Bar raised ... La Coupole, a Hemingway haunt.Credit: AFP
The lead in Woody Allen's new film time-travels to Hemingway's Paris in a vintage car. Nina Caplan heads there on foot.
It's midnight, it's chilly and I'm loitering in a street in Paris, feeling one-eighth hopeful and seven-eighths sheepish. I'm looking for vestiges of the 1920s expat artists and writers dubbed the Lost Generation by Gertrude Stein (because they went to war at a young age, missing an important stage of the growing-up process). I've been inspired by Woody Allen's new film, Midnight in Paris, which allows Lost Generation fan Gil (Owen Wilson) to travel back in time and party with Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Stein. Every midnight, a vintage car picks him up from this spot on the street and carries him magically to a golden age.
But even without a vintage car, the '20s aren't hard to find in Paris. This is partly because, despite Hemingway's famous pronouncement that Paris is a moveable feast, the city has barely altered in 150 years. Baron Haussmann's 19th-century boulevards still march across the city, each perfectly aligned to a monument. Running alongside are the tiny streets of an older Paris, interspersed with the occasional art deco frivolity or 1970s embarrassment.
Details change: the boulangerie on Rue Notre-Dame des Champs, opposite an early home of Hemingway, his first wife and their baby, has become an Asian delicatessen, while the sawmill they lived above is long gone. But you can still creep up the deli's back stairs, through the shop and into Boulevard du Montparnasse, walk past No. 159 (once the Hotel Venitia) and on towards a cluster of famous cafes.
Hemingway would have been able to write or drink in La Closerie des Lilas, stop off at the Venitia for a little light adultery with Pauline Pfeiffer (later the second Mrs Hemingway) and pick up a baguette on his way home.
La Closerie, Hemingway's favourite "office", is lovely, with a trellised terrace, mahogany bar and lighting so low, no writer could work here now except in Braille. The menu features filet de boeuf Hemingway - one of the impossibilities is to escape his commercial legacy.
It is odd to be looking for someone and fleeing him simultaneously but these writers, who had quit the US for a cheap franc and an easier life, might have understood. They gathered at Gertrude Stein's at 27 Rue de Fleurus or in cafes in the 6th or 14th arrondissements to talk art and literature, yet they rarely wrote about Paris (even A Moveable Feast was published after Hemingway's suicide in 1961).
My initial plan was to find every surviving bar Hemingway patronised and have a small, salutatory drink in each. This isn't practical.
Even 50 years dead, Hemingway, who ends his description of a day's drinking with Scott Fitzgerald - breakfast whiskies, five bottles of wine, more whiskies, two more bottles of wine before bed - by deploring his friend's low alcohol tolerance, can outdrink me. So I stick to the choicest spots: Harry's New York Bar, where patrons quaff whisky and water at 2pm; and the Ritz's Hemingway Bar, a snug cubby decorated with photos of the great man.
Catch head barman Colin in a quiet patch and he will pass on stories told by his predecessor, Bertin, who knew Hemingway well (there's a good one involving a lot of cognac, a half-bottle of champagne and no glasses - Hemingway drank it straight from the shaker. But Colin tells it better).
La Coupole, once Europe's largest bar, is an odd mix of terrific and tacky, with pillars painted by impecunious artists as payment for drinks and a dome daubed with a hideous sci-fi fantasy.
Legend has it that Hemingway danced here once with Josephine Baker in a fur coat, not realising that the fur was the full extent of her outfit. The African-American chanteuse (who has a small square named after her down the road) dined here often, as did Man Ray and Picasso; you can see her, posing archly, on a pillar beneath the wonderful art deco lights, blithely ignoring the monkeys around her.
Around another corner is an unexceptional Italian restaurant, the Auberge de Venise; this was once the Dingo club, where Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met, during a time that the latter described as "a thousand parties and no work", which sounds good until you stop to think about it.
Allen's film touches on Scott and Zelda's drama although, as usual, Fitzgerald, writing to Zelda in the asylum, says it better: "You were going crazy and calling it genius; I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand."
It is easy to forget, as I flit between the contemporary luxury of the beautiful Hotel Le Bristol (where Gil stays with his fiancee and her parents) and the past, how difficult life must have often been, both emotionally and physically. The walk from Rue de l'Odeon - where Sylvia Beach published Ulysses from her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company - through the lovely Jardin du Luxembourg was a favourite of the young, poor Hemingway because "you saw and smelled nothing to eat from the Place de l'Observatoire to the Rue de Vaugirard".
I'm following him from his first apartment in Rue Cardinal Lemoine (a cold-water dive that now houses a posh clothes shop and a travel agency called Under Hemingway's) to Stein's via Place de la Contrescarpe, mentioned in his story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but it takes a while because en route, I rediscover one of Paris's greatest pleasures: spontaneity. This is a small, walkable city and the people I'm spying on did not live to any timetable.
