Free Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Page B

prices.
    On the way back to our hotel we pass 159 Boulevard du Montparnasse, formerly the Hotel Venitia where, four years after his arrival in Paris, Hemingway slept with a woman called Pauline Pfeiffer, whilst his family waited for him in Austria.
    And I remember to ask Basil about Hemingway’s Chinese birth sign. It was the Year of the Pig.
    E ight-thirty in the morning and I’m in an operating theatre at the American Hospital of Paris lying on a hospital trolley, my head bandaged with toilet paper. This is not the result of yesterday’s sporting feats, it’s an attempted recreation of one of the most bizarre accidents of Hemingway’s accident-prone life.

    It happened in March 1928. In the previous nine months Hemingway had sustained an anthrax infection in a cut foot, grippe, toothache, haemorrhoids, several ski falls as well as having the pupil of his right eye cut open by the playful finger of his son. On the night of 4 March he had gone to the bathroom at his flat in the rue Ferou and pulled what he thought was the lavatory chain only to find it was the cord attached to the skylight above him. The skylight came crashing down, slicing into his head. Two weeks later he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: ‘We stopped the hemmorage [Hemingway’s spelling] with thirty thicknesses of toilet paper (a magnificent absorbent which I’ve now used twice for that purpose).’
    Which is why I’m lying here in the American Hospital at Neuilly, where he lay seventy-one years ago before being given nine stitches in the forehead. To Professor Michael Reynolds, one of Hemingway’s biographers, this was more than just another injury. Reynolds suggests that when the skylight split Hemingway’s head open, the pain and the spilling of blood caused him to relive memories of his wounding in Italy which he had desperately sought to suppress: ‘When the pain dulled … he knew exactly what he should be writing … the story was the war, the wound, the woman.’
    Or, as it became,
A Farewell to Arms
. Which, let’s face it, is a much better title.
    Reynolds’ thesis is borne out by a remark Hemingway made years later, to Lillian Ross: ‘I can remember feeling so awful about the first war that I couldn’t write about it for ten years. The wound combat makes in you, as a writer, is a slow-healing one.’
    Within two weeks of the injury which left him with a lipoma, a lump of hardened skin, permanently disfiguring his forehead, Hemingway was writing to Perkins that the new novel ‘goes on and goes
wonderfully’
.
    As I lie staring up at the doctors and the light and the needle and the anaesthetic mask coming towards me, I can’t help thinking that there must have been easier ways of dealing with writer’s block.
    O nce Hemingway had been in a place where he was happy and had worked well, he regarded it in some sense as his property. So, in August 1944, not long after he’d suffered another mangling car accident in the London black-out, he was back in Paris under contract to
Collier’s
magazine to play his part in liberating what he called ‘the city I love best in all the world’.

    Whilst more conventional Allied troops were busy flushing out the remaining pockets of German resistance, Hemingway and an ill-assorted guerrilla band went on to conduct his own personal liberation of Paris, including the Cafe de la Paix and the Brasserie Lipp, as well as Sylvia Beach’s bookstore and the Ritz Hotel, where the barman asked Hemingway what his men would like and received the answer, ‘Fifty martini cocktails!’
    In the interests of historical research I have been given a chance to experience my own liberation of Paris. We have permission for me to ride up one of the approach roads to the Arc de Triomphe in a World War Two American tank.
    Unfortunately the tank is stuck in rush-hour traffic. A chilly, insidious drizzle has descended, as we look in vain among the Renaults and Peugeots of the commuters for the reassuring sight of