Dear Subscribers,
This week I thought I’d switch gears a bit to offer you a conversation (in both print and audio form) with the author of a book I recently read and can fully recommend. I hope you enjoy our conversation on the life, writings and travels of one Ernest Hemingway— which includes a now-almost obligatory discussion around whether, and why, we should continue reading his work in an era that often balks against devoting attention to “canonical” white male authors.
{Please note that due to technical problems with recording the interview and a last-minute change in the platform we used to chat, the audio file is not of the highest quality. We’ve done our best to make the conversation, which has been edited and shortened, as clear as possible. The interview transcript below should hopefully help, assuming you’re able to access it.}
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to this special audio feature for the Paris Unlocked Newsletter. I’m Courtney Traub. This is a bit of an experiment, so please do bear with me as I brave the sometimes-rocky new rapids of audio recording and editing. You can always refer to the transcript for today’s interview in the main Substack post.
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Thanks so much for your continued support—and let’s get to it.
Today I'm chatting with Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, who’s the author of Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life. It was first published in 2019. But I've actually only had the pleasure of reading it in full recently, which is why I asked Cristen to chat with us today. And Cristen is also the author of works of fiction including the short story collection, The Smallest of Entryways. So welcome, Cristen. And thanks so much for being with us today.
CHJ: Thanks for having me.
CT: So, I guess just diving right into your wonderful book, which, of course looks at the various places where Ernest Hemingway spent his life; where he drew inspiration for his writings, where he formed some of his most important relationships, familial relationships, and friendships. And [it’s] really a wonderfully clear, but also, I think, complex account of how much international travel and living abroad kind of shaped Hemingway's writing and perspectives. And [it] kind of gives people who are interested in following his roots a way in, which I thought was wonderful.
Like I said, it was clear, but not dumbed down, which I really appreciate...So maybe you could just tell us how you came to writing this book and what it meant for you to do so. It's a big question. I know, forgive me for it! But I'd just like to start with the basics a little bit.
CHJ: There have been so many biographies of him-- you know, he's such a complex individual and had such an adventurous life, and wrote so many well-known short stories, and novels, and journalism, and all sorts of things. So he's been kind of approached from every angle biographically. But I thought...so much of his personality is wrapped up in his travels. And people love to go and visit these places. And see the places that he wrote about in his fiction, see the places where he's lived. People are sort of endlessly fascinated by him.
And there was no comprehensive sort of account, just kind of focusing on the places which are really, really important, not only in his life, but in his writing. I mean, the places where he lived and worked and wrote about...they're really more like characters in his books: they're just as important as the characters. So I just thought it would be kind of fascinating. And it was a really lovely experience for me to sort of focus on the travels, which is exciting and interesting.
And every chapter, I felt like I was traveling to these places-- I'd already been to many of them, myself. But every chapter that I wrote, was like travels for me. So it was really wonderful, and a great way to approach him. And people can use it as a guidebook. It's a biography and a guidebook. You don't have to read it all the way through chronologically, you can just pick it up, again, Madrid or Paris or Key West...
CT: Absolutely. And just out of curiosity, to research the book, did you travel to some of these places, [or] did you rely on archives, [or] on anything from the family estate? As somebody who's interested in writing nonfiction -- and I know there are readers out there who are as well-- [I'm] always really curious about process. [So] how did you go about doing the research for this book, and especially to get a sense of place?
CHJ: When I first did the proposal for the book, I had to outline all the chapters. So I thought about what places I'd want to include and figured those out. And then, for each chapter, it was sort of like building a little mini-book for each chapter. And I used archives online, I used articles, and I used many, many books written by other people as a compilation for all the information-- so you know, my bibliography is in the book.
CT: And what about A Moveable Feast, which is of course Hemingway's own famous, I think wonderful autobiographical account of his years in Paris. Was that an important source for your Paris sections?
CHJ: Yeah, definitely. I have several quotes from A Moveable Feast. And, you know, I'd read [and spent] a lot of time with that book. So all these things were sort of mulling around in my mind as I wrote it, as well as my own experiences. I stayed at Shakespeare & Company when I was young in Paris, [so] my own... feelings about Paris from when I was young [came up as I was writing], and they just all kind of meld together, you know?
CT: Right. One thing that you're transparent about and which also seems to be, you know, important to your process of thinking about Hemingway's life is, of course, [as] readers will probably be curious to confirm, that you are a relative of Ernest Hemingway-- you are his great-granddaughter. And I'm curious to know how you think that comes into your process of writing about him? Because one might say, well, how can one be a biographer when... you've got this kind of familial connection?
