The Brasserie Lipp is famous for three things: Its choucroute; its cevelas, cold, squishy sausages smothered in mustard; and the man who made those sausages famous, a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who came here when he had enough francs in his pocket for a cheap lunch. It’s not so cheap anymore.
I had come to Paris’s Left Bank on a quest for all things Hemingway, and I dragged my fiancée Cristina along. Cristina, who is from Mexico, has not read much Hemingway, but she has a great sense of adventure, which she exhibited by ordering the house special without having any idea what the house special actually was.
“What am I eating?” she asked, taking a stab into what looked like pink flesh wrapped in octopus tendon over gristly bone. (more…)
The writer’s legacy in the town that he helped transform
BY DAVID FREY
PHOTOGRAPHY MARK OLIVER
ILLUSTRATION GINA SCANLON
On the morning of Ernest Hemingway’s death, long shadows tugged at a typewriter perched at the window where clear Idaho skies hovered over the Wood River Valley. Throughout his writing life, Hemingway had always visited Ketchum in the fall, when the impending winter carried a sharpness, and fallen aspen and cottonwood leaves perfumed the air with the bouquet of changing seasons. After much of a lifetime in Italy, Paris, Cuba, Spain and Africa, Ketchum had become home. Hemingway and his wife, Mary, left behind Caribbean fecundity for the arid West, a place where he had friends–actors, socialites and cowboys–from many years and many visits. This was his first summer.
Hemingway boasted never missing a sunrise, and the morning of July 2, 1961, was a glorious one. Sunlight spilled into the bedroom where he slept alone. Down the hall, in her separate room, Mary slept.
Ketchum still had the feel of an outpost on the edge of the wild. It reminded the Midwesterner with no college degree of rugged places he’d known in his six decades of rough living. The meadows near Silver Creek recalled the green hills of Africa. The dry, rugged hills teemed with Basque shepherds and, with their flocks, he was reminded of Spain.
Born in the waning days of the nineteenth century, an age of exploration succumbing to machine modernity, Hemingway was ill fit for a world turned Technicolor. His expatriate days were behind him, and he settled in this remote corner of America, still drawn to wild places even as the world’s wildness waned.
What would he tell us, I wonder, about the world he never lived to see? (more…)
Mount Sopris. Photo courtesy BIll Meriwether. (Thanks across the Great Divide, Bill.)
A mountain looks different after you have climbed it. Once you have known it with your feet and your hands, it is transformed, even when seen from your bedroom window. Those graceful grays, you know now, are big boulders that could twist an ankle, or dislodged, could even crush a person. Those gentle greens are Krummholtz , clinging to existence with knobby fingers in the last place on earth a tree could expect to grow.
It wasn’t until after I had climbed Mount Sopris and known it with my whole body that I fell in love with it. I will confess I had another lover before. I was living in an old miner’s cabin on Lamborn Mesa above Paonia, Colorado, with just a clock radio for electronic companionship. Each evening, I cooked dinner, popped open a beer and watched the sun flush Mount Lamborn above me with alpenglow. It was my version of prime time. I came to see Mount Lamborn like Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, a muse out my window that I hoped would give me something of the same inspiration he got painting the same peak time after time, in different colors, in different lights.
Places change, though, and love changes, and not always easily. (more…)
Cristina and I step off the Metro at Chateau Rouge and step into the sunlight and into another world. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is market day. The streets are filled with vendors in bright African clothes selling mangos and papayas, fish and lamb, African prints and pirate DVDs.
“It’s hard to say this is France,” Cristina says.
We’re meeting Sophie Nellis, our tour guide into the African side of Paris. Nellis is completed a master’s in Paris studies. Like many Americans and British lured to Paris, Nellis, who is British, was drawn to the Paris of Hemingway and his expat chums. It was the later wave of immigrants, though, that fascinate her now. (more…)
Hemingway has left us plenty of lessons, but this is one of the most enduring: embrace the world. I’ve been in Europe for the past three weeks walking in the footsteps of Hemingway, exploring how these places have changed since Hemingway’s day.
To see what Hemingway can tell us about these places, and what these places can tell us about Hemingway.
I’ve found myself drawn to Hemingway through place. Hemingway’s places led me to the writer. The writer led me to the tragic puzzle of a man: a Chablis-swishing great white hunter with a thing for housecats. (more…)
I’m a freelance journalist based near Washington, D.C., where I specialize in writing about food, the environment and travel writing from a shrinking globe. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to contact me at david@davidmfrey.com.
The Brasserie Lipp is famous for three things: Its choucroute; its cevelas, cold, squishy sausages smothered in mustard; and the man who made those sausages famous, a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who came here when he had enough francs in his pocket for a cheap lunch. It’s not so cheap anymore.
