Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  Poincaré’s Election Promises

  The Toronto Daily Star

  March 11, 1922

  PARIS.—No matter what your political views may be, it is impossible not to admire the way ex-President Raymond Poincaré, newly appointed prime minister of France, is administering his government.

  M. Poincaré has a difficult task. It was made more difficult because for a long time before he came back into power he had been explaining from the outside just what he would do if he were in power. Then he was suddenly required to do all the things he had been suggesting as an onlooker. The situation presented difficulties.

  It is easier to advise than execute and so far M. Poincaré has occupied no territory, nor sent French troops into any new territory. But he and his government have settled down to a study and administration of their various departments that is drawing much admiration. Meetings of the heads of various departments are held each week and the underheads confer constantly. This efficiency contrasts with the Briand government, which was greatly lacking in liaison between its different branches.

  Financial affairs look better each day. The inflating of the paper currency has been stopped. Unemployment is daily less and French export trade is booming. Germany’s meeting of her indemnity payments in the present revised schedule has been a stabilizing factor.

  Of course the French budget is still a long way from balancing, and there are the national defense bonds, which run from three months to a year in length, to be paid. The official journal has recently announced that there will be no more of these bonds issued. That means that those outstanding, some 68 billion francs according to reports, will have to be paid inside of a year at the latest. The government may plan to convert them to long-term bonds, but the people who have bought them have tied up their money with the understanding that they are to get it back in a year. Being French people, there is a very great chance that at the end of the year, the six months or the three months, they will ask for their money in cash. That may start the paper-money presses going again.

  Meanwhile the Poincaré ministry is going well. “France was quite sick,” an American writer who has lived in France for many years said to me the other day, “and she tried all sorts of medicines. Finally, after she had tried doctors of all sorts, she took to Poincaré, who is a patent medicine.” Now it appears that the patent medicine is making a cure.

  Sparrow Hat on Paris Boulevards

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  March 18, 1922

  PARIS.—Parisian milliners have at last discovered a use for the English sparrow. The sparrow hat has made its appearance on the boulevards and the unpopular little bird has come into its own.

  The new hat, of which milliners assure me they are having a big sale, is a brown, mushroom-shaped affair with a girdle of stuffed English sparrows. The sparrows look as though they were nestling against the band of the hat and there are about fifteen of them to a headpiece.

  So far the milliners are pushing the sparrow creation strongly. Still, you never can tell, it took monkey fur a long time to catch on but the only thing that will ever end the monkey-fur rule now is for the monkeys to give out. The peculiar long-furred monkey has to be imported from Africa and South America and is becoming noticeably scarcer. There will not be that trouble with sparrows at any rate.

  The Luge of Switzerland

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  March 18, 1922

  CHAMBY SUR MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND.—The luge is the Swiss flivver. It is also the Swiss canoe, the Swiss horse-and-buggy, the Swiss pram and the Swiss combination riding horse and taxi. Luge is pronounced looge, and is a short, stout sled of hickory built on the pattern of little girls’ sleds in Canada.

  You realize the omnipotence of the luge when on a bright Sunday you see all of Switzerland, from old grandmothers to street children, coasting solemnly down the steep mountain roads, sitting on these little elevated pancakes with the same tense expression on all their faces. They steer with their feet stuck straight out in front and come down a twelve-mile run at a speed of from twelve to thirty miles an hour.

  Swiss railroads run special trains for lugeurs between Montreux, at the edge of Lake Geneva, and the top of Col du Sonloup, a mountain 4,000 feet above sea level. Twelve trains a day are packed on Sunday, with families and their sleds. They put up their lunch, buy an all-day ticket, good for any number of rides on the winding, climbing, Bernese Oberland railway, and then spend the day sliding gloriously down the long, icy mountain road.

  Steering a luge takes about as long to learn as riding a bicycle. You get on the sled, lean far back and the luge commences to move down the icy road. If it starts to sheer off to the right, you drop your left leg and if it goes too far to the left, you let your right foot drag. Your feet are sticking straight out before you. That is all there is to steering, but there is a great deal more to keeping your nerve.

  You go down a long steep stretch of road flanked by a six-hundred-foot drop-off on the left and bordered by a line of trees on the right. The sled goes fast from the start and soon it is rushing faster than anything you have ever felt. You are sitting absolutely unsupported, only ten inches above the ice, and the road is feeding past you like a movie film. The sled you are sitting on is only just large enough to make a seat and is rushing at motor-car speed toward a sharp curve. If you lean your body away from the curve and drop the right foot, the luge will swing around the curve in a slither of ice and drop shooting down the next slope. If you upset on a turn, you are hurled into a snowbank or go shooting down the road, lugeing along on various plane surfaces of your anatomy.

