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To travel like Hemingway

His sharp, crystal-clear writing culled the essence of human experience in a manner that many have imitated but few have equalled

Ernest Hemingway in 1945. Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images<br />
Ernest Hemingway in 1945. Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Following the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway is a passion many journalists and writers suffer from. There have been many articles about Hemingway’s Paris, his Barcelona, his Madrid, his Africa, his Cuba—in each of which the writer following his footsteps imagines himself to be reliving a glorious past, made more glorious because of the circumstances in which he wrote (about the world wars), how he travelled (on rugged roads in Jeeps, often in close proximity of death), and the landscape he made his own (seeing Africa, true at first light, or the twilight of Paris, with the reflection of its lamps shimmering on the surface of the river). I’m a victim of that disease too; I blame him for part of my wanderlust.

And the writers who follow Hemingway’s footsteps are often male. He wrote about bullfighting and boxing, about wars and hunting, fishing and drinking. It is not as if women don’t enjoy these pursuits, but Hemingway’s personality—his misogyny, his narcissism, his petty cruelties and his depression—was hardly endearing, even though his sharp, crystal-clear writing culled the essence of human experience in a manner that many have imitated but few have equalled.

In early winter in New York, I went to The Morgan Library & Museum to see an excellent exhibition about Hemingway between the wars. There were indeed photographs and early yearbooks, but the predominant image was of words. And those words have travelled the world, and absorbed the meaning, visible through photographs, identity cards, passports, notes, letters, and typed drafts. These are words typed on yellowing sheets, words struck off with pencil, words rewritten with ink, words distilling and encapsulating an experience that became vivid after each rewrite. I wonder what kind of a writer Hemingway would have made today, with the ease of editing that modern word processors offer, making the act of retyping misspelt words, redrafting and rewriting easy. For Hemingway, revising a text was almost a religious experience. He said the more you throw away, the surer you could be that there was something substantial to begin with.

And he did so by capturing in his words the essence of a lived experience. At a young age he was in Europe, during World War I, and he was wounded in a mortar attack in Austria. The experience would transform him; while recuperating, he would meet the nurse he would love deeply. When you see the drafts of his writing from that time, not only do you see how he compressed emotion in sentences, but how, even visually, the commas, semi-colons and dashes broke the rhythm of the sentences at just the right time, making you feel the disruptive unpredictability that wars bring.

The experience abroad shaped him so much that while he gained fame as a great young American author, he was leaving the US far behind. His life after that became a roller-coaster ride through the history of the 20th century—after the early experience of World War I, there was the Spanish Civil War (where he fought the fascists and wrote about the war), and then, going on a landing craft to Normandy on D-Day in 1944, liberating Paris—he claimed credit for liberating the bar at the Ritz hotel and Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. And he cheered Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

What made his writing so real was that he immersed himself in the societies in which he lived—he was not a correspondent, nor a tourist or a traveller; he became a local, so much so that Havana, Madrid, and Paris were as much home to him as were Key West (where he lived for many years) or Ketchum (where he died). About Oak Park, where he was born, he would write in a letter to his wife Mary Welsh: “Never have been back except to bury my Father that same fall (of 1928). Since, many time(s) (sic), I haven’t gone because it would be rude to go and not see my mother and I can’t stand to see her."

It is not easy to return home, and where you return may not be where you began. T.S. Eliot put it profoundly in Little Gidding, one of the Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And it would, inevitably, not be what we had left. In his essay about the film Wizard Of Oz, Salman Rushdie writes: “...the truth is once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’, but rather that there is no longer any such place as ‘home’: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began."

This is what it means, to travel—you leave your home, you wander across the world, you discover yourself, and if you return to where you began from, you find that the place is no longer what it was, that the place is new, that each visit is like a new discovery, because home is what you one day leave, taking new paths, new alleys, new roads, taken or not, even if the detour is much longer.

The exhibition Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars will travel to the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in April.

Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. He tweets at @saliltripathi.

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