Driving through Hemingway's Basque Country

We drive across the Pyranees through the Basque Country, from Biarritz, on the French side, to Pamplona, on the Spanish side, passing through scattered villages of ancient farmhouses made of stone that look like they were carved out of the mountains themselves. Low clouds hang in the mountains and their air smells moist and rich. Hawks soar overhead. Clouds of white sheep and goats float across lush hillsides. This may be the most beautiful corner of western Europe I've ever seen.

This is the landscape and the culture Hemingway loved, and the place his character Jake Barnes escaped from the world in The Sun Also Rises. Ignoring the highway signs, it's easy to believe these clusters of 20, 30, 50 houses on the Spanish side look pretty much as they did in Hemingway's day, and as they did 100 years before he arrived.

These old stone churches and castles and whitewashed houses with their red shutters and terra cotta roofs seem to have resisted the rush of time. That's the power of old Europe: the sense of history abiding with the present, neither trapped in the past, exactly, nor destroying it either. The buildings are made from the earth, and their inhabitants' lives are tied to the earth.

I wonder if Hemingway was searching for authenticity in his world wandering. Was he looking for something real he couldn't find in the Midwest suburbs he left behind? Was that his fascination with war, with hunting, with bullfighting: the poetry of life and death played out? Is that what lies behind his unique sense of place? He always seemed to seek out places filled with simple people living authentitc lives.

Did he, ironically, end up living an inauthentic life by living on the backs of the locals he met in France, Spain, Italy, Cuba, Key West, Idaho? Was he left enjoying their lifestyle without ever being one of them, always a lost generation? Jake Barnes could swig wine from a leather bag on the back of a truck, but he could never be Basque.