By-Line Ernest Hemingway

Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

Ernest Hemingway

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476770062
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literarische Sammlungen

Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless collection shows Hemingway's work as a reporter, from correspondent for the Toronto Star to contributor to Esquire, Colliers, and Look. As fledgling reporter, war correspondent, and seasoned journalist, Hemingway provides access to a range of experiences, including vivid eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway offers a glimpse into the world behind the popular fiction of one of America's greatest writers.

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Reporting, 1920-1924

The Swiss Luge

The Toronto Star Weekly • MARCH 18, 1922

CHAMBY SUR MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND.—The luge is the Swiss flivver. It is also the Swiss canoe, the Swiss horse and buggy, the Swiss pram and the Swiss combination riding horse and taxi. Luge is pronounced looge, and is a short, stout sled of hickory built on the pattern of little girls’ sleds in Canada.

You realize the omnipotence of the luge when on a bright Sunday you see all of Switzerland, from old grandmothers to street children, coasting solemnly down the steep mountain roads, sitting on these little elevated pancakes with the same tense expression on all their faces. They steer with their feet stuck straight out in front and come down a twelve mile run at a speed of from twelve to thirty miles an hour.

Swiss railroads run special trains for lugeurs between Montreux, at the edge of Lake Geneva, and the top of Col du Son-loup, a mountain 4,000 feet above sea level. Twelve trains a day are packed on Sunday, with families and their sleds. They put up their lunch, buy an all-day ticket, good for any number of rides on the winding, climbing, Bernese Oberland railway, and then spend the day sliding gloriously down the long, icy mountain road.

Steering a luge takes about as long to learn as riding a bicycle. You get on the sled, lean far back and the luge commences to move down the icy road. If it starts to sheer off to the right you drop your left leg and if it goes too far to the left you let your right foot drag. Your feet are sticking straight out before you. That is all there is to steering, but there is a great deal more to keeping your nerve.

You go down a long, steep stretch of road flanked by a six hundred foot drop-off on the left and bordered by a line of trees on the right. The sled goes fast from the start and soon it is rushing faster than anything you have ever felt. You are sitting absolutely unsupported, only ten inches above the ice, and the road is feeding past you like a movie film. The sled you are sitting on is only just large enough to make a seat and is rushing at motor car speed towards a sharp curve. If you lean your body away from the curve and drop the right foot the luge will swing around the curve in a slither of ice and drop shooting down the next slope. If you upset on a turn you are hurled into a snow bank or go shooting down the road, lugeing along on various plane surfaces of your anatomy.

Additional hazards are provided for the lugeurs by hay sleds and wood sleds. These have long, curved-up runners, and are used to haul the hay down from the mountain meadows where it was cut and cured in the summer, or to bring down great loads of firewood and faggots cut in the forests. They are big, slow-moving sledges and are pulled by their drivers, who haul them by the long curved-up runners and pull themselves up in front of their loads to coast down the steepest slopes.

Because there are many lugeurs, the men with the hay and wood sleds get tired of pulling their loads to one side when they hear a lugeur come shooting down, shouting for the right of way. A lugeur at thirty miles an hour, with no brakes but his feet, has the option of hitting the sleds ahead of him or shooting off the road. It is considered a very bad omen to hit a wood sled.

There is a British colony at Bellaria, near Vevey, in the canton of Vaud, on Lake Geneva. The two apartment buildings they live in are at the foot of the mountains and the British are nearly all quite rapid lugeurs. They can leave Bellaria, where there will be no snow and a mild, springlike breeze, and in half an hour by the train be up in the mountain where there are fast, frozen roads and thirty inches of snow on the level. Yet the air is so dry and crisp and the sun shines so brightly that while the Bellarians are waiting for a train at Chamby, half way up the mountain to Sonloup, they have tea out of doors in the afternoon in perfect comfort clad in nothing heavier than sports clothes.

The road from Chamby to Montreux is very steep and fairly dangerous for lugeing. It is, however, one of the favorite runs of the Britons from Bellaria, who take it nightly on their way home to their comfortable apartment buildings just above the lake. This makes some very interesting pictures, as the road is only used by the most daring lugeurs.

