As his disgust and disillusion with the war increase so does Frederick Henry's passionate love for Catherine Barclay. When he narrowly escapes a random execution during the chaotic Italian retreat from the front, he joins Catherine in Stresa. But by now he is wanted for desertion. Stresa's vibrant beauty is marred by the November rain that greets his arrival in the town, and by our awareness that the lovers' time in this lovely place is fated to be cut short. When the Italian army comes looking for Henry, he and Catherine are rescued by the hotel barman who warns them and helps them to slip out of the hotel and into his boat. He explains the route that they must row to escape to neutral Switzerland at the north end of the lake.
The hotel manager is handing me another photo of Hemingway in a small boat fishing in front of the hotel. No guests go fishing during my stay. The couples who pause for a cappuccino at La Verbanella café on the lake shore or buy an excellent sandwich from Rosaria at the Cambusa delicatessen and wine shop in town are more likely to hire a mountain bike or follow the percorso vita, an obstacle course of gymnastic equipment set at intervals along the lakefront. "Stresa is one of the few resorts that has grown quieter," says Rosaria in her excellent English. "There used to be orchestras in all the lake front cafes - now they are too expensive." The town does seem to be fading gently into its past. Majestic villas stand abandoned behind stern padlocks guarded only by headless statues or winged lions with rusty halos. Buddlea bushes grow out of the rooftops. Back at the Grand Hotel, music and the modern world reappear in the form of another American, singer Billy Joel who is sitting at the bar ordering tea for his daughter. The Arabian princess wanders by on her way to the gym.
Ernest Hemingway's Stresa - A Farewell to Arms
The manager of the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees in Stresa on Italy's Lake Maggiore hands me a photo of Ernest Hemingway. The Nobel laureate is sitting at the hotel bar. He is leaning slightly backwards, clutching his stomach, his eyes are closed. He looks as is if he is about to slide peacefully on to the Persian carpet. Has he just consumed yet another of the "cool and clean martinis" that Frederick Henry, the hero of his novel, "A FAREWELL TO ARMS," mentions twice in one page as he sits at the same bar? "Hemingway stayed here many times," says the manager. "He first came in 1918 and kept coming back right through to the fifties." He shows me the hotel's Golden Book of illustrious guests where, along with John Steinbeck, Clark Gable, assorted Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and various maharajahs and kings, (the hotel does have its own heliport) Hemingway has signed himself as "an old client." He always stayed in room 106 which was, in fact, a suite on the first floor, looking out on Lake Maggiore and the peacocks, statues, topiary and terraces of the dream-like "Isola Bella." "You cannot, alas, visit," says the manager. "It is occupied." I will later learn that the suite is booked for a long stay by an Arabian princess. Hemingway's protagonist, Frederick Henry and his lover, the English nurse, Catherine Barclay arrive at the Grand Hotel just before the book begins it final, tragic climax. The novel opens on the Austro-Italian frontier where American ambulance driver, Henry, is based with the Italian army. The Italy of Hemingway's novel is a grey land of the north and of war. Mud, mountains, mist and most of all, rain, fill the landscape of A Farewell to Arms. I first read this novel when I was twelve. The only Italian place name that I recognized in the novel was Milan where the love affair between Frederick Henry and Catherine Barclay is consummated in an empty American hospital after he undergoes major knee surgery. My twelve year old self was too innocent to wonder, as I did at a recent reading, about the logistics of lovemaking within days of such surgery. At twelve I knew nothing of war or Italy or passionate love and yet I devoured this book. If Milan marks the beginning of the lovers' happiness, Stresa marks the beginning of the end . I would glimpse Stresa four years later in 1970 from a train window. It was my first sight of Italy and I felt woozy from what seemed then to be the sultry, sensuous, radiant Mediterranean charm. There was a palm tree (the first I'd ever seen) on the station platform, there were rounded red tiles on the roofs and a royal blue lake dotted with mysterious islands as a back drop. Hemingway's hero also travels by train around this region but he is wounded and moving through the greys and browns of the war zone in winter. He tells how he vomits on the train floor but "it did not matter because the man on the other side had been very sick on the floor several times before."
