A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway | 1964 | Simon & Schuster | Paperback $16
Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920’s. Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe’s cultural landscape. It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.
Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway’s slightly rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Here, too, is an evocation of the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man — a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafes and bookshops that comprised the city in which he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.
I first read this book wayyy the hey back in [redacted] when it was required reading for a high school study-abroad program. The program was in Paris.
Well, I say I read it, but I’m not sure I even managed to finish it. I had no memory of it other than a vague feeling that it was boring. In school I know I was assigned to read at least one other book by Hemingway, but I’m not even sure which one — again, no memory other than boring.
Yes, I know this is practically blasphemy among the literati. At the time I was mainly only interested in books with dragons, if that’s any excuse.
As you can probably imagine, I did not go into this re-read with especially high hopes. But I have over the years developed a fondness for memoirs and a higher tolerance for stories that sadly lack dragons, so it seemed like it would be worth a shot.
I have to say that teenaged-me wasn’t 100% off the mark. When it comes to Hemingway, I still sometimes feel that I just don’t “get it.” His direct, sometimes terse prose can be off-putting to me. Well, “terse” except the occasional sentences that are just random stream-of-consciousness musings on bicycle races that go on for three-quarters of a page. It occurred to me that this book had the feel of a series of overwrought blogs. I somehow think that if the author had lived in the era of blogging he’d have been happy as a clam. And I like blogs — I mean obviously, I run one — but it’s not the kind of writing that I highly enjoy in a book.
The author himself comes off as kind of alternately naïve and self-important, though this was perhaps not such an unusual state of being for a young modernist in post-war Paris, to be fair. Hemingway has had a reputation as being a very macho guy, to the point of misogyny; however, even though he does write a bit like a chauvinist, I didn’t get the impression from this memoir that he was significantly more disrespectful towards women than other men of this time period. I wonder how much of his famous machismo might have been at least in part a clever bit of “He-Man Woman Haters Club” marketing.
That said, there are some really memorable moments of humor in this book. In one charming incident, Ezra Pound convinced the author and several other writers and miscellaneous patrons and salon-goers to contribute to a fund to rescue a then-struggling poet from a boring job at a bank. The poet was T.S. Eliot. In another incident, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows up at a café with a sad story about his wife making fun of his… size. Hemingway took him out back where he dropped trou for his friend to take a look at the goods and offer reassuring words.
Though I may never really “get” Hemingway, I can see why this is a classic of the memoir genre and I’m glad I gave it another chance.
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Publication information: Hemingway, Ernest. A moveable feast. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Paperback.
Source: Personal library.
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