But from another perspective, one might say, well, that you willingly bring in a very personal sort of approach to the entire topic. And in this sense, you're also doing family history, right? I imagine that there's something very poignant about it. But it's, you know, it's not sort of an impersonal character, or just a famous writer, but it's someone who's part of your family tree and your history.
CHJ: You have the automatic, built-in sort of removal, because we didn't actually live at the same time. So there's that sort of distance, built in that way... Anyone [who] thinks about their great grandparents, you know, you may have known them a little bit when you're really young, but you never really knew them. But I remember feeling, when I first started to read him, and especially when I started to read the short stories, I felt like I had sort of an insight. Because the way that he thinks and he writes-- it felt familiar to me.
So although I didn't know him, I felt like I really got to know him by reading his fiction. And I also grew up with his brother. When I was a kid, his brother [Leicester Hemingway] was still alive. And his brother was very much like him, physically, [and] he was a storyteller. There are a lot of similarities between them, and they were very close. So there's this strange sort of familiarity, but distance at the same time. And I think that that's... unique in writing a biography. And... it was kind of a neat feeling for me to be able to impart on people. So I feel like writing a biography of someone that you're related to is actually kind of a really special thing.
CT: Just to backtrack a little bit. Could you just say what the name of Ernest’s brother is, for readers who are unfamiliar? And just so we know a little bit more about about those times and that history.
CHJ: He was the youngest of the Hemingway children-- there's six of them. And he was 16 years younger than Ernest, but they actually bonded; he went and stayed with [Ernest] in Cuba. And they looked for U- boats together during the war. And he also came to London when Ernest was over there. So they actually, you know, spent a lot of time having adventures together. But he was quite a bit younger. And [Ernest] called him the Baron. And... he looked up to Ernest a lot, and they had a wonderful relationship. And he was also a writer. He wrote a wonderful biography of his brother called My Brother, Ernest Hemingway. Although, you know, he wasn't well-known like his brother [was], they were very, very similar.
CT: Just, I'm sorry, what was his name? Leicester. Leicester Hemingway. So pivoting back to the book, and particularly to the sections on Paris. Because obviously, this is a little audio feature for the Paris Unlocked Newsletter-- so there are going to be many readers picking up your book, who I think will eagerly want to peruse, or read very carefully, the sections on Paris. And aside from Key West, and perhaps Havana, Paris is the city that people most associate with Hemingway.
But I get the feeling that people tend to have a kind of a caricatural knowledge of his life in Paris. They think mostly of him sitting in bars with Fitzgerald and getting drunk and then, you know, this sort of myth of him storming the Ritz Hotel on Place Vendome and sort of liberating it from Nazis at the end of World War Two, with a machine gun in hand and somehow managing to liberate it by drinking 51 martinis. It's not really something I understood and I can't ever separate out the truth from the myth in it. So maybe we could start... maybe you could tell us, since you've done so much great research on this-- What is what is the story about the Ritz? Does it have any truth to it? And if not...
CHJ: I honestly do not know, you know, the true account of that. I don't know that anyone in my family does. Perhaps my grandmother Valerie-- she, you know, she spent a lot of time with him in Havana and perhaps she would be the one that I would think might possibly know-- and Patrick, my uncle who's [now] in his 90s-- [he's] Ernest's son. Those two would be the ones to ask. I wish that I had asked him [Patrick] before this interview, but I do not know.
As you said...you know, [Ernest] has been, unfortunately, so caricatured that there are these stories that stick out; that sound ridiculous, and people start to associate them with him. If anyone drank 51 martinis, I would think they would be completely incoherent. So I don't know. But I think a lot of things got exaggerated. He [Ernest] used to exaggerate stories, too. So yeah, he may have been part of the part of the myth of that.
CT: The myth-making, yeah...
CHJ: Who knows? I don't know.
CT: But do you know, though -- sorry to interrupt. Do you know that whether there's any truth to that story? I just had a hard time kind of figuring out whether...
CHJ: He's at the Ritz. I mean, he was definitely in Paris. Yeah, he never had any fear of being right there, you know, when things were happening; when bombs were dropping. No, I know he was in Paris. I know that he went to the Ritz, and I know that he went to visit Sylvia Beach [his friend and the owner of Shakespeare & Company]. So I mean, he wanted to be right in the thick of it. And I know that he was... but that particular story... I don't know the details of that.
