Following Hemingway round Madrid
I have been following old Ernest Hemingway around on my travels, he just keeps cropping up. In Milan, Lake Maggiore, Paris and now in Madrid. Well Madrid was more deliberate. I did have a Hemingway plan for Madrid.
Hemingway would have walked up these stairs to the Hostal Aguilar ( there is a lift too)
I deliberately stayed the night in a Hemingway hotel. The Aguilar in Calle de Jeronimo. It is typical of many hotels In France and Spain a pension occupying one floor of a larger building, not purpose built but the rooms have clearly been recently modernised. It is very comfortable , quiet and within easy walking distance of the Puerto del Sol, the Prado and the following selection of Hemingway bars in the Gran Via and around the Puerto del Sol . The Aguilar is mentioned several times in Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway. Apparently Hemingway stayed there on his visits in the 1920s, particularly attracted by its popularity with visiting bull fighters.
In the 1920s Madrid’s bullring was at Fuente del berro , to the west side of the Parque del Retiro but not that far away by tram or on foot. The current bullring at Las Ventas opened in 1934, (so would be postwar Hemingway). It is likely that he first stayed at the Aguilar in 1923, in his biography Carlos Baker mentions him staying at a bullfighter’s pension in Calle San Jeronimo , before he moved on to Seville and Ronda. And discovering the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona. In June 1924, he was apparently back in Pamplona with a visit to the Calle San Jeronimo and in June 1925 by now obsessed with bull fighting left Paris for his third visit to the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona. After watching the bullfights , Hemingway and his wife Hadley travelled to Madrid in a third class carriage arriving at the Estación del Norte.
The Hostal Aguilar on the second floor in Calle San Jeronimo
“ They took rooms at the old stand in the Calle San Jeronimo. The Pension Aguilar offered bed and board for ten pesetas a day, and their funds were anyway too slender to allow for more fashionable quarters. “ ( Baker pg. 151)
While in Madrid , they alternated between visiting the Prado( which was a handy ten minutes’ walk from the hotel) and the bull ring which was a tram ride away. Apparently He was not a greater reader , but he did get inspiration from the visual arts and apparently became quite taken with the paintings of Goya, which stimulated him to write. It seems that it was in the hotel that Hemingway began working on his draft of “The Sun Also Rises”. In 1926, they returned to the Aguilar again, this time in May. The weather was unseasonably cold and the bullfighting was cancelled because of snow, so Hemingway got down to writing some short stories instead. ( Baker pg.169). One of these originally entitled “The Matadors", later became “The Killers”- a gangland story set in Chicago. They then returned to the Aguilar the following year, . Since Hemingway like to write from experience, it is likely that Aguilar is the basis for the Hotel Montana in “The Sun Also Rises”.
“The Norte station in Madrid is the end of the line. All trains finish there. They don’t go on anywhere. Outside were cabs and taxis and a line of hotel runners. It was like a country town. I took a taxi and we climbed up through the gardens, by the empty palace and the unfinished church on the edge of the cliff, and on up until we were in the high, hot, modern town. The taxi coasted down a smooth street to the Puerta del Sol, and then through the traffic and out into the Carrera San Jeronimo. All the shops had their awnings down against the heat. The windows on the sunny side of the street were shuttered. The taxi stopped at the kerb. I saw the sign HOTEL MONTANA on the second floor. The taxi- driver carried the bags in and left them by the elevator. I could not make the elevator work, so I walked up. On the second floor up was a cut brass sign: HOTEL MONTANA”
The Museo Chicote on Gran Via,. Madrid
The Aguilar had another advantage for Hemingway , apart from its easy access to the bullfights , it was a short stroll from the Prado. He seems to have become particularly passionate about the Prado, writing after several visits to the city in his 1932 book about bullfighting “Death in the Afternoon “, he says of Madrid:
“if it had nothing else than the Prado , it would be worth spending a month in every spring , if you have the money to spare a month in any European capital”
Of the Prado itself he says;
“The Prado is altogether characteristic of Madrid. From the outside, it look as unpicturesque as an American High School building. The pictures are so simply arranged , so easy to see , so well lighted and with no attempt , with one exception, the Velasquez of the small maids of honor to theatricalise”
The Prado Gallery -the outside of which Hemingway likened to an "unpicturesque American High school" - inside was another story
He seems to have been taken by Goya, references to whom crop up in many of his works
“Velasquez believed in painting, in costume, in dogs, in dwarfs and in painting again. Goya did not believe in costume, but he did believe in blacks and grays, in dust and light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around Madrid… “
Goya's "The Executions" from the Prado
Hemingway’s comments on the Prado seem reasonable enough, from the outside it is nothing special, but inside you could wander around for days. It is actually huge, too big to see everything at once. The pictures are better hung than the National Gallery or the Brera in Milan , and the whole place seems less claustrophobic than many galleries. Definitely worth a visit or several, maybe early in the morning before the crowds built up .
