Hemingway Adventure (1999) (5 page)

W
e leave Milan today to try and locate the place where Hemingway was wounded. It’s complicated because though he portrays his own real injury as the fictional injury sustained by Lieutenant Henry in
A Farewell to Arms
, Hemingway locates the event in a part of the battlefront that he’d never seen - the Isonzo River, now the border between Italy and Slovenia.

This is mountainous, dramatic country, where a milky-green river scours steep, wooded gorges. There was heavy fighting here, but Hemingway never saw any of it. He himself was hit and wounded on the banks of the Piave River in the low, flat farmlands only twenty-five miles from Venice.

The journey out there from Milan is straight and uncomplicated and pretty boring, both road and railway slicing across the rich plains of Lombardy with the snow-capped Alps away to the north a constant, if not always visible, presence.

Romantic cities like Verona, Padua, Vicenza and Venice are nothing more than names on overhead gantries as the autostrada curves to avoid them. Open country is quickly snuffed out by development. The wide plain is in danger of becoming one long industrial estate.

East of Venice the landscape patterns change. Dead straight roads, canals, power cables and the fresh-ploughed furrows of the fields bisect, criss-cross and converge on each other like lines on a Mondrian painting.

We put up at a hotel in Noventa di Piave, a tiny town with the second tallest bell tower in the Veneto outside St Mark’s Square, a pizzeria called ‘Smack!’ and a smoky cafe where the old men gather to play cards. Eat good plain food washed down with jugs of
prosecco
, the local sparkling white wine, in a busy local restaurant.

Later, before bed, read a few more pages of
A Farewell to Arms
with a keener pleasure than usual, knowing that I am now only one and a half miles from the tiny town of Fossalta, the place where the story was born.

O
n the afternoon of 7 July 1918, exactly one month after arriving in Italy, Hemingway set off on a bicycle from the farmhouse where he was billeted and rode a mile or so through the village of Fossalta to the Italian front-line trenches where he distributed morale-boosting supplies of chocolates and cigars.

Rumours were rife that an offensive was about to begin and Hemingway, impatient to see some action, returned to the lines that night. He talked the soldiers into letting him move up to a forward listening post beside the river. Half an hour past midnight, just after the offensive had begun, an Austrian mortar shell hit the post. In
A Farewell to Arms
, written ten years later, Hemingway describes the moment of impact:

There was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind
.

One of the men with him had his legs blown off and died from loss of blood. Though some biographers dispute exactly what happened next, it seems that Hemingway dragged the second wounded man back to the trenches, and was hit in the legs by machine-gun fire as he did so. He was taken to the town hall and then to a dressing station at the local school, before being moved by Fiat ambulance (so uncomfortably he vomited) to a field hospital in Treviso and finally back to Milan.

Today I’m going to try to recreate his journey to the trenches and back (without the getting blown up bit) to see what, if anything, is as it was.

A good start. The farmhouse at which he was billeted still exists. It’s a long three-storey building standing at right angles to the road on the outskirts of Fossalta. A driveway leads to a pair of mossy stone gate-posts, with no gate, which give on to a friendly overgrown garden. Over a door is a shield embossed with an eagle carrying off a lamb, the coat of arms of the Botter family, who have occupied the house continuously since 1711. It’s not difficult to imagine Hemingway, wheeling his bicycle out into the heat of a high summer afternoon, checking one last time that he has everything he needs for the men in the front line.

My bicycle is not quite the one Hemingway would have used, but not far off. It dates back to the 1920s and has been lovingly looked after by a local doctor. The road runs beside deep ditches with bare and spindly trees on either side, over a frozen canal lined with the shrivelled sinews of winter vines, through the forgettable streets of Fossalta and along the sunken road that runs below the embankment. I have to stand on the pedals to pull myself up to the top.

There below me is the Piave River, about 200 feet wide and the water not blue, as Hemingway remembers it, but a milky green, only a shade darker than turquoise.

I can see the bend in the river that Hemingway talks about, but there is a new bridge being built and much of the far bank has been stripped away. The trees that remain are festooned with plastic bags caught on the branches after the last flood. Today the river flows by without much effort, drifting beneath the rickety old pontoon toll-bridge whose days are numbered.

I park my bicycle against a tall black steel slab with an inscription that marks this as the place where Hemingway was wounded. It displays a much more reverential approach to the past than that adopted by Colonel Cantwell, Hemingway’s hero in
Across the River and into the Trees
.

The Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before
.

‘A poor effort,’ he said aloud to the river and the river bank that were heavy with autumn quiet and wet from the fall rains. ‘But my own.’

