In the footsteps of Hemingway

‘They were living at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea.’ So begins Hemingway’s posthumously published transgender-themed novel The Garden of Eden. He began writing it in 1946 and kept at it intermittently through his long mental and physical decline. Yet it’s a marvellous novel, in parts as vivid as Hemingway’s miraculous early stuff, which, once read, susceptible people confuse with their own lived experience.

In 1927 Hemingway and his second wife Pauline came to Grau-du-Roi on the Camargue coast for their honeymoon and the first three chapters of the novel are clearly based on that visit. As one of the susceptibles, I was very interested to see the canal, the lighthouse, the jetty, the beach and the hotel, and to experience the light and the wind, and to compare them with the indelible images and feelings planted in my head by a barmy old drunk clinging to the wreckage of his once great artistry.

He and Pauline stayed at the Hotel Bellevue d’Angleterre, an imposing old building on the canal at the heart of the fishing port. But two stars and some angry reviews put us off there and instead we chose the Hotel Café Miramar, a modern family hotel and restaurant further down the beach. We had a second-floor room with a sun trap balcony and wide sea-view. From here it was a short walk back along the water’s edge to the working port where the novel opens and we are introduced to the two young lovers, who are at it like a honeymoon couple in The Benny Hill Show.

‘It was late in the spring,’ intones the exhausted narrator, ‘and the mackerel were running and fishing people of the port were very busy.’