The indomitable Hemingway who drank the winds for wild Spain

Gertrude Stein, writer, protector of Picasso and godfather of the Lost Generation, advised the young and unyielding Ernest Hemingway (Oak Park, 1899 – Idaho, 1961) visiting Spain after the First World War. The then journalist and future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature visited Algeciras in 1919 arrived in Vigo in 1921, as a passenger on the ocean liner Leopoldina from New York. In the spring of 1923, he ended up in Madrid and Pamplona and was enchanted by the “real” country and its people. A country “wild, with bulls and drink” which, according to Stein, was not “crushed” and where people lived “with a spontaneity that does not exist in the rest of Europe”.

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful love story that is reflected in the story of Hemingway, a lover of drinks, the Prado Museum and a bullfight, respectively, which still attracts many tourists eager for traces of the writer. in Spain. Especially his time in Pamplona and Sanfermine, festivities that he universalized. It is now one hundred years since the arrival in Madrid by train of an American writer and journalist who would visit our country at least twenty times and who was considered almost a Spaniard. “I wasn’t born in Spain, but that’s not my fault,” said the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1954.

In the coming months, his presence will be evoked in the places that inspired some of his works and his work as a war reporter in various events. In Madrid, from June to November, the Soy de la Cuesta association will develop initiatives such as a gastronomic route through the places he often visited, such as the Chicote cocktail bar, the German brewery or the Aguilar guesthouse, now a hostel, Hemingway’s first accommodation in Madrid where he was inspired to write his story The capital of the world. Admirers still flock to this establishment, at number 32 Carrera de San Jerónimo, looking for room number seven, which Hemingway occupied in his first months in Madrid. Like those looking for number 201 of La Perla Hotel in Pamplona.

Sympathy

A great connoisseur of Hemingway’s adventures in Madrid is Ramón Buckley, son of Henry Buckley, a correspondent Daily Telegraph in Spain during the Civil War. Educated in Great Britain, Ramón Buckley fulfilled Hemingway’s wish and stayed in Spain. Here he developed his entire career as a teacher of Spanish and North American literature. “Hemingway fell in love with Spain without medicine. This infatuation would make him return on numerous occasions. But he became enraged when they said he had come to get the bulls. “His real Spanish love, apart from drinks, was the Prado museum,” says Buckley.