He then has his hero bury a ten thousand lire note. The burying of the note is generally considered to be what Hemingway himself did when he came back here in the 1940s. I try a bit of amateur archaeology and see if I can dig around and find it. I get lots of help from the locals, all of it contradictory. The daughter of the man who runs the toll-bridge points me down the slope and nearer the river. The father of the local journalist who has a collection of unexploded First World War shells in his back garden says this is all wrong and it’s actually buried at a site further up-river opposite a small island. As I’m scraping around in the sand, a lean and bearded local computer expert points unequivocally to the island itself. It’s mid-winter, and though a smudgy sun is reflected off the water, I’m not swimming over there.

Then it occurs to me that if I really want to be true to the precedent set by Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, I should be burying, not digging.

I look around for something suitable to leave by the banks of the Piave and there in my shoulder bag is the obvious choice.

My contribution to the rich undersoil at Fossalta is the Penguin edition of
A Farewell to Arms
, which helped me to pass my English Literature A’ Level exam in 1959.

‘C
hasing yesterdays is a bum show,’ Hemingway confided to readers of the
Toronto Daily Star
after visiting Fossalta in 1922.

Hemingway was in his element when writing about war - not what caused it, but how it was fought. No wonder he found battlefields in peacetime such a let down. It must be like finding that your childhood home has become a car park - or the hospital where you first fell in love has become a bank.

Hemingway never flinched from describing the brutality and the destruction of war but he could not write it all off as barbarity. War was a crucible in which something positive could be forged. In battle, acts of loyalty, bravery, and self-sacrifice were everyday occurrences.

I can’t help thinking of all this as I climb up the vast terraces of the First World War memorial at Redipuglia, an hour’s drive east of Fossalta. Entombed in the hillside below me are the remains of a hundred thousand soldiers of the Italian Third Army who fought and died against the Austrians and Germans in the Great War. It’s been estimated that a million were killed on both sides.

At the bottom is a monument to the Duke of Aosta, commander of the Third Army; behind him are five black granite blocks marking the remains of his five generals and behind them, rising up the slope, are twenty-two white limestone terraces, each one a hundred and fifty yards long and twenty feet deep. The remains of those who died are set into the walls of these terraces and the leading edge of each terrace is embossed with the endlessly repeated word
‘Presente’
.

It’s impossible not to be affected by it. It is as if the Third Army, far from dead and buried, is lined up on parade, each soldier answering his name,
‘Presente!’
Each one ready to follow his leaders into battle once again.

It’s a con, but a very good one, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that, like Milan Central, this was commissioned by Mussolini, in an attempt to glorify a bloody past and to erase the uncomfortable memories of the massive defeat the Italians suffered at Caporetto in 1917 (and which is the background for
A Farewell to Arms)
.

The intention of the Fascist architects is obvious. Anyone climbing these massive terraces soon becomes a mere speck against the stonework, tiny and insignificant before the unifying might of the state.

In an attempt to preserve my sense of identity I retreat to the cafe at the military museum across the road and order a
cappuccino
.

Music is blaring out, but it’s not marching bands. It’s Sheryl Crow.

A
fter his formative experiences in the First World War, Hemingway didn’t return to Italy for nearly thirty years.

When he did he was no longer the cocky teenager, he was a forty-something best-selling author and international celebrity.

He was particularly susceptible to the attentions of Italian aristocrats and in the winter of 1948 he went shooting at the private reserve of Baron Nanyuki Franchetti. Here history began to repeat itself as, thirty years after his love affair with his nurse in Milan, his attention was caught by the only woman at the shoot, an eighteen-year-old called Adriana Ivancic.

She was wet through and miserable at the end of an unsuccessful day’s shooting and after drying her hair found she had nothing to comb it with. Hemingway produced his own comb (by then he was quite vain about his thinning hair), broke it in two and handed half to her.

So began, if not a love affair, certainly an infatuation with Adriana, which led to the writing of probably his worst novel,
Across the River and into the Trees
, which tells the story of an American soldier returning to his old stamping grounds in Italy and falling in love with a nineteen-year-old girl called Renata. The relationship is consummated in a gondola.

In the
New Yorker
, E. B. White parodied the book’s style under the title Across the Street and into the Grill’:

This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Pirnie as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Pirnie, but I commute good
.

I’m told that the son of Baron Franchetti still lives in the family palazzo in Venice, and that is where we head for now.

Anyone driving into Venice these days knows that it is a journey bereft of visual delights. It can look sensational from a plane, or from the top of the old tower on the island of Torcello, or even from the steps 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.