On the Gran Via is one of Hemingway’s favourite bars in Madrid, the Bar Chicote. Now the Museo Chicote which as been going since the 1930s. It crops up in two Hemingway Short Stories, “The Denunciation “ and “The Butterfly and the Tank” . Before looking at these, it is worth considering a bit of history of the bar.
The Museo Chicote
Bar Chicote is on the ground floor at Gran Vía 12, a residential and office building for the Real Estate Society of the City of Madrid, designed by the Madrid architect Eduardo Reynals Toledo who introduced modernism to the capital , it was one of the earliest parts of the Gran Via to be redeveloped in the late 1920s.
A native of Madrid , Pedro " Perico" Chicote Serrano, grew up fatherless in a family of humble origins, began working at the age of eight as a bar waiter in the Mostenses market ( a now demolished market near the Estación del Norte), which specialized in the distribution of fish from Galicia and Cantabria. In 1911, at the age of twelve, he joined Telégrafos, as a second-class delivery man. In 1915, he was hired as a bartender’s assistant at the Ritz Hotel , where he worked with the bartender Pedro Sarralta from whom he learned the trade. In the summers, when the Spanish Court, government and high society left the capital, he completed his apprenticeship in prestigious establishments in San Sebastián, Biarritz and San Juan de Luz. He then moved to the Savoy and ended up at the Pidoux bar on Gran Vía. In 1930 the magnificent spa "La Perla" in San Sebastian was refurbished and Chicote directed the service of the American bar. In 1931 he opened his own bar on the Gran Via. In 1934 during the Republic, Julián Besteiros a Spanish socialist deputy and Speaker of the Cortes offered him the possibility of managing the bar of the Congress of Deputies,
Perico Chicote, in addition to being a bartender, was an announcer for Unión Radio,. It began in April 1932 when, learning that Gonzalo Avello was making a program of cooking recipes, he proposed to, that one day a month he would broadcast a cocktail recipe, without saying its title, and the listener who got it right would be given the cocktail for himself and people he chose at he bar. "El coctel del día" became a daily broadcast at 2 p.m, on the air from May 1932 to July 1936. Chicote commented on the preparation of his cocktails and interviewed the customers who came to his establishment to try his innovations. Chicote also wrote on the subject of cocktails, publishing a number of recipes. In his book , " Cocktails "he describes the profession of barman , relations with clients, how the bar should bet set up , bar furnishings and equipment, This is followed by a comprehensive list of bottles required, from Allasch (a caraway liqueur from Leipzig) to Whisky, a discussion on wines and sherries , a selection on cocktail glasses, bar tools and impressions of a trip he made to the cocktail bars of New York . There then follows his alphabetical list of cocktail recipes from an Absinthe Cocktail onwards. . He followed up with a book about the " American Bar in Spain" Unfortunately they are both in Spanish. So unless you read that language, you are unlikely to get the full benefit,
Chicote's defined a good barman in an interview with the Spanish magazine 'Esfera' on June 3, 1930:
"The good bartender has to know not only the wines and liquors of the land, but also their mixtures and transformations; he must master several languages, he will be a good psychologist and he will have a very careful education. He will have an easy and pleasant conversation, he will have traveled a lot, he will know great capitals, hotels and casinos, he will be discreet and reserved..."
He began to accumulate a vast collection of bottles of alcohol, which were to form the basis of his future museum. Guests brought Chicote rare bottles from all over the world. In the end he accumulated 22,000 bottles.
Things then got difficult for Chicote with the Military rebellion and the start of the Civil War. Chicote was travelling abroad in London, when the Military rebellion took place. He returned to Spain, via Biarritz and appears to have remained in San Sebastian, which had fallen to the rebels .With Madrid under siege, the frontlines around the Casa del Campo and Parque Oeste, were only a few kilometres from the Bar Chicote, but it kept going.
