Austria enters the memoir through the Vorarlberg valley of Schruns, a seasonal home that joined family routine, mountain sport, and writing. From about Thanksgiving until nearly Easter, Ernest Hemingway, Hadley Richardson, and Bumby lived there in a welcoming hotel, spending little, climbing and skiing, and building a life that the narrator later remembers as happy and innocent. Schruns was not simply an escape from Paris: its terrain and daily rhythms helped shape both Hemingway’s work and the memoir’s account of a first, fragile period of happiness.

Arrival and the valley setting

The journey to Schruns crossed Switzerland and reached the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. From there the train passed through Liechtenstein to Bludenz, where a small branch line followed a pebbly trout river through farms and forest. Schruns, at the end of the route, was a sunny market town with sawmills, shops, inns, and the year-round Hotel Taube. The rail journey makes the valley feel both sheltered and connected: reaching it required a sequence of borders and trains, but the last leg carried the family directly into a settled rural landscape.

The Hotel Taube gave the family large rooms with big stoves and windows, generous beds, good blankets, and feather coverlets. Its dining room and wood-planked public bar were heated and friendly; the meals were simple and excellent. The pension for all three was about two dollars a day, and the Austrian schilling’s longer decline made their room and food progressively cheaper. The memoir distinguishes this economy from the desperate inflation and poverty Hemingway had seen in Germany: money mattered, but Schruns offered a comparatively stable refuge rather than a scene of crisis.

Family life and mountain routines

The family returned around Thanksgiving and stayed until close to Easter. Schruns did not reliably have enough snow to function as a high-altitude ski resort, except in winters with heavy snowfall, but that limitation did not make the season idle. Logging and cattle trails led up the mountain valleys; climbers attached seal skins beneath their skis for the ascent. At the Taube, a practice slope ran behind the hotel through orchards and fields. Across the valley, another slope lay behind Tchagguns, where an inn displayed a collection of chamois horns. From the village’s far edge, good skiing climbed toward the Silvretta Mountains.

The narrator describes climbing as a practice in controlled effort: the party set a pace below its capacity, carried heavy rucksacks, and learned that a steep ascent such as the climb to Madlener-Haus became easier with repetition. By the second climb it was less difficult; eventually the same route could be managed with twice the original load. The gradual mastery of the terrain contrasts with the effortless purchase of a ticket or excursion: the most rewarding skiing had to be earned through the winter’s work of climbing.

Domestic pleasures made the physical exertion sustainable. The family was often hungry, and meals became events: bread or toast, fruit preserves, eggs, ham, local beer and wine, and occasionally hare or venison. Red wine, though more expensive than white, could cost as little as twenty cents a liter at the best; some was packed in kegs to Madlener-Haus. Books supplied by Sylvia Beach and bowling in the hotel’s summer-garden alley filled other hours. A dog named Schnautz slept at the foot of the bed, joined ski trips, rode on the narrator’s back or shoulder on downhill runs, and accompanied Bumby and his nurse on walks beside a small sleigh.

Work and winter sport

Schruns was also a working place. In the winter of 1925–26, Hemingway undertook what he calls the most difficult rewriting job of his life: he transformed the first draft of The Sun Also Rises, written in a six-week sprint, into a novel. The account gives no comparable detail about the several stories he wrote there, but records that some turned out well. The contrast is telling: the valley’s quiet was not an absence of labor. The same winter that offered skiing, books, and family routine gave him the conditions for sustained revision.

The mountains demanded attention as well as strength. Hemingway recalls the varieties of snow formed by wind and the different dangers they presented on skis. In blizzards, even the country the party had entered before became unfamiliar; routes had to be chosen carefully, as if the terrain had never been seen. The winter’s culminating reward was a long glacier descent: after climbing with heavy packs, the skiers could run in a low stance down smooth, crisp powder. The speed was not an independent thrill but the result of accumulated effort, built through the climbs that made the descent possible.

A refuge that does not last

Hemingway remembers the Vorarlberg as a place of intense physical and domestic happiness. When he returned by train, Hadley and Bumby waited beside piled logs at the station; he describes their reunion as a moment in which his love for Hadley eclipsed everyone else. He says that during their time alone he worked well and they made great trips, and that he believed they had become invulnerable again. That sense of security lasted only until late spring, when they left the mountains and returned to Paris, where the other trouble began again.

The memoir places this ending in a larger temporal contrast. Its final account calls the winter of the avalanches happy and innocent beside the nightmare winter and murderous summer that followed, when the rich entered the family’s lives. Hemingway says that neither he nor the rich ever returned to the Vorarlberg. Austria consequently remains more than a picturesque setting: it marks the end of a protected interval, remembered through its affordable rooms, repeated climbs, shared meals, and carefully earned moments on the glacier before life in Paris changed again.