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Hem was mad about bicycle racing. He used to get himself up in a striped jumper like a contestant on the Tour de France and ride around the exterior boulevards with his knees up to his ears and his chin between his handlebars. It seemed silly to me but in those days Hem submitted to a certain amount of kidding.
-John Dos Passos, who could not ride a bicycle
I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is good as it is both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads.
-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I imagine Hemingway in Paris emerging from his home on rue Férou. He is with Pauline now, newly married, a Catholic convert fascinated by this sport he cannot write. So far in Paris there have been a couple books, fame, a certain amount of money and prestige. But he is on the bike because he is unsure about the limits of his talent. He has been to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, watched the racers come down the pitch at a velocity that is both terrifying and thrilling. He wants the bike in his pantheon of masculine sports: boxing, big game hunting, bullfighting. All are so clearly male, so dangerous that the stories practically wrote themselves. But the bikes. The racers wear tight shirts with thick horizontal stripes and thin shorts that revealed the striations in their legs. And then there is something about the constriction of the genitals, the vibration of the seat over the wooden boards that makes him question. But, what the hell. Here he is, in France, a mere fifty meters from the Luxembourg Gardens, his expat haven, home to the Cézannes, where he learned his pared-down prose. His Paris is an agglomeration of symbols. The bike is just one more. He is going to try it on for a while, see if it holds the stuff of manly metaphor.
The most time I ever spent on a bike was as a Mormon missionary in the south of France. A bike was an added expense, so choosing one was an important part of a missionary's identity. We all wore the same uniform: rumpled, short-sleeved white shirt with a button-down...