If they saw, as I do on Rue Racine, a shop dedicated to knives, complete with sharpening wheel (how Hemingway would have loved this, though he would have surely baulked at the high prices), they could allow themselves a brief diversion.
When Zelda wrote of the Madeleine pink at 5 o'clock and the car horns that play Debussy, she was drawing on impressions acquired at leisure. Paris is never a city in which you should rush, even if the boulevards and the Metro make it easy to do so. So I take time to check that the Madeleine is still rosy at teatime (it is) and that Boulevard Raspail remains, as Stein said, cold enough to deserve the nickname "the retreat from Moscow" (it does).
Later, I'll walk down Boulevard St Germain, past Les Deux Magots, where no modern Hemingway could afford to drink, and dawdle back up Rue de l'Odeon and into a tiny bar, l'Ambassade de Bourgogne, which has decent burgundy at €7 ($9) a glass and staff as happy to argue about politics as the relative merits of Gevry-Chambertin and Pernand-Vergelesses wines. And it is here, in a place that opened just last February, that I feel closest to the writers I've been chasing back through the decades.
No magic car appears for me that chilly midnight but no matter. For my trip through time, I have only a dusting of Paris magic and my imagination - and what could be more apt?
FAST FACTS
What to see
Gertrude Stein and her siblings, as collectors and patrons, are the subject of Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso ... L'aventure des Stein at the Grand Palais. More than 120 works from their combined collections are on show until January 16 next year. Entry €12 ($16), 3 Avenue du General Eisenhower, phone 4413 1717; see rmngp.fr.
Shakespeare and Company remains an eccentric institution, with interesting English-language books and a new generation of expats who work in the shop in exchange for uncomfortable but spiritually nourishing accommodation upstairs.
37 Rue de la Bucherie, phone 4325 4093; see shakespeareandcompany.com.
If you are using public transport, buy a carnet — a book of 10 tickets, costing €12.50 — at any Metro station: they are valid on trains and buses and are the cheapest and most efficient way to get around the city.
Reading
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas by Gertrude Stein has lots of charming anecdotes, although rather too much about the self-regarding Stein; Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is still one of the greatest books about this city, although not to be mistaken for anything but fiction; anything by F.Scott Fitzgerald for the spirit, if not the physical reality, of the city at that time; Janet Flanner's Paris was Yesterday 1925-1939.
Staying there
Hotel Saint-Germain-des-Pres is a comfortable, plushly decorated, 18th-century townhouse that was home to Hemingway's close friend, Janet Flanner, the first Paris correspondent of The New Yorker. Rooms cost from €125, 36 Rue Bonaparte, phone 4326 0019; see hotel-paris-saint-germain.com.
Hotel D'Angleterre is small and charming, with timbered ceilings and, in some places, exposed stone walls. Hemingway and his wife stayed in room 14 on their arrival in Paris. Rooms with breakfast from €160, 44 Rue Jacob, phone 4260 3472; see hotel-dangleterre.com.
Hotel Le Bristol Paris is a top-end hotel in the smart 8th arrondissement and stars in Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris. Rooms from €800, 112 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, phone 5343 4300; see lebristolparis.com.
Eating there
L'Auberge de Venise is not the greatest Italian meal you'll eat but decent and you're here for the history — Hemingway meeting Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker shimmying and, across the road, an art deco building that was the dancer Isadora Duncan's last home before she was strangled by her scarf. 10 Rue Delambre, phone 4335 4309.
At La Coupole, ask to sit near the dome — its art might put you off your excellent seafood dinner but watching the waiters prep food beneath the dome is worth it. 102 Boulevard du Montparnasse, phone 4320 1420; see lacoupole-paris.com.
Le 114 Faubourg is less fancy than the other Hotel Le Bristol restaurant — the three-Michelin star Gastronomique (where Allen filmed several of Midnight in Paris's contemporary scenes) — but is more relaxed, with a fine modern French menu. 114 Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, phone 5343 4300; see lebristolparis.com.
Drinking there
Harry's New York Bar: This pennant-hung bar at 5 Rue Danou will celebrate its centenary on November 24. Phone 4261 7114; see harrysbar.fr.
L'Ambassade de Bourgogne is a tiny, modern bar with a great range of burgundies, cheese pastries made in-house and an informal feel that is most un-Parisian but very welcome. 6 Rue de l'Odeon, phone 4354 8004; see ambassadedebourgogne.com.
La Closerie des Lilas was Hemingway's favourite bar until the owners revamped it as an American bar and made Jean, the waiter, shave his moustache. In revenge, he poured ludicrous measures for his favourite customers. 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse, phone 4051 3450; see www.closeriedeslilas.fr.
- The Telegraph, London
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