Cultural Contacts
His next meeting with Hemingway after the latter's departure from Genoa in 1919 took place in Paris in 1922, where "Chink" was spending his vacation with his parents. Hemingway was living there with his wife Hadley and working as a freelance journalist. He invited Dorman-Smith to accompany them to Montreux. They spent their days fishing and climbing mountains and Hemingway alluded to this holiday in Green Hills of Africa. They decided to show Hadley around Milan and, en route, crossed the St Bernard Pass on foot - an adventure commemorated by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
They met up over Christmas 1922, again in Montreux, and spent the visit luging and ski-ing. In early 1923, Hemingway visited Dorman-Smith in Cologne on behalf of the Toronto Star newspaper. During the following summer, he visited them in Paris where Hemingway introduced him to the intelligentsia, including John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound. Hemingway's first book, In Our Time, was dedicated to Dorman-Smith and includes some anecdotes from "Chink's" memories of the Mons campaign.
In March 1924, he paid another visit to Paris and became godfather to Ernest Hemingway's eldest son John.
That summer, in company with Dos Passos, Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert McAlmon, they visited the San Fermin festival in Pamplona in July and participated in the bull-running,. This stay was probably one of the fountain springs for Hemingway's novel The Sun also Rises. Characteristics of Dorman-Smith can be seen in the minor character Wilson-Harris.
Proof of the high esteem in which Hemingway held Dorman-Smith is contained in his 1924 poem To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering. However, after their next meeting in April 1926, when Dorman-Smith was accompanying an army rugby team to Paris, they gradually drifted apart because of the stresses of Dorman-Smith's military career and the changes in Hemingway's lifestyle. They did not meet again till Dorman-Smith was touring the USA in April 1950. He is widely believed to be one of the models for Colonel Richard Cantwell, the hero of Hemingway’s novel Across the River and Into the Trees.
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