Dirty, White Candles: Ernest Hemingway's Encounter with the East

Foreign writers who have visited Istanbul, or Constantinople, have often described the city in erotic terms, a practice common in the poetry and prose of Turks as well. In fact, there is a Turkish expression, "Ankara is a wife, Istanbul a mistress." Works by writers like Herman Melville and Pierre Loti contain paeans to the city's seductive beauty, descriptions reminiscent of the veiled odalisques in orientalist paintings. When Melville stopped off in Constantinople on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his impressions of the city were remarkably un-Christian, as he noted in his journal, "The fog lifted from about the skirts of the city . . . It was a coy disclosure, a kind of coquetting, leaving room for the imagination & heightening the scene. Constantinople, like her Sultanas, was thus veiled in her 'ashmack'" (Parker 306).

A few decades later, in the fall of 1922, when Ernest Hemingway visited the city on assignment from the Toronto Star to cover the end of the Greco-Turkish War and its aftermath, his first impressions differed decidedly from those earlier, romantic notions of the East. He noted in his dispatch of October 18, 1922:

From all I had ever seen in the movies Stamboul ought to have been white and glistening and sinister. Instead the houses look like Heath Robinson drawings dry as tinder, the color of old weatherbeaten fence rails, and filled with the little windows. Scattered through the town rise minarets. They look like dirty, white candles sticking up for no apparent reason.

(Dateline 290)

The reporter's refrain throughout the article is of the dirtiness of the city, almost as if he were viewing purity that has somehow been defiled beyond redemption. In the next paragraph, he refers again to "dirty white minarets" and goes on to say, "Everything white in Constantinople is dirty white. When you see the color a white shirt gets in twelve hours you appreciate the color a white minaret gets in four hundred years" (Dateline 291). In later paragraphs he describes the people he encounters: "Anglo-Levantine gentlemen in slightly soiled collars, badly soiled white trousers"; the money given to a Turkish gendarme, "a dirty, crumpled note"; and the business quarter, "one narrow, dirty, steep, cobbled, tramcar-filled street" (Dateline 291-92). He also continues to relate landmarks and structures in Constantinople to the US Midwest—interesting, since he was writing for a Canadian newspaper.

Of course Hemingway visited Constantinople under very different circumstances from those of most of the other writers who remembered the city in their fictional work or memoirs. By the time Hemingway set off for Constantinople, he had already served as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I and been wounded, after which he and Hadley lived in Paris, where he reported for The Toronto Star and began visiting Gertrude Stein's famous salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus. It was there that Stein told him, "If you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things . . . you will only see words" (Lynn 197). Yet Hemingway continued to earn his living as a journalist for some time longer, and in the fall of 1922, he found himself in the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, which was occupied by forces of the Allied Powers who were attempting to uphold the articles of the Sevres Agreement. Their task was to maintain order in the face of advancing Turkish nationalist forces flush with a victory that culminated in the burning of Smyrna (whether caused by Greeks, Turks, or Armenians is still unclear) in the wake of the retreating Greek army. Now Constantinople was feeling the heat, and a massive exodus of Greek and Armenian citizens away from it into Thracian Greece had begun.

When Hemingway disembarked from the Orient Express in Constantinople, he entered a scene of confusion, fear, and uncertainty, and, having only partly recovered from his war wounds, he may have felt that he was revisiting the nightmare from which he had just escaped. He might well have also been caught up in the general feeling that the war between Greece and Turkey was...