  Additional hazards are provided for the lugeurs by hay sleds and wood sleds. These have long, curved-up runners, and are used to haul the hay down from the mountain meadows where it was cut and cured in the summer, or to bring down great loads of firewood and faggots cut in the forests. They are big, slow-moving sledges and are pulled by their drivers, who haul them by the long curved-up runners and pull themselves up in front of their loads to coast down the steepest slopes.

  Because there are many lugeurs, the men with the hay and wood sleds get tired of pulling their loads to one side when they hear a lugeur come shooting down, shouting for the right of way. A lugeur at thirty miles an hour, with no brakes but his feet, has the option of hitting the sleds ahead of him or shooting off the road. It is considered a very bad omen to hit a wood sled.

  There is a British colony at Bellaria, near Vevey, in the canton of Vaud, on Lake Geneva. The two apartment buildings they live in are at the foot of the mountains and the British are nearly all quite rapid luguers. They can leave Bellaria, where there will be no snow and a mild, springlike breeze, and in half an hour by the train be up in the mountain where there are fast, frozen roads and thirty inches of snow on the level. Yet the air is so dry and the sun shines so brightly that while the Bellarians are waiting for a train at Chamby, halfway up the mountain to Sonloup, they have tea out of doors in the afternoon in perfect comfort clad in nothing heavier than sports clothes.

  The road from Chamby to Montreux is very steep and fairly dangerous for lugeing. It is, however, one of the favorite runs of the Britons from Bellaria, who take it nightly on their way home to their comfortable apartment buildings just above the lake. This makes some very interesting pictures, as the road is only used by the most daring lugeurs.

  One wonderful sight is to see the ex-military governor of Khartoum seated on a sled that looks about the size of a postage stamp, his feet stuck straight out at the sides, his hands in back of him, charging a smother of ice dust down the steep, high-walled road with his muffler straight out behind him in the wind and a cherubic smile on his face while all the street urchins of Montreux spread against the walls and cheer him wildly as he passes.

  It is easy to understand how the British have such a great Empire after you have seen them luge.

  Black Novel a Storm Center

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  March 25, 1922


  PARIS.—“Batouala,” the novel by René Maran, a Negro, winner of the Goncourt Academy Prize of 5,000 francs for the best novel of the year by a young writer, is still the center of a swirl of condemnation, indignation and praise.

  Maran, who was born in Martinique and educated in France, was bitterly attacked in the Chamber of Deputies the other day as a defamer of France, and biter of the hand that fed him. He has been much censured by certain Frenchmen for his indictment of French imperialism in its effects on the natives of the French colonies. Others have rallied to him and asked the politicians to take the novel as a work of art, except for the preface, which is the only bit of propaganda in the book.

  Meanwhile, René Maran, black as Sam Langford [the boxer], is ignorant of the storm his book has caused. He is in the French government service in Central Africa, two days’ march from Lake Tchad, and seventy days’ travel from Paris. There are no telegraphs or cables at his post, and he does not even know his book has won the famous Goncourt Prize.

  The preface of the novel describes how peaceful communities of 10,000 blacks in the heart of Africa have been reduced to 1,000 inhabitants under the French rule. It is not pleasant and it gives the facts by a man who has seen them, in a plain, unimpassioned statement.

  Launched into the novel itself, the reader gets a picture of a native village seen by the big-whited eyes, felt by the pink palms, and the broad, flat, naked feet of the African native himself. You smell the smells of the village, you eat its food, you see the white man as the black man sees him, and after you have lived in the village you die there. That is all there is to the story, but when you have read it, you have seen Batouala, and that makes it a great novel.

  It opens with Batouala, the chief of the village, waking up in his hut, roused by the cold of the early morning and the crumbling of the ground under his body where the ants are tunneling. He blows his dead fire into life and sits, hunched over, warming his chilled body and wondering whether he will go back to sleep or get up.

  It closes with Batouala, old and with the stiffened joints of his age, cruelly torn by the leopard that his spear-thrust missed, lying on the earth floor of his hut. The village sorcerer has left him alone, there is a younger chief in the village, and Batouala lies there feverish and thirsty, dying, while his mangy dog licks at his wounds. And while he lies there, you feel the thirst and the fever and the rough, moist tongue of the dog.

  There will probably be an English translation shortly. To be translated properly, however, there should be another Negro who has lived a life in the country two days’ march from Lake Tchad and who knows English as René Maran knows French.

  American Bohemians in Paris

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  March 25, 1922

  PARIS.—The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow, and with its afternoon and evening levees has made the Rotonde the leading Latin Quarter showplace for tourists in search of atmosphere.

  It is a strange-acting and strange-looking breed that crowd the tables of the Café Rotonde. They have all striven so hard for a careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity. A first look into the smoky, high-ceilinged, table-crammed interior of the Rotonde gives you the same feeling that hits you as you step into the bird-house at the zoo. There seems to be a tremendous, raucous, many-pitched squawking going on, broken up by many waiters who fly around through the smoke like so many black and white magpies. The tables are full—they are always full—someone is moved down and crowded together, something is knocked over, more people come in at the swinging door, another black and white waiter pivots between tables toward the door and, having shouted your order at his disappearing back, you look around you at individual people.