The Maltese Falcon - Sam Spade's San Francisco
"On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” So says a plaque on a building on the corner of Burritt Alley and Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. This is a pleasant residential block in a cul-de-sac - not quite the place for a murder but, of course, this murder only happened in the pages of Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon”. As I will discover as I make my way around Sam Spade’s neighbourhood, San Franciscans are happy to pretend that Sam, and that motley crew of Falcon hunters, the mysterious Miss Wonderly, oily little Joel Cairo and the chillingly genial Gutman all really travelled the city blocks around Union Square in their pursuit of the shiny black bird.
This pretence requires some effort for Dashiell Hammett was not given to elaborate scene setting.The most detailed description in The Maltese Falcon consists of one sentence: Spade has received the call telling of Miles’s murder; he phones a yellow cab company. The taxi drops him “where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown.”
Sam Spade’s San Francisco ignores everything that the postcards and travellers, including me, associate with the city. "Little cable cars don’t climb halfway to the stars” or anywhere else in Sam Spade’s world. There is hardly a sense of the hills that can turn even a walk up the block for breakfast into a calf-stretching hike. Bush Street’s “roofing” of Stockton just hints at the way this city scrambles up and down Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill - the three heights that separate Sam Spade from a blue ocean, an orange bridge and a beautiful bay that he never seems to see. As I walk around Sam Spade’s world I realize how small it is. This is dark, busy San Francisco, the part that turns its back on all the blue sea and sky and on all those pastel-painted, gabled Victorian houses that cling so optimistically to those cruel hills. As I ride the Hyde Street cable car from Nob to Russian Hill at that point when it turns to tumble down to the Pacific, San Francisco looks to me as though it has just emerged from the laundry all crisp and blue and white, hung out to dry in the morning sun. But Hammett’s characters don’t have time to look at such loveliness. They are, after all, in pursuit of a much more elusive beauty - “the stuff dreams are made of” as Bogart said in the film (but Hammett did not in the book): the black-enamelled, solid gold, jewel-encrusted falcon that will consume all their ambition and energy and ultimately escape them all. Hammett grants his characters a very occasional diversion. Joel Cairo attends a show. They are currently showing Moliere’s Misanthrope; A Christmas Carol is announced for the holidays. It is hard to imagine Joel Cairo attending either one. He wouldn’t have had far to walk from his Hotel Belvedere. In its true incarnation as the Bellevue it was just one block down at Geary and Taylor. These days it has been reborn as the Monaco, a chic boutique “fantasy” hotel where upturned Vuitton trunks serve as the front desk and hot air balloons on the trompe l’oeil ceilings race through fluffy clouds. There is an occasional mention of San Francisco’s night fog, “thin, clammy and penetrant,” but most of the time, the Falcon’s characters move through a world of interiors: Sam’s office, his apartment, Brigid’s apartment and various hotel suites. Dashiell Hammett worked for a while as a detective in San Francisco He moved around a lot but lived for a while at 891 Post Street and that is where he put Sam Spade’s apartment. When I ask a restaurant waiter if it’s a safe area to visit at night, he shrugs and says, ”It’s a bit of a gay ghetto after dark…..”
Hammett gave Spade an office in a splendid 1926 building at 111 Sutter Street. The marble hall and walls and the beamed, painted ceiling look more like the entrance to a Medici palace. The doorman, the maintenance man, anybody who happens to be around the hallway knows that this is where “Sam Spade had his office - on the fifth floor.”