CT: Well, I guess we'll just have to settle with assuming that it's going to remain a mystery for now. I certainly don't want to, you know, reveal all of the places in your book in Paris that you delve into, because that would of course be spoiling it for readers. And I do really encourage readers to pick up a copy of your book. And as you say, bring it to Paris, bring it to Key West, bring it to Madrid and use it as both a sort of biography and guidebook, as you say. But are there just a couple of places that you could sort of entice us with: [can you] direct visitors to just a couple of places that might help them connect with Ernest's legacy? What would those places be, if you could just name a couple?
CHJ: Yeah. I love beginnings. I love the story of how he and [his first wife,] Hadley first go to Paris together...when they were young, in their early 20s. And he was still learning how to write, and he really learned how to write in Paris. So I would say, the places that I would want to go, if I were just sort of trying to discover him in Paris, would be the Hôtel Jacob et d'Angleterre, which is on Rue Jacob... it was the first place [where] he and his first wife, Hadley stayed when they arrived in Paris in December of 1921. And he had been directed there by Sherwood Anderson, another writer who had spent time in Paris, and said Paris...because Ernest had been thinking about moving to Italy with Hadley, and Sherwood Anderson, who he was friends with in Chicago, [said] "No, no, no, you have to go to Paris, Paris is where... all the writers are, it's where all the artists are, it's the center of the artistic world."
So he followed Sherwood Anderson's advice, and went to Hôtel [Jacob] et d'Angleterre with [Hadley] on his recommendation. And that hotel-- what I like about this, this location for Paris for someone going as a tourist, is that it's still a hotel, and it's still in operation, and it still has the same name. So you can experience what it was like for them to be in the same setting. And you can actually stay there. So that would be definitely-- that's where I would probably stay if I was really trying to immerse myself, right?
I would definitely [also] go to Shakespeare & Company. The location now is not the location where [Hemingway] actually went, but you can go by the original location, which-- the address, and the history of it is in my book. But you can also go to the new one. And honestly, I, stayed there when I was in my early 20s. Back in the day, decades long ago, and the people who run it now-- the owner's name is Sylvia, actually, like Sylvia Beach, the owner of the original location.
And she [Sylvia Beach Whitman] really tried and succeeded to have it have that special feeling of mystery. And it's just a place you can go-- you can go upstairs, sit in the piano room, there are cats, and you can really feel the literature, you can really feel... I don't know, it's hard to describe that place. I try to describe it in my book, but it's a very magical place. And I would go there for sure.
{Read my interview With Kerri Maher, Author of Sylvia Beach biographical novel The Paris Bookseller}
The other place that I would go would be La Closerie des Lilas, which is one of the places where-- it's on Boulevard Montparnasse, and Ernest wrote there a lot. He also describes it in The Sun Also Rises, and he repeatedly mentions it in A Moveable Feast as a place where he works. He hung out there with Fitzgerald and James Joyce, and it's still a cafe. And it's just -- a can't miss place if you really want to feel, you know what it...would have been like to write, like he did in the 20s. And you know, it's a century ago [that] Ernest was there! Really crazy! It has actually been a century since he was in Paris learning how to write.
{Read our full guide to Montparnasse, from cafes and brasseries to artists’ studios}
CT: That's incredible. So-- a good time as any to to think about these things, and revisit them. Oh, that's wonderful-- thank you for those [suggestions]. Now, my next question is, is a little bit about the moment we're in. I was thinking about how we're in a little bit of a cultural moment where one might say it isn't particularly popular to focus on the so-called, sort of canonical, quote, unquote, great American writers, especially if they happen to be men and white. And so Hemingway isn't necessarily kind of a cultural darling at the moment.
I think I have heard things to the effect of "Oh, I won't read people like Hemingway because he's an old dead white man." And I just wonder, do you think people are missing out when they take that attitude towards his work? What do you wish-- it's kind of a two-part question. Sorry. Do you think people are missing out when they take that attitude? And number two: What do you wish our culture would pay more attention to when it comes to Ernest's writings, and his legacy? That's sort of related back to what we were saying about him being caricatured.
CHJ: Yeah, have you got like three hours? This is something-- it's such a complicated subject. But first of all, I think if you pigeonhole any writer, any artists in that manner, you're missing out. Right? It doesn't matter who they are. Yes, it's true that Ernest is a white man. His upbringing was in some ways, you could say, sort of stereotypical, but if you really look at the history of my family, we are a family of artists going way back. There were musicians in our family for generations before Ernest. So there's an artistic strain that runs through our family, and he had a very unconventional life. So we have to look at someone's life. He spent 20 years living in Cuba, [and] he related to the Spaniards and Cubans better than Americans, I would say. So he was in no way a typical white male.