One wonderful sight is to see the ex-military governor of Khartoum seated on a sled that looks about the size of a postage stamp, his feet stuck straight out at the sides, his hands in back of him, charging a smother of ice dust down the steep, high-walled road with his muffler straight out behind him in the wind and a cherubic smile on his face while all the street urchins of Montreux spread against the walls and cheer him wildly as he passes.

It is easy to understand how the British have such a great Empire after you have seen them luge.

Russian Girls at Genoa

The Toronto Daily Star • APRIL 24, 1922

GENOA, ITALY.—The great hall of the Palazzo San Giorgio, where the sessions of the Genoa conference are held, is about half the size of Massey Hall [Toronto] and is overlooked by a marble statue of Columbus sitting on a pale marble throne sunk deep into the wall.

Columbus, and the press gallery at the other end of the hall, look down on a rectangle of green-covered tables arranged in the familiar shape of tables at banquets, lodges, Y.M.C.A. dinners and college reunions. There is a white pad of paper at each table that, from the press gallery, looks like a tablecloth, and for two hours before the conference opened a woman in a salmon-covered hat arranged and re-arranged the ink-wells at the long rectangle of tables.

At the left of the statue of Columbus, a marble plaque twelve feet high is set into the wall bearing a quotation from Machiavelli’s history, telling of the founding of the Banco San Giorgio, site of the present palace, the oldest bank in the world. Machiavelli, in his day, wrote a book that could be used as a text-book by all conferences, and, from all results, is diligently studied.

To the left of the rather pompous marble Columbus is another plaque similar in size to the quotation from Machiavelli, on which is carved two letters from Columbus to the Queen of Spain and the Commune of Genoa. Both letters are highly optimistic in tone.

Delegates began to come into the hall in groups. They cannot find their place at the table, and stand talking. The rows of camp chairs that are to hold the invited guests begin to be filled with the top-hatted, white-mustached senators and women in Paris hats and wonderful, wealth-reeking fur coats. The fur coats are the most beautiful things in the hall.

There is an enormous chandelier, with globes as big as association [soccer] footballs, hanging above the tables. It is made up of a tangled mass of griffons and unidentified beasts and when it switches on everyone in the press gallery is temporarily blinded. All around the wall of the hall are the pale marble effigies of the fine, swash-buckling pirates and traders that made Genoa a power in the old days when all the cities of Italy were at one another’s throats.

The press gallery fills up and the British and American correspondents light cigarets and identify for one another the various bowing delegates as they enter the hall at the far end. The Poles and Serbs are the first in; then they come in crowds carrying their eight-quart silk hats. Marcel Cachin, editor of Humanité, circulation 250,000, and leader of the French communist party, comes in and sits behind me. He has a drooping face, frayed red mustache and his black tortoise shell spectacles are constantly on the point of sliding off the tip of his nose. He has a very rich wife and can afford to be a communist.

Next to him sits Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, who is doing a series of special articles for a New York paper and who looks like a big, jolly, middle-western college professor. He and Cachin converse with difficulty.

Movie men set up a camera under the nose of one of the niched-in Genoese heroes who look down at it with a frozen marble expression of disapproval. The Archbishop of Genoa in wine colored robes and a red skull cap stands talking with an old Italian general with a withered apple of a face and five wound stripes. The old general is General Gonzaga, commander of the cavalry corps; he looks a sunken faced, kind eyed Attila with his sweeps of mustaches.

The hall is as noisy as a tea party. Journalists have filled the gallery, there is only room for 200 and there are 750 applicants and many late comers sit on the floor.

When the hall is nearly full, the British delegation enters. They have come in motor cars through the troop-lined streets and enter with élan. They are the best dressed delegation. Sir Charles Blair Gordon, head of the Canadian delegation, is blonde, ruddy-faced and a little ill at ease. He is seated fourth from Lloyd George’s left at the long table.

Walter Rathenau, with the baldest bald head at the conference and a scientist’s face, comes in accompanied by Dr. Wirth, German chancellor, who looks like a tuba player in a German band. They are half way down one of the long tables. Rathenau is another wealthy socialist and considered the ablest man in Germany.

Prime Minister Facta of Italy takes the chair. So obscure has been his political career, until he came into light as a compromise premier when it looked as though Italy would be unable to form a cabinet, that biographies of him were issued to all the newspaper men by the Italian government.

