Hemingway in Italy by Richard Owen

Author:Richard Owen [Owen, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4806661
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2017-01-21T21:00:00+00:00

11

Rapallo and Cortina

“After renouncing Italy and all its works I’ve gotten all nostalgique about it. I bet it’s swell now”

Hemingway to Ezra Pound, 17 March 1924

RAPALLO TODAY STILL conjures up a vision of seaside charm. It boasts a sixteenth-century sea fortress, the Castello sul Mare, built to defend the town against Turks and pirates when it was still part of the Republic of Genoa, and elegant villas set in the hillside above the promenade. Rapallo has inspired writers, thinkers and artists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound and Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, who lived there from 1910 onwards (and died in Rapallo in 1956), with the celebrated stage designer Gordon Craig in the villa next door from 1917 to 1928. After the war it was the scene of an international conference which drew up the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo, resolving frontier issues between Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.

Henry Villard, who had met Hemingway when they were both at the American Red Cross hospital in wartime Milan, later recalled having suggested Rapallo to him as a place to relax or convalesce. Its attractions, Villard said, included swimming off the rocks, an English-speaking contessa to dance with against “an unreal background of music, moonlight and roses”, and cherry brandy and crème de menthe after dinner “to complement the miniature port and starboard lights of the vessels manoeuvring offshore”.

Hemingway had made his first visit to Rapallo during the 1922 Genoa conference, with other reporters, to interview the Russian delegates who were staying there. But he also went there as a welcome break from covering the talks to meet Max Beerbohm, driving past hillsides of vines and olive groves together with two other journalists, Max Eastman, the left-wing (at the time) editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, and George Slocombe of the London Daily Herald.

Beerbohm had left the bustle of literary and political London for Liguria, preferring the peace and quiet of the orange and lemon trees in his garden and the Mediterranean views he could see from the cane chair on his terrace at the Villino Chiaro. He received few guests, but agreed to meet the Genoa journalists, offering them Marsala and discussing the need for creative artists to “revolt against the evils of commercial journalism”.

The following year Hemingway had an even more pressing reason to go to Rapallo: Ezra and Dorothy Pound had moved there after Hemingway had sung its praises to them. Ernest and Hadley – who was by now pregnant – stayed at the Hotel Splendide in February and March 1923. The Hemingways had got to know Ezra and Dorothy Pound well in Paris, and had enjoyed a brief holiday with them on Lake Garda.

Pound – who was 14 years older than Hemingway – had encouraged the younger man’s attempts to write fiction, while Hemingway greatly admired the American poet’s work. He also tried to teach Pound how to box, but found – as he told Sherwood Anderson – that the poet “led with his chin” and had “the grace of a crayfish”.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.