In another of Hammett’s curt stage directions, he has Spade say: “Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street.”And there, the detective asks the waiter to hurry his order of “chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes.” In 1997, John’s Grill was declared a National Literary Landmark. For an expensive $26 dollars, a visitor can still order those chops. If they do, they should try to eat them in the upstairs dining room where Hammett books and a replica Maltese Falcon are kept in a glass case in the entrance. But there is something missing. Sam Spade might recognize the look of the place but probably not the smell. There is no smoke. And the smokers who lurk outside his office building back up on Sutter, puffing furtively during a short American lunch break are a reminder that Sam and his mink-draped ladies have been left behind in another century.
This pretence requires some effort for Dashiell Hammett was not given to elaborate scene setting.The most detailed description in The Maltese Falcon consists of one sentence: Spade has received the call telling of Miles’s murder; he phones a yellow cab company. The taxi drops him “where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown.”
Sam Spade’s San Francisco ignores everything that the postcards and travellers, including me, associate with the city. "Little cable cars don’t climb halfway to the stars” or anywhere else in Sam Spade’s world. There is hardly a sense of the hills that can turn even a walk up the block for breakfast into a calf-stretching hike. Bush Street’s “roofing” of Stockton just hints at the way this city scrambles up and down Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill - the three heights that separate Sam Spade from a blue ocean, an orange bridge and a beautiful bay that he never seems to see. As I walk around Sam Spade’s world I realize how small it is. This is dark, busy San Francisco, the part that turns its back on all the blue sea and sky and on all those pastel-painted, gabled Victorian houses that cling so optimistically to those cruel hills. As I ride the Hyde Street cable car from Nob to Russian Hill at that point when it turns to tumble down to the Pacific, San Francisco looks to me as though it has just emerged from the laundry all crisp and blue and white, hung out to dry in the morning sun. But Hammett’s characters don’t have time to look at such loveliness. They are, after all, in pursuit of a much more elusive beauty - “the stuff dreams are made of” as Bogart said in the film (but Hammett did not in the book): the black-enamelled, solid gold, jewel-encrusted falcon that will consume all their ambition and energy and ultimately escape them all. Hammett grants his characters a very occasional diversion. Joel Cairo attends a show. They are currently showing Moliere’s Misanthrope; A Christmas Carol is announced for the holidays. It is hard to imagine Joel Cairo attending either one. He wouldn’t have had far to walk from his Hotel Belvedere. In its true incarnation as the Bellevue it was just one block down at Geary and Taylor. These days it has been reborn as the Monaco, a chic boutique “fantasy” hotel where upturned Vuitton trunks serve as the front desk and hot air balloons on the trompe l’oeil ceilings race through fluffy clouds. There is an occasional mention of San Francisco’s night fog, “thin, clammy and penetrant,” but most of the time, the Falcon’s characters move through a world of interiors: Sam’s office, his apartment, Brigid’s apartment and various hotel suites. Dashiell Hammett worked for a while as a detective in San Francisco He moved around a lot but lived for a while at 891 Post Street and that is where he put Sam Spade’s apartment. When I ask a restaurant waiter if it’s a safe area to visit at night, he shrugs and says, ”It’s a bit of a gay ghetto after dark…..”
Hammett gave Spade an office in a splendid 1926 building at 111 Sutter Street. The marble hall and walls and the beamed, painted ceiling look more like the entrance to a Medici palace. The doorman, the maintenance man, anybody who happens to be around the hallway knows that this is where “Sam Spade had his office - on the fifth floor.”
In another of Hammett’s curt stage directions, he has Spade say: “Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street.”And there, the detective asks the waiter to hurry his order of “chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes.” In 1997, John’s Grill was declared a National Literary Landmark. For an expensive $26 dollars, a visitor can still order those chops. If they do, they should try to eat them in the upstairs dining room where Hammett books and a replica Maltese Falcon are kept in a glass case in the entrance. But there is something missing. Sam Spade might recognize the look of the place but probably not the smell. There is no smoke. And the smokers who lurk outside his office building back up on Sutter, puffing furtively during a short American lunch break are a reminder that Sam and his mink-draped ladies have been left behind in another century.
