Free Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Page A

play. I’m told that the aim is to move the frisbee up your opponent’s end and score a goal, but if you receive the frisbee you must stay still until you’ve delivered it. All this is academic as I spend most of my time just trying to stand up, whilst younger, fitter, infinitely dirtier people slither past me. It’s all taken with a seriousness of which Hemingway would surely have approved, though he might have been surprised to find that, once the layers of Parisian sub-soil are removed, at least half these sturdy competitors are women.
    Best of all, Hemingway liked to box. He brought a pair of boxing gloves in his trunk with him to France and had barely unpacked before he was challenging Lewis Galantiere, a man of exquisite manners who was helping them find accommodation, to a fight in his hotel room. Hemingway smashed his glasses.
    Not long afterwards, ever on the look-out for a potential opponent, Hemingway taught his new friend, the poet Ezra Pound, to box. He ‘has the general grace of the crayfish’, he wrote to Sherwood Anderson.
    I have only boxed twice in my life, and both occasions were in the same school tournament. Having disposed of someone as inexperienced as myself in a messy first round scrap, I found myself catapulted into the final to face the only other competitor in my weight, a Junior Schools champion. He was a compassionate man who hit me so hard early on that the rest of the bout felt like having a tooth out under local anaesthetic.
    So it is with mixed feelings that I find myself at a ninety-year-old iron-framed gymnasium off the Avenue Jean Jaures for the early evening boxing class. This takes place in a room off the main gym, which is presently full of middle-aged ladies with their hands in the air. This is the daily aerobics class for senior citizens and it looks much more suitable for me. But it’s too late now for, with a charming smile, the boxing teacher, Monsieur Chiche, begins to squeeze me into a pair of recently vacated, exceedingly sweaty, boxing gloves.
    Monsieur Chiche is small and built like a barrel, but he must be in his sixties, and I worry that I might hurt him more than he hurts me. This proves not to be a problem as he is only putting on the gloves before turning me over to his son, who is also small but built like a whippet.
    Apart from Monsieur Chiche senior I must be one of the oldest people ever to have climbed into this ring. All around me are young, wiry lads, many of them African, who look lithe and mean as they rain punches at each other.
    Young Monsieur Chiche shows me the moves, how to protect the face and when to throw a punch. At first he is complimentary about my deft footwork but, after a few minutes of my Ali shuffle, a certain amount of impatience shows through.
    ‘Hit me! Hit me now!’
    I close my eyes and think of Ernest and surprise myself with a few well placed hooks.
    ‘Good!’ he exhorts. ‘Hit me again!’
    This time I obey his orders to the letter. One jab goes through his guard and connects with his head. I stop immediately.
    ‘Sorry!’
    He smiles and I feel a bit foolish. With one word I’ve confirmed why an Englishman can never be a Hemingway.
    Eat tonight at the Closerie des Lilas, ten minutes’ walk from our hotel, and once Hemingway’s favourite Paris cafe. He came here to write and worked on short stories and what was to become the novel,
The Sun Also Rises
.
    Hemingway liked the clientele at the Closerie: ‘They were all interested in each other and in their drinks or coffees, or infusions, and in the papers and periodicals which were fastened to rods, and no one was on exhibition.’
    He later wrote with some disgust of the treatment of the waiter who was forced by the management to shave off his moustache when the Closerie went up-market. Though Hemingway’s name is immortalised on yet another piece of metal, attached to the bar next to the dining-room, I don’t think he himself would still be sitting there. Not at today’s