Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin

a gun barrel. When, an hour later, our tank does arrive, it’s smaller than I expected - the sort of tank you might use to do the shopping.
    An anxious bespectacled face peers apologetically from one of the forward hatches. This is Patrick, the French owner of the tank, an M8 Greyhound with a stubby 37 mm cannon, made by Ford in 1944. After introductions all round, I climb aboard, inserting myself like a shell into a mortar barrel at the hatch next to Patrick. Choosing our moment, we make a slow but spectacular pull-out into the traffic.
    Unlike 1944, our progress is almost completely ignored. Though tourists wave and point, the first French people to acknowledge a tank in their traffic are two gendarmes who bring us to an undignified halt half-way up the Avenue Hoche and demand to see our papers.
    The good news is that the papers are in order. The bad news is that the tank won’t start again. Patrick and his assistant tinker around for a while before diagnosing a failure in the fuel supply. It might take an hour or two to get it fixed, so they suggest we try and kick start it. Just how easily the filming process can turn human beings into automatons is that we all without question agree to Patrick’s suggestion that we push the tank.
    In 1944 he would doubtless have had thousands of willing volunteers, but today there’s half a dozen of us and we manage to shift it only as far as an old lady crossing the road, who shrieks at us in a most un-liberated way.
    Patrick notices a tow-truck about to hitch itself to a trailer full of builder’s rubble. He races through the traffic and manages to persuade the driver to hook up to the tank instead. He agrees with remarkably good grace and after a moment the M8’s engine is conjured into life with a puff of smoke and a flash from the rear exhaust.
    The liberation of Paris is never quite the same after this, but trundling across the cobbles towards the Arc de Triomphe, encased in inch-thick steel, is not a bad way to remember the place.
    All that’s missing are the martinis.
    As we prepare to leave Paris I have the same feelings I always have when I leave Paris. I have been happy here and I’m full of admiration for this well-run city and the way it respects and displays its heritage of antiquity, elegance and culture. But Paris is impossible to thank. It will not soften and allow itself to be hugged around the shoulder as you say goodbye. Unlike Venice, or Chicago, or even New York, it has no sentimental side. It outlasts and outshines everyone, and Hemingway recognised this too.
    ‘Paris’, he wrote in a piece for
Esquire
magazine in early 1934, ‘was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man’s education … But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now.’
    By that time there was another place Hemingway had fallen in love with. It was, along with Italy and France, the third, and most important of that triumvirate of European countries in which he felt truly happy. Gertrude Stein had pointed him in its direction and he had already used it as a setting for the novel that had made him famous. It was Spain and the Spanish way of life that were to remain the greatest influence on him from now on.

SPAIN

In December 1921 the Leopoldina , en route from New York to Le Havre, put in at Vigo in the province of Galicia on the north-west coast of Spain
.

‘You ought to see the Spanish coast,’ Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson. ‘Big brown mountains looking like tired dinosaurs.’

And in a letter to his childhood friend Bill Smith, he compared Galicia with north Michigan. ‘We’re going back there. Trout streams in the mts. Tuna in the bay. Green water to swim in and sandy beaches … Cognac is 4 pesetas a litre.’

Though he was only there four hours, he came up with an article on tuna fishing for the Toronto Star Weekly . In it, apart from an uncanny foretaste of a later book, is the essence of all that