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Cannery Row, in Monterey, California lies between Castroville and Carmel.Castroville, the “artichoke capital of the world” once crowned a young Marilyn Monroe “the first California Artichoke Queen,” in 1947. Carmel once had Clint Eastwood as mayor. Back in the 1930s, where John Steinbeck set his novel of the same name, Cannery Row once had sardines - millions and millions of them swirling around just offshore waiting for the Chinese and the Sicilian and the Portuguese immigrants to fish them out of the Pacific. Eventually they would fish them out of existence and the “stink and the grating noise” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row would disappear. But before then, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner had a tale to tell.
“To open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves,” says John Steinbeck in the opening chapter of. He is telling the reader how he plans to set down his story of life on Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, the row of sardine canneries and fisheries that would eventually name itself after his book. He is comparing this subtle capture of a story with the capture of certain delicate ocean flatworms that will break if touched and must be allowed to “ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife.”
Subtlety and delicacy are not the first words that come to mind on today’s Cannery Row. But woven in among the shopping malls, the amusement arcades and the seafood restaurants are a handful of wooden buildings that contain the dramatic history of the short life and death of an industry. Better still they contain the story of the life and work of one man. “Doc,” the collector of all the lovely animals of the sea in his little wooden laboratory overlooking the Pacific. “For Ed Ricketts who knows why or should” says the enigmatic dedication at the front of this book. Ed Ricketts was Steinbeck’s friend and mentor and Ed Ricketts was “Doc.” “Half-Christ and half-goat” was how Steinbeck described the man who would write"Between Pacific Tides" and introduce to marine biology the, then revolutionary, concept of ecology -that you can’t understand an organism unless you understand where it lives and who lives with it. Ricketts’ Doc, is working quietly away at this major task in the background of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. In the foreground of this story is a compassionate loner “a fountain of philosophy and science and art,” who loved good beer and Bach, and “true things.” And who by being faithful to those “true things” automatically made the people around him each aspire to be a better person." Among the people around Doc in Cannery Row were the prostitutes in the two bordellos, the group of drifting young men who settled in the Palace Flophouse and Lee Chong the owner of the Chinese grocer’s across the street. Of the two bordellos, the Bear Flag Restaurant (in reality the Lone Star Café) was replaced by a concrete warehouse in 1942. But La Ida’s is still standing. This was where Eddie,one of the boys at the Flophouse, would drain the remaining drinks to take back to the others. There are no more trips upstairs but the café is still in business, run these days by Kalisa, an exuberant Latvian. The ceiling is still papered with the same Chinese newspapers that grew yellow from the smoke of Steinbeck and Rickett’s cigarettes.The fictional Lee Chong’s grocery was based on Wing Chong’s Market next to La Ida’s. Whether his store had the same extraordinary stock of the fictional “miracle of supply” in the novel, where “he never had a sale, never reduced a price and never remaindered,” we cannot know. Recently the owner of what is now a gift store opened up access to the old 1930’s ice box where Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck would have bought their beer.Running through these interweaving tales of all the teaming life along the Monterey shore, is the ongoing story of a surprise party to be held for Doc. The drifting boys at the Palace Flophouse are somewhat in awe of him and conceive confused and often boozy plans to “do something nice for Doc.” His old home and laboratory where the resulting disastrous party is held was later burned down by fire but rebuilt and purchased by the City of Monterey. The Palace Flophouse is long gone. A new life has come to Cannery Row. There is excellent jazz at Sly McFlys where the locals go. And those same locals dance the two step up at the Blue Fin café and stop for cigars at the Cool Cat cigar shop. Neighbour Clint Eastwood filmed the bar scenes in “Play Misty for Me” at the bar of The Sardine Factory Restaurant. The task that Doc performed with such dedication goes on now opposite La Ida’s old whorehouse at the magnificent Monterey Aquarium. But to go where Doc’s spirit still lingers, read Steinbeck’s loving and magical description of the Great Tide Pool at the opening of chapter six - I guarantee that after a few lines, the page will seem to undulate and shimmer like the mysterious underwater world it is describing. Then turn your back on the shopping malls and souvenir shops and walk through Steinbeck Plaza down to McAbee Beach and Ed Rickett’s beloved ocean beyond.
