The ground floor now hosts the Cervecería Tropicana, a rowdy watering hole that, on the evening I pop in, is far removed from the polite retreat of matadors that Hemingway eulogises. Quintana, an open critic of Franco, vanished in the Forties, and the hotel was turned into apartments. He was a friend of Hemingway, and the model for the novel's gruff hotelier, Montoya. The property, in the south-east corner of the Plaza del Castillo, was run by Juanito Quintana. The bolthole where the group stays in The Sun Also Rises was the Hotel Quintana – or the Hotel Montoya, as it is named in the book. There are less subtle alterations to Hemingway's Pamplona blueprint. This is the corpulent Fifties Hemingway (though a photo behind shows the svelte lothario of the Twenties), full of face – and the scowl upon it conveys what would surely have been his opinion on Spain's break-up with tobacco. And Hemingway is here, too, swarthy statue standing by the bar in a side room that, until Spain enforced a ban on 1 January, was the smoking area. It is a weekday morning, and, as I sip a café con leche (€1.90), I am surrounded by elderly matriarchs, huddled in pairs at rounded tables. "We had coffee at the Iruña," Barnes continues, "sitting in the comfortable wicker chairs, looking out from the cool of the arcade at the big square." Café Iruña does not seem to have changed in 86 years – a gilded ghost of the 19th century, vast polished mirrors affixed to its walls, Arabesque pillars rising to ornate ceiling, black-and-white tiled floor scuffed by decades of chair-legs scraping backwards. This brings me, instantly, to a landmark. "The flags hung on their staffs, and it was good to get out of the sun and under the shade of the arcade that runs around the square." And, though the day is merely warm, I do the same, diving into the semi-dark and tracing the edge of the plaza below the low overhang that still flanks it on four sides. "The square was hot," says Jake Barnes of his first impressions. But I am hopeful that it still exists, the Pamplona of 1925 – café chatter and friendly spirit – that dances in The Sun Also Rises.Īs soon as I enter the square, I feel that I have tripped into a chapter of the book. And, so, when I arrive in the city on a spring evening, yet another tourist attracted by his prose, I am aware of the folly of chasing something that Hemingway had deemed spoiled. While it would be a leap to say his last dalliance with Pamplona was a factor in his suicide, there is no doubt that it left Hemingway troubled. four decades ago." Two years later, on 2 July 1961 – 50 years ago today – he walked on to the porch of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and put a shotgun in his mouth. There were not twenty tourists when I first went there. It is all there, as it always was, except forty thousand tourists have been added. I've written Pamplona once, and for keeps. Writing in The Dangerous Summer, published posthumously in 1985, he mused: "Pamplona was rough, as always, overcrowded. The spry Spain of the Twenties had been replaced by a state stifled by the fascist fist of General Franco for two decades, a country in which Hemingway's books were banned.Īnd San Fermí* had swelled hugely – so much so that Hemingway feared he had created a monster. Increasingly frail of body, mind and mood, he found a city he did not know. The author's final visit to Pamplona was not a happy one. And for the cold voice of the narrator Jake Barnes, you should hear Hemingway himself.īut if 1925 was the beginning of something beautiful, 1959 was the end of the affair. For her ex-lover Robert Cohn, you can picture Harold Loeb, Hemingway's former boxing partner. For the fictional Lady Brett Ashley, whose bed-hopping rips the group apart, you should read Lady Duff Twysden, a British divorcee socialite. Its genius is built on fact, inspired by what happened to Hemingway's own friends in the July heat. A portrait of a group of Bohemians caught in the frenzy of the festival, it fizzes with the abandon of the Roaring Twenties. The Sun Also Rises was his first novel (published in 1926), and his finest.
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