More of the Lost Generation

Last summer I was invited to Asheville to do a week detail in the museum storage area of the Blue Ridge Parkway. One of my favorite NPS team-mates also came, and in our free time we scoured the city for remnants of Thomas Wolfe and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Part of it was showing Kate places I'd already found, such as My Old Kentucky Home, Riverside Cemetery, and the Grove Park Inn.



My Old Kentucky Home was Julia Wolfe's boarding house and the setting for "Look Homeward Angel. It is still very much like stepping into the novel.

The Parlor

The dining room

One of Tom's suits hanging in an upstairs closet. He was very tall.

Tom's grave marker in Riverside Cemetery - we left a pen.

While at the Wolfe site, we found out that Jude Law had visited as research for his part as Thomas Wolfe in the upcoming film "Genius." We were told they even took him to the cabin where Wolfe wrote "You Can't Go Home Again." No amount of wheedling could make them tell us more, or where the cabin was, or whether we could see it. That made us more determined than ever. We asked everyone we could think of, did online research, and sleuthed out the rest... It took some crawling over gates and quite a hike, but....

As for the Fitzgeralds....

At the Grove Park Inn, where Scott would stay when visiting Zelda during her days in Highland Hospital.

Zelda died in a fire at Highland Hospital on March 10, 1948. I'd never been to the site of the hospital before, so we had to find the location and pay homage there as well. Many of the building still exist, but there is a stone to mark the location of the hospital.

One of the buildings Zelda would've known

The site of the hospital and Zelda's marker - "I don't need anything except hope, which I can't find by looking backwards or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to shut my eyes."  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

To finish off the trip, we found a "Speak-Easy," which had been one of Thomas Wolfe's father's favorite local spot. Lex 18 - the atmosphere was evocative. A silent film played on a screen in the dining room, and Kate and I ended up naming the night's cocktail based on the plot of the film - "Marushka's Revenge"!

Lex 18 Moonshine Bar

Helen Hunt Jackson

In Colorado Springs, on a recent visit, my sister told me about Helen Hunt Jackson falls. "Who was Helen Hunt Jackson?" I asked.

"A writer," she responded. "Contemporaries with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe." Suddenly my mind reeled back to "The Belle of Amherst," where Emily Dickinson says of Helen ~ "She has the facts, but not the phosphorescence."

It sounded like a perfect literary journey ~ plus, as it was in Cheyenne Canon, a perfect place to see some snow and do some hiking!

Helen Hunt became an advocate for Native American rights, and I didn't realize that her novel Ramona had been made into a play and several films.

The falls were beautiful, and supposedly Helen liked to come here to think and write. Helen's house in Colorado Springs was dismantled, but part of it was salvaged and rebuilt inside the Pioneer Museum downtown. It was eerie, to say the least!

No days such honored days as these! While yet 

Fair Aphrodite reigned, men seeking wide 

For some fair thing which should forever bide 

On earth, her beauteous memory to set 

In fitting frame that no age could forget, 

Her name in lovely April's name did hide, 

And leave it there, eternally allied 

To all the fairest flowers Spring did beget. 

And when fair Aphrodite passed from earth, 

Her shrines forgotten and her feasts of mirth, 

A holier symbol still in seal and sign, 

Sweet April took, of kingdom most divine, 

When Christ ascended, in the time of birth 

Of spring anemones, in Palestine. 

Helen Hunt Jackson

A weekend get-away

My first get-away after the snow - mostly - allowed me to leave the farm was to Huntsville, AL to the Monte Sano Writer's Retreat. The theme was "Unleash Your Creative Spirit!" and I feel like that's what it's allowed me to do. I've come home rich with ideas and inspiration.

Monte Sano means "Mountain of Health," and it has helped heal me, body and spirit, several times now. I have gone there to walk, to gaze out over the valley, to search for fossils, and now, to commune with fellow craftsmen of the pen, including my precious sister. We hashed over the agenda, deciding which breakout sessions would best meet our differing needs, and lamenting some that we weren't able to attend.

This year, however, all the authors were on a group panel. All the attendees gathered in a great room, and listened as each genre/author got about 20 minutes to speak to their trade. The things we learned from the most unexpected! The sessions we never would've attended ended up being the most illuminating.

One piece of advice that was consistent was to "read to write." We were encouraged to read those who inspire us to craft our own voice and vision. I'm ready to begin...

Art inspired by art ~ my short film inspired by the works of poet Kathryn Stripling Byer.

Wildwood Flower from Kendra Hinkle on Vimeo.

Braisserie Lipp's

"Don't you know that all writers ever talk about is their troubles?" Sylvia Beach

     "Outside on the rue de l'Odéon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly...You God damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord...Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now?
     Lipp's is where you are going to eat and drink too....
     There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer. I asked for a distingué, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad.
     The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.
     I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a demi and watched it drawn. It seemed colder than the distingué and I drank half of it.
     I had not been worrying, I thought. I knew the stories were good and someone would publish them finally at home."

                                                                                                      A Moveable Feast

Lipp's was an important place in Hemingway's career, because he says it was there that he remembered when he had been able to write again after his wife accidentally lost all his manuscripts. He said hunger was a good discipline and he learned from it. And he knew he must write a novel.

After leaving Lipp's Hem walked back to La Closerie des Lilas...

     "I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café creme and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote...The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it...

