Free Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin

in which he sleeps when his flat above is occupied by a visiting author.
    We talk a little about Paris in the twenties and why it was such an attraction for people like Hemingway. George ticks off the reasons crisply. Prohibition, book-burning and a general repressive attitude to the arts in the United States after the war, and of course, a favourable exchange rate which meant Americans could live quite well on very little. And the traditional qualities of Paris: tolerance for the arts, an audience for the avant-garde, an indulgence of experiment. The scale of the city, big enough to encompass cosmopolitan groups, ideas and influences, small enough to be walkable, and intimate enough for people to keep in touch easily. George believes the ferment of ideas that followed the end of the First World War has died down. The city is no longer the artistic focal point it was then. It has different priorities now. Most of the young Americans have business degrees. But he has a regular turnover of would-be writers, helping around the shop in return for as many books as they can read and, if they’re lucky, a bed in an alcove in the Children’s Book department.
    W ake up, heart thumping and very anxious. Vivid dream that I had lost all the film crew’s baggage somewhere in the Alps. Could have been prompted by last night’s reading of the story of Hadley Hemingway who, early in 1923, lost almost every one of her husband’s original manuscripts, at the Gare de Lyon, on her way to join him in Switzerland.

    I think I might have had a glimpse of how she felt.
    It’s Chinese New Year today and at breakfast we toast Basil with coffee and croissants. He says it’s the Year of the Rabbit. Must remember to ask him under which animal Hemingway was born.
    Today the plans so lightly entered upon over a
sangria
in the Dix bar are set to materialise. Brian, my Hemingway for the nineties, meets me in the Tuileries Gardens for a brisk run to start the day. Jogging through this spectacular park seems a wretchedly trivial activity, dwarfed as we are by magnificent gilded arches, monumental fountains and the massive grandeur of the Louvre.
    The only disadvantage of being surrounded by such sumptuous display is that it takes your eye off the dog shit. This is plentiful, and avoiding it demands considerable agility, which probably adds an extra aerobic twist to the exercise.
    We run on, past elaborate neo-classical statues which have an odd Hemingwayesque touch to them - elephants struggling with rhinos, lions devouring peacocks - and rest briefly before taking to bicycles near the Eiffel Tower. Hemingway became a devoted fan of French long-distance cycle races and an avid reader of the sport’s most influential organ -
Le Pedale
. After this an almost relaxing game of table tennis on a concrete public table beside the Canal Saint-Martin, until we are thrown off by some very small children, followed by proper tennis in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Hemingway often played, though not, according to Hadley, with great patience.
    ‘Whenever he missed a shot he would just sizzle.’ His racket, she went on, ‘would slash to the ground and everyone would stand still and cower’.
    Brian has not yet run out of sports. In fact he seems to have invented a new one for me. It’s a US import called Ultimate Frisbee and, unlikely as it may seem, it’s played in the most magnificent of settings - in front of the Hotel des Invalides, the hugely imposing, gold-domed home for veterans of Louis XIV’s wars. When we get there the patch of grass on which they play has been turned into a scene reminiscent of a more modern war, with the participants wallowing in a sea of mud from which a grimy blackened object occasionally emerges and sails through the air.
    There look to be about ten participants per team, though it’s quite hard to tell where the ground ends and a person begins. With wholly regrettable generosity one of the players comes off to enable me to