  You can only see a certain number of individuals at the Rotonde on one night. When you have reached your quota you are quite aware that you must go. There is a perfectly definite moment when you know you have seen enough of the Rotonde’s inmates and must leave. If you want to know how definite it is, try and eat your way through a jug of soured molasses. To some people the feeling that you cannot go on will come at the first mouthful. Others are hardier. But there is a limit for all normal people. For the people who crowd together around the tables of the Café Rotonde do something very definite to that premier seat of the emotions, the stomach.

  For the first dose of Rotonde individuals you might observe a short, dumpy woman with newly blond hair, cut Old-Dutch-Cleanser fashion, a face like a pink enameled ham and fat fingers that reach out of the long blue silk sleeves of a Chinese-looking smock. She is sitting hunched forward over the table, smoking a cigarette in a two-foot holder, and her flat face is absolutely devoid of any expression.

  She is looking flatly at her masterpiece that is hung on the white plaster wall of the café, along with some 3,000 others, as part of the Rotonde’s salon for customers only. Her masterpiece looks like a red mince pie descending the stairs, and the adoring, though expressionless, painter spends every afternoon and evening seated at the table before it in a devout attitude.

  After you have finished looking at the painter and her work you can turn your head a little and see a big, light-haired woman sitting at a table with three young men. The big woman is wearing a picture hat of the “Merry Widow” period and is making jokes and laughing hysterically. The three young men laugh whenever she does. The waiter brings the bill, the big woman pays it, settles her hat on her head with slightly unsteady hands, and she and the three young men go out together. She is laughing again as she goes out of the door. Three years ago she came to Paris with her husband from a little town in Connecticut, where they had lived and he had painted with increasing success for ten years. Last year he went back to America alone.

  Those are two of the twelve hundred people who jam the Rotonde. You can find anything you are looking for at the Rotonde—except serious artists. The trouble is that people who go on a tour of the Latin Quarter look in at the Rotonde and think they are seeing an assembly of the great artists of Paris. I want to correct that in a very public manner, for the artists of Paris who are turning out creditable work resent and loathe the Rotonde crowd.

  The fact that there are twelve francs for a dollar brought over the Rotonders, along with a good many other people, and if the exchange ever gets back to normal they will all have to go back to America. They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist upon posing as artists.

  Since the good old days when Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through the same old Latin Quarter, there has not been much good poetry written in cafés. Even then I suspect that Baudelaire parked the lobster with the concierge down on the first floor, put the chloroform bottle corked on the washstand and sweated and carved at the Fleurs du Mal alone with his ideas and his paper as all artists have worked before and since. But the gang that congregates at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail have no time to work at anything else; they put in a full day at the Rotonde.

  Wild Night Music of Paris

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  March 25, 1922

  PARIS.—After the cork has popped on the third bottle and the jazz band has brayed the American suit- and cloak-buyer into such a state of exaltation that he begins to sway slightly with the glory of it all, he is liable to remark thickly and profoundly: “So this is Paris!”

  There is some truth in the remark. It is Paris. It is a Paris bounded by the buyer’s hotel, the Folies
Bergère and the Olympia, traversed by the Grands Boulevards, monumented with Maxim’s and the So-Different, and thickly blotched with the nightlife resorts of Montmartre. It is an artificial and feverish Paris operated at great profit for the entertainment of the buyer and his like who are willing to pay any prices for anything after a few drinks.

  The buyer demands “that Paris be a super-Sodom and a grander Gomorrah” and once alcohol loosens his strong racial grasp on his pocket-book he is willing to pay for his ideal. He does pay for it too, for the prices charged at the various Parisian resorts that begin to liven up around midnight are such that only a war profiteer, a Brazilian millionaire, or an American on a spree can pay.

  Champagne, that can be bought anywhere in the afternoon for 18 francs a bottle, automatically increases in price after ten o’clock to 85 to 150 francs. Other prices are in proportion. An evening at a fashionable dancing café will cut into a foreigner’s pocketbook to the extent of at least 800 francs. If the pleasure-seeker includes a supper in his program he will be lucky to get out without spending a thousand francs. And the people he is with will do it all so gracefully that he will, after the first bottle, consider it a privilege until the next morning when he contemplates the damaged bankroll.

  From the taxi-driver who automatically cranks up five francs on his meter as soon as he picks up an American, either North or South, from in front of a fashionable hotel, to the last waiter in the last place he visits who has no change under five francs, the study of rooking the rich foreigner in search of pleasure has been reduced to a fine art. The trouble is that no matter how much he pays for it, the tourist is not seeing what he really wants.