Meanwhile Ernest Hemingway had returned to Madrid as a war correspondent. Hemingway left for Spain in February 1937 representing the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) , he also agreed to serve on the board of directors of a new film production company called Contemporary Historians. Their project was a film “The Spanish Earth” by the director Joris Ivens. In one of his early NANA dispatches, filed on 15 March, Hemingway bitterly noted that while journalists were being held up by the Franco-Spanish border , Italian troops were landing at Málaga and Cádiz”.. “The Spanish Earth” was completed in the early summer of 1937 and endorsed in the United States by Hemingway,. The film featuring narration written and spoken by Hemingway, has as its main theme the Spanish people and their connection to the earth which they live on which and their fight against foreign aggressors for their right to self-determination. Hemingway used his celebrity status to support the government of Spain and openly called for an end to non-intervention . Returning to Madrid in autumn 1937, Hemingway lived at the Hotel Florida with the rest of the foreign press corps and also worked on writing a play, “The Fifth Column”. Hemingway’s Stay in Madrid also produced the two short stores. Hemingway left Madrid in 1939 and began to write “For whom the Bell Tolls”,
“The Denunciation” takes place wholly within the bar. Hemingway-s narrator describes it as “ the best bar in Spain, certainly , and I think one if the best bars in the world”. The drinks were of the highest quality,, reflecting Chicote’s passion for collecting the best spirits from around the world, although by the time of the story’s setting in 1938, supplies were running low. Probably because of the rebel siege and blockade , imported spirits were running low. .The narrator is walking home from the American Embassy with some meat and stops off at the Bar Chicote for something to drink. ( at the time the Embassy offices were on the Gran Via, with the Ambassador’s residence in Palacio del Montellano. The ambassador had withdrawn to St Jean de Luz in France. ) So stopping off at the Bar Chicote , the narrator drinks a Gin and Schweppes Indian Tonic in the company of a Greek Company Commander from the 15th ( International )Brigade, who has recently survived being buried alive by a bomb blast at the front. One of the waiters consults the narrator, since he has recognised one of the customers , as being a Luis Delgado, a Fascist. The narrator also recognises the man he has met him at a prewar Pigeon shoot in the resort town of San Sebastian., before the war, the bar was popular with Madrid's demi-monde and Delgado is foolishly returning to his old haunts. As the narrator puts it
“He was a fool to go to go to Chicote's. But that was exactly the sort of thing he would do in order to be able to boast about it when he returned to his own people”.
The telephone in Museo Chicote - was this the one the waiter used in " "The Denunciation" ?
The Seguridad ( the Republican Government SIM or Military Intelligence ) duly arrive to pick up Delgado. Later the narrator makes a point of telephoning the Seguridad and asking that he lets Delgado know that it was not one of the waiters, but the narrator who gave him up. As the narrator puts it ;
“ Luis Delgado was an old client art Chicote’s and I did not wish him to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters before he died”.
In “The Butterfly and the Tank”, the narrator is walking home to the Hotel Florida from the Censorship office along the Gran Via. It is raining and he decides to pop into Chicote’s for a quick drink.
The narrator was heading home to the Hotel Florida- now demolished and replaced by El Corte Ingles
By now it is the second winter of the war, there are shortages everywhere and the population is tired and irritated by the smallest issues. The Chicote is smoky and full of uniformed men and women. One of the few civilians in the bar, starts to spray the waiters with a Flit gun. ( A flit gun is a type of pneumatic spray gun typically used for spraying insecticides before aerosols were invented ) A group of uniformed men take issue with his and throw the civilian out of the bar. Looking worse for war., the civilian comes back into the bar and sprays everybody with the Flit Gun. A shot is fired and the civilian ends up dead on the floor. The police arrive and after letting the presumed perpetrators leave, they keep everybody in the bar for questioning. The narrator returns the next day and finds out that the shot civilian, was a war veteran who had been invalided out, he had bought the Flit gun for a wedding prank and ended up in Chicote because of the rain. Unfortunately he could not handle his drink and the soldiers could not take a joke, the bar manager suggests that the man had the gaiety of a butterfly, but that gaiety had come into conflict with the seriousness of war like a” Butterfly and a Tank.” In the end the manager suggests to the narrator that it would make aa good story of “misunderstood gaiety coming into contact with the deadly seriousness that is here always”.
