the Papa Doble lives on.
The Finca Vigia, ‘Look-Out Farm’, Hemingway’s Cuban home for twenty years.
One of the sacred typewriters being lovingly cleaned by the staff.
Hemingway on the driveway followed by one of the fifty-seven cats. The house was found for him by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn.
Hemingway’s favourite boat, the Pilar, enshrined in the grounds of Finca Vigia. He left it to his captain Gregorio Fuentes, who in turn left it to the government.
On the outside looking in. Because of the delicate state of Hemingway’s perfectly preserved possessions you have to be stuffed, or working for the BBC, to get inside the house.
Hemingway working the Gulf Stream.
Memorial on the waterfront at Cojimar is a tribute from the locals.
A concrete fisherman in the grounds of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ Hotel, Marina Hemingway.
No marlin today, which is why they call it fishing, not catching.
A luckier fisherman.
Gregorio Fuentes, 101, tells me of the heydays with Hemingway at Cojimar (overleaf) where Hemingway kept his boat.
AMERICAN WEST
Bison herds were once so big that it took early explorers ten days to ride through them. Now the sight of a solitary bison brings cars to a halt on the road.
Yellowstone National Park. Thermal energy bubbles up at Fountain Paint Pot.
Pre-hunting breakfast at the Corral Bar. The men talk of the liberties and responsibilities of the hunter. These are not trophy hunters; they may take days to stalk one elk.
The Big Country. My first time in Montana and Wyoming and I feel swallowed up by the landscape.
Montana; rolling, uninhibited and expansive country.
My one-ton Ford pick-up truck is dwarfed by the forests of Yellowstone National Park, scorched by the huge fires of 1988.
A bison for the wall at the taxidermist in Outlaw Drive.
The first time I’ve felt comfortable on a horse. Riding a Palomino at the Hargrave Ranch, Montana.
The front office and recent clients (including stuffed author).
Leo and Ellen - our heavenly hosts at the Hargrave Ranch.
‘Wrist and elbow’. All you need to remember when throwing a lasso, according to Ken, my rope coach.
The Magnificent Six bring the cattle back home. Less of a stampede, more like rounding up a creche. But it was our first day.
Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 10