Obviously, you know, there's all these different advantages that you have, you know, [at] certain times in history or most of history, that comes along with that. But...that's a whole other set of issues. As far as [being] an individual, I don't think that's a very useful thing to think about when you're talking about someone's artistic proclivity or their output. Ernest is someone that is unique in the history of literature, because he started a style that has influenced so many writers that you can't really discount him.
[But] I have plenty of problems with him. The biggest being the big game hunting. I'm an environmental journalist. I-- if he were alive, I would have a serious talk with him. I would hope that with all the endangered species now and the biodiversity crisis, that he would rethink-- you know, that he wouldn't even necessarily be participating in the kind of slaughter, you know, that they did on their safaris. And I'd also have a conversation with him about bullfighting as well. When I went to Pamplona [in Spain], I didn't even go to any bull fights. You know, I wasn't interested in that-- in seeing that.
Um, I understand the problems that people have with him. I totally empathize. And I have the same issues. But that being said, there are many, many things to learn from him about literature. And he has completely changed the face of American literature. I mean, you can't possibly think about American literature, specifically, without thinking about him. You can take all the modern writers-- probably at least half of them would say they were influenced by [Hemingway]. I can understand, and I'm so glad, that people are focusing more on, you know, different things now. I think it's so essential, and that's where we are, and I'm glad that we're here.
But if you are going to study literature, and you're going to think about it... and also, his nature writing is beautiful. I mean, the way that he writes about nature-- it's incredible. And you can learn so many things about how to write, and how to tell a story in a bare manner, and still get the most vivid pictures you will ever get when you're reading. I mean, it surprises me every time I read [something like Ernest's early short story] “Big Two-Hearted River” or some of the [other] Nick Adams stories. [There are these] incredibly vivid pictures, and you feel like you're there, with such sparse language. I mean, it's just-- it's like magic, it really is. So if you want to learn how to write or you want to learn how to read literature, you can't just write him off. I think that's simplistic.
CT: Can you just say once again, a little bit more slowly, the works, that you feel kind of represent his best nature writing, so readers could perhaps go find those?
CHJ: The “Nick Adams” stories. They're just stunning accounts of nature in Michigan in the [19]20s, or the teens, when he was growing up. My family used to go to [sic] Lake Michigan every summer from Chicago and spend like three months there. And ... they were allowed, the girls and boys were allowed to wear overalls all the time, or go barefoot. I mean, it was just the complete opposite of their Victorian upbringing in Chicago. And [Ernest] just relished those summers. I mean, they stay with him the rest of his life. They were the first thing he was writing about when he was in Paris. It was like, you know, James Joyce left Ireland to write about Ireland.
CT: Right-- you write best about a place when you're not there.
CHJ: Both of them [Hemingway and Joyce] came to Paris to write about where they had grown up. So you can read things-- stories like “Big Two-Hearted River” and think, okay, I'm reading a wonderful account of camping in Michigan. But then there's this dark underbelly of war. My gosh, I had no idea that this was actually about a soldier coming back with PTSD. You know, for years, I didn't know that Big Two-Hearted River was about that. I just thought it was really neat to read about my great-grandfather eating pork and beans by the river, and fishing for trout, and setting up his little camp.
And, you know, oh, how wonderful is that he knows all these things about how to build a lean-to ... because he learned all these things from his doctor father, because he grew up in Michigan. And the summers-- his father was a naturalist who taught him all kinds of things. His father did all the cooking for the family.
I mean, [Ernest] was a complex individual. It's like everyone else. And his nature writing is beautiful. And there's always ... an undercurrent of something else [in it]. So it's fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. And of course, The Old Man and the Sea. I mean, you're going-- you are on a boat with Santiago. You know what it's like to be days at sea, fishing for a marlin. And that book is so vivid. I read it when I was 12. It was the first book I ever read. And I stayed up till midnight, as a twelve-year-old, because I was enthralled with this story.
CT: I think that's a good point to end on-- that we should try to approach everything, whether it be Hemingway's oeuvre or the way that we approach writing and people, with the complexity they deserve. So thank you-- thank you so much for that, Cristen. This has been a really fascinating chat. And I really encourage all of you out there to go pick up a copy of Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life. And it's just been wonderful to chat with you.
CHJ: So wonderful to speak with you as always
You can see more about Cristen at her author page, here, and follow her work in environmental journalism with Ecowatch here.
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Interview: Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, Author of Ernest's Way