Hemingway Slept Here

[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]

In Paris, every old stone, every leafy vista, every glimpse of the Seine evokes a nostalgic reaction, some combination of love and ennui. Paris can make us think of George Sand, Gertrude Stein, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and not our novel-in-progress. This romantic reaction is right and proper but a trap, the trap of Paris as soulful museum, a place of anecdotes and literary attractions. If you are inclined not to write, or not quite sure what to write about, or just a little short of wherewithal, you will come to Paris looking for a Hemingway fix rather than an encounter with your own notepad.

I don’t care where Hemingway slept. I’m not drawn to locate the exact spot in the Luxembourg Gardens where he pilfered pigeons for dinner. What writers write interests me. I’m also interested in their lives, in the exact nature of their heroism and foibles, in the stands they take, in their failures of nerve. What does not interest me, however, is that Joe Celebrity Writer lived in this studio or that a certain underappreciated poet frequented that café. How much more resonant is a cup of coffee at Les Deux Magots or Le Procope than the same cup at a charming café in your part of Paris? At Le Procope the ghosts of dead poets and postmodernists add nothing except 100 percent to the bill.

I’m interested in the French physician and novelist Louis Ferdinand-Céline, who returned to his Parisian practice of medicine after a stint in Germany as a Nazi collaborator. He surrounded his home with barbed wire, posted guard dogs, and lacerated the Chinese instead of the Jews in his novels—the Jews posing less of a threat after the Holocaust. Céline the phenomenon is fascinating. But I don’t need to visit the spot where his guard dogs roamed.

There’s nothing wrong with cultural tourism. I make my own pilgrimage to Monet’s Giverny with my daughters, and we have a splendid day. But our happiness has nothing to do with Monet’s house and gardens and everything to do with the ice cream cones we eat sitting on a stone step, and the way the day’s sharp light will affect our future work. When you wake up in Paris each morning, let your first thought be Where will I write? and not Whose ghost shall I stalk?

If Hemingway is important, it is because what he had to say still touches us. But is it important that on this exact spot, now smack in the middle of a fancy mall, he had onion soup after a night of debauchery? Hardly. The past is no substitute for the present. Love the 1440s, love the 1680s, love the 1920s—love any epoch that touches your soul. But start each day focused on your writing and not on your literary maps.

In her book Found Meals of the Lost Generation: Recipes and Anecdotes From 1920s Paris, Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter describes her unsatisfying experience chasing literary ghosts. She explains: “Like many others with a literary bent and a passion for the expats, I often toured the Montparnasse hotspots of yesteryear. I dallied on the sidewalk before the ancient building where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway first lived in 1921, I stood outside 27. Rue de Fleurus, imagining Gertrude Stein’s studio hung floor to ceiling with the most explosive art of the century. This was all great fun, but something was missing. I was on the outside looking in. I resigned myself to this fact until one day I stumbled onto a way I could participate here and now with there and then.”

Her participation was to research and write her book. It is only by participating—that is, by creating—that cultural tourism makes sense to the writer. You may go to a famous café; but you go to write. You may fill your head with anecdotes of the lost generation; but only if those anecdotes constitute grist for your mill. You may sleep in a room in which Hemingway slept, but so as to dream your own work. Adopt this orientation whenever you travel: less tourist, more artist.

You can do one or another of an infinite number of tours of Paris, this one following the path of Jake Barnes through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, that one leading you to the ateliers of Picasso, Modigliani, and Chagall, a third guiding you around Napoleon’s Paris. You could focus on sewers, on catacombs, on the evolution of the Marais from Jewish quarter to tourist mecca. Most poignantly and importantly, you can choose to engross yourself in the intellectual-al history of Western thought. Virtually any idea you can think of has been birthed or batted about in the studios, classrooms, and cafés of Paris—it is the birthplace of the humanistic tradition.

Sadly, the casual tourist is hammered into believing that the history of Paris has everything to do with Notre Dame’s start date and completion date. Facts of that sort don’t interest the tourist, but he feels obligated to listen, just as his tour guide feels obligated to tell bad jokes. The writer, painter, or composer who visits Paris should abandon this pointless bandwagon and instead read The Social Contract or Candide, Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom or Jean Rhys’ Night Out 1925, Elsa Triolet’s Paris Dreaming or Christina Stead’s The Beauties and the Furies. Bask in ideas, not in statistics.

If I were Paris, I would rather you knew the myriad ideas I’d embraced over two plus millennia, not the number of objects I had stored up in the Louvre. While Paris is the perfect place to create, it is also the perfect place to engage in intellectual rather than traditional history. Skip learning which bridge was built when or which statue commemorates which noble prince. Instead, throw yourself into a week-long, month-long, or year-long exploration of some striking idea. It is splendid to do this in Paris; it is no less splendid to do this at home.

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