Everyone is in the room but the Russians. The hall is crowded and sweltering and the four empty chairs of the Soviet delegation are the four emptiest looking chairs I have ever seen. Everyone is wondering whether they will not appear. Finally they come through the door and start making their way through the crowd. Lloyd George looks at them intently, fingering his glasses.

Litvinoff, with a big ham-like face, is in the lead. He is wearing the rectangular red insignia. After him comes Tchitcherin with his indeterminate face, his indefinite beard and his nervous hands. They blink at the light from the chandelier. Krassin is next. He has a mean face and a carefully tailored Van Dyke beard and looks like a prosperous dentist. Joffe is last. He has a long, narrow, spade beard, and wears gold rimmed glasses.

A mass of secretaries follow the Russian delegates, including two girls with fresh faces, hair bobbed in the fashion started by Irene Castle, and modish tailored suits. They are far and away the best looking girls in the conference hall.

The Russians are seated. Some one hisses for silence, and Signor Facta starts the dreary round of speeches that sends the conference under way.

Fishing the Rhone Canal

The Toronto Daily Star • JUNE 10, 1922

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND.—In the afternoon a breeze blows up the Rhone valley from Lake Geneva. Then you fish up-stream with the breeze at your back, the sun on the back of your neck, the tall white mountains on both sides of the green valley and the fly dropping very fine and far off on the surface and under the edge of the banks of the little stream, called the Rhone canal, that is barely a yard wide, and flows swift and still.

Once I caught a trout that way. He must have been surprised at the strange fly and he probably struck from bravado, but the hook set and he jumped into the air twice and zigged nobly back and forth toward every patch of weed at the current bottom until I slid him up the side of the bank.

He was such a fine trout that I had to keep unwrapping him to take a look and finally the day got so hot that I sat under a pine tree on the back of the stream and unwrapped the trout entirely and ate a paper-bag full of cherries I had and read the trout-dampened Daily Mail. It was a hot day, but I could look out across the green, slow valley past the line of trees that marked the course of the Rhone and watch a waterfall coming down the brown face of the mountain. The fall came out of a glacier that reached down toward a little town with four grey houses and three grey churches that was planted on the side of the mountain and looked solid, the waterfall, that is, until you saw it was moving. Then it looked cool and flickering, and I wondered who lived in the four houses and who went to the three churches with the sharp stone spires.

Now if you wait until the sun gets down behind the big shoulder of the Savoie Alps where France joins on to Switzerland, the wind changes in the Rhone valley and a cool breeze comes down from the mountains and blows down stream toward the Lake of Geneva. When this breeze comes and the sun is going down, great shadows come out from the mountains, the cows with their manypitched bells begin to be driven along the road, and you fish down the stream.

There are a few flies over the water and every little while some big trout rises and goes “plop” where a tree hangs over the water. You can hear the “plop” and look back of you up the stream and see the circles on the water where the fish jumped. Then is the time to rewrap the trout in Lord Northcliffe’s latest speech reported verbatim, the reported imminent demise of the coalition, the thrilling story of the joking earl and the serious widow, and, saving the [Horatio] Bottomley [fraud] case to read on the train going home, put the trout filled paper in your jacket pocket. There are great trout in the Canal du Rhone, and it is when the sun has dropped back of the mountains and you can fish down the stream with the evening breeze that they can be taken.

Fishing slowly down the edge of the stream, avoiding the willow trees near the water and the pines that run along the upper edge of what was once the old canal bank with your back cast, you drop the fly on to the water at every likely looking spot. If you are lucky, sooner or later there will be a swirl or a double swirl where the trout strikes and misses and strikes again, and then the old, deathless thrill of the plunge of the rod and the irregular plunging, circling, cutting up stream and shooting into the air fight the big trout puts up, no matter what country he may be in. It is a clear stream and there is no excuse for losing him when he is once hooked, so you tire him by working him against the current and then, when he shows a flash of white belly, slide him up against the bank and snake him up with a hand on the leader.

It is a good walk in to Aigle. There are horse chestnut trees along the road with their flowers that look like wax candles and the air is warm from the heat the earth absorbed from the sun. The road is white and dusty, and I thought of Napoleon’s grand army, marching along it through the white dust on the way to the St. Bernard pass and Italy. Napoleon’s batman may have gotten up at sun up before the camp and sneaked a trout or two out of the Rhone canal for the Little Corpora...