Having spent the war in San Sebastian , Chicote returned to Madrid when the city fell to the Francoist rebels . Although he had remained safe, he seems to have been regarded with a certain suspicion by the Nationalist Military Intelligence , the SIM for his prewar associations with Republican and Socialist politicians and with Basque politician in San Sebastian. Whether those suspicions were founded or not, Chicote was photographed serving drinks to the rebel officers as they finally entered University City and Madrid.
Inside the Museo Chicote with some celebrity photos on the wall
After that Chicote seems to have established a modus vivendi with the Francoist regime. After the war, the Bar Chicote, now renamed the Museo Chicote and his wonderful collection of bottles continued to grow. In the post war eras it became the place to be seen in Madrid with as clientele of international celebrities which included Ava Gardner, Audery Hepburn , Cary Grant and Sofia Loren among others . Although Hemingway had vowed not to return to Spain, while Franco was in power, he came back in 1953, seemingly sacrificing his principles for a general desire to return to Spain and made an increasing number of visits throughout the 1950s, including of course his favourite Madrid bar. Despite Hemingway-s prominent support for the Republican cause, the Francoist authorities admitted him to the country. In 1953, the Francoist censors had allowed the Old Man and the Sea to be published in Spain, “For Whom the Bell Tolls “ remained banned until 1968. Chicote died in 1977, and his drinks museum was unfortunately sold off and has now disappeared. As might be expected the Bar Chicote is not exactly cheap, the cocktails range from about Euro 15 upwards, but it is exceedingly pleasant.
The Cervecería Alemana- another Hemingway haunt
Another Hemingway bar, not far from the Puerto del Sol and more linked to Hemingway’s later visits , is the Cervecería Alemana. The Alemana was opened on March 20th, 1904 by a group of German manufacturers at number 7 of Plaza de Santa Ana The bar was devoted to tasting beer, with a décor that has remained virtually unchanged up to date although without the Prussian fireplace and large Bavarian mirror that adorned the walls in the early years. It seems to have been another part of the 1950s celebrity circuit in Madrid. There are pictures on the walls of Hemmingway visiting during his 1950s trips, apparently he liked to take the odd beer in there. Off peak, it is relatively easy to get a table there and a reasonably priced beer and some tapas.
Inside the Cervecería Alemana
Another Hemingway haunt across Plaza from the Cervecería Alemana is the Villa Rosa a flamenco tablao . The entire ground floor exterior, is decorated with a series of tile panels, a ceramic work by the Sevillian Alfonso Romero Mesa, based on sketches by Juan Ruiz de Luna,3representing postcards of the main Spanish cities. The bar was founded in 1911 by three bullfighting assistants, the banderillero "Alvaradito" and the picadores Farfán and Céntimo, occupying the premises of an old chocolate mill. In 1918, Rafael Marcos Colombi turned it into a restaurant and a year later, Antonio Torres and Tomás Pajares, waiters at the neighbouring Viña P bar, transformed the place following the tastes of the time, in "Andalusian Arabic style. Its life as a tablao began in 1921, when Pajares took over the business and managed to hire the singer Antonio Chacón the doyen of flamenco in Madrid The tablao continued to be active for more than thirty years, until 1963, when it closed for a season. It reopened in 1964 until the 1970s. Closed again, in the 1980s it was set up as a nightclub, and subsequently reopened a flamenco tablao. It hosts an entertaining flamenco show, with a couple of glasses of sangria included in for around Euro 50,
La villa rosa- Flamenco tablao
La Venencia - for a spot of nicely chilled Manzanilla
Finally there is La Venencia , a sherry bar that time forgot. Apparently Hemingway used to pop in here too. Established in 1922, it just serves sherry to drink , with some tapas. It follows the rule, which apparently dates back to the civil war of no photography inside, which keeps the bar mercifully free of instagramming students, while the locals enjoy the many different types of sherry on offer. The chilled Manzanilla was exceptionally good and excellent value, I queried the bill because I thought it was too low, I can probably say that since the sherry and the lack of photography hopefully means it won’t be overrun by people taking selfies, Hemingway would have hated selfies anyway.!
Sources
" The Sun Also Rises", Ernest Hemingway
Perico Chicote's books ( in Spanish)
1927 El Bar Americano en Espana by Pedro Chicote
The Bars
La Venencia