     There were days ahead to be doing that each day."

                                                                                                      A Moveable Feast

Along the river...

Today we return to the banks of the Seine. It's refreshing journey, after going back to work and finding it more depleting than wandering 4-6 miles a day in Paris. In the latest chapter of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks about the People of the Seine.

"Across the branch of the Seine was the Île St.-Louis with the narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses, and you could go over there or you could turn left and walk along the quais with the length of the Île St.-Louis and then Notre Dame and Île de la Cité opposite as you walked."

Looking toward the Île St.-Louis

This was particularly meaningful, as the Île St.-Louis was our home away from home during the Left Bank Writer's Retreat. There are two islands in the river.  The Île St.-Louis is an island behind the Île de la Cité on which the city was founded, and on which sits Notre Dame. There is also the Crypte Archeologique under the island, with early Roman and Gaul ruins.

Notre Dame from the rear

He continues ~ "In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for sale very cheap." These bookstalls are still there, all along the river, and they are proudly owned by multi-generational families.

"At the head of the Île de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the waters's edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading, and in the currents and back waters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish. You went down a stairway to the park and watched the fisherman there under the great bridge."

The Pont Neuf ~ unfortunately I balked at the idea of taking a picture of another statue,
so Henry 4th is not visible...

Under the great bridge...

Hemingway says "if the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing." We had our farewell drinks by the Seine very near that spot. Although the fishermen are gone and Hemingway is gone (and this so near the anniversary), the sun is still good, and so is the wine. And so is the river.

Shakespeare and Company

Continuing on in re-reading A Moveable Feast, I've come to the chapter about Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company...                          

Perhaps one of (and maybe the only one of) my biggest disappointments in Paris was discovering that the current Shakespeare and Company is not the original. Sylvia Beach's original store was on the rue de l'Odéon. This is the place where the expats came in the 20's and where Sylvia risked publishing Ulysses for James Joyce.

The original Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia and Hem are the last two on the right.

The store front is still there, but the original store was closed during WWII. The story is that Sylvia packed up and hid the entire store from the Nazis. 

The original facade.

In 1951, George Whitman opened the current store. Yep, he is a relative of Walt's. It sits right across the street from Notre Dame. After Sylvia's death he named the store Shakespeare and Company in her honor. 

Me by the current store.

The current store is the store of the beat generation and current writers, but it still retains the atmosphere that Hemingway described: "...this was a warm, cheerful place with...tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive...as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library."

 Today the bookstore is run by Sylvia Beach Whitman, George's daughter...

The current Sylvia still meets with prospective writers and contributors

Happy Place.

Marshal Ney

"You are all a génération perdue...that's what you are," Miss Stein said. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."

Statue of Marsal Ney next to the Cloiserie des Lilas

Continuing on with Hemingway in A Moveable Feast: "...as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Wateroo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill."

La Closerie des Lilas

Sitting by Hemingway's plaque at the Lilas bar

Location of where the sawmill/flat had been

Luxembourg

A segueway with advice on writing from Hemingway in his studio:

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going...I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence."

Then, on to the Luxembourg Gardens ~ Hemingway would write about meeting Gertrude Stein in the gardens. I couldn't walk through them without thinking about that chance encounter and where it might have taken place.

"If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon, I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day...I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough..."

The Musée du Luxembourg - we went there to see the Chagall paintings. It is very near Scott and Zelda's apartment.

The Chagall paintings still inspire, even if the Cezannes have been moved! What florid, lurid inspiration - red skies, floating peasants, crescent moons - all indicative of a period of Russian history. The paintings are our photographs of how life was perceived in a time and place before technology made it available. Words do as well. I'm thankful for those who recorded it all for us - and that we can revisit them today.

All of this fits in perfectly with one of the sessions in our writing retreat. It was called the Ekphrasis exercise, and we practiced it while looking at the paintings at the Musée D'Orsay. The definition of Ekphrasis means "description" in Greek, and according to poetryfoundation.org,

“...an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the 'action' of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion..."

We were to study a work of art that inspired us, write about it, and learn something from observation and even the style used by the artist. It was one of my favorite sessions. 

Feasting

I know there are more literary journeys left to make ~ many, many more. But I would be remiss if I didn't recognize that I have just come from one of the biggest, most marvelous yet ~ from the one that nearly every writer dreams of. I have come from my own writing retreat in Paris, the land of the moveable feast. I cannot thank the Left Bank Writer's Retreat enough for filling a week with incomparable magic. Every need and expectation were met, and we traveled through the cobblestone streets with utmost confidence in our experiences to come.

I am rereading A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway now that I am home, and I will be filling this literary journey as I go along with the book - that way I can let it last longer myself. I can keep drinking from the fountain, supping from the cafes, and remembering the feel of the whole experience.

From the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks about "...the hotel where Verlaine died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."

The plaque erroneously states that Hem lived here, but this was the locale of his studio. It is, however, where Verlaine died (another literary journey in and of itself).

"It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs...I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possible filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain."

It seems apropos that the building now has a cafe on the bottom floor.

Hemingway goes on "down past the Lycée Henri Quartre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon..."

Is it coincidence that Woody Allen used the stairs of the St.-Étienne-du-Mont in his film "Midnight in Paris" as the place where Gil Pender takes off in a Peugeot for his foray into the past? Maybe...but I don't think so.

To be continued...