“To open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves,” says John Steinbeck in the opening chapter of. He is telling the reader how he plans to set down his story of life on Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, the row of sardine canneries and fisheries that would eventually name itself after his book. He is comparing this subtle capture of a story with the capture of certain delicate ocean flatworms that will break if touched and must be allowed to “ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife.”
Subtlety and delicacy are not the first words that come to mind on today’s Cannery Row. But woven in among the shopping malls, the amusement arcades and the seafood restaurants are a handful of wooden buildings that contain the dramatic history of the short life and death of an industry. Better still they contain the story of the life and work of one man. “Doc,” the collector of all the lovely animals of the sea in his little wooden laboratory overlooking the Pacific. “For Ed Ricketts who knows why or should” says the enigmatic dedication at the front of this book. Ed Ricketts was Steinbeck’s friend and mentor and Ed Ricketts was “Doc.” “Half-Christ and half-goat” was how Steinbeck described the man who would write"Between Pacific Tides" and introduce to marine biology the, then revolutionary, concept of ecology -that you can’t understand an organism unless you understand where it lives and who lives with it. Ricketts’ Doc, is working quietly away at this major task in the background of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. In the foreground of this story is a compassionate loner “a fountain of philosophy and science and art,” who loved good beer and Bach, and “true things.” And who by being faithful to those “true things” automatically made the people around him each aspire to be a better person." Among the people around Doc in Cannery Row were the prostitutes in the two bordellos, the group of drifting young men who settled in the Palace Flophouse and Lee Chong the owner of the Chinese grocer’s across the street. Of the two bordellos, the Bear Flag Restaurant (in reality the Lone Star Café) was replaced by a concrete warehouse in 1942. But La Ida’s is still standing. This was where Eddie,one of the boys at the Flophouse, would drain the remaining drinks to take back to the others. There are no more trips upstairs but the café is still in business, run these days by Kalisa, an exuberant Latvian. The ceiling is still papered with the same Chinese newspapers that grew yellow from the smoke of Steinbeck and Rickett’s cigarettes.The fictional Lee Chong’s grocery was based on Wing Chong’s Market next to La Ida’s. Whether his store had the same extraordinary stock of the fictional “miracle of supply” in the novel, where “he never had a sale, never reduced a price and never remaindered,” we cannot know. Recently the owner of what is now a gift store opened up access to the old 1930’s ice box where Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck would have bought their beer.Running through these interweaving tales of all the teaming life along the Monterey shore, is the ongoing story of a surprise party to be held for Doc. The drifting boys at the Palace Flophouse are somewhat in awe of him and conceive confused and often boozy plans to “do something nice for Doc.” His old home and laboratory where the resulting disastrous party is held was later burned down by fire but rebuilt and purchased by the City of Monterey. The Palace Flophouse is long gone. A new life has come to Cannery Row. There is excellent jazz at Sly McFlys where the locals go. And those same locals dance the two step up at the Blue Fin café and stop for cigars at the Cool Cat cigar shop. Neighbour Clint Eastwood filmed the bar scenes in “Play Misty for Me” at the bar of The Sardine Factory Restaurant. The task that Doc performed with such dedication goes on now opposite La Ida’s old whorehouse at the magnificent Monterey Aquarium. But to go where Doc’s spirit still lingers, read Steinbeck’s loving and magical description of the Great Tide Pool at the opening of chapter six - I guarantee that after a few lines, the page will seem to undulate and shimmer like the mysterious underwater world it is describing. Then turn your back on the shopping malls and souvenir shops and walk through Steinbeck Plaza down to McAbee Beach and Ed Rickett’s beloved ocean beyond.
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