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Greetings from Amazon.co.uk Delivers Travel & Holiday
Editor, Tamsin Todd

What does it take to exhaust Michael Palin? Having only recently
finished his travel trilogy, "Full Circle", "Around the World in
80 Days", and "Pole to Pole", the ex-Python set off around the
globe once again--this time hot on the heels of Ernest Hemingway.
In the American writer, Palin found a man with a passion for travel
that matched his own. "He wasn't content to just be a tourist or a
passer-by. He tried to get to grips with the language, the people,
the food, the way of life", writes Palin. In an exclusive article
for Amazon.co.uk, Michael Palin confronts the macho myths that
surround Hemingway and describes a side of the man he never knew.

You can find "Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure" at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297825283/entertainments08

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Finding Hemingway
by Michael Palin

I first encountered Hemingway when I was studying at school as a
teenager. I read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "A Farewell to Arms",
and they struck me as being very modern. The other books I was
reading at the time were Victorian and Edwardian, with very elaborate
and flowery language. Hemingway was different. His writing had a great
sense of freshness. He wrote sparingly and I remember thinking this
was a very striking way of expressing himself. Those books were also
very different from the war stories I'd been brought up on, which were
escapist English stories in which war was a glorified game. Hemingway
wrote about the futility of war, the brutality of battle. Those were
strong ideas.

Many years later, I had the idea for my novel "Hemingway's Chair",
about a guy obsessed by Ernest Hemingway. To flesh out his obsession
I had to do an awful lot of reading and I began to find out more about
Hemingway. There was much more to him than I'd thought. Not all his
books were about war. There were short stories about life as a young
boy, being a teenager in the woods of Michigan, sexual experiences--
all sorts of things that weren't present in the other books I'd read.
I got a more rounded and intriguing view of Hemingway and that lead me
into doing the "Hemingway Adventure" series.

Hemingway was a great traveller. He was a very restless character,
and he always liked to be in a different country from the one he was
in at the time. He really liked to know about the places he was going
to. It was important for him to find "the true gem", as he called it.
He wasn't content to just be a tourist or a passer-by. He tried to get
to grips with the language, the people, the food, the way of life.
He absorbed places very thoroughly. I liked that attitude. I often
feel I'm racing past places without noticing them. But in "Hemingway
Adventure" I was able to stop and look at places in more detail. I
got to see what really goes on and that's the fascinating part of
travel.

In Havana, I went out to the little village where Hemingway lived.
It brought to life the way Hemingway preferred to live among ordinary
people, playing baseball with the local kids, not in south Kensington,
or even in the posh suburbs of Havana. Hemingway didn't like celebrity.
When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he donated it to a church
in southern Cuba. As a young man he went out to Montana and the west to
get away from metropolitan America and from the literary establishment
in New York. There he could clear his mind out and write and work and
hunt. He was always looking for places he could go to and be left to
his own devices. But by the 1940s he was suddenly much more famous. He
went to Sun Valley Lodge as a guest of Averell Harriman where he was
given a room and entertained. He didn't have to pay and in return he
did a few publicity photos. That seemed to me a real sell-out. Maybe
that was why he eventually went to Cuba for so long. He realised he
had fallen into the trap of becoming an advertising celebrity.

The Hemingway legend--his macho image--is enormous. But legends are
as much use as barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Hemingway was an
odd mixture. Everyone knows that Hemingway committed suicide, but
not that he suffered depression throughout his life. He called it
his "black dog". Even in Paris in the 1920s there were times when
he felt desperate. And while he could be very critical of people in
books like "A Moveable Feast", he was also very sensitive to
people's needs. At the very end of his life he wrote a beautiful
letter to a friend whose son had died, in which he talked about
the value of life. For me, that letter revealed another side of
his character.

More than anything he was committed to writing. He worked hard at
it, writing most days of his life. Even on days when he had two
bottles of wine for lunch, he would have spent the morning writing.
He left behind a great deal of advice about writing, which I found
useful. He battled to understand the process of writing--how to
write truly and honestly, how to avoid clichés, how to write
sparingly so that what wasn't said was as important as what was
said. When he had writers' block, when he couldn't write a piece
for Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, it must have been a great blow
to him, and that was probably why he took his life. He's known for
his bravado, but in the end he was a man who really worked at his
writing. It was the only thing that really had significance for him.
That's worth remembering.

******

Featured in this e-mail:

"Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure"
by Michael Palin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297825283/entertainments08

"Full Circle"
by Michael Palin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563551070/entertainments08

"Around the World in 80 Days"
by Michael Palin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563384956/entertainments08

"Pole to Pole"
by Michael Palin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563551062/entertainments08

"Hemingway's Chair"
by Michael Palin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0749319305/entertainments08

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"
by Ernest Hemingway
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099289822/entertainments08

"A Farewell to Arms"
by Ernest Hemingway
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099273977/entertainments08

"A Moveable Feast"
by Ernest Hemingway
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099909405/entertainments08

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