Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Read Free Book Online

of the railway station, but if you’re in a car you must be prepared to be pushed around the industrial extremities and squeezed over the bridge from Mestre and into the hell of the multi-storey car park at Piazzale Roma, before you catch a glimpse of anything remotely resembling a canal, Grand or otherwise.
    On this our first night we make a bee-line, as Hemingway used to, for Harry’s Bar.
    Now bars can be good or bad but they are always a hundred times better if you know the barman and he knows you. When Ernest Hemingway entered Harry’s he was doubtless received by Harry himself, shown to his favourite seat (‘They were at their table in the far corner of the bar, where the Colonel had both his flanks covered’) and served a double martini without ever having to ask. From those days come the classic Harry’s Bar stories, such as that of the elderly customer who, having waited an hour for a table, sat down, heaved a sigh of relief, and declared, ‘Now I can die.’
    Harry’s Bar today is merely busy, full of people trying to be Hemingway. Drinks are pre-mixed and served with a dash of boredom. The room itself is small and, when full, is like an overcrowded cabin on a 1950s liner.
    Harry’s Bar has become a global brand - a clock on the wall shows ‘Harry’s Bar time’ in Venice, Buenos Aires and New York, and there is a book for sale called
Legends of Harry’s Bar
. And that’s maybe the problem. Harry’s Bar
was
a legend. Now it’s a legend that knows it’s a legend, and that’s very different.
    B reakfast at the Gritti Palace. Or, more accurately, breakfast-
time
at the Gritti Palace. Guests at this most exclusive of Venetian hotels are filling their faces in the dining-room whilst we, who have feasted more economically at our hostelry opposite the station, are setting up to shoot on the terrace.

    Someone shows me a copy of
Il Gazzettino
, one of two Venetian morning papers, which carries a report of our filming activities up in Fossalta. The Italian language bathes our mundane efforts in a Dante-esque glow. I come out as
‘Il cinquanta-cinquenne attore Inglese’
. It may only mean ‘fifty-five-year-old English actor’, but it makes me sound like the Renaissance.
    We are here to recreate the true story of Hemingway sitting on this very terrace forty-five years ago, reading newspaper reports of his death after a plane crash in Africa. I put down
Il Gazzettino
and pick up a copy of the
New York Daily Mirror
for 25 January 1954 with the banner headline: ‘Hemingway Wife, Killed In Air Crash’.
    He wasn’t killed but he was badly hurt, sustaining injuries to his skull, shoulder, spine, liver and kidneys. As soon as he was well enough to travel he took a boat to Europe and, for the second time in his life, found himself recovering from serious injury in Italy.
    Once installed in the best room in the Gritti Palace - first-floor, on the corner, with balconies - he set about his treatment with a vengeance. The treatment consisted of a little luxury and a lot of champagne. But though Hemingway was an expert at recovery, his friend A. E. Hotchner, summoned to see him at the Gritti, could see that this time, things were different.
    When I came into his room he was sitting in a chair by the windows, reading, the inevitable white tennis visor (ordered by the dozen from Abercrombie
&
Fitch) shading his eyes … What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months … some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out of him
.
    It didn’t stop Hemingway playing baseball with friends in his room. The ball, a pair of tightly rolled woollen socks, was hit so hard that it smashed clean through one of the windows and out into the street. According to Hotchner, the manager pointed out that no one had ever played baseball in any of the rooms throughout the 300-year-old history of the Gritti. For this reason he had decided ‘to reduce Signor Hemingway’s bill by ten per cent’.
    Baron