Ernest Hemingway in Cuba - close to the bar, and the bull.
“Ah, una Garibaldi,” said the waiter at the Auberge de Venise in Montparnasse, and pottered off to fill my order for a pre-lunch tipple.
I’d never heard that name for the mixture of red Cinzano vermouth and fresh orange juice, ideally from blood oranges, but of course it made sense, its colour recalling the shirts worn by the revolutionary leader who brought about a united Italy.
In the nineteen-twenties, this little Italian restaurant had been the Dingo Bar, preferred hang-out of Ernest Hemingway, and the site of his first meeting with Scott Fitzgerald. (“Dingo” derives from dingue = crazy or silly.) Of the original decor, only the wooden bar survives, but the proprietors wring the last drop from its history, evoking Hemingway on the menu, in displays around the walls, and even on a plaque on the bar at floor level - implying that he spent some time in a recumbent position?
The Auberge de Venise: the famous bar is on the right.
It's possible he did, of course: his taste for the hard stuff later became famous. “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares,” he wrote. “If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.” Arriving in Paris in 1921, however, he encountered a culture in which heavy drinking, at least as Americans practiced it, was almost unknown.
The French had never heard of cocktails. Bars served wine and distilled spirits, particularly rum and cognac, and infusions made from alcohol and herbs. Inherited from concoctions developed by medieval monks, aperitifs or digestifs were supposed to encourage appetite and aid digestion. Accordingly, any visitor ordering a Martini would get a bitter-sweet plant-flavoured liqueur, either rosso or bianco, while, if he mis-pronounced “beer”, he could wind up with Byrrh, made from red wine flavoured with Cinchona bark, coffee beans and the rind of the bitter orange.
Cafés soon got the message, however, and opened establishments called “bars Americaines”, to signify that they served cocktails. African Americans were fitted with tight, short “bum-freezer” jackets, supplied with silver shakers, muddlers and strainers, and set to studying The Savoy Cocktail Book.
Jimmy Charters, British and a former boxer, presided over the Dingo, and became something of a celebrity. His autobiography This Must Be the Place is among the least affected and most informative books about Paris’s literary boheme. Hemingway even provided a foreword, asserting that he rated Charters’ wisdom over that dispensed by “certain hostesses” – a dig at Gertrude Stein.
It didn’t take long for the cocktail fad to spread. “Our epoch is the cocktail epoch,” announced Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, a leading celebrity portraitist. “Cocktails! They are of all colours. They contain something of everything… The modern society woman is a cocktail. She is a bright mixture. Society itself is a bright mixture. You can blend people of all tastes and classes.”
Hemingway seems, initially at least, to have put up a pretty poor show among the accomplished boozers of Montparnasse. He probably never drank anything as mild as a Garibaldi, but nor can I see him sipping a Savoy favourite, the Angel’s Kiss (Crème de Cacao, Prunelle Brandy, Crème de Violette and sweet cream) nor even film-maker Luis Buñuel’s favourite, a variation on the Negroni which he christened the Bunueloni: 1.5 measures of gin, a measure of Carpano Antica Formula vermouth and a measure of Cinzano Rosso sweet vermouth. (While researching Buñuel’s biography, I used to meet with his son Juan-Luis at another Montparnasse cafe, the Select, the barman of which, he explained, was, according to his father, the most expert at mixing these.)
The Hemingway Bar at the Ritz - but where’s Hemingway?
Later in his life, Hemingway’s name became associated with the Montgomery Martini. He is supposed to have developed this legendarily potent mixture of gin and vermouth in the proportions of fifteen to one : allegedly the ratio of his own troops to those of the enemy which Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery preferred to face in battle. These are still served in the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Hotel, where a gold bust of Ernie and decorations evocative of Montparnasse and les années folles obscure the fact that Hemingway could never have drunk them there, since, as the former Ladies Bar, it didn’t become a shrine to his memory until long after his death.
Most of the time, Hemingway, as one cynic wrote - employing an apt metaphor of the corrida- , “worked very close to the bull.” Very occasionally, however, one gets a glimpse of a simple man behind the macho façade. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson during his first winter in Paris, he wrote “And we sit outside the Dome café, warmed up against one of those charcoal brazziers and its so damned cold outside and the brazzier makes it so warm and we drink rum punch, hot, and the rhum enters into us like the Holy Spirit.” Amen to that.